‘So?’ Laura fixes her with a scurrilous smile. ‘Fill me in. What’s happening with Ian?’
‘He seems to think he can go on with the film without Ben,’ says Mary, deliberately misunderstanding her. ‘He’s become quite excited about that group souls theory we were talking about. Having discovered that Lord Jim was Annie’s brother Jimmy—’
‘What?’
Mary laughs at the expression of total amazement that comes over her friend’s face. ‘I was forgetting you weren’t around when we worked that out. The dates matched, and the – er – homosexual leanings.’
‘Homosexual fallings over and rolling around in it, more like, in the case of Lord Jim.’ Laura unscrews a miniature jar of blackcurrant jam Mary recycled from the last conference she attended and spreads it on her bread.
‘Anyway, that appeared to support a group souls approach, so Ian then persuaded me to regress him.’
‘Why am I not surprised?’
‘And he turned out to be – you’ll love this, Laura – he turned out to be Annie’s mother.’
‘Holy Mary Magdalena, as the lovely Lord Jim would have said. What did he make of that?’
Mary takes a bracing sip of her coffee. ‘It was quite upsetting for him actually. She ended up dying in childbirth, on her own. It was awful.’
‘And there was I thinking I was having all the fun.’ Laura clicks two sweeteners into her latte and agitates the liquid with her spoon. ‘Have I missed anything else?’
‘Then yesterday Mr Skipper asked me to regress him again.’
‘But I thought, after that other time—’
‘I know, I know. But he was so insistent, I hadn’t the heart to refuse. And I was incredibly careful to take him into a shallower trance whenever I thought he was getting too upset. It was a rather interesting process actually, trying to keep him focussed on memories of Annie. I might write it up later.’
‘So he knew Annie too, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Remember all those traumatic experiences from that other session we had, years ago? Well, it turns out they were from the latter years of Flo’s life, when she was married to Tom.’
‘Old Skip used to be the lovely Flo? There’s a turn up for the sailor’s trousers, and no flies. It’s like a cast list from a play. So who’s left to match up?’
‘Well assuming there’s any validity whatsoever in this group souls idea, there are still three significant characters in 1898 that we haven’t matched up with their 2007 incarnations. Annie’s father, Henry; her boyfriend, Sam – and the priapic young man who looks increasingly likely to be her murderer.’
‘Tom.’
‘It seems Flo followed him the night Annie disappeared and overheard him with a woman. His relationship with her seemed to go downhill after that.’
‘He married her, though. Wasn’t that what you said?’
‘She was pregnant, so he had no option. And I suppose it gave her a motive to keep quiet about what he might have been doing that night.’ Mary’s musing aloud, but it makes sense. Flo was pregnant and besotted with Tom; she was clearly desperate to get married.
‘What, marry me or I’ll tell everyone what you did to Annie?’
‘It was hard to get a clear picture – despite my interventions it was still a pretty fragmented account. But that would seem a reasonable hypothesis.’ Mary rips off a crust and dips it in a tiny jar of clear honey. ‘He gave her a terrible time once they were married, though. Terrorized the entire family.’
Laura’s animated face subsides suddenly, like a balloon when the air’s been let out. ‘That was my Tom, wasn’t it?’ she says. ‘Tom the rapist and wife beater. Tom the all-round total utter bastard. He killed Annie too, didn’t he?’ She pushes her plate away as if the very sight of it makes her feel nauseous. ‘That’s why I’ve been getting them nightmares again. It’s him come back to haunt me.’
Mary puts a gloved hand on her friend’s arm. ‘I know it might look like that, but please don’t jump to conclusions quite yet. You remember how many Toms I found when we were doing that research in the library. Even Sam’s father was called Tom. There could have been any number of wife-beaters in that little lot.’
‘But what about your group souls thing? If we were all there in 1898, one of us has got to be Tom.’ Laura fishes a pack of Nicorettes out of her bag and presses a little square of gum out of its foil compartment. Her hands are shaking.
