So I talk about myself compared to Annalise. I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to do that.
I told you why I came here. I have anxiety about graduating. It’s not the usual worry about wondering if my thesis will be accepted. I’m confident that it will be, and that’s what upsets me. I’ll have a master’s, and then what? You know that room I told you I wish for, the one with no new doors? Graduating just seems like it will spit me out into a room with a thousand doors, and if I choose the wrong one I’ll regret it. I may not even know that I regret it until a dozen more doors in, and then …
I never told Jason (my uni boyfriend) that I’d lied to him that night, about me being attacked when I was younger like Annalise Wood. I always let him believe that what I said had really happened to me, and of course he didn’t betray my privacy by telling anyone else. Sometimes I brought it up again, just the two of us. I’d share a little detail, and he’d get this emotional, pained look. He’d become very protective and it just … it fed me. I don’t know how to explain it. It made me feel closer to him. I was strict with myself; I never brought it up more than once a month. We were together eight months, so I suppose I talked about it eight times. I haven’t told that to a man since.
No, I don’t mean … Of course I have. I had a boyfriend the summer before starting here. I never said anything about Annalise, though. I thought I’d grown out of it.
Look, it’s just a comfort thing. It’s like a child who has to learn to not suck his thumb so his teeth don’t get wonky. He’s not doing something fundamentally wrong. Sucking his thumb isn’t objectively bad. But it can have a bad consequence, so you gently tell this person, this small person, “Sorry, you have to stop this now. I know it feels good, and you’ve done nothing wrong, but it has to stop.” If you yell about it, if you go on about how wrong it is, you just add to the need to do the comforting thing that you want him to stop.
I know I have to not lie about that again, but the more I get stressed about graduating … It’s just a comfortable story. I know it so well. I just … I can just put it on, and make a man feel sorry for me. It feels good. It feels safe.
Not anyone in particular. Not yet. Just men that I look at, and who look at me.
Oh! Sorry. Of course I understand. I should have looked at my watch.
Yes, in two weeks. Thank you, Dr. Ambrose. Thank you. I feel better already.
Chapter 2
Laurie Ambrose
THE OFFICE DOOR fell shut behind her. I didn’t lean back in my chair until I heard the outer door open and close. She was on the pavement, my view striped by the blinds on the window. She was shrugging a rucksack over her shoulder and heading towards the Fitzwilliam. Typical student; typical twenty-something. But she was the second client to bring up Annalise Wood to me within months.
I shimmied my shoulders in a dismissive little shiver. Ms. Williams had been my last appointment of the day. I was eager to leave but needed to wait for Blake. He’s always been late, ever since coming into the world two weeks after his due date. I tidied the desk. I checked my phone for texts and missed calls. None. Nothing to be done; adult children have their own minds.
Ms. Williams wouldn’t have known this, but I grew up not far from the Annalise murder. Not in Lilling itself, like she did, but I’m almost twice her age so was alive when Annalise was killed. I was five then, and then nearly graduating from Cambridge when her body was found.
Even sixteen years after the disappearance, that was big news. That day I had been in a charity shop buying a shimmery purple wrap to go with a party dress I was planning to wear, and the woman at the till had been the one to tell me. She’d said, “They found Annalise,” without context or explanation, but it was the very bareness of the statement that had made it clear that she was talking about the Annalise, not just someone who also happened to have that name.
I should clarify that this was true only because of geography. I was home for Easter break at that time. At home, just the name Annalise is enough. I was surprised when I then returned to Cambridge how few people were discussing it. It was in the national newspapers, of course, but not the local one. In Cambridge, one had to say “Annalise, that girl from Hertfordshire who was killed ages ago” or, at least, “Annalise Wood.” Just fifty miles away from Lilling, less than an hour’s drive, and the public wasn’t on a first-name basis. I grant that this is mostly to do with Cambridge having so much of a student population, constantly leaving and being replaced, often from much farther away. Still, it was one of the first times I can remember feeling suddenly foreign so close to my own home.
Back in that charity shop, the woman behind the till had looked blank and stunned and that’s how I’d known that Annalise was dead, not found alive. I must have naturally assumed that that would be the case by then, but knowing it for certain was terrible. It really was. She wasn’t the girl in the school uniform any more, or whomever that girl would have grown into. She was just a body, not even a whole body by then, surely. She would be bits and pieces.
I wrapped my arms around myself. The heating in our office hadn’t yet caught up with the autumn chill.
My phone rang, quivering in my pocket. I snatched it up. “Blake?” I said, without first checking that it was actually him.
“Sweetheart!” Dad said, and he sounded unstressed, ready for a chat. I gave in, to give Blake more time.
Mum was fine, Dad told me. Everything was the same. We talked about my sister, Helen, and how Dad used to come to all of my tennis matches.
“Dad, do you remember Annalise?”
He hesitated. “Sure! Uh, who? Was she a friend of yours?”
I hesitated too. Maybe Dad’s memory was going, like Mum’s. No, I assured myself. Maybe just not everyone is wrapped up in collective concern for a singled-out and taken-down teenage girl.
