Lock Me In
Lock Me In
Kate Simants
‘A five star, unputdownable thriller that had me gripped from the very first page… I read it in one sitting!’ Caz Finlay, author of The Boss Shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger award Whatever you do, don’t open the door… By day, Ellie Power has a normal life. She has a stable home, a loving boyfriend, a future. But at night, she suffers from a sleep disorder. She becomes angry, unpredictable, violent. Her mother locks Ellie in her bedroom every night, to keep them both safe. Then one morning, Ellie wakes up, horrified to find the lock on her bedroom door smashed from the inside. She is covered in injuries, unable to remember anything about the night before. And her boyfriend Matt is nowhere to be found… Praise for Lock Me In ‘Intricately plotted, beautifully written’ Harriet Tyce, author of Blood Orange ‘This ambitious and wide-reaching novel had me hooked from the very first page’ S. E. Lynes, author of The Women ‘One of the best debuts I have ever read’ Clare Empson, author of Him 'A flawlessly written, jaw-dropping, chilling and twisty psychological thriller' Sam Carrington, author of Saving Sophie ‘A disturbing psychological thriller’ Rachel Sargeant, author of The Perfect Neighbours ‘The characters are fresh, the dialogue sharp’ G. D. Abson, author of Motherland ‘A stunning debut. Gripping, compelling and skilfully crafted’ N J Crosskey, author of Poster Boy
Lock Me In
KATE SIMANTS
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
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One More Chapter
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Kate Simants 2019
Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd2019
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
The CWA Dagger logo is a registered trademark owned by and reproduced with the permission of the CWA.
Kate Simants asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008353292
Version: 2019-09-27
For Tom, who never once suggested I give up this nonsense and get a real job.
You’re the best mate a girl could have.
Table of Contents
Cover (#u79f1c16f-d70b-5d62-901b-382e3e6e02f8)
Title Page (#u373e94d0-f346-55fa-b511-a13584e6cd13)
Copyright (#u48154ad9-a76f-5e38-8de2-00435e845f44)
Dedication (#ub24fe957-6a08-5407-94c9-41e7f0dda71c)
Prologue
1. Ellie
2. Mae
3.
4. Ellie
5. Mae
6. Ellie
7. Mae
8. Ellie
9. Mae
10. Ellie
11.
12. Mae
13. Ellie
14. Mae
15. Mae
16. Ellie
17. Mae
18. Ellie
19. Mae
20. Ellie
21.
22. Mae
23. Ellie
24. Mae
25. Ellie
26. Mae
27. Ellie
28. Mae
29.
30. Ellie
31. Mae
32. Ellie
33. Mae
34. Ellie
35. Mae
36. Ellie
37. Mae
38.
39. Ellie
40. Mae
41. Ellie
42. Mae
43. Ellie
44. Mae
45. Ellie
46. Mae
47. Ellie
48.
49. Mae
50. Ellie
51. Mae
52. Ellie
53. Mae
54. Ellie
55. Mae
56.
57. Mae
58. Ellie
59. Mae
60. Mae
61. Ellie
62. Mae
63. Ellie
64. Mae
65. Ellie
66.
67. Mae
68. Ellie
69. Mae
70. Ellie
71. Christine
72. Mae
73. Ellie
74. Ellie
75. Mae
76. Ellie
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
You want to know fear?
Imagine someone there, every day when you wake. Imagine knowing, without even opening your eyes, that someone is watching you.
Take your time. Let your mind get used to consciousness.
A girl. There. Not in the passage, not at the door, or by the window. Not even at the end of your bed.
Closer than that.
She stares, unblinking, her eyes burning into yours even though you keep your eyelids shut tight. You move, and for a moment, she slips away from you. But she’s not gone. You know that much.
You think, please. Not again. Your teeth tighten so hard they squeak against each other. You don’t mean to do it, but this is real, right-now fear, and your body doesn’t care what you want. Your heart starts firing out ball-bearings instead of blood. Open your eyes, you tell yourself.
You say her name, and she stiffens. You feel her do it, rigid and alert in your stomach. She is inside you. She is always inside you, listening under your skin.
When you were little, the doctors said this was a known disorder, that they could help. That this other you, your alter, the one who’s always there like an unwanted imaginary friend, could be brought out into the light. That this other girl that you sometimes became was there because, at some point in your life, you needed to switch your reality off. There must have been something, they said, that brought her bursting out of you: some trauma, some incitement, some moment of quickening. You never found it. In the end they gave up, telling you she was nothing to fear, that she could be managed, medicated, contained.
The doctors were wrong.
You feel her rising. And it doesn’t matter how much you know it’s not a physical condition, that it’s all in your head: when she fights you, it hurts. If you want your body to be yours and not hers, you have to fight back.
Now comes the tension, a thickening, swelling the marrow of your bones. You wrench the bedclothes in your fists, and you press your heels into the mattress. She is stiff and screaming in your veins, inside the cells of your blood. You try to cry out but your voice sticks behind your tongue, no breath behind it. She has her hands in the wet depths of your throat, bending the stiff cartilage of your windpipe.
And just like that she bursts into smoke. Goes quiet. You’re left with the ragged sound of your breath, your heartbeat thundering in your ears. Even as it slows, you know she isn’t gone. She doesn’t go, ever.
You have learned never to trust the silence, never to let your guard down. Even as you sleep.
Especially as you sleep.
You want to know fear?
Fear has a name.
Her name is Siggy.
1. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Ellie (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
London, 2011
I woke gasping, the sheet dislodged and twisted tight around my limbs.
I kicked a leg out against the thin partition between my room and the kitchen. Through the wall I heard the radio being clicked off.
‘Ellie?’ Mum’s voice, muffled through the plasterboard.
Siggy went still, and became a cold, thin layer at the base of my brain. She was quiet for a few moments, then she disappeared like a flame in a vacuum, leaving just the staccato sound of my breathing.
‘Ellie, sweetheart? You awake?’
I let my eyes open, worked my jaw and mumbled a croaky, ‘Yeah.’
It was later than I’d thought. A cold screen of early winter daylight sliced through the middle of my tiny room. Motes of dust danced in its blade. I spread my hand across the bare wall. All our walls were bare, in all the flats and houses we’d lived in since I was a child. We never stayed long, and whenever we left, we left in a hurry.
‘She gone?’ Mum called. She always managed to sound cheerful.
‘Mm-hmm.’ I untangled myself from the sheet and tried to swing my knees over the edge of the bed, but I couldn’t do it. Too heavy. It was bad this morning, worse than usual. Soreness bloomed across my right shoulder and down my arm. I had to heave my breath in.
‘Just doing coffee,’ she said, her voice already moving away. She turned the radio back up. The track finished and was replaced by a DJ in an inoffensive, sing-song voice. I heard her unlock the crockery cupboard, taking out mugs, locking it again, setting them down.
I lay for a minute in the S-shape of warmth, trying to salvage what I could of the dream. There was a bright blue sky, and that building. Always that building, the one I’d drawn as a child over and over again: long and low, as unchanging and precise as a photograph, every time. Every night.
Slowly, under the duvet, I shifted. But as I moved to push myself up, bright, brilliant pain shot across my hand, bringing tears to my eyes.
Bisecting my palm, intermittent but extending right over to the base of my thumb, was a ragged tear. Deep punctures, red and swollen. I touched it and winced: it was exquisitely sore, the flesh not yet dry.
Gingerly, I pushed away the covers and looked myself over. Across the right of my pelvis, a blue-black mess of bruising. I pressed the tip of a finger to the centre of the darkest part. The ache, bone-deep, rose up to meet it.
Where had it come from?
A fine thread of fear started to tug at me, hard. I sat up, planted my feet on the floor. Built up the courage to look at the door.
It would be locked. It had to be locked. Hadn’t I heard Mum lock it? I played back the last moments of the day before. Matt had dropped me off after our quick trip to the pub near the narrowboat he was renting. Mum had made me dinner, a pasta thing we ate together in the kitchen. I’d gone to bed early to read for a while. Mum had locked me in before she left for her late shift. She had.
With my blood roaring in my temples, I turned my head. Opened my eyes.
It was only a fingerbreadth, but the door was open. There, on the white gloss of the frame, was something that made me shoot out of bed as if it had caught fire. I crossed the room in three steps and lifted my fingers to the dark marks on the paintwork.
Smears of reddish-brown, crusted at the edge. And on the backs of my hands – I saw it now – the same thing, the same colour, exactly.
Mud.
Siggy had taken me outside.
Mum appeared in the corridor, holding mugs. She stopped dead, then nudged the door fully open with her toe.
‘What—?’ she started.
I met her eyes. ‘You locked it.’
She gripped her eyelids shut for a second, as if dislodging an image.
‘You locked it,’ I repeated, louder. ‘You did. I heard you.’
She set down the two mugs of coffee and bent to touch the door. She was still wearing her cleaning uniform from the nightshift at the same hospital where Matt worked, the bleach-stained mauve tabard over blue scrubs.
‘Holy shit,’ she whispered, the blood sinking from her skin. She went back out, examining it from the other side. ‘What the hell happened here?’
I followed her. In the hall, the bolt that should have been above the mortice lock on the outside of my door was lying on the floor, its two separate sections still secured together with the padlock. Torn paint and splinters of wood clung to the screws where they’d been wrenched out of place. Several inches higher was what remained of the sliding chain lock, the plug hanging uselessly, swinging on the chain. The force it would have taken to break it like that, wrenched inwards with enough power to break the locks on the outside …
Siggy’s little fingers plucked the fibres of my biceps. If I hadn’t known her better I would have wondered if she was smiling.
‘Do you not remember anything?’ Mum asked.
‘No. But … look.’ I lifted my hand, and her eyes went wide.
I let her take it, and she turned it over. Under her breath she muttered, ‘Jesus,’ then decisively, ‘Bathroom. Got to wash it. Come on.’
Holding me by the wrist so she didn’t touch the wound, she guided me through into the bathroom and pulled the cord for the light. She flipped the toilet lid down and sat me on it like a child, then yanked up her sleeves, exposing her ropey, muscular forearms, hardened from the years of push-ups she did to make sure she was stronger than Siggy.
‘This’ll sting, love.’ The tap screeched as she turned it on, and a thick twist of cold water ran into the avocado-coloured sink. ‘Stick it under here.’
I did as I was told.
Frowning at my palm, she pointed. ‘My guess is barbed wire. Look at the spacing.’ She was right: the punctures were even. Each a centimetre from the last.
She turned and angrily whipped the towel from the electric heater that hadn’t worked in the eight months we’d been there. She dried her hands and kicked it into a bundle by the washing basket.
‘Fucking Siggy,’ she said, dragging her fingers hard across her scalp. ‘What did she do with you this time?’
She wasn’t expecting an answer. We called them fugues, and I never knew what Siggy made me do during them, where she took me. Or why. All I could do was piece it together from whatever mess Siggy left behind, crowbarring in cause by surveying the effect, trying to make sense of it. The fact that the fugues always happened at night had baffled psychologist after psychologist, neurologist after sleep specialist when I was younger until Mum got so frustrated with them that we stopped going altogether. It’s a time in my life I have almost no memory of, but Mum kept journals: all the medicines, all the experts, all the sessions and techniques and homework. Nothing worked. The drugs they said would help with the dissociation made no difference. The fugues continued; the nightmares kept coming. Although I didn’t get worse for a long time – I was plagued by panic attacks, but I never started ‘switching’ during the day, which had always been my fear – I didn’t get better. Eventually, they ran out of things to try. We never got a cure, and we never got an answer: we were dismissed as an anomaly.
But this was back when Siggy was playful, doing small stuff, things that didn’t matter. Like when she filled our shoes with milk while we slept or pulled all the books off the shelves and made them into colour-coded piles. Just the little things, things we could laugh about, almost.
This was before we started needing locks.
This was before Jodie.
My fingers were going numb with the cold, but the torn flesh on my hand was burning now and had started to swell. The mud darkened and flaked off under the water until soon there was nothing left, just clean, pink, angry skin. I turned to wash the mud from the other hand too, and found more of it, up my arm, as far as my elbow.
Where had I gone last night?
What had I done?
Eventually the cold got too much to bear, and I pulled my hand out of the sink and shook my hair back. Mum’s eyes went to my throat.
‘What the hell happened to your neck?’
I got up, dodging round her to get to the mirror. I lifted my chin.
‘Don’t freak out.’ Mum stood behind me, put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Control it. Do not freak out.’
Dark marks the size of grapes, with blue-white crescents indented at their outer edges. Bruises: four in a line on one side of my windpipe, one on the other. Just above the old, jagged scar from years before.
Four and one. Fingers and a thumb.
‘Come on, sweetheart, try,’ she said, angry now. ‘Try to remember.’
I studied the bruises, touched my fingers to them, lining them up, then I stared at myself in the eyes in the mirror: one green, one blue. One for me, one for Siggy.
Think.
Mud.
Barbed wire on my hand.
And a handprint on my neck.
My breath turned solid in my chest as the thought bloomed, running its course.
‘Mum. What if someone was trying to stop …?’
I trailed off. Matt. I lurched out of the room.
My phone wasn’t beside my bed, and it wasn’t in the jeans I’d worn the previous night. I went to look for it in the pocket of the raincoat I was sure I’d left on the back of the door, but neither the phone nor the coat were there. I stumbled out into the living room. Spotting my phone charging in the corner, I yanked the cable out and dialled, pressed it to my ear, thinking, answer. Answer, for Christ’s sake.
‘OK, stop,’ Mum said from behind me. ‘Take a moment to think about this. Ellie. Stop.’
I turned to face her. ‘What?’
‘We need to think smart,’ she said, reaching for the phone.
I ducked away from her before I processed what she’d said. I’d been thinking there must have been a fight, something I could fix. But my mother, she was already thinking of Jodie. Of what Siggy had done before.
That she’d done it again.
The fog in my head cleared suddenly and the gentle Scots of Matt’s voice was in my ear saying you’ve reached Matt Corsham. I’m probably in my dungeon – the photo lab, in the hospital basement – leave a message. I hung up before the beep and dialled it again. Looked at the clock: 07:43. He was on earlies, started at eight, he should have been on his way to the hospital, on the 267. He should have his phone in his hand. I slumped onto the sofa. He should be texting me.
Mum sat beside me and took my face in her hands.
‘What do we do?’ she asked me gently. ‘Things get tough, what do we do?’
‘We deal with it,’ I told her in a whisper.
‘That’s exactly what we do. You and me.’ She sighed, took my good hand and peeled each finger from the phone, until I released it. It went on the table, out of reach, then she moved up next to me, pulling me close. I relented, sank my head against her chest.
‘Please don’t let this happen again, Mum.’
‘Shh. He’ll be OK, though. Probably just have worked late or started early or something.’ She gave me a gentle nudge. ‘Don’t worry. Just a bit of mud. Just some scrapes.’
Even then, neither one of us believed it.
2. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mae (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Detective Sergeant Ben Kwon Mae stopped at the lights. He raised his eyebrows in the rear-view mirror and the kicking to the back of his seat immediately ceased. Bear, his 8-year-old daughter who was suspiciously engrossed in the palm of her hand, slowly lifted her chin to meet his gaze.
‘What?’ Eyes all wide, butter-wouldn’t-melt incredulous. ‘It wasn’t me!’
He laughed. Thirty quid a pop, the drama lessons his ex-wife made him shell out for and look what it bought.
‘You’re a terrible actress, Bear. Really bad,’ he said, returning his attention to the school-run gridlock. Should have walked.
The kicking resumed, and he swung around. ‘Oi! Stop it!’
She laughed, but then he clocked the crisps all over her almost-freshly-laundered school sweater. Busted, she started to brush at them, scattering them into the footwell.
He blew out his cheeks. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.
‘I’m hungry.’
‘But crisps, mate?’
He wanted to leave it, because the clock on the dash gave him eight minutes to get Bear to school and wasting one of those minutes complaining about her diet meant wasting them all. When the bell rang at 8.45 he’d be looking at a clear week and a half until he got her back. But Nadia had complained enough times about having to deal with what she called ‘the BMI situation’ on her own. It wasn’t fair on her for him to just ignore it.
He shook his head. ‘I did offer you a proper breakfast. I thought you loved scrambled eggs.’
‘Not since I was like three. I hate it.’ He could only see the top of her head now, but he was pretty sure she was holding back tears. ‘You never have any decent food in your stupid flat. I’m always hungry at school after I have to stay at yours.’
‘OK, well. I’ll stock up next time.’ The lights changed and he turned back to the road. ‘Just have to make healthy choices, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘All you’re saying is I’m fat and no one likes me.’ She stared angrily out of the window, nicking at the raw skin around her thumbnail with her teeth.
‘That’s absolutely not true.’ Nice one, Superdad. One guess what she’d remember about the visit with him now. In the mirror he saw her lean her head on the glass, and they finished the journey in silence. Could they bunk off for an hour? Take her to the park, make things okay between them so they’d part on good terms? No. Obviously not. Nadia would find out, for a start, and his approval rating was already on the floor. Things had eroded badly enough between them lately without him adding truancy to the list.
Only three minutes late, he swung into a space miraculously close to the school entrance. He got out and went round to open Bear’s child-locked door.
‘My tummy hurts,’ she whined.
‘OK. Well, let’s get some fresh air and see how you feel in a minute.’
‘But I’ve got a headache.’ Her voice was quieter. He followed her gaze out across the playground to where two boys, older, were in direct line of sight. They turned away as soon as he made eye contact. Bear sighed and looked at her feet.
He leaned across her to undo her seatbelt. ‘Friends of yours?’
‘No! Get off, Ben,’ she snapped, twisting away.
He made sure the sudden sag in his chest didn’t make it to his face.
‘It’s Dad,’ he told her, pulling her bag and reading folder out from the back seat. This Ben thing was new this visit. No way did she call Nadia by her first name. He hadn’t even heard her shorten it from Mummy yet. He wasn’t having it. ‘You call me Dad.’
‘Whatever.’ She squeezed past him and stumped off towards the gate. Catching her up, he reached for her shoulder but let his hand drop before it touched her. Best not push it.
‘Tell you what. If you don’t give me a cuddle, I’ll cave your head in with a fire extinguisher.’ A bit too hopeful, the way it came out, but she let him draw level. He coughed, dropped his voice a bit. ‘Gouge your eyes out with a soup spoon. I will. I’ve done it before. In Helmand.’
Which won him a very small smile. ‘You haven’t been to Helmand.’
‘Flipping have.’
‘And you’ve used that one before, too.’
‘Right, right. Sloppy.’ He shoved his hands in his pockets, thinking. ‘In that case I’ll just have to grate your nose off.’
‘Yeah? How?’
‘Cheese grater. Like I did in Operation Desert Knickers.’
A single sniff of a laugh, and she glanced at him. The shape of her eyes so almost-Caucasian, hardly a sniff of Korean about her. Like even his genes were being diluted, rinsed out of her life.
But her sideways smile was all his. She took a deep breath. ‘I’ll boil you alive and peel your skin off and sell it to the shoe shop so they can make shoes out of you.’
The realization that she’d planned that, rehearsed it, glowed like a coal in his belly.
‘Nice.’ He gave her a serious look and slow-nodded. ‘What’s the score? Seventeen-twelve?’
‘You wish,’ she said, appeased now. ‘Nineteen-twelve.’ She cheerfully swung her bag at him, obliviously but narrowly missing his bollocks.
Bear started to skip but stopped when she got to the gate. She was scanning the yard for those boys.
Mae crouched. ‘If there’s anything you need me to deal with—’
She shot him a serious look. ‘No. There’s nothing. There isn’t.’
‘Because if—’
‘Please, Dad.’
Mae shrugged, straightened up, committing those two lads to memory: bags, hair, sneery little faces. The last of the latecomers ran past them, ushered in by her classroom assistant (Mr Walls, 29, newly qualified last year, single, previously a gardener, caution for shoplifting aged 13). Mae bent to fix the mismatch of toggles on her coat, and she let him.
‘Thanks for hanging out with me, Bear.’ He squeezed her shoulders. ‘See you next week.’
She ducked him and was gone, off down the path, trying to press into a group of girls he half-recognized. Flicking a hand up briefly as a backwards goodbye. He flexed his fingers a few times in his pockets and headed back to the car.
It didn’t get to him. Saying goodbye and not even getting a hug: it was no big deal. He dealt with assaults and suicides and RTAs, no problem, all the time. Cat C murders, child abuse, DV, the lot. All the fucking time. So, his little girl forgot to give him a hug before a whole nine days away from him, even though five minutes ago she was three years old, falling asleep in his arms as he read The Gruffalo for the eighteenth time? Christ! Take more than that to make him cry.
From the driver’s seat he watched Bear disappear into the building.
Music. He reached round to dig a CD out from the pocket behind his seat, and his fingers closed on a disk in a square plastic wallet. She must have left it there by mistake. He brought it out: Lady Gaga for Bear! on the disk in sharpie, and then under the hole,
(not really, it’s Daddy’s very best CLEAN hip-hop mixtape).
And it was clean, too: he’d checked and double-checked each track, and there wasn’t a single swear. It had taken some doing.
He tucked it into the glovebox, then tried again and found Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle under a fine layer of fried potato crumbs. It was scratched to shit but last time had played fine up to ‘Who Am I (What’s My Name)?’, which would be long enough to get him to the nick. His speakers were almost as creaky as his brakes, but they were loud, and loud meant a clear head.
Ignition, arm round the headrest to reverse. And off.
All business.
3. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
CC: OK, I think that’s recording … Good. Right, before we begin can we just confirm this because we’ve got a slightly unusual situation here. You have asked for your friend Jodie – our mutual friend, should I say – to be here during this first session?
EP: Yes. Please. If that’s all right.
CC: Certainly, whatever makes you feel comfortable. OK. So, what I’d like to do to begin with is to have a chat about the dissociation, and the range of what you’re experiencing on a daily basis.
EP: OK.
CC: And from there we can move on to having a think about where you’d like me to get you to. Does that sound OK?
EP: Yeah. Yes. That’s fine.
CC: So. A normal day then. How does that start?
EP: OK well, it depends on whether I’ve had a fugue or not.
CC: Tell me about that.
EP: So, um, Siggy sometimes—
CC: Siggy is your alter.
EP: Yeah, sorry yeah my alter, she sometimes kind of takes over. I wake up at night sometimes but I’m not like, actually awake, it’s not me, it’s her. She talks to my mum sometimes, otherwise she’ll just try to go outside, that kind of thing. Sometimes we’ll only know Siggy was up because things will be moved, or lights will be on. Stuff like that. But I always know anyway because I feel her there.
CC: Physically?
EP: Not exactly. I mean, I always feel sick afterwards, sort of achy.
CC: OK, so let’s say you’ve woken up, got up. What happens next?
EP: Well, she’s always there. Just … like I can sort of sense her, whatever’s going on. It’s like she thinks things that I can hear—
CC: Does she speak? Does she have a voice?
EP: Well … no. Not really. But it’s like she’ll get scared or angry or whatever and I know it’s not me feeling those things. Does that make any sense?
CC: Yes, it does. It sounds like what you experience is what I call co-conscious dissociation, which is when a person can feel that they have more than one identity at the same time.
EP: Right. Yes, that’s what it’s like. But the times she gets me up and does stuff with me at night, and … I just have completely no memory of that at all.
CC: OK. I’m getting from the way you’re speaking now that it’s quite distressing.
EP: I just … I don’t know.
[pause: 32 sec]
CC: Would you feel comfortable going into a little more detail about the episodes you have at night?
[pause: 12 sec]
EP: Look, I-I don’t know.
CC: OK: Eleanor—
EP: Ellie.
CC: Ellie. A lot of the people I see, they find it very hard at the beginning. They can feel like … well, they don’t know if they can trust me. Or it might be that they don’t trust that talking is going to help.
[pause: 27 sec]
EP: No. It’s not that. I just know what’s going to happen. We’re going to go through all this, and then you’re going to give up.
CC: Ah, OK. Tell me a bit more about that.
EP: I’m just … like, I’ve tried. You know? I talk to Siggy, I talked to other people, tried medicine and everything. All kinds of stuff. I don’t want to do all of that again. Just tell you all of it and then have you just say that actually you can’t help. Or that you don’t believe me.
CC: Who does believe you, Ellie?
EP: My mum.
CC: She’s always believed you.
EP: Yeah. She’s-she’s seen what happens. The fugues, and – everything.
CC: Anyone else close to you? Other family?
EP: I’m an only child. My dad’s dead.
CC: OK.
[pause: 11 sec]
CC: OK. And was that a long time ago that you lost him?
EP: Yes. Before I was born.
CC: I see. It can be challenging, growing up without—
EP: No. It wasn’t.
CC: You don’t want to talk about your father.
EP: No.
[pause: 31 sec]
CC: OK, Ellie, there’s a couple of things I’d like you to know. Sometimes therapists can be a bit mystifying. They can wait for you to work things out for yourself even if they have a good idea of what’s going on and what needs to shift in order to improve. But that can take a lot of time. In my experience I think it’s best to be up front and tell you what I think is happening, and what we’re going to do to put it right. Seems more honest, that way. Does that sound OK?
EP: Yes. I just want her gone. I want to be better.
CC: I hear you. So the first thing is, the aim of the psychotherapeutic work I’m going to do with you is to understand what’s happened. What I want to do is reduce the conflict between the different parts of your identity, help them cooperate.
EP: OK. I mean, I can’t see that happening, but OK. We can try.
CC: Good. So, the second thing I need you to know is that the kind of issues you’re having with Siggy, they’re something that almost always stem from quite a significant trauma, often something in early childhood.
[pause: 34 sec]
EP: OK.
CC: And so at some point in our sessions we’re going to need to talk about that. What you yourself think is at the bottom of it, how it all started.
[pause: 19 sec]
CC: Would you like us to come back to this at another time?
EP: No.
CC: OK. I understand. The reason I’m—
EP: I just … look, nothing happened, OK? There’s no deep dark secret. She’s just there. I don’t know why. I’m not going to come along here and just suddenly remember some massive, buried … it’s not going to happen. She’s always been there. I just want her gone. OK? I want her to leave me alone.
[pause: 22 sec]
EP: I just want her to leave me alone.
4. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Ellie (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
It felt like she was gone forever. I called Matt again and again but there was no answer.
I checked the time on the wall clock – three hours gone – and then saw the streak of pink highlighter on the calendar. I was supposed to be doing a shift that afternoon, volunteering in the children’s ward in the hospital where Mum cleaned, and Matt worked in the imaging lab. He’d set the whole thing up for me, sorting all the stuff out with the permissions, after I told him how one day I’d like to work with children. But after his effort, I’d managed to miss my slots twice in the last few weeks. The HR person had already come to see me about it, but I couldn’t explain to her what had really happened: that if I went back to sleep after a fugue, I was impossible to wake.
Matt said I should just come clean about it, explain that I had a mental illness. It was a hospital, he said – how could they not understand? I didn’t dare, but I knew then I’d made the right decision in confiding in him.
At first I’d been careful to stick to the rules, to censor myself. Mum knew how serious I was about him, and in his company at least, she approved of him. I’d come home once to find them roaring with laughter over a game of cards: he was genuine, polite, reliable, she said, and nothing like my father. She made me promise not to let myself fall asleep with him, no matter how tired I got, but she was still worried. There wasn’t a man alive who was patient enough, understanding enough, to be with someone who’d always sleep alone. Even good guys can break your heart,she said.
To begin with I said nothing at all about Siggy, but I couldn’t keep the secrecy up for long. There was no boundary where I stopped and she began, and after a few months, I realized I couldn’t be myself without telling him.
Matt had listened to it all. We’d been sitting in front of the log burner in his narrowboat, sharing a bottle of wine. I sat propped against his chest, and I told him the whole story. From the first time Siggy had got me up at night and taken me outside, until Mum, frantic at 4 a.m., found me lying underneath the car. I told him about the exhaustion I got the mornings after a fugue, the grinding headaches, the ten-tonne limbs. I told him everything.
No. Not everything. I didn’t tell him about Jodie.
After my very long monologue, there was a very long silence. And then he’d lifted my head from his shoulder and looked right into my eyes.
‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand this yet, but I’m going to. We’re going to make you OK.’
I told Mum later, and she was silent for a long while. Eventually, she just hugged me. ‘It’s your life,’ she said. ‘Remember to be careful, though. He’s a good guy, but I can’t protect him from her.’
The very next morning, there were bruises all up her arms. I had no memory of what Siggy had done – what I had done. How I had slammed my own mother against a wall and thrown her out of my way.
Like I was an empty coat, Mum said. But it wasn’t your fault.
I heard a sudden movement and I froze, listening, but it wasn’t Mum coming back. Just boxes being moved around downstairs, from what I guessed was the stock room. Our flat was above a shop, an off-licence, and from the way sound travelled it seemed Mr Symanski’s ceiling, our floor, was made from little more than cardboard.
I gave a start. Thin floors.
If I could hear him …
I pulled on my shoes and was at the front door before Mum’s warnings about him sounded in my head. Don’t talk to the neighbours. It only takes one person to suspect us.
What was I going to say? Did you hear me leave the flat in the middle of the night? Because I’ve got a whole load of unexplained injuries and I don’t remember what happened? I stood there for a moment, my forehead resting on the cold glass of the door. Then I took my shoes back off and kicked them sullenly away.
In the kitchen, next to the sink, Mum had left a beaker for me and a carton of orange juice. Forgetting the damage to my hand, I made the mistake of trying to twist the cap. I recoiled and knocked the whole box to the floor where it slopped out across the lino.
Irritated, I opened the safe cupboard under the sink and took out the homemade cleaning fluid and some latex gloves. We didn’t take chances anymore: everything harmful was locked away. I couldn’t even be left alone with a bottle of bleach. I tried all the other doors, out of habit. All locked. Knives, matches, bleach, all beyond my grasp. I snapped on the gloves and clenched and stretched my hands, feeling the thin scabs on the wounds split, reasserting myself over her.
My pain, Siggy. Not yours.
After I mopped up the juice I carried on cleaning, using the soft scourers to attack the rest of the floor, the dented metal sink, the wood-effect laminate of the worktops. I scrubbed until my jaw ached from gritting my teeth. Folded in a corner, Siggy eyed me.
My phone rang, and I pulled off the gloves, my heart leaping as I recognized the first few of digits of the number on the screen. It was the hospital.
‘Matt?’
‘Oh, hi,’ said an awkward voice, a man. Not Matt. ‘Ellie, right?’
I let my eyes close. If someone at his work was calling me, that meant—
‘Listen, do you know where Matt is? Only, we were expecting him in, and he hasn’t shown up.’
I told him – after swallowing the lump of lead in my throat – that I hadn’t. ‘Who is this?’
‘Leon. From the hospital. The imaging lab?’
‘Oh, OK. Leon.’ Matt had mentioned Leon: they’d been working together for a couple of months now and he’d gone for a pint with him after work once or twice, though I didn’t get the sense they were particularly good friends.
‘Did you see him yesterday?’ Leon asked, concern in his voice. ‘Like, in the evening? Because I can’t get hold of him on the mobile, and the guy at his moorings says he’s not there, and with yesterday being a bit … you know.’
‘A bit what?’
The wet sound of him opening and closing his mouth told me he was choosing his words. ‘No it’s … it’s nothing. But look, if you hear from him—’
‘It was a bit what, Leon?’
‘Nothing. Just, you know. Busy.’
