She sent in a letter to the station and they said I should throw it away and forget about it, but I read it and decided to grant her this little request. I feel like I owe it to her, which is a strange sensation, but then she is a very old friend. We go back as far as anyone I know.
I’ve been trying to keep my head down recently. In fact, Levine and the nervy chief pretty much insisted on that. In their ideal world, they would have washed their hands of me and Bartu as soon as the blood had been washed away at the house on Tollington Road.
The fluids and carnage we left in our wake, the litany of complaints that followed us around, and the general ball ache we caused everyone involved when they had to unpick it all, left them red-faced and palpitating. Jarwar and the rest looked at us with new eyes but it understandably irked those further up the chain. Grudging respect is an understatement. Especially when they still haven’t got a good interview from me saying what an inclusive multi-racial non-disablist group hug the police force is.
Fortunately, when the press came in and looked at the whole thing from a distance they could only see it one way. We brought those girls home. That act was the sin-eater that saved our skins. It even made the national press. As soon as that happened those cold looks turned to morning winks and conversations about career advancement.
That’s right. After a twenty-three-week course, I will emerge from the chrysalis as PC Mondrian. I said, ‘Twenty-three weeks is too long, I’ll fast-track it, please.’ They said, ‘That isn’t a thing that exists’, and that I should ‘count myself lucky’. Which, in many ways, I do. At least Bartu will be coming along for the ride too.
‘Hello there,’ I say.
‘Hi, Tom,’ says the guard. I’m known by the unknowns even better these days.
There are more enthusiastic ‘Hi Tom’s as I walk through the corridor and greet the other uniformed guards. My stomach tightens as I realise the next greeting I’ll get will be from her. Bartu did ask me to say hello from him. Maybe this was humour, I don’t know. But I took it at face value and earnestly said I would.
He was pretty cross with me for not telling him about the hunch I had about Sarah. But I tell him the same thing every time he brings it up. ‘I was still piecing it together right up until the end. And I had lost a pint and half of blood by the time you turned up.’
It was that deep cut they favoured, the one to the femoral artery that should ensure a lot of blood but not necessarily fatality, which gave me the last hint I needed, that those girls might still be alive. Memories of other curious cuts on Sarah’s exposed childhood flesh came drifting back to me. Sometimes it was wrist, sometimes calf, sometimes thigh. Practice makes perfect.
They had left a similar tell-tale scar behind some years earlier, on Rita Singh’s body, the one who was found from the second wave of missing girls. She wasn’t supposed to die. But they dumped her in a shallow grave when she accidentally bled out and was of no use to them.
After they shot Katherine in the head for finally making an escape after all these years, they didn’t want to leave the thigh scar as any kind of clue that might link back to Singh’s death. Which is why they cut the leg off to muddy the issue.
Singh’s death happened, you see, because Rabbit was new to this. Sarah had to show him how to do it and his first go didn’t go so well. She’d started out using another guy. His name was Shane and he disappeared one day, quite a few years after Sarah and he had ‘disappeared’ the first group of girls. No one in ‘the ring’ could locate him. We haven’t been able to either. He could be anywhere.
But that meant Sarah needed to move on and when she found Rabbit she had the perfect ally to start the thing up again. To take it further, to push her fetishes and obscure tastes. Turan was part of the ring, too. They all found each other online. Along with two other officers operating in other boroughs, one who had helped pin the Katherine Grady disappearance on Ed Rampling. She found these men in the recesses, the places normal people don’t go.
Sarah named names in the end. This is how we eventually went even further with our investigation, how we discovered and broke ‘the ring’. She gloried in telling it all to us. Like a mother driving her kids around to show them her old neighbourhood. Knowing where it all started, pointing out those blue signs on various kerbs, and the nostalgia of living it all over again, seemed to be part of the thrill.
So I followed her to the basement. And then we followed the wire further down into the depths of the web. Yes. It all started with the girl sitting in front of me now, fingering the scars on her lips.
