Can You See Her?: An absolutely compelling psychological thriller

by S. E. Lynes

3

  Ingrid

  Transcript of recorded interview with Ingrid Taylor (excerpt)

  Also present: DI Heather Scott, PC Marilyn Button

  IT: I could tell there was something wrong with her the first time I saw her. Her appearance was… I mean, I’m not being mean, but I just thought she’d let herself go like a lot of women that age do. Then when I stepped inside her house that first time, she had this folder thing on the side by the hob, and when I asked her about it she was really quite shifty. She said it was bank statements or something, but she closed it quickly – too quickly, I thought – and put it on the shelf on the dresser, as if she didn’t want me to steal her lasagne recipe or something.

  HS: And you looked inside it?

  IT: Look, I know you shouldn’t go snooping in someone else’s house, but the way she was acting made me curious. Anyone would be. She went to fetch an ashtray – I mean, I always smoke in the garden but she insisted I could smoke indoors – and when I heard her plod upstairs – she has a very heavy tread – I had a quick glance through, that’s all. And I can tell you something: it wasn’t recipes.

  HS: Ms Taylor, can you tell us what you found?

  IT: Well, the cuttings, obviously. All those deaths. Violent crimes. Related articles too – knife crime on the rise, how safe are our streets, campaigns, that sort of stuff.

  HS: And what was your reaction?

  IT: Shock. It was shocking. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, to be honest. Page after page of it. There must have been over a hundred articles in there – stabbings, shootings, armed robbery, you name it. Mark told me she wanted to organise some sort of campaign, but of course now it all makes perfect sense. I mean, this was before I got to know Mark, and I have to say, I almost ran out of the house screaming. I mean, hello? Talk about psychopathic, my God! What’s your hobby? Oh, I collect violent deaths and keep them under cellophane so they don’t spoil. I mean, who does that? You’d have to be… well, she was, wasn’t she? In the guise of a mother figure. I mean, it’s straight from Stephen King.

  HS: Ms Taylor—

  IT: I suppose there’ll be more clippings in there now, won’t there? Including the… the ones she did herself… Oh God, I don’t even want to think about it, but it was the organisation, you know? The care. That was almost the most terrifying thing. Each one in its own clear sleeve like it was a precious document. And when I found out about… about what she’d done, I thought, why not keep a folder on the computer? Call it something random like, well, like Recipes or Kids or something. Expenses. Anything. Why keep paper, these days? But I guess you can’t settle down on the sofa and leaf through a computer file quite the same, can you, if that’s even what she spent her time doing. Who knows? Maybe she liked to flick through them on her days off. Perving over other people’s murders while she sipped the rank instant coffee she served. That makes sense, I suppose. I mean, it’s sick, isn’t it? Morbid. Actually, this is making me stressed. Can I smoke in here?

  4

  Rachel

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Lisa was still in her dressing gown. ‘What’s the matter, wet the bed?’

  ‘Very funny. I was up early, that’s all, so I thought I may as well walk the dog.’

  She backed up, still holding the front door open. ‘Come in then, if you’re coming.’

  I’ve known Lisa since we were kids – jigsaws and Sindy dolls, primary school, secondary, first boyfriends, first time getting drunk, borrowing each other’s clothes, make-up, you name it. Even got pregnant at the same time – my first, her second. Kieron and Jodi. Both her girls are at uni now. Jodi went off to Leeds the year before Kieron to do modern languages and Kieron went to Goldsmiths to do fine art last year after his foundation. I thought Katie would leave home this year with her being so academic, but she said she wanted to do a gap year, which so far seems to mean seventy-two zillion hours alternating between Instagram, YouTube and Netflix. Oh, and getting bladdered with her mates twice a week. I’m not sure she’ll ever go to uni now to be honest. What a waste.

  Lisa brought us a coffee. It wasn’t quite warm enough to sit out, so we went to sit in her conservatory, where Archie had a quick sniff before curling up for a doze. ‘So, what’s new?’

  I dived straight in, told her about how I’d become the invisible woman.

  ‘I was so shocked it gave me a nosebleed,’ I said.