Matt hadn’t mentioned anything unusual. Had I even asked? I told Leon I’d call if I heard anything and hung up.
I went to the window, pulling the net aside. The thick cloud of the early morning was gone now, swept clean to expose a sky of cold blue, scarred all over with sharp shards of white.
Wherever Matt was, he wasn’t OK. He wasn’t OK at all.
My eye was caught by movement. I recognized Mr Symanski’s son, Piotr. Maybe a little older than me, mid-twenties and already paunchy. He was a sullen figure, shuffling up the road. I watched him bend to scratch a passing cat behind the ears, and let it weave between his ankles a few times. When he stood, he saw me. Stock still, nothing on his face, staring straight at me for five seconds, ten. More. Then as if he’d suddenly come to his senses, he looked away, got out his keys, and went inside.
I dropped the corner of the net curtain, and stood there blinking, thinking only of that stare. Did he know something? I thought again of going down, speaking to them. But before I could make a decision, I heard movement on our steps outside and the clatter of fumbled keys against concrete.
5. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mae (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
The Snoop Dogg was damaged worse than he’d thought, so he felt around in the side pocket for anything CD shaped and slipped it in. Turned out to be a demo from a mate of a mate, who Mae vaguely remembered wanting to punch. White guy, gangster lean, called everyone bruv. Mae gave it until after the first refrain, pressed eject, checked for witnesses, and windowed it.
He took a little detour and got a coffee from a new Cuban place on the corner by Acton Central. He ordered short and black on the grounds that it would be fastest and bounced on the balls of his feet as the barista made it up, feeling the snip of unspent energy amassing in his blood. A muted newscast on the screen above the counter was wringing the final drops from an American school shooting, a week old and almost forgotten.
After paying, he got out of there, and had emptied half the scalding caffeine into his mouth before he’d even pulled away. Needing the buzz, needing the lift, because there hadn’t been a chance for a run that morning, either.
He tolerated the flack he got about his thing for exercise. If it made his colleagues feel better about themselves to call him vain, call him a poser, that was their business. But to Ben Mae, exercise had never been optional. Without a run in the morning, without an hour of circuits or weights or anything else in the evening, the noise in his head got too much and he knew where that ended. These days, he could trust himself to recognize that inevitable build-up of whatever-it-was and burn it off in the gym. But age as he might, those years after his dad died of finding himself prowling, angry without provocation, skulking around for a fight or a fuck never seemed that far behind him.
Objectively, he thought, as he slowed for the barrier and flashed the fob at the reader, it was doubtful that coffee helped. Objectively, the right thing to do was to deal with the anger, understand it. Go right back to that dark six months when he changed from a normal teenage boy and into a thug, to the point where his life could have gone either way. Tear the thing out by the root.
But who would he be then?
Leaning back in his desk chair, Mae transferred the phone to the other ear, then rubbed the stubble on his head up and down hard with the palm of his hand. Around him, the office was already in the full throes of post-briefing activity.
‘But he’s still missing,’ the woman at the other end of the line was saying, her voice rising towards the inevitable crack. ‘He’s still gone. We can’t cope with this not knowing. My poor kids—’
Her name was Charlotte, wife of Damien Hayes. Widow, almost certainly, of Damien Hayes. Mother of his four kids. Six months previously, Mr Hayes had left the final shift of his job at the vehicle plant just outside Uxbridge, driven his car half the way home, abandoned it, and disappeared. He left no note but, as it unravelled, it was a tale that told itself. The poor bastard had been in the red by almost forty grand, had defaulted on his last half a dozen mortgage payments and then, just to kick the man while he was down, the plant had laid him off. Mrs Hayes had only discovered in the weeks following his evaporation that he left behind no savings, no pension, and no insurance.
‘Mrs Hayes I promise you we’ve done everything we can—’
‘Done? Done?’
Mae winced. ‘Doing. We’re doing everything—’
‘Are you? Like what? What have you done, since you made this call a month ago? On our last weed date,’ she said, bitterness curling at the term.
He lifted the top sheet of the stack of paper in front of him and stifled a sigh. Four more calls exactly like this one, scheduled for today, but there was no news, no concrete developments in a single one of them. Thing was, in this business no news was bad news, even if – especially if – it wasn’t the kind of bad news that had an event attached, a clear and obvious trauma that could at least heal cleanly. In the majority of the cases he had the misfortune to head in his current role, the misper was there and then they were not. No stages of grief to work through, no ritual to mark the end of the life. The family around them remained in stasis until eventually, secretly and ashamedly, they started to long for news of a body being found.
‘I’m afraid without new information, there’s really not much else—’
‘So you’ve given up?’ And right on cue, the sob. ‘If you had any idea of what this is doing to us.’
Mae pressed closed his eyes. They always said that. Every one of them, and not just in Missing but in everything he’d ever been assigned. Murders and rapes and robberies, beatings, the lot. Nearly always, they were right. No, he’d never been sexually assaulted. Hadn’t suffered the violent death of someone he loved. Since he’d been leading Missing, though, the accusation that he didn’t know how it felt had been harder to take. But he never let it out, never put them right, not even to McCulloch when she’d given him the gig. Especially not then.
He was going to need that run, he decided.
‘Look, Mrs Hayes,’ he said, quietly. ‘Charlotte. I’ll put some calls in to the charities again, OK? See if there’s anything new there. Sometimes there are delays with them putting stuff through to our systems. I’ll see if I can extend the hospital checks a bit. I’m not promising anything,’ he added as he heard her intake of breath, but the hope had already returned to her voice.
‘Yes. Please.’ She paused to delicately blow her nose. ‘Anything you can do.’
A red light started blinking on his desk phone. Mae straightened, dispatched Mrs Hayes as sensitively as he could, and answered it.
‘Should I send down a written invitation?’ The gentle Hebridean lilt of DCI Colleen McCulloch.
Mae glanced at the time. Shit. ‘Sorry, ma’am. On my way.’
He bombed it up the back steps and made McCulloch’s floor in about thirty seconds flat. He slowed to a stroll as he passed her glass-fronted office for the sake of some semblance of cool, then went in.
‘Sorry ma’am,’ he muttered, ‘difficult call to a—’
‘Spare me,’ she said, nodding over her glasses to the door, which he dutifully closed. Standing at ease the other side of the room was a statuesque, stony-faced uniform, a woman. He nodded an acknowledgement: he’d seen her swinging kettlebells around in the basement gym. She had cropped, bleach-blonde hair and had to be a good 180 lbs and rising six foot. The kind of woman who occupied every inch of herself. Lot of tattoos, he’d noticed: not that they were visible now.
McCulloch cleared her throat. ‘How’s it been going downstairs these past few weeks, Ben? Haven’t seen you since I went to Egypt. Ooh, talking of which,’ she said, turning to dig something out of a drawer, ‘got you one of these. From the pyramids.’
He caught the paper bag just before it struck him on the head – she was nothing if not a good shot – and opened it. Inside was a small, stuffed camel, made from some kind of felt. He closed the bag. ‘Uh, I’m honoured?’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t be, it’s cursed. Paid the extra, thought why not.’
The uniform bit back a grin.
McCulloch had arrived on the force six months after Mae: they’d both started out in Sussex, albeit at very different levels of seniority. She’d been a hard sell to the whole department, straight in from civvy street to detective inspector, leapfrogging not only a whole generation of CID sergeants who’d been waiting in the wings – some of them – for literally years, but also sprinting past the two long years of uniform service. She was part of a new Philosophy of Recruitment, they’d been told, which recognized outside skills and combatted red tape. Translated: stuffed suit. Decoded: clueless leg-up wannabe. The entire team had been rooting for her to fuck up her first major job, but she’d steered the investigation to a solve with the cool, effortless ease of a seasoned skipper. Those who still remained unconvinced waited, hoping for a trip up to ratify their prejudices. It never came. Problem was, she might have come from some woolly sounding NGO background, but she was also bulletproof. She was bright as a supernova, knew her PACE back to front, her Murder Manual inside out and recited her CPS guidelines with her eyes closed. She bit only when antagonized, and she called every single decision with blistering speed and perfect judgement. What made all of that worse was that she was the most eminently likeable boss any of them had ever had.
And after Brighton, when his immediate superior had been sacked and Mae himself had been given a month’s suspension, she’d moved to the Met to take the helm at Brentford and had been in the role ever since. It was McCulloch who’d encouraged him to relocate, to come and work in the capital with her, and with nothing on the coast to stay for, he’d eventually relented.
McCulloch pushed aside the wireless keyboard to make room for her tailored-shirted forearms and took a sip from a steaming mug of her ubiquitous mint tea.
‘Detective. Ben.’ She gave him a broad smile that pushed the plump cheeks into freckled bulges and exposed the quarter-inch gap between her front teeth.
‘Ma’am.’
‘I have a job for you.’
‘That’s very kind, Ma’am, but I have seventeen open—’
‘Call it an expansion of your already impressive burden,’ she said, waving his reluctance away. ‘Tell me, how long have we been in the force?’
She knew the answer to this. She knew everything. Where he’d been to school, his bench press PB, and the name of his first pet. Not for the first time, it occurred to him she probably even knew about the dark years after his mum disappeared, even though he’d always managed to keep a half-step ahead of the law.
‘Eight years, Ma’am.’
She pulled the keyboard back over. ‘I’ve had some applications. Some of your colleagues putting themselves forwards for inspector.’ She was looking at her screen now, scrutinizing it for his benefit. ‘But I’m not seeing your name here.’
‘I’m happy where I am.’ He glanced at the uniform, wondering where this was going.
Ignoring him, McCulloch folded her arms and leaned back in her chair, addressing the ceiling. ‘You see, Ben, when we rank people up, we like to see people proving themselves as leaders. Showing managerial qualities.’
‘I’m not looking to rank up. Sergeant suits me fine.’
‘I see. Well anyway. Detective Sergeant Mae, this,’ she said, gesturing at the mystery uniform, ‘is DC Catherine Ziegler.’
‘Right.’
‘And she,’ McCulloch went on with a twinkle of the eyes, ‘is going to be your new TI.’
Mae took the hand extended towards him, met her eyes, and briefly returned a rough approximation of the broad, open smile she gave him. Thinking, shit. Trainee Investigator meant a shadow. Constant company.
‘Hate to say it, Ma’am—’ Mae started, but he was silenced with a finger held aloft.
‘Then don’t.’ McCulloch folded her arms across her chest, assessing the two of them like a mother at a playdate. ‘I understand that Catherine—’
‘Kit,’ the younger woman put in.
‘I understand that Kit passed her NIE with stand-out results,’ McCulloch was saying. ‘So when HR asked me for a mentor, I looked around the floor and I thought to myself, Colleen, who have you got with the kind of skills and characteristics to drive a talent like that? I thought, who’s willing to take the time to make opportunities for a new generation of detectives?’
My arse you did, Mae thought. Try, who have I got who’s been coasting for getting on for half a decade, without a foot of movement in any direction? Who have I got spare? Not that he could begrudge it. If it had been DCI Anyone Else, this would have been a punitive move. But she’d called it right, he couldn’t deny it. Sure, he’d sat the exams and taken the promotion to sergeant when he came back from his absence, even though he was fairly sure she’d swung it for him. After that, he’d kept his head down. He’d gone where he was sent, done the courses, gone through the motions. But it didn’t take an HR review to see he’d been treading water since … since before … since before it had all gone wrong. He pumped his fists tight and loose, tight and loose at his sides, dispelling it.
‘I thought Missing would give Kit a nice easy start,’ McCulloch told him, ‘and you can get her used to the juggling.’ Turning, she added, ‘Ignore the grumpy exterior, Kit. They’re all the same: like to pretend they’re brooding mavericks but buy them a bacon roll and they’re anyone’s.’
DC Catherine Ziegler glanced at him to gauge his reaction, and he conceded a reluctant twitch at the corners of his mouth. Might as well be decent, because he could see he wasn’t going to win this.
‘Squirt of HP and we can talk.’
‘Then that’s sorted,’ the boss said. ‘And don’t forget your camel.’
McCulloch was already pulling the keyboard close, on to the next thing. She started typing, then looked up. ‘What are you waiting for, lollies? Run along.’
But he could tell from the meaningful, encouraging look on his boss’s face as she shooed them out of the door that there was nothing malicious about this. He wasn’t despised, he was pitied. This was intended to aid his personal development. She thought this was what he needed.
And as Mae left the office, with his new TI following behind like a rugby-shouldered Valkyrie, he hated McCulloch for always being right.
6. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Ellie (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mum’s outline was distorted through the bumpy glass as she bent to retrieve the dropped key. She cursed, but it was the weakness in her voice that made me certain that something was not good.
She came inside, her hair stuck across her face in muddy streaks as she unbuttoned her coat.
I took it from her and asked, ‘Did you find him?’
‘I’m sorry, baby,’ she said. ‘No luck.’
‘So where have you been?’
‘Just down to the boat, but he’s not there. I thought I’d get a run in on the way back.’ She started stripping off, moving quickly, her T-shirt slopping to the floor where she dropped it. Leggings going the same way; socks, the tube-bandage support she used on her dodgy knee. The bare wet flesh of her arms and torso was paling from the cold and stiffened with goosebumps, ropes of muscle tensing underneath as she moved.
She found a plastic bag and shoved the clothes inside. ‘Don’t look so worried, love. He’ll be … I don’t know. Out for a walk? Or out taking pictures?’
‘He’s supposed to be at work. They called, Mum. He’s not there.’
She was suddenly serious. ‘What did you tell them?’
I shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
‘You didn’t say …’ she started, her eyes drifting down the hall, to my bedroom door.
‘That I smashed my way out of my room in the middle of the night and I don’t remember it, and I’ve woken up covered in bruises? No. I kept that to myself.’
‘OK. Stupid question. I’m sorry.’
I followed her into her room. She unlocked the box beside her bed where she kept tools, matches, things she couldn’t leave lying around. She removed a pair of nail scissors and started cutting her nails down.
‘So where is he?’
She sighed. ‘I don’t know, Ellie.’ Finishing her own no-nonsense manicure, she gestured for my hand, which I gave her. ‘There’s nothing to say you had anything to do with it,’ she said, trimming the white from the tops of my nails.
I tried to pull away. ‘Mum, if you found something—’
‘I didn’t. It’s nothing.’
‘But it’s not, is it?’ I said, disentangling. ‘What if Siggy … what if it’s happened again?’
‘Don’t. Please. Just don’t think about it.’ Mum took a deep breath, held it, as if bracing for something. ‘And even if something has happened. We should definitely sit tight,’ she said at last.
I broke free, stood up, went into my room.
‘Where are you going?’ she called.
‘I’m calling the police.’
It took her about half a second to come after me. ‘No.’ She grabbed the phone out of my hand. ‘No. That’s not the right play. Not at all.’
I stared at her. ‘Play? He could be—’ I stopped myself from saying it.
‘But he’s not. OK? He’ll be fine. There could be any number of explanations. He might have just gone on a trip.’
I folded my arms. ‘Right. A trip.’
‘Maybe he wanted a break.’
It took me a moment to process that. ‘From me?’
She shrugged apologetically.
‘You’re saying this is just him breaking up with me?’
‘Men. They eat your pies and tell you lies,’ she offered. It was our joke, the phrase with which every conversation we’d ever had about my father would eventually end. But I wasn’t in the mood, and she saw it. ‘I’ve got to get to work, sweetheart.’
‘Me too. I’ve got a shift with the kids. What?’ I said, when she made a face.
‘Maybe best call in sick?’
‘What? Why?’
She spread her hands but didn’t answer my question. Didn’t need to. She didn’t want me to go because she wanted to keep me out of sight.
She thought I’d killed him.
Had I killed him?
After she left, I stood in the hall, taking in our dingy home. Nothing to mark it as ours. Our rent paid in cash – everything always paid in cash – so we could leave at a moment’s notice if anyone came knocking on the doors, asking questions about me, about Jodie. Mum used a different name, Christine Scott, wherever she could. She chose agency work over proper contracts because it meant wages in cash, and there were always agencies with a relaxed approach to background checks.
Our whole existence, Mum’s jobs, everything we did, was built around Siggy. Everything in her life was about me: boyfriends had been dismissed when they started to ask too many questions, jobs abandoned when demands were made that took her away from her duty to me. She’d given up everything just to cover my tracks and keep me happy, or at least keep me safe. Even before Jodie, we’d never put down roots, but since? I’d lost count of the number of times we’d moved. Always in a hurry when someone recognized her. It made her curse herself for ever having had success: if she’d never been on TV, it wouldn’t be half this hard.
I padded back to where the calendar hung on the wall: my shifts marked in pink highlighter.
It’s not like it’s actually a job.
I was coming up twenty years old. I was the same person I’d been at fourteen. Afraid of everyone and everything, locked into the bedroom in my mother’s flat every night for fear of what I might do if I was free. Whatever she said about my value in the world, I was jobless, dependent.
But I had Matt. Loving, understanding Matt. Patient. Blindly at risk.
I made a promise right there and then, that if Siggy had hurt him in any way, that I was ending it. I’d take her with me. I didn’t care.
Nobody wins, Siggy. Do you hear me? This ends here.
Siggy heard. Her black eyes flashed wide, but she shrank back, flattening into the shadows. Didn’t move, not a moment of a challenge. She’d been around me long enough to know when I meant what I said.
7. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mae (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mae arsed the access door open and climbed the steel steps, steep enough to make the toe of his size twelves clang on the underside of each one as he ascended. The fire door at the top swung open and banged against the wall. He squinted as he went out. Bright. Stretching his arms out, opening his chest, he made a circuit of the flat roof then leaned out across the suicide bars, looking down to the street below.
He bit into his bacon roll. He’d lost DCCatherineZiegler shortly after she’d handed it to him in the canteen. Or maybe not lost, exactly, more turned and walked away from, without checking she was behind him.
He rarely ate in the canteen. The food was adequate, but the place was rammed full of cops. For him, up here was the place to be. He chewed slowly, felt the cold on his skin, had a stretch. Movement at the edge of the roof caught his eye: from the door of the shed-like block that housed the steps came his new TI. Striding out across the felt roof like an uncaged animal.
‘Sarge,’ she called, ‘got a sec?’ She carried a sheet of paper, the other hand visored across her forehead against the sharp November sunshine.
Mae jerked his chin to greet her, then chased a dot of brown sauce from the corner of his mouth with his tongue.
‘Love it up here, too,’ she said, tilting her head back to the open sky and filling her lungs. An exchange of car horns sounded, and she glanced over the edge of the building.
She laughed softly. ‘Funny little bastards.’
‘Who?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. All of us.’
Mae followed her eyeline, down to the stop-start of traffic by the junction of Boston Manor Road. Tiny faraway people pottering around, in and out of shops and cars and offices, fluid masses of them sloshing out of buses and onto the streets where they dispersed easily, innocuous as peas from a split bag. When he looked back at her, a smile had risen over her face.
‘Did you need something, Ziegler?’ he said, popping the last mouthful of the butty into his mouth and balling up the bag.
‘Please don’t call me by my surname, Sarge. Makes me feel like I’m at boarding school.’ She followed him back out towards the steps and passed him a printout. ‘Got a new one in. Misper.’
Mae glanced at the sheet she was holding out, swept his eyes over the first couple of lines. Just a log from a triple-9. He handed it back, frowning.
‘Give it to uniform. If it’s already marked as low-risk they’ll do the work-up. They hand it over as and when.’
‘Usually, yeah. But I thought the name might be of interest,’ she said.
He sighed, took the sheet back. They went down the metal steps into the blue-walled normality of the nick. ‘What was the name?’
‘Matthew Corsham,’ she said, peeling the top sheet off, handing it to him. ‘White male, twenty-six, some kind of technician at Hanwell Hospital. No history of missing, not a pisshead or a junkie.’
He nearly choked. ‘I think that’s supposed to read, no history of drugs or alcohol abuse.’
She shrugged and moved on. ‘The workmate who called it in said he’s worried because it was the guy’s last shift yesterday, dismissal was a bit out of the blue and he was distressed. Corsham promised to take his work computer back, and didn’t show, which is very out of character because he swore he’d be there and he’s very reliable. So the workmate calls, but it goes straight to voicemail, so goes round to his place – he lives on a boat, just up towards Isleworth – and he’s disappeared.’
Mae scanned the text for dates. ‘What timescale we talking?’
‘It’s only half a day. Leon, the colleague, says he spoke to him yesterday and he was really agitated about having lost his job.’
‘Half a day? Give the bloke a chance, Christ! They never heard of a bender?’
‘I think that’s supposed to read, excessive period of alcohol consumption.’
Mae gave her a look. ‘And anyway, I don’t know a Matthew Corsham. Am I supposed to?’
‘Not him. The girlfriend.’
Mae returned his eyes to the document. And his heart skidded to a stop. Eleanor Power.
Kit leaned against the doorframe. ‘Rings a bell, right?’
It wasn’t a question, and they both knew it. He gave her a quick glance. ‘You like your homework, then?’
He read the whole thing en route to his desk, walking on autopilot. Not taking his eyes from it until he was in his chair, screen on. A dull wince, the kind that sits there for years until it’s so familiar it almost goes unnoticed, tightened in his chest.
Yeah. It rang a bell.
Mae pulled the keyboard over, put the name through the PNC. Fourteen Eleanor Powers in the country, three in London.
Could it really be her?
‘I’ve run her already,’ Kit told him, reminding him of her presence behind his chair. ‘No records on her, DWP, electoral roll, nothing. Hasn’t had contact with a GP in five years.’
It figured. Five years meant 2006. The year everything fell apart. Eleanor, Ellie, who had seen Jodie Arden getting into a car the night she went missing. Ellie Power, whose mother held her hand and finished her sentences for her when she was too upset to speak. Who was consumed with the irrational belief that her friend’s disappearance – her death, Ellie believed – was her fault. To the extent that, one afternoon, after the session of questioning that would end up being replayed and dissected in the tribunals that lost DS Heath his job and nearly destroyed Mae’s career, she decided that her imagined guilt was unbearable. She followed that conviction through with such brutal decisiveness that Mae was unable to hold it together at work the next day, or the day after that. He’d never gone back, not to his old job, not to any of the spots they’d offered him in Traffic or Custody. Not to anything in the Brighton and Hove district. Not to anything on the Sussex force at all.
But there was one other tiny detail. One minor footnote that he hadn’t come across before or since and would happily never come across again, not least because it was this that discredited her in the eyes of the CPS and collapsed the entire case against Cox: Ellie Power suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder. He felt the fine hairs on his arms lift as he recalled the specifics of it. How according to her own testimony, sometimes she did and said things, went places that she couldn’t remember. Stopped being Ellie Power at all and became – someone else.
Siggy. The name sounded like a whisper in his head, crept like insects on his skin.
He rubbed his palm over the stubble on his scalp and willed his heart to decelerate.
Kit, oblivious, reached over for the mouse and clicked through the pages. ‘Coincidence she turned up here, on your patch. Nothing on her since your missing prostitute, and now—’
‘Jodie Arden was a fucking child.’
She lowered eyes. ‘Sir.’
Mae sighed. He leaned forward, started lifting the various notes and notices pinned to the blue hessian-fronted panel at the back of his desk. Under several sheets of stuff he’d been meaning to read, there was a photo. He pulled the rusting pin out.
Kit leaned close. ‘Is that her?’
It was a head-and-shoulders of a dark-blonde girl in a dress that fastened at the neck: Jodie Arden at her cousin’s Bat Mitzvah. It was the shot they’d used in the police press packs, but the media had rejected it in favour of a racier snapshot taken by a friend on a night out, that showed her in an altogether different light. The papers had treated her like an adult, which meant printing whatever they wanted. She’d missed the social media explosion by a hair’s breadth, but the hacks had got hold of everything, nonetheless. Including the drinking, including the drug use. And including the fact that she had been sleeping with a much older man, a psychotherapist by the name of Charles Cox, who just so happened to be treating her best friend Ellie. Worse still, Cox also just so happened to be dating Jodie’s own mum. It was this man who owned the car Ellie Power saw Jodie climbing into before she disappeared off the face of the planet. Her disappearance had been news for all of two days, after which another girl in another part of the country had gone missing. A nicer girl, Aryan and clean, a girl who’d volunteered in Uganda and had a place at Cambridge and played the oboe or whatever. With no new information, Jodie Arden had just become another statistic, one among thousands of almost-adult runaways who slipped through the cracks.
‘She was a week off eighteen when she disappeared,’ he said, carefully. ‘I don’t know what you were like, but I sure as hell wouldn’t fancy being judged for life at that age.’
Kit put her hands up. She ventured a tentative laugh. ‘You always this heavy first thing on a Monday?’
‘You just wait till end of the week,’ he said, replacing the photo. ‘I’m an unstoppable gag machine by Thursday lunch.’
‘Right. Well, apologies.’ She gathered up the paper she’d delivered, giving him a sideways look that he couldn’t interpret. ‘Just saw the name and thought you’d be interested. Given your involvement.’
‘Ancient history, to be honest.’ He stood up and straightened his shirt. ‘Come on.’
‘So we are looking at it?’
‘You’re the trainee, so I’m training you. Got to start somewhere.’ Good thing about rank was how you didn’t have to explain yourself to anyone under you. He swept his jacket off the back of his chair and felt in his drawer for a tie, then remembered something. ‘You got a change of clothes?’
Kit frowned, shook her head. ‘Not apart from my gym stuff. Why?’
‘Best ditch the uniform. There’s a plain-clothes store down by the armoury, you can get the key from the guy in Evidence. Find something there, OK? Meet me in reception in five.’ He flipped the collar of his shirt up and gestured an after you.
8. (#ulink_77c71461-6b7c-5800-873c-67068e78a588)
Ellie (#ulink_77c71461-6b7c-5800-873c-67068e78a588)
I stood back from the door, head on the side, to admire the result. Cosmetically at least, my doorframe was OK now. Between the tub of wood putty and a few scraps of sandpaper I’d found, I’d rebuilt the splintered section back up and shaped it to match the contour of the rest. There had been an inch of gloss paint left in the tin from last time it had needed repairing, and I’d done a fair job. I was proud of it. Mum would be pleased.
I felt my shoulders drop as I thought how Matt would be proud, too. I’d managed to convince him I was pretty handy with repairs the first time I’d gone to his narrowboat. It was about a month after I’d first got talking to him at the hospital while I waited for Mum to finish her shift. For weeks, we’d accidentally-on-purpose bumped into each other before he properly asked me out. Our first real date was on a Saturday afternoon: a lazy lunch at a riverside pub. Matt invited me back to see the boat afterwards but had forgotten that he’d been halfway through laying new floorboards until we went inside.
‘Oh god, state of the place,’ he said, shoving the mess of cushions on the built-in sofa up to one end to clear a space for me. ‘Sorry, not a great start.’ He started lugging the new boards across from where they were propped by the log burner, roughly laying them into place to give us something to stand on.
I sat where I was shown, but raised an eyebrow, flirty from the wine. ‘Start to what, exactly?’
He glanced up, embarrassed, ‘I meant, I—’
Nudging him with a toe, I put him out of his misery. ‘Kidding.’ And he laughed, and it felt good. Then, seized with the urge to show off, I got to my feet, rolled up my sleeves, and picked up a hammer from a pile of tools in the corner.
‘Let’s do it, then,’ I said, indicating the boards. ‘I’ll help you get this floor down.’
He bit the corner off a wry smile. ‘You don’t strike me as the woodworking type.’
‘Stronger than I look.’
‘Oh yeah?’ He grinned, ran his eyes over me. I let him do it, my hands on hips, weighing the hammer in my hands. After that, it was a matter of pride to prove it.
The memory of it split like a burning frame of celluloid the moment I heard the front door. I glanced at the time: Mum wasn’t due back for another half hour.
She burst into my bedroom. ‘Has he rung?’
‘No. I’d have told you—’
‘OK. All right,’ she said, slumping slightly.
‘What’s happened? How come you’re early?’
‘I swapped cleaning sectors with Angie so I could leave early,’ she said, then she told me how she’d gone to the photographic lab where Matt worked, to see if Matt had been there. ‘There were two blokes talking outside his office, one of them said Matt’s name, so I hung around. He said he’d been to find Matt, hadn’t got anywhere, so he’d called the police.’
It was probably Leon, I thought, the friend who’d called me before. ‘But the police weren’t actually there.’
‘No, but—’ she made a gesture with her hands, flustered. ‘Look – I just – are we still OK here? I mean, you’ve been careful, even with Matt, right? They’re not going to find the address?’
I tried to hold her eye, but I couldn’t.
She gaped. ‘Oh no, Ellie. What did you do?’
‘I’d been meaning to tell you,’ I said weakly. ‘It was when we were applying for the volunteering.’
‘You gave them our address?’
‘No, he did it. He didn’t know not to. I could hardly tell him not to, could I? How would I explain it?’
‘Well, fuck!’ She threw her free hand up. ‘Great! Wonderful, good work!’
I wanted to say sorry, but she hated me apologizing.
‘I said this would happen. I said, the first time you brought him round. It was too big a risk. Didn’t I say?’ She went into her bedroom and started to rush about, pulling off her tabard and stuffing it into the washing basket. Then as if remembering, she went out to the kitchen and returned with the bag containing the wet clothes from that morning.
As calmly as I could, I said, ‘Mum. Tell me what’s going on.’
‘Nothing! I just want to be prepared.’ She roughly pulled a shirt on and went to the dressing table, plonked herself down and pulled out her make-up. ‘They’re going to come here, aren’t they? The police. And they’re going to ask questions.’
‘So we answer them.’
‘Yeah?’ She spun round, a blob of foundation balancing on fingertip halfway to her face. ‘With what?’
‘How about the truth?’
‘We don’t know what happened! We’ve got no fucking idea what the truth is, have we?’
I bit into my cheek until I tasted blood. I wasn’t going to cry.
Mum applied the make-up, sighed and got up. She went to the bed and patted the place beside her.
I sat, and she put an arm around my shoulders. ‘Come on then.’ She squeezed. ‘They’re going to come, so let’s think what we’re saying. Where had you been, last night?’
‘The pub, but—’
‘Which pub?’
‘Mum, why are we even—?’
‘Which one?’
‘The Windmill. He had an IPA; I had a lemonade.’
‘And people saw you.’
‘Yes. No. Not people we knew.’
‘You weren’t arguing?’
‘No! Why would we be?’
She sighed heavily and went back to the mirror, flipped open a compact. ‘They’re going to ask you this, Ellie. You need to get this right. If they get a whiff that you might be hiding something, we’ve got trouble. They’re already going to have linked you to … what happened before. You do understand that, right?’
‘I’m not hiding anything!’
She raised her eyebrows, then moved her gaze pointedly to my neck. Gave a loose, open-handed gesture to my shoulder, my hip. Siggy shuddered in the aches, as if she was part of them, like they were hers.
Quietly, I said, ‘I’ll just tell them what happened.’
‘About the bruises?’ she said, incredulous.
‘He might be somewhere right now needing help, Mum!’
‘You can’t talk to them. Not yet. Not until we know what’s happened.’
‘But that’s what they do! That’s what the police do, they find out what happened!’
She said nothing to that, but the rise of her eyebrows said, not always. I looked away. If there was one thing I did not want to be talking about right now, it was Jodie Arden.
My eyes lighted on the bag of wet clothes from the morning. ‘What are you going to do with that?’ I asked, nodding to it.
