A Trick of the Mind

by Penny Hancock

  ‘Are you telling me you trust a potato-head and a country bumpkin over me?’ he said.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then why are you asking?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘Well don’t. It makes me feel you don’t trust me. Talking of which, I have to ask you something I don’t understand, Ellie. You led me to believe you had sailed before. You agreed, that night in the pub before my accident, to spend the weekend sailing with me. You told me you loved sailing. What’s going on? You didn’t know what a jib sheet was, or a shackle key. You’re confusing me – after my accident! Taking advantage of my amnesia to act as if you’re quite a different woman to the one you led me to believe.’

  He turned and began to limp away up the track towards May’s house.

  ‘Patrick,’ I called after him. ‘Please. Look! I’m not trying to confuse you. There are things we need to talk about. Things we both need to explain. Wait for me.’

  I caught up with him at Aunty May’s front door. I turned the big key in the lock and we fell in. Pepper rushed to the door and leapt up at us, wagging his tail, beside himself with finding we hadn’t abandoned him forever.

  I stood in front of Patrick, determined to clear the air.

  ‘I’m here to help you, you know I am, and to get you back on your feet . . .’

  He laughed a bitter laugh.

  ‘OK, sorry, that was a bad turn of phrase. But you know I’m here for you. I would never choose to confuse or mislead you. It’s just there are some things which have got overlooked since you lost your memory that I need to explain.’

  He didn’t answer, but stripped off his waterproofs, sitting to pull the leggings off his prosthetic, and flung them on a kitchen chair, then limped into the sitting room and began to pile logs on the wood-burner, his back to me.

  ‘Look,’ I said, following him. ‘There are things you have to tell me too! Whose boat did we take out today? Was it yours or not?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘And what really happened to Stef? Tell me that! Please, Patrick. We have to be honest with each other. You tell me stuff, and I can explain why I can’t actually sail and why you thought I could.’

  He wouldn’t reply, wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘OK. I’m going to change.’ I was shivering, my clothes were sodden. ‘And then, we need to talk,’ I said to his back.

  I went upstairs, put the immersion heater on, wishing the house had constant hot water. I stripped off my wet clothes in my bedroom, which I still thought of as Aunty May’s, my hands numb and raw. I pulled a towel out of the pile, rubbed myself down and stared out of the window at the stormy sky.

  The picture the man in the pub had waved at us slid back into my mind’s eye.

  If Patrick had had something to do with his wife’s death, as the man had implied, then was he more dangerous than I’d let myself believe? I shuddered. And here I was, miles from anywhere, alone in a secluded house on the shore with him, a house that he had said all children wanted to live in – but I now suspected from what the diaries revealed – he had been rejected from.

  Patrick was calling me from the sitting room.

  I pulled on some dry clothes and picked up Pepper, gaining some comfort from his wriggling form.

  ‘What is it?’ I called out, trying to keep my voice bright and normal.

  ‘Come quickly! My leg, it’s hurting like hell. I don’t know what I’ve done to it.’

  I ran down, saw straight away the contortion of pain on his face.

  ‘I must have strained it on the boat.’

  ‘Can I get you anything? Paracetamol?’ A plan was hatching in my mind. If I could get hold of the paper the man had cut the photo from, I could find out what they really thought had happened to Stef.

  But how would I get hold of a paper from two years ago? There was no internet access here. I needed a library. There was one in the town. It would still be open if I hurried.

  ‘Yes, please. And a strong whisky.’

  My heart was pounding against my chest as I rummaged in the kitchen, my mind searching for an excuse to go into town without setting off his suspicions. I couldn’t find any pills but poured a small measure of whisky and took it to him. He was sitting by the fire now.

  ‘Ellie, I’m sorry about earlier. About being impatient with you about your sailing,’ he said. He was doing it again. Turning on the charm. It was so convincing!

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I understand, you thought I was more experienced than I am.’