  I’d expected her to tell me I was mad or to call an ambulance, but she didn’t. She was nodding her agreement before I’d even finished.

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ she said. ‘I was in a café the other day and the guy served the woman behind me in the queue. Behind me, can you believe that? He literally looked through me to her as if I was made of glass.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  She eyeballed me and raised her forefinger. ‘I said, “Oi, ferret face! What am I then, chopped liver?”’

  ‘You never did.’ I laughed.

  ‘I didn’t, no, but when he took my order, I told him how kind he was to give me a complementary cappuccino, that I appreciated the gesture.’

  ‘He gave you a free coffee?’

  ‘He did then. He was too embarrassed not to.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Lis.’ I was full-on laughing by then. Lisa has this way of building her routines until you’re helpless on the couch. She shows no mercy; won’t stop even if you tell her to – especially if you tell her to.

  A determined expression setting in on her face, she put her coffee down on the smallest of her nest of pine side tables.

  ‘I was furious,’ she started. ‘Costs them ten pence to make a coffee – it’s a bloody licence to print money – and I reckon after all I’ve already been through, with periods and pregnancy and torn lady bits from childbirth and spaniel’s ears from breastfeeding and mopping up shit and sick and you name it I’ve cleaned it, and all the invisible woman-hours spent running a hotel cum counselling service single-handed for non-paying guests, and reduced job prospects and low pay and divorce from a randy dog man-child, if on top of that I’m now going to be having the sweats and the rages and the memory loss and this bloody extra tyre I seem to have acquired that seems to be made entirely from porridge, not to mention the face, oh, the face, the sodding eyebrows on it, disappearing as fast as the bloody beard seems to be growing, do you know, I now have to push down my facial hair with moisturiser every sodding morning, literally smear it down and hope to God it doesn’t fluff back up…’ She breathed, finally, eyebrows shooting up. ‘So I reckon I deserve a free frigging coffee.’

  She cracked a smile and we both chuckled.

  ‘I mean,’ she added. ‘Backlit, I look like Robert Redford.’

  I wiped my eyes, feeling better already. Five minutes with Lisa’s like a shot in the arm. ‘I can’t get out of a chair without making a noise these days.’

  ‘Just be thankful you can still get out of a chair. Woman down the road got stuck in the bath last week. She had to call 999. She’s only fifty-eight and thank God she’d taken her phone in with her, but talk about embarrassing… Pass me a towel, officer, isn’t in it.’

  Hysterical. God, I miss her.

  Once we’d stopped laughing, she had a good moan about her ex, Patrick, a headmaster, who, in a fit of originality, had left her for a young geography teacher with a pierced belly button called Caz – the woman, not the belly button – before we came back around to where we’d started, i.e. me moaning about Mark.

  ‘He might not look at you like he used to,’ Lisa said. ‘But at least he’s a decent bloke. Unlike Patdick, he’s actually there.’

  ‘In body if not in spirit.’ I regretted saying that straight away. Yes, you could be lonely in a marriage, but Lisa was lonely full stop and she’d always liked Mark, always had a soft spot for him. And before Patrick left, he made sure he drove in the final nail by telling her he didn’t find her attractive anymore and that he only had one life. Talk about kicking her when she was down. It was as if he’d died, she said at the tim
e. Except that he hadn’t and she wanted to kill him. And all the jokes in the world couldn’t hide the longing in her for someone to grow old with now that her girls were off living their own lives. All she had was the smoke and mirrors of gags and laughter to hide her pain, her fears, the yawning abyss of loneliness.

  ‘Like most of us,’ I say, and give Blue Eyes a smile.

  She almost smiles back. ‘And did you tell Lisa that you’d read or felt you’d read the man in the park? That you’d understood him by instinct?’

  ‘I did, actually.’

  ‘And how did she respond?’

  I tell Blue Eyes that, again, Lisa didn’t seem at all bothered.

  ‘That’s a skill you’ve been practising your whole life,’ was all she said, as if telepathy were the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘How d’you mean?’ I said. ‘Like mind-reading?’

