Prejudices are comforting: everyone should make sure to cultivate at least three.
I walk in, stamp my feet on the mat beside the door. Snow slides off my shoes, turns from white to transparent as it liquefies. I take off my coat, hat, scarf and gloves, and try not to resent the hours I’ve committed to spending here. It’s hard. If I hadn’t come on Tuesday, if I hadn’t listened to all the people who extolled the effectiveness of last-resort hypnotherapy . . . If it’s so brilliant, why is it nobody’s first choice? Why hasn’t word-of-mouth pushed it up the league table?
‘This is a first for me,’ Ginny says. ‘No one’s ever booked in for a whole morning before.’
I adjust the reclining chair so that it’s as upright as it can be, feeling more comfortable in this position, more equal. What is it about hypnotherapy that makes it work better horizontally than vertically?
Stop. Give it a chance.
‘I’m sorry I accused you of lying,’ I say to Ginny. ‘I had no right to yell at you and storm out without paying. You were right, I was wrong. I just . . . I was confused. I thought you’d said something and asked me to repeat it and—’ I break off, wondering how much she already knows. ‘Did Charlie Zailer tell you about the case her husband’s working on? Katharine Allen’s murder?’
‘She didn’t, no, but I’ve since been interviewed by the police.’
‘About me?’ Why else would they talk to Ginny other than to ask about my state of mind, how I’d come to say the magic words, whether I’d looked and sounded like a murderer when I’d said them? ‘What did you tell them?’
I don’t like her smile. It’s a pity smile, not the kind that anyone with any self-respect would want to be on the receiving end of. ‘Amber, I’m really sorry, but I’m not comfortable with you asking me about my interactions with the police. Why don’t we talk about what you’d like to do here today?’ From her tone, it sounds as if she’s about to offer me a choice of face-painting, skipping, or playing in the sandpit.
Stop. Seriously. How would you like to have to deal with you? Give the woman a break, for fuck’s sake.
‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel,’ I say.
Ginny nods, as if it makes sense all by itself.
‘I saw it written down on a piece of paper – three headings, with spaces in between. Lined paper: blue lines going across, one pink vertical line on the left, for the margin.’
‘Why are you telling me what the paper looked like?’ Ginny asks.
‘I have a strong visual memory of it, but nothing else, no context. I need to know where I saw it. Hypnotherapy’s good for making memories resurface, supposedly. I mean, that’s what it’s for, right? So . . . here I am.’
That sheet of paper is the piece of the puzzle that’s missing. Dinah and Nonie didn’t kill anybody; neither did William or Barney. Which means one of them must have shared the secret with someone else, someone who wrote those words on a notepad in Kat Allen’s flat before or after they brought a metal pole down on her head. If I can remember where I saw that torn-off page, I will know who in my life is a murderer. I’ll know for sure.
‘Hypnotherapy’s great for retrieving repressed memories,’ Ginny says, ‘but I have to be honest with you, Amber, because it won’t help either of us if I’m not: I’m sensing a potential problem, and it’s a serious one.’
I don’t want to hear about what might go wrong. This has to work. ‘I’m willing to do whatever it takes to find out what I need to know,’ I say. ‘I’ll come as many times as I have to, and pay as much as—’
‘Amber, Amber – stop.’ Ginny holds up both hands, as if miming a window. ‘It’s not a question of insufficient time. It’s more complicated than that. Our unconscious minds are their own bosses. Really, they are. Yes, repressed memories come up under hypnosis, but randomly. Though, actually, there’s often a reason.’ She sighs. ‘I’m not doing a very good job of explaining this, am I? Look, to put it simply, using your case as an example: you want to know where you saw a piece of paper. Your conscious mind thinks that’s what you need to know. It thinks it’s all you need to know. Problem is, there’s a strong chance your unconscious mind disagrees. It’ll release other memories – not what you’re looking for, things that strike you as entirely irrelevant . . . except they won’t be irrelevant.’
I hate that knowing look in her eyes. This is my nightmare, not hers – my life in chaos, my girls in danger – and she thinks she knows more about it than I do.
