Pulse(59)

I, meanwhile, was desperate to get back to my investigation of races ridden by Jason Conway and Mike Sheraton since the previous November. By the time I had been interrupted by the suspected abduction of my son, I’d looked at races up to the end of January and had a list of forty-two in which Conway had jumped the first fence in front, with twenty-six others where Sheraton had done the same.

But was that significant? After all, someone had to be in the lead at the first fence.

Over that three-month period, Jason Conway had ridden in just over two hundred races. So he had led over the first fence in only a fifth of them.

Was that by chance or by design?

I could see that I would have to spend many more hours studying videos of races, even those in which Jason Conway had not been riding, to see if his numbers were significantly greater than anyone else’s. But there was something about the determination he often showed to be the one in front that I found suspicious.

Not that I’d get any chance to continue my research on that particular evening. To say that Grant would not have approved would be a gross understatement. He was determined that I should do nothing but rest, as if that alone would solve all my ills, both physical and mental, while I felt I needed a goal, a target, something to occupy what Hercule Poirot always referred to as ‘the little grey cells’.

After supper, the boys went up to their rooms to do their homework while Grant and I sat together on the sitting-room sofa in front of the TV, testing our general knowledge by attempting to answer a question or two on University Challenge.

Over the past year, watching television had seemingly become our way of not having to speak to each other. It was easier to allow the programmes to wash over us, filling the void, than to address the one thing that was most important in our lives – the elephant in the room – my mental state, and whether I was continuing to recover.

I was certainly in a better place than I had been back in November. For a start, I no longer believed that taking my own life was the inevitable outcome, and that was a major step in the right direction. Admittedly, I still thought about suicide now and then but, since coming out of Wotton Lawn Hospital in December, I felt that I was able to rationalise my thinking and positively decide against any form of self-harm.

Not that I didn’t sometimes feel the weight of gloom and depression hanging on my shoulders, when a fear of being self-indulgent was the only thing preventing me wallowing in tears and despair. But those episodes were now more rare and less intense, helped, I was sure, by a regimen of regular weekly blood tests and targeted hormone therapy. At last I could begin to appreciate how fluctuating amounts of thyroxine or testosterone, oestrogen or progesterone, could affect my mood – not that I fully understood why.

However, I was becoming increasingly frustrated that I had to go on taking medications in ever-greater numbers. Every trip to a doctor seemed to add another tablet to my lengthy list. But I wanted to stop pill-popping altogether, to stop ingesting man-made chemicals and to become ‘organic’ once again.

I was fed up with my body and its continually changing hormone levels.

I was fed up that, in spite of the drugs, I never felt happy.

Indeed, I was just fed up.

‘I think I’ll go up to bed,’ I said to Grant at a quarter to ten.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked with concern. Quarter to ten was very early, even for me.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Just tired.’

‘I’ll be up in a while.’

‘I may be asleep,’ I replied. ‘Night, night.’

‘Goodnight.’ He didn’t lean over and give me a kiss, he merely waved a hand in my general direction as his eyes, and his concentration, returned to the TV screen and the end of a murder-mystery drama that I hadn’t been following.

It was hardly married life as I’d expected it.

I was woken by Oliver, shouting outside our bedroom door.

‘Mum, Mum. My bike is back. It’s out on the drive.’

‘Great,’ I said, turning over and looking at the clock on my bedside table.

Six-forty. Not too bad. The alarm was due to go off in only a few minutes anyway. I turned on the light and sat up on the edge of the bed.

‘What time is it?’ Grant asked, sleepily. I hadn’t heard him come to bed so I expect he’d stayed up watching a movie until midnight, as he often did these days.

‘Almost a quarter to seven,’ I said. ‘Oliver says his bike is back and lying on the drive.’

‘I bet that Williams boy had it all along,’ Grant said. ‘I imagine he’s handed it back before the police returned to ask him a second time.’

I heard both the twins running down the stairs and the front door being thrown open. But there was no joy or delight at the discovery.

‘It’s all bent and broken,’ Oliver said gloomily as he came back up the stairs. ‘Both the wheels are twisted and the frame is all out of shape.’

He was close to tears again. It was bad enough for him to have lost his bike in the first place, but then to believe it had been returned safe and sound only to find it ruined was almost more than the poor boy could handle.

Grant put on his dressing gown and went downstairs and out onto the drive.

The phone rang and I immediately picked it up using the handset beside the bed.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Dr Rankin?’ asked a quiet male voice.