Isolation - a heart-stopping thriller, Shutter Island meets Memento

by Neil Randall

  “That’s what she told me. But when they spoke to him, he denied having attacked me, and was so convincing, they believed him.”

  At this point, I was truly terrified. So many people had died, in circumstances so violent and bizarre, so random yet so obviously linked, I could see no clear way out for myself, so much evidence was stacking up against me.

  “So what happens now? Surely I’m not being charged with anything. I was here, locked up, when the murder took place.”

  “But that’s just it,” said Kendrick “– no you weren’t. The medical examiner who attended the scene has Richmond’s time of death at approximately eight o’clock this morning, a good hour or so after you fled Mrs Forbes-Powers’ house.”

  “But what about Michelle’s parents and Bannister? Have you spoken to them yet? Have they verified everything I told you?”

  “No they haven’t. Because neither party can be contacted. It’s as if they’ve vanished from off the face of the earth.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Whether I’d watched one American crime drama too many, it felt wise to request for a solicitor now. Every question the police asked was loaded, and I didn’t want to risk losing composure and incriminating myself. Still, it was close to dawn before a legal representative finally arrived.

  “No need to panic,” were Julian Price’s first words. “I don’t think anyone in their right mind would attempt to prosecute on this evidence.”

  Even though he must’ve been disturbed in the early hours of the morning, Price, a tall, angular, well-dressed man in his early fifties, showed no signs of tiredness or irritability. In fact, he couldn’t have appeared more alert, or better informed regarding the murders, my connection to the victims, and how I’d helped the police with their inquiries.

  “From the outset, you’ve cooperated fully with the authorities.” He sat on the bench beside me. “Now, let’s break things down. Crucially, there’s no physical evidence linking you to any of the crime scenes. So if the police suspect that you’re involved in the killings, they must think you’ve acted as an accessory, the prime suspect appearing to be Jeffrey Fuller.”

  “But he’s dead now.”

  “Exactly. So, by process of elimination, the only other credible suspect, the only other person not accounted for, is Miss Michelle Rouse. Which, neatly enough, brings us round to the diaries and letters, at best, circumstantial evidence against you.”

  “What about Michelle’s parents and Bannister? Do you think they could be involved to some degree?”

  “This is where we may face some problems: explaining your disappearance, the way you bumped into Bannister by chance, and the as yet unverified visit to the Essex farmhouse.”

  “But I swear to you. I was pushed down some steps and kept under lock and key. Everything happened just the way I told the police.”

  “And I believe you, Mr Barrowman. But it would appear that the mother, Mrs Forbes-Powers, has taken a turn for the worse, a minor stroke of some description. Being of advancing years, the doctors aren’t holding out much hope of her pulling through. And it looks as if the son has decided to make a play at being mentally incompetent.”

  “Which means?”

  “That neither mother nor son can confirm or deny that you were locked away in that basement. Although it’s clear something highly irregular took place down there.” He stared into space for a moment, as if mulling this particular point over in his head. “Then we’ve got the wooden box your girlfriend bought at Portobello Road Market, and the violent killing of Scott Richmond, someone not directly involved with your old counselling group, but a man who nonetheless had a photograph of the original murder scene on his, erm…person, when his body was found, indicating that whoever murdered him wanted to once again tie you to the victim.”

  “From what the police told me, it must’ve been the same photograph, the one that was originally stolen from my desk drawer.”

  “And I’d agree,” said Price. “So, for the time being, we really need Mr and Mrs Rouse and this Bannister chap to turn up. They’re the only people who can verify your whereabouts for the crucial hours when the latest murder took place.”

  “But they didn’t say anything about dropping out of sight. I got the impression, well, Bannister said as much, that they just wanted to talk to me first, to show me the diaries accusing them of abusing their daughter, because they knew about the diaries and letters implicating me.”

  Again Price told me not to worry. Until I was officially charged, which was highly unlikely, there was no point in upsetting myself unnecessarily. Legally speaking, the police could only hold me for another twenty-four hours. In that time, if they wanted to question me again, Price would insist on being present.

  “At some stage today, I’ll try and speak to your girlfriend, Miss Green. Undoubtedly the wooden box is a highly contentious piece of evidence, as she freely admits to having brought it to your flat.” He hesitated before asking, “You haven’t known her all that long, though, have you?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t really know all that much about her background, either?”

  “Not as such,” I said, not really liking his tone or the direction the questions were heading. “But I seriously doubt Liz has been plotting and scheming against me.”

  “But you only really got to know her after you’d received the photograph at your office, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “At this stage, then, with so many inexplicable events having taken place, I don’t think we should rule anything out.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Just that, Mr Barrowman.” He got to his feet. “Now, try and get some rest. With a bit of luck, we’ll get you out of here at some stage today.”

  The duty officer hammered on the cell door, telling me that I’d got another visitor.

  “Who is it?”

  Surprise turned to disappointment when the door swung open and in walked Michael from the office, a thin folder wedged under his arm.

  “Nige!” He shook me warmly by the hand. “So good to see you again, mate. When you went missing the other night, we all feared the worst.”