‘I agree that is a possibility. But don’t you think something as serious as a murder would have come up in one of your sessions with me?’
‘Maybe I was avoiding it – like Ben.’
‘But there was absolutely no indication in our sessions that you were avoiding anything – and why would you remember all the other violent things he did and omit that one significant act?’
‘Sweet Mary Magdalena,’ says Laura, chewing furiously. ‘What will Ben do when he finds out? I was his pal—’
‘Laura!’ Mary slaps her hand on the table. ‘Just listen for a moment, will you? I think it could very well be me who murdered Annie in a previous life.’
At last, she’s got her friend’s attention. ‘You know those flashbacks I told you about?’ she asks. ‘Well, do you remember me telling you about a tobacco tin with some initials scratched on the side? Well, the initials were T.H., Tom’s initials. Then yesterday I got another flashback, involving a knife.’
Laura stops chewing and stares at her. ‘You saw a knife?’
‘Yes. It was most disquieting.’
‘I never saw a knife, did I? My Tom always used his fists.’
‘That’s certainly what I recall of our sessions.’
‘Hard to kill a lass with your fists.’
‘Yes.’ Mary sighs. She’s dying for a cigarette. ‘I’ve just looked out my old training notes to see if there’s anything from my original regression sessions that will cast a light on what happened.’
Laura laughs suddenly. ‘It’s lucky you can’t hypnotize yourself, isn’t it? How would that look on telly? The therapist who murdered her own client.’
‘Oh God!’ Mary buries her face in her hands. ‘I hadn’t thought about that. How excruciating.’ Now she really needs a cigarette.
‘Better keep schtum with that Ian then. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.’
Mary eyes the Nicorettes packet. ‘He told Mr Skipper he wanted to film a session with him – without consulting me first. That’s why the old boy turned up here yesterday. He wanted to have a trial run. Then I find out this morning that he’s been contacting old clients of mine without my knowledge.’
‘Have you asked him about it?’ Laura reaches for the bread; she seems to have regained her appetite.
‘That’s another thing. Having taken over my entire life for the past week, he hasn’t been in touch for days.’
‘That’s the meeja for you, though, isn’t it? Use people up then throw them away like paper tissues.’
‘Thank you for that analogy, Laura.’ Mary feels in her pocket for her Gitanes and curves her hand comfortingly around them. ‘To tell you the truth, I find I’m rather hurt. I was beginning to think he might have changed. Mellowed, perhaps; become a little more vulnerable, a little less self-centred. Then the night before last—’
‘You’ve never let him seduce you?’ Laura admonishes her with delight. ‘I don’t know. Leave you alone for a second and look what happens.’
‘It was only a kiss, but I was beginning to think—’
‘You’ve been out of it too long, that’s the trouble. You’ve forgotten the rules. You should try a spot of Internet dating. Get back into the swing of it.’
Mary shudders with distaste. ‘I don’t think I ever was in “the swing of it”, as you put it. And I’m certainly not going to start now. But perhaps I have become too reclusive.’ She takes out her cigarettes and puts them on the table. ‘I’ve been thinking of getting a lodger,’ she announces, quite surprising herself. But now she’s voiced
the idea, she realizes it’s something she’s been considering vaguely for several weeks. ‘And now, if you don’t mind, I have to go outside for a cigarette.’
Chapter Forty
2007
When Laura’s gone, Mary stands in the hall and glares at the silent phone, the letter from Geoffrey Johnstone on the hall table, the Yellow Pages still open at Grand Hotel. She picks up the phone and starts to dial, then hangs up with a sigh.
In her consulting room – where the velvet curtains remain annoyingly half-drawn, to accommodate the lighting requirements of Ian’s damn camera – the sun slants in like an accusing finger, spotlighting the box of old files she carried down from the attic.
She picks up the box and humps it over to her desk, only to remember that Ian moved her anglepoise over to the other side of the room because it ‘cluttered the view of the bookshelves’. Damn. Restless and irritable, she dumps the box back where she found it, then decides to put her agitation to good use by getting on with ‘this lodger business’, as she has already begun to think of it. After all, she tells herself bracingly, she can put a stop to it at any time if no one suitable turns up.
