The Last Thing She Remembers

by J. S. Monroe

  “I was doing okay until I heard it on the radio,” Jemma says. “Not great but doing okay, you know?”

  “Heard what?” he asks.

  “Why didn’t they leave me be? I’ve come here before. To see mum.”

  Jemma is shaking now, barely able to keep the knife at Laura’s throat. She must have listened to his press conference, heard the public appeal for information about her.

  “Please don’t,” Laura whispers, just loud enough for Silas to hear.

  “Guv, my boss is here,” the sergeant says behind him, unable to conceal the urgency in his voice. “‘Firearms Silver’ has been transferred to her with immediate effect.”

  Silas closes his eyes in defeat. Another five minutes, and he would have defused the situation. Jemma seems to clock the change in his manner. He hasn’t retreated but he can’t disguise the look of resignation, of apology, in his eyes. Laura’s noticed the change too. There’s nothing more he can do here, for either of the women.

  “Please, no,” she whimpers as Jemma adjusts the position of the knife at her neck. Silas holds up his own hands again in one last attempt to placate her.

  “Guv, I must ask you to step back,” the sergeant repeats, one hand to an earpiece, listening to orders. Silas has been bypassed, not for the first time in his career.

  Jemma stares back at Silas. He’s never seen such sadness before, not even in Conor’s bloodshot eyes. At first he used to pick his son up off the streets himself, bring him home at 2:00 a.m. But the social workers said it wasn’t helping, told Silas to show some tough love.

  “I think you’d like Conor,” he says. “Maybe you could even help him, share your story, tell him how to beat his demons. You’ve beaten yours, haven’t you? I mean, for twelve years you’ve been okay, done your time, lived your life, no danger to others, to yourself. Weaned yourself off meds, been rehabilitated back into the community. That’s pretty impressive, isn’t it? You could help others, not just Conor.”

  He’s beginning to sound like a social worker. At least Jemma’s still listening.

  “It hasn’t always been easy,” Jemma says.

  “Of course it hasn’t.”

  “Sometimes I forget everything. Who I am. Then it all comes back, and I remember the things I want to forget.” She pauses. “Anniversaries are the hardest.”

  “Anniversaries?” Her carer was right.

  “My mum’s death. I always like to be near then, somewhere in the area. This time it was different—when I heard you talking about me on the news. That’s when the voices started.”

  Christ, she recognizes him. After all these years. He stares at her again, thinking back to that fateful day. “What did the voices say?” he asks, worried what he might have triggered in her.

  “Told me to come back into the village.” She looks around her and then stares at him. “To kill again.”

  Silas stares back. He must keep her talking if he’s to prevent another death.

  “Will you at least meet Conor?” he asks. “Promise me that?”

  “Guv,” the sergeant says again, even greater urgency in his voice.

  A smile breaks across Jemma’s face. “I’m not so good with boys.”

  “I know you’d like him, see through to the nice lad underneath. My boy who worked hard at school, had good friends, scored lots of goals—until I walked out on his mother. He never got over that. Never forgave me.”

  “Maybe you didn’t listen to him,” Jemma says, shifting her footing. She adjusts the grip on the knife, as if bracing herself to strike. Silas feels a surge of adrenaline run through him. Has he said something wrong? Gone too far? He couldn’t live with himself if she kills again.

  A gust of warm air whips down the canal. Jemma looks up at the swaying treetops. Silas looks up too, listening to the plangent sound of the branches bending in the wind, like the roar of a distant sea. What’s Jemma hearing? A moment later, she drops the knife—at the same time as two gunshots ring out through the warm summer air.

  Jemma slumps to the ground, felled by the impact of the bullets striking her torso. Her blank eyes stare up at the trees. Laura stands there, stunned, as if waiting for the pain, but she hasn’t been hit. The next moment she rushes toward him.

