I Know My Name: A stunning psychological thriller

by C. J. Cooke

  Harriet Ayres. I had expected anything but this. I had expected a terrorist plot, a conspiracy, aliens … Not this. Anything but this.

  And yet, as the pieces slide awkwardly and painfully together in my head, I realise what Canavan is really saying. Harriet has killed Eloïse. The next stages of this investigation will simply tell us how and when.

  I phone Sophie Ojukwu from my car and tell her about Harriet Ayres. I’m shaking with a fresh surge of adrenalin as I recount Welsh’s line of questioning and Harriet’s claims.

  ‘Did DS Canavan provide any specifics?’ Sophie asks. ‘Did he give you any detailed information about what this woman said?’

  ‘No,’ I say, mopping my forehead. ‘But she seems to be implying that she hijacked our baby cameras because we had something going on.’

  A pause. ‘The detectives are obliged to ask you about it – it’s nothing personal.’

  I bite down on the knuckles of my right hand. My whole body is rigid and the muscles in my neck and arms feel like lead weights.

  ‘She’s taken my wife, hasn’t she? Anyone crazy enough to hack into someone’s baby cameras is sick enough to do something like that, aren’t they? That’s why she was spying, isn’t it? To work out when Eloïse would be alone.’

  I’m starting to lose it. Tears are rolling down my cheeks and I’m screaming into the phone. Everything is falling apart.

  ‘Go home, get some rest,’ Sophie says soothingly, and her words pierce me because it’s exactly what Eloïse would say if she were here now. I rub my face and take deep, quivering breaths.

  She promises to call me once she’s got more information. My phone goes crazy with yet more Facebook messages and texts, but now they’re all about the newspaper article on Eloïse. I hesitate for a moment before calling my brother.

  ‘Hello?’

  I didn’t expect him to answer and it catches me off guard. I make a fist, clear my throat, thrust the voice of my father into my head. Toughen up, laddie.

  ‘It’s me. You got a minute?’

  ‘I’ve got several.’

  ‘I’ve found out who was bugging the baby cameras. Her name’s Harriet Ayres. She’s a … colleague. It’s likely she’s the one who took Eloïse. She says I had an affair with her.’

  He pauses. ‘And did you?’

  I groan.

  ‘For how long, Lochlan?’

  ‘It wasn’t an affair. It was just …’

  ‘Either you had an affair or you didn’t.’

  I have never breathed a word of this to anyone. Not to colleagues who probed, not to anyone.

  ‘We never slept together,’ I blurt out. ‘It was all … a stupid infatuation. She came to the house when El was at her parents with Max and …’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘I couldn’t go through with it.’

  He sniffs. ‘I see. Well, happens to us all at some point.’

  ‘No, not that!’ I cover my eyes with my hand. I have never loathed myself more than at this moment. How stupid could I have been? Harriet and I seemed to bump into each other regularly, despite being from different departments. She’d always take her lunch at the same time as me, or she’d call into my section to check on the security software or Wi-Fi connection. She was young, fresh out of university, as yet unjaded by things like poor mortgage rates, childcare issues and the impact of an NHS on the brink of collapse. She was full of pep and aspiration. She talked sanguinely about her future plans, about her life dreams, about sailing weekends and evenings spent learning Chinese. She was saving to travel the world. I was mesmerised. I remembered having free time like that, dreams like that. The unmitigated zest that bled from her made me perceive that so many of the people I socialised with seemed to be trammeled by their own lives – and I was no exception. By comparison, Harriet was like oxygen.

  We discovered a mutual love of Green Day and that we’d been to the same concert at Wembley Stadium in 2010, only she’d managed to get Billie Joe Armstrong to autograph her shoulder. She liked to one-up me, and it became a running joke: I’d seen a Great White Shark in Australia, she’d almost been eaten by one. University College London paid my undergrad fees, she won a full-ride scholarship at Cambridge University and came top in her year. I was an extra on an episode of Casualty in 1990, she had a speaking part in a Mel Gibson film at the age of eight.

