I Know My Name: A stunning psychological thriller

by C. J. Cooke

  She pauses to allow the message to sink in. Gerda has started to weep and is reaching for the box of tissues in front of us. Magnus puts his arm around her. I can hear him making hiccup sounds, as though trying not to break down.

  I make eye contact with a man wearing headphones and holding a large feather-duster mic in my direction. He throws me an odd grin, and panic grips me. There could have been more than one person involved in hacking the babycams. Are they here, right now?

  Did they record our conversations?

  Did they plan to blackmail us?

  ‘Eloïse Shelley was not erratic or prone to abandoning her family,’ Welsh continues in a grave tone. ‘Eloïse was a devoted mother who stepped down from her role at the charity because her children needed her more at that time. We appeal to anyone with information pertaining to her whereabouts as of Tuesday the seventeenth of March to contact us on the number given here. All information will be held—’

  Suddenly Magnus leans forward and roughly thumps his mic, causing a surge of ear-bursting feedback. He clears his throat and says, ‘I would like to offer a reward of fifty thousand pounds to anyone who has information about what has happened to my granddaughter. Anything at all.’

  ‘Mr Bachmann—’ Welsh interjects, but he waves her away.

  ‘And to anyone who is able to bring her back to us within the next twenty-four hours, I pledge two hundred thousand pounds in cash.’

  Was that it? Was El blackmailed?

  Reporters begin thrusting arms into the air, clamouring to put their questions. ‘Mr Bachmann! Mr Bachmann!’

  Welsh steps forward and instructs the press to remain quiet until she has finished her address.

  ‘We will be taking questions in a moment. Please bear with me whilst I relay the necessary contact information and details that will assist us in locating Eloïse. We urge anyone who may have seen Eloïse in the hours leading up to her disappearance to make contact via the number provided on the press release. We guarantee that any information relayed will be treated sensitively and in confidence.’

  She nods at me. I can tell she’s keen to distract the media from Magnus’ offer of a reward, but the men and women in the front row look poised to follow up on it.

  I glance over the cameras and mobile phones and microphones, then pull out a folded photograph of Eloïse from my shirt pocket. She is standing in our back garden in denim shorts and wellies, posing with a flute of champagne in one hand and a giant weed in the other, a saucy smile on her face and her blonde hair caught by the wind. On a deep exhale, I hold it up in front of me.

  ‘This is my wife,’ I say. ‘Eloïse is an incredible woman. My son and daughter miss her so very much. We are lost without her.’ I begin to well up, my voice becoming tighter with each word I utter. I have never felt so exposed in my life, so completely naked. The words on the page swim and merge and I swipe my eyes with my hands. ‘Please, Eloïse. Please … anyone … just tell us she’s safe. Please bring her back to us.’

  A hand shoots up. ‘Mr Shelley, was your marriage in trouble? Do you think Eloïse may have walked out on your family?’

  The question catches me off-guard. ‘No,’ I say in disgust, which seems to trigger every hand in the room to rise.

  ‘Mr Shelley! Mr Shelley!’

  ‘Please, let him finish!’ Welsh shouts, but her voice is drowned out.

  I pull at my collar. Sweat pools in my armpits and runs down my back. I try to regain my composure, reminding myself of the many thousands of eyes that are watching. My colleagues. My bosses. Whoever may have taken my wife. I try to speak. But the thought that whoever has been arrested for spying on us is at this moment confessing to her murder overwhelms me.

  ‘Mr Shelley, do you have a message for your wife?’

  I take a deep breath and stare into the lens ahead. ‘If you’re watching, Eloïse, I promise that I’ll find you. I won’t rest until I bring you home.’

  21 January 1986

  Brixton, South London

  Eloïse was in her mother’s bedroom, trying to wake her up. She held Peter tightly in one hand and shook her mother with the other.

  ‘Mummy,’ she said. ‘Mummy, please wake up!’

  Eventually her mother stirred. She had bruises all over her pale arms and Eloïse noticed that her mummy’s arms were becoming very thin. Her legs were skinny, too. Eloïse knew what Mamie would say if she saw Mummy. She would make her a big pot of potatoes and meat and tell her to eat the lot.

