Oh no. No, no, no.
He knows he’s been found out and he’s going back to finish what he started. Two weeks ago Stephen Merriman tried to commit suicide and failed and today he’s heading back to the same spot. He doesn’t want to be Stephen. He doesn’t want to go back to that life. I understand his thinking: Once the press get hold of this information, Stephen’s life will be plastered across the Internet for all to judge. If his life wasn’t hard already, it will be unbearable once his identity breaks. I have to stop him from doing what I think he might be doing. I pocket his phone and run.
* * *
—
I burst out of the security door at the back of the hospital and into the car park, colliding with Rhoda coming the other way. Her hands fly to her chest with surprise but I barely slow to register her before sprinting on toward my rental car. I fish around desperately in my bag for the car keys but I can’t seem to find them anywhere. Frantic, I tip the entire contents of the bag out onto the tarmac. “Everything okay?” Rhoda asks, crouching to help me scoop up the contents of my bag. “Graceford was looking for you. She’s gone to the garden.”
Shit, Graceford. I don’t have time for that right now, the last thing this situation needs is a uniformed police officer.
“Someone’s taken my car keys,” I blurt instead. “I left my bag in Matthew’s room, and now my keys are gone.” I realize I must look insane to her, scrambling around on the ground sifting through my worldly possessions. Two more missed calls from Peter on my mobile. Ugh. “Fuck, I literally just had them,” I mutter. Either someone took them, or I must have dropped them or put them down somewhere.
“Did you find Matthew?” She frowns down at me, confused.
I’m not really listening. I’m scanning the car park for something heavy. I remember what the man at the car rental company said. There’s a spare key inside the car manual folder in the glove box, passenger side. I see what I’m looking for over by the wall next to the clinical waste bins.
That’ll do.
I race over to it.
“Because I can’t find him anywhere. I looked in the garden, and he’s not on the ward or out here. Should we tell security?” Rhoda calls over to me, her tone anxious.
I heft the brick in my bandaged hand as I run back to the car.
This should work. But then, I’ve never really done this before, so what would I know?
“He’s gone,” I say, breathlessly pulling up opposite her, the car between us. She eyes the brick. “But I think I know where he’ll be.” I pull back my arm as Rhoda finally seems to put two and two together.
“Wait!” she shouts as I start swinging the brick forward. “What the hell are you doing with that, you crazy—”
The car window flashes milky on impact, shattering to crumbs. My hand burns white-hot as the sharp crumbles of glass rain over it and I drop the brick. I use my elbow now to push in the crumbled glass that still holds. Once it’s clear, I reach through the gap, pop open the glove box door, pull out the manual and unearth the key. My hand is on fire. I flex the fingers and use my other hand to depress the spare door fob. The satisfying clunk of the central locking opening. We’re in.
I peer at Rhoda over the roof of the car. “Rhoda, can you drive?” She stares at me openmouthed. If the pain in my hand weren’t so bad, I might find her expression quite funny.
“Rhoda! Can you drive?” I say louder, shouting now.
She seems to recover and her focus clicks in. She may not have been her best self in the crisis yesterday, but I almost see her make the decision that she damn well will be today.
“Yes, I can drive,” she answers. She yanks open the unlocked driver’s door and slides in. I brush the glass crumbs from the passenger seat with the sleeve of my coat as I dive in next to her, slamming the door behind me.
I push the ignition key into her outstretched palm and we lock eyes.
“Where to?” she says turning the engine over and slipping smoothly into first gear.
“The beach. Head out toward Holkham—that’s where he’ll be. We need to get there fast, Rhoda!” I say. She nods, and once we calmly clear the security barrier she presses her foot on the accelerator and we screech out onto the road.
41
DR. EMMA LEWIS
DAY 13—BACK WHERE WE STARTED
The car hares down the snowy country lanes, Rhoda’s hands tightly gripping the wheel as we bend sharply into the next turn.
