Lasting Damage

by Sophie Hannah

  That’s it. I’ve looked at all the pictures, seen all there is to see.

  And found nothing. Satisfied now?

  I yawn and rub my eyes. I’m about to shut down the Roundthehouses website and go back to bed when I notice a row of buttons beneath the picture of the back garden: ‘Street View’, ‘Floorplan’, ‘Virtual Tour’. I don’t need a view of Bentley Grove – I’ve seen more than enough of it in the past six months – but I might as well have a look at number 11’s floorplan, since I’ve got this far. I click on the button, then hit the ‘x’ to shut down the screen within seconds of it opening. It isn’t going to help me to know which room is where; I’d be better off taking the virtual tour. Will it make me feel as if I’m walking around the house myself, looking into every room? That’s what I’d like to do.

  Then I’d be satisfied.

  I hit the button and wait for the tour to load. Another button pops up: ‘Play Tour’. I click on it. The kitchen appears first, and I see what I’ve already seen in the photograph, then a bit more as the camera does a 360-degree turn to reveal the rest of the room. Then another turn, then another. The spinning effect makes me feel dizzy, as if I’m on a roundabout that won’t stop. I close my eyes, needing a break. I’m so tired. Travelling to Cambridge and back in a day nearly every Friday is doing me no good; it’s not the physical effort that’s draining, it’s the secrecy. I have to move on, let it go.

  I open my eyes and see a mass of red. At first I don’t know what I’m looking at, and then . . . Oh, God. It can’t be. Oh, fuck, oh, God. Blood. A woman lying face down in the middle of the room, and blood, a lake of it, all over the beige carpet. For a second, in my panic, I mistake the blood for my own. I look down at myself. No blood. Of course not – it’s not my carpet, not my house. It’s 11 Bentley Grove. The lounge, spinning. The fireplace, the framed map above it, the door open to the hall . . .

  The dead woman, face down in a sea of red. As if all the blood inside her has been squeezed out, every drop of it . . .

  I make a noise that might be a scream. I try to call Kit’s name, but it doesn’t work. Where’s the phone? Not on its base. Where’s my BlackBerry? Should I ring 999? Panting, I reach out for something, I’m not sure what. I can’t take my eyes off the screen. The blood is still turning, the dead woman slowly turning. She must be dead; it must be her blood. Red around the outside, almost black in the middle. Black-red, thick as tar. Make it stop spinning.

  I stand up, knock my chair over. It falls to the floor with a thud. I back away from my desk, wanting only to escape. Out, out! a voice in my head screams. I’m stumbling in the wrong direction, nowhere near the door. Don’t look. Stop looking. I can’t help it. My back hits the wall; something hard presses into my skin. I hear a crash, step on something that crunches. Pain pricks the soles of my feet. I look down and see broken glass. Blood. Mine, this time.

  Somehow, I get myself out of the room and close the door. Better; now there’s a barrier between it and me. Kit. I need Kit. I walk into our bedroom, switch on the light and burst into tears. How dare he be asleep? ‘Kit!’

  He groans. Blinks. ‘Light off,’ he mumbles, groggy with sleep. ‘Fuck’s going on? Time is it?’

  I stand there crying, my feet bleeding onto the white rug.

  ‘Con?’ Kit hauls himself up into a sitting position and rubs his eyes. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’

  ‘She’s dead,’ I tell him.

  ‘Who’s dead?’ He’s alert now. He reaches under the bed for his glasses, puts them on.

  ‘I don’t know! A woman,’ I sob. ‘On the computer.’

  ‘What woman? What are you talking about?’ He throws back the covers, gets out of bed. ‘Your . . . what have you done to your feet? They’re bleeding.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It’s the best I can do. ‘I did a virtual . . .’ I’m having trouble breathing and speaking at the same time.

  ‘Just tell me if everybody’s okay. Your sister, Benji . . .’

  ‘What?’ My sister? ‘It’s nothing to do with them, it’s a woman. I can’t see her face.’

  ‘You’re white as a sheet, Con. Did you have a nightmare?’

  ‘On my laptop. She’s there now,’ I sob. ‘She’s dead. She must be. We should call the police.’

