‘Are you still there?’ he asked, thinking suddenly that she had done it again.
‘Yes.’
‘I should apologize,’ he said. ‘About the way I reacted to your news about Nigel. I’m sorry.’
‘What are you sorry for exactly, Adam?’
‘For being distracted by other things. For not being happier for you. I am. In a way anyway.’
‘In a way?’
‘Well, I have to admit it took me by surprise. I mean, I’m used to you being not married I suppose. Or being around or something.’ He heard himself talking, and thought he wasn’t making any sense at all. ‘I think what I’m trying to say is I’ll miss you.’
The truth was he’d experienced a vague twinge of jealousy at her news. He’d always felt there was something special about their friendship. It stemmed at least partly from the night they’d spent together a year or so earlier. Even though it had been a mistake, it had lent their relationship a kind of intimacy. Okay, they hadn’t had sex, but they had slept entwined in one another’s arms. He remembered watching her as she slept in the morning, and the confused tangle of emotions he’d felt. A kind of protectiveness and tenderness, along with a healthy dose of lust that only a cold shower had prevented him acting on. That and the fact that he liked her too much to screw their friendship up, literally or otherwise.
There was a moment of two of silence. ‘Life moves on, Adam.’
‘I know,’ he said. The real truth here, he suddenly saw, was that they might have made a go of it together, but then he had thought that about other women at other times, and he’d always been wrong. He hadn’t wanted that to happen with Karen, but he couldn’t have explained that then, any more than he could now.
He heard her sigh at the other end of the line, a sound of weary resignation. ‘Look, let’s just forget it shall we? Apology accepted.’
‘Right.’
‘Since I’m awake now, I may as well tell you about Jane Hanson.’
‘You did find her?’
‘No, it seems that she’s moved, and at the moment I don’t know where to.’
Karen explained that she had managed to get Jane’s address from the university, but that when she had left London for the summer she had also left her Battersea bedsit. ‘I talked to a neighbour who remembered Jane saying something about starting a new job in September. She’s been sending mail to an address she thought was a friend of Jane’s. A flat in Clapham. I went there too, but there was nobody home. The woman next door told me the girl who lives in the flat works for an airline and she’s often away, but she hadn’t seen anyone who looked like Jane around and she didn’t think anyone else was living there.’
‘Great. What about the job she was starting? Any ideas about that?’
‘No. Her neighbour thought it had something to do with PR, but that’s all she knew.’
‘Makes sense,’ Adam said. ‘So, that’s it?’
‘Not quite. I called the university back and managed to get an address for her parents. It’s in Brighton. So far I haven’t had any luck calling them, but I’ll keep trying. I’ll let you know if I make any progress.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
‘You still think it’s important to talk to her?’
‘Yes.’ He looked at the documents he had spread out on his bed, reminded of why he had called Karen in the first place. ‘I found something tonight which she might be able to explain.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m not sure. From what I can make out it’s somebody’s medical records, or doctor’s notes or something.’
‘Medical records? Where did you get them?’
‘In the wreck Ben was meant to be driving. I’ve been trying to decipher them. The patient was somebody called Marion Crane. From what I can make out she was in some kind of hospital for a period of several weeks. There are dates beside each entry. The first I can make out is T/27/4, which I assume is Tuesday the twenty-seventh of April. The last is M/22/5. Monday the twenty-second of May. There are a few more before and after that I can’t make out. The notes mention medications and dosages and observations about her condition, but I can only read fragments so it’s hard to put it all together. As far as I can tell she was suffering from some kind of illness, but she seems to have slowly recovered. I’ve found the phrase, “the patient’s condition has improved” several times.’
He gave up and put his notes down. The long night and the hours staring at faded handwriting had taken its toll. His brain wasn’t functioning properly any more and he had sharp pains in his temples. He should have left this until the morning, except that he couldn’t escape the feeling there was something there, right in front of him, staring him in the face. But he couldn’t see it.
‘What does this have to do with the accident?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said wearily. ‘That’s what I’m hoping Jane can tell me.’
‘Can you find the doctor’s name anywhere, or the hospital?’
‘No. At least if there is I can’t make it out.’
‘What about the medication? What are the drugs mentioned?’
He brightened suddenly. Why hadn’t he thought of that? He searched his notes, and then went back to the photocopies. ‘There’s one here. Clopalmazine. Fifty milligrams.’
‘That’s an antipsychotic I think. Hang on.’ There was silence and then he could hear a tapping sound.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m in the other room. Wait, I’m just hooking up.’
He heard the sound of a modem, and then more tapping, which he realized was the sound of her typing into a computer keyboard. ‘I’m starting a search,’ she told him.
Adam cast his eyes over his notes again, his brain slowly clearing. It was starting to make sense.
‘Here you go,’ Karen said. ‘Clopalmazine. A drug used in cases of acute depression. Blah blah and so on. The rest is technical stuff mostly, but it looks as if your mystery patient might have been in a psychiatric ward or hospital. Apparently Clopalmazine was superseded by more effective treatments in the late eighties.’
