The Last Thing She Remembers

by J. S. Monroe

  “We’ve got digital matches for all the seahorses—they’re not his photos, he lifted them from various marine photography websites—but we can’t find anything for the hippocampi.”

  “Dark web?”

  “DC Strover’s checking now. Assuming these hippocampi have been taken from real people, they’re either walking around with no memories like zombies, or they’re dead.”

  “I guess it depends who removed them,” Ward says, sitting back, hands behind his head, displaying an annoyingly lean midriff. Silas could look like that one day. Quit the fags, vegan diet, ten thousand steps.

  “What do you want from me, Silas?” he asks.

  “One more day. Let me liaise with Interpol, check against international missing person lists.”

  “That’s quite a long list.”

  “We start with missing persons in Berlin—we’ve got first names of seven people from the pictures, excluding Denise, which I think is a diversion. There’s actually a real seahorse called that—and there’s no hippocampus overlay in that photo. Maybe that’s what gave him the idea. I reckon these people are either English or North American—English speakers—and they’re not all common names—we’ve got an Alwyn and a Florence, which should make searching easier, even if we include variations.”

  “And why’s this Maddie at risk?” Ward asks.

  Silas takes a deep breath.

  “We’ve just found some old picture files on Tony’s computer,” he says.

  “Of hippocampi?” Ward asks, picking up the report from his desk. “You didn’t mention that in here.”

  “Of seahorses. The computer file names match the pictures in his café. All except one, recently created.”

  “And?”

  Silas thinks again of Maddie, prays that she’s still alive. “It’s called ‘Hippocampus madeleine.’”

  CHAPTER 94

  I don’t know exactly how long it will take for the Xanax to kick in. It’s a fast-acting benzo, so anywhere between fifteen and thirty minutes—well before we touch down in Berlin. Two milligrams is large for a single dose, according to the guy outside the club. The maximum you can get in one pill of quick-release Xanax. I haven’t noticed the telltale signs of drowsiness yet, but we’ve both just had a second glass of champagne, which will only help to speed things up, magnifying the effects of the alcohol and benzo to a potentially lethal level. Later, the amnesia will cast its long shadow back to at least half an hour before the powder was ingested. Maybe longer.

  “Are you feeling more relaxed?” Tony asks quietly, his hand on mine again.

  “Much better,” I say, but I don’t like the new tone in his voice.

  “Funny thing, fear,” he says.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You started to relax before we drank the champagne.”

  “Did I?” My stomach tightens.

  “As soon as I’d returned from the restroom. Your whole face was different, less tense.”

  I shift in my seat as he grips my hand a little tighter, pressing it into the armrest.

  “I was pleased to see you again,” I say. “You were in there a while. I got stuck in one once,” I add, trying to defuse the tension with a light laugh. “Terrifying.”

  My laugh evaporates. I’ve made a mistake. Has he noticed too? I’ve never been stuck in an airplane loo and even if I had, how would I be able to remember?

  “You weren’t scared to climb into the trunk of my car,” he says. I sigh inwardly with relief. He didn’t notice.

  “That was different,” I say, smiling at him. He doesn’t smile back. Instead he fixes me with his blue eyes, and all I can see is anger. Anger and disappointment. Another mistake and this time there’s no reprieve.

  “That was yesterday,” he says, letting go of my hand. “You didn’t write any notes for yesterday, did you?”

  I shake my head. “You told me not to,” I say quietly. My mouth is almost too dry to talk.

  “What did you put in my champagne?” he asks.

  “Nothing.” The Xanax will kick in soon.

  He holds up a hand and catches the attention of a passing air hostess.

  “Two large black coffees. Strong as you’ve got.” He’s starting to slur his words.

  “I don’t drink coffee,” I say.

  “They’re both for me.”

  Tony watches the hostess pour out two coffees and place them on his tray. Then he turns to face me, a heavy drowsiness weighing down his eyelids, his voice barely a whisper.

