Déjà Vu

by Stephen Edger

  Finding the nurses station unmanned, he proceeded along the corridor, noting the names of the patients written on the panel outside the main room, containing half a dozen beds.

  ‘Can I help you with something,’ a passing nurse asked, the expression on her tired face far from welcoming.

  ‘I’m looking for DC Annie Lockwood.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  It was an odd question, and ordinarily he would have fished out his identification and held it in her face, but the Chief Super had it.

  ‘I’m her boyfriend,’ he said all too quickly, hoping somebody else hadn’t already arrived using the same excuse. He was pretty sure the man she was dating wouldn’t rock up. His wife wouldn’t like it.

  The nurse eyed him suspiciously, before a smile broke out on her face.

  ‘She is in one of the private rooms. Keep going along the corridor, until you come to that area. You will need to scrub in and put on protective clothing.’ She held her arm out to indicate where she meant, and Jake nodded his thanks, before heading in that direction.

  He repeated his story to the nurse who was working in the secluded area and she showed him where he could properly clean his hands and then passed him a fresh gown to pull on over his t-shirt and jeans. It was a good thing the air conditioning was working.

  The room was dark as he entered, the blinds shutting out the morning’s sunshine. And in the centre of the room, cloaked in a variety of tubes of all different shapes and sizes was a mass that barely resembled the DC Annie Lockwood who had been so full of life just twenty-four hours earlier. As he drew closer, he saw her face was badly swollen, and her skin a lurid mix of purple and yellow, like someone had allowed a small child to paint it. Over her mouth and nose was a mask connected to a long corrugated plastic tube that stretched across the bed to a large whirring machine off to her right.

  ‘She has a collapsed lung,’ a quiet voice said from the corner of the room behind him, as he studied the apparatus.

  Jake hadn’t realised anyone else was in the room. Turning he saw an older woman, her face devoid of makeup and showing the strain of pained tears.

  ‘Mrs Lockwood?’ he said. ‘I am so sorry about what happened to your daughter.’

  She nodded acknowledgement, as she rose and joined him at the foot of the bed. ‘Did I hear you tell the nurse you’re Annie’s boyfriend?’ Her eyes remained focused on the woman in the bed, being kept alive by machinery. ‘I didn’t realise the two of you were involved, DS Knight.’

  ‘Wait, you know who I am?’

  ‘Annie speaks of you often, but I hadn’t realised there was anything romantic between you. I was sure she’d said you were married.’

  ‘I am,’ he admitted, unable to continue the lie to the woman whose expression barely registered any hope. ‘I wanted to check how she was doing. Have the doctors updated you this morning?’

  ‘There’s a bleed on her brain that they are monitoring. They’re pumping her with thinners to see if it reduces, so she will remain sedated until that happens. Her lung needs time to heal as well, which is why they’re keeping her ventilated for now. We just have to wait and see how well she recovers.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Lockwood.’

  ‘You don’t need to apologise, DS Knight. If it wasn’t for you, she would already be dead.’ She reached for his arm as her legs gave way, and Jake caught her, before leading her back to the chair in the corner.

  ‘I did what anybody would have in that situation. I’m surprised you know what happened.’

  ‘What do you mean? You’re front page news. Well, Annie is, but I think your name was on page three.’ She handed him a copy of the morning’s Daily Echo, and he couldn’t contain his surprise at the headline: OFFICER FIGHTS FOR LIFE.

  He quickly skimmed the summary beneath the headline before flipping to the full article, barely able to read the words in the low light. But the article was a blow-by-blow account of the operation, down to the exact time McGregor had detonated the bomb, to the moment he was arrested and led away. Jake was relieved not to read of his punch. But the accuracy of the story told him one thing: the office had a leak.

  ‘I don’t know how to properly thank you,’ Mrs Lockwood continued, wiping her eyes with a scrunched, damp tissue.

  ‘Your daughter showed great bravery, chasing after the suspect.’

  She grunted. ‘What you call bravery, I call stupidity. You’re a hero, DS Knight.’

  He’d read the same word in the newspaper, but it was harder to hear it said aloud. ‘I’m really not, Mrs Lockwood.’ A real hero wouldn’t allow his anger to control his actions.

  She stood suddenly. ‘I’ll give you a few minutes peace. The nurses can’t say for sure whether she can hear it when I talk to her, but I like to think she can hear every word. If I tell her how much she is loved and needed, maybe she will come back sooner.’

  He waited for her to leave the room, before carrying the chair over to the right side of the bed, away from the ventilator, careful not to inadvertently place the chair’s legs on any of the tubes.

  ‘You’ve looked better,’ he said, hoping to deflect his real feelings with humour, but missing the mark. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear that McGregor is in custody. Although chasing after him alone was irresponsible, if you hadn’t he would probably now be in the wind.’ He paused, as he searched for the words to confess. ‘Unfortunately, the case is now hanging in the balance because of my stupidity. But Tosh says we will get him again. Anyway, none of that is on you. I was the one to blame, not you.’

  He stopped as he was sure one of her fingers had twitched. His eyes watered as he glared at the finger, willing it to move again, but it remained still, and he couldn’t be sure if it had even moved to begin with, or whether it was simply a trick of the poor lighting.