  ‘Not like Derren Brown, you nit. You’re not a bloody Jedi. But we weren’t born yesterday, were we? We’ve got to a stage in life where we can pick up on things, read people if not minds exactly. We don’t see everything in black and white like kids do. At our age we know nothing and no one is simple. It comes with being older.’

  I thought about the chap’s crumpled trousers. When I was young, I would’ve assumed he was a slob. This morning, I’d had the compassion, I suppose you’d say, to think a bit more deeply about why he hadn’t ironed them. Same when I saw an older woman all dolled up like mutton dressed as lamb – before, I would have said to myself, look at the state of her, still thinks she’s twenty-one. Now, I know she doesn’t think anything of the sort. She knows bloody well she’s not twenty-one anymore. And it’s killing her.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said to Lisa.

  ‘No one gets to our age without living through something that knocks them about a bit.’ She met my eye and a flash of understanding passed between us, the one subject we never talked about. ‘We lose our certainty about things, don’t we? And that’s no bad thing sometimes when you look at the state of the world, people thinking they’re right all the time, that their way is better. We’ve spent most of our lives putting others first, haven’t we, you and me and a trillion other women? Meeting other people’s needs while pushing our own to the side, forgetting what our own needs ever were sometimes, not to mention who we were when we last had them. A tough habit to break, but it must make us more in tune with what others are feeling. It has to, doesn’t it? Stands to reason.’

  I nodded. ‘I got eighty-five per cent in Grazia’s “Are You an Empath?” quiz the other week.’

  ‘There you go. And that’s bloody science, is that.’ She shot me a wicked grin. ‘God knows, if I’d had to discuss my interior life all those years with Patrick instead of you, I’d have thrown myself off the nearest bridge. He’d probably have started talking to me about the football scores. In fact, there’s no probably about it. He did. He used to. That or the mortgage.’

  She pushed her once brown hair over one ear. She’d made that tricky transition to honey-toned blondey-grey without ever having the old caterpillar roots situation. Only reason I didn’t have grey roots was because I hadn’t bothered to dye mine at all this last year. My hair was pretty much salt and pepper these days, if you were being kind; geriatric mouse if you weren’t, and if I went back to the original black now I’d end up looking like something from The Addams Family. Lisa wore trendy clothes too, and even though she’d complained of a spare tyre, I couldn’t see one. Silently I vowed to get back on my hip and thigh diet the next day. My diets always start on Mondays. By Wednesday I think I can still turn it around. By Friday I’ve reached sod it I’ll try again next week, pass the chocolate.

  ‘Rach? Rachel?’ Lisa was staring at me. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Just… you were off somewhere else there for a second. Are you sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Of course I’m OK – why wouldn’t I be OK? I’m just not sure I’m ready to be invisible, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. ‘If no one can see you, you can do anything you want, can’t you? You can get away with murder.’

  5

  Lisa

  Transcript of recorded interview with Lisa Baxter (excerpt)

  Also present: DI Heather Scott, PC Marilyn Button

  LB: We were just chatting, that was all it was. I thought it was no more than our age, time of life type thing. I didn’t realise she was so fragile until later on, and even then I thought it was the hormones, because I was in the same boat – hot flashes, tiredness and feeling cross about everything all the time. But I should have known it was more than that. I mean, I knew it was, obviously.

  HS: It was more?

  LB: (Pause) She’d been ill before. When her Kieron was born. Mark and I were frantic. In the end we called the hospital and they came and took her, and to be fair, she did get better. Postpartum psychosis she had, so I should have put two and two together, what with it being another hormonal time for a woman. But I’m only putting two and two together now. At the time, I didn’t know she had anything to do with those attacks. It never occurred to me. Thing is, Rachel’s kind to everyone, and I mean everyone, from the man in the street to her best friend. That’s me. I’m her best friend, always have been. I’d do anything for her, literally anything at all. She was a bloody rock to me when Patrick left. Both my girls call her Auntie Rach. She never forgets their birthdays, never. She even sends them both a Valentine’s card every year with love from guess who? on it. I mean, they’re in their twenties now so I suppose I should break it to them, like… Sorry, I make jokes when I’m nervous. I’m just so up to here with it all. I just wish I’d done more to help her. I kept asking her if she was OK, but she wouldn’t let me in. She wouldn’t talk to me about it. So in the end I had to respect that. She knew I was worried about her. She knows I love her to bits, like. We didn’t need words to know that the other one wasn’t right. You don’t, do you, when you’ve known somebody that long?