  “I don’t know who you are or what game you’re playing.” He pauses, sipping at one of the coffees. “But you won’t win.”

  CHAPTER 95

  Luke is booked onto the first flight to Berlin he could get. He has no idea what flight Maddie and Tony took, or how he will find them. All he knows is that he has to get himself to Berlin. Is it the journalist in him, hunting down a good story? He’s confident it’s not. Does he still believe that Maddie might be his daughter? Enough for him to feel protective toward her with a force that’s shocked him. Hart’s haunting words in the police car won’t go away.

  Seems like each seahorse has been overlaid with another image—of a human hippocampus.

  He’s also found evidence online of a stronger connection between Maddie’s father and the Baha’is, a talk he once gave to a group of Iranian Baha’i exiles living in Cheltenham. Freya said it was their daughter’s adoptive mother who is the Baha’i, but at least it’s something. He needs to talk to Maddie again but she’s now in Berlin, where her life is potentially at risk. Strover and Hart assured him that they would be contacting Interpol, sharing what they know, but the police are busy people, as Strover’s always reminding him, with other priorities. Like explaining how Jemma Huish was shot dead by the canal on a sunny afternoon in Wiltshire.

  He had driven to Heathrow in the Austin-Healey, leaving it in the short-stay car park, where it looked out of place sandwiched between two shiny SUVs. As he had passed through the airport’s security checks, he had tried to picture Maddie and Tony before him. Was Maddie in charge? The swallow? Isn’t that what Sean called her?

  He sits back in his seat, drawing comfort from the fact that she can now remember her name and has been reunited with her handbag and passport. Maybe it’s just a simple affair, and he’s stalking a couple on a romantic break in Berlin. That would be weird. He feels bad he didn’t see more of Laura before he left. He’d walked her back along the canal to the village after they had both given their statements to the police, and handed her over to Susie Patterson at the surgery.

  Luke keeps his phone on during takeoff in case Strover contacts him. He’s about to switch it off when a message appears from an international number. The dialing code is 91, which he knows from his calls with Freya is India.

  Can you come to Berlin? Today? I need to tell you my story. Maddie x

  Luke stares at the message. What story does she want to tell him? About her life? How she was adopted? And how did she get his number? Then he remembers he gave her his card that first day, when he saw her in the surgery. She must have kept it. Again, it feels good to be ahead of the game. Did she somehow know he would come to Berlin anyway, in search of his daughter? The message doesn’t sound panicky. Maddie seems in control.

  He’s about to text a reply when an air steward asks him to turn off his phone. Luke protests but the man is insistent. He glances at his phone again. The signal has gone.

  It’s two hours before touchdown in Berlin.

  CHAPTER 96

  “He suffers from acute fear of flying,” I say to the air hostess. “Always gets anxious in airplanes, ever since he was a kid.”

  The air hostess glances back down the aisle to where Tony is slumped in his seat, semiconscious.

  “It’s happened before—I’m sorry, I thought the therapy was helping,” I continue. “W
e wouldn’t have had a drink if I’d known he’d taken medication.”

  “Does he need medical attention when we land?” The air hostess asks, casting her eye across the sea of upturned passenger faces. “We could also ask if there’s a doctor on board today. There often is.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I say, keen to snub out that idea as quickly as possible. “I just need a wheelchair at the other end—and maybe a bit of help getting him down the aisle,” I add.

  “I’ll see what we can do. Normally we require forty-eight hours’ notice. You’re sure he’s okay?”

  “He’s fine. I’m just sorry for the other person in our row. My husband can snore for Britain.”

  The air hostess smiles at me sympathetically, wondering perhaps why I’m with an older man who passes out on planes and snores. I return to my seat. I was hoping to have booked a wheelchair for Berlin when I rescheduled my flight, but it proved impossible at the airline desk in Heathrow as Tony was with me and had insisted on doing all the talking. Hence plan B and arranging what I can on the plane.