She peered into the mirror. ‘I am going,’ she said, lifting her lashes now with the mascara wand, ‘to incinerate it.’
I waited for her to face me, to grin. But she wasn’t joking.
‘What did you find, Mum? This morning?’
An infinitesimal pause. ‘Ellie—’
And then, from outside, we heard a woman’s voice. ‘This one. Over here.’
We both stood up, fast. She had turned towards the sound but swung back to face me, hands on my shoulders, pulling me into a hug.
‘Listen to me,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Let me talk to them. We can make sure they look for Matt properly, and maybe it’ll all be fine. But it wasn’t before, with Jodie, was it? And if something has happened to him, and if you – Siggy – had anything to do with it, we need to control this as best we can.’
Three knocks at the door.
‘You are a good person, Ellie. We are good people. We’ve done our bloody best. I will not allow that bitch to ruin your life, or mine.’ She brought her mouth right against my ear, and in a vicious whisper she said, ‘Do you hear me? Siggy? You’re not having her. You’re not going to take my daughter.’
From the other end of the corridor I could hear a second voice, a man, calling through the front door.
My mother touched my face. ‘Not. A. Sound.’ And then she left the room, closing the door softly behind her.
9. (#ulink_ff0f5615-6040-5edc-8018-83e1d51a5d0c)
Mae (#ulink_ff0f5615-6040-5edc-8018-83e1d51a5d0c)
Mae knocked again.
Cold spiked in the morning air, and the sky above Abson Street was a flat, formless grey. Kit, looking distinctly uncomfortable in a borrowed pinstripe skirt suit, took a step back to assay the building, intermittent clouds of breath forming in front of her face. She stretched, then pressed her fists into the small of her back, wincing.
He cocked his head. ‘Been fighting?’
She let out a small grunt and straightened up. ‘Roller derby.’
‘You’re kidding.’
Kit grinned. ‘Nope. You’re looking at west London’s fourth-finest blocker.’
He’d seen bruises on her legs before, at the gym, and wondered what her sport was. Hockey, he’d guessed, or rugby possibly. But roller derby was something else. Explained the tattoos, too. He tried extremely hard not to think about her in war paint and fishnets. Extremely hard wasn’t hard enough.
‘You play round here?’ he asked, bending to call through the letterbox. ‘Ms Power? Ellie?’
‘Sure. Another reason that I’ll hate you forever for making me wear this—’ she gestured at her skirt, ‘monstrosity. I look like I’m selling insurance. I’ve got a rep to protect. This is my “hood”.’ She accompanied that with some kind of gesture that he guessed was supposed to be gangsta.
‘Straight outta Acton,’ he offered, but she just frowned, too young for the reference. ‘Never mind.’
There was the scrape of several locks, and the door opened to reveal a lean, serious woman in her fifties. For just a moment, she gave them a warm smile that didn’t match the restless eyes, and he remembered her in her entirety: the feeling that she always had a mask up, was always trying to calm herself down, keep something in.
Christine Power.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked. Then she recognized him. ‘Ah. DC Mae.’ The finest splinter of ice in her voice.
‘It’s DS now, actually. How are you, Christine?’
She didn’t answer the question. This was the moment to say she looked good, that she hadn’t aged. But the truth of it was that every minute of the five years since their paths had last crossed was in stark evidence in each crease of her face, in the near-complete greying of her hair.
Kit cleared her throat.
‘This is DC Ziegler,’ he said. ‘She’s a Trainee Investigator.’
Christine pulled her gaze away from Mae and greeted Kit, turning on the smile that reminded him how she’d been semi-famous once. A reporter, back when women covering international stories were vanishingly scarce.
‘We’ve come for a chat with Ellie. Is she in?’ he asked, taking in what he could of the corridor behind her, given the lack of light. ‘We’re concerned about the whereabouts of a Matthew Corsham?’
Christine gave a tight shake of her head. ‘She’s not here right now, I’m afraid. Can I help?’
‘If you have a few minutes,’ Kit said, stepping forward.
The door opened a little wider as Christine stood aside, and Mae followed Kit into a square, magnolia-coloured living room. They were offered tea. Mae declined with a smile, but Kit groaned with relief.
‘Could murder one,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘Coffee would be great, if you have it.’
Christine nodded and turned away, closing the door behind her.
Mae turned slowly to face Kit. ‘Ordinarily we avoid using words like murder.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Figure of speech, man. Lighten up.’ She shoved her hands in her pockets and looked around.
The place was as tidy as it could have been, but everything was shabby. The carpet was in tiles, worn down in places to the foam backing: decades of service had left the curtains with vertical streaks sun-bleached almost to white. Elsewhere: chipped paintwork, bare lightbulbs, no photos, no clutter of any description. And it was cold in there. He touched a radiator. Hadn’t been on that morning, and the dust on the control tap at the bottom said it had been longer. Like last year. This was more than slumming it.
‘They just moved in?’ Kit whispered, looking around. ‘I’ve been in homelier bus stations. Who doesn’t even have a single photo on the wall?’
She turned to the single line of paperbacks, standing on the deep sill of the single-glazed window, and bent her head to read the spines. Mae looked, too: Dissociation and Me; A Child of Many Parts; Fugue State: A Carer’s Guide. She glanced back at him, confused. He knew what was coming.
‘Yeah. Ellie’s … she’s not well. Mentally.’ Said it casually, like he was telling her Ellie was fond of horses.
‘OK. Like how?’
He lifted a shoulder, dropped it. There wasn’t time to explain properly. ‘Complicated.’
‘Try me.’
Mae checked round the doorway, then said, quickly, ‘It’s called DID. Dissociative Identity Disorder.’
Kit nodded. ‘Makes sense she still lives with her mum, then. Poor bastard,’ she added with a shrug, an unfazed gesture that made him suddenly conscious of how diametrically different their back-and-forth was from the relationship he’d had as a TI with his own mentor. One sniff of mental illness back then would have been enough to release a feverish tirade – sometimes delivered out of earshot of the target, sometimes not – about snowflakes and limp-wristed millennials. It would all be easier to stomach now if Mae could have convinced himself he’d stood up for the victims of DS Heath’s vitriol. But it hadn’t happened like that, had it?
And wasn’t that why he was here in this flat, right now?
He turned back to the books, ran his finger along the titles until he came to a slim paperback, cheaply made, well-thumbed. Its spine was peeling away to expose the glue beneath, but Mae knew it immediately. He handed it to her.
‘“A Splintered Soul: Collected Essays on Dissociation, Fugue and Recovery”,’ she read, whispering.
‘Chapter seven is Ellie.’
‘Seriously? What does—?’ Kit started, but she was interrupted by the sound of Christine coming back with the drinks. Kit put the book back and affected a smile.
The coffee was distributed, and Christine perched on the arm of the angular sofa. She folded her arms over her chest, crossed her legs at the knee. Mae thought of a Transformer toy he’d had as a kid. Bend and fold and click and bam, suddenly you had something totally different.
He cleared his throat. ‘So where’s Ellie right now, do you know?’
‘She’s not feeling good. Gone for some air.’ Then, to Kit, in a woman-to-woman tone, ‘She has anxiety.’ And to Mae: ‘As I’m sure you’ll remember.’
Kit nodded, sympathetic. ‘That’s no fun.’ She glanced at Mae, who gave her a slight tilt of the head: go ahead, your interview. ‘Mrs Power, we—’
‘Ms,’ Mae corrected her.
‘Ms Power, my apologies,’ Kit said. ‘We received a call from a workmate of Mr Corsham’s saying that he’s potentially gone missing, so we wanted to talk to Ellie about him.’
‘I see.’ She ran her hands over her face, stretching the skin under her eyes for a moment. She looked tired, but not the kind of tired that went away with a good night’s sleep. ‘I’ll ask her to call you, if you like? Although I’m not sure how much she’s been seeing him lately. She’s young. Keeping her options open.’
Kit smiled. ‘Do you know Matthew at all yourself?’
‘A little. We both work at the same hospital.’
Mae pulled out his notes. Frowned. ‘Really? Because I—’
‘Yes. Hanwell. I’m just a cleaner there. He’s in the photographic lab.’
‘That how Ellie met him?’ Kit asked brightly.
‘She was waiting for me in the canteen one day. They got talking.’
‘Sweet.’
Kit made a note, took a long slug of her coffee, then stood. ‘We’ll need to speak to Ellie as soon as possible. Could you give her this card, ask her to call?’
‘Of course.’
Kit thanked Christine and opened the door, making to leave. She made small talk as they passed to the hall, but it dried up at the front door. There was an awkward silence as Kit tied her shoes.
‘Christine,’ Mae said. ‘What happened before—’
She held up a hand. ‘It doesn’t matter. All I need is for you to treat her carefully. All right?’
He nodded, handed her a card. There was nothing else to say. ‘Could you have Ellie call us as soon as possible?’
Christine Power looked Mae full in the face. ‘Be gentle. Do you understand? My daughter is not like the rest of us. If one good thing came from the …’ she paused, skewering the word, ‘mess,back then, I hope you at least learned that.’
10. (#ulink_54102bbb-50e7-5a91-9477-8551f80eae85)
Ellie (#ulink_54102bbb-50e7-5a91-9477-8551f80eae85)
I waited in Mum’s room, too scared of making a noise to even move.
I would have known that voice anywhere. Ben Mae. I could make him out clearly as they came down the hall, but the moment they closed the living room door all I could hear was low, muffled and intermittent, and I could hardly catch a word.
Siggy breathed static in my head, watching me. She knew exactly what had happened last night, but she would never tell me. All I could do was imagine, and that was the worst part: the inability to differentiate between mine and hers. Between real memory and my own terrified imagination doing its best to fill in the gaps.
When I lost Jodie, I told the police the same story every time they asked, the story that Mum and I had gone over and over. What I saw that last night before she disappeared. Jodie got into Cox’s car. It was red. They were fighting. That was the last time I saw her.
I’d rehearsed it so many times by the time I told the police, I’d almost believed it was true.
Dr Charles Cox had been in his mid-forties when they’d got together. She was seventeen. It wasn’t illegal, as Jodie reminded me almost every time we talked about him, even though it was never me who complained about the age gap. What I was bothered by was the fact that he was dating her mother. But even that was something I could overlook, under the circumstances. The fact was that, apart from my own mum, Jodie was the only friend I’d ever had.
Our friendship lasted four months. From the day I met her to the day she died: 121 days. It was a Tuesday, the first time we met. I’d seen her around before, but she went to the big comprehensive the other side of Hove and wasn’t around much. But that Tuesday morning in April, colder than she was dressed for and drizzly to boot, she was there in the stairwell outside our flat like she was waiting for me. Legs draped widthways across the step, smoking. I tried to go past her and when she didn’t move I turned to go back the way I’d come, backing away from confrontation like I always did. But then she held out the cigarette. Hand-rolled, lipstick on the filter.
‘You’re the home-school kid.’
I nodded.
‘Missing your GCSEs?’
My GCSEs, if I was going to take them, would have been two years off, but I didn’t correct her. Looking at her I knew she had to be sixteen, seventeen at least. If I told her my real age, she’d have been up and out of there. So I just folded my arms, affecting nonchalance, and said, ‘Whatever.’
She smiled, blew the smoke in a thin, elegant stream from the corner of her mouth. ‘Just you and your mum in there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Your dad turn out to be a bastard, like mine?’
I shrugged, but the answer was an indisputable yes: he’d only been with Mum a few months when she found out she was pregnant, and promptly disappeared when she told him the happy news. The news that he’d died of an overdose found its way to her a week before I was born. I used to ask her about him, what he was like, but I learned to accept her reluctance in the end. From the shadow that came over her face whenever I mentioned him, I guessed bastard didn’t even come close. But somehow, I’d never quite given up hope that she was wrong: that whoever told her he was dead had made a mistake. I still found myself checking the eyes of every man I saw who could, conceivably, have been the right age to be my dad, looking for the mismatched irises that Mum said I’d inherited from him.
Jodie waved the cigarette again, offering.
‘No thanks,’ I said, almost inaudibly.
She looked at it and shrugged, then tossed it into the void at the middle of the stairwell. I gasped, leaned over the railings to see if there was anyone down there, and she laughed.
‘Fuck ’em,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Going for a walk. The pier. Coming?’
She was on a suspension from school – one fucking joint and they reckon you’re Amy Winehouse, she said – and things were brittle with her mum. Jodie drank, she smoked, she did drugs occasionally. After she disappeared there were even claims that she’d sold sex, though I’d never heard that from her. For all these reasons, I kept my friendship with her from Mum. Although I knew it was an unthinkable betrayal, lying by omission over and over: having a secret was the most delicious liberation, too. Jodie and I saw each other nearly every day, always at hers, always arranged the day before, to coincide with Mum being out.
Everything was easy with Jodie. I was happy. I’d never had a friend like her, someone I could truly be myself with. So, despite the promises I’d made to Mum, despite her warnings, eventually I told her about Siggy.
I told her everything. All of it. Not just the fugues but about the dreams that repeated until I knew every thread and wisp of them: the long, low building, just flashes of it; being trapped, a fire; the little boy bleeding on the ground; the cell-deep of the man in a uniform. These dreams – nightmares – were so vivid, their details so constant even in my waking thoughts that they felt like memories.
I explained to her about the panic attacks: terrors that would burst out fully formed, whose triggers I could pin down no more easily than puffs of smoke. Over the years, Mum had helped me understand that these fears lodged in my mind weren’t mine but Siggy’s, and that was a distinction that helped me make sense of them. And even though it couldn’t have made sense to her in the way I wanted it to, Jodie had listened.
The next day, she took me to see her mum’s boyfriend. Dr Cox. Charles.
I didn’t want to go, of course. I refused all the way along the prom to his office in east Brighton. ‘It’s not going to make any difference,’ I insisted.
‘Oh yeah? How do you know? You psychic, too?’
‘No,’ I said grumpily. ‘I’ve done psychotherapy before.’
‘When?’ She clunked her jaw, trying to perfect her smoke rings.
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was a kid. Little.’
‘Can’t have been great if you don’t remember it.’
‘Well yeah,’ I said, making an effort the way I tried to back then to give as good as I got. ‘Obviously, it wasn’t great, because it didn’t work, did it?’
She pulled on my sleeve, rolling her eyes. ‘He’s gooood,’ she wheedled. ‘You’ll like him. Come on. It’s got to be worth trying again.’
We found a way of me going to sessions with him, and she came along. I ran with the lie I’d told Jodie about my age because it meant that Dr Cox would see me without parental permission. He waived his usual fee too, claiming I was an interesting case, though we all knew it was really because I was Jodie’s friend. To start, she’d sit in and listen, not saying anything. No one, not Mum, not Cox, not even Matt, ever listened to me like Jodie did. Like she was storing it all away, cataloguing it, fitting the pieces of my fragmented pasts together. I believed she would solve it.
Maybe she would have done.
There was a click from the living room door, and the voices were clear again. Right outside the bedroom where I was hiding, crouching like a shamed dog. I mouth-breathed, absolutely silent, quiet enough to hear Ben Mae’s deep breath before he said, ‘What happened before …’
What happened before. I pressed my hands against my temples, and Siggy grinned.
Don’t think about it, I told myself.
The only images I have in my head of the night my friend died are Mum’s, just hand-me-down mental pictures appropriated from her description. The problem was that these appropriated visual details are lodged so close to my own memories – of the endless summer before it and the black-hole horror of the months after – that I sometimes feel that it was me who was there, not just Siggy. But that would mean the lines between her and me had started to blur, and if that could happen …
Just don’t think about it. Calm down. Breathe.
Mum found her down by the river, where we go on Cherry Tree Day, to mark a special day for Siggy. I’d never taken Jodie there before, and it’s a secret place, inaccessible, overgrown and wooded. But I – or Siggy – had taken her there that night. It was days until Mum admitted to me what she’d found.
The missing belt—
I can’t breathe.
The missing belt from my—
Shit. I can’t breathe!
The police were still in the hall, just a couple of inches of plasterboard separating us. I tried to force myself to think about something else, because this couldn’t happen, not with them there – the police! – right outside the bedroom door with my mother lying to them.
Breathe. Breathe. Please just breathe.
Everything rotated. A slow, dark tornado, twisting around me, and the vacuum in my chest got harder, tighter. My vision darkened at the edges and my skin started to burn, and the insides of my lungs started to curl up from the heat and this was it but right at the last second, the pressure broke, and I was breathing but
Calm. Calm down.
Too fast now. I couldn’t stop.
Deep breaths. Slow. You are having a panic attack. Slow down – breathe slowly – but I couldn’t stop. In and out and in and out and too shallow, not enough, not enough air, and all the time the only thing I could think was all the things Mum had eventually told me—
The missing belt from my coat, sodden and caked and wrapped twice around Jodie’s neck and
her fingernails broken and her hair bloodied and studded with broken leaves and
not enough air!
the skin of her throat pressed white and her mouth slack and her eyes wide and glazed and
the rain falling against their bulging, panicked, unblinking surfaces
Because of me.
Movement in the hallway. I felt myself lighten, losing consciousness. Were they, were they coming in? They were coming in.
They know what you did.
The last thing I heard was the front door opening, and then everything went black.
11. (#ulink_ad35d87c-cf44-51b6-9cff-5a83ac9c68d5)
CC: So let’s start by checking in. How are you feeling today?
EP: I’m OK.
[pause: 32 sec]
CC: I’m sensing some anxiety.
EP: No. I’m fine.
[pause: 22 sec]
EP: Can you – why do you leave these huge long gaps all the time?
CC: OK. I’m glad you asked. Sometimes we find that when we’re not rushed, when we’re given the time to go into greater depth, we discover things that really help our journeys.
[pause: 23 sec]
EP: I haven’t got anything to say.
CC: Sure.
[pause: 35 sec]
EP: OK, look, fine. She came. Last night.
CC: Siggy came?
EP: Yeah.
[pause: 19 sec]
CC: Would you like to talk about the episode you had?
EP: Well I don’t know, do I? That’s the whole fucking – sorry
CC: That’s fine
EP: That’s the whole problem. I don’t know anything about it. It’s like I go to bed every night and I’m me but then this other person I don’t know or like or want there, this other me climbs in. She moves me about, says things like she’s me, like I’m, I’m, I’m just this, this puppet. I don’t think you can possibly know what that’s like. It’s terrifying. I’m terrified, and I can’t even think about it without ending up – look, like this – ending up shaking. Do you see that, my hands?
CC: I do.
EP: It’s like, and I know that I shouldn’t say this and that it’s not the same thing but having someone else in your body, someone you, you hate, who is there without permission, it’s like waking up and finding you’ve been … I can’t say it.
CC: You feel … let’s say, you feel violated?
EP: Yes. Yes. Even if she’s just got me up and walked around the flat. I can’t remember any of it. [crying] Anything, at all. And just – my mum, the way she describes it – I just-I just [crying] I want to just
[pause: 1 min 6 sec]
EP: Sorry. I’m sorry.
CC: OK. Ellie, can you look at me? I know it’s hard, but just look at me just a moment. Thank you. There is no judgement here. None at all. Anything you say will be heard and believed.
[pause: 56 sec]
CC: OK. Do you need some water before we go on?
EP: I’m OK.
CC: It’s extremely difficult for you to talk about; I can see that these episodes affect you very deeply.
EP: Yeah. Yeah, they do. I’m scared. I never know when it’s going to happen. Like, I had this fight with my mum last night, because I wanted to try school. I mean, like sixth form. I haven’t had a fugue for, I don’t know, a couple of weeks? She just kept saying I wasn’t strong enough and about how last time we tried, my panic attacks got worse and everything, and we fell out big time because I just want to do normal stuff. Go out and live my actual life, you know?
CC: I do.
EP: And then I went to bed and I wake up and this has happened. She said – my mum said – Siggy was really angry last night. Like, she was scary, Mum couldn’t get near her to talk to her without her lashing out. Then she went out—
CC: Siggy went outside?
EP: Yeah went out and Mum had to follow me … follow her round the block until she’d agree to go back in again. Here, look this is where she fell over at one point when she was running. Look can you see on my elbow—
CC: That’s quite a scrape—
EP: Yeah. Yeah it-it really hurts.
[pause: 20 sec]
CC: What I’m hearing is a lot of conflict between you and Siggy. It’s a battle.
EP: Yeah. That’s exactly what it is.
[pause: 22 sec]
EP: The days after the fugues, I can feel Siggy kind of … there, all of the time. Like she’s got to rub it in, make sure I know she’s won, you know? Like last night was her telling me …
[pause: 27 sec]
CC: You feel she’s telling you something. Can you say a bit—
EP: It was like she was telling me to stay scared. Like it was a warning.
12. (#ulink_d082d5ec-e2da-5fc2-bc0e-35c92b9942f0)
Mae (#ulink_d082d5ec-e2da-5fc2-bc0e-35c92b9942f0)
They said nothing until they were back at street level, outside the Powers’ flat. Fine rain sieved across the street, and Mae shrugged up the collar of his pea coat. Kit strode back to the car, heading for the driver’s seat.
‘Well that was weird,’ she said, when Mae was in beside her.
‘In what way?’
Kit frowned into the middle distance. ‘I spoke to the guy at the hospital, Leon, right? The dude who called it in.’ She turned to him. ‘And he gave me Ellie’s name as someone who knows Matt and said how he’d said she volunteered there. So I called the HR office and got them to find her address. He searched for Power on the staff system – he spelled it out loud as he typed it in – and he said “Here it is, one entry, first name Eleanor”. Hers was the only record they had. Which means Christine isn’t on their system, even though she works for them.’
‘Maybe she’s agency staff?’
‘That’s what I thought, but everyone needs clearance at a hospital, surely? Kids and vulnerable adults at a hospital, you need a DBS or whatever.’
Mae frowned, went to get his phone out, but Kit was eyeballing something in the rear-view.
‘What?’ he asked, turning in his seat to see.
On the pavement, staring into the car, was a young man. Caucasian with black, tightly curled hair, a faded band T-shirt under a checked flannel shirt. Early twenties, but already a little old for the gloomy, emo vibe he was projecting.
Kit was out of the car and coming round the front before Mae was even out of his seatbelt. ‘Help you?’ she asked him, brightly.
Mae joined them on the pavement.
‘Doing surveillance?’ the guy said. His voice was scratchy, something Mae immediately put down to the yellow plastic wallet of rolling tobacco protruding from his top pocket.
Kit already had her pad out. ‘How do you mean?’
‘The people in the van!’ His jittering glare ricocheted endlessly between them. ‘I’m not stupid.’
Which may or may not have been true, but what Mae knew with a reasonable level of certainty was that he was a nutcase. Kit, on the other hand, needed maybe a little more field experience.
‘We’re the police, CID,’ Kit said, and gave their names, proper by-the-book. ‘We’re checking out a possible missing person. Do you live round here?’
He nodded across the road to the rear access of a shop that sat underneath the Powers’ flat. Mae had clocked it on the way in, a Polish place.
‘I see a lot.’ The young man pointed enigmatically to his eyes with the V of his index and middle fingers, then turned the gesture on the street. ‘But what I want to know is, what are you doing with the van? You want to listen to what I’m saying in my own house?’
Kit glanced around. ‘Can you see this van now?’
‘I’m not imagining it! It’s just gone, right now, obviously!’
Kit nodded diplomatically and tucked her pad away again. Mae couldn’t fault her professionalism: she gave him the non-emergency number, closed the conversation, stayed polite and respectful. The guy was still talking when Mae swung his own door shut.
‘… parabolic microphones, serious kit, and if it’s not you, it’s MI6, or SO-15, or whatever, and I know about it. I know, OK, man?’
Kit waited until they were around the corner before she took her eyes off the road. ‘Jesus. Get that a lot?’
Mae laughed, and got out his phone.
By the time they hit the Boston Manor Road he’d found what he expected to find. Not only was Christine not on her employer’s records – at least not under her own name – but there were no records on Christine or Eleanor Power at that address anywhere else. No entry on the local government system, NHS, banks, credit agencies, nothing.
Didn’t happen by accident.
So, what? Were they hiding? Why?
Kit turned on the radio, flicked quickly away from Heart, found nothing, turned it off.
‘Christine Power was pleased to see you though, yeah?’ she said, biting the edge off a wry smile. ‘Big DS Mae fan. Ker-azy pheromones coming off that one.’
‘Kit. Please.’
She lifted her hands from the wheel in surrender. ‘Just saying. But what did she mean about—?’
‘Can we leave it?’
She blew out her cheeks. ‘What’s next then? Open-door search then grade it? I couldn’t get hold of the guy at the moorings, but I can go down there now, sure I’ll find someone to let me in. Won’t take long.’
The open-door search was the first point of call usually, checking the missing person’s home in case they’d got sick or stuck or injured anywhere. But if it was a narrowboat it was going to be a pretty quick job.
‘After lunch,’ Mae said, suddenly aware of the chasm in his stomach. ‘I’ll go to the marina, you hit the phones. Talk to his manager about what he got sacked for.’
His phone buzzed against his leg and he pulled it out, checked the screen: Nadia. Turning in his seat for whatever privacy he could get in a five-door, he hit the green button.
‘Are you OK to pick Dominica up from violin?’ his ex-wife wanted to know. ‘I’ve just been asked to go to this meeting.’
No hi, no how’s things. And it was Dominica now instead of Bear, like they couldn’t even agree on the name of their kid. ‘Sure.’
‘And bring her back at half eight?’
‘Yep.’
‘Mike’ll be here, OK, so … just so you know.’
Mike. Who had ten years on Mae, twelve on Nadia, although a stranger could easily place him in his mid-sixties because the guy was utterly, relentlessly grey. It wasn’t like Mae hadn’t tried to find something interesting about him, something likeable. Mid-west American, drove a Citroen, played badminton three times a week, with a record that couldn’t be cleaner if it had been formulated in an aseptic lab. Never so much as a day late with his TV licence. There was, of course, more than a slim chance that Nadia’s attraction to Mike was all Mae’s fault. That ten years with him had turned his funny, brilliant, game-for-anything wife into a reliability junkie. Or maybe it was just that maybe Mike happened to be hung like a centaur.
‘Mike. Sure.’
Nadia sighed. ‘Try to do something fun with her after, OK? She always comes back from you so … I don’t know. Flat.’
He took the screen from his ear and thumbed the red circle until he could feel the casing start to bow.
‘Touch-screen means you only have to touch it, you know,’ Kit told him.
‘Uh-huh. And advanced driving means keeping your eyes on the road.’
13. (#ulink_1e9d1e36-52d1-5836-b18a-d027c4161c99)
Ellie (#ulink_1e9d1e36-52d1-5836-b18a-d027c4161c99)
Quarter of an hour passed before I felt halfway normal. After the police left and the panic subsided, Mum brought me sweet tea, made herself late waiting until I could convince her I was fine. She fetched the duvet from the bedroom and tucked me in on the sofa, then checked the time and swore softly under her breath.
‘I have to go and make up for that shift.’ She bent to kiss me goodbye. ‘Just stay put. Don’t let anyone in.’
‘All right, Mum.’
She tapped her fingers on the edge of the mug, running something through her mind. ‘They’ll go to his boat next, I should think,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘Maybe they’ll find something there.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing.’ She found a brief smile, shrugged her shoulders.
When she finally left, I got straight up from under the duvet and went into her room, pulling a corner of the curtain aside to watch her through the window. She paused at the car, glanced up at me, and touched her fingertips to her lips. Then got in and drove away.
Maybe they’ll find something.
She meant a note.
Was there a note?
I wasted no time. I pulled some shoes on, and looked for my raincoat before remembering I’d been unable to find it earlier. I dug around in a drawer until I found the fleece-lined zip-up hoody I’d borrowed from Matt and refused to return. I left the flat with Siggy still tiny and shuddering in my chest.
14. (#ulink_ab7f00f9-eb58-5851-be30-8d6d15c3517d)
Mae (#ulink_ab7f00f9-eb58-5851-be30-8d6d15c3517d)
Mae bit into his bagel. Pinned to the fabric-covered room divider behind his workstation was a page from a set of ACPO guidelines, thoughtfully printed out and displayed by whoever had last occupied Mae’s desk. IF IN DOUBT, THINK MURDER, it read. It had been there so long that the drawing pins had gone rusty, and snagged on the cloth when Mae pulled them out. He balled it up to lob, with flukily perfect aim, into the recycling, just as Kit walked in.
‘Like things spic and span, don’t you?’ she said, looking around, holding a pen drive and standing in a strict at-ease. ‘Speaks of a need to instil order.’
Mae held out his hand for the drive. ‘Spare me the amateur mind reading. What have you got?’
‘Apart from a first-class honours degree in psychology?’
He laughed, then stopped. ‘Really?’
She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I can see into the very blackness of your soul,’ she said, before breaking into a grin. ‘No but seriously, tidy people do tend to crave reliability and control, and you tend to crave the things you didn’t get as a kid. Just saying.’
He opened his mouth, shut it again, totally at a loss for what to say. What to even think. ‘You do remember that I’m your boss here, right?’
She shrugged. ‘Fluid thing, though, hierarchy, isn’t it? Anyway,’ she said, leaning over him to slide the drive into a port and commandeer his keyboard. ‘Headlines. I couldn’t get hold of the person who dealt with Corsham’s contract but the HR person I spoke to said it looked like he was on short contracts and just hadn’t been offered a new one. I’ll keep trying for his direct line manager though, see if there’s any more to it.’
Mae nodded, scanning the document she’d opened. ‘Any more workmates?’
‘The guy he shared an office with said he was talking about buying some vintage lomo gear.’
‘Lomo?’
‘Kind of cult photography thing. Analogue, retro stuff. Apparently Corsham had been reading up on the ones where you take the picture and they spit the thingy out, and you …’ she mimed waving a wet photograph, ‘you remember?’
He scrolled through the rest of the notes, ticking off the lines of investigation. Matthew Corsham was an only child, estranged from his father since infancy; mother dead from cancer a few years previously.
‘DVLA have a 1989 soft top Golf Cabriolet registered to him,’ she told him, pointing it out lower on the page. ‘I’m going to run a search on that in a sec. He’d been for a few after-work drinks but no particular mates – sounds pretty shy – and he hadn’t been in the job that long.’ She lifted her hands, dropped them, underwhelmed. ‘Not much to go on though. He’d signed up for a few socials with a local photography group. I’ve emailed the guy who organized it to see if he made any friends there.’
As Mae read, the picture emerged of a quiet, unremarkable man. He’d moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh a couple of years before, then down to London only a few months ago. From what Kit had managed to trawl in a couple of hours, they were looking at an average twenty-something bloke, without a particularly vibrant social life, with good, normal, healthy pursuits. Vintage cameras. The gym. Batshit crazy girlfriends.
In the pause, Kit moved her feet a bit before telling the floor, ‘So I found that book online, A Splintered Soul. That chapter on Ellie.’
Mae looked up from the documents. ‘OK. And?’
She gave him a look. ‘You could have told me, you know.’
‘Told you what?’
‘Her phobia. Why you wanted me to change into plain clothes.’
‘OK. Well,’ he said, holding his hands up, ‘not everyone’s as well-versed in mental health as you are.’ Back in 2006, if he’d suggested DS Heath wear plain clothes because a uniform was a known trigger for a vulnerable witness, he’d never have heard the end of it.
But Kit was still looking distracted. ‘Maddening though, isn’t it? I mean, I know it’s none of my business what happened when she was little but, even in the book, there’s no mention of the trauma.’
