Lasting Damage

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Connie’s been a mess. For months,’ Kit mutters.

  Go on. Don’t stop now. In a way, it will be a relief to hear him say it. At least then I’ll have something concrete to fight against.

  ‘There was no dead woman on the Roundthehouses website. Maybe Connie saw her in the flesh. In that house, in the lounge. Connie could have parked my car on Bentley Grove. She often drives my car, she’s in Cambridge all the time . . .’

  ‘I’ve never driven there in your car,’ I tell him. ‘Not once.’

  ‘Ask her,’ Kit urges Grint. ‘Make her tell you the truth – she won’t tell me.’

  Ask away, DC Grint. As many questions as you want, and I’ll tell you no lies.

  ‘Why do you think Connie goes to Cambridge?’ Grint stays focused on Kit.

  ‘She told you why. Don’t you listen? Why don’t you tell us what’s happened, what you know about this dead woman? Is there a dead woman?’

  ‘Why does Connie go to Cambridge so often? She doesn’t live there, she doesn’t work there . . .’

  Kit slumps in his chair. ‘Like she said before: she’s looking for me.’

  ‘She said that, yes, but what do you say? She claims she’s trying to catch you out in an adulterous relationship. She claims she found 11 Bentley Grove as the home address in your SatNav – she says you programmed it in. If she programmed it in, as you’re suggesting, then surely she would know you didn’t. Why, then, would she hang around 11 Bentley Grove waiting for you to emerge on the arm of your bit on the side? Does that make any sense to you, Mr Bowskill?’

  Kit says nothing.

  ‘Or did she put the address into your SatNav because she suspected you were having an affair with the woman that lived there? Was it her way of saying, “The game’s up”?’

  ‘Kit?’ Sam prompts.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why! I don’t know anything.’ Kit makes a choking sound, covers his mouth with his fist. ‘Look, Connie’s not evil, she’s . . . I love her.’

  I can’t help jumping slightly, as the word ‘evil’ joins us in the room. Like a gust of cold air.

  ‘Shall I take over?’ I say briskly, trying to sound as impartial as I can. The only way to get through this is to be objective. Grint needs to know what Kit and I both think. Then maybe we can make some progress. ‘Kit thinks I murdered a woman. Or maybe I didn’t murder her – maybe it was manslaughter or self-defence, since I’m not evil. Either way, I’m so guilty and traumatised, I try to block it out. I succeed in banishing 11 Bentley Grove and the dead woman from my conscious mind, but my subconscious isn’t so compliant. The guilt erupts, and causes trouble for me. Like Kit says, I’m a mess – that’s definitely true, that’s the one thing we agree on. I programme the address of the house where the murder took place into his SatNav. Maybe, deep down, I want to be caught and punished.’

  ‘Connie, stop,’ Sam mutters, shifting in his seat. He really shouldn’t work for the police if he can’t cope with tense, unpleasant situations.

  I ignore him and continue with my story. ‘When the house comes up for sale, the part of me that knows the truth is terrified that whoever buys it will find evidence of my crime. That’s why I stay up all night looking at it on Roundthehouses, staring at the pictures of every room. The dead woman and the blood are long gone – I’d have made sure to remove all traces – but I’m paranoid, and, in my panic, I imagine I can see the crime scene exactly as it was: the body, the blood—’

  ‘Hold on a second,’ Grint interrupts. ‘If you’re looking at the house to check there are no traces of the murder you committed, then you haven’t repressed the memory, have you? You know what you’ve done.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I say, impatient because he’s missing the point and it’s so obvious. ‘I only know it subliminally. I’ve blocked it out: the murder, putting the address into the SatNav – everything. As far as I’m aware, Kit must have programmed in the address. But he denies it, so, understandably, I’m suspicious. I start going to Cambridge nearly every Friday, trying to catch him red-handed.’ I flinch as an image of bloodstained hands fills my head. Streaked with red past the wrists, down to the elbows.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Sam asks me. ‘Would you like some water?’