  I ease past Tony’s legs and sit down in my seat. He’s unconscious now. I breathe out and look around, acknowledging the man next to me, who is taking off his headphones.

  “Likes to knock himself out completely,” I say to him, by way of explanation. “Can’t stand flying,” I add. The man smiles nervously.

  “That’s all fine,” the hostess says, appearing by my side and saving me from further embarrassment. “A wheelchair will be ready for your husband at disembarkation.”

  “Thank you so much,” I say.

  For the first time in a while I can relax, at least for a few minutes. Plan B seems to have worked out well. I’ve had to do a lot of planning in recent weeks. Ever since I saw the photo of the monks. Ever since I started to remember.

  I glance across at Tony again, slumped beside me. Amnesia was my bait when I turned up on his doorstep: anterograde, retrograde, a hint of distant childhood memories. I had done my research, knew how to reel him in.

  I can’t remember my own name.

  And now we are about to land in the city where it all started. I reach down for my bag under the seat and pull out a crumpled photo of Fleur, her cheek pressed close to mine. We look so similar, like twin sisters. Same haircut, matching clothes. A fatal likeness. Tony’s type, both of us. She’s smiling at the camera, laughter in her eyes. Fleur was my name for her. Everyone else called her Flo apart from her mother, who apparently called her Florence.

  I will phone my own mother in India when this is all over, explain what I’ve done and why. And I must make contact with Luke again. I messaged him from Heathrow, asking him to fly to Berlin. He didn’t reply but I hope he will come. I liked him when we met at the pub quiz, and he talked about about Freya Lal, how he had started to search for her again. It was moving to hear him talk in that way, rare to encounter such openness in a man. He feels like someone I can trust. When we land, I will send him another text. And when we finally meet, I will explain why I came to his village. Tell him my story.

  CHAPTER 97

  Silas stares at a printout of the latest list of Berlin missing persons on his laptop, sent through by his colleagues in the Bundeskriminalamt—BKA—the federal investigative police agency in Germany. Its head office in Wiesbaden also acts as Interpol’s National Central Bureau for the country, which is why Silas went there first for help.

  Ward’s not going to like this. Silas doesn’t like it. He looks around the squad room, which is busy today, full of response officers. Why aren’t they out on the street? Work is what you do, not a place you go to. Word’s got around that he’s on a potentially big case, and people have been throwing glances in his direction all morning.

  “Are you sure they’re all here?” he asks Strover, who is scrolling through the list on her laptop too. She’s already diced and sliced the data—her phrase, not his—searching for people who have disappeared in Berlin and have a first name that matches the labels of Tony’s pictures in the gallery.

  “All seven of them—three males, four females. Four of them are British. Two Americans, one German. No one’s over thirty. And they all disappeared from Berlin between five and ten years ago.”

  Silas should be pleased with the breakthrough, but the implications fill him with dread. A network of loss and pain, spreading out from a small village in Wiltshire. Each person’s file includes name and age, country of birth and place of disappearance. The more detailed ones also list parents’ names, language spoken and distinguishing marks. Lacerated wrists come up too often for his liking. Conor cut his wrists once.

  It could all be coincidence, of course, but Florence and Alwyn aren’t the most common names. Alwyn turns out to be a man from the UK (Holyhead). The file for Florence, also from the UK (London), says that she goes by the name of Flo. Although there’s no mention of Fleur, Silas is convinced she’s Maddie’s friend.

  “She looks like Maddie too, don’t you think?” he asks, glancing at Strover’s laptop.

  Strover is deep in concentration, studying the screen. “Flo’s identifying marks include a lotus flower tattoo on her wrist,” she says. “Exactly what Maddie had.”

  “Did you see the tattoo?”

  “Luke told me about it. He thought it might be linked to a religion connected with his daughter. Long story.”

  “It’s definitely Fleur,” Silas says, thinking aloud.

