by Nicci French
I became more and more miserable. All the spaces and arcades and terraces looked the same. And in the daylight it looked like nothing I'd ever seen before. Cross was patient with me. He just waited, his hands thrust into his pockets and his breath curling up into the air. He started asking me about time instead of direction. Did I remember how long it had taken me to run from the building to Tony Russell's house? I tried to recall it. I couldn't get it to make sense. He kept trying. Five minutes? I didn't know. More? Less? I didn't know. Had I run all the way? Yes, of course I had. As fast as I could? Yes, I'd thought he might be behind me. I had run so fast that it hurt. So how far would I be able to run at top speed? I didn't know. A few minutes? I couldn't tell. It wasn't normal. I was running for my life.
Gradually the day seemed colder, greyer.
"I'm not helping, am I?" I said.
Cross seemed distracted and hardly heard me. "What?" he said.
"I wanted to do better."
"Take your time."
Jack Cross barely spoke on the short journey back to the hospital. He stared out of the window. He murmured a few routine words to the driver.
"Are you going to search the estate?" I asked.
"I wouldn't know where to start," he said. "There's over a thousand derelict flats there."
"I was underground, I think. Or in a basement. Or at least on the ground floor."
"Miss Devereaux, the Browning estate is about a quarter of a mile square. Or more. I don't have the men."
He walked back with me to my new special room. That was something, a room of my own. He stopped at the door.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought it would go better."
"Don't worry," he said, with a smile that quickly faded. "We're depending on you. You're all we've got. If there's anything else .. ."
"There's the other women Kelly, Kath, Fran, Gail and Lauren. Can't you check them out?"
Suddenly Jack Cross looked weary of it all.
"I've got someone on it. But I've got to say, it's not as simple as you think."
"What do you mean?"
"How do you imagine I can check for the names? We don't have a last name, any location, a date, even an approximate one. We have nothing. We've got a bunch of common first names."
"So what can you do?"
He shrugged.
A nurse wheeled a telephone into my room and gave me a small handful of change. I waited until she was out of the room and then fed in a twenty-pence piece.
"Mum?"
"Abigail, is that you?"
"Yes."
"Is everything all right?"
"Mum, I wanted to tell you
"I've had the most terrible time."
"Mum, I just needed to talk to you, to tell you something."
"It's the pains in my stomach. I've not been sleeping."
I paused for a moment. I took a deep breath. "I'm sorry," I said. "Have you been to the doctor?"
"I'm always going to the doctor. He gave me some pills, but he doesn't take it seriously. I've not been sleeping."
"That's awful." My hand tightened round the phone. "You couldn't come to London for the day, could you?"
"To London?"
"Yes."
"Not at the moment, Abigail. Not the way I've been feeling. I can't go anywhere."
"It's less than an hour on the train."
"And your father's not been well."
"What's wrong?"
"His usual. But why don't you come and see us? It's been ages."
"Yes."
"Give us some notice, though."
"Yes."
"I should go," she said. "I'm making a cake."
"Yes. All right."
"Ring again soon."
"Yes."
"Goodbye, then."
"Goodbye," I said. "Goodbye, Mum."
I was woken by a large machine being pushed through the door. It was a monstrous floor-cleaning machine with a revolving circular contraption and nozzles releasing soapy water. It would quite obviously have been far better to use a bucket and a mop and this machine was especially useless in the confined space of my room. It couldn't reach into the corners and it couldn't go under the bed and it didn't like tables very much so the man behind it pushed it along the few exposed spaces. He was followed by another man. This man didn't look like a cleaner or a nurse or even a doctor since he was dressed in black shoes, baggy brown trousers, a navy blue jacket that looked as if it was made out of sacking, and an open-necked checked shirt. He had wiry all-over-the-place grey hair. He was carrying a stack of files under his arm. He was trying to speak. I could see his mouth moving. But the noise of the cleaning machine drowned everything so he stood rather awkwardly by the wall until the machine had passed him and headed down the ward. He looked dubiously after it.
"One day somebody's going to check one of those machines and discover it doesn't do anything," he said.
"Who are you?" I said.
"Mulligan," he said. "Charles Mulligan. I've come to have a word with you."
I got out of the bed.
"Have you got any identification?"
"What?"
I walked past him and shouted for a passing nurse. She looked reluctant but she saw that I meant business. I said that a stranger had come into my room. There was a brief argument and she led him away to make a phone call. I went back to bed. A few minutes later the door of my room opened and the man was led back in by a more senior-looking nurse. "This man has permission to see you," she said. "He will be with you for a very short time."
She left with a suspicious glance at Charles Mulligan. He took some horn-rimmed glasses from his jacket pocket and put them on.
"That was probably sensible," he said. "It was very boring but probably sensible. What I was in the middle of saying was that Dick Burns rang me and asked me to have a word with you."
"Are you a doctor?"
He put down his files on the table and pulled a chair over towards the bed. "Is it all right if I sit down?"
"Yes."
I am a doctor. I mean, I'm qualified as a doctor. I don't spend much of my time in the hospital."