Extracting a biro from her cardigan pocket, she starts to draft an advert on the back of Mr Johnstone’s envelope.
SINGLE ROOM IN NORTH SHIELDS WITH SEA AND RIVER VIEWS. AVAILABLE IMMEDIATELY. SHARE KITCHEN, BATHROOM, SITTING ROOM, GARDEN.
She hesitates, wondering what else to write. All mod cons? That might be stretching the truth a bit. And which room should it be? Whichever it is, she’ll have to organize some furniture before showing anyone around.
She plods up the stairs to survey her spare rooms, starting with the one on the first floor, which is jam-packed with furniture from her parents’ old house. She’ll have to convert this into a sitting room, she realizes, because she can’t have the lodger lolling about in her consulting room, can she? Mary sighs. This is turning out to be rather more complicated than she’d envisaged.
She continues up the stairs to the second floor, to the room she’s always thought of as ‘the spare bedroom’, though all it contains is an ironing board and a wardrobe of old clothes. How would she feel having the lodger sleeping here, just one floor below her own bedroom? Would she disturb whoever it was when she tiptoed downstairs to the loo in the middle of the night? And what about vice versa? Computer games and Radio One, or, worse still, Radio Two; or one of those dreadful local stations, where the presenters shout about carpet sales and traffic jams the whole time. Would it be unreasonable to impose a sound curfew?
Then there’s the thorny issue of significant others. Mary sighs again. She’s not sure how she’d cope with a lodger with a sex life. Some kind of cordon sanitaire would definitely help, she muses, reaching her own little sanctuary on the next floor up and sitting down on the bed. Perhaps she should move into the attic? It would mean a longer excursion to the loo, but that might be worth it for the sense of separation she’d get from any youth culture and carnal activity on the second floor. She gets up and wanders over to the window.
Looking down at the Fish Quay, at a view that resonates to her very bones, she wonders whether she’s ready to move on from this room yet. Perhaps it’s time to contact Karleen after all, to see if she can help explain the hold it has over her.
Pressing on to the attic, Mary pauses at the threshold and tries to imagine it transformed into a bedroom. It would need painting, of course, and carpeting; and she’d have to find a new home for her ‘archive’. But because the staircase terminates here, it’s significantly larger than the rooms below and the view, of course, is magnificent. But what’s that? She crosses to the far side where there’s a spreading brown stain on the bare boards beneath the radiator. Damn. That explains an equivalent spreading brown stain on the ceiling in her bedroom, that she keeps vaguely noticing, then forgetting to investigate.
The leaky radiator rather takes the wind out of her sails and leaves her feeling thwarted and oddly forlorn. It seems she has a choice of two irksome tasks: organize some plumbing person to fix her leaking radiator, or embark on a possibly disturbing examination of the tape transcripts of her hypnosis sessions with Karleen. Call the plumber or open the box? After traipsing back downstairs and flicking through the Yellow Pages to ‘P’, she opts to call the plumber.
But before she’s even started trying to decide among the hundreds of contractors listed, the phone rings.
‘Hello? Dr Charlton speaking.’
‘My darling girl, it’s grand to hear your voice.’
‘Karleen? How very strange. I was just thinking of you.’
‘Isn’t that so often the way of it? There now, and I’ve even got my coat on to go to the Post Office, but my hand reached for the phone instead of the doorknob.’
‘I was about to phone the plumber,’ says Mary, smiling into the mouthpiece. She pictures Karleen in her red duffle coat, propping her walking stick against the wall.
‘You know why I’m calling, I suppose?’
‘Actually, no. I’ve no idea. But I was going to ask whether you’d mind conducting another series of sessions with me. A couple of issues have come up recently that I think need exploring.’
‘Well, now you’ve got me confused. I’d be delighted, of course – it would be a joy to work with you again. But that BBC man said you’d probably need some convincing.’
Mary tenses. ‘Ian called you?’