  “There was a lot of social media activity around all of them when they first went missing,” Strover says. “MySpace, Bebo, DontStayIn. Facebook and WhatsApp for the later ones.”

  Silas looks up at Strover. Conor’s mother once tried to persuade him to join a WhatsApp group with Conor, but he had refused.

  “Appeals for information,” Strover continues. “Twenty-four-hour hotlines in case of sightings. The ones I’ve checked all seem to like clubbing, according to their profiles. It’s what a lot of young people go to Berlin for.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Silas went to Berlin once, for the currywurst and Checkpoint Charlie, both of which had disappointed. The Topography of Terror, on the site of the former SS and Gestapo headquarters, had left him reeling.

  “And Tony used to take photos of DJs,” Silas adds, remembering the American’s old website. Strover looks up at him.

  “Alwyn and Flo both listed GrünesTal in their music likes,” she says. “It was a nightclub, techno mainly, on Revaler Strasse in what was once East Berlin. Closed down now.”

  “Complaints from the neighbors?”

  “Unlikely. It was a run-down part of town. Lots of old warehouses, abandoned factories. The club was in a former railway yard.”

  “We need to get an image of Maddie over to Interpol in Wiesbaden—use the one from her Indian passport,” Silas says, standing up from his desk to stretch his long legs. He’s been sitting down all morning. “They’ll forward it to the BKA office in Berlin. Ward also wants us to establish contact with Maddie.”

  A couple of response officers by the window look over at him, chatting. No doubt they think Silas is trying to get back onto the Major Crime Investigation Team again. He misses the big cases and fancy ID passes—they featured silhouettes of Sherlock Holmes and Swindon legend Isambard Kingdom Brunel—but not the collaboration with other forces. He joined Wiltshire Police to investigate local crime.

  “The phone Tony rang her on from the interview room was his wife’s old one,” Strover says, keen to get her boss’s attention again. “He’d lent it to her. We’ve checked the number—it hasn’t been turned on since.”

  “She must be using her own phone now,” Silas says. “The one she got back from lost property.”

  “Luke might have the number.”

  Silas still feels uncomfortable about Strover’s relationship with Luke. He’s proved useful so far, but he’s clearly got his own agenda and hasn’t
flown all the way to Berlin just because he thinks Maddie is his daughter. Once a journalist, always a journalist. At least he let them know he was going to Berlin. And he seems to be onside about the shooting.

  “He’s still in the air,” Strover continues. “I’ve sent a text asking him to call us as soon as he lands.”

  “About what?”

  Strover pauses. “I came across a missing person in the Berlin list called Freya. She’s Indian-looking and—”

  “And?”

  “Luke’s former girlfriend was called Freya. It might be his daughter...”

  “Stay focused, Strover,” Silas snaps. “Ask him if he’s got a number for Maddie. That’s all we’re interested in. If her phone’s switched on, Wiesbaden can locate it.”

  Silas looks at the list on his laptop again, feeling a pang of guilt for snapping at her. The list is too long, each one a personal tragedy. One day he fears it might include Conor. At least he knows where his son is. Some of these people will be found by the police or other agencies, and will choose not to let their loved ones know their whereabouts, that they are okay. Their right but a cruel one. Others will never be found.

  Silas might soon have answers for the families of seven of them. Just not the news they’ve been waiting for.

  CHAPTER 98

  Tony is semiconscious as we enter the passport control hall, still slumped in his wheelchair like a drunkard. The airport staff who met us at the airplane door is pushing him. He doesn’t speak English, and I have forgotten what little German I once knew. When we reach the front of the non-EU queue, the passport official beckons for us all to come forward together.

  “He’s asleep,” I say by way of explanation. “Doesn’t like flying—his way of coping.”

  I pass both our passports to the official, who looks at Tony, now stirring enough to open his eyes. He probably thinks Tony is just another tourist who has consumed too many in-flight drinks. He looks at his British passport and then at my Indian one.