‘Trauma?’
‘Yeah. The cause of the disorder she’s got.’
‘I think he just couldn’t work it out?’
She shrugged, but the nonchalance was forced, hiding something. ‘Just – frustrating. I mean, this is an extreme thing, DID. It gets diagnosed like, practically never, and when it does … well, they say the mind can do literally anything, but there’s going to be a bloody good reason for it to do that.’
Mae squinted. ‘You really have got that degree, haven’t you?’
But she waved it away. ‘What I’m saying is, the trauma you’d have to experience for something that extreme to happen would have to be chronic, for one thing, and fuck-off massive, for another. But he never even offers a guess. Do we even know if she knew her father, for example?’
‘Christine had been single for a long time. That’s all I know.’
‘See, that’s waaaay suspicious, isn’t it? Surely there has to be some context about her dad? Early years with him, or something. And I get that Cox had to anonymize it,’ she said, holding up her hand to pre-empt the next thing that Mae was going to say, ‘but it just seems like a massive missing piece. I mean, there’s the mention of these scars of hers but it says that was because of an accident, right? I mean, I’m no expert but I don’t think a one-off accident is going to be enough to cause something as serious as a dissociative disorder.’
Mae had noticed it too, way back when. The other cases in the book were fleshed out, the abuse or trauma that triggered the disorder in the first place forming part of the story. As per the title, they were stories of successful treatment. The book had been funded by a charity, so the message was fairly consistent: funding + excellent care = positive outcomes. The exception was the part dealing with Ellie, which was just a snapshot of the middle of her story, the few months she’d spent under Cox’s care. There was no background, and no happy ending.
‘Guess maybe he wanted to talk about the treatment part of it? To be honest it wasn’t exactly the focus of our investigation.’
Kit seemed to take offence for half a second before delivering a hearty smack on the arm. ‘I’m just interested.’ Then, ‘Maybe I should ask him.’
‘I’m going to assume you’re joking,’ he said, before remembering something. ‘You’d be wasting your time anyway.’
‘Because?’
‘It was something Lucy Arden told us – Jodie’s mum,’ he explained. ‘Apparently Jodie had asked him for copies of his research, a few weeks before she disappeared. He had transcripts done from the audio recordings of Ellie’s sessions, all her medical notes, loads of data, but he lost it.’
Eyebrows up, incredulous. ‘Lost it? How did he manage that?’
‘Apparently. He was still using floppies. Useless things. Lost your data all the time.’
Kit retracted her chin. ‘What the hell is a floppy?’
Mae rolled his eyes in reply. Kids. He turned back to his screen.
Kit was staring ahead now, through him.
‘What?’ Mae asked.
She shook herself and looked at him. ‘Just doesn’t … I don’t know.’ She mimed cogs with her fingers, not quite meshing. ‘Doesn’t fit. He spends all that time with her, recording her, everything, then the whole lot disappears? It’s fishy.’
‘Be that as it may. It’s her own business, not our remit.’
Kit dropped her hands, reddening very slightly.
‘I know. I’m just interested.’ She cleared her throat. ‘You going to get that?’ she asked him, raising a finger towards the desk phone.
Mae laughed and shook his head, then took the call he could see was from the switchboard.
‘DS Mae, Mr Jupp on the line. Says he’s returning your call about visiting a boatyard.’
15. (#ulink_60b60176-0070-5211-bab2-275b6762b370)
Mae (#ulink_60b60176-0070-5211-bab2-275b6762b370)
Jupp’s boatyard was only a couple of miles away, so Mae borrowed one of the force pushbikes. It was late afternoon, the light was sparse through a heavy ceiling of cloud. Spotting the marina entrance, he swung a leg over the crossbar and sailed it standing on one pedal, then hopped down and secured it in a single practised movement against a lamppost.
Mae had discovered the wharf earlier that summer, when he’d talked Bear into a walk along the towpath. He’d pointed out where he’d dealt with a burglary at one of the warehouses that backed straight onto the river, and he’d seen the boats on the towpath that extended from the yard. That was back when it had been warm enough for the residents to still be sitting out on their decks as the sun went down, drinking and barbequing. Different story now, at the arse-end of November. He smelled the smoke of the little log burners they used, the diesel emissions. There was the rumble of generators, punctuated by the honking of a pair of Canada geese. Scraps of laughter from outside a nearby pub lifted and cracked in the air.
He took the steps built into the sloping wall down to where a shabby prefab cube of an office sat precariously levelled on bricks. He knocked and went in. Cheap, functional furniture was laden with papers, notes scribbled on envelopes, and a jumble of polystyrene cups. Behind the desk, a fat guy in a shirt made for a thinner one.
Mae put out a hand. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Mae. We spoke on the phone.’
‘Jupp,’ the man said. He was puffy and goutish, the kind of clean-shaver who should have considered a beard. Waving a hand vaguely behind him, he said, ‘My yard.’ Strong Bristol accent. He didn’t get up, and only shook the hand reluctantly when it became clear Mae wasn’t going to put it away unshaken.
Jupp listened while Mae gave him the basics, then rummaged in a drawer and brought out a key. ‘Take you down to his boat, shall I?’
Standing, Jupp was short enough for Mae to see the shiny top of his head, lit up with the reflection of the flickering single-bar strip light. Then again, everyone was short, to Mae.
Outside, a half-hearted drizzle had started to fall, blown across them by a brisk wind. A tang of lager and used nappies was emanating from three overfilled wheelie bins. They stopped at a gate where Jupp paused to key in the code, angling his thickly padded shoulders to block Mae’s view of the keypad. Mae saw it anyway: 2580, all four numbers in a vertical line down the middle. Nice one, Mae thought: unbreakable. The gate buzzed and clunked open.
They went down the sloping pontoon towards the water, Jupp confirming on the way that he hadn’t seen Matt since the morning of the day before.
‘Said he was going to go down to the pump-out.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Mile or so.’ Jupp indicated with his arm: downriver, east.
‘Did you see him go?’
Jupp shrugged. ‘Nope. But he came back, didn’t he? Must have come back last night on the big tide. Boat was in place when I did my patrol.’
‘But you haven’t seen him today?’
‘It’s not a prison.’ Jupp eyed Mae with obvious dislike as they approached the bottom of the slope. ‘They come and go as they please. Lot of us boaters just want leaving alone, tell the truth, not so keen on people coming round, poking their noses—’
‘Left or right?’ Mae asked with a smile, aware that life was short and he wasn’t getting any younger.
Jupp sniffed and turned, leading Mae left along the metal gridding.
‘How does it work then, mooring here?’ Mae asked. ‘Your tenants pay in advance?’
‘Invoice them on the twentieth, payment due first of the month. Month’s notice either way.’
The first of the month was coming up in a few days. ‘People rent these boats then, or own them?’
‘Bit of both. Matt rents his off my brother.’
Mae followed Jupp along a floating pontoon stretching maybe thirty, forty metres along the river. The walkway dipped and bounced as they moved along it, their footsteps causing the sections to clank together.
‘Watch your step, boy,’ Jupp said, glancing at Mae. ‘Dangerous if you’re used to nice safe driveways.’
‘Don’t worry about me. Spent my childhood fishing.’
Jupp frowned. ‘Din’t know your lot fished.’
‘Police?’
‘Chinese.’
Mae blinked. ‘Korean.’
He shrugged. ‘Same difference. Thought it was snooker. Gambling.’
‘OK, yeah. We’re all ninjas, too.’
Jupp frowned, but Mae raised a hand to dismiss it. Just could not be arsed.
The pontoon bouncing under their feet, they passed an assortment of boats. Traditional narrowboats; flimsy-looking fibreglass cruisers; wide, curvy-bottomed things with wheelhouses and Dutch-sounding names painted along their bows. Twee Gebroeders, Derkje, Ziet Op U Zelve.
‘Mr Corsham been here long? Regular with the rent? Any problems?’
‘Moved down from Scotland somewhere a few months ago. Pays on time.’
‘No wild parties, anything out of the usual?’
Jupp cast a look over his shoulder. ‘People call us gypsies, you get that? Pikies, river scum.’
Mae waited, unsure where this was going.
‘We get it in the neck, is what I’m saying. Brick brigade making their judgements. So we stick together, yeah? You’re not going to get us dishing dirt on each other.’
‘I’m not after dirt. I’m checking on his safety.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Jupp stopped, flipping through a bunch of small keys. ‘This one.’
Matthew Corsham’s boat was a red and green narrowboat, last on the stretch, past a mains hook-up board. Reasonable nick from the outside. Through a window in the front end – the fore? – the place looked tidy, nothing immediately suggesting forced entry. Moving along he tried the next window when the boat suddenly listed, the water slapping underneath the pontoon. Jupp had grabbed the thin handrail running along the edge of the roof and was hauling himself up, keys in hand. But after an extended fumble with a circular padlock, he grunted and gave up, huffing and stepping down clumsily from the gunwales.
‘Changed the bloody locks. Supposed to supply the management with a working key at all times.’ So much for the Anarchists’ Manifesto of three minutes previously. ‘You can have a look through the windows, but I’m not breaking the door without my brother’s say-so.’
Jupp turned to head back the way they’d come.
‘Do you have CCTV here?’ Mae called after him.
‘No. And I’ve got jobs to do.’ He paused to light a cigarette, then stumped off back towards his office.
Mae stepped up onto the deck. The smooth metal was slippery under his feet as he braced to shove back the hatch. It wouldn’t give, so he ducked down to the level of the two tiny doors that came up no higher than his thighs. Cupping his hands between his forehead and the glass, he peered inside.
Bear would have given her thumbs to live in there. Not that there was enough money in the world to pay him to endure what looked like several inches of negative headroom, but the attraction of the cosy, simple lifestyle in evidence there wasn’t hard to imagine. Shallow shelves tucked under the windows held books and a few video games, secured against the inevitable rocking with taut lengths of curtain wire. A crocheted blanket was stretched neatly over the back of a sofa, and the few feet of wall space between the single-glazed windows were covered in mismatched picture frames holding photographs.
He was about to leave when something caught his eye. A single sheet of paper on the table opposite the wood burner and a pen next to it. Mae went along to the window next to the table, to get a better look. Carefully bending into a crouch on the narrow ledge beneath the glass, he wiped the rain from his eyes and squinted in.
It was a list. Toothpaste, toothbrush, razor. Blue holdall, phone, charger, wallet, tickets. Camera, film, batteries. All the items on it crossed off.
He read to the end. Footsteps approached, and he waved Jupp away with his free hand as he brought himself up to standing. ‘All right, I’m coming.’
But when he turned, Mae saw that Jupp was long gone. The person who had passed him, who was now on the back deck and unlocking the door with her keys, was Ellie Power.
16. (#ulink_cd667fbb-0fa7-5446-8d6e-2262bcb0c5ec)
Ellie (#ulink_cd667fbb-0fa7-5446-8d6e-2262bcb0c5ec)
The dirty remains of the afternoon sun quivered in the puddles at my feet as I approached the marina. The office was closed up, but as I headed down to towards the boats I saw Mr Jupp. He threw his cigarette on the ground like a dart when he saw me, and came lumbering up the gangway.
‘We’ve got the bloody police down here, looking for Matthew,’ he said, passing me. ‘You’ve got keys, you bloody let him in.’
Shit. Fear swelled in my chest, inflating in seconds. But I made myself go down before I could change my mind. Before I’d had a chance to think through what I was and wasn’t going to tell him, there was Ben Mae, hanging off the side of Matt’s boat.
‘All right, I’m coming,’ he said, waving me away without looking up.
I cleared my throat, and he turned.
‘Ellie.’
‘DC Mae.’
He smiled. ‘Been a while. It’s DS now. I’m the lead on Missing Persons, so that’s why I’m …’ he trailed off, gesturing at the boat, the yard. Me.
‘Congratulations,’ I said.
We stood there for a moment, before I remembered what I was doing. I climbed up, got both locks open and swung the tiny doors open and slid back the hatch.
‘Coming in?’ I asked him.
‘Are you inviting me?’
‘That’s vampires, isn’t it?’
He laughed and gestured at the door. ‘After you, then.’
The familiar smell rose up around me as I went down, a woody warmness with the slight tinge of damp. I half-expected him to be there but the boat was empty. I stepped down into the cabin. Mae started to follow me in, but paused on the steps. He gestured at the four coat hooks next to the door.
‘Should these have anything hanging on them?’
‘It depends.’ I frowned, thinking of the last time I’d been there, when I’d hardly had room to hang my own raincoat. Matt loved being on foot, but winter was forging on and he was skinny. Usually, those pegs were draped with his layers.
I went in and sank into the built-in sofa. It was as if the place had been exorcized. So cold in there. The few square feet of hearth under the wood-burning stove had been swept after its last use, and the shallow pile of the fabric of the upholstery was sticking up unevenly, recently vacuumed. Usually the windows wept condensation, but now they were dry. Which only added up if there had been no breath to wet them. I unzipped my rain-soaked top and hung it above the stove. Mae came in and abruptly slammed his head on the ceiling.
‘F … lipping hell,’ he said, rubbing his scalp where he’d hit it. I almost wanted to laugh: Matt had a permanent bruise on his hairline at the front where he continually banged his head coming in. Unscrewing his eyes Mae said, ‘This is not sensible for a man of his height.’
I fiddled with the keys, rolling the cork float-ball keyring around in my palm. Mae nodded at them.
‘Mr Jupp couldn’t get his to work. Reckons the locks had been changed.’
I nodded. ‘First time I’ve used these ones. The old locks had just got rusty.’ Matt had said he’d been meaning to change them for ages, and had given me the set of keys as an afterthought, less than a week ago. He’d rolled down the window of his car and called me back after we’d already said goodbye outside the flat. Keep them to yourself, he’d said. You never know who might want to break in and swipe my dirty underpants.
‘You know why? Security worries?’
I gave it half a moment’s thought, and shook my head. ‘Not that I know of. No. He would have said.’
‘Sure? His colleague said the hospital had been expecting his laptop back, so—’
‘He’s lost it.’
‘OK,’ he said, his notebook out now and pen poised. ‘Details?’
‘I don’t know any more than that. He asked me to check around the flat.’
‘But you didn’t find it?’
‘No,’ I said, irritable. But now I thought about it, Matt hadn’t found it and I hadn’t asked. Guilt pecked at me as I ran that phone call back: he’d sounded really worried, but I hadn’t offered to help. ‘Does it matter?’
Mae made a search me face. ‘It wasn’t … stolen, or anything? You’re sure?’
‘Look, I really don’t—’ I started, then I broke off. Processed what he was saying. ‘Why did the hospital want it back?’
Mae took a breath before he answered me. There was a look on his face that I couldn’t interpret. ‘West London NHS Trust had him on rolling freelance contracts,’ he said, watching for my reaction.
‘Yes.’
‘Until the end of last week.’
I blinked. Thinking, no. He’d have said.
‘Did he not tell you he’d lost his job, Ellie?’
I said nothing.
‘I have to ask, do you have any problems in your relationship, would you say?’
‘No.’
‘Because that would seem like a rather big omission, if you know what I mean.’
‘We’re fine.’ It came out hard and loud, and he blinked at me. I felt Siggy spark at the base of my skull, goading, satisfied.
Were we fine?
Mae nodded solemnly, appraising me for a moment, then went to the table.
‘So there’s this.’ He handed it to me.
I took it. A list, printed out. Things you’d take if you were going away. I held it with both hands, the burn of tears starting up in the corners of my eyes.
A bloom of hope spread across me. Did this mean he’d just taken a trip? But if it did—
Toothbrush, toothpaste, razor
then he’d left. He’d left me.
There was a blue-biro tick next to every item. I scanned it again, a storm started spinning in my head.
‘Anyone could have written this,’ I said eventually. ‘Where’s the pen? Huh? Are we looking for the pen, for fingerprints?’
Mae spread his hands. ‘Ellie—’
‘No. He wouldn’t have just disappeared.’ Not without telling me. He loved me. He loved me. I brushed the hair out of my face and handed the list back to him, defiant. ‘This doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because we’re happy, that’s why.’
We were. There was no way Matt had been planning to go away. A few weeks ago we’d been talking about a trip, a long weekend. Mum was so worried, wouldn’t say why in front of Matt even though she knew he and I had talked about it all, but she went on and on about the locks on the hotel doors. Matt hadn’t flinched. When she got emotional, demanding to know how he planned on dealing with Siggy, asking did he really understand what he was getting himself into, he put his arm around me. I love your daughter, Christine. Nothing is going to change that.
‘What if he didn’t write it?’ I went into the kitchen and turned on the tap to fill the kettle. ‘I mean, it doesn’t prove anything, does it?’
Neither of us spoke for a moment, and I realized the water pump was rumbling, but nothing was coming out. The tap spat droplets and air. His water tank was empty.
I turned and checked the fridge: a Coke would do just as well. I opened the door, and looked inside. Dark.
Mae was standing next to me. ‘It’s been switched off.’
Meticulously cleaned and emptied, too. Mae paused for a while, then gently shut the door, leaving my hand to drop down to my side.
‘Sometimes I go away in the winter,’ he said, in a slow, quiet voice. ‘Take my little girl snowboarding. I turn the water off in my flat and run all the taps until there’s no water left in them. In case it freezes in the pipes, and the pipes burst.’
I opened the breadbin. ‘He wasn’t going away.’ The breadbin was empty.
‘And I use up everything in my fridge,’ he said, as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘and give it a good clean.’
I pushed past him, cursing the lack of space, the fact that there is nowhere to go on a stupid tiny boat, nowhere to escape to. ‘I’ve said he wasn’t going away.’ I dropped onto the sofa and drew my hands over my face. I wanted my mum.
‘Ellie.’
When I opened my eyes, he was looking at my neck. I pulled my chin down fast, but it was too late.
Slowly, he asked, ‘What happened there, then?’
He wouldn’t have asked about the scar. He meant the bruises. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘No. It’s not.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘No?’ Mae came round and sat next to me, the other end of the sofa. ‘Doesn’t look like nothing.’
I let all my breath out at once. ‘Well, it is.’
Leaning forward, he said, ‘Was it Matt? Did he hurt you, Ellie?’
‘No! God, no! He would never. He’s not like that. No.’
Mae looked away, placed his hands on his knees. ‘Someone reports someone missing, we need to look at everything that might be suspicious. And to be honest,’ he said, indicating my neck with a nod, ‘mystery bruising might look a bit suspicious.’
I stared down at my feet. ‘It’s not mystery bruising.’
‘OK.’ He waited.
‘I was … sleepwalking. Mum tried to steer me back to bed. I was agitated. She had to be … forceful.’
‘And this was, when? Last night?’
I nodded, my heart hammering. Mae inclined his head to get another look.
‘Looks like she fought pretty hard.’
‘I was just confused,’ I mumbled.
‘Confused. OK.’ There was a pause. ‘See. Ellie, I get confused all the time. Sometimes I can’t remember if I’ve left the oven on. Or I lose my car, or, you know, I annoy someone and I get confused about what I might have said to upset them. But I can’t remember a time when confusion has ever ended up in me being held by the throat.’
‘I’m telling you it wasn’t him.’
Mae stayed where he was for a moment. Then he got to his feet, steadied himself against the motion of the boat under his feet, and turned to me.
‘So for now, we’re classing this as a low-risk case—’
‘Low risk. What does that mean?’
‘It means that we wait and see what happens. This is still very early days. To be honest it’s only because I saw your name on the information that it’s me dealing with this and not just a bobby making a couple of calls. But look, you have to realize that everything we have here is pointing to Matt having just gone away somewhere.’ He tucked everything into his bag. ‘It’s a dynamic thing, though. If anything changes—’
‘But what does it mean you will do?’ I interrupted. ‘You have to do something.’
He pressed his lips between his teeth for a moment, measuring his words. ‘Look. Men are weak. Sometimes they are really shitty. I’m sure he’s been great to you, and break-ups can be awful but—’
‘No. It’s not a break-up. He is the most honest, the most grounded person you’ll ever meet. He is a good man, and I can rely on him. I can. You’re making a mistake.’
He watched me for a second, like he was trying to find something in my face. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got a hundred other jobs stacking up and this is just,’ he gestured around the boat, to me. The whole thing. ‘It’s just not a police matter,’ he finished at last. ‘I’ve already done more than I am supposed to.’
‘Fine. Then go.’ I turned away. He would not see me cry.
On the deck, he crouched and turned back to me. ‘This isn’t about you, you know. Men are shits. He didn’t deserve you.’
I watched him swing himself down onto the pontoon, and I thought about how much Matt had given me. How bottomless his patience was, how hard he’d tried to help me believe in myself.
Mae was right. Matt didn’t deserve me. He really, truly did not.
17. (#ulink_ce9dc421-bf73-5dc3-bc3f-012cef1c2c2d)
Mae (#ulink_ce9dc421-bf73-5dc3-bc3f-012cef1c2c2d)
Mae had just swung his leg back over the crossbar when he heard the blip-blip greeting of the siren. Kit, in a squad car, a heavy shade of pissed-off darkening her face.
‘You planning to answer your phone any time soon?’ The window was wound all the way down and her shirt sleeve was rolled all the way up. The pointed toe of the 1950’s pinup girl tattooed on her bicep peeked out just above her elbow.
He dug his phone out, failed to wake it, showed her the screen. ‘Dead. Sorry.’
‘No deader than you are.’
He unsnapped the fastener under his chin and took the helmet off, leaning an elbow on the roof of the car. ‘How do you mean?’
Kit turned to speak into the radio clipped onto her lapel. ‘Got him,’ she told it, then, ‘I’ll deal with it, Ma’am.’ To him, she said, ‘Get in.’
‘That’ll be, “get in, Sarge”,’ he corrected, then gestured to the bike, opened his mouth to argue that he couldn’t, but she cut him off.
‘Get in the car, Sarge, right now. You forgot to collect your daughter, and she’s gone missing.’
18. (#ulink_799e6d4e-de3a-5406-9a34-5d5ba1e0e492)
Ellie (#ulink_799e6d4e-de3a-5406-9a34-5d5ba1e0e492)
I sat still for a long time on Matt’s sofa, listening to the boats bump and creak. Thinking about the list. I’d looked for all the things on it, ticked them off one by one. Every single one of them was gone.
My phone rang: it was the hospital.
I didn’t even say my name when I answered. ‘Have you found him?’
There was a pause. ‘Sorry, Ellie, found who?’ the caller said, and I placed her voice. It was Helen, who managed the volunteer schedule at the children’s ward where I worked. ‘I was calling about the session you were going to do with the kids this morning.’
‘Oh god, I’m sorry, I—’
‘Look, I’m afraid to tell you that we can’t have you volunteering here anymore.’
‘What? Why?’
‘We need reliability. We can’t have the children disappointed.’
‘You told me you were crying out for volunteers! That’s why Matt got my forms rushed through, so I could—’
‘Nothing was rushed,’ she said. ‘Look I’d love to keep you but the children have to come first, and if you can’t keep your promises to them—’
‘I’m sorry, I just—’
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m sorry too, but that’s where we are.’ She said goodbye coolly and hung up.
I stood there in the kitchen, blinking, not believing it. Matt was going to be so disappointed. He’d suggested the volunteering in the first place, had set up my interview, helped me with the application. I’d loved it, too. I’d even started to believe maybe it could lead to an actual job, one day. And now I’d lost it. I slumped down onto the arm of the sofa.
Something caught my eye. A big metal bulldog clip hanging on a hook next to the sink, and between its teeth a wedge of scraps of paper. I reached over and took the clip down. Just receipts, mostly: a few postcards. But right at the back, with a fold of card across the top to protect it from being marked by the pressure of the clip, was something else. A faded, square-shaped photo, the old-fashioned instant kind that came straight out of the camera, ready-developed to be waved around and blown upon impatiently until the image slowly appears and definition emerges like a fog lifting. The colours were vague, less saturated, as if they were trying to fade back to a sleepy sepia.
A little girl. Less than a year old, probably, hair already thick and black. Even with the colours muted by age, the eyes clearly distinct: one eye sky-blue, one green with a narrow slice of brown in the iris. Her cheeks rounded with health and happiness.
Me.
As a child. The only picture in existence. What was it doing here?
I rubbed my thumb across the top of it, the two rust-stained puncture holes where a staple must once have been. We’d had a burglary when I was two and a half, a few days before we were due to move house. Everything we owned was in boxes by the door of the one-bed flat we’d been renting. Might as well have gift-wrapped it, Mum always said afterwards. All of my baby stuff, a whole load of Mum’s old things, but worst of all, all the photos of me as a little kid.
Maybe because I didn’t have any family, the absence of the pictures felt like a huge hole as I grew up. I used to make up pretend photo albums, drawing pictures of my dead grandparents, my dead dad. In my pictures, he was just like me, dark and broad-shouldered, each of us with one green and one blue eye, standing either side of petite, yellow-haired Mum. I pinned those pictures everywhere, but what I wanted more than anything was a photo. But they were all gone.
All but this one.
I’d found it inside a book. I was ten, and we had just moved flats again. I remember the swell of excitement when it fell onto the floor and I realized what it was. I’d never seen this one before. I ran into her room, beaming with pride at the discovery of such a coveted treasure. I had expected tears of joy.
None came. Just a request not to snoop in her things, and a dark, brittle silence for the rest of the afternoon. Confused, I apologized, and she put her arms around me and said the same.
‘It was a dark time with your dad,’ she’d say, by way of explanation. ‘I’ve got my memories of you, baby, and they’re good enough.’
The next day I found it folded into four, in the bathroom bin. So I saved it a second time. But this time, I kept my secret to myself.
In the picture I was smiling. I looked into the eyes of my infant self and tried to see Siggy. Was she there, in my head, when I was that small? Lurking, waiting for my eyes to close and for the dummy to drop out of my pink little mouth so she could show me all her horrible things?
But more importantly, why did Matt have it? I’d dug it out and shown it to him, maybe a month ago, after we’d gone through an old album of his. I hadn’t given it to him, though. I’d tucked it back into the book where I kept it. He knew how precious it was to me. So why had he taken it?
I tucked the photo into my pocket and looked around. I had come to look for a clue, and all I had was a photo and a printed-out list. Outside, a solid darkness was starting to fall. I noticed Mr Jupp’s light on, and realized he’d be locking up soon.
He snorted and hurriedly took his feet from the desk as I opened the office door. A thread of dribble hung sleepily from the corner of his mouth, which he noticed only when it hit his wrist.
‘You, is it?’ he said accusingly. ‘Police gone, have they?’
‘For now,’ I said, forcing a smile. His eyes swept down to my chest and up again, like a kid reaching for a sweet they knew they weren’t allowed. ‘But I’m still a bit worried, to be honest.’
Not waiting to be asked, I brought over the only other chair, a faded green, moulded plastic thing, and perched on its edge, leaning towards him with as much warmth as I could muster. ‘I know he liked the chats he had with you,’ I lied. ‘I was just hoping he might have said something about a trip somewhere. Anything about being away from the boat?’
He blew his cheeks out. ‘Love, listen. Sometimes us blokes have got to blow off a bit of steam.’
‘He hasn’t fallen out with anyone here or anything?’ I said, knowing Matt would have told me if that was the case. ‘Or got behind on his rent or anything?’
He leaned back importantly. ‘That’s confidential.’
‘Please, Mr Jupp.’ Genuine desperation cracked my voice. ‘I don’t know who else to ask.’
He let out a big sigh. ‘Look, leave your number, sweetheart,’ he said, handing me an opened, empty envelope. ‘Anything occurs to me, or he misses the payment, I’ll be sure to let you know. Now if you don’t mind, my missus is waiting for me, so I’m going home for my tea.’
I wrote my name and number on the envelope, with PLEASE CALL IF YOU HEAR ANYTHING underlined beneath. ‘Anything at all,’ I told him, handing it over and getting up to leave.
‘Oh, while you’re here, get rid of that lot, will you?’ he said, indicating the moorers’ postboxes on the wall, a grid of open-fronted pigeonholes. ‘He got a parcel the other day and I had nowhere to stick it.’
I pulled out the stack from Matt’s box and flipped through it. Bills, circulars. Everything machine-franked.
‘Can I have the parcel?’
‘Fuck knows where it is right now,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop it over if I find it.’
I thanked him, shoved the post into one of Matt’s huge coat pockets, and went back down to the boat. I shook the hoody off and used the chemical toilet. On the inside of the bathroom door was a full-length mirror. I stood in front of it, remembering.
Once, months ago, when Mum was on a night shift and I didn’t have to be home until almost dawn, Matt and I spent hours in front of this mirror. He took my clothes off slowly like he was peeling an exotic fruit. I stood there now, in the dark, the reflection of my body lit just by the moon. Matt had made me look. The fine hairs on my arms bristled with the memory of his fingertips, stroking down my naked sides, kissing each one of the constellation of tiny puckered scars across my shoulder and down my back, from the accident when I was small.
I let my eyes flutter shut, recalled the way Matt raked the backs of his nails softly up my sides, then reached around to hold my breasts, tucking his hands underneath them. How he brushed his thumbs across my nipples, not letting me look away. The light had been just like this, an identical blueish monochrome. He had placed my hands high on the mirror so I was bent forwards, and took me like that. Slowly. Telling me to look myself in the eye, saying it again and again because I wouldn’t, until his insistence took hold and he wasn’t laughing, he meant it. He really meant it. When I eventually looked, he slid his hand around and pressed his fingers against me, making me gasp.
‘Look at who you are,’ he whispered as I came, shuddering hard against his hand. His breath hot and low and liquid against my neck. ‘You are beautiful.’
I blinked the memory away, avoiding my eye in the mirror, and went along to his bedroom at the far end. I lifted the duvet and got into his bed, wriggling down with the covers over my head. I’d been in this bed dozens of times, but never to sleep. Closed my eyes and inhaled deeply.
Damp and woodsmoke and sex.
I slipped my good hand inside my jeans. I held the sense of him, built him up from the smell of his skin, his hair. I started to move, small circles, conjuring his mouth on my mouth. His fingertips on my breasts. I imagined the feel of his chest under my hands, my fingers moving along his shoulders, sliding across to his throat. Glimmers of his face, darts of memory, coming faster.
But then
the skin on his neck, glistening gathering and twisting, pink then white against the pressure of my fingers,
and
his face suddenly panicked tight, and his hands on mine, grabbing,
and
his eyes starting to bulge, looking at me, not understanding,
and
a creaking sound from his open mouth, no air going in or coming out,
and
his hand, coming up to my face, his eyes still locked onto mine. Stones in the ground under my knees digging in to me asI kneel over him. Sticks and leaves the same as when Mum found Jodie and something sharp against my shin. The smell of the wet leaves and the roar of a jet engine descending, low, and his eyes wild with horror, knowing now that I am not going to stop.
