The Last Thing She Remembers

by J. S. Monroe

  “Hey, I’m intrigued—and I owe you one, remember? Speak later.”

  Luke had forgotten. A year ago, he’d arranged for Nathan’s son to work for a week on an English newspaper. The experience persuaded him to ditch journalism forever and follow his delighted father into medicine.

  CHAPTER 84

  DAY FOUR

  Tony wakes early after a night of fitful rest and dark dreams of Berlin. He’s sure he called out in his sleep again, maybe even screamed, but no one was at home to hear him. Laura didn’t return again after she had taken her things, which makes matters simpler now. He dreamed of his old photographic studio—he must remember to take the keys—locked up for five years, empty and unloved. And he dreamed of Maddie, of what must happen to her if she knows anything about his life in Berlin.

  It was then that he had screamed, he remembers now. But was it out of guilt for what he has done to others? Or was it fear for what is happening to his atrophying brain? In between nightmares he lay awake, thinking about the files, how much the cops might discover. How quickly. Damn the cops.

  His plan is for them to catch the earliest flight they can out of Heathrow. Right now, though, he needs to sort the café. It’s important to give the impression to others—the police—that he might return from Berlin to the village, even though he knows his future now lies in his past. The teenage daughter of the pub landlord sometimes covers for him in the café at weekends. He rang her last night, and she’s agreed to come in today and run the show. No early morning TLTs on the station platform, just the basics.

  Taking a small overnight bag with him, he heads down the road in the early-morning light. Sunrises are good. It’s when the sun sets that Tony feels vulnerable. He becomes confused and disorientated. Restless. They call it Sundown Syndrome, associated with the early to middle stages of Alzheimer’s.

  The teenager is waiting bleary-eyed and barely awake when Tony arrives outside the café. He glances at his watch: 5:00 a.m. He lets her in and hands over the keys, briefing her about today’s specials and to be nice to any passing cops. If people ask where he is, she’s to explain that he’s gone up to a food show in London.

  She looks suspiciously at his suitcase.

  “How long are you going for?” she asks, pushing a strand of hair away from her eyes.

  “Couple of days,” he says, stepping behind the counter to turn on the coffee machine. “Sure you’re okay for tomorrow?”

  “I’ll have to close early.”

  “That’s fine.” He checks the fridge. “Just keep the place clean.” There’s enough baba ghanoush and dolma for the Middle Eastern platter to stay on today. He’ll miss the café. Maybe he’ll open another one in Berlin.

  “What about the pictures?” she asks.

  He looks up at her. “What about them?”

  “If someone wants to buy one.”

  He laughs, glancing over to the photos hanging on the wall. He’s never thought through what would happen if someone actually bought one. That would be interesting. “Twenty percent commission on every sale.”

  “Really?” she asks, her sleepy eyes brightening.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Tony says, pausing at the door to take one last look around the café. He’ll get the pictures sent out to Germany, back where they belong. “Text me if any cops do drop by, will you?”

  “Are they likely to?” she asks, suddenly alarmed.

  “I was wrongfully arrested yesterday, released last night without charge. You know what the cops are like,” he adds, winking at her.

  CHAPTER 85

  At 5:30 a.m., Nathan calls Luke again. This time Luke is in a deep sleep, and he wonders how long the phone has been ringing before he answers it.

  “Turns out your man de Staal had quite a reputation at college,” Nathan says, as if they were talking only a couple of minutes ago. “A lot of people still remember him in Sante Fe.”

  “Reputation for what?” Luke asks, hoping to buy some time while he opens his notebook. He’s struggling to wake up.

  “He was obsessed with the work of a neurosurgeon called William Beecher Scoville—crazy dude from Connecticut who performed lobotomies in the fifties, mainly on asylum patients. It was the era of ‘psychosurgery’—when parts of the brain tissue were either destroyed or removed in the hope of curing mental disorders.”

  “Do they still do that?” Luke asks, writing down “William Beecher Scoville” in his notebook.