  She looks sick, Peter said. Maybe she needs to sleep.

  ‘But it’s my birthday, Peter,’ Eloïse said. ‘I’m seven. I’m not six any more. I want Mummy to wake up.’

  You’ve still got to go to school, though.

  On the bedside table Eloïse could smell the funny stuff that made Mummy go droopy, or sometimes very happy, or occasionally very silly. She suspected that Orhan gave Mummy that stuff but dismissed the thought even as it prodded her, because Orhan was nice to her. Orhan was the one who bought her toys and sweets and sometimes pretty clothes. When Orhan hurt her, he always said sorry.

  She looked over the spread of dirty spoons and paper wrappers on the table with a stab of anger. Peter was wrong. Mummy wasn’t sick. She was floppy because of the stuff she took.

  She took Peter back into the bedroom. The front door slammed downstairs, making the toys on her windowsill shake. She felt a familiar slick of cold running up her back and all down her arms, a tightening of her chest.

  It’s Orhan, isn’t it? Peter said.

  She held a finger to her lips and closed her eyes. She wished, without understanding why, that she could become invisible.

  She held off getting changed until she thought it was safe. Then she did so quickly, first climbing on top of her chest of drawers and reaching across to the lock on her door. Orhan had moved the lock twice before, higher, and then higher again, to ensure that she couldn’t lock it herself. He had to do that, he said, because he was in the room with her and she might unlock it and find that there were intruders out there. People who wanted to hurt her in different ways.

  ‘Happy birthday, princess,’ a voice said. She gave a jump and spun around. Orhan was standing in the doorway of her room, both hands in his pockets, smiling.

  He wasn’t wearing his factory uniform: just jeans and a black T-shirt.

  He walked in and sat on the edge of the bed. She had managed to get her skirt and shirt on but not her tights. She opted for socks. He watched.

  ‘I got you some presents,’ he said, and she lit up.

  ‘Presents?’

  He glanced at Peter. ‘I got you a new teddy. That one there’s looking a bit old and grubby. This one’s white, too, instead of brown.’

  She couldn’t hide her disappointment. Peter said nothing, as he was wont to do when Orhan was in the room. She wondered sometimes if Peter was scared of Orhan, or if he didn’t like him.

  ‘You don’t like your present?’ Orhan said.

  She looked at the new teddy in her arms. ‘No, no. He’s nice. Snowball. I’ll call him Snowball.’

  Orhan grinned. ‘And your big present is downstairs.’

  She went to race out of the room to see it, but Orhan said ‘ah, ah, ah,’ making her stop.

  ‘What do we do before getting a present?’

  She turned. ‘We say please?’

  He shook his head, rising to his feet and stroking her cheek. ‘Remember what I told you? It’s nice to give presents, too. Isn’t it?’

  There it was again, a horrible feeling in her tummy when he said that, the same feeling she had when he needed a cuddle in the middle of the night. She wanted to say no, she didn’t want to any more, but he was already standing, and Peter was sagging on the windowsill, sad and empty, and there was no one anyway, no one anywhere to come and unlock that door.

  28 March 2015

  Potter’s Lane, Twickenham

  Lochlan: The atmosphere at home is unbearable. Gerda has decided that she is in charge of the
children and won’t make eye contact. When I try to intervene in the militaristic schedule she’s created for Max and Cressida she becomes upset and I feel pressed to back off. Magnus has taken to wandering the house or neighbourhood, unshaven and dishevelled. I keep finding him at odd hours in the garden in his pyjamas, looking under the hedges. At two this morning he came downstairs with a torch and a cardboard box that had arrived from Amazon – a home fingerprinting kit that he insisted on dusting all over the back door and kitchen. We both stayed up all night, Magnus in the kitchen on his hands and knees, muttering to himself in German, me in the family room, cross-legged on the floor in one of El’s dressing gowns, checking the #findEloise Twitter campaign and the Facebook page we set up. I came across missing person statistics. Apparently, over seven hundred and fifty people go missing in the UK per day. It’s staggering. Selfishly, that figure depresses me because it makes El’s disappearance less significant in the public domain. Seven hundred and fifty a day. Over five thousand a week. I’ve been badgering the police all weekend for information, wanting to punch the walls in frustration when they say they’re working on it. How could anyone have hijacked the babycams? Why would they do that? They have no answers.

