Close to Death

Adam stood up and put his arms around her. She was wearing an ivory-coloured nightie which hung loosely off her shoulders and her skin had the wonderful warmth that is only generated beneath the covers of a bed. There was a faint muskiness about her. He would have recognised that scent anywhere. Teri was his second wife. His first marriage had been a hopeless mistake, but with her he had found the love of his life. He allowed the memory of forty-five of the games he had just played to slip away from him.

But one still remained.

Suddenly tired, Adam Strauss followed his wife upstairs. At the far end of the close, the lights in the big house blinked off.

2

Tom Beresford also heard his neighbour arrive, but in his case it was the slam of the car door rather than the strains of One Direction at full volume that jerked him out of his shallow sleep. Even without looking, he could tell exactly where the emerald-green Porsche Boxster (number plate COK 999) had parked. The sound of the tyres on the gravel and the crunch of footsteps heading towards the front door of the big house had given him a perfect mental image. It was going to happen again. When he tried to drive to work in about three hours’ time, the car would be on the drive, perhaps with an inch either side allowing him to squeeze his way through, although it was more likely that he would have to ring the doorbell, engage in another pointless confrontation and quite probably end up walking or taking the bus to his surgery in Richmond.

He glanced sideways, searching for the silhouette of his wife in the darkness. Gemma was lying on her back, quite still apart from the almost imperceptible rise and fall of her chest. He was glad she hadn’t been woken up, although if there had been the slightest sound from the twins next door, she would have been out of bed in an instant. Forget the fact that there was a live-in nanny upstairs, fast asleep in her cosy room built into the eaves. Gemma had been connected to the girls from the day they had been born. If one of them fell over and hurt herself in a playground a mile away, she would somehow know.

Lying on his back next to his sleeping wife, alone but not alone, Dr Beresford had that familiar sense of a life no longer in his control. He had never wanted to come to Riverview Close, even if the house had seemed perfect when the estate agent had shown them round. A study for him, a garden for the children, the river, a golf club and the deer park all nearby. Richmond was regularly voted one of the happiest places in London, but he still missed the terraced house in Notting Hill Gate where he and Gemma had first lived together and where he’d had his own parking spot with no arguments, nobody blocking the way.

He also missed his old surgery. What was it that had changed, moving just seven miles west? He liked the other GPs he was working with in Richmond, although he saw very little of them. He was busier than he’d ever been, tired when he arrived at his consulting room and worn out by the time he left. He thought about the day ahead. Monday . . . always the worst day of the week. He could expect twenty patients in his morning surgery, as many as twenty-five in the afternoon. There would be the usual backlog from the weekend. He could already see the letters piled up on his desk: clinic letters, lab reports, referrals, hospital discharge letters demanding one action or another. QOF indicators, CCG prescribing initiatives, CQE assessments. This was something that had become ever more apparent in the years since he had left Notting Hill. He had to wade through a slurry of different acronyms before he could actually start doing his job.

There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth and he remembered the whiskies he had thrown back before he’d gone to bed – but after he’d cleaned his teeth. The mixture of mint, fluoride and single malt had left an indelible coating on his tongue. If he had thought it would help him sleep, it had done exactly the opposite.

He was aware of a movement in the corner of his vision, as if someone or something had entered the room. But there was nobody there. The lights had gone out in the big house, allowing the night to leap up, filling in the corners. He closed his eyes. Go back to sleep, he told himself. Count sheep! Think about chapter six of Fishburne and Grove: Workforce Planning and Development in the NHS. Sink into the pillows and forget everything else. He should have taken a sleeping pill. He had prescribed zolpidem for himself. The 5 mg sleeping pills worked quickly and caused no residual cognitive impairment. Nor were they addictive. He took them once or maybe twice a week but never more than that. He had the situation under control. He was tempted to swallow one now, but even half a pill at this time of the morning would be disastrous. The one thing he couldn’t do today was oversleep.