“Never mind. She was just a girl I …” I almost said “knew.” That’s what it feels like sometimes, when you grow up in the shadow of something like that. I had forgotten that. This new client was bringing it all back.
“I can look in your mother’s phone book. I can see if her parents are still—”
“Aw, Dad, that’s sweet but it’s all right. I don’t need—”
“Did she play tennis with you?” Dad asked, not letting go.
“She was a school friend, Dad,” I said expediently. It was easier than trying to explain. But even in lying I didn’t take the simpler road of saying yes, yes, we played tennis together. I’ve never seen a picture of Annalise playing tennis or any reference to sport in her life at all. It didn’t feel right to lie about the dead more than strictly necessary. “Remind Mum that we’ll all be coming for Christmas.”
“Christmas!” he said, sounding pleased and surprised, but I’d told him weeks ago that we’d be there for the looming holiday. It was already November; not long now.
And November is a busy time at the University, first term of the new academic year. No sense waiting any longer for Blake, or chasing him up. I should be relieved he has better things to do than meet his mum for dinner.
“I have to go, Dad,” I said, ending the call with just a few more back-and-forths, and fumbled in my handbag for my car keys, which reminded me of taking away Mum’s car keys last Christmas, and how it had shamed her. But she would have kept driving if we hadn’t. Nothing short of an accident was going to convince her she wasn’t able to any more. Now Dad has to keep his keys where she can’t reach them. It was one of the most difficult things I’d ever been part of; thank goodness for my sister and father. I don’t know if I could have resisted her tears and pleading by myself.
As I stepped outside our old Victorian office building, and breathed in the sound and smell of the rush-hour traffic on Trumpington Street, the office phone inside rang brightly, chipperly. I wouldn’t have been able to get in fast enough to pick it up, so I waited a few minutes at the door and then dialled into the office voice mail from my mobile.
“Dr. Ambrose?” said a young, female voice.
“This is Anna, from today. Annalise Williams?” She paused as if we were talking together, waiting for me to fill in the blank with an acknowledgement. “I just want to say thank you. I’m already thinking of what else I’d like to tell you. Well, everything, really. It’s good to talk. Sometimes everything is all tangled up inside but when it comes out in words somehow the mouth has funnelled it all into a straight line that makes sense. It makes a proper story. I can’t wait to see you again.”
There was no click, just a hanging-on. I listened to that airy sound of being connected for about twenty more seconds before there was a staticky clack and the recording cut off. I wasn’t sure if she’d hung up, or if it was the system that had automatically limited the message. It was discomfiting, the way the message had stopped but not properly ended. Sometimes clients get a little too close. It was best to take care.
I looked around before descending the steps. It was darkish already, the normal but somehow always surprising autumn early dark, and thoughts of dead Annalise made me stupidly anxious. The murder had never been solved. Her body had been eventually found, but not her killer. I wondered if any police were still looking.
Once in my car I made a note of the client’s call, to put in her file. I abbreviated her name as “Anna,” which is how she’d booked the appointment. The full “Annalise” felt taken.
Chapter 3
Morris Keene
I’M USED TO every new door I approach belonging to a witness or suspect or family of a victim. It should feel good to make a social call, but I didn’t know if I’d be welcomed. I stopped to check the address on my phone again, to put off arriving a little longer.
I was in the right place.
Damn.
The house was pressed down by heaps of big, ball-like blossoms clinging to the end of summer. They climbed up from below and then up and over the roof, like the ropes pinning Gulliver.
Chloe is no gardener. Neither is Dan. They’d just moved in; that’s why everything was still alive. By this time next year, there’ll be weeds choking the flower beds.
No, don’t underestimate her, I reminded myself. Who knows how she’s changed?
She’d had a baby. Maybe she was nesting. Maybe Dan was nesting. He was the one who chose the place.
The bell was a little brown button on a porcelain circle. It looked like a nipple. I turned my head to avoid staring at it while I pressed it and waited.
It was almost a year since the back of my right hand had been slashed in the process of apprehending a murderer. At first I’d been relieved to be alive; the slash to my abdomen had scared me a hell of a lot more. Then the loss of my ability to grip had affected, well, nearly everything: driving, writing, even using my phone. It was frightening, but at the same time a convenient distraction from the psychological trauma reaction, which was much more embarrassing than mere physical incompetence. You thought getting stabbed in the belly was bad? Wait till you see the effects of the seemingly minor hand injury! You thought the hand injury was incapacitating? Wait till you see what it’s like when your mind betrays you!
But both my hand and my panic attacks were now under control. I had adaptations to my car, and I’d trained my left hand to pick up some slack. I’d learned to recognise my physical stress reactions as artefacts of the attack and not necessarily as evidence of present danger. I wasn’t “back to normal” but I was good enough. I pressed the bell again, with my impaired right hand, just because I could. I kept track of such little normalities throughout each day and stacked them around me like sandbags against a flood of self-recrimination. Points for me, I thought, and even smiled.
From inside the formerly silent house, a baby wailed.
Dan answered, wearing an apron around his waist and a little towel on his shoulder. He raised his finger to his lips as the baby continued to cry in the background.
I shrugged to mean “sorry about the bell.”