I pray that we don’t hit a patch of ice.
I’ve had time to think as we drive. I tried to call Chris, but outside of King’s Lynn the phone signal has dropped away and I don’t have the benefit of the lodge’s Wi-Fi out here. The only way to get help is to find it in person or get somewhere with reception. But we don’t have time for that.
Up ahead it comes into view, the lay-by and the path leading directly down to the beach. He’ll be there. God, I hope he’ll be there. My eyes shoot to Rhoda. “Once you drop me, just go!” I shout over the wind buffeting through my broken window. “Just go. Okay? Get to somewhere with phone signal and call Chris Poole.”
I scramble into my bag for my wallet, fumble out the crumpled slip of paper with Chris’s phone number, and thrust it at her.
“Do you understand, Rhoda? Don’t call the police! All right?”
Her eyes flash to me for a second as she shifts down into third gear, and then she quickly snatches the paper. She moistens her lips, eyes back on the road.
“Just Chris!” I tell her again. “Okay? Whatever you do, do not call the police.” If Stephen is there to take his own life, the sight of multiple uniformed police officers showing up to potentially arrest him is not going to help me convince him that everything is going to be okay.
I search Rhoda’s face. She’s weighing my request. She knows that the police might be exactly the people she should be calling. But her intuition will be telling her too that the police might cause more harm here than good. Police might escalate this far too quickly.
“Okay,” she answers finally, out of time, as we crunch into the lay-by. “No police. Just Chris. Got it! Go! Go!”
I fly out of the car before it stops moving, and I’m running. Pounding across the lay-by’s shingle and onto the beach path, sand flying out behind me. My breath rasps high in my throat as I hear the whine of the rental car reversing behind me. She’s going to get Chris. To get help.
Because I’m not sure I can stop him by myself.
The trail opens out onto the vast sweep of Holkham Beach, the wind pummeling me as I head up the steep bank of the nearest dune. I need a good vantage point.
I scramble to the top and catch my breath, gasping in air, a cramp spasming deep in my side. I scan the horizon.
A black speck in the distance, hard to see at first; the tide is out and he’s walked out across the wet sand to meet it. If he gets in the water at this temperature, he won’t last long before he slips under. That must be his plan, his original plan. I bound down the shifting slope and race across the endless flat of the beach.
A hundred yards from him I slow my pace, breath heaving in and out of me. He’s not wearing shoes, he’s taken them off; no coat either.
“Matthew?” I yell over the wind.
Either he doesn’t hear me or he doesn’t want to. I try again, louder, as I jog on toward him, but he doesn’t turn. I try something else.
“STEPHEN!”
He stops in his tracks.
I stop now too, twenty yards between us, and watch, panting, as he turns to face me. He holds my gaze, exposed, for a long moment. His eyes full of so much—so much apology, so much vulnerability, so much understanding—and then with a sad smile he shrugs, not carelessly but as a kind of explanation.
Something about it is so touching my heart yawns wide open in my chest. His borrowed clothes, his borrowed life, his cold
bare feet and the fact that no one even missed Stephen. Almost two weeks on the front page of every national paper, on the news daily, and only doddery old Nigel Wilton recognized him. Stephen has no one.
But Matthew, Matthew had everyone. It was a no-brainer.
He watches me as I approach him again, and when I’m close enough he opens his mouth to speak.
“It was the gates, wasn’t it?” he calls over the howl of the wind.
I nod. “And…you had a visitor today.”
He frowns, perplexed.
“Nigel. A friend of your mother’s?”
His eyebrows shoot up and he lets out a surprised laugh. “Ah, I see.”
“Stephen, I’m sorry about what happened to you. About your loss.”
He nods mutely, eyes cast across the dunes in the distance. “I never meant for all this, you know, Emma.”
“I know you didn’t,” I say.
Because we never do, do we? Any of us. Sometimes we just start down a road and before we know it things spiral out of control. People get hurt. We get hurt. “Will you come back with me, Stephen? To the hospital?”