  Silas folds Laura into his arms, but his eyes are on Jemma’s limp body, his thoughts elsewhere, twelve years ago, the different paths that have led them both from South London to a canalside in Wiltshire. She was on the road to recovery, preferring to live in the shadows, away from help, doing it her way. Is this his fault? He launches a nationwide manhunt and tips her over the edge. He closes his eyes. Did he cause this? They didn’t have to shoot her. He was winning, talking her around. Finally, someone was listening to her.

  Silas peels his arms gently from Laura, who is shaking uncontrollably, and looks around for a female officer. At the same time, the sergeant signals to one of his colleagues, who moves forward, MP5 trained on Jemma’s still body, until he reaches the knife. He puts a foot on the blade in the grass.

  “She’d dropped it,” Silas says over his shoulder to the sergeant, as he escorts Laura away. “She’d bloody dropped it.”

  CHAPTER 61

  Luke stands there in silence, trying to understand what he’s just witnessed. The armed police officer had ordered him back down the towpath so that he was more than one hundred yards away when the shots were fired, but he still had a clear view of everything that happened. He heard what was said too, enough to know that the woman who turned up in the village three days ago was Jemma Huish.

  It’s just as Laura feared. And Jemma’s been shot dead in front of him as she held a knife to Laura’s throat. He assumes she’s dead. Jemma’s body is lying in the long grass, off to one side of the towpath, surrounded by police officers and an ambulance crew, one of whom has begun to unfold a blanket. He half expects Jemma to get up and dust herself down as a director shouts “Cut!” But there are no cameras, none of the bustle of a film set. Just the afternoon stillness of the canal, the sound of gunfire already a distant memory.

  Jemma wasn’t his daughter, wasn’t a Baha’i from Berlin, wasn’t adopted by German parents in India. She was Jemma Huish, a disturbed woman who came home after many years of being away. He feels foolish, embarrassed. What was he thinking? Laura was right all along. Right to be worried that night when Jemma returned from the pub and one of the kitchen knives was missing. And then, two days later, here on the towpath in the clear light of day, her worst fears were confirmed.

  He knows he can’t leave the scene. The police will want a statement, not least because he’s the only public witness. The journalist in him is already asking if it was necessary to shoot her. He sees Jemma drop to the ground again, hears the shots ring out. Detective Inspector Hart was talking to her right up until the last moment, seemed to be making progress.

  Tears prick his eyes as he walks over to where Laura is being comforted by a female officer. She is still in shock. The officer is about to tell him to stand back when Laura sees him and rushes over, throwing her arms around him.

  “It’s okay,” he says, her sobs rocking both their bodies. “You’re safe now.”

  They stand like that for a minute or two before Luke speaks again. “I’m so sorry. We should have listened to you.”

  Slowly her sobbing starts to ease and then stops altogether.

  “You knew from the start, when she first arrived, and none of us believed you,” he continues.

  Laura extracts herself from Luke and looks at him, puzzled by his words.

  “What did you say?” she whispers.

  “We should have listened to you. When you thought it was Jemma Huish. The woman who came to your house.”

  “It’s not her,” she says, her voice growing stronger.

  “Not who?”

  “It’s not the same woman.”

  “How do you m
ean?”

  Luke knows at once what she’s saying, but he doesn’t dare to believe it.

  Laura glances behind her at the body, which is now covered in a red blanket. Detective Inspector Hart has overheard their conversation and is walking across to them.

  “She’s not the same Jemma who came to our village,” Laura says, louder now, as if for the detective’s benefit. “Who turned up on our doorstep.”

  “How do you know?” Luke asks.

  “I’m sorry, I know this is difficult,” Hart says, interrupting her, “but I’m going to need you to make a full statement. You too,” he adds, turning to Luke.

  Luke’s happy to oblige, to do anything that might confirm what Laura has just said. He feels guilty for how happy he suddenly feels inside, sick with guilt given a woman’s dead body is still cooling in the summer grass barely twenty feet away from them, but he can’t deny the joy in his heart that his daughter might still be alive and well and somewhere nearby.

