by Tim Weaver
There were others too.
After being passed around for a while, I managed to locate Simon Griffin and Rory Yarkley, the two men from the lifeboat station who first found Richard on the shores of Southampton Water. Separately, they both expressed guilt about not having kept in touch with him, and sounded genuine as they asked how he was doing, but neither could add much to what I already knew.
Finally, there was Reverend Colin Parsons, who I hadn’t been able to chat to the previous day. He had a delicacy to his tone, a compassion, that put me in mind of a concerned parent, and maybe – in lieu of a mother, or father, or any family coming forward at all – that was what he’d become to Richard. I tried to focus his attention on the things that Richard could remember, rather than the things that he struggled to, because ultimately that was going to be the only way forward.
‘Some days he seems so confused,’ Parsons said to me. ‘Did he mention that he has this very strong memory of growing up close to a beach, to the sea?’
‘He did, yes.’
‘That’s been pretty consistent since the start. I wasn’t around right at the beginning, when they first found him; he was in the custody of the police and the authorities. It was only later I decided to pick up the phone. I saw an article in one of the local newspapers, and I really felt for him. “The Lost Man” they called him. Anyway, he seemed so alone, so I got in contact with Hampshire Police and told them that, if he was inclined, he could give me a call at the church and I’d do what I could to help him. He called about two hours later.’
I returned to something he’d said a second ago. ‘You mentioned that he seems confused some days. Do you mean confused about something in particular, or confused as a by-product of the condition he’s suffering from?’
‘I would say both,’ Parsons said, ‘but then those two things are related. I mean, dissociative amnesia, by its very nature, is confusing. But there have been times over the months I’ve got to know him when he’s said things that are at odds with something else.’ He paused. ‘I’m not explaining this very well, am I? I suppose what I mean is, that memory he has of looking out at the beach, the sea, as a child – that’s been pretty consistent all the way through. But then, occasionally, when he’s been talking about that same memory of the beach, he remembers it slightly differently.’
‘Differently how?’
‘He can suddenly picture other houses there, or see crowds of people out on the beach. Once he said to me that he thought it was a “popular seaside town”. The time I remember most clearly, though, is when he said the sea wasn’t sea at all, but a river, and on the other side of the river was a city. He said he could picture big buildings, and long roads, and cars, and traffic – all that sort of stuff.’
I frowned. ‘What did you say to that?’
‘I replied, “But you’ve never mentioned a city to me before, Richard,” and he just seemed kind of bewildered by it, and said, “I could never see it until now.” ’
‘But suddenly he could?’
‘Suddenly he could.’
‘When was this?’
‘I don’t know. Four, five months ago.’
‘He never talked about that when I spoke to him.’
Parsons sighed. ‘In the end, that whole thing just slipped away again.’
‘So his recollection of the city didn’t last?’
‘No. A week or so later I said to him, “Do you remember anything else about the city?” and he shook his head and said, “I’m not sure there even was a city.” That’s kind of what it’s been like. He has these moments where the story changes – and then it changes back.’
‘You think he’s lying?’
‘Oh, no. No, no, absolutely not. I don’t believe for one minute he’s ever told me, or anyone else, a lie. But I do think he’s deeply confused. I think there’s a kind of … I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know what you’d call it. Maybe emotional “interference”. He thinks of things, then tries to make them the truth.’
‘He makes things up?’
‘No. Or maybe, yes – but not deliberately or vindictively. I mean, just put yourself in his position. If you became convinced that you grew up by a beach, in view of the sea, or you possibly remembered the introduction to a children’s TV show, but no one else in the entire world knew what part of the country you were describing, or which TV show you were talking about, what would you do next?’
‘Try harder to remember.’
‘Exactly. Try harder, and then harder, and then harder. And then, one day, you’d start thinking, “What if there actually were people on that beach but I just don’t remember them?” And the longer you spend thinking about that, the more the idea grips, the more your mind starts moving on: “What sort of people would there be? How many people?” You’d start to think, “If there are people, there are houses. If there are houses, there’s a village. Or maybe a town. Or maybe a city.” It just goes on and on until one day you have this clear view of what you think might have been there.’
‘Except it might not have been there at all.’
‘Right. But by that stage, it’s too late already because it’s not some flight of imagination any more. It feels real, because you want to believe it’s real.’
‘So, are you saying you don’t think any of his memories can be trusted?’
‘I wouldn’t necessarily go that far,’ Parsons replied. ‘I guess what I’m saying is, if he’s suddenly uncertain about his memory of the beach, it does tend to shake one’s belief in what might be true, or … you know …’
‘What might not be.’
‘Yes,’ Parsons said glumly. ‘Yes, exactly.’
There was a delay on the Tube heading out of Ealing Broadway, so I found a bench halfway down the platform and got out my notes and my phone. I wanted to ensure I was prepared for Naomi Russum – partly because I doubted she’d make it easy for me, but mostly because I wanted to make certain that I hadn’t missed anything.