  ‘You’re a great detective, Annie – a little rough around the edges – but if you knuckle down, there’s no telling how far you’ll go. Which is why you need to wake up and recover. I blame myself for your recklessness. When you arrived at the office yesterday morning, I could see there was something not quite right about you. You seemed troubled, but I ignored my instinct to pull you from delivering the warrant. I should have done my duty and spoken to you about whatever was on your mind. When our eyes met immediately after the explosion, I could see you were pumped, and that was why I chased after you. I was worried what you might do if you caught up with McGregor.’

  He paused.

  ‘Ironic, isn’t it? That I was worried about your temperament when I should have thought about my own.’

  The ventilator continued to puff and wheeze for her, but she remained still.

  ‘When you get out of here, I want you to promise me that you won’t follow my example. You need to be better than me. I let you down and will take what’s coming to me without challenge. I owe you and the team that much.’

  An image of Gabby flashed to the forefront of his mind. Annie would have been six, going on seven once, and at that age it was so tough for a parent to wonder what the future held for their precious child. There was no way Mrs Lockwood would have predicted seeing her daughter barely functioning in this way.

  What did the future hold for Gabby?

  A knock at the door, interrupted the thought. Turning, Jake closed his eyes in frustration as he saw Tosh’s white hair and moustache staring in through the door. ‘A word, Jake. Outside.’

  FOURTEEN

  The water machine gurgled, as it spat out the fresh water into Megan’s cup. It had been almost an hour since she had arrived at Dr Patel’s office, and demanded an emergency appointment with him. Patel’s heavily-pregnant secretary had told her Dr Patel had a full schedule for the day but could squeeze her in on Friday afternoon. It had been like waving a red rag at a bull.

  The shouting became so fraught that Patel had emerged from his office to tell them both to calm down. Megan had briefly told him why she desperately needed to see him, and Patel must have taken pity on her as he
had instructed the secretary to ring his next patient and delay the consultation.

  Megan couldn’t bring herself to look back at the fragile woman behind the desk. It hadn’t been right to have a pop at her, particularly as she looked just about ready to drop. So, Megan sipped her water and focused her attention on the clock, which seemed to be going slower than ever.

  The door to Patel’s enclosed office finally opened just before eleven, and a pretty redhead emerged, thanking him for his time, and promising she would work on the breathing exercises he had suggested. Megan took an instant dislike to her: the way she fluttered her eyelashes at Patel, giggling at his lame jokes and making it clear to everyone in the room what was on her mind.

  Patel, gracious as ever, directed her towards the pregnant receptionist to book a follow-up appointment in a fortnight. He then turned, and smiled at Megan, displaying no animosity towards her following the interruption.

  ‘Just give me two minutes to finish writing my notes, and I’ll be right out,’ he promised, clapping his hands together and bowing slightly.

  He disappeared back into his room, and Megan did her best not to stare daggers into the redhead’s back, though not entirely sure why. When his door eventually reopened, he indicated for Megan to enter, holding the door for her, and then closing it once she was in position by the couch. Dropping into his usual chair, he removed his reading glasses, and rested them on his cluttered desk, before smiling warmly at her once more.

  ‘Right, Megan, you sounded upset earlier. Can you tell me what’s happened since yesterday?’

  Megan remained in the chair, unsure whether this constituted one of their regular sessions and she should stretch out on the lounger, or whether he was likely to turf her out after a few minutes. Assuming the latter, she reached into her bag, withdrew the yellow exercise book and passed it to him.

  ‘Ah, you’ve written something in the Dream Journal? That’s excellent!’

  She waited for him to open the book and read her notes. In his early fifties, Dr Patel’s hair was more charcoal-coloured than grey, but his thin beard showed the signs of age, with thick wisps of white interspersing his naturally dark tones. He was handsome for an older man, but not Megan’s type, yet she couldn’t ignore the voice in the back of her mind that continued to judge the redhead for her outrageous flirting.

  Patel once again removed his reading glasses, and handed the book back to Megan. ‘I see you had a different dream to your usual one. Tell me about it.’

  He seemed in no urgency to usher her from the room, and she glanced once more at the lounger, before deciding to remain where she was. ‘I drowned. What I mean is: I drowned in the dream.’

  ‘That’s not what I read. It said you thought you were going to drown when you woke up.’

  ‘That’s the same thing.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘It was because I was about to drown that I woke up.’

  He studied her in silence for a moment. ‘If I throw this pen at the wall, but then I wake up, can I categorically confirm that the pen struck the wall? Any number of things could have happened to prevent the assumed outcome.’

  The sound of a door closing in the neighbouring office echoed through the ventilation system above Patel’s head.

  Megan raised her voice to get through to him. ‘But I was in the car, under the water and I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were burning with exhaustion, and I began to open my mouth. I could taste the grimy water as it filled my mouth. I drowned.’

  He continued to watch, waiting for her to fill the uncomfortable silence.

  When she could take it no more, she said, ‘I didn’t think about Rob this morning.’

  ‘Ah, I see, and that’s why you came here.’