‘Don’t play with those, you’ll give yourself an infection,’ I say as I sit.
‘I am an infection,’ she says, looking deep into me as she continues to play with the abrasions.
‘What makes you say that? Bartu says hi, by the way,’ I say.
‘I know. I know I scare you,’ she says. And of course she’s right, but I don’t want to give her that, so I find another emotion from somewhere and play that.
‘Is this why you asked me here? So you could say that? It’s pretty brief. You could’ve tweeted me that.’
There’s no wall of glass in between us. Her head rolls to the side.
‘I make you nervous,’ she whispers.
‘You make me something,’ I say.
‘What is it about me that makes you nervous?’ she says in an intimate bedtime whisper.
The guard, overhearing this, frowns. Everyone knows about how I caught Sarah by now. There have been pictures of her in the paper, photos of her with knives, of picture messages she’s sent to ‘friends’ over the years, images that wanted an audience. That required a reaction of titillation or distaste. It hurts me that she’s getting exactly what she always wanted.
‘Maybe it’s because… I understand Rabbit. He was an abused kid. It’s a story that seems sadly recognisable, and it’s one I understand. Rabbit –’
‘Rabbit’s dead,’ she says.
‘Yes. Rabbit’s dead,’ I affirm.
He hung himself the morning after he was refused bail. She makes a mock-upset face.
‘How does that make you feel?’ I say.
‘I don’t feel... anything,’ she says.
‘See, I think you do. The feeling of crossing that line, then going further into the gore of it. Turan is an addict with a fetish and a means of abusing power to get it. But you’re not that, you’re different. I’m not religious. But you’re what hell is. For me.’
She taps on the table and looks up at me.
‘What are they saying out there? That I’m crazy?’
I draw breath and then swallow. My eyes turn back to her. The horny-prudish media have obsessed over her ‘feminine perversions’.
‘No. They say you’re evil. But I don’t believe in evil.’
She just smiles and keeps her eyes on me as I continue.
‘That’s what they say every time we find another one. Another man you sold a girl to for their pleasure, in basements and airless rooms.’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ she says. ‘Tell me what I am.’
It’s like the moment in a wrestling hold when the guy underneath gets his leg free. Everyone else sees it but the one who thinks they’re on top.
‘Oh. The fact is, now that we have them all, no one is interested in you.’
She stops picking at her skin.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she says. ‘You don’t know me.’
Her breathing changes.
‘Oh, Sarah. It’s a feeling, isn’t it? And you can’t do anything about it. Can you?’
‘Yes. Yes,’ she says.
‘And that’s why I could never be afraid of you.’
We go quiet. All is quiet. Except for the faint murmuring from other tables. She snorts, she looks away.
‘And I can’t hate you because you’re in service to your mind. I’m a slave to mine too. The only difference between us is that what makes me get up is stopping people like you. And what sates you means you en
d up here. You have an obsessive psychotic imbalance. Plus, your step-dad doesn’t seem like the easiest man to get on with.’
‘Don’t talk about him. You don’t know him.’
‘I do. We spoke,’ I say. ‘On the phone.’
Her fingers drum on the table. ‘He didn’t like me,’ she says.
‘He didn’t like you… kissing other girls. That sort of thing?’
‘He…’ she runs her finger from cheek to chest ‘…caught me. Told me it was wrong and when I wouldn’t listen he beat it into me. And when –’
‘And when you do that to someone with a psychotic…’
‘Fuck off.’
‘…imbalance, then you can forge a real hatred for… other girls. Put your pain into them. Right at the top of the psychopath checklist is shallow effect, meaning a narrow field of emotions. You got spite, shame, disgust. Next on the list is… need for stimulation, then lack of remorse, criminal versatility, insatiable sexual urges, lack of empathy, impulsivity, poor behaviour controls, lack of realistic long term goals. I did the test for you and, well done, you scored very highly. Welcome to your mind. It did all this to you, to a certain extent. So, you see, the last thing I could do is hate you. I feel sorry for you. Truly,’ I say.