‘They’ll prove they’re not irrelevant by presenting themselves to your conscious mind over and over again, and you’ll think, “Why does this stupid incident keep coming back when it’s so insignificant?” Hopefully, that’s when you’ll realise it isn’t insignificant at all. Whatever it is, chances are it’ll be more important than where you saw your piece of paper.’
No, it won’t. She knows nothing.
‘What you need to know and what you want to know are two different things,’ she goes on, enjoying the sound of her own wisdom. ‘I think you’d benefit enormously from hypnotherapy. I’m certain I can help you, and that you’ll solve several mysteries you don’t know exist. Not murders – mysteries inside you, in your character, in your day-to-day life. What I can’t do is guarantee that you’ll remember this one particular detail, and . . . I have to say, the more you set it up as the big crucial thing, the less likely you are to remember it.’
‘Fine,’ I say, though it isn’t. It’s as far from fine as Mozart’s Requiem is from a disappointing Eurovision Song Contest entry, but if I want to get anywhere, I have to try to cooperate. ‘Fine. Look, I told you, I’ll do whatever it takes. If you think it’ll help if I stop wanting to know what I want to know, I’ll try to stop.’
Ginny presses the palms of her hands together. ‘Why don’t you lie back, relax, and stop worrying about results and outcomes?’ she says. ‘We’ve got three hours, so let’s do some hypnotherapy, some free association, and see where it takes us. Okay?’
‘You’ve got no personal experience of murder, have you?’
‘No. Does that bother you?’
‘What about your patients? I’m sure you’ve got abuse victims coming out of your ears, but have you got anyone else like me, where murder’s the issue?’
‘No, and—’
‘Have you ever?’
‘Amber, murder isn’t the issue for you. You only think it is.’
‘Funny how everything I think turns out to be wrong, isn’t it?’ I snap. ‘Tell you what: why don’t I go and get my legs waxed, and you can sort out all my problems on your own, since you seem to know more about me than I do.’
Ginny smiles as if she appreciates the joke. ‘You think you want to know who killed Katharine Allen, but you don’t wonder why it matters so much to you. You didn’t know her, did you? It’s the police’s job to find her killer, not yours.’
I laugh. ‘Are you serious? No, I didn’t know her, but I know I’ve seen a piece of paper that was torn from a notepad in her flat. That means there’s a chance I know her murderer, in case you’re too dim to work it out.’
‘Exactly,’ says Ginny.
What kind of person says, ‘Exactly’ when you’ve just proved they’re a fool?
‘You came to me on Tuesday hoping I could cure your insomnia.’
I haven’t got the patience for this. I know what I did on Tuesday; I don’t need a recap. Previously on The Smug Hypnotherapist . . .
‘You told me you knew why you couldn’t sleep – stress – but made it clear that you were unwilling to discuss what was causing the stress. Now, thanks to a combination of circumstances that no one could have predicted, you’ve brushed up against a murder investigation and, again, you come to me with a specific, narrowly focused request: you don’t want to get sidetracked, you just want to find out this one thing and then you’ll be fine. Just as, on Tuesday, you believed that if I could cast a spell on you to make you sleep, everything else would be fine.’
She’s unbelievable. And I�
�m a saint for not walking over and smacking her in the face. I imagine myself doing it, then saying, ‘Sorry, but we don’t all work in the caring professions.’
‘You might not have been lying on Tuesday, but you are now,’ I tell her. ‘At no point did I say or think that if I slept, everything would be fine. What I thought, and sorry if I didn’t make it clear, was that if I slept, I might not die in the next fortnight. See the difference?’
‘Amber, I don’t want to argue with you. We should stop this and get on with the hypnotherapy. The more I say, the more there is for you to twist.’
‘And vice versa.’
‘Your issue isn’t insomnia and it isn’t an unsolved murder. You’re here now and you were here on Tuesday because there’s something terribly wrong in your life and you don’t know what it is. That scares you. That’s the mystery I hope to be able to help you solve, if you’ll let me. Why don’t you lie back? Adjust the chair to make it go flat, close your eyes, and—’
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Before we start, there are things I need to tell you.’