  ‘It was the first time since the fire that I didn’t wake, picturing him next to me in bed.’

  ‘How did that make you feel?’

  ‘Guilty!’

  ‘Why guilty?’

  ‘Because he was my rock – my whole world – and I didn’t remember that.’

  He frowned. ‘What do you think that means?’

  She ground her teeth against the salty sting at the edge of her eyes. ‘It means I’m forgetting about him.’

  ‘I don’t agree.’

  The challenge caught her off-guard. ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘But I didn’t dream about the fire and I didn’t forget what had happened for that tiny moment.’

  ‘I know, and it’s a good thing. It doesn’t mean you’re forgetting about him, but it shows that you’re making progress in recovering from the horrific trauma you experienced.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Patel lowered his pen and paper, and suddenly stood, striding across the room and taking down one of the many frames on the wall. He stared at it for a moment, before returning and handing it to Megan. ‘This is my wife, Anya.’

  Megan stared at the black and white photograph of a striking woman in her late thirties, laughing raucously at something, her hand raised up to one eye like she was brushing away a tear. ‘She’s very beautiful,’ Megan said.

  ‘Thank you. You’re right: she is the most beautiful woman I have ever known. She is my everything, and yet I haven’t heard her voice in more than six years. But that doesn’t mean my heart doesn’t ache for one more chance to touch her soft skin, or to breathe in her bodily smell.’

  Megan suddenly realised why he’d handed her the image. ‘You’re a widower too.’

  ‘I don’t think of myself in those terms, but yes. I am the luckiest man in the world that I got to spend any time with someone whose memory continues to light my life every single day. That picture you’re holding. At that exact moment, I had just broken wind. Silly, isn’t it? Looking at her face, you’d think she’d just heard the funniest punch line ever, yet the truth is, she was giggling at my flatulence. We were at a wedding of one of her closest friends, and I was trying to take a photograph that reflected just how beautiful she looked in her bridesmaid’s sari. I’d had a dozen attempts, and she hadn’t liked any of them, and we were both growing frustrated. Her, because I kept getting it wrong, and me because I just wanted to go and have a dance. And as we both grew more frustrated, my bottom eked out the most high-pitched noise imaginable; like a balloon quickly extinguishing air. And we both erupted into the silliest fit of giggles, and that was one of the snaps that followed. But despite the context, I couldn’t have captured a more fitting tribute to her.’

  He took the frame from Megan’s outstretched hands. ‘When I look at this image, I don’t think about the arguments, the pointless discussions about what we should have for dinner, or the heartbreak when the doctor told me she had died. Instead I see the pure joy she bought to me every day. Sure there are moments where I don’t think about her, but she is never far from my mind: the first notes of a song we once danced to; the flavour of a tandoori dish I know she would have loved; or a dirty joke that would have had her in stitches.’

  He stood and returned the frame to its place on the wall. ‘The grieving process is different for us all, Megan, and there is no set amount of time that will pass, before the pain in your heart will feel more manageable. But you shouldn’t beat yourself up for what isn’t your fault.’

  ‘It isn’t my fault,’ she wanted to shout, ‘it’s yours!’ But seeing this vulnerable side to him, she couldn’t get the words further than her internal voice.

  ‘How do you explain my dream, then?’ she said, with a small sigh.

  His brow furrowed. ‘I don’t understand what you expect me to say.’

  ‘Why did I dream I was in a car that crashed into a lake, killing both me and the faceless driver?’

  He ran his fingers across the hair covering the lower half of his face, the skin hanging loosely from the back of his hand. ‘How the brain processes our experiences is unique to every person. Have you ever had a similar dream?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Wh
at can you tell me about your activities after you left my office yesterday?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t get into a car that was driven in to a lake, if that’s what you mean.’

  He smiled at the challenge. ‘Humour me. Did you go straight home, or did you stop off anywhere on the way?’

  ‘I laid some flowers on Rob’s grave, and then I went home.’

  ‘Did you interact with anyone before arriving at the cemetery or after?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘How did you get to the cemetery?’

  ‘I caught the bus.’

  ‘So, presumably you spoke to the bus driver?’

  ‘I told him my destination, and he asked me to scan my pass. I don’t see how the exchange triggered such a vivid nightmare.’

  Patel chuckled gently. ‘Not unless he was dressed in scuba gear.’ He composed himself. ‘Did you speak with anyone else?’

  Megan looked away. ‘Okay, I also stopped by the flat to see if the council had managed to clear any of the charred remains.’

  ‘I see. And had they?’

  ‘No, it looked as bad as the last time I was there.’

  ‘And I assume you heard about the explosion in Bitterne yesterday?’

  ‘Of course, it dominated the news. But what does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘I didn’t say it did, Megan. Did you speak to anyone when you were at the flat?’

  ‘Only some woman I used to work with.’

  ‘Oh really? An old friend?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘But someone you used to know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Rob knew?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ she repeated, not wishing to get drawn in to the detail of her conversation with Janice.

  ‘And did you bathe or shower before bed?’

  Her eyes widened. He couldn’t know what she’d planned before the smoke alarm had interrupted her.