  Last night I had a long conversation with Niamh about El and I was left more confused than enlightened. I went to pick up Max and she invited me in. All of El’s friends and associates have been really helpful in trying to compile some insights from the last few months – and particularly the days leading up to her disappearance – in order to nail down possibilities, so I sensed she wanted to give me some info to add to that.

  Niamh told her little boy, Daniel, to take Max upstairs again and play with his new train table while she sat down with me in the front room. They live in a tiny flat not far from us. I know Niamh’s partner walked out on her a couple of years ago, so she’s been especially sympathetic to my situation.

  ‘I wanted to mention something that has been bugging me,’ she told me, keeping her voice low in case the boys burst in. ‘It’s probably nothing, but after I watched the press conference … well, you’ll agree that something’s better than nothing.’

  I nodded, suddenly feeling sick at what she might say.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She started to explain why she hadn’t said anything before, and I saw she was growing upset. I tried to reassure her that it was fine, that I wanted to know whatever it was she had to say. She took a deep breath and laced her hands together, bracing herself for the terrible information she was about to set loose.

  ‘About six months ago, El said she’d joined a writer’s group.’

  I waited. ‘OK.’

  She looked to the ceiling and sighed. ‘I knew this was a stupid thing to tell you …’

  ‘No, no, please. Go on.’

  ‘I’m not even sure where the group met, or why she joined. But she seemed different while she was attending it. She even said she might publish a book.’

  I wasn’t sure why this was such a big deal, or why it might bother Niamh so much that she had to tell me. In the brief amount of time that I had got to know her, Niamh had struck me as a thoughtful, quiet woman. Not the type to exaggerate or cause a fuss. I asked her when El joined the group – she’d never mentioned anything of the sort to me – and Niamh said September last year. I told her I’d search El’s email account again, see if I could find any details. She had a hunch that something had been off, and that it had happened around the time of this mysterious writer’s group. Maybe El had been seeing one of the other writers. At this point I was still in the dark about who Canavan had arrested for hacking the babycams, tortured by all the waiting and silence, and so I quickly imagined whole scenarios involving El and a sonnet-writing lover who tried to blackmail her into staying with him. Maybe he threatened the kids and she tried to protect them.

  ‘When you say El was acting different,’ I asked, ‘what do you mean by that?’

  ‘She didn’t seem herself,’ she said. ‘We’d make plans to meet – here, or at the park – and she’d not turn up. Wouldn’t call or text to say her plans had changed. It was … unlike her. And our friendship suffered.’ She lowered her eyes to the floor. I tried to offer words of reassurance, to coax it out of her. She nodded and cleared her throat.

  ‘I can’t help feeling guilty,’ she said in a cracked voice. ‘We were close, as you know, and then … when she kept ditching me, especially at a time when I was so stressed, what with Paul messing me around with child payments …’

  ‘I understand.’

  She wiped her eyes. ‘I assumed she was at the writing group because whenever I saw her it was all she talked about. She even said she’d resign from the charity permanently to write.’

  I made a face at this. ‘That doesn’t sound like El.’

  She laughed. ‘I know, it sounds crazy. I mean, she stopped talking about it once Cressida was born.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Yeah. I didn’t want to bring it up again in case, you know … But for a few months she wasn’t herself. Maybe it was nothing.’ She bit her lip, the certainty that had been in her voice a moment ago slipping away. ‘She was pregnant at the time. Maybe it was hormones.’

  I recalled seeing some new poetry books on the shelves of the bookcase that I hadn’t spotted before. I’d wondered who they belonged to – neither of us were poetry fans, or so I thought – but now it made sense. Niamh was right, though – for El to talk about resigning was completely out of character. She’d never mentioned anything like this to me.

  ‘She’d taken up smoking,’ I said then. ‘Did you know anything about this?’

