The Last Thing She Remembers

by J. S. Monroe

  I don’t know if I’ve made a mistake by hitchhiking, but my options are very limited without any money. I must keep moving, get myself away from the woods. Away from the police. It terrifies me that I’ve been mistaken for Jemma Huish. Why didn’t I see that coming? Why didn’t I guess that Tony is living in her village, in her old house?

  He must have thought I was Jemma Huish from the moment I turned up on his doorstep. She’s just his type: short dark hair, suffering from amnesia. At least it explains why he called me Jemma, the radio, why he made sure I had one in the loft and in the forest. Apparently, Jemma Huish could never be without one if she was on her own. I hope I’ve done enough to convince the police that I’m not her. They will find the hairbrush soon enough, test it for DNA. I just pray that Tony won’t give up on me now. I will call him from Heathrow.

  The guy driving seems sweet enough. He’s called Mungo, on his way up from Falmouth where he’s been DJing, and has to be back in London for college tomorrow. That’s if his battered old Golf lasts the distance. The other problem is that motorways make him nervous, and I’m beginning to feel sick on the smaller roads. I can’t complain, though. He’s agreed to drop me off at Terminal 5, which is so nice of him, particularly as I’m not sure he’s bought my story. And he’s playing a top line in funk music. Takes me back.

  “I don’t get it,” Mungo says, glancing across at me. He’s got a shaved head and a beautiful smile. Twenty-one, maybe a bit younger. “You say you weren’t on a bender, but you couldn’t remember a thing about the past three days. Come on, you must have taken something. And I’d like to know what it was.”

  “Honestly,” I say. “I didn’t take anything.”

  “Maybe your drink was spiked? On the plane?”

  An image of Fleur comes and goes. Carefree, happy, dancing at the bar, Long Island Ice Tea in one hand, mine in the other.

  “No chance.”

  He glances across at me but I stare ahead, determined to keep the tears at bay. We both fall quiet.

  “What was the last thing you could remember, then?” he says, relentlessly cheery, nodding to the music.

  “Arriving at Heathrow Terminal 5 from Germany.”

  “And that’s where you lost everything,” he says, glancing at me. I wish he’d keep his eyes on the road. “Passport, bank cards, the lot.”

  “All gone.”

  “Nuts.” Another glance at me, his hands tapping to Sly Stone on the steering wheel. “Did you ring the police?”

  “What would I have said? I didn’t know my name so how could I report it?”

  “Mental. And you’re sure your name is Maddie?”

  Maddie.

  I double-take. I told Mungo my real name as soon as I got into his car, but it still feels strange after three days of being called Jemma.

  “I’m sure,” I say, smiling properly for the first time in a while.

  I have already explained how I turned up at the village using a train ticket I found in my pocket, and how a kind couple looked after me. I didn’t tell him why I left, that I feared I was about to be mistaken for a psychotic murderer called Jemma Huish. Instead, I told him a lie, that I woke up this morning feeling different, memory restored after three days of amnesia, and decided it was better for everyone if I just slipped away, much like I had arrived.

  If only it was that simple.

  Mungo shakes his head. “And they’ve definitely got your handbag? With everything in it?”

  “Absolutely,” I say, telling another lie, smaller this time. “I rang the lost property office at Heathrow this morning, as soon as I recalled my name. Seems like it was handed in a few minutes after it disappeared from my trolley in Arrivals. Takes a while to be processed.”

  “Don’t expect to find any cash.” He pauses. “Okay if I listen to the news?”

  “Fine by me.”

  “There’s been a big police shooting.”

  My whole body tenses. “Where?”

  “Somewhere near here, I think.”

  CHAPTER 65

  “Why don’t you stay round my place tonight?” Susie Patterson asks, resting a hand on Laura’s arm. They are sitting on the sofa in Laura’s sitting room. Detective Inspector Hart had insisted on her being checked over by a doctor, and Laura is pleased—and surprised—it’s Susie. She hasn’t been replying to her texts or calls.

  “What exactly have they been looking for?” Susie asks quietly, nodding toward the kitchen.

  “Tony might have been hiding her,” Laura says. It was a shock to discover a team of forensics in the house, but they have almost all gone. Only one, a woman, is left, sitting at the kitchen table with Tony’s laptop, and she’s about to leave.

  “At least, that’s what the detective said,” Laura says. “He kept asking me if I thought Jemma was ‘Tony’s type.’”

  “Are they still looking for her?”

  Laura nods. “They think she could be in danger. I’m not sure why they care, to be honest.”

  “Because she’s unwell,” Susie says. “Not herself. Possibly in a fugue state.”

  “She can rot in hell for all I care.”

  Laura is struggling to hold back the tears.

  “If you want me to prescribe you something, to help you sleep tonight—”

  “I’m okay,” Laura says, in between sobs. “Thanks for being here.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I was beginning to wonder where your loyalties lay.”

  “I had a duty of care to her as a patient. That’s all. I should never have texted you that first night. Particularly as I was wrong about her.”

  The woman who had knocked on their front door wasn’t Jemma Huish, as Susie had warned. No one knows who she is, which worries Laura more. Why did she target her house? Her marriage? And where is she now?