  ‘Sweetheart, there’s no dead woman on your laptop,’ Kit says. I hear the impatience beneath the reassurance. ‘You had a bad dream.’

  ‘Go and look!’ I scream at him. ‘It’s not a dream. Go in there and see it for yourself!’

  He looks down at my feet again, at the trail of blood on the rug and the floorboards – a dotted red line leading to the bedroom door. ‘What happened to you?’ he asks. I wonder how guilty I look. ‘What’s going on?’ The concerned tone has gone; his voice is hard with suspicion. Without waiting to hear my answer, he heads for the spare room.

  ‘No!’ I blurt out.

  He stops on the landing. Turns. ‘No? I thought you wanted me to look at your computer.’ I’ve made him angry. Anything that interrupts his sleep makes him angry.

  I can’t let him go in there until I’ve explained, or tried to. ‘I did a virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove,’ I say.

  ‘What? For fuck’s sake, Connie.’

  ‘Listen to me. Just listen, okay? It’s for sale, 11 Bentley Grove is for sale.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I . . . I just know, all right?’ I wipe my face. If I’m under attack, I can’t cry. I have to concentrate on defending myself.

  ‘This is just . . . Connie, this is so fucked up, I don’t know where to . . .’ Kit pushes past me, tries to get back into bed.

  I grab his arm to stop him. ‘Be angry later, but first listen to me. Okay? That’s all I’m asking.’

  He shakes me off him. I hate the way he’s staring at me.

  What do you expect him to do?

  ‘I’m listening,’ he says quietly. ‘I’ve been listening to you talk about 11 Bentley Grove for six months. When’s it going to stop?’

  ‘It’s for sale,’ I say, as calmly as I can. ‘I looked it up on Roundthehouses, a property website.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now, just . . . before.’

  ‘You waited until I was asleep?’ Kit shakes his head in disgust.

  ‘There was a virtual tour, and I . . . I thought I’d . . .’ It’s better if I don’t tell him what I was thinking. Not that he couldn’t guess. ‘There was a woman, in the lounge, face down on the floor, blood all around her, a huge pool . . .’ Describing it makes me feel as if I might throw up.

  Kit takes a step back, looks at me as if he’s never seen me before. ‘Let’s get this straight: you went onto Roundthehouses, took a virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove, which you happen to know is for sale, and saw a dead woman in one of the rooms?’

  ‘In the lounge.’

  He laughs. ‘This is inventive, even for you,’ he says.

  ‘It’s still up on the screen,’ I tell him. ‘Go and look if you don’t believe me.’ I’m shaking, freezing cold suddenly.

  He’s going to refuse. He’s going to ignore what I’ve told him and go back to sleep, to punish me, and because it can’t possibly be true. There can’t be a dead woman lying in a sea of blood on the Roundthehouses website.

  Kit sighs. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’ll go and look. Evidently I’m as big an idiot as you think I am.’

  ‘I’m not making it up!’ I shout after him. I want to go with him, but my body won’t move. Any second now he’ll see what I saw. I can’t bear the waiting, knowing it’s going to happen.

  ‘Great,’ I hear Kit say to himself. Or maybe he’s talking to me. ‘I’ve always wanted to look at a stranger’s dishwasher in the middle of the night.’

  Dishwasher. The tour must be on a loop. In my absence, it’s started again at the beginning. ‘The obligatory kitchen island,’ Kit mutters. ‘Why do people do it?’

  ‘The lounge is after the kitchen,’ I tell him. I force myself onto the landi
ng; that’s as close as I’m willing to go. I can’t breathe. I hate the thought that Kit’s about to see what I saw – no one should have to see it. It’s too horrible. At the same time, I need him to . . .

  To what? Confirm that it was real, that you didn’t imagine it?