  CHAPTER 62

  “I’d like you to make an identification,” Silas says, leaning in through the open rear window of his car to where Tony, still handcuffed, is sitting. Strover is outside the car, chatting to a uniform.

  Tony doesn’t say anything. He stares ahead, sullen, subdued, all his former resistance gone. Silas had told him earlier that the incident on the canal path involved Jemma Huish. He must have heard the gunshots.

  “I could have talked her out of it, whatever she was doing,” Tony says quietly.

  “I tried, believe me,” Silas says. “She was holding a woman at knifepoint.”

  Tony looks up. “Who was it?”

  Silas pauses. He hasn’t told Tony everything. “Your wife.”

  “Laura?” Tony seems genuinely surprised, concerned. “Is she okay?” he asks.

  “She’s fine,” Silas says. “Shocked but unharmed.”

  “Can I see her?” Tony asks. Maybe Silas has got this all wrong. Maybe Tony loves his wife and wasn’t hiding Jemma.

  “She’s with the medics right now,” Silas says. “And then she’s got to give a statement.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  Silas opens the rear door of the car, gesturing for Tony to get out.

  “We can’t be certain who was holding your wife at knifepoint,” he says, taking Tony by one arm. “As you know, we think it was Jemma Huish.”

  “Is she dead?” Tony asks, looking around at the busy scene. A police helicopter passes low overheard.

  Silas nods. “We just need to establish if she’s the same woman who arrived in the village three days ago.”

  In normal circumstances, he would ask Strover, who interviewed Jemma at the surgery, but he wants to observe Tony’s reaction, see how he responds.

  Five minutes later, Silas is standing with Tony on the towpath, looking down on the unmistakable contours of a body beneath a medic’s red blanket. Silas has attended plenty of formal IDs in his time, but it never gets any easier. Perhaps it’s because one day he expects to see Conor’s face staring back up at him. He bends down, shutting the thought away, and lifts the blanket from the woman’s face.

  “That’s not her,” Tony says at once. Is there a hint of relief in his voice? They both look down on the body.

  “Not who?” Silas asks, his eyes drawn to Jemma’s, cast sideways in an abject look of shock. Someone could at least have closed them. He covers her face up again.

  “The woman who came to my house three days ago.”

  “She told us that she was Jemma Huish,” Silas says, walking back toward his car with Tony. “When she dialed 999. Warned us that she wanted to kill someone. Like she did twelve years ago. This time we believed her. She certainly looks like the file photos we have of Ms. Huish.”

  “Then it must be her.”

  “So who’s the woman who came to the village?”

  “Does it really matter anymore?” Tony asks. “After what’s happened here?”

  The American might be right. She was technically only a threat to the public while everyone thought she was Jemma Huish. Social services will pick up the case again if she reappears. The shooting will now become everyone’s main priority. There will be a long and time-consuming investigation amid more talk of budget cuts.

  In particular, questions will be asked about his own initial decision to order the AFOs to retreat out of Taser range, but he knows she dropped the knife before the shots were fired. That’s how he remembers it anyway. No doubt pressure will be brought to bear on him to recall the sequence of events differently—in return for overlooking his decision to pull back the AFOs—but he won’t play the game. He never does. Little wonder he’s still only a DI.

  “Everyone thought she was Jemma Huish,” Tony says.

  “Did you?”

  “I didn’t know who she was.” He’s lying again. Silas is also starting to doubt Tony’s insouciant attitude to the other Jemma. He invited her around for dinner when his wife was in London, which was beyond the call of neighborly duty. This is a woman he cared about. And he’s sure there was relief in his voice when he first saw the dead body.

  “So where is she now?” Silas asks. “The other Jemma?”

  “As I said, I don’t know. She disappeared, and then she called me from the forest.”

  “Were you hiding her?” Silas asks, increasingly certain that Tony is lying.

