Mr. Nobody

by Catherine Steadman

  Then in the crowd I see a flash of red hair, a face I instantly recognize. It takes me a second to realize that I only know her from a photograph, though. Chris’s wife. Zara Poole’s red hair is pulled back slickly in a fashionably low bun, her Dictaphone ready in hand. Her expression changes as her gaze finds mine, her smile slipping from her face.

  I hadn’t realized she was press. We lock eyes only for an instant—there’s something disconcerting in the way she’s staring. It’s not that she recognizes me from school, it’s not that, it’s something else, and it frightens me.

  31

  THE MAN

  DAY 11—BURIED

  That night Matthew has a dream. A dream so real he cannot clear it from his mind on waking. In the dream he is alone in the ward garden. Everything is so real in this dream, the scent of the plants and the malty earth, the soft rain and the rustle of the trees. He somehow knows his memory has returned, though he does not attempt to access it. He sits quietly, contented, in the garden and closes his eyes. He lets the breeze play across his face but slowly he becomes aware of a sound and his eyes flicker open. The new sound is coming to him from deep inside the landscaped bushes and shrubs of the hospital garden; it is constant, a scraping noise. Scraping, scratching.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch.

  He cannot ignore it. He rises from the stone bench and looks around the garden. There is no one there. He cannot see where the noise is coming from, but it sounds like digging, a creature digging in the mud. The sound makes him shudder.

  It seems to be coming from the bushes behind the stone bench. He looks around to see if anyone has come out to the garden and heard it, but as he looks up at the windows surrounding the garden he notices that there is no one anywhere. It’s almost as if the whole hospital were abandoned, with only him remaining. It is just him and the horrible scratching.

  He looks back toward the bushes where the sound is coming from. It grows louder, more insistent, like a rat trapped behind a skirting board.

  It scares him to think what it may be, back there, what he’ll see if he looks. But the noise continues and he knows there is only one way to stop it. He steps toward it, going behind the bench and pushing through the fronds of foliage. He pushes on deeper into the dark branches.

  And then he sees him.

  A man, kneeling half-hidden, digging in the undergrowth. The man does not look up at Matthew. He just keeps digging, head bowed, scrabbling and clawing with bare hands at the mud. He is burying something, something small. Something important. There is something important buried in the garden. The back of the man’s head is dripping with blood. The digging man is so focused on his task he doesn’t seem to have noticed his terrible wound. Matthew knows this because the man is him.

  Matthew wakes sweating.

  The clock in his room reads 4:39. He sits bolt upright in the dark, his heart pounding, listening for the sounds of the hospital around him.

  He’s not sure if the dream means something or if he should just go back to sleep. Was it a memory, distorted by dreams? Or just a nightmare? Dr. Lewis warned him that the memory exercises they worked on might trigger connections. He recalls the noise in the dream, the noise in the darkness between the plants, insistent, and he squeezes his eyes shut.

  Moments later he is out of bed, pulling on his shoes and the puffer jacket Rhoda gave him. He slips from the shadows of his room into the brightly lit corridor, makes his way tentatively past the empty nurses’ station and down toward the ward garden. He ducks smoothly into the toilets as an aide passes; he waits a moment and then heads on. The door to the snow-encrusted garden is propped open for night-shift smokers and he slips out easily into the night.

  He is certain now that there will be something there. Hidden in the earth. Answers maybe.

  When he reaches the stone bench he stops, shivering, the dizzying feeling from his dream returning. He looks up at the sky, clear and starry above, his breath clouding in the air, and he suddenly doubts himself. He thinks of the progress he’s making, of Emma, beautiful Emma, of how she wants to help him. Of how she held him, how she’s trying to fix him. Perhaps he should go back to bed, curl up in the darkness and the warmth and wait for things to come clear. Every day things seem to be getting clearer. He watches mesmerized as the frost-glittered plant fronds behind the stone bench sway in the night breeze.

  It can’t hurt to look behind there, can it?

  He pushes his way into the icy foliage, listening carefully for the sounds of anyone approaching from the ward. Just like in the dream, he finds a small clearing behind the bushes.

  Kneeling on the ground, hidden from sight, he starts to move the soft dirt aside, scraping at the mud with his fingers.

  Perhaps it was just a dream, he decides, perhaps I really am going mad after all. He claws deeper and then his nails hit plastic.

  Half a foot down, a Ziploc bag in the soil. He stops abruptly, stunned to have actually found something. He looks around, listening, but there is only the distant bleeping of call buzzers, the breeze in the laden branches. He looks down at the small bag, at the glint of metal inside. He doesn’t know what it means yet, not exactly, or how it got here, but it seems like the first step toward finding out. Someone put this here for him. He pulls it loose from the crumbly soil and slips it into his jacket.

  32

  ZARA POOLE

  DAY 11—AHEAD OF THE GAME

  Zara Poole is driving along the coastal road between Wells and Holkham at 7 A.M. on a Saturday morning on her way to doorstop Emma Lewis.

  The address Zara was given by her contact at the hospital was odd. A house essentially in the middle of nowhere. She expected Dr. Lewis to be closer to the hospital, that would have seemed more logical, but this address doesn’t. Not to someone who knows the area. But then, something is off about all of this, as far as Zara is concerned.