  I had no idea if any of this was true, but that was beside the point: our banter was energising, and I felt a spark between us. And of course there was the fact that she was very easy on the eye – liquid gold hair to her shoulders, toned legs, flirtatious eyes. I started to look forward to going to work and replayed our conversations in my head on the way home.

  In contrast, Eloïse seemed to be consistently irritable. Our interactions became rhapsodies of the inane: bills, disputes with neighbours, whether to get a vented tumble dryer or the condenser variety (we went with the latter). She sniped at me over stupid things, like not responding to a text or texting back with a full stop, which insinuated a ‘tone’, apparently. Most nights, El slept in our bed with Max while I took to the spare room.

  At a work party a few months after first meeting Harriet, I got very drunk. We were at a restaurant in Mayfair and Dean had plied the table with enough wine for a small country. One minute I was chatting with Rod Hammersmith about Grexit and the next I was in a corner snogging Harriet.

  ‘Has she confessed to kidnapping Eloïse?’ Wes asks.

  ‘The police are working on it.’

  ‘You know where she lives?’

  ‘Somewhere in King’s Cross. I’ve checked Facebook, but she has blocked me. She’s blocked my calls to her mobile, too.’

  What am I doing, discussing this with Wes? His methods are usually five-fingered, knuckle-dustered and altogether unsavoury, but they seem to be rather effective, and right now there is a fury in me that begs to be let loose. Crash the car, start a fight – my mind races through options of self-violence. If I could go back in time, I would go into my office the morning after our work party and I’d immediately apologise to Harriet. I would tell her I was drunk and, more importantly, married with a kid, and therefore any flirtation was a mistake. I would not follow up on our drunken exchange with more flirtation, more kissing, and an invitation to spend a weekend at my home.

  I wouldn’t do so many things.

  When she arrived that night she looked stunning – her hair pinned up in fat curls, a black playsuit clinging to her slim figure, glossy pink lipstick on full lips. I’d felt nervous until that moment. She was so young, so naïve. Maybe I thought by being with her I was recapturing something lost, I don’t know.

  But when I saw her in the doorway I didn’t hesitate to invite her in. She seemed nervous and excited, her eyes darting to the pictures of Eloïse and Max on the walls.

  ‘This place is about three times the size of my flat,’ she said, and I told her about my first place in London, a loft apartment I shared with a friend from university. There was only one bedroom and we took turns sleeping on the sofa. I felt nostalgic telling her about it, suddenly wistful about being penniless and exploited and finding claw marks in the butter from our resident rats.

  We had dinner and talked about work, about films we’d both seen, about her adventures in Vietnam last summer. Later, as we stumbled up the stairs, lips locked and her hands under my shirt, she happened to spot the babycam mounted on the wall of the landing.

  ‘What is that?’ she said, breaking away.

  I buried my face in her neck. ‘Baby monitor. We’ve got them all over the house.’

  She pushed back from me further and laughed. ‘That’s a bit creepy. Won’t your wife see what we’re doing?’

  I stopped for breath. ‘No. No, I made sure they were all turned off before you got here.’

  We continued to kiss, the bottle of champagne abandoned downstairs, Harriet’s hair spilling around her shoulders. We made it all the way to the bedroom before the knowledge arrived in my gut like a bullet that I
couldn’t go through with it. It was like waking up to the knowledge that she was twenty-one, that I was married with a child. If we went any further, we would cross the point of no return.

  Even with Harriet standing there between me and the bed, her eyes shining with anticipation, I had lost all ability to do what I knew, deep down, would signify the end of our family. I might lose Max. He had recently started to walk, staggering across the room into my arms with the most magnificent chuckle of self-satisfaction. How could I risk losing him?

  In that moment, the desire I felt for Harriet alchemised into recognition of the unearthly love I had for my wee boy. Before, I’d acknowledged how cute he was, how lovely, that his existence involved singing nursery rhymes at three in the morning to get him to stop crying, enduring porridge and baked beans being thrown wildly around the room in the name of weaning, and dry-retching whilst changing nappies filled with twice his body weight in poo. Presented with Harriet in a state of breathless near-undress and the promise of a long-awaited, hard-earned night of ecstasy, my ardour transformed to a conviction that I would fight dragons, go to hell and back, and most definitely walk away from Harriet Ayres for my son.