  “No.”

  “But you did advise her not to take a DNA test?”

  “She was worried about being mistaken for Jemma Huish. Frickin’ good call in the circumstances, I’d say.” Tony glances back in the direction of the dead body. “Am I still under arrest?”

  Silas hasn’t had time to consider Tony’s situation. All he knows is that his relationship with the other Jemma, if that’s really her name, is troubling him more and more. She was a vulnerable single woman suffering from amnesia. Did Tony take advantage of her? It seems unlikely that she could have set up home in the woods on her own, given Susie’s assessment of her fragile mental state.

  They are now at his car, where a uniform is still chatting with Strover, no doubt discussing her boss’s failure to defuse the situation, his poor career prospects, whether she should jump ship.

  “DC Strover, take Tony Masters back to the station and interview him,” Silas says, tossing her the keys to his car. Silas will need to be on-site for several more hours and can get a lift back later. They’ve got less than twenty-four hours to charge Tony, which now seems unlikely, but there’s something about the American that won’t go away. “And get forensics to search his house again—properly this time.”

  CHAPTER 63

  “Funny thing is, I never felt I was going to die,” Laura says, sitting with Luke on a bench on the towpath. They are up near the train station, waiting to be interviewed by the police. A female officer is standing off at a distance, keeping a kind eye on her.

  Laura knows she is still in shock, speaking too fast. “Of course it was terrifying,” she says to Luke. “Jemma told me quite clearly that someone was ordering her to kill me, but she also said that she would listen to the treetops instead. We just had to wait for the wind to blow, to drown out the voices in her head. I believed her. I think the detective did too. The one who was talking to her, who wants to talk to us. And then the wind did blow, ruffling the leaves high up above us. I’ve never heard such a beautiful sound in all my life.”

  She stops talking and the tears come, hot and burning. Luke puts his arm around her, and she rests her head on his shoulder. The female officer approaches.

  “Are you okay, madam?” she asks.

  Laura looks up and nods, wiping the tears away. “Thank you,” she says, trying to be strong.

  She’s grateful Luke is with her. It should be Tony, but they’ve just seen him being driven away in handcuffs. There was no time to talk, and she’s not sure w
hat they would have said. She shakes her head, watching a mother duck and her ducklings on the canal. Above them, a red kite soars and circles on the summer currents.

  Four days ago, life was so simple. The yoga classes were going well, she was optimistic about her chances of getting pregnant, her marriage seemed good. How things change. Out of the blue a stranger turns up on her doorstep, and they argue like never before. Tony just didn’t seem to care what she thought; her worries about the new woman in their house. And now this. She puts a hand to her neck, thinking again about the cold blade that was pressed against her throat, the firecrack of the police guns, the way Jemma’s grip loosened, her body falling away. She shivers, closing her eyes.

  “You’re safe now,” Luke says, putting an arm around her again.

  “Am I?” she asks, sighing. “She’s still out there, Luke.”

  “I’m sure the police are looking for her.”

  She turns to watch another police car pull up in the station car park, joining a row of others. “How long will they hold Tony for?” she asks.

  “Normally they have twenty-four hours to charge someone. It depends what he’s being arrested for.”

  Laura shakes her head, thinking of Tony, the empty look she gave him just now as he was being led away. How can love disappear so quickly? Maybe it doesn’t and just gets transferred elsewhere. Redistributed.

  “Do you think he was hiding her?” she asks.

  “Why would Tony do that?”

  She doesn’t know the answer herself, not yet, why her loving husband placed a stranger’s needs above his wife’s. “You saw her. A beautiful girl.” The tears come again.

  “And it definitely wasn’t her?” Luke asks. “Just now.”

  “Absolutely not.” It would have been so much simpler if it had been. If the woman who knocked on their door had been Jemma Huish and was now lying dead by the canal. But she’s alive and out there somewhere, circling her husband like the red kite above them.

  CHAPTER 64