  Niamh looked puzzled. ‘Smoking? Are you sure?’

  Her reaction was identical to the other friends I’d asked: nobody knew a thing about a smoking habit. I would have been tempted to convince myself I’d been mistaken, but Max had confirmed it. Or maybe he’d repeated what I said. I told Niamh about the babycam footage, how we were all perplexed over the scene of El apparently talking to someone who shouldn’t have been there or talking to thin air. At this, a shadow fell across Niamh’s face.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she said.

  I thought about it and said that no, I wasn’t sure. I’m not sure of anything.

  My mobile rings as I’m trying to put breakfast cereal out for Max, though Gerda is insisting on giving him croissants and Gouda. My sense of time is completely mixed up and I have to check the clock every five minutes to keep on top of things.

  Finally, the screen of my phone reads ‘number withheld’, and I know it’s the call I’ve been waiting for. I called Welsh and told her about the conversation with Niamh, but they seemed unimpressed. El went to lots of groups – baby yoga, Toddler Tales, Spanish for Kids, etc etc. Nobody from her many groups has been particularly helpful, and I suspect that Welsh and Canavan are anxious not to waste any more police resources than they have to.

  I answer on the first ring, and the caller speaks first.

  ‘Lochlan?’

  It’s Sophie Ojukwu, the Family Liaison Officer. My heart stops.

  ‘Who did they arrest?’

  ‘The detectives would like to speak to you this morning,’ she says. ‘Can you be at the station at nine?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The clock says eight twenty. My heart in my mouth, I throw on a clean shirt and grab my car keys.

  ‘What do you know about Harriet Ayres?’ Canavan asks.

  I’m in his office at the police station with Welsh at one end of the table and Canavan at the other.

  ‘Harriet Ayres?’ I repeat, not sure I’ve heard correctly.

  Canavan reaches for a file and pulls out an A4-sized colour photograph of a tall man with white hair, an orange tan and a full set of gleaming dentures, and a younger woman with caramel-blonde hair, twinkling eyes and a red-lipped smile. I tell them that the man is Dean Wyatt, one of the partners at the firm where I work.

  ‘Do you recognise the woman?’ Canavan says.

  I take a deep b
reath and inspect the image closely, my heart racing. ‘She’s a colleague. Works in IT. I used to see her sometimes in the staffroom at lunchtime.’ I risk a glance up at Welsh. ‘What’s she got to do with this?’

  Welsh raises her eyebrows. ‘That’s all you know about her?’

  Sweat is gathering under my armpits and along my forehead. I look from Welsh to Canavan.

  ‘OK,’ he says, setting the picture aside and leaning back in his chair. ‘Well, she seems to know a good deal more about you. She’s been charged with stalking and offences contrary to the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and an offence of Voyeurism contrary to Section 67 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.’

  An invisible wrecking ball hits me square in the chest. ‘Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me that this woman … you’re saying this is who took Eloïse?’

  Welsh is quick to correct me. ‘We don’t know that yet. She has confessed to hacking the baby cameras.’

  The room tilts beneath my chair. ‘This is who was spying on us,’ I manage to say. Canavan gives a faint nod.

  ‘But you don’t know if she took Eloïse?’

  Canavan studies me coolly. ‘Did you and Harriet have something going on between you?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ The words tumble out of my mouth before I can even think about what I’m saying.

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘I’m sure about that.’

  ‘She says otherwise,’ Welsh adds.

  Inside my head, there’s a storm. On the outside I am working as hard as I can to look appropriately shaken by the news that a woman I don’t know has been spying on my family, at the same time as maintaining a dignified air of innocence in the face of suspicions that I was cheating on Eloïse. Beneath all of that, I am bleeding regret, anguish, terror.

  What has Harriet done?

  Canavan watches me carefully for a moment and then, when I fail to re-engage my faculties of speech, proceeds to tell me what happens next. Harriet has been charged with this offence and will either be remanded in custody or released on bail, during which time the police and her defence will prepare their case. They currently have insufficient evidence that she had anything to do with El going missing. I nod and make noises that hopefully avert any suspicion that I am on the verge of bursting apart at the seams.