  I don’t imagine things that aren’t there. I don’t. I sometimes worry about things that maybe don’t need to be worried about, but that’s not the same thing. I know what’s true and what isn’t. My name is Catriona Louise Bowskill. True. I’m thirty-four years old. True. I live at Melrose Cottage in Little Holling, Silsford, with my husband Christian, but he’s always been known as Kit, just as I’ve always been known as Connie. We have our own business – it’s called Nulli Secundus. We’re data management consultants, or rather, Kit is. My official title is Business and Financial Director. Kit works for Nulli full-time. I’m part-time: three days a week. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I work for my mum and dad’s business, Monk & Sons Fine Furnishings, where I have a more old-fashioned job title: book-keeper. My mum and dad are Val and Geoff Monk. They live down the road. I have a sister, Fran, who’s thirty-two. She also works for Monk & Sons; she runs the curtain and blind department. She has a partner, Anton, and they have a five-year-old son, Benji. All these things are true, and it’s also true – true in exactly the same way – that less than ten minutes ago I took a virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge, and saw a dead woman lying on a blood-soaked carpet.

  ‘Bingo: the lounge,’ I hear Kit say. His tone sends a chill shooting up my spine. How can he sound so flippant, unless . . . ‘Interesting choice of coffee table. Trying a bit too hard, I’d say. No dead woman, no blood.’

  What? What’s he talking about? He’s wrong. I know what I saw.

  I push open the door and make myself walk into the room. No. It’s not possible. 11 Bentley Grove’s lounge turns slowly on the screen, but there’s no body in it – no woman lying face down, no pool of red. The carpet’s beige. Moving closer, I see that there’s a faint mark on it in one corner, but . . . ‘It’s not there,’ I say.

  Kit stands up. ‘I’m going back to bed,’ he says, his voice stiff with fury.

  ‘But . . . how could it disappear?’

  ‘Don’t.’ He raises his fist, smacks it against the wall. ‘We’re not going to talk about this now. I’ve got a good idea: let’s never talk about it. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen.’

  ‘Kit . . .’

  ‘I can’t go on like this, Con. We can’t go on like this.’

  He pushes past me. I hear our bedroom door slam. Too shocked to cry, I sit down in the chair that’s still warm from Kit’s body, and stare at the screen. When the lounge disappears, I wait for it to come back, in case the dead woman and the blood also come back. It seems unlikely, but then what’s happened already is also unlikely, and yet it happened.

  I sit through the tour of 11 Bentley Grove four times. Each time the kitchen fades, I hold my breath. Each time the lounge returns spotless, with no dead woman or blood in it. Eventually, because I don’t know what else to do, I click on the ‘x’ in the top right-hand corner of the screen, shut the tour down.

  Not possible.

  One last time, starting from scratch. I click on the internet Explorer icon, go back to Roundthehouses, retrace my steps: find 11 Bentley Grove again, click on the virtual tour button again, sit and watch. There’s no woman. No blood. Kit is still right. I am still wrong.

  I slam my laptop shut. I ought to clear up the broken glass, and the real bloodstains on my own carpet. I stare down at Nulli’s certificate of incorporation, lying on the floor in its shattered frame. In my shock at seeing the dead woman, I must have knocked it off the wall. Kit will be upset about that. As if he hasn’t got enough to be upset about.

  Reframing a certificate is easy. Deciding what to do about a disappearing dead woman that you might have imagined in the first place – not so easy.

  As far as I can see, I have two choices. I can either try to forget about it, talk myself into believing that the horrific scene I saw only ever existed in my mind. Or I can ring Simon Waterhouse.

  *

  POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/12IG

  CAVENDISH LODGE PRIMARY SCHOOL

  BULLETIN NO. 581

  Date: Monday 19th October 2009

  Autumn Thoughts from Mrs Kennedy’s class

  Conkers are . . .

  Silky smooth,

  Velvety and chocolate brown

  And rusty red on the outside.

  Their shiny shells are crusty

  Creamy and cool to touch.

  I love Autumn because

  Conkers fall off the trees in Autumn.

  I love conkers SO much!

  by Riordan Gilpatrick

  Conkers

  They fall off trees

  Hit you on the head.

  You can tie them on strings

  Have fights with them

  You can collect them

  And put them on your shelf.

  Green-brown-orange-red, that’s the colour of . . .

  Conkers!

  by Emily Sabine

  Well done to both of you – you have really brought Autumn to life in all our minds!

  Thank you!

