by Mark Davis
Elizabeth always felt a flutter of stage fright when she glanced around a room and saw so many well-dressed people looking at her expectantly. While the ambassador droned on, she quietly drew in a breath for four seconds, held it for seven, and exhaled over eight. Elizabeth was able to do this three times by the time the ambassador finished introducing her.
The 4-7-8 breath always calmed her down before a talk.
Elizabeth walked confidently to the podium and made a few American-in-London quips. She spoke of her background before medical school, how she and her brother Mike were in a fragile state after the death of their mother and then torn to pieces by the subsequent suicide of their father. She spoke about Mike’s suicide while they were both in college, and how hard it was for her to survive the loss of the last member of her family.
She told of her successes and her failures, including the story of Jeremy, three months before. As she spoke, Elizabeth marveled at how easy it had become to speak about such things in public, the first time she had talked about Jeremy outside of therapy. Being so open was not possible in the first such speech she had made, or the tenth. But she had talked about her life for so many years in therapy, first as a patient, then as a resident, that she was finding it was becoming second nature.
Elizabeth told her stories because they were useful. It gave her credibility, connecting with audiences in a way no academic talk ever could. Above all, it gave Elizabeth Browne the ability to communicate with potential suicides as a peer. I know, she said, I’ve walked in the valley of the shadow of despair just as you have. I’ve turned a pill bottle in my hands and thought about it. In this moment, there was a hush in the room, a quiet intimacy with people who were no strangers to her struggle.
At these moments, when she spoke about Mike, she seemed to stand outside of herself, listening to herself speak as if she were sitting in the audience. That felt good, felt right, her story more important than all her credentials or presence as a speaker.
Yet there were times, thankfully it did not happen tonight, when the retelling of her family story seemed like a recitation, even, she sometimes felt, a vulgar display of the special qualification of victimhood that was such a hallmark of these times. When that feeling came over her, she felt inauthentic, false, even a betrayer of her lost loved ones.
Such thoughts posed the danger of becoming intrusive, even disabling. They threatened to make her choke in front of an audience. But Elizabeth had learned to dismiss that little voice of self-condemnation and carry on.
Elizabeth came to the close of her speech. It had become a part of her, and she felt like an old stage actor coming to the most important part of a famous soliloquy.
“If it had not been for the intervention of a mentor—a remarkable man who had guided me through my own analysis—I very well may have been the final victim of suicide in the Browne family.”
The only sound in the room was the clinking of plates from the kitchen.
“That is when I came to know what I had to do with my life, to pull others from the pitiless gaze of the abyss,” she said. “Yes, I’ve lost some patients. But I’ve saved many more—as I know every practitioner here tonight has done. We’ve saved enough people to fill this room many times over. Like you, I have yet to find a better purpose for a career, for my very life.”
The applause was explosive. It always was.
As Elizabeth smiled appreciatively at her audience, the thought came to her that for all their admiration, no one in the room would be terribly surprised to read one day that she had finally killed herself.
___________
The castle stood high and lonely, perched on a plug of land surrounded by a long stretch of purple sand fast by a purple sea. In her dream, Elizabeth labored under the weight of a basket of laundry she had to take to the king. It was supposed to be clean, of course, but wind-borne sand kept dirtying it up.
A murmur, slight and tinny, caught her attention. The sound was coming from the basket, pathetic little mouse voices crying out for help, but there was nothing funny about them. She set the basket down on the sand. She fished through sheets and found that the cries emanated from a cord of multi-colored knots. When Elizabeth examined the knots of the cord more closely, she could see they were made of people, human figures with limbs tied tightly together, binding them into a single chain of agony.
She began to untie them with frantic haste. She wanted to save them, but the more she pulled on their tangled arms and legs, the more she hurt them.
Elizabeth couldn’t stop and she couldn’t save them. So she kept hurting them. Even killing them.
A dull, insistent tone called out to her.
She looked up at the castle. The king was waiting, impatient, upset . . .
The sound again, two dull tones in rapid succession.
The king was angry.
She stirred, unwilling to rise from the depths of sleep.
That obnoxious British ring tone.
The red lights of the digital clock said 3:33 a.m. She answered with her name. Elizabeth didn’t mind that she sounded scratchy and half-asleep. She wanted the caller to know how rude he was. But she was also grateful to be pulled away from such a disturbing dream.
“Sorry to call so late, but this is an emergency.”
The voice was American, not familiar.
Something must have happened to Max.
Elizabeth bolted upright in bed, gripping the phone like a weapon.
“Is my son okay?”
“Oh no,” the voice said. “Nothing like that. Put yourself at ease. This is a business call.”
“A business call or an emergency? Do you know what time it is in London? We’re ahead of you, not behind you.”
“Yes, I am in London too. Townsend Gray, chargé d’affaires at the American embassy. Again, I’m sorry to have awakened you. You are here for the whole summer, are you not?”
Townsend as a first name? Did the State Department have a secret breeding facility for fops?
“Academic exchange, King’s College . . . What can I do for you, Mister Gray?”
“There has been a mass suicide, four are Americans.”