‘No, there aren’t. You only think there are.’
Unbelievable. ‘I feel like that tree,’ I say, mainly because I know it will confuse her.
‘Tree?’ She looks at the botanical prints on her wall. None are of trees. Guess again.
‘The one that falls in an empty forest. No one hears it fall. Can it be said to have made a sound if there was no one there to hear it?’
Ginny frowns. ‘And . . . you feel like that tree?’
‘Was there any point in my brain popping round this morning, if you’re going to dismiss every thought it produces?’
‘Your brain’s a bully,’ says Ginny. ‘It needs to back off.’
‘It feels the same way about yours,’ I tell her.
‘That’s already an improvement.’ She smiles. ‘A feeling is always an improvement on a thought, in therapeutic terms. Look, I’ll do you a deal: you tell me whatever you want, and then, from then on, I’m the boss. You switch off your brain and take orders from me? Agreed?’
‘All right.’ Kind of.
Now that she’s given me permission, I don’t know where to start. And then I do: with the mystery words. I tell her that when I blurted them out to her on Tuesday without being aware of what I was saying, my mind was on Jo’s Christmas vanishing act seven years ago; I was trying to decide whether it was too showy, too good a story – did it count as a newly surfacing memory, given that it was so often in my mind?
I describe what happened at Little Orchard in detail. It’s more of a relief than I imagined it would be. It doesn’t help me to understand any of it any better, but it feels good all the same to arrange the facts and present them to someone who isn’t a member of the family. When I’ve finished, the gaps in my knowledge seem more clearly defined.
I tell Ginny about Sharon’s death, Dinah and Nonie, Marianne, the adoption that might or might not happen. There’s no need, but I find myself wanting to say more, so I explain about Terry Bond and the residents’ association, about my DriveTech course and the scam Jo and I pulled. I allow myself to rant about the hypocrisy of Jo’s disapproval that extended only to me and not to herself, her claim that I’d betrayed Sharon by going to the launch of Terry’s restaurant. By now it seems necessary to put Jo in context, so I tell Ginny everything I think she needs to know: Neil, Quentin, William and Barney, Sabina, Ritchie, Kirsty, Hilary, the too-small house stuffed full of people.
Over and over, I hear myself say her name: Jo, Jo, Jo.
I must change the subject. I go back to Tuesday, explain to Ginny how I ended up in Charlie Zailer’s car; the notebook, DC Gibbs turning up at my house a short while later, being taken to the police station and questioned. My attempts to convey the awfulness of DI Proust make her laugh. Her expression turns serious again when I move on to the case notes Charlie Zailer posted through my letterbox, but she doesn’t interrupt. She’s a good listener. Her still attentiveness does more than anything she’s said so far to convince me that I’m not wasting my time. Nobody in my real life would listen to me for this long, without trying to intervene.
Is that a good enough reason for me to start talking about Jo again, listing things she’s done and said over the years, tiny inconsequential things? Why can’t I stop?
I force myself to talk about other people: Simon Waterhouse, the shaving-rash bobby that he referred to as a ‘police presence’. I tell Ginny about the favour I asked Charlie to do for me, her refusal, my embarrassment. How could I have thought, even in my wildest dreams, that she’d agree? I wouldn’t have made that mistake if I’d had a good night’s sleep, but that was before we moved into Hilary’s house. It was after a night of no sleep at all, the night of the fire, the night I emailed Little Orchard’s owner, having got it into my head that I had to go back, that I must have seen that lined sheet of A4 there, even though I knew I hadn’t, which makes no sense to me – as little sense as Neil being woken in the early hours of Christmas morning and ordered to pack up the boys and go into hiding against his will, hiding from the people he and Jo had invited to spend Christmas with them.
Eventually, I run out of steam and fall silent. The information I’m holding back rings in my mind, so loud that I imagine Ginny must be able to hear it. I haven’t said anything about Dinah’s confession, about my knowing what Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel means. I try to convince myself this won’t matter. Ginny can’t imagine I’ve told her my full and complete life story, missing nothing out. There are other things I haven’t mentioned, plenty of things, all unimportant.