  “Banned in most countries. These days it’s more about deep brain stimulation. Anyway, this guy Scoville, he liked to, shall we say, experiment. His most famous operation was on an epilepsy sufferer called Henry Molaison—both medial temporal lobes were surgically resected, including the hippocampi.”

  “Resected?”

  “Surgically removed. The operation cleared up the epilepsy, but it also wiped the poor man’s memory.”

  “That’s awful,” Luke says, thinking back to what Laura had told him of Maddie’s amnesia. The void in her head.

  “Forming new memories was impossible for Molaison,” Nathan continues. “He lost most of his old memories too. He lived in a permanent present tense, telling the same stories over and over. Couldn’t even remember if he’d just eaten and had to carry a note around in his wallet, explaining that his father was dead and his mother was in a nursing home.”

  “And you said his name was Henry Molaison?” Luke asks, checking his notebook. His handwriting is bad enough when he’s awake.

  “Known to all as ‘H.M.,’ he became a bit of a celebrity, particularly among cognitive neuropsychologists. After his death, his brain got even more famous. Cut up into twenty-four hundred slices and now on display at the University of California in San Diego. You can even go online and watch the video of it being sliced.”

  “Thanks.” It’s the last thing Luke wants to do. He’s never had a strong stomach.

  “De Staal was big into drugs too, benzos mainly. Seems like the authorities tried to be sympathetic at first. His dad died of Alzheimer’s ridiculously young, just before Tony’s first fall semester—quite a famous case over here. Reading between the lines, I’d say Tony got kicked out of medical school not for disrespecting cadavers but for date rape. Hushed up by the victim’s parents, apparently. No one’s heard of him for years.”

  CHAPTER 86

  I stare at the ceiling of my room, listening to the sterile sounds of the hotel: the hum of air-conditioning, traffic outside. The transience of airports. I’ve woken early, troubled by the thought of Tony’s imminent arrival.

  It’s 6:00 a.m. and he’ll be here soon. I need to be in control today, but I feel disconcerted by the earlier flight, his desire to test my amnesia by asking me not to write any notes for yesterday. Sitting up in bed, I look at the simple message I wrote to myself on the table. How could I ever forget that I’m going with Tony to Berlin today?

  I’ve been planning this for weeks.

  My phone, the one Tony gave me, buzzes with a text. No explanation, just a brief message that his coach is not far from Heathrow and he hopes to be at the hotel in half an hour. I am about to reply when I check myself. There are no numbers stored on the phone and the text is anonymous. It’s obviously from Tony, but is he testing me again? I glance at the simple note he had asked me to write to myself last night and text back.

  Who is this?

  I’m not taking any chances. I need to forget everything again. Wipe the slate clean. I can’t remember my own name.

  He replies straightaway: It’s Tony-read the note by your bed. xxx.

  I shower and dress, wearing new clothes that I bought at the airport yesterday. Looking around the hotel room one last time, I walk out the door with my handbag. Tony didn’t want me to check out, but I’m not falling for that one. I’ll tell him I’ve forgotten.

  I feel scared as I wait for the lift to reception and wish
Fleur was with me. What happens next is not about me but about her. And all the others.

  CHAPTER 87

  Silas walks into the Seahorse Gallery & Café with Strover, surprised that it’s open so early. He should be back at Gablecross, dealing with the fallout from yesterday’s shooting: writing up his PIP, briefing the Comms and Engagement team from Devizes. He’s left a message for his boss, keen to explain his continuing concerns about the woman who wasn’t shot and his related worries about Tony, but he hasn’t heard back.

  Tony is nowhere to be seen. He’s probably at the airport already, on his way to Berlin with Maddie. Silas can’t stop him, not without hard evidence. He’s not in the mood for a fresh fruit chia pudding, tofu scramble or anything else on the blackboard—what was he thinking yesterday?—and just nods at the young woman behind the counter as he walks through to the gallery area at the rear. Strover hangs back, ordering a takeaway soya mocha.