Adam looked back to the dates that appeared beside each entry made on the original sheet. ‘You said Clopalmazine was superseded in the late eighties?’
‘That’s what it says here.’
‘Can you get a twentieth-century calendar on your screen?’
‘Don’t see why not. Wait a sec.’ He heard the tapping of keys. ‘It’s downloading now.’
‘See if you can match the dates here to a year before the nineties. When does Tuesday the twenty-seventh of April first appear?’
‘Hold on.’ He heard tapping again. ‘First hit before the year 1990 is ’eighty-five.’
‘And the next?’
‘Nothing then until ’seventy-eight, and then we’re into the sixties. ’Sixty-nine. Do you want me to go on?’
He finished writing them down. ‘No, it’s okay.’
‘You think your mystery patient could have been treated in one of those years?’
‘It’s a reasonable deduction. Somewhere to start anyway.’
He apologized again for waking her, and Karen promised to call as soon as she found Jane. After they’d hung up he stared at the dates he’d written down. ’Eighty-five. He had lived in Castleton that year. He would have been sixteen, and that summer he’d worked for the Courier during the school holidays. Something else had happened that summer too. ’Eighty-five was the year Meg Coucesco had vanished.
It was coincidence, he told himself. And yet intuitively he felt it was more than that. He had learnt over the years that life works in curious ways. Fate. Coincidence. A grand plan. Who knew? But maybe past and present were separated by little more than the blink of an eye. Perhaps every significant event had repercussions that resonate continually through life, affecting everything that follows.
In the end, defeated and exhausted, he fell into a deep and troubled sleep.
Part Three
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
>
The room where Mary lay on the big old-fashioned bed was lit by a single small lamp that stood on a scarred three-legged table. She had covered the shade with a red scarf, so that the light was like a heart. Warm, red, pulsing with blood. Sometimes she imagined that she could actually see it beating. As if it really was a heart, and she was in a womb surrounded by the pulsing flow of blood, of life. Safe and protected.
She heard the sound again, a muffled thump.
It’s coming for you, Mary.
The voice in her head was both frightening and oddly comforting. She had lived with it for so long now that when it was absent she almost missed it. Without the voice the silence was like a vacuum. She remembered learning at school that nothing could live in a vacuum.
It’s getting nearer, Mary. It won’t be long now. The waiting is almost over.
She didn’t know whom the voice belonged to. It didn’t matter. When she was young, before she had started to become ill, she had read books about crazy people who heard voices in their heads. They gave their voices names. The Watchers or something like that. Those stories had made her heart thump under the covers at night, and sometimes she’d been afraid to turn out the light, but she knew in her heart that they were only stories, they weren’t real. She didn’t think that any more. The voice spoke in a sibilant dry whisper like something slithering through the grass.
She heard another thump, and then the creaking of floorboards, very faint, almost undetectable. The sound ceased. A mewing sound like that of a newborn kitten escaped her lips. A whimper of fear. She could feel a presence nearby. She wished Nick would come home. He knew how much she hated being here alone at night.
He’s not coming.
The voice chuckled. It liked to taunt her, it liked her to be afraid. But she was not afraid of it The voice could only take her fears and twist them, magnify them, parade them before her even when her eyes were screwed shut, but it couldn’t hurt her. Sometimes she spoke back to it. She told it she wasn’t afraid. It laughed, but she sensed its impotent anger, knowing that she had uncovered its Achilles’ heel. But now the voice was enjoying itself, because what she was afraid of was real, it was not inside her head, it was real.
Mary opened her eyes. She heard the wind outside and felt the movement of air through the ill-fitting window frame. The thin cotton curtains flickered, and the scarf over the lamp lifted fractionally and fell like a breath, like the beat of a heart. Mary could see her reflection in the mirror above the dressing table. She was curled up in a foetal position, her thin, pale arms like those of a child. Her hair was lank and stringy and needed washing, her eyes stared wide, accentuated by dark smudges underneath.
I am a mess, she thought. Twenty-seven years old. Hard to believe. Much of her life was lost to her. She recalled it in fragments, as if viewing a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which had been scattered haphazardly on the floor. Her thoughts, her inner self, veered crazily between extremes. At times she understood a great deal about herself, at times she hardly knew who she was. Sometimes the voice in her head seemed more like the real her, and she, what she was now, faded and paled into the background. She thought this was the real goal of the voice, to dominate her, make her so afraid that she would just go away and then the voice would control her body. The voice was, she thought, only herself. Another part of her. The crazy part.
When she had been taking her medication the voice almost went away. She had felt as if she was waking from a kind of sleep, during which she had been conscious the whole time, immersed in a world her brain manufactured and that she was unable to escape from. But the other world, the one she knew everybody else lived in, slipped in and out of her own allowing her glimpses of reality, though it remained out of reach. The medication changed all that. She began to get better. The problem was that the medication made her shake, it made her feel sick and it left an unpleasant metallic taste in her mouth that wouldn’t go away. When she looked at herself in the mirror she saw somebody with the slightly slack-jawed, vacant appearance of the heavily drugged. She moved through her days as if they were a swamp, she felt listless and tired. Eventually she’d made the decision to stop taking the medicine.