  ‘Yes. But I was thinking that of course, we never actually got round to sailing the weekend of my accident! I made assumptions when you said you’d come with me and it was unfair of me. I’ve been thinking as I was sitting here and I’m sorry. I get a bit impatient when I’m out at sea. It’s the sailor in me, we all get like that when conditions are hairy. When we’re at the command of our superiors. You know who they are, don’t you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘At the command of our superiors – it’s a waterman’s motto. It means the wind and the tide.’

  ‘I see. Yes, I understand. I can see that when it’s stormy like that you have to concentrate, that nothing else matters.’

  ‘Exactly. Oouch! I’ve definitely pulled something.’

  ‘Where does it hurt?’

  ‘Here,’ he said, taking my hand, placing it on his stump.

  ‘It’s so weird how sometimes I can still feel pain even though it’s not there any more. As if it’s being crushed all over again. Please would you massage it?’

  ‘Like this?’ I asked, taking his thigh between my hands, rubbing it, thinking all the time about how I might get away, get out of here, get home.

  But where was my home now?

  ‘The water should be hot by now,’ Patrick said. ‘Let’s run a bath and take some wine up. And then we’ll eat supper by the fire. I think that’ll be enough to make me feel better.’ He leant forward, took my face between his hands, pushed a piece of hair back behind my ear.

  He was looking at me tenderly, his eyes shining, with his most disarming boyish expression, his head on one side.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Yes. That would be nice. But I need to get you some paracetamol. I’ll nip into town with Pepper. You run the bath while I’m out.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘No, it’s fine, really.’ I stood up and pulled on a coat then made for the door.

  ‘Come on, Pepper.’ Pepper sprang after me. ‘I won’t be long,’ I told Patrick.

  ‘Don’t be,’ he said.

  I took the car.

  I drove along the front and up into the square and parked on the high street.

  The town was deserted, the shops closing apart from the Co-op, which was always open. I found the library, though it, too, was about to close.

  I went to the young boy at the desk and told him I needed to see newspaper reports for a speedboat accident that happened two years ago.

  He opened the big old computer laboriously and it clicked and whirred.

  I prayed for him to hurry.

  ‘Don’t you have newspaper archives?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps that would be quicker?’

  An older woman came over, and told him there were copies of all the papers in a file downstairs, that she would go and get them and I should follow her.

  ‘You’d better be quick though. It’s almost closing time,’ she said. I went with her, down into the dark basement, and she flicked on the fluorescent lights and hauled out some files of newspapers.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ I told her, and began to rummage through.

  Once I’d found the papers for two years ago it didn’t take long to find reports on the accident. It was headline news in several papers in the May of that year, how the speedboat had gone out of control, just as Patrick had said.

  One report stated that forensic evidence showed the safety cord had not been fitted. Again this tallied with what Patrick had told me. That Stephanie McIntyre, nee
Gilligan, had died in a tragic accident.

  I flicked through more papers.

  Then I found a headline that took my breath away. Later the same year Patrick McIntyre had been arrested for the murder of his wife.

  My heart banged, my head span.

  Witnesses said they had seen him tampering with the boat he knew Stephanie was using.

  The accident had happened shortly after some dispute between Stephanie and her husband Patrick McIntyre, when Stephanie had said she was leaving him. Friends said they had met up to discuss their relationship in the Harbour Inn and their meeting had ended in a fight where Patrick had lost control. Some people claimed they had heard shouting and crying and later seen Patrick fiddling with the boat just before his wife went off in it.

  No evidence was found to prove that Patrick had tampered with the boat, however, and McIntyre had been released without charge.

  On my way back to May’s house the words played around my head: ‘When Stephanie had said she was leaving him.’

  The words Patrick had spoken when I’d first asked him about the photo of her in her wedding dress came back to me. They echoed in my ears as I drove down the straight road away from the town, the sea wall grey to one side, the sky lowering in front of me, towards my aunt’s solitary house. I was filled with a sense of doom that dragged my heart down into my boots.