  ‘No. I’m fine,’ I lie. ‘One day – the Friday just gone – I see that 11 Bentley Grove has sprouted a ‘‘For Sale’’ sign in its garden. That night, I’m determined to have a nosy at the pictures on a property website, to see if I can spot anything that belongs to Kit in any of the rooms. I find nothing – not a scrap of proof. I almost go to bed feeling reassured: everything’s under control. Up until this point, I’ve successfully repressed my awareness of what I’ve done, but having the pictures of the house there on the screen in front of me is too much – the memory flares up, and I see the . . .’ I stop, swallow. ‘I see the death scene, as clearly as if it were on the website. I don’t realise it’s a mental projection; I believe I’ve seen it on my computer.’

  Kit is openly crying now.

  ‘I’m only saying what I know you’re thinking,’ I tell him.

  ‘Let me see if I’ve got this right,’ says Grint. ‘You kill a woman, and manage to conceal the memory from yourself, so that most of the time you have no idea you’ve done it. There are only two occasions when your guilty subconscious breaks the surface: once when you programme the address into the SatNav, and then again when you see a dead body that isn’t there on the Roundthehouses website.’

  ‘That’s what Kit thinks, yes.’

  Grint pushes his chair away from the table, leans back. He kicks the heel of one shoe against the toe of the other. ‘So, when you look at 11 Bentley Grove on Roundthehouses, on a superficial level you’re looking for evidence of your husband’s presence in the house. Simultaneously, without allowing yourself to acknowledge it, you’re actually looking for any evidence you might have left behind that could link you to the murder you committed.’

  I force a smile. ‘Absurd, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who is she, then, this dead lady? Why did you kill her?’

  ‘I didn’t. Kit thinks I did. I’m hoping you’re going to tell him that the scenario I’ve just described is the biggest load of rubbish you’ve ever heard.’

  Grint drums his fingers on the arm of his chair. ‘Post-traumatic memory loss is a handy fictional device, but I’ve never come across it in real life,’ he says, after a short pause. ‘Though I’ve met a fair few low-lifes pretending to be afflicted with it.’

  ‘What do you think?’ I ask Sam.

  ‘You keep saying all this is what Kit believes . . .’

  ‘Oh, he believes it – look at him! Have you heard him deny it? Or rather, it’s what he wants us all to think he believes. Most of all, he wants me to think he believes it – don’t you? You want me to be terrified that I’ve lost control of my own mind – that I might have killed someone and buried the memory so deep that I don’t know I’ve done it!’

  Kit covers his face with his hands. ‘Can somebody make this stop?’ he murmurs.

  ‘I think we should . . .’ Sam tries to come to Kit’s rescue, but Grint raises a finger to silence him. So it’s Grint and me versus Sam and Kit, is it? Two of us want to hear the worst; two of us don’t.

  ‘Course, Kit would tell you I’ve got a powerful subconscious,’ I say with false brightness. As concisely as possible, but omitting none of the gory details, I tell Grint about my hair loss, the vomiting, the facial paralysis – how my assorted symptoms sabotaged our escape to Cambridge in 2003. ‘I’ve regretted not moving ever since. I’ve got a bit of a thing about Cambridge. I’ve built it up in my mind to be this . . . civilised beautiful paradise, unreachable for the likes of me. Even being here, in a police station – I can’t say I’m enjoying it, but I’d rather be under suspicion of murder here than anywhere else.’ Silently, I congratulate myself on a fine performance; the person I’m pretending to be is shielding me from the pain I would otherwise be feeling. If Grint’s a competent d
etective, he should be able to distinguish between insanity, eccentricity and a sense of humour.

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ he says.

  ‘Cambridge, for me, it’s like . . . the one that got away, if that makes sense. Kit calls it my “land of lost content”. It’s a quote from a poem.’

  ‘A E Housman,’ Grint smiles. ‘ “Into my heart an air that kills / From yon far country blows: / What are those blue remembered hills, / What spires, what farms are those? / That is the land of lost content, / I see it shining plain, / The happy highways where I went / And cannot come again.” ’

  I start to laugh. I can’t stop.

  ‘Connie.’ Sam puts his hand on my arm.

  ‘What’s funny?’ Grint asks me.

  ‘Only in Cambridge would the cops quote poetry at you. You’re reinforcing all my preconceived ideas.’

  ‘Will you shut up?’ Kit snaps at me, looking at me for the first time since we got here. ‘You’re embarrassing yourself.’