He looks past me, back toward the forest, considering his options. “Is it just you here, Emma?”
“Yes. I got someone to drop me. They went back to get help. I wasn’t sure what I would find when I got here.” I catch a flicker of something behind his eyes and quickly add, “But I can tell them not to come. We can get somewhere with signal, then we can just sort this all out together,” I continue. “Just you and I. I promise.”
But that’s a lie. We both know it. We can’t sort this out together. Because now I know who he is. I know and I will have to tell other people and those people will tell other people and then the whole world will know that he lied. So, no, this can’t all be sorted out between us.
He knows the game has ended. Unless I decide to try to keep it going.
He studies me for a long moment, weighing his options. “I’ve been trying to get you on your own for so long now,” he says, his eyes warm with feeling. “I wanted you to know. I wanted to tell you, just you—I thought if I could explain everything to you maybe you’d understand—but there were always other people just around the corner. I wanted to be your Matthew so much.”
“Come back with me and we can talk, Stephen. I promise you. Just us.”
“I don’t think so, Emma.” He shakes his head. “I think I’ll stay here. But thank you. And I’m sorry, you know. Sorry for everything, everything that’s happened to you because of me.”
For putting my career in danger, my life. He waits for a moment, eyes cast into the distance beyond me as he gives a final nod and turns back toward the sea.
“Stephen, you don’t have to do this!” I shout after him.
He turns back suddenly, the floodgates seeming to burst within him, as words pour violently from him, vibrating with emotion.
“I do! All my life, Emma, all my life I’ve been invisible. I thought if I left here, if I went somewhere new, to London, if I started a new life, a new job, things would change. I’d live this amazing life, out there in the world. I’d have these brilliant friends and be part of something bigger, something important. I’d connect. I’d create, tell stories. But it didn’t happen that way, it just didn’t. It’s lonely out there. And people aren’t often kind, they’re just as broken and as cruel as us. I wasted years, years of my life and on what? Chasing some notion, some dream. And meanwhile the only person I ever really loved died. The only real connection I had.” He frowns. “She’d forgotten everything by the time I made it back up here. My mother. I kept putting it off. I knew she was getting worse and I waited too long. She’d forgotten me—she’d forgotten she even had a son! I don’t think people can understand how much that hurts. The only real connection you have just evaporating. I could have gone back to London after the funeral, back to my own life, back to my one-bed flat and my shitty part-time job, but why? There’s nothing there for me! I could have gone back and hoped for the best, hoped that someday…what? That I’d meet somebody? Somebody who really sees me? Who really cares? Who can get past the surface? Do you know how hard that is? The statistical likelihood of that happening? And the lonelier you get, the harder it is to hide it. It festers inside you, like a wound you can’t conceal. People sense it, they sense it more the harder you try to hide it. And I’m tired of hiding it. I’m tired of waking up every morning to a future I can’t quite see. So, to answer you: Yes, Emma. Yes, I do have to do this, because I don’t want to go back to the way things were—and I certainly don’t want to go back to worse. I would have given anything to be Matthew but I can’t be Stephen anymore.” His words hang in the air, his chest heaving from the storm of words. His eyes scan the pine forest behind me, lost, because what more can he say, really?
I understand, more than he can ever know. And what he says is true. Things will be worse after this—for both of us. He might face criminal charges—wasting police time, fraud— he might spend the rest of his life in and out of mental health facilities. The press will come down hard on him, for wasting NHS funds, lying to the public, and the most cardinal of sins: tricking them. It will be hard for him to put his life back together, to find the connection he so craves. But then, some people never do. I know I haven’t.
I wish there was something I could do to fix this. I was so wrapped up in my own life that I didn’t see what was happening right in front of me. I let him down. The guilt is overwhelming.