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Kate Simants
‘A five star, unputdownable thriller that had me gripped from the very first page… I read it in one sitting!’ Caz Finlay, author of The Boss Shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger award Whatever you do, don’t open the door… By day, Ellie Power has a normal life. She has a stable home, a loving boyfriend, a future. But at night, she suffers from a sleep disorder. She becomes angry, unpredictable, violent. Her mother locks Ellie in her bedroom every night, to keep them both safe. Then one morning, Ellie wakes up, horrified to find the lock on her bedroom door smashed from the inside. She is covered in injuries, unable to remember anything about the night before. And her boyfriend Matt is nowhere to be found… Praise for Lock Me In ‘Intricately plotted, beautifully written’ Harriet Tyce, author of Blood Orange ‘This ambitious and wide-reaching novel had me hooked from the very first page’ S. E. Lynes, author of The Women ‘One of the best debuts I have ever read’ Clare Empson, author of Him 'A flawlessly written, jaw-dropping, chilling and twisty psychological thriller' Sam Carrington, author of Saving Sophie ‘A disturbing psychological thriller’ Rachel Sargeant, author of The Perfect Neighbours ‘The characters are fresh, the dialogue sharp’ G. D. Abson, author of Motherland ‘A stunning debut. Gripping, compelling and skilfully crafted’ N J Crosskey, author of Poster Boy
Lock Me In
KATE SIMANTS
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
One More Chapter
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Kate Simants 2019
Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd2019
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
The CWA Dagger logo is a registered trademark owned by and reproduced with the permission of the CWA.
Kate Simants asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008353292
Version: 2019-09-27
For Tom, who never once suggested I give up this nonsense and get a real job.
You’re the best mate a girl could have.
Table of Contents
Cover (#u79f1c16f-d70b-5d62-901b-382e3e6e02f8)
Title Page (#u373e94d0-f346-55fa-b511-a13584e6cd13)
Copyright (#u48154ad9-a76f-5e38-8de2-00435e845f44)
Dedication (#ub24fe957-6a08-5407-94c9-41e7f0dda71c)
Prologue
1. Ellie
2. Mae
3.
4. Ellie
5. Mae
6. Ellie
7. Mae
8. Ellie
9. Mae
10. Ellie
11.
12. Mae
13. Ellie
14. Mae
15. Mae
16. Ellie
17. Mae
18. Ellie
19. Mae
20. Ellie
21.
22. Mae
23. Ellie
24. Mae
25. Ellie
26. Mae
27. Ellie
28. Mae
29.
30. Ellie
31. Mae
32. Ellie
33. Mae
34. Ellie
35. Mae
36. Ellie
37. Mae
38.
39. Ellie
40. Mae
41. Ellie
42. Mae
43. Ellie
44. Mae
45. Ellie
46. Mae
47. Ellie
48.
49. Mae
50. Ellie
51. Mae
52. Ellie
53. Mae
54. Ellie
55. Mae
56.
57. Mae
58. Ellie
59. Mae
60. Mae
61. Ellie
62. Mae
63. Ellie
64. Mae
65. Ellie
66.
67. Mae
68. Ellie
69. Mae
70. Ellie
71. Christine
72. Mae
73. Ellie
74. Ellie
75. Mae
76. Ellie
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
You want to know fear?
Imagine someone there, every day when you wake. Imagine knowing, without even opening your eyes, that someone is watching you.
Take your time. Let your mind get used to consciousness.
A girl. There. Not in the passage, not at the door, or by the window. Not even at the end of your bed.
Closer than that.
She stares, unblinking, her eyes burning into yours even though you keep your eyelids shut tight. You move, and for a moment, she slips away from you. But she’s not gone. You know that much.
You think, please. Not again. Your teeth tighten so hard they squeak against each other. You don’t mean to do it, but this is real, right-now fear, and your body doesn’t care what you want. Your heart starts firing out ball-bearings instead of blood. Open your eyes, you tell yourself.
You say her name, and she stiffens. You feel her do it, rigid and alert in your stomach. She is inside you. She is always inside you, listening under your skin.
When you were little, the doctors said this was a known disorder, that they could help. That this other you, your alter, the one who’s always there like an unwanted imaginary friend, could be brought out into the light. That this other girl that you sometimes became was there because, at some point in your life, you needed to switch your reality off. There must have been something, they said, that brought her bursting out of you: some trauma, some incitement, some moment of quickening. You never found it. In the end they gave up, telling you she was nothing to fear, that she could be managed, medicated, contained.
The doctors were wrong.
You feel her rising. And it doesn’t matter how much you know it’s not a physical condition, that it’s all in your head: when she fights you, it hurts. If you want your body to be yours and not hers, you have to fight back.
Now comes the tension, a thickening, swelling the marrow of your bones. You wrench the bedclothes in your fists, and you press your heels into the mattress. She is stiff and screaming in your veins, inside the cells of your blood. You try to cry out but your voice sticks behind your tongue, no breath behind it. She has her hands in the wet depths of your throat, bending the stiff cartilage of your windpipe.
And just like that she bursts into smoke. Goes quiet. You’re left with the ragged sound of your breath, your heartbeat thundering in your ears. Even as it slows, you know she isn’t gone. She doesn’t go, ever.
You have learned never to trust the silence, never to let your guard down. Even as you sleep.
Especially as you sleep.
You want to know fear?
Fear has a name.
Her name is Siggy.
1. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Ellie (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
London, 2011
I woke gasping, the sheet dislodged and twisted tight around my limbs.
I kicked a leg out against the thin partition between my room and the kitchen. Through the wall I heard the radio being clicked off.
‘Ellie?’ Mum’s voice, muffled through the plasterboard.
Siggy went still, and became a cold, thin layer at the base of my brain. She was quiet for a few moments, then she disappeared like a flame in a vacuum, leaving just the staccato sound of my breathing.
‘Ellie, sweetheart? You awake?’
I let my eyes open, worked my jaw and mumbled a croaky, ‘Yeah.’
It was later than I’d thought. A cold screen of early winter daylight sliced through the middle of my tiny room. Motes of dust danced in its blade. I spread my hand across the bare wall. All our walls were bare, in all the flats and houses we’d lived in since I was a child. We never stayed long, and whenever we left, we left in a hurry.
‘She gone?’ Mum called. She always managed to sound cheerful.
‘Mm-hmm.’ I untangled myself from the sheet and tried to swing my knees over the edge of the bed, but I couldn’t do it. Too heavy. It was bad this morning, worse than usual. Soreness bloomed across my right shoulder and down my arm. I had to heave my breath in.
‘Just doing coffee,’ she said, her voice already moving away. She turned the radio back up. The track finished and was replaced by a DJ in an inoffensive, sing-song voice. I heard her unlock the crockery cupboard, taking out mugs, locking it again, setting them down.
I lay for a minute in the S-shape of warmth, trying to salvage what I could of the dream. There was a bright blue sky, and that building. Always that building, the one I’d drawn as a child over and over again: long and low, as unchanging and precise as a photograph, every time. Every night.
Slowly, under the duvet, I shifted. But as I moved to push myself up, bright, brilliant pain shot across my hand, bringing tears to my eyes.
Bisecting my palm, intermittent but extending right over to the base of my thumb, was a ragged tear. Deep punctures, red and swollen. I touched it and winced: it was exquisitely sore, the flesh not yet dry.
Gingerly, I pushed away the covers and looked myself over. Across the right of my pelvis, a blue-black mess of bruising. I pressed the tip of a finger to the centre of the darkest part. The ache, bone-deep, rose up to meet it.
Where had it come from?
A fine thread of fear started to tug at me, hard. I sat up, planted my feet on the floor. Built up the courage to look at the door.
It would be locked. It had to be locked. Hadn’t I heard Mum lock it? I played back the last moments of the day before. Matt had dropped me off after our quick trip to the pub near the narrowboat he was renting. Mum had made me dinner, a pasta thing we ate together in the kitchen. I’d gone to bed early to read for a while. Mum had locked me in before she left for her late shift. She had.
With my blood roaring in my temples, I turned my head. Opened my eyes.
It was only a fingerbreadth, but the door was open. There, on the white gloss of the frame, was something that made me shoot out of bed as if it had caught fire. I crossed the room in three steps and lifted my fingers to the dark marks on the paintwork.
Smears of reddish-brown, crusted at the edge. And on the backs of my hands – I saw it now – the same thing, the same colour, exactly.
Mud.
Siggy had taken me outside.
Mum appeared in the corridor, holding mugs. She stopped dead, then nudged the door fully open with her toe.
‘What—?’ she started.
I met her eyes. ‘You locked it.’
She gripped her eyelids shut for a second, as if dislodging an image.
‘You locked it,’ I repeated, louder. ‘You did. I heard you.’
She set down the two mugs of coffee and bent to touch the door. She was still wearing her cleaning uniform from the nightshift at the same hospital where Matt worked, the bleach-stained mauve tabard over blue scrubs.
‘Holy shit,’ she whispered, the blood sinking from her skin. She went back out, examining it from the other side. ‘What the hell happened here?’
I followed her. In the hall, the bolt that should have been above the mortice lock on the outside of my door was lying on the floor, its two separate sections still secured together with the padlock. Torn paint and splinters of wood clung to the screws where they’d been wrenched out of place. Several inches higher was what remained of the sliding chain lock, the plug hanging uselessly, swinging on the chain. The force it would have taken to break it like that, wrenched inwards with enough power to break the locks on the outside …
Siggy’s little fingers plucked the fibres of my biceps. If I hadn’t known her better I would have wondered if she was smiling.
‘Do you not remember anything?’ Mum asked.
‘No. But … look.’ I lifted my hand, and her eyes went wide.
I let her take it, and she turned it over. Under her breath she muttered, ‘Jesus,’ then decisively, ‘Bathroom. Got to wash it. Come on.’
Holding me by the wrist so she didn’t touch the wound, she guided me through into the bathroom and pulled the cord for the light. She flipped the toilet lid down and sat me on it like a child, then yanked up her sleeves, exposing her ropey, muscular forearms, hardened from the years of push-ups she did to make sure she was stronger than Siggy.
‘This’ll sting, love.’ The tap screeched as she turned it on, and a thick twist of cold water ran into the avocado-coloured sink. ‘Stick it under here.’
I did as I was told.
Frowning at my palm, she pointed. ‘My guess is barbed wire. Look at the spacing.’ She was right: the punctures were even. Each a centimetre from the last.
She turned and angrily whipped the towel from the electric heater that hadn’t worked in the eight months we’d been there. She dried her hands and kicked it into a bundle by the washing basket.
‘Fucking Siggy,’ she said, dragging her fingers hard across her scalp. ‘What did she do with you this time?’
She wasn’t expecting an answer. We called them fugues, and I never knew what Siggy made me do during them, where she took me. Or why. All I could do was piece it together from whatever mess Siggy left behind, crowbarring in cause by surveying the effect, trying to make sense of it. The fact that the fugues always happened at night had baffled psychologist after psychologist, neurologist after sleep specialist when I was younger until Mum got so frustrated with them that we stopped going altogether. It’s a time in my life I have almost no memory of, but Mum kept journals: all the medicines, all the experts, all the sessions and techniques and homework. Nothing worked. The drugs they said would help with the dissociation made no difference. The fugues continued; the nightmares kept coming. Although I didn’t get worse for a long time – I was plagued by panic attacks, but I never started ‘switching’ during the day, which had always been my fear – I didn’t get better. Eventually, they ran out of things to try. We never got a cure, and we never got an answer: we were dismissed as an anomaly.
But this was back when Siggy was playful, doing small stuff, things that didn’t matter. Like when she filled our shoes with milk while we slept or pulled all the books off the shelves and made them into colour-coded piles. Just the little things, things we could laugh about, almost.
This was before we started needing locks.
This was before Jodie.
My fingers were going numb with the cold, but the torn flesh on my hand was burning now and had started to swell. The mud darkened and flaked off under the water until soon there was nothing left, just clean, pink, angry skin. I turned to wash the mud from the other hand too, and found more of it, up my arm, as far as my elbow.
Where had I gone last night?
What had I done?
Eventually the cold got too much to bear, and I pulled my hand out of the sink and shook my hair back. Mum’s eyes went to my throat.
‘What the hell happened to your neck?’
I got up, dodging round her to get to the mirror. I lifted my chin.
‘Don’t freak out.’ Mum stood behind me, put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Control it. Do not freak out.’
Dark marks the size of grapes, with blue-white crescents indented at their outer edges. Bruises: four in a line on one side of my windpipe, one on the other. Just above the old, jagged scar from years before.
Four and one. Fingers and a thumb.
‘Come on, sweetheart, try,’ she said, angry now. ‘Try to remember.’
I studied the bruises, touched my fingers to them, lining them up, then I stared at myself in the eyes in the mirror: one green, one blue. One for me, one for Siggy.
Think.
Mud.
Barbed wire on my hand.
And a handprint on my neck.
My breath turned solid in my chest as the thought bloomed, running its course.
‘Mum. What if someone was trying to stop …?’
I trailed off. Matt. I lurched out of the room.
My phone wasn’t beside my bed, and it wasn’t in the jeans I’d worn the previous night. I went to look for it in the pocket of the raincoat I was sure I’d left on the back of the door, but neither the phone nor the coat were there. I stumbled out into the living room. Spotting my phone charging in the corner, I yanked the cable out and dialled, pressed it to my ear, thinking, answer. Answer, for Christ’s sake.
‘OK, stop,’ Mum said from behind me. ‘Take a moment to think about this. Ellie. Stop.’
I turned to face her. ‘What?’
‘We need to think smart,’ she said, reaching for the phone.
I ducked away from her before I processed what she’d said. I’d been thinking there must have been a fight, something I could fix. But my mother, she was already thinking of Jodie. Of what Siggy had done before.
That she’d done it again.
The fog in my head cleared suddenly and the gentle Scots of Matt’s voice was in my ear saying you’ve reached Matt Corsham. I’m probably in my dungeon – the photo lab, in the hospital basement – leave a message. I hung up before the beep and dialled it again. Looked at the clock: 07:43. He was on earlies, started at eight, he should have been on his way to the hospital, on the 267. He should have his phone in his hand. I slumped onto the sofa. He should be texting me.
Mum sat beside me and took my face in her hands.
‘What do we do?’ she asked me gently. ‘Things get tough, what do we do?’
‘We deal with it,’ I told her in a whisper.
‘That’s exactly what we do. You and me.’ She sighed, took my good hand and peeled each finger from the phone, until I released it. It went on the table, out of reach, then she moved up next to me, pulling me close. I relented, sank my head against her chest.
‘Please don’t let this happen again, Mum.’
‘Shh. He’ll be OK, though. Probably just have worked late or started early or something.’ She gave me a gentle nudge. ‘Don’t worry. Just a bit of mud. Just some scrapes.’
Even then, neither one of us believed it.
2. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mae (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Detective Sergeant Ben Kwon Mae stopped at the lights. He raised his eyebrows in the rear-view mirror and the kicking to the back of his seat immediately ceased. Bear, his 8-year-old daughter who was suspiciously engrossed in the palm of her hand, slowly lifted her chin to meet his gaze.
‘What?’ Eyes all wide, butter-wouldn’t-melt incredulous. ‘It wasn’t me!’
He laughed. Thirty quid a pop, the drama lessons his ex-wife made him shell out for and look what it bought.
‘You’re a terrible actress, Bear. Really bad,’ he said, returning his attention to the school-run gridlock. Should have walked.
The kicking resumed, and he swung around. ‘Oi! Stop it!’
She laughed, but then he clocked the crisps all over her almost-freshly-laundered school sweater. Busted, she started to brush at them, scattering them into the footwell.
He blew out his cheeks. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.
‘I’m hungry.’
‘But crisps, mate?’
He wanted to leave it, because the clock on the dash gave him eight minutes to get Bear to school and wasting one of those minutes complaining about her diet meant wasting them all. When the bell rang at 8.45 he’d be looking at a clear week and a half until he got her back. But Nadia had complained enough times about having to deal with what she called ‘the BMI situation’ on her own. It wasn’t fair on her for him to just ignore it.
He shook his head. ‘I did offer you a proper breakfast. I thought you loved scrambled eggs.’
‘Not since I was like three. I hate it.’ He could only see the top of her head now, but he was pretty sure she was holding back tears. ‘You never have any decent food in your stupid flat. I’m always hungry at school after I have to stay at yours.’
‘OK, well. I’ll stock up next time.’ The lights changed and he turned back to the road. ‘Just have to make healthy choices, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘All you’re saying is I’m fat and no one likes me.’ She stared angrily out of the window, nicking at the raw skin around her thumbnail with her teeth.
‘That’s absolutely not true.’ Nice one, Superdad. One guess what she’d remember about the visit with him now. In the mirror he saw her lean her head on the glass, and they finished the journey in silence. Could they bunk off for an hour? Take her to the park, make things okay between them so they’d part on good terms? No. Obviously not. Nadia would find out, for a start, and his approval rating was already on the floor. Things had eroded badly enough between them lately without him adding truancy to the list.
Only three minutes late, he swung into a space miraculously close to the school entrance. He got out and went round to open Bear’s child-locked door.
‘My tummy hurts,’ she whined.
‘OK. Well, let’s get some fresh air and see how you feel in a minute.’
‘But I’ve got a headache.’ Her voice was quieter. He followed her gaze out across the playground to where two boys, older, were in direct line of sight. They turned away as soon as he made eye contact. Bear sighed and looked at her feet.
He leaned across her to undo her seatbelt. ‘Friends of yours?’
‘No! Get off, Ben,’ she snapped, twisting away.
He made sure the sudden sag in his chest didn’t make it to his face.
‘It’s Dad,’ he told her, pulling her bag and reading folder out from the back seat. This Ben thing was new this visit. No way did she call Nadia by her first name. He hadn’t even heard her shorten it from Mummy yet. He wasn’t having it. ‘You call me Dad.’
‘Whatever.’ She squeezed past him and stumped off towards the gate. Catching her up, he reached for her shoulder but let his hand drop before it touched her. Best not push it.
‘Tell you what. If you don’t give me a cuddle, I’ll cave your head in with a fire extinguisher.’ A bit too hopeful, the way it came out, but she let him draw level. He coughed, dropped his voice a bit. ‘Gouge your eyes out with a soup spoon. I will. I’ve done it before. In Helmand.’
Which won him a very small smile. ‘You haven’t been to Helmand.’
‘Flipping have.’
‘And you’ve used that one before, too.’
‘Right, right. Sloppy.’ He shoved his hands in his pockets, thinking. ‘In that case I’ll just have to grate your nose off.’
‘Yeah? How?’
‘Cheese grater. Like I did in Operation Desert Knickers.’
A single sniff of a laugh, and she glanced at him. The shape of her eyes so almost-Caucasian, hardly a sniff of Korean about her. Like even his genes were being diluted, rinsed out of her life.
But her sideways smile was all his. She took a deep breath. ‘I’ll boil you alive and peel your skin off and sell it to the shoe shop so they can make shoes out of you.’
The realization that she’d planned that, rehearsed it, glowed like a coal in his belly.
‘Nice.’ He gave her a serious look and slow-nodded. ‘What’s the score? Seventeen-twelve?’
‘You wish,’ she said, appeased now. ‘Nineteen-twelve.’ She cheerfully swung her bag at him, obliviously but narrowly missing his bollocks.
Bear started to skip but stopped when she got to the gate. She was scanning the yard for those boys.
Mae crouched. ‘If there’s anything you need me to deal with—’
She shot him a serious look. ‘No. There’s nothing. There isn’t.’
‘Because if—’
‘Please, Dad.’
Mae shrugged, straightened up, committing those two lads to memory: bags, hair, sneery little faces. The last of the latecomers ran past them, ushered in by her classroom assistant (Mr Walls, 29, newly qualified last year, single, previously a gardener, caution for shoplifting aged 13). Mae bent to fix the mismatch of toggles on her coat, and she let him.
‘Thanks for hanging out with me, Bear.’ He squeezed her shoulders. ‘See you next week.’
She ducked him and was gone, off down the path, trying to press into a group of girls he half-recognized. Flicking a hand up briefly as a backwards goodbye. He flexed his fingers a few times in his pockets and headed back to the car.
It didn’t get to him. Saying goodbye and not even getting a hug: it was no big deal. He dealt with assaults and suicides and RTAs, no problem, all the time. Cat C murders, child abuse, DV, the lot. All the fucking time. So, his little girl forgot to give him a hug before a whole nine days away from him, even though five minutes ago she was three years old, falling asleep in his arms as he read The Gruffalo for the eighteenth time? Christ! Take more than that to make him cry.
From the driver’s seat he watched Bear disappear into the building.
Music. He reached round to dig a CD out from the pocket behind his seat, and his fingers closed on a disk in a square plastic wallet. She must have left it there by mistake. He brought it out: Lady Gaga for Bear! on the disk in sharpie, and then under the hole,
(not really, it’s Daddy’s very best CLEAN hip-hop mixtape).
And it was clean, too: he’d checked and double-checked each track, and there wasn’t a single swear. It had taken some doing.
He tucked it into the glovebox, then tried again and found Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle under a fine layer of fried potato crumbs. It was scratched to shit but last time had played fine up to ‘Who Am I (What’s My Name)?’, which would be long enough to get him to the nick. His speakers were almost as creaky as his brakes, but they were loud, and loud meant a clear head.
Ignition, arm round the headrest to reverse. And off.
All business.
3. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
CC: OK, I think that’s recording … Good. Right, before we begin can we just confirm this because we’ve got a slightly unusual situation here. You have asked for your friend Jodie – our mutual friend, should I say – to be here during this first session?
EP: Yes. Please. If that’s all right.
CC: Certainly, whatever makes you feel comfortable. OK. So, what I’d like to do to begin with is to have a chat about the dissociation, and the range of what you’re experiencing on a daily basis.
EP: OK.
CC: And from there we can move on to having a think about where you’d like me to get you to. Does that sound OK?
EP: Yeah. Yes. That’s fine.
CC: So. A normal day then. How does that start?
EP: OK well, it depends on whether I’ve had a fugue or not.
CC: Tell me about that.
EP: So, um, Siggy sometimes—
CC: Siggy is your alter.
EP: Yeah, sorry yeah my alter, she sometimes kind of takes over. I wake up at night sometimes but I’m not like, actually awake, it’s not me, it’s her. She talks to my mum sometimes, otherwise she’ll just try to go outside, that kind of thing. Sometimes we’ll only know Siggy was up because things will be moved, or lights will be on. Stuff like that. But I always know anyway because I feel her there.
CC: Physically?
EP: Not exactly. I mean, I always feel sick afterwards, sort of achy.
CC: OK, so let’s say you’ve woken up, got up. What happens next?
EP: Well, she’s always there. Just … like I can sort of sense her, whatever’s going on. It’s like she thinks things that I can hear—
CC: Does she speak? Does she have a voice?
EP: Well … no. Not really. But it’s like she’ll get scared or angry or whatever and I know it’s not me feeling those things. Does that make any sense?
CC: Yes, it does. It sounds like what you experience is what I call co-conscious dissociation, which is when a person can feel that they have more than one identity at the same time.
EP: Right. Yes, that’s what it’s like. But the times she gets me up and does stuff with me at night, and … I just have completely no memory of that at all.
CC: OK. I’m getting from the way you’re speaking now that it’s quite distressing.
EP: I just … I don’t know.
[pause: 32 sec]
CC: Would you feel comfortable going into a little more detail about the episodes you have at night?
[pause: 12 sec]
EP: Look, I-I don’t know.
CC: OK: Eleanor—
EP: Ellie.
CC: Ellie. A lot of the people I see, they find it very hard at the beginning. They can feel like … well, they don’t know if they can trust me. Or it might be that they don’t trust that talking is going to help.
[pause: 27 sec]
EP: No. It’s not that. I just know what’s going to happen. We’re going to go through all this, and then you’re going to give up.
CC: Ah, OK. Tell me a bit more about that.
EP: I’m just … like, I’ve tried. You know? I talk to Siggy, I talked to other people, tried medicine and everything. All kinds of stuff. I don’t want to do all of that again. Just tell you all of it and then have you just say that actually you can’t help. Or that you don’t believe me.
CC: Who does believe you, Ellie?
EP: My mum.
CC: She’s always believed you.
EP: Yeah. She’s-she’s seen what happens. The fugues, and – everything.
CC: Anyone else close to you? Other family?
EP: I’m an only child. My dad’s dead.
CC: OK.
[pause: 11 sec]
CC: OK. And was that a long time ago that you lost him?
EP: Yes. Before I was born.
CC: I see. It can be challenging, growing up without—
EP: No. It wasn’t.
CC: You don’t want to talk about your father.
EP: No.
[pause: 31 sec]
CC: OK, Ellie, there’s a couple of things I’d like you to know. Sometimes therapists can be a bit mystifying. They can wait for you to work things out for yourself even if they have a good idea of what’s going on and what needs to shift in order to improve. But that can take a lot of time. In my experience I think it’s best to be up front and tell you what I think is happening, and what we’re going to do to put it right. Seems more honest, that way. Does that sound OK?
EP: Yes. I just want her gone. I want to be better.
CC: I hear you. So the first thing is, the aim of the psychotherapeutic work I’m going to do with you is to understand what’s happened. What I want to do is reduce the conflict between the different parts of your identity, help them cooperate.
EP: OK. I mean, I can’t see that happening, but OK. We can try.
CC: Good. So, the second thing I need you to know is that the kind of issues you’re having with Siggy, they’re something that almost always stem from quite a significant trauma, often something in early childhood.
[pause: 34 sec]
EP: OK.
CC: And so at some point in our sessions we’re going to need to talk about that. What you yourself think is at the bottom of it, how it all started.
[pause: 19 sec]
CC: Would you like us to come back to this at another time?
EP: No.
CC: OK. I understand. The reason I’m—
EP: I just … look, nothing happened, OK? There’s no deep dark secret. She’s just there. I don’t know why. I’m not going to come along here and just suddenly remember some massive, buried … it’s not going to happen. She’s always been there. I just want her gone. OK? I want her to leave me alone.
[pause: 22 sec]
EP: I just want her to leave me alone.
4. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Ellie (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
It felt like she was gone forever. I called Matt again and again but there was no answer.
I checked the time on the wall clock – three hours gone – and then saw the streak of pink highlighter on the calendar. I was supposed to be doing a shift that afternoon, volunteering in the children’s ward in the hospital where Mum cleaned, and Matt worked in the imaging lab. He’d set the whole thing up for me, sorting all the stuff out with the permissions, after I told him how one day I’d like to work with children. But after his effort, I’d managed to miss my slots twice in the last few weeks. The HR person had already come to see me about it, but I couldn’t explain to her what had really happened: that if I went back to sleep after a fugue, I was impossible to wake.
Matt said I should just come clean about it, explain that I had a mental illness. It was a hospital, he said – how could they not understand? I didn’t dare, but I knew then I’d made the right decision in confiding in him.
At first I’d been careful to stick to the rules, to censor myself. Mum knew how serious I was about him, and in his company at least, she approved of him. I’d come home once to find them roaring with laughter over a game of cards: he was genuine, polite, reliable, she said, and nothing like my father. She made me promise not to let myself fall asleep with him, no matter how tired I got, but she was still worried. There wasn’t a man alive who was patient enough, understanding enough, to be with someone who’d always sleep alone. Even good guys can break your heart,she said.
To begin with I said nothing at all about Siggy, but I couldn’t keep the secrecy up for long. There was no boundary where I stopped and she began, and after a few months, I realized I couldn’t be myself without telling him.
Matt had listened to it all. We’d been sitting in front of the log burner in his narrowboat, sharing a bottle of wine. I sat propped against his chest, and I told him the whole story. From the first time Siggy had got me up at night and taken me outside, until Mum, frantic at 4 a.m., found me lying underneath the car. I told him about the exhaustion I got the mornings after a fugue, the grinding headaches, the ten-tonne limbs. I told him everything.
No. Not everything. I didn’t tell him about Jodie.
After my very long monologue, there was a very long silence. And then he’d lifted my head from his shoulder and looked right into my eyes.
‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand this yet, but I’m going to. We’re going to make you OK.’
I told Mum later, and she was silent for a long while. Eventually, she just hugged me. ‘It’s your life,’ she said. ‘Remember to be careful, though. He’s a good guy, but I can’t protect him from her.’
The very next morning, there were bruises all up her arms. I had no memory of what Siggy had done – what I had done. How I had slammed my own mother against a wall and thrown her out of my way.
Like I was an empty coat, Mum said. But it wasn’t your fault.
I heard a sudden movement and I froze, listening, but it wasn’t Mum coming back. Just boxes being moved around downstairs, from what I guessed was the stock room. Our flat was above a shop, an off-licence, and from the way sound travelled it seemed Mr Symanski’s ceiling, our floor, was made from little more than cardboard.
I gave a start. Thin floors.
If I could hear him …
I pulled on my shoes and was at the front door before Mum’s warnings about him sounded in my head. Don’t talk to the neighbours. It only takes one person to suspect us.
What was I going to say? Did you hear me leave the flat in the middle of the night? Because I’ve got a whole load of unexplained injuries and I don’t remember what happened? I stood there for a moment, my forehead resting on the cold glass of the door. Then I took my shoes back off and kicked them sullenly away.
In the kitchen, next to the sink, Mum had left a beaker for me and a carton of orange juice. Forgetting the damage to my hand, I made the mistake of trying to twist the cap. I recoiled and knocked the whole box to the floor where it slopped out across the lino.
Irritated, I opened the safe cupboard under the sink and took out the homemade cleaning fluid and some latex gloves. We didn’t take chances anymore: everything harmful was locked away. I couldn’t even be left alone with a bottle of bleach. I tried all the other doors, out of habit. All locked. Knives, matches, bleach, all beyond my grasp. I snapped on the gloves and clenched and stretched my hands, feeling the thin scabs on the wounds split, reasserting myself over her.
My pain, Siggy. Not yours.
After I mopped up the juice I carried on cleaning, using the soft scourers to attack the rest of the floor, the dented metal sink, the wood-effect laminate of the worktops. I scrubbed until my jaw ached from gritting my teeth. Folded in a corner, Siggy eyed me.
My phone rang, and I pulled off the gloves, my heart leaping as I recognized the first few of digits of the number on the screen. It was the hospital.
‘Matt?’
‘Oh, hi,’ said an awkward voice, a man. Not Matt. ‘Ellie, right?’
I let my eyes close. If someone at his work was calling me, that meant—
‘Listen, do you know where Matt is? Only, we were expecting him in, and he hasn’t shown up.’
I told him – after swallowing the lump of lead in my throat – that I hadn’t. ‘Who is this?’
‘Leon. From the hospital. The imaging lab?’
‘Oh, OK. Leon.’ Matt had mentioned Leon: they’d been working together for a couple of months now and he’d gone for a pint with him after work once or twice, though I didn’t get the sense they were particularly good friends.
‘Did you see him yesterday?’ Leon asked, concern in his voice. ‘Like, in the evening? Because I can’t get hold of him on the mobile, and the guy at his moorings says he’s not there, and with yesterday being a bit … you know.’
‘A bit what?’
The wet sound of him opening and closing his mouth told me he was choosing his words. ‘No it’s … it’s nothing. But look, if you hear from him—’
‘It was a bit what, Leon?’
‘Nothing. Just, you know. Busy.’
Matt hadn’t mentioned anything unusual. Had I even asked? I told Leon I’d call if I heard anything and hung up.
I went to the window, pulling the net aside. The thick cloud of the early morning was gone now, swept clean to expose a sky of cold blue, scarred all over with sharp shards of white.
Wherever Matt was, he wasn’t OK. He wasn’t OK at all.
My eye was caught by movement. I recognized Mr Symanski’s son, Piotr. Maybe a little older than me, mid-twenties and already paunchy. He was a sullen figure, shuffling up the road. I watched him bend to scratch a passing cat behind the ears, and let it weave between his ankles a few times. When he stood, he saw me. Stock still, nothing on his face, staring straight at me for five seconds, ten. More. Then as if he’d suddenly come to his senses, he looked away, got out his keys, and went inside.