Elizabeth cleared her throat. Four. A pact of some sort, obviously.
“And you need me—?”
“The ambassador was impressed by your speech. He asks that you come to the scene, advise Scotland Yard and the Norwegian Police Security Service.”
“Norway?”
“Yes, we would like you to gather your things for a short trip to Stavanger first thing in the morning. Scotland Yard will make a jet available. And please don’t forget your passport. You’ll be paid of course, one hundred dollars an hour out of embassy funds, surely below your standard rate, but . . .”
“Norwegians?”
“No, three Brits, seven people in all. Several of the Brits and the Americans were, well, prominent. A senior oil company executive from Houston, a pharmaceutical CEO from Delaware, a famous British writer, although I never heard of her . . . And then there is how they, how they . . .”
“Don’t tell me.”
“How anyone could do that to themselves. I would be . . .”
“Don’t tell me,” she said.
A long silence.
“Why not?”
“I like to go into a scene naïve, without preconception. It helps me see it fresh, through their eyes. Please let everyone know that.”
It took Mr. Gray a few more beats to assimilate what she meant.
“Very well. Will you help us?”
“My schedule is light, mainly summer research before I have to be back in Washington. My Georgetown classes don’t start until, uh, August twenty-eighth. And this is the kind of case that I do, so yes.”
And besides, she thought, Mr. Gray described a case that certainly qualifies as research, perhaps the sort that could be the basis of the kind of study that would attract a big grant.
“Thank you, Ms
. Browne. Please be at Victoria Station, the Krispy Kreme bar, five a.m. And don’t forget that passport.”
___________
The coffee at the doughnut shop was surprisingly good. Elizabeth hadn’t been able to catch much sleep after the call, so she needed every drop.
Instead of being met by the American chargé, Elizabeth was met by a Scotland Yard detective. The inspector was dark and pretty, with a heart-shaped face that came to a fine-point chin, almond eyes accentuated by mascara, and black hair that was too long and lustrous for a policewoman.
“Detective Inspector Nasrin Jones, Metropolitan Police.” Her voice was steady, handshake firm.
“Pleased to meet you, Inspector Jones,” Elizabeth said. “I hope I can be of help.”
“We hope so too.”
There was no time for further introduction. They rolled their bags down the escalator and boarded the 5:10 to Heathrow.
Elizabeth took the seat directly opposite Inspector Jones facing the back of the train. She was soon staring at a backwards roll of dreary landscape in the dishwater light of a summer morning, public housing complexes of gray concrete and satellite dishes, cottages with rippling roofs, junk piles of car parts and appliances, and sidings bright with phosphorescent graffiti.
“I did some online research on you last night,” Inspector Jones said. “Browsed several of your papers . . . Ideation and the Adolescent Mind . . . In-Group Ideology and Mass Suicide and, of course, Suicide as Epidemic.”
Elizabeth smiled.
“Then you must have had a good night’s sleep,” she replied.
I sure didn’t.
The Battersea Power Station rolled backwards into view, a relic of Elizabeth’s childhood come to life. Not two weeks after the death of Elizabeth’s mother from cancer, Dad had tacked up old record album covers on the walls of the dining room and set up his amps and electric guitar, converting it into his music room. A beloved, vintage album cover was tacked on the wall depicting a giant pig floating in the air over the power station’s four smokestacks.
“So is suicide your area of investigation?” Elizabeth asked.
“No, homicide,” Nasrin said. “Doctor Browne—”
“Elizabeth, please.”
“Do you truly insist on going to the scene . . . naïve?”
“I should have found a better word to use on the call with Mister Gray. Not at my best at three in the morning.”
Elizabeth glanced out the window again as the power station slipped from view. Pink Floyd, Animals, that was the album. How Dad had listened to that record over and over wearing his clunky, giant headphones. How Mother would have hated what he had done to her dining room.
The inspector leaned forward, noticing Elizabeth’s distraction.
“But yes,” Elizabeth continued, “going in fresh helps me see things, the scene and all its clues to what the victims were thinking. It helps me to experience the site as the victims approached it, to feel a little of what they felt. Homicide, you say?”
“Even suicides are homicides.”
“Of course.”
Elizabeth knew that. Too little sleep had left her brain as dim as the early morning landscape. And, of course, prominent, international suicides would attract high-level police attention.
A car and driver waited for them at Heathrow Station. They were whisked through a gate and out onto a tarmac with a fleet of small government jets with royal seals.
Elizabeth followed Inspector Jones up the tiny metal ramp into a small Brazilian-made jet, a Legacy 500. The beige interior had little headroom, but the seats were plush. Elizabeth again found herself in a chair that faced backwards, this time across a small walnut table from Inspector Jones.
“Will we be met by the Norwegian police?”
“Of course, it’s their country, even though it presently appears that none of their subjects were among the victims. An Inspector Stenstrom will be leading the investigation.”
“What do we know about the victims?”
“One was an oil company executive from Houston. Kenneth H. Woods, vice president for safety, health, security and the environment at XRO Energy.”
The largest publicly held corporation in the world. To be an XRO vice president was better than being the CEO of many Fortune 500s.