I opened up the PDF I’d emailed myself from Richard’s mobile phone account online – a complete breakdown of calls, texts and data usage over the course of the entire time he’d owned the phone – and soon discovered something. While I’d chased down all the calls and texts and found them to be dead ends, I hadn’t looked as closely at his data. Now I did, I noticed an anomaly.
His mobile was a Huawei Y3. It was an entry-level phone, running on the Android OS. There were plenty of apps available for it, so Richard could have used social media and, in theory, watched something like iPlayer on it too. But the truth was, if he was going to do that, he probably would have wanted something higher spec. The phone was for people who only really wanted to text and make calls, or who wanted to keep payments down through low-cost monthly plans. It was why the Huawei Y3 should have suited Richard Kite down to the ground: he didn’t do social media, he wasn’t registered with the Android store, he hadn’t downloaded any apps, and he used his laptop and the caravan park’s Wi-Fi to get on to the Internet, not his phone.
And yet there was something weird here: the amount of data he was using every month was high. Not ridiculously high, but higher than it should have been. He’d bought no apps from the store, hardly used the phone at all for day-to-day surfing, never used it as a GPS, or to check the news, or to stream TV shows or movies. And yet, each month, he burned through about 500MB of data.
How was he using that much?
It was the equivalent of sending about 17,000 emails, except he didn’t email anyone; it was twenty-five hours on Facebook, but he had no social media accounts in his own name, and didn’t ever check the ones that were set up to publicize his case. He didn’t google anything, didn’t use streaming services of any kind, and didn’t do much more than watch a few YouTube videos; and he’d have had to watch thirty-five or forty before he got anywhere near 500MB of data.
Returning to my laptop, I logged back into his mobile phone account and retraced my steps through to the section of the website de
aling with his Internet use. There, I found a series of pie charts, breaking down each of the eight months. I looked at September: of the 500MB he’d used, 42MB was web activity, 61MB were emails, and 398MB was apps – and yet he didn’t ever use or download apps. It made no sense. Either it was an admin error at the network, or there was some kind of a technical issue with the phone.
Or it was something much worse than both.
Richard Kite was lying to me.
Penny
Penny’s dad disappeared when she was three. She was too young to remember much about him, although she kept photographs of the two of them together, faded colour portraits taken in the back garden of their old home. In one, she was running away from her father – arms out, laughing – as he chased her across the lawn. In another, she was on his knee, the two of them in a deckchair with a barbecue smoking in the background. The picture always made her smile because she and her father were both dressed in winter coats and the sky was like granite. ‘Proper British barbecuing weather,’ her mum would always say.
Her mum never liked talking about what had happened to Penny’s dad. Some of Penny’s earliest memories were of her mum bursting into tears as they walked home from school, or hearing sobs through the kitchen window as she played outside with the other kids. After a while, the sobbing stopped, but Fiona seemed to carry her grief around like a weight; like pounds she couldn’t shed. Penny would hear people talking about her mum at the shops, in the playground at pick-up time, in the changing rooms at swimming lessons when they didn’t realize Penny was in the next cubicle. They said her mum brought the mood down.
When she turned eight, Penny was supposed to have a birthday party in the church hall, but it got cancelled when a leg bone was found in the hills surrounding their town. She didn’t understand what all the fuss was about until her mum sat her down the same evening and told her that Ray Sankle, whose dog had found the bone, thought it might be human; and, if it was human, there was the possibility it might belong to her dad. ‘Doctors are testing it,’ was all her mum said.
That night, after Penny went to bed, she heard her mum sobbing again. She crept down the staircase and stopped halfway, looking at her through the banisters. A man was sitting next to her on the sofa.
He was hugging her.
The man was called Jack. Eventually he became Penny’s stepfather. Penny liked him, but she liked her new stepsister even more. Beth was two years younger than Penny, but the two girls got on almost immediately. They’d play together in the garden and build dens from old sheets of tin and corrugated iron. On warm summer days, they’d go swimming together at the lido on the edge of town, an art deco relic with a main building that looked like a flying saucer from a black and white sci-fi film. The two girls even looked vaguely similar, so they started to refer to themselves as sisters, rather than stepsisters, whenever people asked.
The human bone turned out not to be Penny’s father. Her mum sat her down again and told her, trying to comfort Penny by pressing her face to her chest, by enclosing her daughter’s hands inside hers. Penny just listened, not saying anything, and when her mum started crying again, her father’s name like a switch that still set her off, Penny repeatedly told her that everything would be fine, because Mrs Hardew, her teacher, had read them a story in class one day and that was something a woman had said to a man who’d lost his cat.
The next day, before school, when her mum was upstairs showering, Penny saw the front page of the local newspaper. It said the bone belonged to a woman and that tests had revealed that it was a tourist who’d gone missing during a hike in the hills years before. So, as they walked to school together that morning, Penny told Beth about what she’d read, expecting her to be fascinated and frightened. But Beth just shrugged her shoulders and said matter-of-factly, ‘Dad reckons Ray Sankle was an idiot. He says Mr Sankle and his dog could have been killed.’
Penny looked at her. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Mr Sankle. His dog was the one that found the bone.’