  HS: So you’re saying that you had no concerns about Rachel’s mental health back in June?

  LB: Not then, no. No more than was normal. But as the weeks went on, she withdrew. I should’ve recognised the signs. But she’d just button up and that’d be it, change the subject, say she had to go. It was like a screen came down, one of them metal shutters like they have on shop doors, you know?

  HS: Mrs Baxter, do you remember telling Rachel that she could get away with murder?

  LB: What? I mean… I might have said something like that, but I was only joking. Come on, you can’t take something like that and turn it into something else. That’s twisting my words, that is. She was upset because she felt like Mark didn’t notice her anymore. Or her Katie. I knew exactly how she felt – don’t we all? I was just trying to cheer her up, that’s all. I didn’t for one moment suggest that she should go out and start killing people. Come on, that’s completely mad. I still can’t believe she’d attack anyone, let alone kill them. I mean, that young girl? No way. It’s just not Rachel, do you know what I mean? She wouldn’t hurt anyone. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. It’s just not her. (Breaks down)

  6

  Rachel

  ‘Get away with murder.’ Blue Eyes’ head twitches to one side. ‘That’s a bold statement.’

  I see what she did there. I’m not daft.

  ‘I think it’s fair to say it got under my skin,’ I admit. ‘But I didn’t come over all “I Don’t Like Mondays” and go on a shooting spree or anything. Things got weirder, yes. I got weirder, I mean, but weirdness is like ageing: you don’t notice it as much day by day, do you? It creeps up on you and one day you catch your reflection and see your own mother staring back. Or father, in my case, beard and all unfortunately.’

  She doesn’t laugh, even though I’m trying to lighten the mood. But she’s spot on when she suggests the words might have stuck. Most of what Lisa said stuck, to be honest.
Why? Because she’s my best friend, that’s why, and at the time I thought she had only good intentions towards me. But that evening, maybe because I’d had a moan, I noticed more than usual that it was me that made the dinner, me that cleared up, me that put the washing on the rack after folding the dry clothes and sorting them into piles to iron, me that took them upstairs and put them away. I noticed how Mark went straight through to watch telly without saying thank you, how Katie disappeared to her room the moment her knife and fork clattered on china.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ I called after her. ‘Your plate won’t get clean if you put it next to the dishwasher, you know. Cake doesn’t bake outside the oven, does it?’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she shouted back, already at the foot of the stairs. ‘I’m doing my contouring tutorial.’ Bang bang bang went her feet. ‘I told you, like five thousand—’ Slam went her bedroom door.

  Contouring, I thought. Didn’t that have to do with maps?

  That night, my clothes stood up on their own like the Invisible Man. A kitchen knife floated in the air at the end of a sleeve, the steel blade glinting in the dark. Daggers pierced skin. Blood oozed. Sirens wailed. My own face came in and out of the fog: moonlit and pale and weeping.

  In the early hours, I broke from those troubling dreams salt-crusted as a fat white slab of cod. I was shivering, exhausted, sweat running down my cleavage, bottom sheet soaked through. I hadn’t sweated like that since I was breastfeeding Kieron, and that too had gone hand in hand with the visions. Except back then they happened in the day as well. I’d be chopping onions for tea and next thing I’d see myself throw the knife at Kieron as he lay sleeping in his Moses basket. It’s not something I talk about to anyone. Only Mark and Lisa knew about it at the time, and I don’t even talk to them about it anymore. Blue Eyes will have read it in my notes, if she’s requested them from my GP, which she’s bound to have done. It was Lisa who phoned Mark, Lisa who phoned for an ambulance. The NHS were amazing. The right diagnosis, the right drugs and the right person to talk to, and they got me back on track within the year. I can still remember the doctor, how kind she was when I cried into my hands and told her I was mad, mad, mad.