I idly lay my hand flat on the table. I feel it in my heart. How lucky I am that nature has given me my mind. Her eyes wash themselves. She claws the table, her fingers digging into it like they’re plunging into grave dirt. She snatches at breaths through her nose to exert control but her lungs betray her and give her only panic gasps, like her diving tanks are running dry still fifty feet under, she shakes like a blacked-out car about to stall.
I lean in and put my hand near hers.
She screws up her face and makes indiscriminate sounds. They’re almost inhuman. But she is as human as anyone else, as fallible, as capable of love. Just wired differently, as it happens. How fortunate many of us are to be so well wired.
‘Did it feel like… life?’ I say.
I am still so curious.
Her impassioned glare turns into a dead glaze and then a strain. Her momentary vulnerability disappearing. The mask rises again, like she’s trying to summon some unknown power.
‘Sarah?’ I say, softly. ‘What are you trying to do?’
Her face is flushed. Her breathing has changed. A guard stirs and takes half a step towards us. I hold up my hand.
‘I’m picturing what I’d like to do to you. For doing this to me.’
And I let her. I hold still. I stare back. And I am not afraid of it. I’m not afraid of the things that hide in the corners of rooms and cities in the stale 4 a.m. air. I stare into her for as long as it pleases me to do so. Then my hand plunges down and I pull something from my pocket and stand.
‘It didn’t have to be this way. You were so close. You were just missing one of these,’ I say, placing my gift for her on the table. I probably shouldn’t have brought it in, but I didn’t think they’d search an officer. Certainly not a universally adored head case like me.
She looks down at it. I watch her face fall as I turn and leave.
Behind me I hear her obscenities and hate as she is taken away. There’s a struggle but I don’t have to turn. I hear it all. I sense it.
In front of her, on the table that lay between us, sits a single bullet.
*
As I head back to my new home I consider how close they really were: they must’ve thought they’d struck gold when they realised that the yellow school prefect’s tie Tanya had given Rabbit had originally been Asif’s, and even had his name stitched into it. A piece of material they could sew into the jigsaw to give the police what they needed.
When I get back to the Ryans’ house I head up to my room and lie down looking at the plain brilliant white ceiling above my bed. I grab a white tennis ball and start throwing it against the ceiling as I check my voicemail.
Bang. I catch the ball.
Bang. There are three messages.
The first is from another journalist. This one is particularly persistent.
He got me on the phone once and said he loved ‘my story’. Said he could scarcely believe it. I said ‘Me neither.’ He said he thinks it should be a book. I asked him to give me a few weeks to think it over. In this message he’s talking me through how the book would go. His angle. He said he wants to understand what goes on inside my head. And I want that too.
So today, I will start writing it myself.
Bang.
My eyes wander over to the lacklustre CT scan of my brain Ryans managed to make all those weeks ago. I stuck it next to my bed, and sometimes I watch its colours spill out over the sides, chaotically, like blurred constellations.
When I told Ryans that Sarah was the architect all along, and that his brainwashing theory was ‘way off’, he claimed it wasn’t his theory at all. To which I said ‘Well, whatever, you threw it into my head’ and took another sip of his best brandy, which is fairly disgusting stuff, but I appreciate our chats and his company all the same.
Mark jumps onto my chest and curves his body downwards until he finds that perfect spot, his limbs elegantly arranged, his chin on the apex of my sternum, giving me ‘We need to talk’ eyes. My armchair psychiatrist. He spends a lot of time inside with me. I hope I haven’t warped him. It’s certainly possible, but I need the moral support, particularly whenever I get a call or voicemail these days. Especially today.