‘Didn’t you know? I assumed that was how he got my number.’
‘What did he say?’ Really, the man is incorrigible. How dare he contact Karleen when she’d expressly asked him not to?
‘Only that he was making a documentary about past life regression and wanted to rope me in – as a witness for the defence sort of thing. He was on about getting me to regress you again too, though I couldn’t follow his logic there. The film’s about some little boy you’re treating, am I right?’
‘Ian Campbell has his own agenda,’ says Mary grimly. ‘And he doesn’t always tell me what that might be.’
‘Ian Campbell. Now why does that name ring a bell?’
‘He’s quite a celebrity, I’m told. Hard to avoid, apparently, if you’re a fan of BBC2.’
‘Isn’t that the name of that boy you had a fling with way back? The one that started all the trouble with Peggy?’
‘How on earth do you remember that?’
‘My hips may have seized up, but I still have a full set of marbles.’
‘I told him not to contact you.’
‘I suppose I might come over as rather doddery on the telly,’ says Karleen without rancour.
‘Don’t be silly. That’s not what I meant at all. I would just prefer not to be hypnotized for this documentary. Anyway, how are you keeping?’
‘Oh, creaking along as usual. Still seeing a few clients. Trying to balance the painkillers with the side-effects. But what about you? What are these mysterious “issues” you want to explore?’
Mary settles down on the bottom stair and pulls her cardigan across her chest with her spare hand. ‘I am beginning to suspect that I may have been involved with the boy they’re filming, in his previous incarnation as a herring girl.’
‘Ah,’ says Karleen. ‘And you fear the involvement might have ended in tears.’
‘It looks like she was murdered.’
‘I see. Which might prove embarrassing if it was revealed in the course of this film?’
‘Yes – which is why I’d prefer not to be hypnotized. But what’s really worrying me is not knowing. Having something like that in my unconscious and being completely unaware of it.’
‘So what makes you think you were the murderer of this girl?’
‘Images, flashbacks, that sort of thing. The fact that I’m thalassaphobic and the girl’s killer was almost certainly a fisherman. The fact that I feel so protective of Ben now. I’m getting such a strong sense of karma with this case.’
‘Would it matter? Surely Peggy suffered enough to have worked thro
ugh several lifetimes of bad karma?’
‘It makes me feel as though I’ve lost my way. I thought I was on one path – you know, working through all those issues around infertility and solitude, my dislike of being touched; beginning to make some progress. Then I discover there might be a whole other journey I’ve yet to embark on.’
‘As the wise women say, these things are sent to try us.’
‘But I’m worried, Karleen. If I was the man I suspect, there’s a depth of violence there that I never encountered in my sessions with you.’
‘I’d have thought something like that would have made itself felt at some point. But I suppose we never really got around to exploring your other incarnations, did we?’
‘Then yesterday I remembered a knife. Fishermen used to carry their filleting knives in their caps, to avoid accidents at sea. I had a flashback of reaching up to my cap and then seeing the knife in my hand.’ Mary shivers.
‘What else do you remember?’
‘Just fragments. A tobacco tin, for some reason. A woman laughing nervously, as if she’s afraid – or guilty, perhaps. I don’t know.’
‘Do you remember stabbing her?’
‘No – but that doesn’t mean I didn’t do it.’ She closes her eyes for a moment. ‘What will Ben think if he finds out I’m the one who killed his herring girl?’
‘Oh, Mary, I’m so sorry. I wish I could help.’
‘You are. I mean, it’s helping already, just talking to you like this.’ In the silence that follows, Mary hears her friend grunt softly, either with pain or effort, and pictures her pulling out a chair and easing herself down on it.
‘What makes you think the woman laughing was this herring girl?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know who she was. I don’t even know it was a true flashback. All I remember is him wanting to slit someone’s throat – it might not even have been her throat he wanted to slit.’
‘And that’s all you remember.’
‘Pretty much. That’s why I wanted to see you.’
‘So you have no idea what might have led up to that point, or what happened afterwards?’
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