"Are you a psychiatrist? Or a psychologist?"
He gave a nervous, chopping ha-ha laugh.
"No, no, no, I'm a neurologist, really, more or less. I study the brain as if it were a thing. I work with computers and cut up mouse brains, that sort of thing. I talk to people as well, of course. When necessary."
"I'm sorry," I said. "But what are you doing here?"
"I said. Dick rang me up. Fascinating case." A sudden expression of alarm appeared on his face. "I know it was awful as well. I'm terribly sorry. But Dick asked if I could come and have a look at you. Is that all right?"
"What for?"
He rubbed his face with his hands and looked almost excessively sympathetic. "Dick told me something of what you've gone through. It's horrible. I'm sure somebody will be coming to talk to you about that. About the trauma. And all of that." His sentence had trailed off and he looked lost. Now he pushed his fingers through his curly hair. It didn't do much to straighten it. "Now, Abigail, is it all right if I call you that?" I nodded. "And call me Charlie. I'd like to talk to you about your amnesia. Do you feel up to that?" I nodded again. "Good." He gave a faint smile. He had got on to his real subject and his talk, his whole manner, was more assured. I liked that. "Now, this is the only time I'm going to behave like a real doctor, but I'd like to have a look at your head. Is that all right?" More nodding. "I looked at your notes. Plenty of bruising all over, but no particular reference to headaches, soreness on the head, that sort of thing. Is that right?"
"My very first memory, from after the bit where I lost my memory, if you know what I mean. I woke up and I had a terrible pain in my head."
"Right. Do you mind if I take some notes?" He took a mangy little notebook out of his pocket and began writing. Then he put it on the bed and leant forward. "They're going to pop you into a machine later for a quick look at your b
rain. But this is a different sort of examination. Do you mind?" As he said this, he leant forward and very gently touched my face and all over my head. I love my head being touched. It's my secret fetish. The main thing I love about getting my hair cut is having my hair washed by a stranger, those fingers on my scalp. Terry as well. Sometimes we'd sit in the bath together and he'd wash my hair. That's what relationships are for, little things like that. Charles Mulligan gave a little murmuring sound as his fingertips pattered over my head. I gave a little cry when he touched above my right ear. "That hurt?"
"It's just sore." He looked more closely. "Is there a problem?"
"Swollen and bruised but I can't see anything significant." He sat back. "There. That's all done." He reached over for a file. It took some rummaging to find the right one. "Now I'm going to ask you some questions. They might seem a bit silly, but bear with me. They'll take a bit of time. Are you up to it? I could come back later, or tomorrow, if you need a rest. I know you've had a hard day."
I shook my head. "I just want to do anything I can as quickly as possible."
"Great." He opened a large printed booklet. "You ready?"
"Yes."
"What's your name?"
"Is this part of the test?"
"That's sort of a philosophical question. Do you want to bear with me?"
"Abigail Elizabeth Devereaux."
"When were you born?"
"The twenty-first of August, 1976."
"What's the name of the Prime Minister?"
"Are you serious? I'm not that bad."
"I'm testing various kinds of memory. It'll get harder."
So I told him the name of the Prime Minister. I told him the day of the week and that we were in St. Anthony's Hospital. I counted backwards from twenty. I counted forwards in threes. I counted backwards from a hundred in sevens. I was rather proud of myself.
Then it started to get hard. He showed me a page of different shapes. He chatted to me for a moment about something stupid and then showed me another page of shapes. I had to remember which were on both sheets. He got a bit embarrassed as he read me a story about a boy taking a pig to the market. I had to tell it back to him. He showed me stars and triangles paired with colours, word pairs. He showed me four increasingly complicated shapes. The fourth one looked like a vandalized electricity pylon. It made me dizzy even to look at, let alone draw from memory.
"This is giving me a bloody headache," I said, as I struggled with it.
"Are you all right?" he said, with concern.
"It makes my head spin."
"I know what you mean," he said. "I get stuck at the counting backwards. Don't worry, there are just a couple more."
He started to recite sequences of numbers. Groups of three and four were a doddle. He stopped at eight, which I could just about manage. Then I had to recite the sequences backwards that really made my brain ache. After that he brought out a sheet of coloured squares. He tapped them in an order which I had to repeat. Again up to eight. And then backwards.
"Fuck," I said, when he put the sheet away.
"Yes," he said. "That's all. We're done."
"So, did I pass? Am I brain-damaged?"
He smiled cheerfully. "I don't know. I have no tests for the pre-morbid period. Sorry, that sounds grim. I mean for the period before the onset of amnesia. But I can't believe that it was much better than this. You've got a remarkably good memory. Your spatial recall in particular is excellent. I'd swap you any time."
I couldn't help blushing. "Well, thanks, um, Charlie, but.. ."
He looked serious for a moment and peered at me closely. "What do you think?" he said.
"I feel fine. I mean, I don't feel fine. I have bad dreams and I keep going over and over things in my head. But I can think clearly. It's just that gap in my memory. I keep trying and trying to remember but it's like staring into pitch darkness."