And as I stand, caught in the amber of the moment, the wind whipping my hair across my eyes, I remember the words we learned at school. We didn’t recite the Hippocratic oath during training or swear it but we learned a modern version of its tenets.
The health and well-being of my patient will be my first consideration.
I will respect the autonomy and dignity of my patient.
I will respect the secrets that are confided in me, even after the patient has died.
I watch him turn away from me defeated. I can’t let him kill himself. But I don’t want to make his life worse. Do no harm.
And who has he harmed in all this really? What would be gained by making Matthew be Stephen? I will respect the secrets that are confided in me. Perhaps we can let Stephen disappear and Matthew can just take his place.
“MATTHEW!” I call out now loud over the wind. “There’s another option!” I shout. “If you’ll trust me there is another option.” And I say it with such surety I almost convince myself.
42
THE MAN
DAY 13—BEST LAID PLANS
She explains her plan to me as we walk back toward the car. She hasn’t asked yet how I got here, but as we round the path back to the car park the question answers itself.
“It’s Rhoda’s,” I say as she throws me a look, her forehead creased with concern. “She doesn’t know I took it,” I clarify. “I didn’t ask.”
I’m not surprised at her concern because her plan is risky. Very risky—but I always knew she’d help me, that she’d be this way: brave, strong. That’s why I chose her, because she’d try to help no matter the cost to herself.
I wish in a way I’d found her years ago. Things might have been different.
They might have been. They might be yet.
Her plan is simple. I’m going to disappear. Her patient Matthew will disappear. She’ll pretend she never found me on the beach today, she’ll pretend she never heard the name Stephen McNabb, she’ll keep my secret and I can just disappear. All I have to do is promise I won’t hurt myself. She wants me to take her to my mother’s house. She wants to make sure I have everything I’ll need in order to leave—money, documents. She’s not sure yet she can trust me not to hurt myself the moment she turns her back. It’s reassuring but she couldn’t be further from the truth.
I like her. For all her damage there’s a clarity to her, a
courage. I knew there would be. I knew she’d understand.
I pull Rhoda’s car into the drive of the little wood-framed beachfront house. The house that belonged to the late Lillian Merriman.
A compact well-tended garden, lace curtains hanging in the well-proportioned windows, sun-faded paint peeling off the woodwork. Quaint, homey.
I lead Emma up the path and stop at the front door, reaching overhead to lift a key from inside a hanging basket. My elbow brushes against her hair as I do and she moves aside for me, her cheeks flushed. I slide the key into the lock.
Inside it’s dim, the curtains drawn, I flick on the lights and a warm glow floods the open-plan space. Bohemian and disheveled. Stacks of magazines, piles of books. Old photographs pinned directly into the wood of the walls. A treasure trove of curios, antique furniture, all slightly faded, slightly broken down.
I watch Emma’s face as she drinks it all in. A glimpse into a history, a life. If there’s one thing to be said about Lillian, it’s that she had great taste. And somehow the ferns and potted plants that litter the room have stayed alive un-watered for weeks. Their fronds still plump and green in the chink of sunlight peeking through the curtained French doors. She pulls their fabric back and winter sunlight floods the room from the beach beyond the glass. She peers out at the waves, the bank of snow-sprinkled dunes. We’re only a twenty-minute walk from where I was found.
“It’s beautiful,” she remarks, the light from outside throwing her features into relief.
“It is,” I agree as she turns back to me.
“Will you miss it?” she asks.
I look around the lived-in room; it’s been good to me. “Some of it, I suppose.” She’s studying my face. Wondering at what thoughts might be buzzing around beneath. I wonder what she sees.
“I suppose I should get my things together, then?” I say, breaking the tension. It’s what we agreed. I’ll gather enough clothes to last a few days, I’ll gather Stephen McNabb’s passport, license, wallet, and other information, and then I’ll disappear. I’ll take Rhoda’s car and dump it somewhere along the way. Matthew will simply vanish. And I’ll go on to live the rest of my life somewhere else.
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