The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

For all their careful itemization of personality, Graves’s notes tell me nothing.

  I’m dead-ended, aren’t I? Go to bed. You’re tired, you need to come to it fresh. The old half lie, it’ll look better in the morning.

  But my brain won’t let me sleep: I lie there while the thoughts tick in my head, metronomic, insistent, like the drip of a tap. Still I keep coming back to the last moments of our interview with Graves—

  You’ve asked exactly the same questions as your colleague did a year ago … And that surprises you?… I thought as you’d taken the trouble to call on me again … We’d be asking different questions? Not always …

  And that odd vibration in the air between us, jarring, off-key … I thought he was suspicious of us, but he hasn’t pursued it. What, then? What triggered that reaction in Graves? I play and replay our conversation in my head. There’s nothing. Nothing but Graves with his hand flattened protectively across the cover of the file. Keeping me out.

  It’s there, the clue, it has to be—

  There’s only one person left to ask. Stephen.

  And that’s a good idea?

  Stephen knows nothing of Karla. But keeping Karla from him has been a source of friction between us before now. Because although I’m a good liar, of all the people I’ve ever known, Stephen is the one who can always tell.

  He lives alone in Strand on the Green, a ribbon of pretty eighteenth-century houses overlooking the river by Kew Bridge. There are three pubs and a café along its stretch of towpath: on sunny weekends their outside benches are crowded with drinkers, but today’s damp and cold, and only the hardened smokers are on duty.

  He opens the door, beaming. He’s a big man, and he almost fills the frame.

  “Come in, come in—let me take your coat. I’ve just made coffee, do go through.”

  The kitchen is at the back, overlooking a neat lawn and a bare apple tree. Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater” filters out of his speaker system, somber and heartbreaking. “Heavens,” he says, “let’s turn that off. Something more cheerful—”

  “No,” I say, “leave it.”

  “Of course,” he says smoothly. But he fusses over the coffee, over whether I want milk or cream, whether we should drink it in the kitchen or in the sitting room, whether we need biscuits and, if so, which I’d prefer. He takes out one set of cups and then immediately puts them away again and picks out others. He knows something’s up. When did I last call him out of the blue and ask to come round immediately? Show up on his doorstep when I haven’t slept a wink the night before?

  Finally he’s loaded a tray. He lifts it and beams again. “Shall we?” So I lead the way into the sitting room and take a seat and let him go through the ritual of serving me while we chat about things we both know are irrelevant.

  I was five when he was born: the older sister, the sensible, careful one, already aware of the gulf between our parents, a gulf that even Stephen’s arrival—the spitting image of his father—couldn’t bridge. Like me, he was born into a war zone, and like me he became caught up in its hostilities, pressed into service by both sides. Though he had it easier; he had me to explain the rules of combat to him, as soon as he was old enough to understand: when to nod, when to lie, when to make yourself scarce. Ours was a childhood of subterfuge. No wonder we turned out the way we have.

  Other people’s secrets have become our business, but while I buy and sell them, my brother Stephen, like Ian Graves, is a psychiatrist. Except that his clientele’s made up not of the unhappy rich—desperate lawyers, suicidal bankers—but of the criminally deranged, men and women too sick for prison, let alone the “enhanced individual liberty” of the Program. He spends much of his time in secure institutions, behind bars, quietly persuading his damaged charges to reveal their warped assumptions, their sick fantasies. And they look at this big, clever man with his air of unjudgmental concern, and for some reason, they tell him.

  Sometimes I wonder what he’d make of the truth about me.

  He knew about Thomas Drew, of course; the relationship, and the fact I went to work for him. Knew the business was something to do with IT and security. Knew that Drew disappeared, leaving problems that I had to sort out. Knew that I walked away with a windfall, carefully invested, and never had a regular job after that … But he was a medical student then, wrapped up in his own life—and I was still the older sister, aware of the rules before he was even born, telling him only what he needed to know.

  By the time he got round to asking the important questions, I already knew I was never going to answer them honestly.

  Today we talk about things that don’t matter: concerts we’ve been to, mutual acquaintances from years back, his last holiday. He doesn’t say whether he traveled alone: he’s gay, but his private life, like the exact source of my money, is something we skirt around. But I can’t put it off forever. At last I say, “I need to ask you a favor.”

  He smiles as if it’s the simplest thing in the world, but behind that smile his mind is working.

  I reach into my bag and bring out Catherine Gallagher’s notes.

  “I need your opinion.”

  “My opinion?” He says it lightly. I’m not fooled.

  “Your professional opinion. These notes”—I hold the file in my lap, but I don’t offer it to him yet—“were made by a psychiatrist. They concern a young woman. I’d like your view.”

  The word “psychiatrist” has made him uneasy. This is someone else’s case. He looks at the file and then up at my face.

  “I’m asking this as a favor. No one knows I’m speaking to you, and unless you tell anyone, no will ever know. You won’t be quoted—”

  His hand wipes the air between us, as if that’s the last thing on his mind.

