Lost in the Lake

by A J Waines

  I dipped the last of my pasty in the tomato sauce and decided to see if Miranda was at the gallery. I wanted nothing more than to make contact, feel connected, feel attached to the one person I hoped would be a cornerstone in my life. Finding out that she and Con had been…well, it was devastating and had hurt me more than I could ever have imagined. But, my relationship with Con had been over for months and I had to find a way to cope with it.

  I walked into the main display area, the café and workshop in turn, but Miranda wasn’t around so I approached someone in the foyer.

  ‘Miranda’s not in, today. She works at home a lot. Shall I tell her you came by?’

  ‘No, it’s okay…’

  I wandered out like a lost dog unable to find its owner.

  Unwilling to go back now without at least seeing my sister, I crossed the road, passed a line of cars and turned into the street where she lived.

  What was the point of this? If she was painting she wouldn’t want to be disturbed and she could easily be out somewhere. Besides, she might not be alone. He might be there. Then what would I do? But still, my footsteps carried me onwards.

  I was only a few houses away, when I saw her front door open. My first thought was to hide, so I dived behind a wheelie bin at the roadside as if I was tying my shoelace.

  Miranda stepped out and turned to stretch a hand towards the person behind her. Sure enough, Con took it and locked the door behind them, like it was second nature. I cursed myself; I shouldn’t have come un-announced like this.

  They were heading towards me. I pulled up my hood and turned straight through someone’s gateway, hoping no one was home. Standing on tiptoe to see over the high hedge, I watched them walk hand in hand up the road. A scorching pain flared under my ribcage. I hurried back to the pavement and strode out in their direction, staying on the opposite side of the road, watching them. They swung their arms like children and Miranda nuzzled into his neck. Not serious, eh?

  They reached the end of the road and turned in the opposite direction from the gallery, heading along the high street. I half jogged to get a bit closer; with more people around it would be easy to lose them. What was I doing? What was I hoping to gain? I knew the answer straight away. I wanted to see how they were with each other. I wanted to see what their relationship was like for myself, not hear a watered down version of it from Miranda.

  They went into a fashion boutique and I feigned interest in a shop window opposite, trying to find them in the reflection. I heard Con laugh as they moved on and took off after them, staying on the other side of the street.

  I remembered the last time I’d been alone with Con. I’d left him sitting on a bench at a National Trust property with only a bottle of whisky for company. We hadn’t spoken since. I’d had a few measly postcards from him telling me when his next film was coming out, that’s all.

  When had it started with my sister? Had they talked about me, about how they would keep it a secret? I was quite prepared for Con to let me down, but not Miranda. That felt like one twist of the knife too far. Except, could I really call it betrayal, when I was the one who had ended it?

  I kept a steady distance until they reached the park. At times they hugged, walked arm in arm or had their arms wrapped tightly around one another, always in contact. It was difficult to watch, yet I was transfixed. I kept wondering how often we’d done that, Con and I. Not often. That had probably been my fault. He’d always criticised me for not throwing myself into the relationship.

  Miranda skipped along beside him until they found a bench under a sprawling horse chestnut. They huddled together, Miranda reaching inside his coat to bury her face in the crook of his shoulder.

  From time to time they exchanged words and looked at each other and kissed. Miranda gave him a playful punch at one point. Then they kissed for a long time.

  Why did I let him go?

  I had to pull myself up short. Hold on. Be realistic. This wasn’t the full picture. Con had been moody and aggressive whenever other men came on the scene. I’d only had to mention a name and he’d bristled. It happened time and time again. That wasn’t what I wanted. Perhaps he was different with Miranda. In any case, I didn’t need to be concerned. She wouldn’t put up with any nonsense. She was never one to hold back if something was cramping her style.

  For a while, I hovered at the edge of the grass, watching, stepping from side to side to keep warm. I checked my watch a few times, so I’d look like I was waiting for someone. Pathetic. What had I been reduced to?