The engines roared, the craft vibrated and rolled into takeoff. Once airborne, the small jet tilted one way, then the other, before nosing almost straight up into a Wedgewood-blue sky. Once they leveled off, sunlight broke over a pleasant English farmscape of green and yellow squares. The land soon ended at a broken coastline of rock followed by pewter-gray sea dotted with an array of wind turbines like enormous white daffodils poking out of the sea.
“And the pharma CEO from Delaware?”
“Sandra Armstrong. She had led Therapso for almost eight years.”
The name was familiar. Elizabeth had a vague memory of meeting Armstrong at a medical convention. Tall, striking-looking woman, confident and charming. A suicide?
Sun glinted off the mirror of the North Sea.
“And the writer?”
“Anne Shrewsbury. Wrote a mystery series, I read a few. Main character was a widow who was a famous painter in a small village in the Cotswolds. There always seemed to be a murder in the painter-widow’s local parish, which of course, she always solved.”
“Others?”
“Lionel Jacobson.”
“The playwright?”
“Yes,” Inspector Jones said.
Elizabeth remembered a New York Times profile piece on Jacobson, with headline something like, ‘Weaving Success Out of Tragedy.’ She recalled a photo of an earnest-looking man with short-shorn, salt-and-pepper hair on a round head. Proudly gay, intense work ethic, a history of feuds with other writers and endless lawsuits against his producers and others he felt had wronged him.
“The rest?”
“Still working on them. We should have their files by this afternoon.”
“Clearly, they all had to be members of some sort of group,” Elizabeth said.
“I thought you wanted to go into this naïve?”
“Enough of that.”
“Very well,” Inspector Jones had a pleasant smile. “Please call me Nasrin. The truth is, we don’t know exactly what happened. But yes, when you see the scene, there will be no doubt. They were all in some sort of group, we just don’t know what kind.”
TWO
They were greeted on the airport tarmac by a small delegation of police.
An athletic-looking man in a dark blue uniform stepped forward. The gold-leaf clusters that framed his cap made him look more like a NATO general than a cop. Next to him was a trim, blonde woman with a severe expression. She wore a white shirt with epaulettes of brass-colored cords and a dark-blue skirt. Parked behind them were a dark-blue armored Volvo and a white VW station wagon with police stripes.
“I am Chief Inspector Stenstrom and this is my assistant, Inspector Dahl.” Inspector Stenstrom’s handshake was as firm as Nasrin’s had been.
Several others stepped forward. There were introductions all the way around.
“Inspector Jones, you are to ride with me,” Stenstrom said. “Ms. Browne, you are to ride in the white car with Inspector Dahl. We will be stopping in about thirty minutes, and then we shall ride on to the entrance to the park, which should take a further hour.”
On that brisk note, they were off. Elizabeth sat in the back seat while Lieutenant Dahl drove. Elizabeth had never been to Norway before and was eager to drink in as much scenery as she could. All she saw at first were strip malls, high-end car dealerships and gas stations. The suburbs thinned out and they came to a stop at a large store, an outfitter of fishing gear, camping equipment and hiking apparel.
“Do you have any medical conditions that would prevent you from undertaking a strenuous hike?” Inspector Dahl asked.
“No.”
“What is your foot size?”
“Seven-and-a-half, but an eight will do.”
Dahl had a blonde ponytail and a face that would have been pretty if her expression were not so hard.
“Come inside.”
The store was a steel cavern with hanging canoes and kayaks, not unlike any big box outfitter around the Washington Beltway.
“Ready for a hike?” Nasrin Jones, the Scotland Yard inspector, had crept up behind her. She had just been speaking with Inspector Dahl.
“Always,” Elizabeth said.
“Get something warm,” Nasrin said. “There will be altitude changes, and the winds can get pretty brisk up there.”
“Up there?”
Her response to Nasrin made Dahl smile for once.
“They told me about you and your French word,” Dahl said. “I am told not to say it.”
Elizabeth picked out a pair of nylon hiking pants, a green, long-sleeved hiking shirt and a windbreaker. Inspector Dahl presented her with a pair of women’s hiking boots with a pair of water-resistant socks.
“These should be sufficient,” she said. “Seven-and-a-half. Want to try them on?”
“I am sure they’ll fit.”
“Try them on, if you would.”
Inspector Dahl motioned Elizabeth to go to a changing booth. The hiking clothes fit well and the boots were snug. Elizabeth folded her business suit and put it into the bag. She walked toward the counter to pay for the clothes she was wearing, but Inspector Dahl held a hand out for the tags.
“The Crown will pay for all this,” she said.
“Great, can I keep my new outfit?”
“No. It will be cleaned and go to charity.”
Stenstrom and Nasrin Jones were off in a corner talking heatedly while keeping their voices low. Nasrin too had already changed into hiking gear. Stenstrom remained in his uniform. Elizabeth noticed that his uniform included black leather boots, sufficient for a hike, as did Dahl’s.
Inspector Dahl shot her a look of displeasure, as if she had just caught Elizabeth eavesdropping.
“Please wait in the car,” she said.