He began putting the papers back into files.
"Try looking at the boundaries," he said. "Take your image of an area of darkness. You could say that there is an area that's entirely dark and another that's entirely light. You could try concentrating on where the two areas meet."
"I've done that, Charlie. Oh, God, I've done it. There's no problem for the afterwards bit. I woke up and I was there in that place. I didn't know how I'd got there, didn't remember being grabbed. Before it's different. I can't remember the last thing I did or anything like that. There's no cut-off point. I just have vague recent memories of being at work. It was like I went into the darkness slowly without noticing."
"I see," Charles said, and wrote something more. It made me nervous when he did that.
"But isn't there something ridiculous about it? The one thing I need to remember is gone. I don't want to know who the bloody Prime Minister is. I want to remember how I was grabbed, what he looks like. What I've been thinking is, could it be something that happened that was so disturbing that I've suppressed it?"
He clicked his pen shut. When he replied it was almost as if he were trying to hide a faint smile. "And that maybe I could dangle my watch in front of your face and it would all come flooding back?"
"That would be very useful."
"Maybe," he said. "But I'm sure your amnesia is unrelated to any form of post-traumatic stress. Or indeed any psychological symptom."
"When I'm talking to Cross I mean the police it just feels so ridiculous."
"It's unfortunate and frustrating," he said. "But it's not ridiculous. Post-traumatic amnesia after a closed head injury such as yours isn't uncommon. It usually happens in car crashes. They bang their head during the smash. When they wake up after the injury they don't remember the crash, but often they don't remember the hours or even days leading up to it either."
I touched my head gently. Suddenly it felt so fragile.
"Post-traumatic," I said. "I thought you said it wasn't something psychological."
"It isn't," he said. "Psychogenic amnesia -I mean amnesia caused by psychological influences, rather than an injury to the brain is rarer in cases like yours. And also how shall I say? more dubious."
"What do you mean?"
He gave a wary cough. "I'm not a psychologist, so maybe I'm biased. But, for example, a substantial percentage of murderers claim to have no memory of committing their murders. These are not people who have received physical injuries. There could be various explanations. They are often very drunk, which can result in memory black-outs. Committing a murder is, presumably, an extremely stressful thing to do, more than almost anything else that can be imagined. That could affect memory. Some of us sceptics might also say that there is often an incentive for a murderer to claim he has no memory of what happened."
"But being kidnapped and threatened with death must be pretty bloody stressful. Couldn't that have made me forget for psychological reasons?"
"Not in my opinion, but if I were standing in court and you were a lawyer, you could get me to admit that it was possible. I'm afraid you're going to have a few other people prodding you like a lab rat to answer questions like that."
He stood up and mustered his files under his arm with some difficulty. "Abigail," he said.
"Abbie."
"Abbie. You're a fascinating case. I don't think I'm going to be able to resist coming back."
"That's all right," I said. "I seem to have lots of time on my hands. But I've got one question: is there any chance of my memory coming back?"
He paused for a moment and pulled an odd face, which must have been some sort of indication that he was thinking. "Yes, it's possible."
"Could I be hypnotized?"
Suddenly he looked shocked and rummaged in his pocket, which was a particularly awkward operation with his armful of files. He extracted a card and gave it to me. "That's got various numbers on it. If anybody comes in here and starts dangling things in front of your eyes or talking to you in a soothing voice, call me straight away."
With that he was gone, and I lay on the bed with my sore
, vulnerable head. My head with a black hole in it.
"Have you talked to your boyfriend?"
I only managed to murmur something. I wasn't entirely awake and DI Cross leant closer over me in concern.
"Shall I call someone?" he asked.
"No. And, no, I haven't."
"We're having a bit of difficulty tracking him down at the moment."
"Me too," I said. "I've left three messages on the answering-machine. It'll be because of his work."
"Does he go away often?"
"He's an IT consultant, whatever that means. He's always flying off to Belgium or Australia or wherever on special projects."
"But you can't remember when you last saw him?"
"No."
"Do you want to talk to your parents?"
"No! No, please."
There was a pause. I was doing so badly. I tried to think of something I could give Cross. "Would it help if you could have a look at our flat? I'll be back there in a day or two, I guess, but there might be something there. Maybe that's where I was grabbed. I might have left a note."
Cross's blank expression barely altered. "Do you have a key you can give me?"
"As you know I've got nothing except the clothes I escaped in. But in the front garden, to the left of the front door, there are two things that look like ordinary stones. But they're these crazy mail-order gimmicks and one of them is hollowed out. Inside there's a spare key. You can use that."
"Do you have any allergies, Miss Devereaux?"
"I don't think so. I came up in hives once with some shellfish."
"Do you suffer from epilepsy?"
"No."
"Are you pregnant?"
I shook my head so hard it hurt.
It doesn't mean anything but we're legally obliged to tell you that a CAT scan can have side effects, but the likelihood is extremely small, negligible. Would you sign this consent form? Here and here."