  I was exposed now and it was difficult to stay close without being seen. I began to worry that one of them would look up and recognise me so I turned, head down, and hurried back to the bus stop.

  When I got home, I blocked my number and called Con’s mobile. As it rang, I pictured him still sitting where I’d left them. Wrapped around each other, oblivious to the cold.

  ‘Yup…’ came his chocolately actor’s baritone.

  ‘It’s Samantha – er, sorry to bother you.’

  ‘Sam…’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘It’s okay, by the way – I know about you and Miranda and I’m…fine with it…honestly. I know that Miranda lost the baby, too.’ My voice cracked. ‘You can tell me to mind my own business, but I need to know…one thing.’

  I heard a roar of traffic. They were still outside.

  He was going to put the phone down, I just knew it. I gripped the receiver, as if by holding tightly enough I wouldn’t lose him.

  He cleared his voice. ‘Didn’t you ask Mirrie?’ he said.

  ‘Mirrie? Who’s M—’

  There was so much I wasn’t party to. He sounded like a total stranger and he was turning my sister into one too.

  ‘You and I haven’t seen each other for over a year, right?’ he said coldly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Haven’t I the right to move on?’

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s just—’

  Why was I so desperate to know whether he was the father of her child or not? Couldn’t I let it go?

  ‘Is that everything?’ he said. He was enjoying exerting this power over me.

  ‘No…no, it’s not...are you going to brush this away without..?’ I could hear my voice splintering and felt a tear roll down my cheek.

  ‘Mirrie wants a word,’ he said. There was a crackle and my sister came on the line.

  ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ she said chirpily. There was a tiny hesitation. ‘We’d like you…to…you know…come and have lunch or something, sometime.’

  I admired her bravery in attempting to smooth things over, but I wanted answers. Was I overreacting? Would any normal person think that I had no right to know the whole story, that this was none of my business?

  ‘That would be…lovely,’ I said.

  I could think of nothing worse. My feelings of betrayal cut too deeply to move on so quickly. How could I sit there, helping myself to another fondant fancy, carrying on a merry conversation with this hanging over us? It wasn’t so much that she and Con had been to bed together, it was the fact that Miranda had been with Con in a relationship, had got pregnant and never told me. It made me feel shut out, totally disregarded, trampled on. ‘Got to go – someone at the door,’ I muttered.

  I put down the receiver and sank down onto the sofa, burying my face in the stale cushions.

  Chapter 33

  Sam

  Rosie was due any minute, but I was weary after a hectic day at the hospital and had a churning stomach ache. I should have been reading through the notes I’d made last week, but my mind was meandering all over the place. It had leapt to a different time altogether. How it had all started – last Christmas. Scenes began playing out inside my head.

  It began with a call from Joanne on my mobile, late one evening. She sounded like she had been running, was out of breath and babbling something about not feeling safe in a whispery voice.

  ‘Can you come over, please, just this once,’ she’d rasped at the other e
nd. ‘I’m not feeling right at all.’

  Joanne was only seventeen and had been seeing me for three months at the hospital for severe anxiety following the stabbing of a fellow student at college. She’d mentioned having suicidal thoughts during our early sessions, but we seemed to be making progress and I judged her to be no longer at risk.

  ‘You know I can’t do that,’ I said. ‘You know I’m not able to see you outside of hospital hours, but you can get help in lots of other ways.’ I’d given her the numbers of 24-hour helplines so many times that she knew them off by heart, but I ran through them again and explained that I’d contact her GP the next day, if she wanted me to. All the usual steps.

  ‘I don’t want to speak to a stranger,’ she’d pleaded. ‘I only want to speak to you. Please come.’

  Joanne wasn’t living with her parents, because they’d had a terrible row about her boyfriend. Her father had more or less kicked her out, though her mother wasn’t happy about it. As a result, Joanne lived with a bunch of rowdy students in a house due to be demolished – not the best environment for her in my view.

