That had been the Dogs, of course. Or one Dog in particular: Sam Chapman, who they called Bad Sam. He was a dark difficult man, and knew damn well she’d had a key to Charles Partner’s house, because everyone knew she’d had a key to Charles Partner’s house. And knew it hadn’t been because of an affair, but simply because Charles Partner had been hopeless about taking care of himself—ostensibly simple things like remembering to buy food, remembering to cook it, then remembering to throw it away when he’d forgotten to eat it. Charles had been twenty years older than Catherine, but it hadn’t been a father/daughter thing either. That was a convenient label, but the reality had been this: she had worked for Charles Partner, cared for him, shopped for him. and had found him dead in his bathroom once he’d shot himself. Bad Sam could growl all he liked, but he’d only been going through the motions, because Catherine had been the one to find the body.
Funny how swiftly that happened; how swiftly you went from being Charles Partner—not a man whose name was known to the public at large, true, but a man whose decisions dictated whether significant numbers of them would live or die, which had to count for something—to being ‘the body’. All it had taken was one calculated moment in a bathtub. He didn’t want to make a mess, but what mess he’d made was for others to clean up. Funny.
Less funny was how quickly the scary moments accumulated.
Because she was in the bathroom, and because the light was already on, it was hard for Catherine not to catch herself in the mirror. It held no surprises. Yes, the scary moments accumulated, but that was the least of it. Some damage was gifted by your genes. Some you discovered for yourself. Her nose grew red-tipped in the cold, as did her cheekbones. This made her look witchy and raw. Nothing she could do about that. But the rest of it—the spidery tracing of broken veins; the gaunt stretching of the skin across the skull—they told a different story, one she’d written herself.
My name is Catherine and I am an alcoholic.
By the time she’d got around to formulating that sentence, alcohol was a problem. Prior to that, it had seemed like a solution. No, that was too glib: rather, it hadn’t seemed like anything at all; it had simply been what one did. Perhaps a tad self-dramatic (a bottle for solace was such a time-worn trope, it felt like you weren’t doing heart-break properly without a glass in your hand) but more often, just the normal backdrop. It was the obvious adjunct to an evening alone with the box, and absolutely de rigueur for an evening out with girlfriends. And then there were dates, which Catherine often had in those days, and you couldn’t have a date without a drink. A meal meant a drink; the cinema meant a drink afterwards. And if you were plucking up courage to ask him back for coffee, a drink was necessary; and ultimately … Ultimately, if you needed somebody there, because you didn’t want to wake in the middle of the night knowing you were alone, you were going to have to fuck somebody, and sooner or later you were going to have to fuck anybody, and that demanded a drink if anything did.
There was a phrase: the slippery slope. Slippery implied speed and blurriness, and the ever-present threat of losing your feet. You’d end up flat on your back, breathing splinters. But Catherine’s journey had been more moving staircase than slippery slope; a slow downwards progression; a bore rather than a shock. Looking across at the people heading upwards, and wondering if that was a better idea. But somehow knowing she’d have to reach the bottom before she could change direction.
It had been Charles Partner who’d been there when that happened. Not literally, thank God; not actually present when she’d woken in a stranger’s flat with a broken cheekbone, finger-shaped bruises on her thighs. But there to make sure the pieces were gathered together. Catherine had spent time in a facility that was beyond anything she’d have been able to afford had she been paying. Her treatment had been thorough. It had involved counselling. All this, she was told, was in line with Service protocol (