  Poor Harriet. She watched me take a step back from her, the expression of excitement sliding off her face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

  I shook my head, stung with embarrassment. ‘I’m so sorry, I—’

  She stepped forward and tried to kiss me again, but I moved her hands and turned my face. ‘I can’t do this. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Is it me?’ she said, her face crumpling, a tremor in her voice. She started to pull her dress up over her shoulders, the hem down towards her knees.

  ‘You didn’t do anything wrong,’ I said, pacing. ‘I apologise. But I’d like you to leave.’

  Ah, hindsight. I can see now that I treated Harriet very badly. At the time, she looked ashen, even tearful, holding my gaze for a handful of seconds before storming past me out of the room, down the stairs, slamming the front door behind her. A screech of tyres in the driveway announced her departure.

  I fell on to the bed, head in my hands, utterly torn. Had I really told her to leave? Yes, and that was good. No, it wasn’t. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever, ever done. There was no going back. I couldn’t exactly send her a text message and make some excuse about a lapse of sanity. And I couldn’t expect things to be the same between us at work. But that was a good thing – wasn’t it?

  I sent my apologies via email and again by voicemail. To say I was sheepish doesn’t quite do it justice – I knew I had been cowardly and schoolboy-ish, as though I’d run away from a fight. Worse, I was certain that Eloïse would find out. It would be hard to persuade her that it had all meant nothing. There had been feelings involved. In one particularly intense moment, Harriet had said that she was falling in love with me and I had said the same. It had been an emotional affair, not a sexual one. And perhaps that was every bit as bad.

  Harriet and I crossed paths on the stairs the week after. She ignored me. After a while, I didn’t see her at all. I’m certain she was avoiding me, and I took pains to check the attendance list of any company parties to ensure we didn’t find ourselves in an awkward reunion. Last I heard, she was seeing someone from Accounts and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  But as I turn the key in the ignition, I pause. Why would she spy on us, all this time later? Surely she wasn’t so burned by that night that she wanted revenge? She was a sweet girl. She didn’t strike me as the crazy sort, or at least, not crazy enough to spy, or abduct my wife.

  But then, I didn’t know her, did I?

  Wes is talking on the other end of the line and I’ve missed half what he said.

  ‘OK. So she worked at the same place as you. Are you still at Smyth and Wyatt? That place on the embankment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Righto. Leave it with me.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Wes?’

  ‘Well, you’ve let the police take care of things, haven’t you? Now they’ve got the individual who likely had your wife disappeared. They’ll charge her on some minor offence – but find Eloïse? Not likely.’

  Just then a woman crosses the road in front of me with a little boy in her arms who looks exactly like Max. His blond hair flaps in the wind and she plants a kiss on his cheek. I think of my wife, how much she must be craving that right now, wherever she is. I think of Max, how much he misses his mother.

  ‘Take it easy, pal,’ Wes says down the line. ‘This is better news than you think. You’ve got a suspect. Now, we’ll find Eloïse. You have my word.’

  27 March 2015

  Komméno Island, Greece

  My new home is a cave on the south side of the island, close to the dock. Not ideal, but it’s warm and dry and affords a magnificent view of the Aegean. Last night I lay out on a flat slab of rock that still held the sun’s heat and watched the stars spilling out over the night like silver glitter. I saw shooting stars zip across the sky like rockets, and around midnight a scarf of vivid green light unrolled there, just for a minute. Despite everything that has happened, I was mesmerised.

  This morning I woke to the sound of dolphins hooping through the water close by. When I clambered out to get a closer look, they circled back towards me and played for ages. It was remarkable – their slick bodies arcing through the waves, clean as bullets. I lay down on a rock and dangled my hands in the water, splashing at them, and they poked their heads up and clicked at me. I could have watched them all day.