  Her contact at the hospital, a porter she’d been slipping money to, had been pretty accurate so far. He’d informed her prior to anyone else knowing that a new doctor would be coming, although she hadn’t had quite enough time to make any real impact with the knowledge. But the next text she’d received from him three days later had been pure gold. The porter had texted her at 3 A.M. on Thursday, the same night Chris had received that text from Emma. The bright light of Zara’s phone had briefly illuminated their dark bedroom, Chris sleeping peacefully beside her. It said:

  He’s talking.

  He’s British.

  No memory.

  A flash of joy cut through the disappointment of Chris’s text because finally she had her story. She was the first to get it. Which meant that she had something that other people would want.

  She’d quietly slipped out of bed, grabbed some clothes, and headed down to the kitchen. She’d typed up a page of copy, fresh coffee standing by, and then she’d made some calls. Not to the local paper she was currently working for but to contacts she’d been working on for a while. She had new information on Mr. Nobody—she hadn’t come up with the name herself, the Mail had, but everyone was using it—and she could send through her piece if they were interested in running it. It was source-verified. If needs be she could even give her source’s name; she knew she could easily get another one at Princess Margaret’s. Who didn’t like free money?

  She sold the story once and then again and again, and by daybreak, when she was pretty much the sole reporter in the country covering the story, she’d grabbed some toast and headed straight into the storm brewing down at the Princess Margaret Hospital.

  By mid-morning a whole new swarm of journalists had descended, eager to find out what Mr. Nobody was finally saying now he could talk. The story was gaining momentum, with newscasters and networks from other countries jostling alongside the crews she was already starting to recognize. Which was fantastic as far as Zara was concerned; there was more than enough to go around, and
she was getting article requests from papers and magazines she’d never even heard of, across Europe and now America too. Her preparation had finally paid off.

  * * *

  —

  That was two days ago but it was yesterday that things really kicked off. Zara had simply asked Chris, at breakfast, not for the first time, if there had been any breakthroughs since Mr. Nobody had started talking.

  “Apparently, he’s not making much sense at the moment. We’ve been asked by the hospital to defer questioning him again until he starts remembering. His doctor doesn’t want to run the risk of setting his recovery back at this stage,” Chris had told her.

  He hadn’t mentioned the text he’d received from Dr. Lewis. He hadn’t brought any of that up. Not the list of school staff she’d asked him for either. And he certainly hadn’t mentioned asking her out for a drink. So neither had Zara.

  But then a call had come through on her iPhone and she’d slipped out into the garden to take it. It was her contact at the hospital; the call was rushed and muffled, clearly made in haste. The Metropolitan Police had just arrived at the hospital. Something big was happening.

  Either Chris was keeping more things from her or the Met hadn’t told even the local police what was happening. A family was on their way to the hospital to ID Mr. Nobody. The Taylors. The parents of missing Benjamin Taylor.

  Because of her, the press were prepped and ready when the Taylors arrived. They’d known the right questions to ask, and as the couple breezed past them without stopping, they got their pictures, they got their “no comments,” but most important they got their articles. And then an hour later they got even more.

  Mr. Nobody wasn’t Benjamin Taylor, the text she received made that very clear. Again, Zara heard it first. The porter had been in the corridor after the meeting, he’d stood back and watched as Mrs. Taylor gave a sad little shake of her head in answer to DC Barker’s question. Matthew wasn’t their son.

  Zara watched Emma leaving the hospital last night. She’d been ready, she’d seen her before, of course, the day she arrived at the hospital when Mike pointed her out as they stood in the coffee shop queue. She’d thought, at the time, she’d looked interesting, smart, and reassuringly out of place. Zara had always felt slightly out of place too; she recognized the look in others.

  But last night, with her chestnut hair caught in the wind, cheeks rosy from the camera flashes and the flurry of shouts around her, she’d looked beautiful, Zara had to admit. She hated herself for bringing it down to that but she could understand why Chris might find her attractive—although the idea of it made her stomach lurch with heartbreaking apprehension. The thoughts started spiraling out of her grasp: her Chris with a doctor from London, a beautiful, clever, rich doctor. Her Chris. A possessiveness she didn’t realize she could muster bristling hard inside her, Zara had just stood and stared, until their eyes had locked. And Emma had looked back at her, haunted, before disappearing into the night. That’s when Zara had made her decision.

  Zara would find out who Emma was. For the story, of course. She would ask her woman-to-woman: What was going on with the case? Why was she here? And maybe, just maybe, Emma’s connection with Chris would make sense. Maybe everything was actually okay.

  Zara pulls off the main road and down onto the snow-covered drive of Cuckoo Lodge, wincing at the noise her tires make on the gravel. Obviously it’s not meant to be a stealth mission, but the element of surprise does tend to help when someone is opening their front door to a stranger.

  There’s the chance, of course, that Emma Lewis could just slam the door in her face.

  At the end of the drive, Zara pushes her car door closed as quietly as she can and looks up at the house.