  I turn on him. ‘I’m scaring you, you mean. I’ve seen through you, and you hate me for it. Look at you – you can barely be bothered to keep up the pretence any more! You’ve told so many lies, you’re running out of energy. Little inconsistencies are creeping in – if I drove to Bentley Grove in your car, then that’s my pink coat in the back window, isn’t it? Why say it’s a different pink?’

  ‘Mrs Bowskill—’ Grint tries to cut in.

  I raise my voice to block him, wanting only to hurt Kit, to inflict the deepest wound that I can. ‘Do you honestly think you can make me believe I’m suffering from some kind of multiple personality disorder, that Subconscious Me might have committed a crime that Conscious Me knows nothing about? It’s fucking ludicrous! How stupid do you think I am, exactly? You’re the one who should be embarrassed! Even on its own terms, it doesn’t work. If I was suppressing the memory of having killed a woman, surely it’d come back to me now, when we’re all discussing the possibility in great detail?’

  Grint rises to his feet. ‘Why don’t I tell you why you’re here?’ he says.

  I hear a long sigh. I’m not sure if it came from Kit or Sam.

  ‘I’ve got a woman called Jackie Napier in an interview room one floor down. That name mean anything to either of you?’

  ‘No,’ I say. Kit shakes his head. Maybe making him hate me is the way forward; when he no longer cares that he might destroy me, perhaps he’ll tell me the truth.

  ‘Jackie logged onto the Roundthehouses website at almost exactly the same time you did, early hours of Saturday morning.’ Grint watches me, waits for a reaction. I try to keep up, to process what he’s saying. As far as I’m concerned, there are only four people in my nightmare: me, Kit, Selina Gane and the dead woman. There’s no Jackie. ‘She brought up the page for 11 Bentley Grove,’ Grint goes on. ‘Like you, she clicked on the virtual tour button. Guess what she saw?’

  Bile fills my throat. I press my mouth shut, afraid I’m going to be sick.

  ‘She saw what you saw, Connie,’ says Sam. He sounds relieved, as if he’s been wanting to tell me this for a long time.

  ‘Her description was interchangeable with yours,’ Grint says. ‘Copious amounts of blood on the carpet, dark woman in a patterned dress, face down, hair fanned out around her head, as if she’d fallen. But d’you know what struck me most? She said – and so did you, from what Sam here tells me – that the blood was darkest next to the woman’s stomach.’

  I close my eyes and see it all again. ‘You should have told us straight away,’ I manage to say.

  ‘D’you think?’ says Grint. ‘I disagree. If I’d told you when you first walked in here, I’d have been telling strangers.’

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  ‘Jackie couldn’t stand to look at it, she said. She shut down the tour, went to pour herself a large G&T. She thought about phoning her best mate, but didn’t want to wake her up. Ten minutes later, once she’d calmed down a bit, she went and looked again. Second time round, there was no woman’s body.’

  ‘So . . .’ Kit’s sitting up straight now. ‘If this Jackie woman saw what Connie saw . . .’

  ‘There’s more.’ Grint walks over to the window, loops his fingers around the wire grid. ‘I spoke to someone at Roundthehouses. The virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove’s nothing to do with them – it’s the agent selling the property that provides all the material – photos, tours, room dimensions, everything.’

  ‘Lorraine Turner,’ I say, remembering her name from Sam’s story about the previous owners and their Christmas tree, the stain on the carpet.

  ‘Right.’ Grint smiles. He looks inappropriately happy. I hope it’s only his power over us all that he’s enjoying, not the prospect of a woman dead from a stomach wound. ‘Lorraine Turner’s the agent selling 11 Bentley Grove, but she has nothing to do with the IT side of things. How much do you know about computer hacking?’

  ‘There’s nothing about computers that Kit doesn’t know,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not a hacker.’

  ‘But you understand how hacking works.’ It’s not so much a rhetorical question as a statement of fact. Grint turns to me. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Not a clue.’

  ‘Then I’ll ditch the technical waffle and keep it simple. One of the estate agent’s IT guys rang me back about half an hour before you got here. Someone hacked into their website just before 1 a.m. on Saturday. Looks like they substituted one virtual tour for another – the one with the woman’s body for the official version.’

  ‘That makes no sense,’ says Kit, grey-faced. ‘When I looked, there was no dead body, no blood.’