  After George’s threat to shoot Sariah, I didn’t dare go back to the farmhouse. I thought about camping in one of the outhouses but they felt too close. George’s bedroom window overlooks them and I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest easy in the knowledge that he was watching me.

  I explored the island, seeking somewhere safe to hide. The hotel was too eerie, the abandoned houses on the hill too dangerous. Many of the caves I found were too hard to reach, too damp or too dark, but this one is high enough to be away from the tide and on a slight slope so that sunlight can get inside and warm the rocks.

  I spent the night there, too cold and shaken to sleep properly. I eventually drifted off when the sun came up and when I woke again it was high in the sky, beating down in hot waves. I was famished, and I reckoned that George would be off writing somewhere, so I tentatively made my way to the farmhouse.

  Sariah was sitting in the front room by the unlit fire, holding an ice pack to her head. She didn’t look good – still dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing the day before, her face weary and closed. I pulled up a chair and sat close by. When she saw me, she reached for my hand and squeezed it.

  ‘How are you doing?’ I said. I noticed a white dressing on the right side of her forehead close to the temple. Joe must have seen to her.

  ‘I’m doing OK,’ she said. ‘More exhausted than anything. I need a good night’s sleep to function properly.’

  ‘What about your head? How bad is it?’

  ‘Joe looked at it. He said the cut was pretty small. I probably walked into one of the old farm tools in the dark.’

  I faltered at her tone. She’d been knocked unconscious the night before, but she didn’t seem to hold George responsible. Was she protecting him? Or too scared to say?

  ‘Did George say anything to you this morning?’ I asked carefully.

  She slid her eyes to the window. ‘He said things got a little out of hand last night.’

  I glanced behind me before telling her: ‘He threatened to kill you, Sariah.’

  She threw me a puzzled look.

  ‘You saw him attack me?’

  ‘Yes. No. He pointed the gun at you and threatened to shoot you.’

  I watched as she took this in.

  ‘He was pretty drunk, wasn’t he?’ she said doubtfully, and I agreed that yes, he was, but his threat was also pretty damn serious. We had only gone to the barn because Sariah was worried about him. And why wasn’t she reacting the wa
y I expected? It was as though she was trying to downplay it. Whatever way you looked at it, the fact that George had threatened to shoot her was horrifying.

  And then, a terrible thought occurred, and although it was the briefest of shadows across my mind, it made me feel sick, and I couldn’t bat it away.

  What if Sariah had staged her fall?

  Hazel had told me that I wasn’t going to leave. George told me the same. Joe somehow knew my name – not just my first name. My full name. I still had no clue how he knew that. What if there was something more sinister going on? What if Sariah was complicit in some weird plot to get me to stay? What if they weren’t visiting the island at all, but lived here, and now they wanted to keep me prisoner?

  I told Sariah I was going to stay in the cave until Nikodemos came on Friday and, hesitantly, I suggested that she should get off the island, too.

  ‘I’ll be off this island soon enough,’ she said mildly, and I felt relief at the thought that my suspicions were wrong – they were visiting the island, after all. They had lives elsewhere. They would all have to leave in a couple of weeks, go back to their homes. George would have to contact Nikodemos sooner or later. Wouldn’t he?

  ‘Maybe you’ll come and visit me,’ I said, still trying to gauge whether she was playing me or helping me. ‘When I figure out where I live.’

  She smiled. ‘Oh, I promise, I’ll be there.’

  She took some leftovers from the fridge, some bread and bottled water, and put it all into a picnic basket. I felt very anxious at the thought of George coming back. But Sariah insisted I take a shower while she fetched me some clean clothes from Hazel’s room.

  ‘And then can we get out of here?’ I said, glancing out the window.

  ‘Of course. We can have a picnic at the cave.’ A wink. ‘You can show me around your new place.’

  I was worried that Sariah might not be up to the journey, but she insisted that she was fine. She wrapped a blue scarf across her shoulders and found a long wooden stick in a corner of the kitchen to help her walk.