The second message is from Miss Heywood. It’s been a while and I hadn’t expected to hear from either of my lady friends. But after a brief meeting with Anita in that new middle class coffee shop last week, as I tried my best not to feel self-conscious about my scar, she suggested that I should give one of them a call and get on the front foot for once. I’d always taken a backseat on such matters, she’d said. She also said she’d always found me quietly obsessive, and a driven solver of problems. I am, she said, not so different after all, perhaps just a little more me than I ever have been. It was a good coffee. One of the best I’ve ever had. Heywood wants to meet up after her life drawing class.
The third message is about a sentencing for Eli Minton. When it all came out and the relevant people cracked, I was proven correct that it had been Rabbit that had tried to stab me in The Corner Shop, and had stolen the mini-DV, having been keeping tabs on us for a while. And it was Turan that ran me down. But neither would admit to breaking into my house and standing over me that night.
I assumed they engineered my shooting, too, and that in the end some tests, or one of their cohorts in a sweaty interrogation room late at night, would eventually give them away and put that one to bed too.
Bang.
When I found out Eli had confessed to firing the bullet that hit me I couldn’t hide my surprise.
But they didn’t believe it was a stray one, an accident, like he said. They thought he’d been given the task as some kind of initiation. Or, worse, that he’d done it under pressure, after being beaten from every side, as excessive revenge for what he saw as my ‘victimisation’ of him.
Kids are strange these days. Things get stranger every day.
Maybe I just want to believe he wasn’t firing at me, or at least that he was the pawn backed into a corner in this whole thing, not the mastermind of anything. It feels better that way.
I catch the ball and feel it in my hand.
Spite and lust for justice meted out aren’t going to make anything better. You could read him turning on the waterworks in that room with me in a thousand ways, but I choose to believe in his remorse, because maybe that’s how I want to see it. My life is how it is, his can heal with some restraint. So I spoke on his behalf, as a kind of character reference, in search of leniency and hope for the future. He’ll get five years and serve around two if he behaves. He told me he will, but it could go either way.
I forgive him. But maybe forgiveness isn’t quite the right word. I want to thank him.
For… my miracle mind. I like these words.
Along with other words I love. Like cerebellum. And gift.
And with the realisation that we are all just unique individual meteors, flying towards each other at incredible speed.
Like fireflies.
Like debris in a hurricane.
Like neurons and synapses, firing off in all directions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to my wonderful editor, Anna, for another great working experience, and a superb job shaping and developing this book into what it is.
Thanks to Catherine, for her wise words and for tacitly and legally agreeing to spend the rest of her life on a laptop next to me.
To Juliet, for her brilliant thoughts, incredible reading speed and other indicators of her genius. Most days I find myself sparing a moment to feel lucky she’s my agent.
To Headway, who work tirelessly for those with Acquired and Traumatic Brain Injury and their families, and to Dr Mark Lythgoe for invaluable conversations about their work. Thank you so much for picking up the phone and indulging me. I’m pretty sure you thought they were all prank calls, but thanks for taking time to answer my strange questions anyway.
To Lisa Milton and everyone at HQ for your belief in me and my writing, and for your excellent company. I’m fully aware that no one gets to even consider reading this book without the work of teams like publicity, sales and design. I’m lucky enough to feel a sense of collaboration with everything we do at HQ, and it’s a rare and wonderful thing.
Thanks to Mum, Dad, Jim, Al, Carly, Antonia, Evan, Darcy, Margaret and Jeff for your familial support. And to our dog, Edie, for putting me through a routine, and for her looks of encouragement or scepticism when I needed them.
Thanks to Jamie Groves for a copy edit that handled Tom and I with care, and added excellent thoughts and minor explosions.
To the late Oliver Sacks, whose accounts of his work on the brain have been incredibly informative and inspiring for me. And, for that matter (pun intended) to Daniel Kahneman, David Eagleman and Alain De Botton whose books helped me understand some of my own thoughts and become interested in those of others.
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