  “Hippocamus denise,” Silas says, standing in front of the first framed picture of a solitary orange seahorse. He glances up at Strover as she walks over to him, but his attention is caught by the woman behind the counter. She’s sending a text.

  “‘Also known as Denise’s pygmy,’” Strover says, reading from her phone. “‘One of the world’s smallest seahorses, native to the Western Pacific. And a master of camouflage.’”

  “Hiding in plain sight,” Silas says, noticing the way the seahorse matches the color of the orange coral behind it. It looks newborn and old at the same time, almost alien.

  They move on to the next picture like two art students in a gallery. There are eight pictures in total. Swindon’s got artistic ambitions apparently. A local philanthropist wants to make it the cultural center of Britain. The man must like a challenge.

  “Hippocampus florence,” Silas says, looking at the picture. This one is of a pair of seahorses. “Italian presumably. Can’t see it hanging in the Uffizi.”

  “There are fifty-four known species of seahorse in total,” Strover says, scrolling down her phone. “Hippocampus fisheri, Hippocampus fuscus...” She pauses, glancing up at the label again. Her voice is more serious when she speaks. “No Hippocampus florence.”

  Silas picks up on her tone and leans in closer to the image. He fancies himself as a photographer, travel pictures mainly, not this sort of stuff. Unlike Hippocampus denise, there’s something about the bodies of these two seahorses that doesn’t look quite right, as if a second photo has been superimposed on top of each one. He’s not sure if the images are untreated or photoshopped. The colors have definitely been saturated to highlight the seahorses’ tones and the texture of the coral.

  He moves on to the next picture, glancing back at the café area. The woman at the counter turns with a takeaway cup in one hand. Who was she texting? Tony?

  “Your soya mocha’s ready,” Silas says to Strover, relishing the words. She goes over to the counter to collect it.

  He turns to face the picture in front of him. It’s called Hippocampus alwyn. Welsh seahorses, presumably.

  And then it hits him. Hiding in plain sight. Silas’s stomach lurches, like it did the first time Conor was brought into the station, unrecognizable, almost unconscious.

  “Remember what Susie said to us in the surgery?” he asks. “About Maddie having a friend who had died?”

  Strover nods. “She told me about her too, when I interviewed her.”

  “And what was the name of her friend?”

  His question is rhetorical, but he doesn’t stop Strover from pulling out her notebook. As she flicks through her notes, he walks back to stand in front of the first picture again, reading the label: Hippocampus florence. This is the moment he lives for in his working life, the moment he also dreads, when the adrenaline rush of a breakthrough is tempered by the imminent discovery of victims.

  “Fleur,” Strover says, looking up from her notebook. “Her friend who died was called Fleur.”

  He leans in closer to the picture, studying the seahorse’s reptilian features. “Another name for Florence,” he says.

  Hippocampus florence has got nothing to do with Italy.

  CHAPTER 88

  I spot Tony before he sees me. There must be no sense of recognition, no familiarity. I am at a table in the far corner of the hotel’s reception lobby, clutching my handbag on my lap, last night’s note to myself in one hand.

  “Maddie,” he says, approaching me. I look up at him, one stranger to another. Just like I did that first day when I turned up on his doorstep. “It’s Tony. You got my text?”

  I nod and manage a tentative smile, noncommittal. He glances at the note in my hand.

  “We’re going to Berlin today,” he says, leaning forward to kiss me on the lips. Instinctively, I turn away and his lips brush my cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” he says quietly, sitting down next to me. Is that okay? What someone in my position would do? “Rushing ahead. You found the message then?” He looks at the note in my hand again.

  “I read it this morning. I really don’t know what’s going on.”

  Tony rests a hand on my knee. I choose not to disguise the anxiety in my eyes.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” he says. “Trust me.”

  The next moment, he pulls out his phone and leans into me to take a selfie of us. “Today’s photo,” he says.