I dropped the corner of the net curtain, and stood there blinking, thinking only of that stare. Did he know something? I thought again of going down, speaking to them. But before I could make a decision, I heard movement on our steps outside and the clatter of fumbled keys against concrete.
5. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mae (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
The Snoop Dogg was damaged worse than he’d thought, so he felt around in the side pocket for anything CD shaped and slipped it in. Turned out to be a demo from a mate of a mate, who Mae vaguely remembered wanting to punch. White guy, gangster lean, called everyone bruv. Mae gave it until after the first refrain, pressed eject, checked for witnesses, and windowed it.
He took a little detour and got a coffee from a new Cuban place on the corner by Acton Central. He ordered short and black on the grounds that it would be fastest and bounced on the balls of his feet as the barista made it up, feeling the snip of unspent energy amassing in his blood. A muted newscast on the screen above the counter was wringing the final drops from an American school shooting, a week old and almost forgotten.
After paying, he got out of there, and had emptied half the scalding caffeine into his mouth before he’d even pulled away. Needing the buzz, needing the lift, because there hadn’t been a chance for a run that morning, either.
He tolerated the flack he got about his thing for exercise. If it made his colleagues feel better about themselves to call him vain, call him a poser, that was their business. But to Ben Mae, exercise had never been optional. Without a run in the morning, without an hour of circuits or weights or anything else in the evening, the noise in his head got too much and he knew where that ended. These days, he could trust himself to recognize that inevitable build-up of whatever-it-was and burn it off in the gym. But age as he might, those years after his dad died of finding himself prowling, angry without provocation, skulking around for a fight or a fuck never seemed that far behind him.
Objectively, he thought, as he slowed for the barrier and flashed the fob at the reader, it was doubtful that coffee helped. Objectively, the right thing to do was to deal with the anger, understand it. Go right back to that dark six months when he changed from a normal teenage boy and into a thug, to the point where his life could have gone either way. Tear the thing out by the root.
But who would he be then?
Leaning back in his desk chair, Mae transferred the phone to the other ear, then rubbed the stubble on his head up and down hard with the palm of his hand. Around him, the office was already in the full throes of post-briefing activity.
‘But he’s still missing,’ the woman at the other end of the line was saying, her voice rising towards the inevitable crack. ‘He’s still gone. We can’t cope with this not knowing. My poor kids—’
Her name was Charlotte, wife of Damien Hayes. Widow, almost certainly, of Damien Hayes. Mother of his four kids. Six months previously, Mr Hayes had left the final shift of his job at the vehicle plant just outside Uxbridge, driven his car half the way home, abandoned it, and disappeared. He left no note but, as it unravelled, it was a tale that told itself. The poor bastard had been in the red by almost forty grand, had defaulted on his last half a dozen mortgage payments and then, just to kick the man while he was down, the plant had laid him off. Mrs Hayes had only discovered in the weeks following his evaporation that he left behind no savings, no pension, and no insurance.
‘Mrs Hayes I promise you we’ve done everything we can—’
‘Done? Done?’
Mae winced. ‘Doing. We’re doing everything—’
‘Are you? Like what? What have you done, since you made this call a month ago? On our last weed date,’ she said, bitterness curling at the term.
He lifted the top sheet of the stack of paper in front of him and stifled a sigh. Four more calls exactly like this one, scheduled for today, but there was no news, no concrete developments in a single one of them. Thing was, in this business no news was bad news, even if – especially if – it wasn’t the kind of bad news that had an event attached, a clear and obvious trauma that could at least heal cleanly. In the majority of the cases he had the misfortune to head in his current role, the misper was there and then they were not. No stages of grief to work through, no ritual to mark the end of the life. The family around them remained in stasis until eventually, secretly and ashamedly, they started to long for news of a body being found.
‘I’m afraid without new information, there’s really not much else—’
‘So you’ve given up?’ And right on cue, the sob. ‘If you had any idea of what this is doing to us.’
Mae pressed closed his eyes. They always said that. Every one of them, and not just in Missing but in everything he’d ever been assigned. Murders and rapes and robberies, beatings, the lot. Nearly always, they were right. No, he’d never been sexually assaulted. Hadn’t suffered the violent death of someone he loved. Since he’d been leading Missing, though, the accusation that he didn’t know how it felt had been harder to take. But he never let it out, never put them right, not even to McCulloch when she’d given him the gig. Especially not then.
He was going to need that run, he decided.
‘Look, Mrs Hayes,’ he said, quietly. ‘Charlotte. I’ll put some calls in to the charities again, OK? See if there’s anything new there. Sometimes there are delays with them putting stuff through to our systems. I’ll see if I can extend the hospital checks a bit. I’m not promising anything,’ he added as he heard her intake of breath, but the hope had already returned to her voice.
‘Yes. Please.’ She paused to delicately blow her nose. ‘Anything you can do.’
A red light started blinking on his desk phone. Mae straightened, dispatched Mrs Hayes as sensitively as he could, and answered it.
‘Should I send down a written invitation?’ The gentle Hebridean lilt of DCI Colleen McCulloch.
Mae glanced at the time. Shit. ‘Sorry, ma’am. On my way.’
He bombed it up the back steps and made McCulloch’s floor in about thirty seconds flat. He slowed to a stroll as he passed her glass-fronted office for the sake of some semblance of cool, then went in.
‘Sorry ma’am,’ he muttered, ‘difficult call to a—’
‘Spare me,’ she said, nodding over her glasses to the door, which he dutifully closed. Standing at ease the other side of the room was a statuesque, stony-faced uniform, a woman. He nodded an acknowledgement: he’d seen her swinging kettlebells around in the basement gym. She had cropped, bleach-blonde hair and had to be a good 180 lbs and rising six foot. The kind of woman who occupied every inch of herself. Lot of tattoos, he’d noticed: not that they were visible now.
McCulloch cleared her throat. ‘How’s it been going downstairs these past few weeks, Ben? Haven’t seen you since I went to Egypt. Ooh, talking of which,’ she said, turning to dig something out of a drawer, ‘got you one of these. From the pyramids.’
He caught the paper bag just before it struck him on the head – she was nothing if not a good shot – and opened it. Inside was a small, stuffed camel, made from some kind of felt. He closed the bag. ‘Uh, I’m honoured?’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t be, it’s cursed. Paid the extra, thought why not.’
The uniform bit back a grin.
McCulloch had arrived on the force six months after Mae: they’d both started out in Sussex, albeit at very different levels of seniority. She’d been a hard sell to the whole department, straight in from civvy street to detective inspector, leapfrogging not only a whole generation of CID sergeants who’d been waiting in the wings – some of them – for literally years, but also sprinting past the two long years of uniform service. She was part of a new Philosophy of Recruitment, they’d been told, which recognized outside skills and combatted red tape. Translated: stuffed suit. Decoded: clueless leg-up wannabe. The entire team had been rooting for her to fuck up her first major job, but she’d steered the investigation to a solve with the cool, effortless ease of a seasoned skipper. Those who still remained unconvinced waited, hoping for a trip up to ratify their prejudices. It never came. Problem was, she might have come from some woolly sounding NGO background, but she was also bulletproof. She was bright as a supernova, knew her PACE back to front, her Murder Manual inside out and recited her CPS guidelines with her eyes closed. She bit only when antagonized, and she called every single decision with blistering speed and perfect judgement. What made all of that worse was that she was the most eminently likeable boss any of them had ever had.
And after Brighton, when his immediate superior had been sacked and Mae himself had been given a month’s suspension, she’d moved to the Met to take the helm at Brentford and had been in the role ever since. It was McCulloch who’d encouraged him to relocate, to come and work in the capital with her, and with nothing on the coast to stay for, he’d eventually relented.
McCulloch pushed aside the wireless keyboard to make room for her tailored-shirted forearms and took a sip from a steaming mug of her ubiquitous mint tea.
‘Detective. Ben.’ She gave him a broad smile that pushed the plump cheeks into freckled bulges and exposed the quarter-inch gap between her front teeth.
‘Ma’am.’
‘I have a job for you.’
‘That’s very kind, Ma’am, but I have seventeen open—’
‘Call it an expansion of your already impressive burden,’ she said, waving his reluctance away. ‘Tell me, how long have we been in the force?’
She knew the answer to this. She knew everything. Where he’d been to school, his bench press PB, and the name of his first pet. Not for the first time, it occurred to him she probably even knew about the dark years after his mum disappeared, even though he’d always managed to keep a half-step ahead of the law.
‘Eight years, Ma’am.’
She pulled the keyboard back over. ‘I’ve had some applications. Some of your colleagues putting themselves forwards for inspector.’ She was looking at her screen now, scrutinizing it for his benefit. ‘But I’m not seeing your name here.’
‘I’m happy where I am.’ He glanced at the uniform, wondering where this was going.
Ignoring him, McCulloch folded her arms and leaned back in her chair, addressing the ceiling. ‘You see, Ben, when we rank people up, we like to see people proving themselves as leaders. Showing managerial qualities.’
‘I’m not looking to rank up. Sergeant suits me fine.’
‘I see. Well anyway. Detective Sergeant Mae, this,’ she said, gesturing at the mystery uniform, ‘is DC Catherine Ziegler.’
‘Right.’
‘And she,’ McCulloch went on with a twinkle of the eyes, ‘is going to be your new TI.’
Mae took the hand extended towards him, met her eyes, and briefly returned a rough approximation of the broad, open smile she gave him. Thinking, shit. Trainee Investigator meant a shadow. Constant company.
‘Hate to say it, Ma’am—’ Mae started, but he was silenced with a finger held aloft.
‘Then don’t.’ McCulloch folded her arms across her chest, assessing the two of them like a mother at a playdate. ‘I understand that Catherine—’
‘Kit,’ the younger woman put in.
‘I understand that Kit passed her NIE with stand-out results,’ McCulloch was saying. ‘So when HR asked me for a mentor, I looked around the floor and I thought to myself, Colleen, who have you got with the kind of skills and characteristics to drive a talent like that? I thought, who’s willing to take the time to make opportunities for a new generation of detectives?’
My arse you did, Mae thought. Try, who have I got who’s been coasting for getting on for half a decade, without a foot of movement in any direction? Who have I got spare? Not that he could begrudge it. If it had been DCI Anyone Else, this would have been a punitive move. But she’d called it right, he couldn’t deny it. Sure, he’d sat the exams and taken the promotion to sergeant when he came back from his absence, even though he was fairly sure she’d swung it for him. After that, he’d kept his head down. He’d gone where he was sent, done the courses, gone through the motions. But it didn’t take an HR review to see he’d been treading water since … since before … since before it had all gone wrong. He pumped his fists tight and loose, tight and loose at his sides, dispelling it.
‘I thought Missing would give Kit a nice easy start,’ McCulloch told him, ‘and you can get her used to the juggling.’ Turning, she added, ‘Ignore the grumpy exterior, Kit. They’re all the same: like to pretend they’re brooding mavericks but buy them a bacon roll and they’re anyone’s.’
DC Catherine Ziegler glanced at him to gauge his reaction, and he conceded a reluctant twitch at the corners of his mouth. Might as well be decent, because he could see he wasn’t going to win this.
‘Squirt of HP and we can talk.’
‘Then that’s sorted,’ the boss said. ‘And don’t forget your camel.’
McCulloch was already pulling the keyboard close, on to the next thing. She started typing, then looked up. ‘What are you waiting for, lollies? Run along.’
But he could tell from the meaningful, encouraging look on his boss’s face as she shooed them out of the door that there was nothing malicious about this. He wasn’t despised, he was pitied. This was intended to aid his personal development. She thought this was what he needed.
And as Mae left the office, with his new TI following behind like a rugby-shouldered Valkyrie, he hated McCulloch for always being right.
6. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Ellie (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mum’s outline was distorted through the bumpy glass as she bent to retrieve the dropped key. She cursed, but it was the weakness in her voice that made me certain that something was not good.
She came inside, her hair stuck across her face in muddy streaks as she unbuttoned her coat.
I took it from her and asked, ‘Did you find him?’
‘I’m sorry, baby,’ she said. ‘No luck.’
‘So where have you been?’
‘Just down to the boat, but he’s not there. I thought I’d get a run in on the way back.’ She started stripping off, moving quickly, her T-shirt slopping to the floor where she dropped it. Leggings going the same way; socks, the tube-bandage support she used on her dodgy knee. The bare wet flesh of her arms and torso was paling from the cold and stiffened with goosebumps, ropes of muscle tensing underneath as she moved.
She found a plastic bag and shoved the clothes inside. ‘Don’t look so worried, love. He’ll be … I don’t know. Out for a walk? Or out taking pictures?’
‘He’s supposed to be at work. They called, Mum. He’s not there.’
She was suddenly serious. ‘What did you tell them?’
I shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
‘You didn’t say …’ she started, her eyes drifting down the hall, to my bedroom door.
‘That I smashed my way out of my room in the middle of the night and I don’t remember it, and I’ve woken up covered in bruises? No. I kept that to myself.’
‘OK. Stupid question. I’m sorry.’
I followed her into her room. She unlocked the box beside her bed where she kept tools, matches, things she couldn’t leave lying around. She removed a pair of nail scissors and started cutting her nails down.
‘So where is he?’
She sighed. ‘I don’t know, Ellie.’ Finishing her own no-nonsense manicure, she gestured for my hand, which I gave her. ‘There’s nothing to say you had anything to do with it,’ she said, trimming the white from the tops of my nails.
I tried to pull away. ‘Mum, if you found something—’
‘I didn’t. It’s nothing.’
‘But it’s not, is it?’ I said, disentangling. ‘What if Siggy … what if it’s happened again?’
‘Don’t. Please. Just don’t think about it.’ Mum took a deep breath, held it, as if bracing for something. ‘And even if something has happened. We should definitely sit tight,’ she said at last.
I broke free, stood up, went into my room.
‘Where are you going?’ she called.
‘I’m calling the police.’
It took her about half a second to come after me. ‘No.’ She grabbed the phone out of my hand. ‘No. That’s not the right play. Not at all.’
I stared at her. ‘Play? He could be—’ I stopped myself from saying it.
‘But he’s not. OK? He’ll be fine. There could be any number of explanations. He might have just gone on a trip.’
I folded my arms. ‘Right. A trip.’
‘Maybe he wanted a break.’
It took me a moment to process that. ‘From me?’
She shrugged apologetically.
‘You’re saying this is just him breaking up with me?’
‘Men. They eat your pies and tell you lies,’ she offered. It was our joke, the phrase with which every conversation we’d ever had about my father would eventually end. But I wasn’t in the mood, and she saw it. ‘I’ve got to get to work, sweetheart.’
‘Me too. I’ve got a shift with the kids. What?’ I said, when she made a face.
‘Maybe best call in sick?’
‘What? Why?’
She spread her hands but didn’t answer my question. Didn’t need to. She didn’t want me to go because she wanted to keep me out of sight.
She thought I’d killed him.
Had I killed him?
After she left, I stood in the hall, taking in our dingy home. Nothing to mark it as ours. Our rent paid in cash – everything always paid in cash – so we could leave at a moment’s notice if anyone came knocking on the doors, asking questions about me, about Jodie. Mum used a different name, Christine Scott, wherever she could. She chose agency work over proper contracts because it meant wages in cash, and there were always agencies with a relaxed approach to background checks.
Our whole existence, Mum’s jobs, everything we did, was built around Siggy. Everything in her life was about me: boyfriends had been dismissed when they started to ask too many questions, jobs abandoned when demands were made that took her away from her duty to me. She’d given up everything just to cover my tracks and keep me happy, or at least keep me safe. Even before Jodie, we’d never put down roots, but since? I’d lost count of the number of times we’d moved. Always in a hurry when someone recognized her. It made her curse herself for ever having had success: if she’d never been on TV, it wouldn’t be half this hard.
I padded back to where the calendar hung on the wall: my shifts marked in pink highlighter.
It’s not like it’s actually a job.
I was coming up twenty years old. I was the same person I’d been at fourteen. Afraid of everyone and everything, locked into the bedroom in my mother’s flat every night for fear of what I might do if I was free. Whatever she said about my value in the world, I was jobless, dependent.
But I had Matt. Loving, understanding Matt. Patient. Blindly at risk.
I made a promise right there and then, that if Siggy had hurt him in any way, that I was ending it. I’d take her with me. I didn’t care.
Nobody wins, Siggy. Do you hear me? This ends here.
Siggy heard. Her black eyes flashed wide, but she shrank back, flattening into the shadows. Didn’t move, not a moment of a challenge. She’d been around me long enough to know when I meant what I said.
7. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mae (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mae arsed the access door open and climbed the steel steps, steep enough to make the toe of his size twelves clang on the underside of each one as he ascended. The fire door at the top swung open and banged against the wall. He squinted as he went out. Bright. Stretching his arms out, opening his chest, he made a circuit of the flat roof then leaned out across the suicide bars, looking down to the street below.
He bit into his bacon roll. He’d lost DCCatherineZiegler shortly after she’d handed it to him in the canteen. Or maybe not lost, exactly, more turned and walked away from, without checking she was behind him.
He rarely ate in the canteen. The food was adequate, but the place was rammed full of cops. For him, up here was the place to be. He chewed slowly, felt the cold on his skin, had a stretch. Movement at the edge of the roof caught his eye: from the door of the shed-like block that housed the steps came his new TI. Striding out across the felt roof like an uncaged animal.
‘Sarge,’ she called, ‘got a sec?’ She carried a sheet of paper, the other hand visored across her forehead against the sharp November sunshine.
Mae jerked his chin to greet her, then chased a dot of brown sauce from the corner of his mouth with his tongue.
‘Love it up here, too,’ she said, tilting her head back to the open sky and filling her lungs. An exchange of car horns sounded, and she glanced over the edge of the building.
She laughed softly. ‘Funny little bastards.’
‘Who?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. All of us.’
Mae followed her eyeline, down to the stop-start of traffic by the junction of Boston Manor Road. Tiny faraway people pottering around, in and out of shops and cars and offices, fluid masses of them sloshing out of buses and onto the streets where they dispersed easily, innocuous as peas from a split bag. When he looked back at her, a smile had risen over her face.
‘Did you need something, Ziegler?’ he said, popping the last mouthful of the butty into his mouth and balling up the bag.
‘Please don’t call me by my surname, Sarge. Makes me feel like I’m at boarding school.’ She followed him back out towards the steps and passed him a printout. ‘Got a new one in. Misper.’
Mae glanced at the sheet she was holding out, swept his eyes over the first couple of lines. Just a log from a triple-9. He handed it back, frowning.
‘Give it to uniform. If it’s already marked as low-risk they’ll do the work-up. They hand it over as and when.’
‘Usually, yeah. But I thought the name might be of interest,’ she said.
He sighed, took the sheet back. They went down the metal steps into the blue-walled normality of the nick. ‘What was the name?’
‘Matthew Corsham,’ she said, peeling the top sheet off, handing it to him. ‘White male, twenty-six, some kind of technician at Hanwell Hospital. No history of missing, not a pisshead or a junkie.’
He nearly choked. ‘I think that’s supposed to read, no history of drugs or alcohol abuse.’
She shrugged and moved on. ‘The workmate who called it in said he’s worried because it was the guy’s last shift yesterday, dismissal was a bit out of the blue and he was distressed. Corsham promised to take his work computer back, and didn’t show, which is very out of character because he swore he’d be there and he’s very reliable. So the workmate calls, but it goes straight to voicemail, so goes round to his place – he lives on a boat, just up towards Isleworth – and he’s disappeared.’
Mae scanned the text for dates. ‘What timescale we talking?’
‘It’s only half a day. Leon, the colleague, says he spoke to him yesterday and he was really agitated about having lost his job.’
‘Half a day? Give the bloke a chance, Christ! They never heard of a bender?’
‘I think that’s supposed to read, excessive period of alcohol consumption.’
Mae gave her a look. ‘And anyway, I don’t know a Matthew Corsham. Am I supposed to?’
‘Not him. The girlfriend.’
Mae returned his eyes to the document. And his heart skidded to a stop. Eleanor Power.
Kit leaned against the doorframe. ‘Rings a bell, right?’
It wasn’t a question, and they both knew it. He gave her a quick glance. ‘You like your homework, then?’
He read the whole thing en route to his desk, walking on autopilot. Not taking his eyes from it until he was in his chair, screen on. A dull wince, the kind that sits there for years until it’s so familiar it almost goes unnoticed, tightened in his chest.
Yeah. It rang a bell.
Mae pulled the keyboard over, put the name through the PNC. Fourteen Eleanor Powers in the country, three in London.
Could it really be her?
‘I’ve run her already,’ Kit told him, reminding him of her presence behind his chair. ‘No records on her, DWP, electoral roll, nothing. Hasn’t had contact with a GP in five years.’
It figured. Five years meant 2006. The year everything fell apart. Eleanor, Ellie, who had seen Jodie Arden getting into a car the night she went missing. Ellie Power, whose mother held her hand and finished her sentences for her when she was too upset to speak. Who was consumed with the irrational belief that her friend’s disappearance – her death, Ellie believed – was her fault. To the extent that, one afternoon, after the session of questioning that would end up being replayed and dissected in the tribunals that lost DS Heath his job and nearly destroyed Mae’s career, she decided that her imagined guilt was unbearable. She followed that conviction through with such brutal decisiveness that Mae was unable to hold it together at work the next day, or the day after that. He’d never gone back, not to his old job, not to any of the spots they’d offered him in Traffic or Custody. Not to anything in the Brighton and Hove district. Not to anything on the Sussex force at all.
But there was one other tiny detail. One minor footnote that he hadn’t come across before or since and would happily never come across again, not least because it was this that discredited her in the eyes of the CPS and collapsed the entire case against Cox: Ellie Power suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder. He felt the fine hairs on his arms lift as he recalled the specifics of it. How according to her own testimony, sometimes she did and said things, went places that she couldn’t remember. Stopped being Ellie Power at all and became – someone else.
Siggy. The name sounded like a whisper in his head, crept like insects on his skin.
He rubbed his palm over the stubble on his scalp and willed his heart to decelerate.
Kit, oblivious, reached over for the mouse and clicked through the pages. ‘Coincidence she turned up here, on your patch. Nothing on her since your missing prostitute, and now—’
‘Jodie Arden was a fucking child.’
She lowered eyes. ‘Sir.’
Mae sighed. He leaned forward, started lifting the various notes and notices pinned to the blue hessian-fronted panel at the back of his desk. Under several sheets of stuff he’d been meaning to read, there was a photo. He pulled the rusting pin out.
Kit leaned close. ‘Is that her?’
It was a head-and-shoulders of a dark-blonde girl in a dress that fastened at the neck: Jodie Arden at her cousin’s Bat Mitzvah. It was the shot they’d used in the police press packs, but the media had rejected it in favour of a racier snapshot taken by a friend on a night out, that showed her in an altogether different light. The papers had treated her like an adult, which meant printing whatever they wanted. She’d missed the social media explosion by a hair’s breadth, but the hacks had got hold of everything, nonetheless. Including the drinking, including the drug use. And including the fact that she had been sleeping with a much older man, a psychotherapist by the name of Charles Cox, who just so happened to be treating her best friend Ellie. Worse still, Cox also just so happened to be dating Jodie’s own mum. It was this man who owned the car Ellie Power saw Jodie climbing into before she disappeared off the face of the planet. Her disappearance had been news for all of two days, after which another girl in another part of the country had gone missing. A nicer girl, Aryan and clean, a girl who’d volunteered in Uganda and had a place at Cambridge and played the oboe or whatever. With no new information, Jodie Arden had just become another statistic, one among thousands of almost-adult runaways who slipped through the cracks.
‘She was a week off eighteen when she disappeared,’ he said, carefully. ‘I don’t know what you were like, but I sure as hell wouldn’t fancy being judged for life at that age.’
Kit put her hands up. She ventured a tentative laugh. ‘You always this heavy first thing on a Monday?’
‘You just wait till end of the week,’ he said, replacing the photo. ‘I’m an unstoppable gag machine by Thursday lunch.’
‘Right. Well, apologies.’ She gathered up the paper she’d delivered, giving him a sideways look that he couldn’t interpret. ‘Just saw the name and thought you’d be interested. Given your involvement.’
‘Ancient history, to be honest.’ He stood up and straightened his shirt. ‘Come on.’
‘So we are looking at it?’
‘You’re the trainee, so I’m training you. Got to start somewhere.’ Good thing about rank was how you didn’t have to explain yourself to anyone under you. He swept his jacket off the back of his chair and felt in his drawer for a tie, then remembered something. ‘You got a change of clothes?’
Kit frowned, shook her head. ‘Not apart from my gym stuff. Why?’
‘Best ditch the uniform. There’s a plain-clothes store down by the armoury, you can get the key from the guy in Evidence. Find something there, OK? Meet me in reception in five.’ He flipped the collar of his shirt up and gestured an after you.
8. (#ulink_77c71461-6b7c-5800-873c-67068e78a588)
Ellie (#ulink_77c71461-6b7c-5800-873c-67068e78a588)
I stood back from the door, head on the side, to admire the result. Cosmetically at least, my doorframe was OK now. Between the tub of wood putty and a few scraps of sandpaper I’d found, I’d rebuilt the splintered section back up and shaped it to match the contour of the rest. There had been an inch of gloss paint left in the tin from last time it had needed repairing, and I’d done a fair job. I was proud of it. Mum would be pleased.
I felt my shoulders drop as I thought how Matt would be proud, too. I’d managed to convince him I was pretty handy with repairs the first time I’d gone to his narrowboat. It was about a month after I’d first got talking to him at the hospital while I waited for Mum to finish her shift. For weeks, we’d accidentally-on-purpose bumped into each other before he properly asked me out. Our first real date was on a Saturday afternoon: a lazy lunch at a riverside pub. Matt invited me back to see the boat afterwards but had forgotten that he’d been halfway through laying new floorboards until we went inside.
‘Oh god, state of the place,’ he said, shoving the mess of cushions on the built-in sofa up to one end to clear a space for me. ‘Sorry, not a great start.’ He started lugging the new boards across from where they were propped by the log burner, roughly laying them into place to give us something to stand on.
I sat where I was shown, but raised an eyebrow, flirty from the wine. ‘Start to what, exactly?’
He glanced up, embarrassed, ‘I meant, I—’
Nudging him with a toe, I put him out of his misery. ‘Kidding.’ And he laughed, and it felt good. Then, seized with the urge to show off, I got to my feet, rolled up my sleeves, and picked up a hammer from a pile of tools in the corner.
‘Let’s do it, then,’ I said, indicating the boards. ‘I’ll help you get this floor down.’
He bit the corner off a wry smile. ‘You don’t strike me as the woodworking type.’
‘Stronger than I look.’
‘Oh yeah?’ He grinned, ran his eyes over me. I let him do it, my hands on hips, weighing the hammer in my hands. After that, it was a matter of pride to prove it.
The memory of it split like a burning frame of celluloid the moment I heard the front door. I glanced at the time: Mum wasn’t due back for another half hour.
She burst into my bedroom. ‘Has he rung?’
‘No. I’d have told you—’
‘OK. All right,’ she said, slumping slightly.
‘What’s happened? How come you’re early?’
‘I swapped cleaning sectors with Angie so I could leave early,’ she said, then she told me how she’d gone to the photographic lab where Matt worked, to see if Matt had been there. ‘There were two blokes talking outside his office, one of them said Matt’s name, so I hung around. He said he’d been to find Matt, hadn’t got anywhere, so he’d called the police.’
It was probably Leon, I thought, the friend who’d called me before. ‘But the police weren’t actually there.’
‘No, but—’ she made a gesture with her hands, flustered. ‘Look – I just – are we still OK here? I mean, you’ve been careful, even with Matt, right? They’re not going to find the address?’
I tried to hold her eye, but I couldn’t.
She gaped. ‘Oh no, Ellie. What did you do?’
‘I’d been meaning to tell you,’ I said weakly. ‘It was when we were applying for the volunteering.’
‘You gave them our address?’
‘No, he did it. He didn’t know not to. I could hardly tell him not to, could I? How would I explain it?’
‘Well, fuck!’ She threw her free hand up. ‘Great! Wonderful, good work!’
I wanted to say sorry, but she hated me apologizing.
‘I said this would happen. I said, the first time you brought him round. It was too big a risk. Didn’t I say?’ She went into her bedroom and started to rush about, pulling off her tabard and stuffing it into the washing basket. Then as if remembering, she went out to the kitchen and returned with the bag containing the wet clothes from that morning.
As calmly as I could, I said, ‘Mum. Tell me what’s going on.’
‘Nothing! I just want to be prepared.’ She roughly pulled a shirt on and went to the dressing table, plonked herself down and pulled out her make-up. ‘They’re going to come here, aren’t they? The police. And they’re going to ask questions.’
‘So we answer them.’
‘Yeah?’ She spun round, a blob of foundation balancing on fingertip halfway to her face. ‘With what?’
‘How about the truth?’
‘We don’t know what happened! We’ve got no fucking idea what the truth is, have we?’
I bit into my cheek until I tasted blood. I wasn’t going to cry.
Mum applied the make-up, sighed and got up. She went to the bed and patted the place beside her.
I sat, and she put an arm around my shoulders. ‘Come on then.’ She squeezed. ‘They’re going to come, so let’s think what we’re saying. Where had you been, last night?’
‘The pub, but—’
‘Which pub?’
‘Mum, why are we even—?’
‘Which one?’
‘The Windmill. He had an IPA; I had a lemonade.’
‘And people saw you.’
‘Yes. No. Not people we knew.’
‘You weren’t arguing?’
‘No! Why would we be?’
She sighed heavily and went back to the mirror, flipped open a compact. ‘They’re going to ask you this, Ellie. You need to get this right. If they get a whiff that you might be hiding something, we’ve got trouble. They’re already going to have linked you to … what happened before. You do understand that, right?’
‘I’m not hiding anything!’
She raised her eyebrows, then moved her gaze pointedly to my neck. Gave a loose, open-handed gesture to my shoulder, my hip. Siggy shuddered in the aches, as if she was part of them, like they were hers.
Quietly, I said, ‘I’ll just tell them what happened.’
‘About the bruises?’ she said, incredulous.
‘He might be somewhere right now needing help, Mum!’
‘You can’t talk to them. Not yet. Not until we know what’s happened.’
‘But that’s what they do! That’s what the police do, they find out what happened!’
She said nothing to that, but the rise of her eyebrows said, not always. I looked away. If there was one thing I did not want to be talking about right now, it was Jodie Arden.
My eyes lighted on the bag of wet clothes from the morning. ‘What are you going to do with that?’ I asked, nodding to it.
She peered into the mirror. ‘I am going,’ she said, lifting her lashes now with the mascara wand, ‘to incinerate it.’
I waited for her to face me, to grin. But she wasn’t joking.
‘What did you find, Mum? This morning?’
An infinitesimal pause. ‘Ellie—’
And then, from outside, we heard a woman’s voice. ‘This one. Over here.’
We both stood up, fast. She had turned towards the sound but swung back to face me, hands on my shoulders, pulling me into a hug.
‘Listen to me,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Let me talk to them. We can make sure they look for Matt properly, and maybe it’ll all be fine. But it wasn’t before, with Jodie, was it? And if something has happened to him, and if you – Siggy – had anything to do with it, we need to control this as best we can.’