  She can understand why Emma chose this place. She makes her way through the snow-encrusted picket gate up to the gabled front door and knocks. The sound echoes through the empty house. She waits, then she tries again, harder.

  No sound within but echoes. Outside, the sound of the wind through the trees and the occasional burst of birdsong.

  She bends now, pushing open the mail slot. “Hello? Dr. Lewis? It’s Zara Poole, I was wondering if we could talk?” No reply, just the sound of her own breathing. She hopes she doesn’t sound angry or desperate or pathetic, like a crazy girlfriend or a wronged wife looking for an argument, because that’s not what she is. That’s not why she’s here. Chris can do what he likes with his life, she reasons. If he’d rather be with someone else, there’s not really anything she can do about that, is there? she asks herself. You can’t make people love you, she knows that. And Zara doesn’t want to be one of those people, a scorned wife, a victim, the one left behind. So, best not to rail against it, best to take it on the chin, keep her cards close and see how the game plays out. She’s just here for her story, she tells herself. Once she’s got the story, she’ll go.

  Zara straightens and looks up to the darkened windows. No one is in. She turns to look back at the drive. And then she notices. The doctor’s little gray car is nowhere to be seen.

  She must have already left for the hospital.

  Zara pauses. She casts her eyes down the gravel driveway, weighing up her options. She looks back at the empty house.

  If she does this, she thinks, she might be able to get away with it. She would definitely be able to hear someone coming down that long gravel drive. She’d certainly have enough time to get out, if she goes in.

  She tries the front door handle. It pivots all the way down under her hand but the door does not budge. Locked. She smiles wryly to herself. Of course it’s locked. Nobody leaves their front door unlocked, not even in Norfolk. She turns to leave. Then she changes her mind.

  She goes around to the back of the house and tugs at the patio door. It won’t budge. She doubles back to the side of the house; low to the ground there’s a long thin window, a basement window. She crouches to peer in. A dim utility room beyond. She gives the corner of the window a swift tug and nicks a nail. Locked.

  She sucks her finger to dampen the smarting and thinks about what to do next. Suddenly concerned, she scans high along the eaves of the house for a security camera. Nothing.

  Stepping back from the small window, she thinks of her options. She can just see around the side of the building to her car from here. The drive remains otherwise empty. She makes up her mind and swiftly walks up to the window, cautiously looking both ways before cocking her right foot back and kicking as hard as she can. The smash is loud and satisfying. She braces herself for a burglar alarm but no siren sounds. She nudges out the remaining loose shards with a heeled boot before leaning forward to check the hole.

  Inside, the house is quiet and dark. Zara dusts off her trench coat and scans the dark utility room. She doesn’t really know what she’s looking for, she’s never done anything like this before, but she knows she needs to find something and it almost definitely won’t be in the utility room.

  She heads up the basement stairs, gently opens the door at the top, and steps into the immaculate kitchen. Still no alarm sounds. If she can just find something, anything, to help explain what is going on, why this woman is here, who she is, and how she knows Chris.

  Zara takes in the Victorian kitchen, full fruit bowls, fresh flowers in vases, and wonders when the doctor actually has time to do all of this. Perhaps the house is serviced. Because it’s perfect. So effortlessly perfect.

  She tears her gaze away and wanders on through into the living room populated by deep sofas and expensive rugs. But thankfully, it’s messier in here, a soft cashmere throw tossed haphazardly on the sofa, a smudged wineglass on the floor beneath, a tannin stain chalky inside, a dirty plate. So, Dr. Lewis is a human after all.

  And then Zara sees it. A glint. The edge of something poking out from under the rich fawn of the throw. The matte silver sheen of it. She reaches down and pulls it out. Emma’s laptop.


  Zara sits down on the sofa next to it, one hand resting lightly on its smooth brushed-metal lid. If she does this then there’s no going back, she thinks. But then, she’s already come this far. She’s already broken into someone’s home. What difference would looking make?

  Still she hesitates. She might find something she doesn’t like. There could be emails from Chris, more messages. What if looking through her laptop somehow changes everything? She would have to go home to Chris knowing but not being able to say.

  No. It’s better to look, she decides. Yes, better to know.

  She flips the lid and spins the laptop around to face her. It opens to desktop, the tab open on the last page Emma looked at—Chris’s Facebook page.

  Zara’s heart skips a beat, her jaw hardens.

  She minimizes the screen and pulls up Emma’s iMessages; she scrolls to Chris’s name and reads.

  Sorry to text so late. Would it be possible to get a list of past employees at Waltham House? I can’t say why just yet but I think it might be helpful. Also, might have to rain check that drink. Snowed under.

  Emma x

  No problem, totally understand. I’ll get on it & let you know asap & I just want to say it was great to see you today Marn. Chris x

  It’s Emma, Chris! X

  Shit, sorry x

  Zara stares at the screen, frowning. She reads the messages again, trying to make sense of them. She sits in stillness for a moment and then pulls up Google.

  She types “Marn Lewis” and taps search.

  Nothing.

  She tries “Dr. Marn Lewis” and taps search.

  Nothing.

  She tries “Marn, Norfolk.”

  The search autocorrects to “Marni, Norfolk” and below it pages and pages of search results appear.