  As we sat on the bench; a uniformed officer stationed himself by the door, his arms folded across his chest.

  “Caused one hell of a stink,” said Michael, “– you going missing like that. By all accounts, the police had the Deputy-Director in for questioning. No one could understand why he’d sent you to see that old woman. It’s not like dogs fouling the pavement are anything to do with Risk and Assessment now, is it? Then it turns out that they’re previously acquainted, old friends of the family, and that she’d given him a right ear full about your attitude and telephone manner.”

  In between relaying chunks of information, much of which I could probably have guessed for myself, Michael moaned about his workload, how difficult it had been to man the office on his own, and how much he missed me (“not having you around is like losing a limb, Nige!”)

  He then took some papers out of the folder.

  “And I know this sounds a bit cheeky, but could you go through a few of these claim forms with me?”

  Strangely enough, I didn’t feel outraged or offended by this, in the way most people undoubtedly would’ve done. I mean, in little or no time I could very easily be facing a multiple murder charge, and here was my line-manager waving some outstanding paperwork under my nose.

  “This one here needs special attention.”

  It was then I realised Michael wasn’t such a lazy, self-serving, self-obsessed bastard, after all. On the top of the pile was an envelope marked for my attention, not unlike the original envelope received at the office, only of a more standard A4 size.

  “Yeah, if you could look at that one first, Nige, it would be a massive help.”

  As causally as possible, I peeled open the envelope and took out two sheets of paper.

  The Revenge of Wapasha – A Dangerous Regression in the Narciss
istic Patient

  As discussed in a previous chapter, the Native American fable about the horned owl casting a shadow of death over an innocent child can relate to a patient’s frustration when life spirals out of control, when they feel unable to alter their mood, when the complexities of their condition become too much for them to handle. In many respects, the mark of death becomes symbolic of a sense of helplessness. To counter this, patients should be encouraged to alter their myopic worldview, feeling as if everything revolves around them and their problems, to the extent that if some misfortune befalls them, however minor, they feel that the whole world is against them. Once the patient acknowledges that any individual is subject to the same random laws of fortune and misfortune, they are much better prepared to accept their fate in any given situation.

  This was not the case, however, with the protagonist in the fable. After Wapasha’s son is taken by the horned owl, he is subject to uncontrollable rage. He blames everyone else for his family’s misfortune. When he returns to the settlement, he becomes involved in many heated arguments, culminating in one violent altercation after another, until he’s ostracised from the community completely. Riding out over the plains, he goes on a murderous rampage, attacking a group of white frontiersmen, scalping men, women and children, an act which threatens severe repercussions for the rest of his people.

  In an attempt to stop this violent rage from consuming Wapasha whole, Chief Antiman reaches out to him, telling of an ancient tale about a fearsome warrior whose father was murdered by original white settlers. To avenge his death, the warrior went on a similar murderous spree, slaughtering hundreds of sworn enemies, those that had killed his beloved father. But nothing he did, no matter how bloody or disproportionate, went any way to quenching his thirst for revenge. To save the warrior from himself, a wise man from his settlement rode him out to some old caves. Once deep inside, in pitch darkness, he instructed the warrior to ingest a powerful natural hallucinogen. When the drug took effect, and for the next three weeks, he sat cross-legged in the cave, experiencing visions both wondrous and terrifying. Only when he had had this ultimate showdown with self, with the rage burning inside, when his whole life passed before his eyes, when all of nature’s wonders and terrors were shown to him, was he able to dispel the poisonous bloodlust, leave the cave and rejoin his kinfolk.

  Antiman took Wapasha to the same cave and instructed him to ingest the same hallucinogen.

  When he started to hallucinate, Wapasha became subject to similar wild visions, a tumult of past, present and future experiences, until he was eventually reunited with his murdered son. From cradle to grave, he watched him grow from infant-hood to boyhood, youth to young man. He saw the life his son would never live now, a life full of both happiness and pain. On each step of the way, Wapasha’s dead son experienced all the things Wapasha and his own young friends had experienced, which reconciled him with the cycle of life, things repeating themselves ad infinitum, how each man and woman, every creature, animal, fish or insect was an essential part of things, whether they lived out a long and peaceful existence or died an early violent death. And it was this sense of his son belonging to the cycle, no matter how cruelly and unjustly he was taken from his family, which finally quelled Wapasha’s own bloodlust.

  This addendum to the horned owl fable is instructive in many ways, especially when one considers the connection between the ancient tribe’s reliance on natural hallucinogens and the effectiveness of many modern prescription drugs in stabilising a patient’s mood. In one particular case, I treated a patient – a very conflicted, angry individual, suffering from what I have since called the Wapasha Regression – who couldn’t reconcile the anger boiling away inside of them, who could see no way out of their problems. This can be a dangerous phenomenon, one which can lead to self-harming, suicide attempts, or, as is the case of the Wapasha Regressor, violence, lashing out at everyone close to them. It is essential, therefore, that the patient be isolated and counselled one on one, that they are shown the unreasonableness of their thought processes.