Three knocks at the door.
‘You are a good person, Ellie. We are good people. We’ve done our bloody best. I will not allow that bitch to ruin your life, or mine.’ She brought her mouth right against my ear, and in a vicious whisper she said, ‘Do you hear me? Siggy? You’re not having her. You’re not going to take my daughter.’
From the other end of the corridor I could hear a second voice, a man, calling through the front door.
My mother touched my face. ‘Not. A. Sound.’ And then she left the room, closing the door softly behind her.
9. (#ulink_ff0f5615-6040-5edc-8018-83e1d51a5d0c)
Mae (#ulink_ff0f5615-6040-5edc-8018-83e1d51a5d0c)
Mae knocked again.
Cold spiked in the morning air, and the sky above Abson Street was a flat, formless grey. Kit, looking distinctly uncomfortable in a borrowed pinstripe skirt suit, took a step back to assay the building, intermittent clouds of breath forming in front of her face. She stretched, then pressed her fists into the small of her back, wincing.
He cocked his head. ‘Been fighting?’
She let out a small grunt and straightened up. ‘Roller derby.’
‘You’re kidding.’
Kit grinned. ‘Nope. You’re looking at west London’s fourth-finest blocker.’
He’d seen bruises on her legs before, at the gym, and wondered what her sport was. Hockey, he’d guessed, or rugby possibly. But roller derby was something else. Explained the tattoos, too. He tried extremely hard not to think about her in war paint and fishnets. Extremely hard wasn’t hard enough.
‘You play round here?’ he asked, bending to call through the letterbox. ‘Ms Power? Ellie?’
‘Sure. Another reason that I’ll hate you forever for making me wear this—’ she gestured at her skirt, ‘monstrosity. I look like I’m selling insurance. I’ve got a rep to protect. This is my “hood”.’ She accompanied that with some kind of gesture that he guessed was supposed to be gangsta.
‘Straight outta Acton,’ he offered, but she just frowned, too young for the reference. ‘Never mind.’
There was the scrape of several locks, and the door opened to reveal a lean, serious woman in her fifties. For just a moment, she gave them a warm smile that didn’t match the restless eyes, and he remembered her in her entirety: the feeling that she always had a mask up, was always trying to calm herself down, keep something in.
Christine Power.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked. Then she recognized him. ‘Ah. DC Mae.’ The finest splinter of ice in her voice.
‘It’s DS now, actually. How are you, Christine?’
She didn’t answer the question. This was the moment to say she looked good, that she hadn’t aged. But the truth of it was that every minute of the five years since their paths had last crossed was in stark evidence in each crease of her face, in the near-complete greying of her hair.
Kit cleared her throat.
‘This is DC Ziegler,’ he said. ‘She’s a Trainee Investigator.’
Christine pulled her gaze away from Mae and greeted Kit, turning on the smile that reminded him how she’d been semi-famous once. A reporter, back when women covering international stories were vanishingly scarce.
‘We’ve come for a chat with Ellie. Is she in?’ he asked, taking in what he could of the corridor behind her, given the lack of light. ‘We’re concerned about the whereabouts of a Matthew Corsham?’
Christine gave a tight shake of her head. ‘She’s not here right now, I’m afraid. Can I help?’
‘If you have a few minutes,’ Kit said, stepping forward.
The door opened a little wider as Christine stood aside, and Mae followed Kit into a square, magnolia-coloured living room. They were offered tea. Mae declined with a smile, but Kit groaned with relief.
‘Could murder one,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘Coffee would be great, if you have it.’
Christine nodded and turned away, closing the door behind her.
Mae turned slowly to face Kit. ‘Ordinarily we avoid using words like murder.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Figure of speech, man. Lighten up.’ She shoved her hands in her pockets and looked around.
The place was as tidy as it could have been, but everything was shabby. The carpet was in tiles, worn down in places to the foam backing: decades of service had left the curtains with vertical streaks sun-bleached almost to white. Elsewhere: chipped paintwork, bare lightbulbs, no photos, no clutter of any description. And it was cold in there. He touched a radiator. Hadn’t been on that morning, and the dust on the control tap at the bottom said it had been longer. Like last year. This was more than slumming it.
‘They just moved in?’ Kit whispered, looking around. ‘I’ve been in homelier bus stations. Who doesn’t even have a single photo on the wall?’
She turned to the single line of paperbacks, standing on the deep sill of the single-glazed window, and bent her head to read the spines. Mae looked, too: Dissociation and Me; A Child of Many Parts; Fugue State: A Carer’s Guide. She glanced back at him, confused. He knew what was coming.
‘Yeah. Ellie’s … she’s not well. Mentally.’ Said it casually, like he was telling her Ellie was fond of horses.
‘OK. Like how?’
He lifted a shoulder, dropped it. There wasn’t time to explain properly. ‘Complicated.’
‘Try me.’
Mae checked round the doorway, then said, quickly, ‘It’s called DID. Dissociative Identity Disorder.’
Kit nodded. ‘Makes sense she still lives with her mum, then. Poor bastard,’ she added with a shrug, an unfazed gesture that made him suddenly conscious of how diametrically different their back-and-forth was from the relationship he’d had as a TI with his own mentor. One sniff of mental illness back then would have been enough to release a feverish tirade – sometimes delivered out of earshot of the target, sometimes not – about snowflakes and limp-wristed millennials. It would all be easier to stomach now if Mae could have convinced himself he’d stood up for the victims of DS Heath’s vitriol. But it hadn’t happened like that, had it?
And wasn’t that why he was here in this flat, right now?
He turned back to the books, ran his finger along the titles until he came to a slim paperback, cheaply made, well-thumbed. Its spine was peeling away to expose the glue beneath, but Mae knew it immediately. He handed it to her.
‘“A Splintered Soul: Collected Essays on Dissociation, Fugue and Recovery”,’ she read, whispering.
‘Chapter seven is Ellie.’
‘Seriously? What does—?’ Kit started, but she was interrupted by the sound of Christine coming back with the drinks. Kit put the book back and affected a smile.
The coffee was distributed, and Christine perched on the arm of the angular sofa. She folded her arms over her chest, crossed her legs at the knee. Mae thought of a Transformer toy he’d had as a kid. Bend and fold and click and bam, suddenly you had something totally different.
He cleared his throat. ‘So where’s Ellie right now, do you know?’
‘She’s not feeling good. Gone for some air.’ Then, to Kit, in a woman-to-woman tone, ‘She has anxiety.’ And to Mae: ‘As I’m sure you’ll remember.’
Kit nodded, sympathetic. ‘That’s no fun.’ She glanced at Mae, who gave her a slight tilt of the head: go ahead, your interview. ‘Mrs Power, we—’
‘Ms,’ Mae corrected her.
‘Ms Power, my apologies,’ Kit said. ‘We received a call from a workmate of Mr Corsham’s saying that he’s potentially gone missing, so we wanted to talk to Ellie about him.’
‘I see.’ She ran her hands over her face, stretching the skin under her eyes for a moment. She looked tired, but not the kind of tired that went away with a good night’s sleep. ‘I’ll ask her to call you, if you like? Although I’m not sure how much she’s been seeing him lately. She’s young. Keeping her options open.’
Kit smiled. ‘Do you know Matthew at all yourself?’
‘A little. We both work at the same hospital.’
Mae pulled out his notes. Frowned. ‘Really? Because I—’
‘Yes. Hanwell. I’m just a cleaner there. He’s in the photographic lab.’
‘That how Ellie met him?’ Kit asked brightly.
‘She was waiting for me in the canteen one day. They got talking.’
‘Sweet.’
Kit made a note, took a long slug of her coffee, then stood. ‘We’ll need to speak to Ellie as soon as possible. Could you give her this card, ask her to call?’
‘Of course.’
Kit thanked Christine and opened the door, making to leave. She made small talk as they passed to the hall, but it dried up at the front door. There was an awkward silence as Kit tied her shoes.
‘Christine,’ Mae said. ‘What happened before—’
She held up a hand. ‘It doesn’t matter. All I need is for you to treat her carefully. All right?’
He nodded, handed her a card. There was nothing else to say. ‘Could you have Ellie call us as soon as possible?’
Christine Power looked Mae full in the face. ‘Be gentle. Do you understand? My daughter is not like the rest of us. If one good thing came from the …’ she paused, skewering the word, ‘mess,back then, I hope you at least learned that.’
10. (#ulink_54102bbb-50e7-5a91-9477-8551f80eae85)
Ellie (#ulink_54102bbb-50e7-5a91-9477-8551f80eae85)
I waited in Mum’s room, too scared of making a noise to even move.
I would have known that voice anywhere. Ben Mae. I could make him out clearly as they came down the hall, but the moment they closed the living room door all I could hear was low, muffled and intermittent, and I could hardly catch a word.
Siggy breathed static in my head, watching me. She knew exactly what had happened last night, but she would never tell me. All I could do was imagine, and that was the worst part: the inability to differentiate between mine and hers. Between real memory and my own terrified imagination doing its best to fill in the gaps.
When I lost Jodie, I told the police the same story every time they asked, the story that Mum and I had gone over and over. What I saw that last night before she disappeared. Jodie got into Cox’s car. It was red. They were fighting. That was the last time I saw her.
I’d rehearsed it so many times by the time I told the police, I’d almost believed it was true.
Dr Charles Cox had been in his mid-forties when they’d got together. She was seventeen. It wasn’t illegal, as Jodie reminded me almost every time we talked about him, even though it was never me who complained about the age gap. What I was bothered by was the fact that he was dating her mother. But even that was something I could overlook, under the circumstances. The fact was that, apart from my own mum, Jodie was the only friend I’d ever had.
Our friendship lasted four months. From the day I met her to the day she died: 121 days. It was a Tuesday, the first time we met. I’d seen her around before, but she went to the big comprehensive the other side of Hove and wasn’t around much. But that Tuesday morning in April, colder than she was dressed for and drizzly to boot, she was there in the stairwell outside our flat like she was waiting for me. Legs draped widthways across the step, smoking. I tried to go past her and when she didn’t move I turned to go back the way I’d come, backing away from confrontation like I always did. But then she held out the cigarette. Hand-rolled, lipstick on the filter.
‘You’re the home-school kid.’
I nodded.
‘Missing your GCSEs?’
My GCSEs, if I was going to take them, would have been two years off, but I didn’t correct her. Looking at her I knew she had to be sixteen, seventeen at least. If I told her my real age, she’d have been up and out of there. So I just folded my arms, affecting nonchalance, and said, ‘Whatever.’
She smiled, blew the smoke in a thin, elegant stream from the corner of her mouth. ‘Just you and your mum in there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Your dad turn out to be a bastard, like mine?’
I shrugged, but the answer was an indisputable yes: he’d only been with Mum a few months when she found out she was pregnant, and promptly disappeared when she told him the happy news. The news that he’d died of an overdose found its way to her a week before I was born. I used to ask her about him, what he was like, but I learned to accept her reluctance in the end. From the shadow that came over her face whenever I mentioned him, I guessed bastard didn’t even come close. But somehow, I’d never quite given up hope that she was wrong: that whoever told her he was dead had made a mistake. I still found myself checking the eyes of every man I saw who could, conceivably, have been the right age to be my dad, looking for the mismatched irises that Mum said I’d inherited from him.
Jodie waved the cigarette again, offering.
‘No thanks,’ I said, almost inaudibly.
She looked at it and shrugged, then tossed it into the void at the middle of the stairwell. I gasped, leaned over the railings to see if there was anyone down there, and she laughed.
‘Fuck ’em,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Going for a walk. The pier. Coming?’
She was on a suspension from school – one fucking joint and they reckon you’re Amy Winehouse, she said – and things were brittle with her mum. Jodie drank, she smoked, she did drugs occasionally. After she disappeared there were even claims that she’d sold sex, though I’d never heard that from her. For all these reasons, I kept my friendship with her from Mum. Although I knew it was an unthinkable betrayal, lying by omission over and over: having a secret was the most delicious liberation, too. Jodie and I saw each other nearly every day, always at hers, always arranged the day before, to coincide with Mum being out.
Everything was easy with Jodie. I was happy. I’d never had a friend like her, someone I could truly be myself with. So, despite the promises I’d made to Mum, despite her warnings, eventually I told her about Siggy.
I told her everything. All of it. Not just the fugues but about the dreams that repeated until I knew every thread and wisp of them: the long, low building, just flashes of it; being trapped, a fire; the little boy bleeding on the ground; the cell-deep of the man in a uniform. These dreams – nightmares – were so vivid, their details so constant even in my waking thoughts that they felt like memories.
I explained to her about the panic attacks: terrors that would burst out fully formed, whose triggers I could pin down no more easily than puffs of smoke. Over the years, Mum had helped me understand that these fears lodged in my mind weren’t mine but Siggy’s, and that was a distinction that helped me make sense of them. And even though it couldn’t have made sense to her in the way I wanted it to, Jodie had listened.
The next day, she took me to see her mum’s boyfriend. Dr Cox. Charles.
I didn’t want to go, of course. I refused all the way along the prom to his office in east Brighton. ‘It’s not going to make any difference,’ I insisted.
‘Oh yeah? How do you know? You psychic, too?’
‘No,’ I said grumpily. ‘I’ve done psychotherapy before.’
‘When?’ She clunked her jaw, trying to perfect her smoke rings.
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was a kid. Little.’
‘Can’t have been great if you don’t remember it.’
‘Well yeah,’ I said, making an effort the way I tried to back then to give as good as I got. ‘Obviously, it wasn’t great, because it didn’t work, did it?’
She pulled on my sleeve, rolling her eyes. ‘He’s gooood,’ she wheedled. ‘You’ll like him. Come on. It’s got to be worth trying again.’
We found a way of me going to sessions with him, and she came along. I ran with the lie I’d told Jodie about my age because it meant that Dr Cox would see me without parental permission. He waived his usual fee too, claiming I was an interesting case, though we all knew it was really because I was Jodie’s friend. To start, she’d sit in and listen, not saying anything. No one, not Mum, not Cox, not even Matt, ever listened to me like Jodie did. Like she was storing it all away, cataloguing it, fitting the pieces of my fragmented pasts together. I believed she would solve it.
Maybe she would have done.
There was a click from the living room door, and the voices were clear again. Right outside the bedroom where I was hiding, crouching like a shamed dog. I mouth-breathed, absolutely silent, quiet enough to hear Ben Mae’s deep breath before he said, ‘What happened before …’
What happened before. I pressed my hands against my temples, and Siggy grinned.
Don’t think about it, I told myself.
The only images I have in my head of the night my friend died are Mum’s, just hand-me-down mental pictures appropriated from her description. The problem was that these appropriated visual details are lodged so close to my own memories – of the endless summer before it and the black-hole horror of the months after – that I sometimes feel that it was me who was there, not just Siggy. But that would mean the lines between her and me had started to blur, and if that could happen …
Just don’t think about it. Calm down. Breathe.
Mum found her down by the river, where we go on Cherry Tree Day, to mark a special day for Siggy. I’d never taken Jodie there before, and it’s a secret place, inaccessible, overgrown and wooded. But I – or Siggy – had taken her there that night. It was days until Mum admitted to me what she’d found.
The missing belt—
I can’t breathe.
The missing belt from my—
Shit. I can’t breathe!
The police were still in the hall, just a couple of inches of plasterboard separating us. I tried to force myself to think about something else, because this couldn’t happen, not with them there – the police! – right outside the bedroom door with my mother lying to them.
Breathe. Breathe. Please just breathe.
Everything rotated. A slow, dark tornado, twisting around me, and the vacuum in my chest got harder, tighter. My vision darkened at the edges and my skin started to burn, and the insides of my lungs started to curl up from the heat and this was it but right at the last second, the pressure broke, and I was breathing but
Calm. Calm down.
Too fast now. I couldn’t stop.
Deep breaths. Slow. You are having a panic attack. Slow down – breathe slowly – but I couldn’t stop. In and out and in and out and too shallow, not enough, not enough air, and all the time the only thing I could think was all the things Mum had eventually told me—
The missing belt from my coat, sodden and caked and wrapped twice around Jodie’s neck and
her fingernails broken and her hair bloodied and studded with broken leaves and
not enough air!
the skin of her throat pressed white and her mouth slack and her eyes wide and glazed and
the rain falling against their bulging, panicked, unblinking surfaces
Because of me.
Movement in the hallway. I felt myself lighten, losing consciousness. Were they, were they coming in? They were coming in.
They know what you did.
The last thing I heard was the front door opening, and then everything went black.
11. (#ulink_ad35d87c-cf44-51b6-9cff-5a83ac9c68d5)
CC: So let’s start by checking in. How are you feeling today?
EP: I’m OK.
[pause: 32 sec]
CC: I’m sensing some anxiety.
EP: No. I’m fine.
[pause: 22 sec]
EP: Can you – why do you leave these huge long gaps all the time?
CC: OK. I’m glad you asked. Sometimes we find that when we’re not rushed, when we’re given the time to go into greater depth, we discover things that really help our journeys.
[pause: 23 sec]
EP: I haven’t got anything to say.
CC: Sure.
[pause: 35 sec]
EP: OK, look, fine. She came. Last night.
CC: Siggy came?
EP: Yeah.
[pause: 19 sec]
CC: Would you like to talk about the episode you had?
EP: Well I don’t know, do I? That’s the whole fucking – sorry
CC: That’s fine
EP: That’s the whole problem. I don’t know anything about it. It’s like I go to bed every night and I’m me but then this other person I don’t know or like or want there, this other me climbs in. She moves me about, says things like she’s me, like I’m, I’m, I’m just this, this puppet. I don’t think you can possibly know what that’s like. It’s terrifying. I’m terrified, and I can’t even think about it without ending up – look, like this – ending up shaking. Do you see that, my hands?
CC: I do.
EP: It’s like, and I know that I shouldn’t say this and that it’s not the same thing but having someone else in your body, someone you, you hate, who is there without permission, it’s like waking up and finding you’ve been … I can’t say it.
CC: You feel … let’s say, you feel violated?
EP: Yes. Yes. Even if she’s just got me up and walked around the flat. I can’t remember any of it. [crying] Anything, at all. And just – my mum, the way she describes it – I just-I just [crying] I want to just
[pause: 1 min 6 sec]
EP: Sorry. I’m sorry.
CC: OK. Ellie, can you look at me? I know it’s hard, but just look at me just a moment. Thank you. There is no judgement here. None at all. Anything you say will be heard and believed.
[pause: 56 sec]
CC: OK. Do you need some water before we go on?
EP: I’m OK.
CC: It’s extremely difficult for you to talk about; I can see that these episodes affect you very deeply.
EP: Yeah. Yeah, they do. I’m scared. I never know when it’s going to happen. Like, I had this fight with my mum last night, because I wanted to try school. I mean, like sixth form. I haven’t had a fugue for, I don’t know, a couple of weeks? She just kept saying I wasn’t strong enough and about how last time we tried, my panic attacks got worse and everything, and we fell out big time because I just want to do normal stuff. Go out and live my actual life, you know?
CC: I do.
EP: And then I went to bed and I wake up and this has happened. She said – my mum said – Siggy was really angry last night. Like, she was scary, Mum couldn’t get near her to talk to her without her lashing out. Then she went out—
CC: Siggy went outside?
EP: Yeah went out and Mum had to follow me … follow her round the block until she’d agree to go back in again. Here, look this is where she fell over at one point when she was running. Look can you see on my elbow—
CC: That’s quite a scrape—
EP: Yeah. Yeah it-it really hurts.
[pause: 20 sec]
CC: What I’m hearing is a lot of conflict between you and Siggy. It’s a battle.
EP: Yeah. That’s exactly what it is.
[pause: 22 sec]
EP: The days after the fugues, I can feel Siggy kind of … there, all of the time. Like she’s got to rub it in, make sure I know she’s won, you know? Like last night was her telling me …
[pause: 27 sec]
CC: You feel she’s telling you something. Can you say a bit—
EP: It was like she was telling me to stay scared. Like it was a warning.
12. (#ulink_d082d5ec-e2da-5fc2-bc0e-35c92b9942f0)
Mae (#ulink_d082d5ec-e2da-5fc2-bc0e-35c92b9942f0)
They said nothing until they were back at street level, outside the Powers’ flat. Fine rain sieved across the street, and Mae shrugged up the collar of his pea coat. Kit strode back to the car, heading for the driver’s seat.
‘Well that was weird,’ she said, when Mae was in beside her.
‘In what way?’
Kit frowned into the middle distance. ‘I spoke to the guy at the hospital, Leon, right? The dude who called it in.’ She turned to him. ‘And he gave me Ellie’s name as someone who knows Matt and said how he’d said she volunteered there. So I called the HR office and got them to find her address. He searched for Power on the staff system – he spelled it out loud as he typed it in – and he said “Here it is, one entry, first name Eleanor”. Hers was the only record they had. Which means Christine isn’t on their system, even though she works for them.’
‘Maybe she’s agency staff?’
‘That’s what I thought, but everyone needs clearance at a hospital, surely? Kids and vulnerable adults at a hospital, you need a DBS or whatever.’
Mae frowned, went to get his phone out, but Kit was eyeballing something in the rear-view.
‘What?’ he asked, turning in his seat to see.
On the pavement, staring into the car, was a young man. Caucasian with black, tightly curled hair, a faded band T-shirt under a checked flannel shirt. Early twenties, but already a little old for the gloomy, emo vibe he was projecting.
Kit was out of the car and coming round the front before Mae was even out of his seatbelt. ‘Help you?’ she asked him, brightly.
Mae joined them on the pavement.
‘Doing surveillance?’ the guy said. His voice was scratchy, something Mae immediately put down to the yellow plastic wallet of rolling tobacco protruding from his top pocket.
Kit already had her pad out. ‘How do you mean?’
‘The people in the van!’ His jittering glare ricocheted endlessly between them. ‘I’m not stupid.’
Which may or may not have been true, but what Mae knew with a reasonable level of certainty was that he was a nutcase. Kit, on the other hand, needed maybe a little more field experience.
‘We’re the police, CID,’ Kit said, and gave their names, proper by-the-book. ‘We’re checking out a possible missing person. Do you live round here?’
He nodded across the road to the rear access of a shop that sat underneath the Powers’ flat. Mae had clocked it on the way in, a Polish place.
‘I see a lot.’ The young man pointed enigmatically to his eyes with the V of his index and middle fingers, then turned the gesture on the street. ‘But what I want to know is, what are you doing with the van? You want to listen to what I’m saying in my own house?’
Kit glanced around. ‘Can you see this van now?’
‘I’m not imagining it! It’s just gone, right now, obviously!’
Kit nodded diplomatically and tucked her pad away again. Mae couldn’t fault her professionalism: she gave him the non-emergency number, closed the conversation, stayed polite and respectful. The guy was still talking when Mae swung his own door shut.
‘… parabolic microphones, serious kit, and if it’s not you, it’s MI6, or SO-15, or whatever, and I know about it. I know, OK, man?’
Kit waited until they were around the corner before she took her eyes off the road. ‘Jesus. Get that a lot?’
Mae laughed, and got out his phone.
By the time they hit the Boston Manor Road he’d found what he expected to find. Not only was Christine not on her employer’s records – at least not under her own name – but there were no records on Christine or Eleanor Power at that address anywhere else. No entry on the local government system, NHS, banks, credit agencies, nothing.
Didn’t happen by accident.
So, what? Were they hiding? Why?
Kit turned on the radio, flicked quickly away from Heart, found nothing, turned it off.
‘Christine Power was pleased to see you though, yeah?’ she said, biting the edge off a wry smile. ‘Big DS Mae fan. Ker-azy pheromones coming off that one.’
‘Kit. Please.’
She lifted her hands from the wheel in surrender. ‘Just saying. But what did she mean about—?’
‘Can we leave it?’
She blew out her cheeks. ‘What’s next then? Open-door search then grade it? I couldn’t get hold of the guy at the moorings, but I can go down there now, sure I’ll find someone to let me in. Won’t take long.’
The open-door search was the first point of call usually, checking the missing person’s home in case they’d got sick or stuck or injured anywhere. But if it was a narrowboat it was going to be a pretty quick job.
‘After lunch,’ Mae said, suddenly aware of the chasm in his stomach. ‘I’ll go to the marina, you hit the phones. Talk to his manager about what he got sacked for.’
His phone buzzed against his leg and he pulled it out, checked the screen: Nadia. Turning in his seat for whatever privacy he could get in a five-door, he hit the green button.
‘Are you OK to pick Dominica up from violin?’ his ex-wife wanted to know. ‘I’ve just been asked to go to this meeting.’
No hi, no how’s things. And it was Dominica now instead of Bear, like they couldn’t even agree on the name of their kid. ‘Sure.’
‘And bring her back at half eight?’
‘Yep.’
‘Mike’ll be here, OK, so … just so you know.’
Mike. Who had ten years on Mae, twelve on Nadia, although a stranger could easily place him in his mid-sixties because the guy was utterly, relentlessly grey. It wasn’t like Mae hadn’t tried to find something interesting about him, something likeable. Mid-west American, drove a Citroen, played badminton three times a week, with a record that couldn’t be cleaner if it had been formulated in an aseptic lab. Never so much as a day late with his TV licence. There was, of course, more than a slim chance that Nadia’s attraction to Mike was all Mae’s fault. That ten years with him had turned his funny, brilliant, game-for-anything wife into a reliability junkie. Or maybe it was just that maybe Mike happened to be hung like a centaur.
‘Mike. Sure.’
Nadia sighed. ‘Try to do something fun with her after, OK? She always comes back from you so … I don’t know. Flat.’
He took the screen from his ear and thumbed the red circle until he could feel the casing start to bow.
‘Touch-screen means you only have to touch it, you know,’ Kit told him.
‘Uh-huh. And advanced driving means keeping your eyes on the road.’
13. (#ulink_1e9d1e36-52d1-5836-b18a-d027c4161c99)
Ellie (#ulink_1e9d1e36-52d1-5836-b18a-d027c4161c99)
Quarter of an hour passed before I felt halfway normal. After the police left and the panic subsided, Mum brought me sweet tea, made herself late waiting until I could convince her I was fine. She fetched the duvet from the bedroom and tucked me in on the sofa, then checked the time and swore softly under her breath.
‘I have to go and make up for that shift.’ She bent to kiss me goodbye. ‘Just stay put. Don’t let anyone in.’
‘All right, Mum.’
She tapped her fingers on the edge of the mug, running something through her mind. ‘They’ll go to his boat next, I should think,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘Maybe they’ll find something there.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing.’ She found a brief smile, shrugged her shoulders.
When she finally left, I got straight up from under the duvet and went into her room, pulling a corner of the curtain aside to watch her through the window. She paused at the car, glanced up at me, and touched her fingertips to her lips. Then got in and drove away.
Maybe they’ll find something.
She meant a note.
Was there a note?
I wasted no time. I pulled some shoes on, and looked for my raincoat before remembering I’d been unable to find it earlier. I dug around in a drawer until I found the fleece-lined zip-up hoody I’d borrowed from Matt and refused to return. I left the flat with Siggy still tiny and shuddering in my chest.
14. (#ulink_ab7f00f9-eb58-5851-be30-8d6d15c3517d)
Mae (#ulink_ab7f00f9-eb58-5851-be30-8d6d15c3517d)
Mae bit into his bagel. Pinned to the fabric-covered room divider behind his workstation was a page from a set of ACPO guidelines, thoughtfully printed out and displayed by whoever had last occupied Mae’s desk. IF IN DOUBT, THINK MURDER, it read. It had been there so long that the drawing pins had gone rusty, and snagged on the cloth when Mae pulled them out. He balled it up to lob, with flukily perfect aim, into the recycling, just as Kit walked in.
‘Like things spic and span, don’t you?’ she said, looking around, holding a pen drive and standing in a strict at-ease. ‘Speaks of a need to instil order.’
Mae held out his hand for the drive. ‘Spare me the amateur mind reading. What have you got?’
‘Apart from a first-class honours degree in psychology?’
He laughed, then stopped. ‘Really?’
She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I can see into the very blackness of your soul,’ she said, before breaking into a grin. ‘No but seriously, tidy people do tend to crave reliability and control, and you tend to crave the things you didn’t get as a kid. Just saying.’
He opened his mouth, shut it again, totally at a loss for what to say. What to even think. ‘You do remember that I’m your boss here, right?’
She shrugged. ‘Fluid thing, though, hierarchy, isn’t it? Anyway,’ she said, leaning over him to slide the drive into a port and commandeer his keyboard. ‘Headlines. I couldn’t get hold of the person who dealt with Corsham’s contract but the HR person I spoke to said it looked like he was on short contracts and just hadn’t been offered a new one. I’ll keep trying for his direct line manager though, see if there’s any more to it.’
Mae nodded, scanning the document she’d opened. ‘Any more workmates?’
‘The guy he shared an office with said he was talking about buying some vintage lomo gear.’
‘Lomo?’
‘Kind of cult photography thing. Analogue, retro stuff. Apparently Corsham had been reading up on the ones where you take the picture and they spit the thingy out, and you …’ she mimed waving a wet photograph, ‘you remember?’
He scrolled through the rest of the notes, ticking off the lines of investigation. Matthew Corsham was an only child, estranged from his father since infancy; mother dead from cancer a few years previously.
‘DVLA have a 1989 soft top Golf Cabriolet registered to him,’ she told him, pointing it out lower on the page. ‘I’m going to run a search on that in a sec. He’d been for a few after-work drinks but no particular mates – sounds pretty shy – and he hadn’t been in the job that long.’ She lifted her hands, dropped them, underwhelmed. ‘Not much to go on though. He’d signed up for a few socials with a local photography group. I’ve emailed the guy who organized it to see if he made any friends there.’
As Mae read, the picture emerged of a quiet, unremarkable man. He’d moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh a couple of years before, then down to London only a few months ago. From what Kit had managed to trawl in a couple of hours, they were looking at an average twenty-something bloke, without a particularly vibrant social life, with good, normal, healthy pursuits. Vintage cameras. The gym. Batshit crazy girlfriends.
In the pause, Kit moved her feet a bit before telling the floor, ‘So I found that book online, A Splintered Soul. That chapter on Ellie.’
Mae looked up from the documents. ‘OK. And?’
She gave him a look. ‘You could have told me, you know.’
‘Told you what?’
‘Her phobia. Why you wanted me to change into plain clothes.’
‘OK. Well,’ he said, holding his hands up, ‘not everyone’s as well-versed in mental health as you are.’ Back in 2006, if he’d suggested DS Heath wear plain clothes because a uniform was a known trigger for a vulnerable witness, he’d never have heard the end of it.
But Kit was still looking distracted. ‘Maddening though, isn’t it? I mean, I know it’s none of my business what happened when she was little but, even in the book, there’s no mention of the trauma.’
‘Trauma?’
‘Yeah. The cause of the disorder she’s got.’
‘I think he just couldn’t work it out?’
She shrugged, but the nonchalance was forced, hiding something. ‘Just – frustrating. I mean, this is an extreme thing, DID. It gets diagnosed like, practically never, and when it does … well, they say the mind can do literally anything, but there’s going to be a bloody good reason for it to do that.’
Mae squinted. ‘You really have got that degree, haven’t you?’
But she waved it away. ‘What I’m saying is, the trauma you’d have to experience for something that extreme to happen would have to be chronic, for one thing, and fuck-off massive, for another. But he never even offers a guess. Do we even know if she knew her father, for example?’