  ‘At 1.23 a.m., the hacker did his stuff again,’ says Grint. ‘Or her stuff, I suppose I should say, since it could have been either. The original tour was reinstated.’

  ‘It wasn’t as late as 1.23 when I looked,’ says Kit. ‘I remember seeing the time on the computer, thinking “What the fuck am I doing up so late?” It was 1.20, exactly. And I didn’t hit the virtual tour button again – I looked at Connie’s tour, the one she’d started. It was on a repeating loop. Why didn’t I see what she saw?’ Kit’s eyes dart round the room, not settling on anything or anyone.

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘In the hacker’s version, he arranged it so that the picture of the dead woman only came up once in every twenty loops, or once in every fifty.’ Haven’t I explained this already? Why has Kit chosen to forget?

  ‘Would that be possible?’ Grint asks him. Because Kit’s the computer expert here, or because Grint thinks he’s the one who tampered with the virtual tour?

  ‘Anything’s possible.’ Kit shrugs. He lets out a long, slow breath. ‘So I guess that’s me off the hook. Think about it, Connie. Where was I, just before 1 a.m.? In bed, next to you. I was reading – you were asleep. Pretending to be asleep,’ he corrects himself. ‘Where was I at 1.23 a.m.? Back in bed – awake and wishing I wasn’t. Wondering whether to put up with your paranoid delusions for another six months, or pack a bag and get the hell out first thing in the morning.’

  He’s right. I see Grint register the look of defeat on my face. He must think I want my husband to be guilty of computer hacking, or bigamy.

  Or murder.

  What I want – all I want – is to understand. To know. At this precise moment, I don’t care what the explanation is, as long as there is one. If Kit didn’t hack into the estate agent’s website . . .

  ‘What are you doing about this?’ I ask Grint. ‘Have you got – forensic people looking at the carpet? Have you interviewed Selina Gane?’

  He ignores my questions, points his finger first at me, then at Kit. With his thumb raised, it looks as if he’s miming a gun. ‘Don’t go anywhere. Sam and I are going to talk to Jackie Napier, then we’ll be back.’ Sam leaps up, on cue. I don’t think he realised his presence would be required, but he’s not going to quibble; he’s going to follow the leader.

  As soon as they’ve gone, I stand up and head
for the door.

  ‘Con, wait . . .’ Kit reaches out his hand.

  ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘I won’t wait. I’ve waited too long already.’

  Outside the police station, I run. My head pounds, too full of blood, as I turn a corner, then another, then another. The pavement tilts. I blink, breathe in as much air as I can. My legs feel wobbly, unconnected to the rest of me. I sink down in a heap on the pavement, prop myself up against a wall. A woman walks past with two small boys behind her, both on push-along scooters that look like strange, angular dogs. One of them says, ‘Mummy, why’s that lady sitting on the road?’ I must look deranged, clutching my bag to my chest – as if I’m afraid someone’s going to mug me.

  When you know there’s a threat, but you don’t know where it’s coming from, it makes sense to be scared of everything. I don’t suppose the boys’ well-turned-out mother has ever bothered to explain that to them.

  Once I’ve got my breath back, I pull out my phone, ring 118118, and ask for the names of any hotels in Cambridge that begin with ‘D’ or ‘Du’. Sam said yesterday that Selina Gane was staying in a hotel; there has to be a good chance she’ll still be there. She wanted to talk to me once before, and I ran away. Maybe if I hadn’t, I’d have found out the truth a lot sooner.

  ‘There’s the Doubletree by Hilton Garden House hotel on Granta Place. Is that the one you want?’

  It could be.

  ‘It’s the only hotel listed in central Cambridge that begins with “D”.’

  ‘Put me through,’ I say. She won’t be there. She’ll be at work. I stay on the line. Even if she’s out, I want to find out if it’s the right hotel.

  Why? Are you planning to pay her a visit?

  I listen to the automated voice’s instructions: 1 for meetings and events, 2 for group reservations, 3 for hotel bedroom prices and individual reservations, 4 for directions and any other enquiries. I press 4 and get through to a human being, a woman. She sounds French. I ask if there’s a Dr Selina Gane staying at the hotel, expecting a one-word answer: yes or no.