  Chapter 2

  17/07/10

  Betting man that he was, DC Chris Gibbs would have put the odds against Olivia’s persuading the concierge to serve them yet another drink, long after the hotel bar had officially closed, at several thousand to one. Happily, he’d have been wrong.

  ‘Just one more titchy little nightcap,’ she breathed, as if confiding a secret. Where did she get that voice? It couldn’t be natural; nothing about her seemed natural.

  ‘Well, perhaps not quite so titchy,’ Olivia quickly amended, once she’d secured an agreement in principle. ‘A double Laphroaig for Chrissy and a double Baileys for me, since we’re celebrating.’

  Gibbs tensed. No one had ever referred to him as ‘Chrissy’ before. He prayed it wouldn’t happen again, but didn’t want to make an issue of it. Fuck. Did the concierge think he called himself Chrissy? He hoped it was obvious from his appearance that he didn’t and wouldn’t.

  Olivia draped herself across the bar while she waited, revealing even more of her world-class cleavage. Gibbs noticed the concierge looking while pretending not to. All men did it all the time, but none as skilfully as Gibbs, in his own not-so-humble opinion.

  ‘No ice in either,’ Olivia said. ‘Oh, and whatever you’re having, obviously – let’s not forget you! A double of something yummy and hugely alcoholic for you!’

  Gibbs was glad she was as drunk as she was. Sober, earlier, she’d been a bit much for him, but he knew how to deal with drunks; he’d arrested enough of them. Admittedly, most weren’t wearing funny-shaped gold dresses that had cost two thousand pounds, as Olivia had told him hers had. He’d done a double-take, expressed disbelief, and she’d laughed at him.

  ‘Kind of you, madam, but I’m fine, thank you,’ said the concierge.

  ‘Did I say no ice? I can’t remember if I said it or only thought it. That’s always happening to me. Neither of us likes ice, do we?’ Olivia turned to Gibbs, then, before he had a chance to respond, back to the concierge. ‘We didn’t know we had anything in common – I mean, look at us! We’re so different! – but then it turned out that we both hate ice.’

  ‘A lot of people do,’ said the concierge, smiling. Perhaps there was nothing he liked more than to stay up all night, dressed like a butler from the 1920s, serving drinks to a loud posh woman and an unfriendly copper who’d had way too many already. ‘Then again, a lot of people don’t.’

  Give us the drinks and spare us the tedious observations. Gibbs had grabbed his Laphroaig and was on his way back to their table when he heard Olivia say, ‘Aren’t you going to ask what we’re celebrating?’ He didn’t know whether it’d be rude to leave her to it, whether he ought to go back and join her; it took him less than a second to decide he didn’t care. If she and
the Jeeves lookalike wanted to bore each other to death, that was their lookout. Gibbs had his drink, the extra one that he hadn’t thought he was going to get; that was all he wanted.

  ‘We’ve been to a wedding today, and guess what?’ Olivia’s voice blared out behind him. ‘There was no one else there! Apart from the bride and groom, I mean. My sister Charlie was the bride. Chris and I were the two witnesses and the only guests.’

  No more ‘Chrissy’, then. Thank God for that.

  ‘They chose one each,’ Olivia went on. ‘Charlie chose me and Simon chose . . . Sorry, did I mention Simon? He’s my sister’s husband – as of today! Simon Waterhouse. The groom.’ She said it as if the concierge ought to have heard of him.

  Gibbs felt a bit irked, probably only because he was hammered, that she hadn’t finished her sentence: and Simon chose Chris. It was clear enough, even though she hadn’t spelled it out. If they’d chosen one witness each and Charlie had chosen Olivia, then Waterhouse must have chosen Gibbs. Not that the hotel concierge needed to know that. It was true whether he knew it or not.

  Yesterday, before setting off to Torquay, Gibbs had asked his wife Debbie why she thought Waterhouse had picked him. ‘Why not you?’ she’d said without lifting her eyes from the shirt she was ironing, clearly not interested in discussing it. There was no room in her head for anything but her IVF at the moment. She’d gone in for the embryo transfer on Tuesday – two had been implanted, the two healthiest specimens. Gibbs hoped to God he didn’t end up with twins. One would be . . .