  I say, “I simply want to know … I would like you to read these notes and tell me what you think. Today—now, if you can. Or I can bring them back some other time. I’d rather not leave them here. This is the only copy I have, and it wasn’t easy to get hold of.”

  I stop then. I could say more, but that won’t change his decision.

  His gaze travels from me to the file and back to me again. At last he says, “It’s important, isn’t it? You seemed—distracted—on the phone.”

  I shrug. “A bad night’s sleep.”

  “Because of this?”

  I had a lie lined up, but for once it fails me.

  He looks at me for a long time. Then he reaches out a hand, takes the file, and opens it. He glances up at me. The top sheet’s missing.

  “I’ve taken out her name. I felt it would be better—”

  “Yes,” he says, “of course.” He hesitates again. But doesn’t state the obvious: that these pages have been photographed.

  “Could you do it today? You may have plans for lunch.”

  He smiles ruefully. “I was planning to have lunch with you.”

  “Were we going out?”

  “I thought I might cook.”

  I rise. “I can fix something.”

  He raises his eyebrows. He knows just how bad my cooking is.

  He takes the file up to his study, a small book-lined room on the first floor. I go up once to ask him if he needs more coffee and again to bring him a sandwich, which is all the lunch he wants. The first time he looks up from the file as if he’s surfacing from a great depth, and his responses are monosyllabic. The second time he’s leafing rapidly back and forth through the pages, cross-referencing something, and he doesn’t even glance at me. I eat alone in the kitchen, looking out at the garden. When the recording ends, I don’t put another one on, and the silence is like an electronic hum in my ears. The riverside path runs directly outside his front windows, and from time to time people walk past, their voices suddenly loud, delivering snatches of conversation I’m not supposed to hear. But they see only the houses, not the people inside; they have no idea anyone’s listening.

  At last he comes halfway down the stairs. “Charlotte?”

  I go up with more coffee. He’s
returned to his chair. The notes are back in their file, on a table beside him. As I take a seat opposite, suddenly I’m anxious.

  He sits with his elbows on the arms of the chair, his hands laced together in front of him.

  “Who is she?” he asks.

  “Just a young woman I … Her mother’s a friend of a friend.”

  Liar. But he lets it go. “Do you know her personally?”

  Safer ground now. “No.”

  “But you know people who know her.”

  “I’ve talked to people who knew her.” Another lie, though this one’s small and white: Ellis has done most of the talking, I’ve just listened. It’s close enough.

  He instantly picks up on the tense. “Knew?”

  “Knew.”

  He doesn’t ask if that means she’s dead. Maybe he doesn’t need to. He sits back in his seat. “Tell me who you spoke to.”

  “Colleagues. Her boss.”

  “Friends?”

  “An ex-lover, but that was just a fling.”

  “Were there friends you could have spoken to?”

  “I haven’t been able to trace anyone who was close to her. Nor could the police.”

  His look says, So the police are involved, are they?

  He murmurs, “And no family, of course, if you don’t count the mother, and sadly we can’t—” Then: “What about the psychiatrist who wrote these notes?”

  “I’ve spoken to him, yes. And I’ve been to her home.”

  “Did she live with other people?”

  “She lived alone.”

  He sits back in his chair, and frowns to himself.

  “Tell me how her colleagues described her.”

  “Very good at her job. Very competent. Ambitious. Driven.”

  “So her depression manifested itself—how? What did her colleagues say?”

  “They had no idea she was depressed. She hid it from them.”

  “No idea at all?”

  “None. She didn’t confide in anyone. She wasn’t the type.”

  “And she didn’t work closely with others?”

  “She worked in a small team, sometimes under pressure. She had a lot of contact with a few close colleagues.”

  He frowns again. He says, “The notes say she was worried about making mistakes at work. She didn’t mention that to her colleagues? She must have been anxious about losing her job.”

  “She didn’t confide in anyone,” I say again.

  “And no one noticed anything? No anxiety? What about anger?”

  “Anger?”

  He touches the file, lightly. “This is an angry woman. Throughout her whole life, no one loved her for what she was, only what she did. Her psychiatrist views her as a suicide risk. Suicide’s a furious act. No one picked up on that?” I shake my head. “A refusal to engage, maybe?”

  “She was certainly a very private person. She kept herself to herself.”

  “It would have been more than that. An absence, almost: her colleagues might have felt rejected or unsupported.”

  “Nothing like that. They didn’t even realize there was a problem until …” I stop there.

  He registers the hesitation. How does his mind finish that sentence? Until she killed herself? Until they found her?

  “But while they were working together?” he asks. “Did they feel she was going to let them down?”

  “No. She prided herself on never making mistakes.”

  Stephen nods once, to himself, but when he speaks again he’s changed the subject.

  “Her psychiatrist didn’t prescribe antidepressants.”

  “She wouldn’t give the name of her GP.”

  A slower nod. He doesn’t comment. “Was she drinking heavily?”

  “Maybe at home, though there’s no evidence. Never in public. Not even at parties. One drink, two at most.”

  “Physical symptoms,” he says. “Complaining about aches and pains.”

  “She was never ill. Nothing stronger than ibuprofen in her bathroom cabinet.”