  “You should have seen Tony, the way he behaved around her,” Laura says. “He apparently cooked dinner for her while I was up in London. In our fucking house.”

  “I’m sure he was just trying to be helpful,” Susie says, without much conviction.

  Laura laughs dryly as the CSI walks through from the kitchen.

  “All done,” she says.

  Laura gets up to open the door but feels dizzy and hesitates.

  “I’ll let myself out, don’t worry,” the CSI says, smiling. “Are you okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Susie interrupts, helping Laura to sit down again.

  “I’ve seen it in him before,” Laura says, once the CSI has closed the front door behind her.

  “Seen what?” Susie asks.

  “There was something about Jemma that fascinated Tony. Her condition, the whole amnesia thing. You know how much he worries about Alzheimer’s, losing his own memory.”

  “Because of his dad?”

  Laura nods.

  “He came to see me in the surgery about it once, wanted to know the early signs,” Susie says. “Knew more about it than I did.”

  “Do you want another tea?” Laura asks, getting up slowly.

  “Thanks,” Susie says, watching her friend. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Laura puts on the kettle in the kitchen, slips peppermint tea bags into two mugs and stirs a spoonful of honey into hers. She never has honey.

  “I don’t think it was a coincidence that we ended up buying this place,” she calls out to Susie, looking around the kitchen. The knife block is on the sideboard, her iPad on its stand. “The house where Jemma Huish grew up.”

  Tony would hate to see it now. CSI has tried and failed to put everything back in exactly the right place. A part of her wants to pull the house apart, rip out all the books, throw the cushions on the floor.

  “How do you mean?” Susie says from the sitting room.

  “Tony decided to call her ‘Jemma’ long b
efore we came to see you. It was just after she turned up at our door. Jemma with a J. Why that name? He told me later that Huish wasn’t on the list of previous owners—we’ve got a record of them all in the attic.”

  “Did you check it?”

  Laura shakes her head, knows she’s been a fool. “Tony did.”

  Two minutes later, she is making her way up the wobbly stepladder into the attic, gripping the sides, trying to control her dizziness. Susie said she should climb up instead, but Laura knows what she’s looking for. She crawls into the narrow space and looks around at all Tony’s boxes, pulling out a photo at random: her smiling at the camera, love in her eyes, soon after they moved into the village. Were they happy? She’s sure they were. CSI was up here earlier, looking for traces of Jemma’s DNA. They suspect this is where he might have kept her. Could he really have done that? Her Tony?

  “You all right up there?” Susie calls from below.

  “I’m fine,” she says. Wiping away a tear, Laura crawls across the wooden floor to a box below the eaves and opens it. She glances at the latest property deeds—her name and Tony’s, their first married home—and digs around for the list of owners. It takes her a split second to find Huish, four down from the top. Tony lied to her. He thought she was Jemma Huish from the moment she turned up at their door, and chose to do nothing about it, even when his own wife was too terrified to sleep in the same house. It doesn’t make any sense.

  And then she sees another box, wedged under the water tank. She crawls over and opens it, leafing through a series of old newspaper articles. They are all about Jemma Huish, her amnesia, the Wiltshire village where she lived, the day she killed her best friend. And each one is covered in Tony’s handwritten notes.

  “Maybe I will stay at your place tonight,” she says, calling out to Susie below.

  CHAPTER 66

  “Could we pull over?” I ask.

  “Are you okay?” Mungo turns to look at me. It’s 3:00 p.m., and we’re still an hour from Heathrow.

  “Feel a bit sick actually.” I can’t believe what I’ve just heard on the radio.

  “My driving, sorry. Makes my girlfriend throw up too.”

  “It’s not your driving.”

  He stops in a lay-by and I step out into the fresh air. Mungo gets out too and comes around to stand beside me. He leans against the car, looking across the fields as he rolls a cigarette. A police car drives past, lights on, siren sounding.

  “Heavy stuff, that shooting,” he says, watching the police car as it disappears around the corner.

  “Terrible,” I whisper.

  “Not exactly a terrorist, was she? You’d have thought they’d learned their lesson after the Duggan shooting in London—not that they’d be expecting a riot around here.”

  There’s a gap in the traffic, and the surrounding countryside feels more silent than ever.

  “I think I might have seen her,” I say.

  “The one who was shot?”

  I take a drag of his cigarette. I haven’t smoked for years, and it catches at the back of my throat. “Jemma Huish. She was in the woods, running. We stopped and looked at each other.”

  “Shit. Like, shouldn’t you tell someone?”

  “No point now, is there?” I look at him, envious of his youth. He turns away, drawing heavily on his cigarette. I don’t want to involve him in my world, no more than I have to.

  “Why was she running?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. I had no idea who she was, that she was even alive.”

  I think back to the moment this morning when I saw a figure in the trees. We had stared at each other for a few seconds, both of us frozen in time. She wasn’t out jogging and didn’t appear to have a dog with her. Two women in a hurry. Was she coming back to her village, like everyone said she would? Rushing back to kill again?

  “Here, there’s a picture of her,” Mungo says. He looks at his phone and then hands it over apologetically. “Looks a bit like you actually.”