‘Christine had been single for a long time. That’s all I know.’
‘See, that’s waaaay suspicious, isn’t it? Surely there has to be some context about her dad? Early years with him, or something. And I get that Cox had to anonymize it,’ she said, holding up her hand to pre-empt the next thing that Mae was going to say, ‘but it just seems like a massive missing piece. I mean, there’s the mention of these scars of hers but it says that was because of an accident, right? I mean, I’m no expert but I don’t think a one-off accident is going to be enough to cause something as serious as a dissociative disorder.’
Mae had noticed it too, way back when. The other cases in the book were fleshed out, the abuse or trauma that triggered the disorder in the first place forming part of the story. As per the title, they were stories of successful treatment. The book had been funded by a charity, so the message was fairly consistent: funding + excellent care = positive outcomes. The exception was the part dealing with Ellie, which was just a snapshot of the middle of her story, the few months she’d spent under Cox’s care. There was no background, and no happy ending.
‘Guess maybe he wanted to talk about the treatment part of it? To be honest it wasn’t exactly the focus of our investigation.’
Kit seemed to take offence for half a second before delivering a hearty smack on the arm. ‘I’m just interested.’ Then, ‘Maybe I should ask him.’
‘I’m going to assume you’re joking,’ he said, before remembering something. ‘You’d be wasting your time anyway.’
‘Because?’
‘It was something Lucy Arden told us – Jodie’s mum,’ he explained. ‘Apparently Jodie had asked him for copies of his research, a few weeks before she disappeared. He had transcripts done from the audio recordings of Ellie’s sessions, all her medical notes, loads of data, but he lost it.’
Eyebrows up, incredulous. ‘Lost it? How did he manage that?’
‘Apparently. He was still using floppies. Useless things. Lost your data all the time.’
Kit retracted her chin. ‘What the hell is a floppy?’
Mae rolled his eyes in reply. Kids. He turned back to his screen.
Kit was staring ahead now, through him.
‘What?’ Mae asked.
She shook herself and looked at him. ‘Just doesn’t … I don’t know.’ She mimed cogs with her fingers, not quite meshing. ‘Doesn’t fit. He spends all that time with her, recording her, everything, then the whole lot disappears? It’s fishy.’
‘Be that as it may. It’s her own business, not our remit.’
Kit dropped her hands, reddening very slightly.
‘I know. I’m just interested.’ She cleared her throat. ‘You going to get that?’ she asked him, raising a finger towards the desk phone.
Mae laughed and shook his head, then took the call he could see was from the switchboard.
‘DS Mae, Mr Jupp on the line. Says he’s returning your call about visiting a boatyard.’
15. (#ulink_60b60176-0070-5211-bab2-275b6762b370)
Mae (#ulink_60b60176-0070-5211-bab2-275b6762b370)
Jupp’s boatyard was only a couple of miles away, so Mae borrowed one of the force pushbikes. It was late afternoon, the light was sparse through a heavy ceiling of cloud. Spotting the marina entrance, he swung a leg over the crossbar and sailed it standing on one pedal, then hopped down and secured it in a single practised movement against a lamppost.
Mae had discovered the wharf earlier that summer, when he’d talked Bear into a walk along the towpath. He’d pointed out where he’d dealt with a burglary at one of the warehouses that backed straight onto the river, and he’d seen the boats on the towpath that extended from the yard. That was back when it had been warm enough for the residents to still be sitting out on their decks as the sun went down, drinking and barbequing. Different story now, at the arse-end of November. He smelled the smoke of the little log burners they used, the diesel emissions. There was the rumble of generators, punctuated by the honking of a pair of Canada geese. Scraps of laughter from outside a nearby pub lifted and cracked in the air.
He took the steps built into the sloping wall down to where a shabby prefab cube of an office sat precariously levelled on bricks. He knocked and went in. Cheap, functional furniture was laden with papers, notes scribbled on envelopes, and a jumble of polystyrene cups. Behind the desk, a fat guy in a shirt made for a thinner one.
Mae put out a hand. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Mae. We spoke on the phone.’
‘Jupp,’ the man said. He was puffy and goutish, the kind of clean-shaver who should have considered a beard. Waving a hand vaguely behind him, he said, ‘My yard.’ Strong Bristol accent. He didn’t get up, and only shook the hand reluctantly when it became clear Mae wasn’t going to put it away unshaken.
Jupp listened while Mae gave him the basics, then rummaged in a drawer and brought out a key. ‘Take you down to his boat, shall I?’
Standing, Jupp was short enough for Mae to see the shiny top of his head, lit up with the reflection of the flickering single-bar strip light. Then again, everyone was short, to Mae.
Outside, a half-hearted drizzle had started to fall, blown across them by a brisk wind. A tang of lager and used nappies was emanating from three overfilled wheelie bins. They stopped at a gate where Jupp paused to key in the code, angling his thickly padded shoulders to block Mae’s view of the keypad. Mae saw it anyway: 2580, all four numbers in a vertical line down the middle. Nice one, Mae thought: unbreakable. The gate buzzed and clunked open.
They went down the sloping pontoon towards the water, Jupp confirming on the way that he hadn’t seen Matt since the morning of the day before.
‘Said he was going to go down to the pump-out.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Mile or so.’ Jupp indicated with his arm: downriver, east.
‘Did you see him go?’
Jupp shrugged. ‘Nope. But he came back, didn’t he? Must have come back last night on the big tide. Boat was in place when I did my patrol.’
‘But you haven’t seen him today?’
‘It’s not a prison.’ Jupp eyed Mae with obvious dislike as they approached the bottom of the slope. ‘They come and go as they please. Lot of us boaters just want leaving alone, tell the truth, not so keen on people coming round, poking their noses—’
‘Left or right?’ Mae asked with a smile, aware that life was short and he wasn’t getting any younger.
Jupp sniffed and turned, leading Mae left along the metal gridding.
‘How does it work then, mooring here?’ Mae asked. ‘Your tenants pay in advance?’
‘Invoice them on the twentieth, payment due first of the month. Month’s notice either way.’
The first of the month was coming up in a few days. ‘People rent these boats then, or own them?’
‘Bit of both. Matt rents his off my brother.’
Mae followed Jupp along a floating pontoon stretching maybe thirty, forty metres along the river. The walkway dipped and bounced as they moved along it, their footsteps causing the sections to clank together.
‘Watch your step, boy,’ Jupp said, glancing at Mae. ‘Dangerous if you’re used to nice safe driveways.’
‘Don’t worry about me. Spent my childhood fishing.’
Jupp frowned. ‘Din’t know your lot fished.’
‘Police?’
‘Chinese.’
Mae blinked. ‘Korean.’
He shrugged. ‘Same difference. Thought it was snooker. Gambling.’
‘OK, yeah. We’re all ninjas, too.’
Jupp frowned, but Mae raised a hand to dismiss it. Just could not be arsed.
The pontoon bouncing under their feet, they passed an assortment of boats. Traditional narrowboats; flimsy-looking fibreglass cruisers; wide, curvy-bottomed things with wheelhouses and Dutch-sounding names painted along their bows. Twee Gebroeders, Derkje, Ziet Op U Zelve.
‘Mr Corsham been here long? Regular with the rent? Any problems?’
‘Moved down from Scotland somewhere a few months ago. Pays on time.’
‘No wild parties, anything out of the usual?’
Jupp cast a look over his shoulder. ‘People call us gypsies, you get that? Pikies, river scum.’
Mae waited, unsure where this was going.
‘We get it in the neck, is what I’m saying. Brick brigade making their judgements. So we stick together, yeah? You’re not going to get us dishing dirt on each other.’
‘I’m not after dirt. I’m checking on his safety.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Jupp stopped, flipping through a bunch of small keys. ‘This one.’
Matthew Corsham’s boat was a red and green narrowboat, last on the stretch, past a mains hook-up board. Reasonable nick from the outside. Through a window in the front end – the fore? – the place looked tidy, nothing immediately suggesting forced entry. Moving along he tried the next window when the boat suddenly listed, the water slapping underneath the pontoon. Jupp had grabbed the thin handrail running along the edge of the roof and was hauling himself up, keys in hand. But after an extended fumble with a circular padlock, he grunted and gave up, huffing and stepping down clumsily from the gunwales.
‘Changed the bloody locks. Supposed to supply the management with a working key at all times.’ So much for the Anarchists’ Manifesto of three minutes previously. ‘You can have a look through the windows, but I’m not breaking the door without my brother’s say-so.’
Jupp turned to head back the way they’d come.
‘Do you have CCTV here?’ Mae called after him.
‘No. And I’ve got jobs to do.’ He paused to light a cigarette, then stumped off back towards his office.
Mae stepped up onto the deck. The smooth metal was slippery under his feet as he braced to shove back the hatch. It wouldn’t give, so he ducked down to the level of the two tiny doors that came up no higher than his thighs. Cupping his hands between his forehead and the glass, he peered inside.
Bear would have given her thumbs to live in there. Not that there was enough money in the world to pay him to endure what looked like several inches of negative headroom, but the attraction of the cosy, simple lifestyle in evidence there wasn’t hard to imagine. Shallow shelves tucked under the windows held books and a few video games, secured against the inevitable rocking with taut lengths of curtain wire. A crocheted blanket was stretched neatly over the back of a sofa, and the few feet of wall space between the single-glazed windows were covered in mismatched picture frames holding photographs.
He was about to leave when something caught his eye. A single sheet of paper on the table opposite the wood burner and a pen next to it. Mae went along to the window next to the table, to get a better look. Carefully bending into a crouch on the narrow ledge beneath the glass, he wiped the rain from his eyes and squinted in.
It was a list. Toothpaste, toothbrush, razor. Blue holdall, phone, charger, wallet, tickets. Camera, film, batteries. All the items on it crossed off.
He read to the end. Footsteps approached, and he waved Jupp away with his free hand as he brought himself up to standing. ‘All right, I’m coming.’
But when he turned, Mae saw that Jupp was long gone. The person who had passed him, who was now on the back deck and unlocking the door with her keys, was Ellie Power.
16. (#ulink_cd667fbb-0fa7-5446-8d6e-2262bcb0c5ec)
Ellie (#ulink_cd667fbb-0fa7-5446-8d6e-2262bcb0c5ec)
The dirty remains of the afternoon sun quivered in the puddles at my feet as I approached the marina. The office was closed up, but as I headed down to towards the boats I saw Mr Jupp. He threw his cigarette on the ground like a dart when he saw me, and came lumbering up the gangway.
‘We’ve got the bloody police down here, looking for Matthew,’ he said, passing me. ‘You’ve got keys, you bloody let him in.’
Shit. Fear swelled in my chest, inflating in seconds. But I made myself go down before I could change my mind. Before I’d had a chance to think through what I was and wasn’t going to tell him, there was Ben Mae, hanging off the side of Matt’s boat.
‘All right, I’m coming,’ he said, waving me away without looking up.
I cleared my throat, and he turned.
‘Ellie.’
‘DC Mae.’
He smiled. ‘Been a while. It’s DS now. I’m the lead on Missing Persons, so that’s why I’m …’ he trailed off, gesturing at the boat, the yard. Me.
‘Congratulations,’ I said.
We stood there for a moment, before I remembered what I was doing. I climbed up, got both locks open and swung the tiny doors open and slid back the hatch.
‘Coming in?’ I asked him.
‘Are you inviting me?’
‘That’s vampires, isn’t it?’
He laughed and gestured at the door. ‘After you, then.’
The familiar smell rose up around me as I went down, a woody warmness with the slight tinge of damp. I half-expected him to be there but the boat was empty. I stepped down into the cabin. Mae started to follow me in, but paused on the steps. He gestured at the four coat hooks next to the door.
‘Should these have anything hanging on them?’
‘It depends.’ I frowned, thinking of the last time I’d been there, when I’d hardly had room to hang my own raincoat. Matt loved being on foot, but winter was forging on and he was skinny. Usually, those pegs were draped with his layers.
I went in and sank into the built-in sofa. It was as if the place had been exorcized. So cold in there. The few square feet of hearth under the wood-burning stove had been swept after its last use, and the shallow pile of the fabric of the upholstery was sticking up unevenly, recently vacuumed. Usually the windows wept condensation, but now they were dry. Which only added up if there had been no breath to wet them. I unzipped my rain-soaked top and hung it above the stove. Mae came in and abruptly slammed his head on the ceiling.
‘F … lipping hell,’ he said, rubbing his scalp where he’d hit it. I almost wanted to laugh: Matt had a permanent bruise on his hairline at the front where he continually banged his head coming in. Unscrewing his eyes Mae said, ‘This is not sensible for a man of his height.’
I fiddled with the keys, rolling the cork float-ball keyring around in my palm. Mae nodded at them.
‘Mr Jupp couldn’t get his to work. Reckons the locks had been changed.’
I nodded. ‘First time I’ve used these ones. The old locks had just got rusty.’ Matt had said he’d been meaning to change them for ages, and had given me the set of keys as an afterthought, less than a week ago. He’d rolled down the window of his car and called me back after we’d already said goodbye outside the flat. Keep them to yourself, he’d said. You never know who might want to break in and swipe my dirty underpants.
‘You know why? Security worries?’
I gave it half a moment’s thought, and shook my head. ‘Not that I know of. No. He would have said.’
‘Sure? His colleague said the hospital had been expecting his laptop back, so—’
‘He’s lost it.’
‘OK,’ he said, his notebook out now and pen poised. ‘Details?’
‘I don’t know any more than that. He asked me to check around the flat.’
‘But you didn’t find it?’
‘No,’ I said, irritable. But now I thought about it, Matt hadn’t found it and I hadn’t asked. Guilt pecked at me as I ran that phone call back: he’d sounded really worried, but I hadn’t offered to help. ‘Does it matter?’
Mae made a search me face. ‘It wasn’t … stolen, or anything? You’re sure?’
‘Look, I really don’t—’ I started, then I broke off. Processed what he was saying. ‘Why did the hospital want it back?’
Mae took a breath before he answered me. There was a look on his face that I couldn’t interpret. ‘West London NHS Trust had him on rolling freelance contracts,’ he said, watching for my reaction.
‘Yes.’
‘Until the end of last week.’
I blinked. Thinking, no. He’d have said.
‘Did he not tell you he’d lost his job, Ellie?’
I said nothing.
‘I have to ask, do you have any problems in your relationship, would you say?’
‘No.’
‘Because that would seem like a rather big omission, if you know what I mean.’
‘We’re fine.’ It came out hard and loud, and he blinked at me. I felt Siggy spark at the base of my skull, goading, satisfied.
Were we fine?
Mae nodded solemnly, appraising me for a moment, then went to the table.
‘So there’s this.’ He handed it to me.
I took it. A list, printed out. Things you’d take if you were going away. I held it with both hands, the burn of tears starting up in the corners of my eyes.
A bloom of hope spread across me. Did this mean he’d just taken a trip? But if it did—
Toothbrush, toothpaste, razor
then he’d left. He’d left me.
There was a blue-biro tick next to every item. I scanned it again, a storm started spinning in my head.
‘Anyone could have written this,’ I said eventually. ‘Where’s the pen? Huh? Are we looking for the pen, for fingerprints?’
Mae spread his hands. ‘Ellie—’
‘No. He wouldn’t have just disappeared.’ Not without telling me. He loved me. He loved me. I brushed the hair out of my face and handed the list back to him, defiant. ‘This doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because we’re happy, that’s why.’
We were. There was no way Matt had been planning to go away. A few weeks ago we’d been talking about a trip, a long weekend. Mum was so worried, wouldn’t say why in front of Matt even though she knew he and I had talked about it all, but she went on and on about the locks on the hotel doors. Matt hadn’t flinched. When she got emotional, demanding to know how he planned on dealing with Siggy, asking did he really understand what he was getting himself into, he put his arm around me. I love your daughter, Christine. Nothing is going to change that.
‘What if he didn’t write it?’ I went into the kitchen and turned on the tap to fill the kettle. ‘I mean, it doesn’t prove anything, does it?’
Neither of us spoke for a moment, and I realized the water pump was rumbling, but nothing was coming out. The tap spat droplets and air. His water tank was empty.
I turned and checked the fridge: a Coke would do just as well. I opened the door, and looked inside. Dark.
Mae was standing next to me. ‘It’s been switched off.’
Meticulously cleaned and emptied, too. Mae paused for a while, then gently shut the door, leaving my hand to drop down to my side.
‘Sometimes I go away in the winter,’ he said, in a slow, quiet voice. ‘Take my little girl snowboarding. I turn the water off in my flat and run all the taps until there’s no water left in them. In case it freezes in the pipes, and the pipes burst.’
I opened the breadbin. ‘He wasn’t going away.’ The breadbin was empty.
‘And I use up everything in my fridge,’ he said, as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘and give it a good clean.’
I pushed past him, cursing the lack of space, the fact that there is nowhere to go on a stupid tiny boat, nowhere to escape to. ‘I’ve said he wasn’t going away.’ I dropped onto the sofa and drew my hands over my face. I wanted my mum.
‘Ellie.’
When I opened my eyes, he was looking at my neck. I pulled my chin down fast, but it was too late.
Slowly, he asked, ‘What happened there, then?’
He wouldn’t have asked about the scar. He meant the bruises. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘No. It’s not.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘No?’ Mae came round and sat next to me, the other end of the sofa. ‘Doesn’t look like nothing.’
I let all my breath out at once. ‘Well, it is.’
Leaning forward, he said, ‘Was it Matt? Did he hurt you, Ellie?’
‘No! God, no! He would never. He’s not like that. No.’
Mae looked away, placed his hands on his knees. ‘Someone reports someone missing, we need to look at everything that might be suspicious. And to be honest,’ he said, indicating my neck with a nod, ‘mystery bruising might look a bit suspicious.’
I stared down at my feet. ‘It’s not mystery bruising.’
‘OK.’ He waited.
‘I was … sleepwalking. Mum tried to steer me back to bed. I was agitated. She had to be … forceful.’
‘And this was, when? Last night?’
I nodded, my heart hammering. Mae inclined his head to get another look.
‘Looks like she fought pretty hard.’
‘I was just confused,’ I mumbled.
‘Confused. OK.’ There was a pause. ‘See. Ellie, I get confused all the time. Sometimes I can’t remember if I’ve left the oven on. Or I lose my car, or, you know, I annoy someone and I get confused about what I might have said to upset them. But I can’t remember a time when confusion has ever ended up in me being held by the throat.’
‘I’m telling you it wasn’t him.’
Mae stayed where he was for a moment. Then he got to his feet, steadied himself against the motion of the boat under his feet, and turned to me.
‘So for now, we’re classing this as a low-risk case—’
‘Low risk. What does that mean?’
‘It means that we wait and see what happens. This is still very early days. To be honest it’s only because I saw your name on the information that it’s me dealing with this and not just a bobby making a couple of calls. But look, you have to realize that everything we have here is pointing to Matt having just gone away somewhere.’ He tucked everything into his bag. ‘It’s a dynamic thing, though. If anything changes—’
‘But what does it mean you will do?’ I interrupted. ‘You have to do something.’
He pressed his lips between his teeth for a moment, measuring his words. ‘Look. Men are weak. Sometimes they are really shitty. I’m sure he’s been great to you, and break-ups can be awful but—’
‘No. It’s not a break-up. He is the most honest, the most grounded person you’ll ever meet. He is a good man, and I can rely on him. I can. You’re making a mistake.’
He watched me for a second, like he was trying to find something in my face. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got a hundred other jobs stacking up and this is just,’ he gestured around the boat, to me. The whole thing. ‘It’s just not a police matter,’ he finished at last. ‘I’ve already done more than I am supposed to.’
‘Fine. Then go.’ I turned away. He would not see me cry.
On the deck, he crouched and turned back to me. ‘This isn’t about you, you know. Men are shits. He didn’t deserve you.’
I watched him swing himself down onto the pontoon, and I thought about how much Matt had given me. How bottomless his patience was, how hard he’d tried to help me believe in myself.
Mae was right. Matt didn’t deserve me. He really, truly did not.
17. (#ulink_ce9dc421-bf73-5dc3-bc3f-012cef1c2c2d)
Mae (#ulink_ce9dc421-bf73-5dc3-bc3f-012cef1c2c2d)
Mae had just swung his leg back over the crossbar when he heard the blip-blip greeting of the siren. Kit, in a squad car, a heavy shade of pissed-off darkening her face.
‘You planning to answer your phone any time soon?’ The window was wound all the way down and her shirt sleeve was rolled all the way up. The pointed toe of the 1950’s pinup girl tattooed on her bicep peeked out just above her elbow.
He dug his phone out, failed to wake it, showed her the screen. ‘Dead. Sorry.’
‘No deader than you are.’
He unsnapped the fastener under his chin and took the helmet off, leaning an elbow on the roof of the car. ‘How do you mean?’
Kit turned to speak into the radio clipped onto her lapel. ‘Got him,’ she told it, then, ‘I’ll deal with it, Ma’am.’ To him, she said, ‘Get in.’
‘That’ll be, “get in, Sarge”,’ he corrected, then gestured to the bike, opened his mouth to argue that he couldn’t, but she cut him off.
‘Get in the car, Sarge, right now. You forgot to collect your daughter, and she’s gone missing.’
18. (#ulink_799e6d4e-de3a-5406-9a34-5d5ba1e0e492)
Ellie (#ulink_799e6d4e-de3a-5406-9a34-5d5ba1e0e492)
I sat still for a long time on Matt’s sofa, listening to the boats bump and creak. Thinking about the list. I’d looked for all the things on it, ticked them off one by one. Every single one of them was gone.
My phone rang: it was the hospital.
I didn’t even say my name when I answered. ‘Have you found him?’
There was a pause. ‘Sorry, Ellie, found who?’ the caller said, and I placed her voice. It was Helen, who managed the volunteer schedule at the children’s ward where I worked. ‘I was calling about the session you were going to do with the kids this morning.’
‘Oh god, I’m sorry, I—’
‘Look, I’m afraid to tell you that we can’t have you volunteering here anymore.’
‘What? Why?’
‘We need reliability. We can’t have the children disappointed.’
‘You told me you were crying out for volunteers! That’s why Matt got my forms rushed through, so I could—’
‘Nothing was rushed,’ she said. ‘Look I’d love to keep you but the children have to come first, and if you can’t keep your promises to them—’
‘I’m sorry, I just—’
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m sorry too, but that’s where we are.’ She said goodbye coolly and hung up.
I stood there in the kitchen, blinking, not believing it. Matt was going to be so disappointed. He’d suggested the volunteering in the first place, had set up my interview, helped me with the application. I’d loved it, too. I’d even started to believe maybe it could lead to an actual job, one day. And now I’d lost it. I slumped down onto the arm of the sofa.
Something caught my eye. A big metal bulldog clip hanging on a hook next to the sink, and between its teeth a wedge of scraps of paper. I reached over and took the clip down. Just receipts, mostly: a few postcards. But right at the back, with a fold of card across the top to protect it from being marked by the pressure of the clip, was something else. A faded, square-shaped photo, the old-fashioned instant kind that came straight out of the camera, ready-developed to be waved around and blown upon impatiently until the image slowly appears and definition emerges like a fog lifting. The colours were vague, less saturated, as if they were trying to fade back to a sleepy sepia.
A little girl. Less than a year old, probably, hair already thick and black. Even with the colours muted by age, the eyes clearly distinct: one eye sky-blue, one green with a narrow slice of brown in the iris. Her cheeks rounded with health and happiness.
Me.
As a child. The only picture in existence. What was it doing here?
I rubbed my thumb across the top of it, the two rust-stained puncture holes where a staple must once have been. We’d had a burglary when I was two and a half, a few days before we were due to move house. Everything we owned was in boxes by the door of the one-bed flat we’d been renting. Might as well have gift-wrapped it, Mum always said afterwards. All of my baby stuff, a whole load of Mum’s old things, but worst of all, all the photos of me as a little kid.
Maybe because I didn’t have any family, the absence of the pictures felt like a huge hole as I grew up. I used to make up pretend photo albums, drawing pictures of my dead grandparents, my dead dad. In my pictures, he was just like me, dark and broad-shouldered, each of us with one green and one blue eye, standing either side of petite, yellow-haired Mum. I pinned those pictures everywhere, but what I wanted more than anything was a photo. But they were all gone.
All but this one.
I’d found it inside a book. I was ten, and we had just moved flats again. I remember the swell of excitement when it fell onto the floor and I realized what it was. I’d never seen this one before. I ran into her room, beaming with pride at the discovery of such a coveted treasure. I had expected tears of joy.
None came. Just a request not to snoop in her things, and a dark, brittle silence for the rest of the afternoon. Confused, I apologized, and she put her arms around me and said the same.
‘It was a dark time with your dad,’ she’d say, by way of explanation. ‘I’ve got my memories of you, baby, and they’re good enough.’
The next day I found it folded into four, in the bathroom bin. So I saved it a second time. But this time, I kept my secret to myself.
In the picture I was smiling. I looked into the eyes of my infant self and tried to see Siggy. Was she there, in my head, when I was that small? Lurking, waiting for my eyes to close and for the dummy to drop out of my pink little mouth so she could show me all her horrible things?
But more importantly, why did Matt have it? I’d dug it out and shown it to him, maybe a month ago, after we’d gone through an old album of his. I hadn’t given it to him, though. I’d tucked it back into the book where I kept it. He knew how precious it was to me. So why had he taken it?
I tucked the photo into my pocket and looked around. I had come to look for a clue, and all I had was a photo and a printed-out list. Outside, a solid darkness was starting to fall. I noticed Mr Jupp’s light on, and realized he’d be locking up soon.
He snorted and hurriedly took his feet from the desk as I opened the office door. A thread of dribble hung sleepily from the corner of his mouth, which he noticed only when it hit his wrist.
‘You, is it?’ he said accusingly. ‘Police gone, have they?’
‘For now,’ I said, forcing a smile. His eyes swept down to my chest and up again, like a kid reaching for a sweet they knew they weren’t allowed. ‘But I’m still a bit worried, to be honest.’
Not waiting to be asked, I brought over the only other chair, a faded green, moulded plastic thing, and perched on its edge, leaning towards him with as much warmth as I could muster. ‘I know he liked the chats he had with you,’ I lied. ‘I was just hoping he might have said something about a trip somewhere. Anything about being away from the boat?’
He blew his cheeks out. ‘Love, listen. Sometimes us blokes have got to blow off a bit of steam.’
‘He hasn’t fallen out with anyone here or anything?’ I said, knowing Matt would have told me if that was the case. ‘Or got behind on his rent or anything?’
He leaned back importantly. ‘That’s confidential.’
‘Please, Mr Jupp.’ Genuine desperation cracked my voice. ‘I don’t know who else to ask.’
He let out a big sigh. ‘Look, leave your number, sweetheart,’ he said, handing me an opened, empty envelope. ‘Anything occurs to me, or he misses the payment, I’ll be sure to let you know. Now if you don’t mind, my missus is waiting for me, so I’m going home for my tea.’
I wrote my name and number on the envelope, with PLEASE CALL IF YOU HEAR ANYTHING underlined beneath. ‘Anything at all,’ I told him, handing it over and getting up to leave.
‘Oh, while you’re here, get rid of that lot, will you?’ he said, indicating the moorers’ postboxes on the wall, a grid of open-fronted pigeonholes. ‘He got a parcel the other day and I had nowhere to stick it.’
I pulled out the stack from Matt’s box and flipped through it. Bills, circulars. Everything machine-franked.
‘Can I have the parcel?’
‘Fuck knows where it is right now,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop it over if I find it.’
I thanked him, shoved the post into one of Matt’s huge coat pockets, and went back down to the boat. I shook the hoody off and used the chemical toilet. On the inside of the bathroom door was a full-length mirror. I stood in front of it, remembering.
Once, months ago, when Mum was on a night shift and I didn’t have to be home until almost dawn, Matt and I spent hours in front of this mirror. He took my clothes off slowly like he was peeling an exotic fruit. I stood there now, in the dark, the reflection of my body lit just by the moon. Matt had made me look. The fine hairs on my arms bristled with the memory of his fingertips, stroking down my naked sides, kissing each one of the constellation of tiny puckered scars across my shoulder and down my back, from the accident when I was small.
I let my eyes flutter shut, recalled the way Matt raked the backs of his nails softly up my sides, then reached around to hold my breasts, tucking his hands underneath them. How he brushed his thumbs across my nipples, not letting me look away. The light had been just like this, an identical blueish monochrome. He had placed my hands high on the mirror so I was bent forwards, and took me like that. Slowly. Telling me to look myself in the eye, saying it again and again because I wouldn’t, until his insistence took hold and he wasn’t laughing, he meant it. He really meant it. When I eventually looked, he slid his hand around and pressed his fingers against me, making me gasp.
‘Look at who you are,’ he whispered as I came, shuddering hard against his hand. His breath hot and low and liquid against my neck. ‘You are beautiful.’
I blinked the memory away, avoiding my eye in the mirror, and went along to his bedroom at the far end. I lifted the duvet and got into his bed, wriggling down with the covers over my head. I’d been in this bed dozens of times, but never to sleep. Closed my eyes and inhaled deeply.
Damp and woodsmoke and sex.
I slipped my good hand inside my jeans. I held the sense of him, built him up from the smell of his skin, his hair. I started to move, small circles, conjuring his mouth on my mouth. His fingertips on my breasts. I imagined the feel of his chest under my hands, my fingers moving along his shoulders, sliding across to his throat. Glimmers of his face, darts of memory, coming faster.
But then
the skin on his neck, glistening gathering and twisting, pink then white against the pressure of my fingers,
and
his face suddenly panicked tight, and his hands on mine, grabbing,
and
his eyes starting to bulge, looking at me, not understanding,
and
a creaking sound from his open mouth, no air going in or coming out,
and
his hand, coming up to my face, his eyes still locked onto mine. Stones in the ground under my knees digging in to me asI kneel over him. Sticks and leaves the same as when Mum found Jodie and something sharp against my shin. The smell of the wet leaves and the roar of a jet engine descending, low, and his eyes wild with horror, knowing now that I am not going to stop.
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Kate Simants
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ‘A five star, unputdownable thriller that had me gripped from the very first page… I read it in one sitting!’ Caz Finlay, author of The Boss Shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger award Whatever you do, don’t open the door… By day, Ellie Power has a normal life. She has a stable home, a loving boyfriend, a future. But at night, she suffers from a sleep disorder. She becomes angry, unpredictable, violent. Her mother locks Ellie in her bedroom every night, to keep them both safe. Then one morning, Ellie wakes up, horrified to find the lock on her bedroom door smashed from the inside. She is covered in injuries, unable to remember anything about the night before. And her boyfriend Matt is nowhere to be found… Praise for Lock Me In ‘Intricately plotted, beautifully written’ Harriet Tyce, author of Blood Orange ‘This ambitious and wide-reaching novel had me hooked from the very first page’ S. E. Lynes, author of The Women ‘One of the best debuts I have ever read’ Clare Empson, author of Him ′A flawlessly written, jaw-dropping, chilling and twisty psychological thriller′ Sam Carrington, author of Saving Sophie ‘A disturbing psychological thriller’ Rachel Sargeant, author of The Perfect Neighbours ‘The characters are fresh, the dialogue sharp’ G. D. Abson, author of Motherland ‘A stunning debut. Gripping, compelling and skilfully crafted’ N J Crosskey, author of Poster Boy