The wailing came nearer, in a bouncing, hiccuping sort of journey. Chloe appeared in the doorway. There must have been a baby on her somewhere, but it was hard to find among the layers of ruffles hanging off her pale pink dressing gown. I’d never seen Chloe wear pink of any shade.
“It was a gift from my mother,” she explained, a tinge of defensiveness in her voice. “It’s convenient for breastfeeding.”
The baby, too, was dressed in pale pink, presumably another grandmotherly gift. She’d gone quiet but wriggly, squirming and yawning.
“Do you want to hold her?” Dan offered.
I waited for Chloe to nod, then reached out towards the frilly nest on her chest.
Chloe hesitated, for only a moment, her glance falling on my compromised right hand before offering the baby up. I slipped my palms under the little one’s shoulders; Chloe’s gown gaped to reveal a complicated beige nursing bra and black leggings. No matter. We’ve both seen each other at our worst.
My still-functional thumb and the palm of my hand made a secure V. My good left hand tucked the baby into my chest.
“Name?” I asked, automatically bouncing. There was less weight than I’d expected. My own daughter was fifteen; I’d forgotten how little and how light they start.
Dan sighed. “Not yet.”
“He wants to call her Robelia,” Chloe said, plonking herself down on the clear space at the end of the sofa. The rest of it was piled with pillows and magazines.
“I don’t. She’s joking.”
“Robessa.”
“Chloe …”
“After his father, Robert.”
“No, I want to call her Robin.”
“That’s a boy’s name.”
“It’s unisex.”
“Christopher Robin,” Chloe said. A Pooh-bear on the floor at her feet emphasised her point.
Dan flung his hands in the air. “This is where we are.”
“What do you want to call her?” I asked Chloe, decanting the now-fussy baby back into her arms.
Chloe arranged cushions under her elbow and around the unnamed baby to make a complex sort of fort and got a breast out. Somehow the baby found it among the ruffles. “I don’t know.”
Chloe usually hates not knowing something; that’s what makes her a good detective. But she said this contentedly. She didn’t seem to mind.
I looked around, to give her privacy. The living room and dining room were piled with boxed plastic toys, the wadded-up wrapping paper in which the toys had arrived, still-packed moving boxes, and unwashed coffee cups. Only Dan’s slanted drafting table was pristine, but empty. He’s an architect. He was taking some time off.
Chloe was also taking time. She’d had to leave work earlier than she’d planned, after a physical fight with a suspect. She’d had to go on bed rest. She must have hated it.
That was months ago. This was the first time since that I’d visited.
“Dan, could you please get me a cup of tea?” I asked. He tactfully left the room. I knew he could still hear us, but that was all right. There was at least the illusion of respect and privacy.
I sat on the edge of a soft chair that was otherwise occupied by a stack of neatly folded baby clothes, tags still on. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
“You can move those,” she offered, meaning the clothes.
I didn’t care if I had the whole chair or not, but I moved them to accept her kindness. I sat back.
“I’m glad that you’re all right,” I said again.
She nodded.
I waited.
“How’s Dora?” she asked.
“How do you think?”
Dora’s my daughter. Chloe had let her be arrested. Dora had then been cleared but she’ll never forget it. I’d ridden with her in the back of the police car. It had felt inevitable and frightening and like the end of the world.
“I’m going back to work,” I announced. This was what I’d come for. I had something to prove.
Chloe’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”
I deserved that. The last time we worked toget
her, she’d seen me utterly fall apart. But I was past that now.
“Back to Major Investigations?” she asked.
I shook my head. Chloe’s place in Major Investigations was being held for her, as is proper. Mine had already been filled.
“Cold case.”
Again, “Really?”
“Yes, really,” I snapped. The dedicated “Review Team” was new, since Cambridgeshire County police had combined with Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. We look at cold cases, current-but-stalled cases, and cases with “bad outcomes” such as domestic violence that has escalated to death. The brief fad of calling forensic investigators “CSIs” has mercifully been overturned, but we in the Review Team emulate a different TV show: as in New Tricks, we’re all technically retired officers, partly paid by our pensions. I’m the youngest in the group, retired by injury not age. As Chloe knew full well. If she thinks me ridiculous, or unfit, or undeserving of work, or perfectly deserving of an old man’s job …
“Fine,” Chloe said, wide-eyed, as if it were my tone that was unreasonable. She moved the baby over to the other side. The first breast, still exposed, glistened. “I’m sorry,” she said, tugging the ruffles around to cover everything except the baby’s downy blond head.
“For what?” I demanded. I needed her to say it straight out and not pretend that we were talking about her tits. I don’t give a fuck about modesty.
“I did the job right, Morris, but I’m sorry it hurt Dora. And I’m sorry that that’s the best I can give you. If you want me to fall on my sword, well, I can’t.”
“And I’m glad that you’re all right and I’m glad your baby’s alive but I’m not sorry that I didn’t visit you. I couldn’t have looked at you. I would have been sick with anger for what you were part of, what you did to my family. I thought you might understand that now.” The baby was between us, forcing us to keep our volume at a civil level.
Look for Her Page 2