  ‘I can spend a few minutes on the phone with you now,’ I told her, ‘But that’s all. You’re due to see me tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. We can talk again then.’ I’d already had a telling off from my supervisor for giving her my mobile number to use ‘in an emergency’.

  Joanne had sounded desperate and started to cry, but it wasn’t me she needed – just someone who would listen, be with her and calm her down. There were plenty of trained and willing volunteers out there who could do that job just as well as I could.

  That’s what I thought, anyway.

  ‘Can’t we bring our session forward to tonight, instead, at my bedsit?’ she sobbed.

  It had been drilled into me, during my training, to watch out for patients who tried to manipulate situations. Dr Rosen would have said Joanne was using classic techniques to test me. He’d already warned me that turning up to ‘rescue’ her would only feed into her early childhood fantasies and ruin all our work together.

  I knew it made sense, but nevertheless I’d always felt there had to be exceptions. She was only seventeen – she was allowed to need rescuing at seventeen, wasn’t she?

  But I didn’t step in.

  I should have acted on my instincts. Joanne was vulnerable and felt like my responsibility. I should have been there for her.

  ‘I’m sorry, that won’t be possible,’ I’d told her. ‘It’s nearly ten o’clock and it’s not the way this works. You managed to call me. You need to call one of the other numbers I gave you…’

  Even as I said it, I knew at the back of my mind that I was wrong.

  Her morning session came and went and that’s when I bolted over to her house. But I was too late.

  Her parents came to St Luke’s every day for five days after I found Joanne’s body, to point the finger at me for letting her die. There was nothing I could say or do to ease their pain. I’d let Joanne down. I’d failed her because I’d stuck to the rules.

  The intercom buzzed and I let Rosie in.

  She walked brusquely past me towards her chair and started talking before she sat down, obviously agitated and upset.

  ‘…so I want to know why you don’t like me,’ she said, glaring at me.

  ‘What? What’s happened? What makes you say that?’ I said, hurrying to catch up with her.

  ‘You don’t, do you? You want to get rid of me.’

  Where had this sudden outburst come from? ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘I want to do my very best to help you.’

  ‘That’s not the same,’ she retorted, eyeballing me. ‘It’s always like this. People never like me and I don’t know why.’

  I swallowed back a weighty sigh. We were in for a long haul.

  ‘I was bullied at school for being fat and weird,’ she went on, ‘and an orphan – let’s not forget that.’ She gave a spluttery laugh. ‘Everyone thought that was a terrific reason to poke fun at me. When I grew up, people avoided me. Men only take any interest if they want sex and women aren’t proper friends at all. When I try to get to know them better, they make excuses. Like Dawn, from upstairs. I don’t know why. If I knew why, I’d fix it.’ She clapped her hands. ‘There you are – that’s Rosie Chandler, Miss Personality of the Year, in a nutshell.’

  I let my eyes settle on hers. ‘Shall I tell you what I think?’ I said.

  ‘That’s the idea,’ she huffed.

  I was too tired to beat about the bush. ‘I think you’ve never been part of a healthy family. You’ve never seen proper love for yourself. Your father wasn’t a good role model and your mother was too busy keeping your father at bay to give you the attention you deserved.’

  Her eyes started to well up, but she didn’t direct them away from me. ‘You’ve been pushed from pillar to post growing up,’ I went on, ‘one foster family to the next, neglected and overlooked.’

  The trickle of tears turned into full, body-shaking sobs.

  ‘You don’t really know how to have deep relationships,’ I told her, ‘you don’t really know what love is all about.’

  ‘You see, that’s why I come here,’ she whimpered. ‘Because you understand.’ She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. ‘How come you “get” it, when other people don’t? They don’t give me a chance.’