  ‘I think you ought to know that she let me down badly, the way EVERYONE seems to think it’s OK to hurt me and then leave me.’

  Leaving Patrick was what I had to do.

  Leaving Patrick was what meant Stef had been killed.

  It occurred to me I could just keep on driving, not go back to Patrick at all. But Patrick was in my cottage, waiting for me, I couldn’t leave him there. He would find me eventually. Perhaps I was over-imagining; after all he had never been charged.

  I had to stay calm. Talk to him, adult to adult.

  Patrick was still sitting by the fire when I got back.

  ‘Ah,’ he said brightly. He was in good-mood mode. ‘Did you get the pills?’

  Shit!

  ‘They didn’t have any,’ I said.

  ‘Then what took you so long?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I felt sick. ‘I was just looking for a shop that might be open.’

  ‘Oh, Ellie darling. There was no need to go to all that trouble. I was getting worried about you. Now, come on, let’s get in that bath.’

  He stood up and moved towards me, stroking my hair off my face.

  Fear took over now. I could no longer control the adrenalin that was demanding I run for safety.

  I spoke without thinking any more about it, trying to keep my voice as steady and as calm and teacher-like as I had to in class when a child was acting up.

  ‘Hang on, Patrick. Listen,’ I said. ‘I think perhaps I should move out of your flat when we get back to London. It was all a bit rushed and I hadn’t thought it through. I’ll find somewhere else to rent for a bit and we can take it all a bit more slowly.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ll drive us back to London tonight, and I’ll go and stay at my dad’s, give you some space, and then we’ll take it one step at a time.’

  ‘You’re leaving me?’

  ‘NO! No, not leaving. But it’s all been too fast. I just want to take it more slowly for a bit.’

  ‘But, Ellie, you can’t. You owe me. Remember?’

  ‘You can have the studio back, I’ll find somewhere else.’

  ‘NO, I’m not talking about that. Or letting you live with me in a Wapping warehouse for nothing. You don’t think I’d care about those, do you? Hardly! Money’s no object for me.’ He was smiling, his head on one side.

  Then he took hold of my hair at the back and jerked it hard so I was looking up at him as he put his mouth back to my ear.

  ‘You owe me my whole fucking leg.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The moment swells and expands. His words ring in the air between us.

  My instinct is to run, covering my ears, shutting my eyes, denying what he’s known all along. But there is nowhere to turn. I want to protest but I can’t speak. There’s nothing to say. I’d like to shake my head, lie my way out of this. But I’ve been caught out. My face is immobile as I stare at Patrick and know he knows. Exposure and pure shame. I’ve known nothing quite like it since I was a child.

  Patrick though, looked quite pleased with himself. He began to speak.

  ‘I knew when you came to visit me in hospital, it was because you were the one who had bumped into me in your car.’ He smiled. ‘I knew you were the hit-and-runner!’

  He was holding me tight to him as he spoke. I was afraid of moving an inch. I had been a fool! I should have gone to the police straight away, not let this thing ride on and on to this. The wood-burner was blazing, it felt too hot.

  ‘I knew all along you weren’t really a girl who was coming for a sailing weekend with me,’ he said, chuckling. He had his hand on my thigh, pressing down. ‘There was no girl! I wanted to see how long you’d keep up the pretence. Quite a long time, as it turns out!’

  ‘I would have told you.’ My words came out quietly when at last I found my voice. ‘I wanted to. But then you said I was the only one who had visited you. I was worried it would be worse for you to know the truth than to go along with what you believed!’ My protest sounded feeble even to myself.

  ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ignoring this, ‘that while you thought I was unconscious, you promised me I could come down to your Aunty May’s house by the sea when I was better? Because you wanted to make amends for what you’d done to me?’

  ‘Yes, I do remember.’