  I stare at the woman in the photo.

  “You think so?”

  “Maybe not.”

  I can’t see the likeness. It’s an old image, from the original court case, the same as the one used in the newspaper cuttings in Tony’s loft. The story is still breaking, but there’s a brief report below the photo, giving details about her past.

  “Poor woman,” I say, passing back his phone. “She must have been unwell.”

  “It says she killed someone at uni—twelve years ago,” Mungo says, reading from the story. “Slit her throat with a kitchen knife. Jesus, maybe they were right to shoot her.” He stops reading. “They could have used a Taser, I guess.”

  I’m not listening. My mind is thinking back to my first night in the village, when I had no idea that Jemma Huish had once lived in Tony’s house. I could so easily have been arrested that evening. Laura had snatched the knife away from me as if I was a murderer after I had come back from the pub. Christ, I could have been shot! Poor Jemma. Poor Laura. I feel sorry for them both. Laura must think she’s jinxed. Two Jemmas brandishing knives in front of her.

  “Shall we go?” I ask.

  “Anything you say, Maddie,” he says, smiling.

  It feels good to be Maddie again. One less lie to tell myself.

  I can’t remember my own name.

  CHAPTER 67

  Silas sits at a desk in the major incident mobile command vehicle, parked up at the train station near the canal. He’s writing notes for his Post Incident Procedure—PIP—statement of what happened while it’s still clear in his mind, although he doubts he’ll ever forget any of it, particularly the final look of surprise on Jemma Huish’s face.

  “Fancy a quick chat? To compare notes.”

  Silas glances up to see the female Tactical Firearms Commander standing in front of the desk.

  “I’m all right,” Silas says, returning to his statement.

  “Shame you pulled the AFOs out of Taser range,” she says.

  “I can live with that,” Silas says, continuing to write. He thinks about saying that it would have been impossible for the Taser’s barbs to have attached themselves to either side of Jemma’s torso, given the way she was holding Laura in front of her, but he will save it for his statement.

  “Let’s see if the IOPC can,” she says, referring to the Independent Office for Police Conduct. “And how they respond when they discover you’ve not been on a negotiator refresher course for—”

  “She’s been clean for twelve years,” Silas interrupts. Other officers in the van look up.

  “And she was holding a knife to a member of the public’s throat,” she says, walking away. “Last time that happened, she severed the person’s carotid arteries. Not sure I could live with that.”

  Silas hasn’t got the energy to argue right now. Or the inclination to confer with other officers, which is now strictly forbidden. He never has. Jemma Huish rejected a hallucinatory command to kill Laura, releasing the knife moments before she was shot dead. End of story.

  Outside the van, he looks around for a lift back to the station at Gablecross. It’s 4:00 p.m., almost three hours since the shooting, and the area is still busy with forensics taking measurements, marking out the positions of key personnel in the grass, where the relevant MP5s, now unloaded, have also been placed. He’s about to approach an officer he recognizes, but the man looks away. Is he a pariah already? Not someone to be seen with? His phone rings. It’s Strover, who’s back at Gablecross.

  “The lab’s just been on,” she says. “Results are in on the hairbrush.”

  “And?” Silas asks.

  “It’s not Jemma Huish.”

  The news comes as no surprise, given that Laura and Tony have both now given formal statements saying that the woman who was shot was not the same person who turned up in the village with no memory.r />
  “Any idea who she is?” Silas asks, looking around for another lift.

  “They’ve got no record of her, or anything on the database that might be a family match. The hairbrush sample matches the one from her bed at Tony’s house and at the pub.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Nothing.”

  “A true mystery woman.”

  Silas makes no attempt to disguise the irony in his voice. She shouldn’t be his problem anymore—he’s got the IOPC to worry about—but he won’t rest until he’s found her safe.

  “It gets worse,” Strover says, deadpan. “They match hair samples found in Tony’s loft—forensics has just confirmed. Looks like Tony was hiding her there this morning when we were looking for her. He must have taken her out to the forest before the roadblocks went up. They’re checking the boot of his Beamer now.”

  Silas closes his eyes. It’s the last thing he needs after the shooting. Was Tony holding her against her will? And if he was, what’s he done with her?

  “We’re running a trace on the phone Tony gave her,” she continues.

  “We haven’t got the resources right now to search the forest. Not with what’s kicked off over here,” Silas says, looking around the busy canal scene. “Tell the lab we’re sending over Jemma Huish’s DNA for fast-track confirmation.” He pauses. “And Strover?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Couldn’t come and pick me up, could you?”

  CHAPTER 68

  Mungo pulls up at the Departures drop-off area of Heathrow Terminal 5. Two armed police officers glance across at us, eyeing the old Golf with suspicion. Mungo must get a lot of that.

  “It’s free here,” he says to me. “They charge you everywhere else.”

  “You fly often?” I ask, trying to hide the surprise in my voice.

  “Went to Berlin last summer,” he says.

  “Berlin?”

  “Brilliant city. Saw Jeff Mills from Detroit play Tresor.”

  “The Wizard?”

  “You know him?” he asks, almost choking with his surprise. Do I really look that old?