  This extract gave me much to think about. If Jeffrey Fuller hadn’t been murdered, I would’ve assumed that the case study Rabie refers to was him. It all fitted into place: the angry young person struggling to deal with past events, i.e. the ambiguous sexual assault on his mother. But could this extract, now Fuller was dead, in fact have been written about Michelle? Was there something in her past that I didn’t know about, were the killings, this whole complicated plot down to her?

  “Is, erm…everything in order, Nige?”

  “Yeah, thanks so much. I don’t know—” Loud, agitated voices sounded down the corridor outside. A moment or two later, both Kendrick and Watson came rushing into the cell.

  “Something’s happened,” said Kendrick. “Miss Green, in her capacity as a volunteer with The Samaritans, has been contacted by a member of the public claiming to be Michelle Rouse.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right, Mr Barrowman. Rouse has finally made contact, and she had some very interesting, not to mention very worrying things to say about everything that has happened.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Like everything about this case,” said Kendrick, “how Miss Rouse managed to contact Miss Green at The Samaritans is completely baffling. Each call goes through to a different volunteer at random, so there’s no way she could’ve known that Miss Green would be manning that particular telephone at that particular time.”

  “Maybe she just tried time and again,” I said, with little or no conviction. “Maybe it was simply a matter of trial and error.”

  “No.” Watson shook his head. “It’s far too random to even be considered a possibility. And the very fact that Miss Rouse knows of your relationship with Miss Green indicates that she, over the last week, at the very least, has been keeping a very close eye on your activities.”

  “That, or Miss Green and Miss Rouse are acquainted, and this is all part of a sick, twisted game, a plan to wrong-foot us at every juncture.”

  This I didn’t want to linger upon. Twice in a matter of hours, Liz’s integrity had been called into question. For now, I wanted to keep my former feelings towards her, as my only friend, my only true ally in all of this, clear and untainted in my head.

  “And what did she actually say? Michelle, I mean. The interesting, worrying things you mentioned.”

  “Well.” Watson glanced at a notebook open on the tabletop. “In a tone of voice Miss Green described as strange, unnatural, lacking the usual emotion in those making disturbing disclosures, Miss Rouse told of the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child, about her parents systematically molesting her from an early age. She then went on to describe the impact this had in later life, especially during her adolescence. In particular, the way her parents manipulated the situation, primarily with doctors, counsellors and therapists, branding their own daughter a fantasist, an attention seeker, someone prepared to embellish wildly, to make ridiculous accusations, to hurt herself, even, and how this ultimately made her feel like there was nobody she could trust.”

  Yet again, this information regarding Michelle didn’t sit right in my head, because I knew how manipulative and deceitful she could be, I knew about her self-harming, her suicide attempts, and somewhat tenuous grasp of reality.

  Watson resumed, “When the caller mentioned the rather unorthodox treatment she undertook with a certain Doctor Rabie, Miss Green realised something very wrong was happening, that perhaps whoever was at the end of the phone had contacted her for a specific reason, that it might, in short, be linked to the killings. Keeping her composure, she proceeded to ask a series of standard questions regarding the caller’s life, about her friends and family, any treatments she might be currently undertaking, if she was on medication, what kind of support structure she had in place. That’s when the caller started to get angry, nasty, confrontational, abusive, spitting out all kinds of threats and accusations, telling Miss Green that she knew all a
bout her relationship with you, her arch tormentor, suggesting that you were somehow complicit in the abuse she suffered, that you were, in fact, part of a network of abusers who kept Miss Rouse as no more than a sex slave.”

  “But that’s ridiculous! I didn’t meet Michelle until we were both in our late teens, when we undertook treatment with Doctor Rabie. Any abuse she suffered as a child happened years before we became acquainted. The time lines just don’t add up. Anybody can see that.” I rubbed both hands up and down my face. “We were boyfriend and girlfriend, we moved in together, we shared a flat for years. And while we might not have been your average twenty-something couple, while we might’ve had our problems, I certainly wasn’t involved in any kind of sexual abuse.”

  Watson and Kendrick shared a doubtful glance; the one that had unnerved me so much of late.

  “But that’s where the mystery deepens,” said Watson. “In the course of a previous line of inquiry, we found that some of Miss Rouse’s medical records were classified. On receiving the necessary clearance to view them – and this was literally a few hours ago – we discovered that there had been a history of sexual abuse, that, in short, Miss Rouse had been abused as both a child and young adult. Why this information was initially withheld, not one of our medical officers can satisfactorily explain. In light of this new information, we’ve put out an arrest warrant for both Mr and Mrs Rouse, and the Bannister chap, the so-called private detective, the man you allege was working for them.”

  This changed everything, not just about the ongoing investigation into the murders, but huge chunks of my past life, my entire relationship with Michelle, every moment we’d shared together.

  “Now, Mr Barrowman, as I’m sure you appreciate, considering the nature of Miss Rouse’s disclosures, we’re going to have to take steps to ensure the safety of everyone involved.”

  “Safety? Why? Did Michelle make specific threats?”