  ‘But now you’re reneging on that promise! Surely all that hasn’t just passed out of your mind now you’re finding things a bit – how did you put it? “A bit rushed”?’

  ‘It isn’t like that, Patrick. We’ve got very involved with each other very quickly and I just think perhaps we should take it a bit more slowly.’

  ‘NO!! You don’t give up on me now! You don’t walk out on me! Not now you’ve maimed me for life!’

  ‘We aren’t a hundred per cent certain it was me who ran you over, are we?’ I asked desperately. ‘What about that man at the pub . . .’

  He pushed me off my feet, onto my back on the sofa. Held my hands against the sofa arm, above my head.

  ‘Sweetie, your numberplate is branded on my brain. NS08 NTJ. Your silver blue Nissan Micra disappearing into the night while I lay on the tarmac will never be erased from my memory.’

  I stared up at him.

  I struggled against his grip.

  ‘What about – you know – compensation.’ I could hear the fear in my own voice. I was breathless, panicky. It was too hot. ‘Surely, if I was responsible for what happened, I must also be responsible for paying it somehow? And of course I’ll do that, Patrick! I do understand! I have to pay. I should have gone to the police straight away. I’ll go to them now, make amends.’ I knew I was gabbling, revealing how panicked I was. But I couldn’t stop myself.

  ‘My goodness, Ellie, you’re a clever girl but you’re terribly innocent. You do know what you committed that evening, hitting me without reporting it, is a serious offence? All you had to do when you realised, was stop, call the police. The worst thing you did wasn’t knocking me over.’ He shifted his weight so he was bearing down on me even harder as I struggled again against his hold. ‘It was driving away from it and withholding the information when the police appealed for witnesses.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything I can do? Now, I mean? Shouldn’t we go to the police? Explain. Then I’ll do what I should have done straight away and we—’

  ‘I could sue the pants off you.’ He laughed. ‘Have you any idea what I’m worth? What my walking’s worth? How much I could sting you for the leg you’ve destroyed?’

  I couldn’t speak. I was trying to process what was happening. What this meant.

  His voice softened
then, and he loosened his grip.

  ‘I’m not asking you to do anything you’ve never wanted to do, am I? You wanted to help me, to care for me. You came to me, remember? Not the other way round. It’s what you wanted too, isn’t it? To be with me?’

  ‘Of course. Yes, of course.’

  ‘Then, Ellie, stop resisting. We’re meant to be together, aren’t we?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, we are.’

  I wanted to get away. I needed to go outside and breathe some air. But everything Patrick was saying was making me realise how trapped I was. I felt the heat from the wood-burner sear up my back to my neck, the back of my neck under my hair break out in a sweat.

  We were here in Aunty May’s remote seaside house, with nothing beyond us but the wild North Sea on one side, and flat countryside for miles on the other. A fear as familiar as my own hand, for it was the one I’d had as a child. I was alone, marooned in this village that was not on the way to anywhere, unable to get back to civilisation even if I wanted to.

  Patrick could sue me to the bones. He’d seen my car. He’d remembered the numberplate. But he also knew that even if I were to pay money, compensation, a fine, serve a prison sentence, whatever, I would always have his injuries on my conscience.

  I could walk away but I’d never walk away. I was trapped. With a man who had tried to kill a woman when she realised she had to leave him.

  And it was a trap of my own making.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I handed in my notice to the school the following Monday. Patrick convinced me I couldn’t be trusted to look after children, pointing out the ease with which I’d lied about his accident, on top of the way I often seemed distracted and had let Timothy go home on his own.

  Mrs Patel, the lovely head teacher, reminded me my contract demanded half a term’s notice, and if I broke it I would find it hard to be employed in schools again.

  I told her nothing would change my mind.

  She looked at me with concern.

  ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing, Ellie? I know your painting’s going well, but it’s hard to make it in the art world. Teaching is secure and you’re good at it. I had plans for you to coordinate the art next year.’