‘You were right,’ she says. ‘You needed to get all of that off your chest. I shouldn’t have tried to stop you. I just want to pick up on something you mentioned in passing, before we start. You implied that, since moving into Jo’s mother’s house, you’ve slept better?’
This isn’t ‘before we start’, I want to say. We started as soon as I arrived.
‘Yes. It’s only been one night, but . . . I slept really well.’
Ginny nods. ‘Because of the police presence outside the house.’ She smiles. ‘You’re off duty. Someone else is making sure Dinah and Nonie are safe, so you can sleep.’
No. I nearly don’t bother to say anything. Then I decide it’s important. I can’t let her tell me things about myself that aren’t true. ‘I don’t think it’s that,’ I say. ‘In fact, I know it isn’t.’
Ginny’s shaking her head. ‘You told me you, Luke, Dinah and Nonie climbed out of the window onto a flat roof.’
‘So?’
‘You might not realise it, but that’s why you chose that house and not a different house. You saw that window and that roof and thought “fire escape”.’
‘True, but that’s not what you said before. I’m not sleeping well at Hilary’s because of any police presence.’
‘For eighteen months, you and you alone have been responsible for making sure that what happened to Sharon can’t happen again. That’s how you’ve felt, anyway. That’s why you’ve had to spend all those nights patrolling the house.’
I stare out of the window at the falling snow. It’s starting to settle, thickening. ‘What do you want, a gold star?’ I say.
‘Luke wouldn’t understand. You haven’t talked to him about it because there’s no point. He’d only say it’s crazy to think that whoever killed Sharon would want to harm Dinah and Nonie. If they had, they’d have left them inside the house with their mother before setting fire to it.’
‘Can you please not—’
‘What can you say to that? Nothing. He’s right, but it makes no difference. Nothing he could have said would have persuaded you that the same wouldn’t happen again: a fire, started deliberately. Next time the girls might not be so lucky, so how can you sleep and take the risk? How can you ever sleep again?’
I clear my throat. I feel as if I’ve been run over by a truck. No one can see the bruises and breakages; only I can feel them. ‘Thanks for clarifying that for me,’ I s
ay. ‘I thought I needed therapy for insomnia. Turns out all I needed was a trustworthy babysitter, all night every night.’
‘Which, at Hilary’s, you have,’ says Ginny. ‘Which is why you slept last night.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Amber . . .’
‘Fuck you and your patronising . . .’ I’m on my feet. It’s a good job I didn’t get as far as reclining my chair. Hard to storm out in disgust from a lying-down position. Can you lift me up so that I can leave, please? ‘Sorry, but you don’t get to be right about everything. Do you really think I’d trust some teenage copper I know nothing about to make sure Dinah and Nonie are safe? That I’d trust anyone apart from myself to be a match for the kind of evil . . . Look, forget it. There’s no point.’ I stagger, reach for the door handle. Ginny is saying something about evil, but I don’t hear it. All I hear is a clear insistent voice in my mind that seems to belong to nobody, that thinks it can explain the change in my sleeping habits, if only I would listen.
Shut up. Shut up. You’re nobody’s voice, you’re not mine, you know nothing.
The police presence. That’s what made the difference. Ginny’s right. She must be.
Then why are you so angry with her? Why are you leaving?
It fills the room: the full weight of what I know for sure and can no longer deny. It fills my nose and mouth, until I feel as if I’m suffocating. I have to get out.
I pull open the door and run out into the snow, and into the arms of Simon Waterhouse.
Since you don’t want to be patronised, I’m going to be absolutely frank with you: I find your request outrageous. Being treated as an equal is one thing; demanding that I tell you what shameful guilty secrets I was forced to confront as part of my own therapy is not acceptable. And I’m not going to do it. If that’s your idea of a fair deal, you must have a bloody screw loose!
Listen to me: the therapist who verbally abuses her patients. What’s the problem, Amber? I’m treating you as an equal: you have a go at me, I have a go at you. Perfect equality.
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