  “What about her attendance record? Days when she phoned in sick at short notice?”

  “No.”

  “No time off sick?”

  “Virtually none.”

  “What about self-harm? Any evidence of that?”

  “You mean cutting herself?”

  “Possibly. But tell me about her background. White collar?”

  “Highly educated middle class.”

  “Then she may have self-harmed through social transgression. Proxy self-harm: screaming at her boss, sleeping with a colleague’s husband. Bad behavior, with potentially catastrophic consequences.”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “And she didn’t cut herself either, I suppose.”

  Something in his tone catches at my attention, but I can’t put a name to it.

  “She may have cut herself where it wouldn’t show.”

  “An autopsy would have found it,” he says. He purses his lips, frowns. It’s as if he’s seen something, and now he’s focusing on it, homing in on it.

  “Tell me about where she lived,” he says.

  The question catches me out. It seems irrelevant. “Clean, tidy. Dull.”

  “Not shabby? Not neglected? Any sign that she’d ceased to notice her surroundings or ceased to care about them?”

  “Very tidy. Cans lined up in the cupboards.”

  “That could link to obsessionality. If she was naturally very tidy that could have been magnified by her depression. But there should have been another area that she neglected. An overgrown garden? Filthy car?”

  “She didn’t have a garden. I didn’t see her car.”

  “What about her appearance? Her clothes?”

  “Conservative. Nothing frivolous but nothing shabby either. I think she took care of her appearance. She bought good clothes, and she looked after them. She wore makeup. She exercised.”

  “And toward the end? I assume there was some crisis—”

  “No change.”

  He passes a hand over his mouth. He’s thinking.

  He says, “The notes say she was anxious about making mistakes at work—catastrophic mistakes. She worked in advertising?”

  “She was a doctor.”

  “But the notes say—” He stops. Then nods to himself: reassessing her. Of course. She lied. “What sort of doctor?”

  “Intensive care.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “And they really never spotted anything, her colleagues?” Then he says, “She didn’t go to her GP either, did she? That’s why she wouldn’t give their name.”

  “She self-referred. Straight to the psychiatrist. Private patient, paying cash. He says she was terrified of anyone finding out she wasn’t coping—”

  “Because she was a doctor, yes. And doctors notoriously hide their own problems.” He sits back again. “You spoke to the psychiatrist. How was he?”

  “Protective. Maybe defensive. The notes seemed to be an issue for him, but when I read them …”

  “She took an overdose?” he asks.

  “No one knows.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “She was never found. The last sighting was CCTV footage from the entrance lobby of the block where she lived. She walked out of the door and vanished.”

  “Who reported her missing?”

  “The psychiatrist.”

  He looks at me intently. “The psychiatrist reported her missing? Not her colleagues?”

  “She was on leave when she disappeared. She failed to turn up for an appointment. He couldn’t reach her by phone, he had no work number for her, so he went to her flat—”

  “He actually went to her flat? He didn’t just write a letter?”

  “He was worried.”

  “And no one answered the door, so he went to the police.”

  “Yes.”

  “Saying, ‘I demand you look for this woman, she’s a potential suicide.’ ”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you�
�re trying to find her?”

  “I want to know what happened to her.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?” he asks.

  “I’d rather not say what I think.”

  “But you want me to say what I think?”

  “Yes.”

  He turns his head away, and then he rises and walks the length of the room. It’s not a large room, and he’s a tall man: three paces take him to the window. For a few seconds he stares out toward the river—to the left a gray-white and red District Line train crosses Kew Railway Bridge, to the right the tower blocks of Brentford lumber up against the sky—then he turns to me.

  “Why did you come to me?”

  “Because I have to know what happened.”

  “But the notes tell you what happened. Why don’t you believe them?”

  Because she killed someone, and it was bad. Because Devlin saw the darkness in her, and Graves should have, too. Because I think he did, but I can’t prove it. I don’t have a lie for that. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Because you don’t know why you don’t believe them?”

  Or that. “I can’t tell you.”

  Another look: baffled concern this time. A good man in an evil universe, trying to make sense of it all. Better than I am, so much better. Better by a thousand miles. He deserves more from me than this.

  I say, “I need to know what happened to that woman. I thought the notes would give me an answer. But they don’t. I’ve read them half a dozen times. The notes don’t give me anything.”

  “They give you a textbook example of a depressive.”

  “Maybe I believed there was more to it than that.”

  “Not in these notes.” He says it with complete finality.

  It’s like a weight’s been dropped on me, pressing me into my seat. My head, my chest, my guts, my limbs, are heavy. Because I was so sure? Or because like Ellis I’ve turned over all the stones? This was the last one, and I’d counted on there being an answer beneath it? An answer that would explain it all, deliver me the client, make Johanssen safe? But there isn’t.

  But he mustn’t see any of that. I begin to gather myself. “Then I’m sorry I deprived you of a good lunch—”

  I glance up, into his face.

  “Everything you’d expect to see in a potential suicide,” he says. “And that’s the problem. The whole thing’s too clean, too … focused. Real people are messier than this. Especially real people who’re planning to kill themselves.”