  I look at him with confusion. “You just need to read your notes,” he says. “There’ll be in there, I’m sure.”

  He nods at my handbag. I search inside, as if I don’t know what I’ll find, and pull out three A4 pages of writing.

  “Won’t be anything for yesterday,” he continues, watching me start to read. “You had a difficult day. The other days should explain everything. We’re going to Berlin together—to get you well again. Have you got your ticket? We need to change to an earlier flight.”

  He orders a coffee for himself and a peppermint tea for me, and for the next few minutes we chat intermittently as I read through the diary of my first few days in the village. I’m impressed by how thorough I was.

  “Making more sense now?” he asks. “You and me, being here together?”

  “You’ve been very kind,” I say.

  “Not sure my wife would agree.”

  I flinch again at the reference to Laura and keep reading. “Did the police find Jemma Huish?”

  “Yeah, they found her.”

  “Why did I leave the village?”

  “Because you feared the cops might mistake you for Jemma. Good call. Have you checked out?”

  I nod, still reading.

  “I told you not to.” I look up, the sudden change in his tone taking me by surprise. “Last night.”

  “I don’t remember,” I say.

  He turns away, frustrated. “It’s okay. My mistake. I should have told you to write it down.” He pauses. “Have they cleaned the room yet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But Tony isn’t interested in my answer. He’s already walking away to the reception desk. What’s he doing? I watch him chat to the woman, who glances over in my direction. Tony then beckons for me to come over.

  “I was just explaining that you’ve accidentally left your bag in the room,” he says, looking from me to the receptionist.

  I turn to Tony for an explanation but he doesn’t offer one. “That you forgot it. That you’re forgetting a lot of things at the moment.”

  There’s no need to fake my concern. I now know exactly what he’s doing. The woman behind the desk gives me the key to my room, the one I handed in to her half an hour ago, despite my pleading eyes. It feels like female betrayal, but I can’t be angry with her.

  Two minutes later, we are back in my hotel room.

  “Nice enough,” he says, glancing around the confined space. “I don’t care how small a room is as long as it’s clean.” He runs
a finger along the sideboard, checking for dust and nodding with approval.

  “Why are we up here?” I say.

  He turns to face me, holding my shoulders like he did in the forest. “You don’t remember anything, do you, baby? What we did yesterday?”

  “What did we do?” I can’t bear to look into his eyes.

  He lets me go, removes his jacket and places it on the back of the chair. I try to suppress a rising nausea. This wasn’t part of the plan.

  “Don’t we have a flight to catch?” I ask.

  He leans forward and kisses me on the mouth, pushing me back down onto the bed, a hand already making its way into my jeans. One, two, three. I think fast, desperately working through my limited options, unable to reach my tattoo. This is a nightmare, why I checked out of the room, why I have to get Tony back to Berlin.

  “I just need the bathroom,” he says, leaving me lying on the bed. “Wait here.”

  “Don’t be long,” I say, letting go of his lingering hand as he walks over to the bathroom door. Thank God for his obsession with cleanliness. He closes the door.

  Too nervous to breathe, I rifle through my handbag and pull out a small bottle of perfume. A quick look around the room. There’s a smoke detector by the main door, above the closet. It’s my only chance. I stand on tiptoe and spray the perfume through the plastic grille, hoping the fine particles will trigger it. Nothing. I try again, glancing at the bathroom door. I hear him flush the loo and spray the perfume again. Come on. A moment later the room is resonating to the sound of a piercing alarm. I rush over to the bed, drop the perfume back into my handbag and slip off my top.

  “Jesus, what’s going on?” he says, coming out of the bathroom. He’s naked except for a white hotel robe, too loosely tied at the front.

  “Just a practice, I hope,” I lie, trying to look keen, unflustered.

  “I can’t even think straight,” he says, eyeing my breasts. The sound is deafening, music to my ears, his passion wilting in front of me.