Mary rose from the bed and went to the window. She pulled the curtain aside a fraction and peered into the night. There was a moon, and the meadow was softly lit with grey light. Something moved to her left, close to the cottages, a shape merging with the wall, then with a piece of junk rotting in the long grass. It moved quietly, silently, and paused. It was lost in the depths of shadow beneath a twisted beech that had been struck by lightning years ago and now stretched bony dead branches to the sky. She stared at the black place where she thought it was, willing it to materialize until her vision swam. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there. She could feel it.
It’s watching you, Mary. Soon it’ll come.
‘Fuck off,’ she muttered under her breath. Her heart was thumping, fear wrapped its sinewy limbs around her throat. She gripped the edge of the window frame and the tendons stood out hard on her thin wrist. The dark, almost purple scars underneath showed in sudden relief and as they caught her eye the voice chuckled. She ignored it, focusing on the movement outside. And then it was gone, for now, slipping away among the trees.
She went back to the bed and lay down, curling herself up again. There was a gun underneath the bed that Nick had put there. He’d told her that when she was frightened she should think of it. But she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.
Her thoughts flowed like a river, churning and twisting over rocks, forming rapids, slipping away too fast for her to catch sometimes. The voice was trying to speak to her but the sound of the water drowned it out. She allowed herself to float, to be carried, and she fell into a restless sleep.
When she awoke she knew instantly that she wasn’t alone. Terror seized her and she fought the urge to cry out.
It’s here, Mary. It’s come for you. I told you it would, you little bitch. Now you’re going to be sorry. Now it’s going to hurt you.
The voice chuckled and goaded her. It wanted her to be frightened. It wanted her to try to run. It came to her that the voice wanted her to die. It wanted to die. But she wasn’t ready to give up. She remained still, controlling her breathing, pretending to be asleep.
It was at the door. She sensed the door was open because the flow of air across her body had altered. She could feel it across her bare thigh and buttock. She knew her skirt had ridden up, exposing her knickers. It was standing at the door staring at her. She could hear its breathing. Shallow. Watching. Thinking.
Please leave me alone. She said the words in her mind. Please. Please. Please. She thought about the gun under the bed. Where was Nick? Why wasn’t he home? He left her alone too much. She was frightened. She couldn’t prevent a pitiful sob escaping her lips. Her body trembled and she screwed her eyes shut.
Won’t do you any good, Mary. It’s going to get you. Now you’re really going to get what you deserve.
She heard something move closer. Her eyes were tightly shut but she knew it was there. Time passed. How long? She didn’t know. Slowly she opened her eyes. Something swam into her vision. Something not human, its shape changing, fluid. She wanted to scream but she couldn’t make her voice work. She was paralysed with terror.
Then it moved away and she heard the door close, the click of the old-fashioned latch. Not this time. It had left her. Not this time. But it would be back. She knew it would be back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The discovery in Cold Tarn made the breakfast TV news. Adam watched as reporters speculated about the bone, which the police were now confirming was human. Comparisons were drawn with the case of a woman’s body that had been discovered in Ullswater a few years earlier, but in the absence of any real facts there wasn’t much to report. John Shields was interviewed, enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame.
When Adam arrived at the lake he found a different scene from the day before. The promontory had been cordon
ed off and uniformed police were on hand to keep back the crowd of reporters and the merely curious. Janice was talking to somebody, but when she saw him she came over.
‘Hello. Where’ve you been?’
‘I had a late night,’ he said drolly. She looked at him curiously but didn’t ask anything more. Towards the lake a group of police officers, among them Graham, and several other people were standing around watching two people in a small boat fifty yards out on the lake. ‘What’s going on?’
‘They’ve been sending divers down all morning, but they havenae found anything yet,’ Janice said.
They watched the boat for a little while. A diver surfaced briefly, and there was a ripple of interest among the people on the shore, but when he vanished underwater again the murmur of voices returned.
The man that Janice had been talking to earlier passed them as he walked around with a phone glued to his ear trying to pick up a signal. When he smiled at her briefly she saw Adam’s questioning look.
‘He’s a reporter from the Mail,’ she said. ‘They ran a story this morning.’
‘About this?’ Adam was surprised that they had heard about it in time to make the first edition.
‘Hmmm.’
Janice avoided his eye, and then he understood. ‘Did you tip them off?’
Guilt flashed across her expression. ‘I know, I know, you don’t have to say anything. I’m a terrible person.’
‘I wasn’t going to say that.’
‘Aye, mebbe not. But you think it.’
Adam avoided commenting directly on what he thought. ‘Does Findlay know?’
‘He knows about the story, but I don’t think he knows it was me that gave it to them.’ She glanced at him. ‘I’d appreciate it if you didnae say anything.’
‘I think he’ll work it out for himself.’
She frowned. ‘Aye, I suppose he will. Listen, I know how it looks, but I don’t want to be stuck here all my life, you know. Findlay should have stood by me when I wanted to do a piece about the planning committee. A story like that could’ve gotten me noticed.’
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