  I held the tissue box out for her. She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth, glancing up at me as if hoping I’d offer her a hug. I was determined not to, this time. It was too easy for Rosie to misinterpret those responses. She’d initiated several embraces before, ‘accidentally’ touched me on a few occasions; brushed her hand against mine or patted my arm as she’d left. I needed to keep my distance. Finally she sat back and the tears dried up.

  ‘Did you cover this kind of issue with your last therapist?’ I said, without taking my eyes off her.

  ‘Not really. She was older, for a start.’ She began tracing a pattern on the chair arm with her finger. ‘She wasn’t as smart as you.’

  I’d finally heard from Professor Dean earlier in the week to say that half of Erica’s notes were missing. He didn’t want to hand over an incomplete record, so he was checking with Guy’s Hospital and Erica’s husband, to see if she’d kept any at home. He said he’d get back to me.

  Rosie wiped her cheek with the cuff of her blouse and sighed several times. Then she changed the subject.

  ‘I’ve brought the DVD of the party like you asked me to.’ She placed it on the table in front of her, sounding flat, disinterested.

  We watched it from the beginning, in silence. Several scenes in, I pressed pause.

  ‘There…’ I said, staring at a figure near a parlour palm, twitching in the freeze-frame. I shifted forward and pointed. ‘Him. The tall, thin guy, standing on his own behind Karl Hinds?’

  ‘Yeah?’ She looked nonplussed.

  ‘Didn’t you say last time that you knew him? I can’t remember his name.’

  ‘Him?’ Her finger hovered over the shape. ‘Oh…no, I don’t think so. I only knew a few people – mostly the Hinds’ family.’

  ‘Let’s rewind and see it again. Watch his jerky mannerisms,’ I said.

  She peered at the screen as it ran again and shook her head. ‘No – I don’t know who that is.’

  ‘I think it could be the guy from the auction house who tried to sell the watch,’ I said. ‘You remember that bit of phone footage you showed me?’

  ‘You mean Teddy Spense?’

  ‘Yes, that was his name. Look at his posture.’

  ‘But, this was fifteen years ago,’ she said. ‘Surely he’d have changed a lot by now?’

  ‘Look at the way he’s shifting from one leg to the other, playing with his hair, fiddling with his pockets. Have you got your phone handy?’

  She looked unconvinced, but reached for her mobile. She played me the few seconds of blurred footage.

  ‘See? The way he tips his head to one side, the hunch o
f his shoulders?’ I reiterated. There was definitely more than a similarity. It’s part of my job to tune in to people’s body language; something I can’t help but pay attention to.

  ‘If I’m right, you’ll need to take it to the police,’ I said. ‘It looks like this “Teddy” bloke was there in 2001 and at the roadside just after the crash collecting his pickings. Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?’

  She was shaking her head. ‘Sorry, Sam. It’s not ringing any bells for me. I don’t think it’s the same person.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Cameron Hinds know who this guy is?’ I said, pointing to the TV screen. Her expression didn’t change. ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’

  ‘I can contact him, I suppose, see what he says. I want to get to the bottom of this more than anyone, but that’s not the guy who tried to sell the watch. I’m certain.’

  Pity. It was the one tenuous thread we had linking the party to the crash, the one single overlap, but perhaps she was right; the images were fuzzy and lots of people shared similar mannerisms.

  Was I trying to find a link where there wasn’t one? Was I engineering a breakthrough so Rosie could find closure and our sessions could end?

  ‘We’re still stuck,’ she said despondently, as if she’d heard my thoughts.

  She had a point. There was so little to go on. Nothing concrete pointing to where her viola was, who had sabotaged the seatbelts, why someone had wanted the van to go into the lake.

  ‘But we’ve got six more sessions left,’ I said, trying to sound buoyant, but also reminding her of our agreement. ‘We can make a lot more headway in that time.’ I cleared my throat to make sure I had her attention. ‘I’ll give you a list of people I can recommend in a week or two,’ I added. There was no way I was going to get caught out this time.