‘Yeah, I know that. But why would they have got killed?’
‘Because Dad says there’s something up in the hills.’
Penny frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Like a monster or something.’
Unlike a lot of girls in her class who preferred writing and art, Penny loved things like science and history. She loved watching wildlife documentaries when her mum could get hold of them from the library, or when, very rarely, they appeared on TV, and she loved seeing how people lived in the olden days. Old black and white films. Old fashions. Her mum said she knew a lot about history for a girl her age, but Penny knew even more about animals and science.
‘There’s no such thing as monsters,’ she told Beth.
Beth didn’t seem particularly bothered either way. ‘Well, Dad says it’s the real reason they put the fence up.’
‘What fence?’
‘Up in the hills.’
Beth pointed to the peaks north of the town. Penny had never been up there before. They told the kids to steer clear of the area because it was dangerous. Penny had always thought they meant dangerous because kids could get lost out there, just like that tourist had.
But maybe they meant something else.
‘Ages and ages ago,’ Beth went on, ‘Dad says we put bombs up there to stop the baddies invading us.’
‘Are you talking about the Second World War?’
Beth didn’t seem to know what that was, but it must have been what she was referring to. Penny had borrowed a book from the library once and it had talked about how some places in Britain had put landmines down to protect against a Nazi sea invasion.
‘So is Jack saying there aren’t really any bombs up there?’
‘I don’t know,’ Beth said.
‘He reckons that’s not the real reason they put the fence up?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said again. ‘I guess.’
‘Have you ever been up there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Really?’ Penny couldn’t hide her surprise. ‘How many times?’
‘Only once.’
‘With Jack?’
‘Yeah. Dad went to check on the fence after Mr Sankle’s dog found that bone.’ Beth broke into a smile and started pretending her hands were paws; that she was a dog digging in the earth. ‘It found a gap in the fence and then dug, dug, dug until it squeezed through. Have you ever seen Mr Sankle’s dog?’
‘No.’
‘Her name’s Jessie. She’s so cute.’
Penny just nodded. ‘What was it like?’
‘What?’
‘The fence?’
‘It was boring. It’s just a big fence.’
Beth clamped her hands on to the straps of a backpack way too big for her, and neither of them said much for a while. But eventually, Penny noticed Beth looking sideways at her, hesitating, as if unsure whether to say what she was thinking.
‘What’s the matter?’ Penny said.
‘Nothing.’ Beth cleared her throat. ‘It’s just, after him and my mum split up, Dad got drunk one night and started telling me loads of things that he shouldn’t have. Mum would have called it “gossip”.’ She stopped, cleared her throat a second time. ‘Did you know that your mum has got absolutely loads of money?’
Penny glanced at her. ‘No, she hasn’t.’
‘She has. Your dad was rich.’
‘No, he wasn’t.’
‘He was. He kept all his money in bags.’
‘No, he didn’t.’
Beth shrugged.
‘He wasn’t rich, Beth,’ Penny said. ‘Rich people live in huge mansions like in Beverly Hills 90210. If Mum has loads of money, why doesn’t she have a Ferrari and a butler? Or a pool. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a heart-shaped swimming pool?’
‘Very cool.’
‘And a waterslide.’
‘No, a death slide!’ Beth shrieked. ‘It would be, like, fifty storeys high and – by the time y
ou got to the bottom – your costume would be right up your bum!’
They began giggling, and then the giggling descended into laughter, and pretty soon after that Penny had forgotten about the idea of her mum being rich.
But she didn’t forget about the bombs in the hills.
A couple of weeks later, after Jack and Beth had officially moved in with Fiona and Penny, Penny was walking through the town, the air damp with fog, and found her attention drifting to the slopes beyond the rooftops. The mist was so thick on the high ground, it was impossible to see anything more than the vaguest hint of three worm-like trails working their way up the side of the mountain. She began thinking about what Beth had said, about the fence, about the idea of there being something up there, a monster of some kind, and then about the bone that had been found by Mr Sankle’s dog. What if that tourist hadn’t died because she’d got lost on a hike? What if she was attacked? What if there really was something up there and the bombs were just a story invented to keep people out?
What if her father was out there somewhere too?
What if the monster was the reason he disappeared?
11
By the time I emerged from Aldgate station, the rain had become a mist. It cast a petrol-blue tint across everything, from the clouds to the roads, as if all the light had escaped. When I looked right, I could see the giants of the City – the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater, the Walkie Talkie – but almost as soon as they appeared they were gone again, blinking in and out of existence like wraiths.
I crossed the street, jumping puddles that had settled on uneven tarmac, and looked for the door to the Aldgate Clinic. Eventually I found it, halfway along a short alleyway. I pushed the buzzer and waited.
‘Can I help you?’
I leaned in towards the intercom. ‘David Raker for Dr Russum.’
The door whirred and bumped away from its frame, and I found myself in a tiny foyer with a lift and a staircase. I took the lift up to the top floor. Behind another door, a woman at the front desk buzzed me into a small reception area with walls of frosted glass on either side.