“That’s wonderful.”
“It is,” he admits. “I’m very proud of him.”
I can tell that George is holding back. The unspoken words hang between us. But now he can’t visit as much. And I’m lonely. Other patients, the nurses, me—we don’t replace family. At that moment, I realise that I’m lonely too, because the one member of my family that I have left is shutting me out of his life. I don’t think I’ve thought of myself as lonely until that very moment.
I clear my throat and change the subject. “I’ve started to research your sister’s disappearance on the internet.”
“Oh, yes?” he says, his head lifting and some shine coming back to his eyes. When George’s eyes twinkle, it’s obvious that he was once a very handsome man.
“Mm-hmm, but I haven’t found much. Just a few conspiracy theories. I need to go to the library and find the newspapers to research it a little better.”
George’s lips form a tense smile, and he nods once. His brow is furrowed, and his eyes seem unfocussed. I’m about to check that he’s okay when he lifts his finger and points to the top drawer in the cabinet at the foot of his bed.
“Open that drawer, will you, Lizzie? There’s something I want to show you.”
“This one?” After standing up from the chair, I place my hand on the drawer in question.
“That’s the one. Open it up. There’s something I haven’t told you about yet. I wasn’t sure if you were interested at first, so I left it. But it might be important, you know, for the investigation you’re attempting. Reach in. There’s a bundle of old photographs.” George’s finger trembles as he continues to hold out his arm.
I reach in and find the photographs he’s referring to. The drawer is sticky to close, requiring a good shove with my shoulder.
“I have them.” I sink back into the chair next to his bed and hand the bundle over.
George tuts. “I can’t see a thing these days. Be a dear and pass me that magnifying glass.”
After I hand him the glass, George holds it in one shaking hand and peers down at the stack of black-and-white photographs.
“No, no,” he mutters to himself. “That’s my father and his mother on the pier. Oh, and that’s our old dog Bruce.”
I take a look at Bruce—a black lab pup lying on the grass with his tongue lolling out and his head tipped to one side, adorably large ears and paws, and big puppy-dog eyes gazing into the camera. I bet Bruce was a lot of fun. A great family dog. My heart aches for George after the life he’s lived. I don’t want to know whether Bruce existed before the fire, or after.
“Here we are.” George lifts the photograph higher to get a better view. “This is the one.”
I lean over his shoulder. The image is of a smiling young woman leaning against a tree with a wide trunk, like an oak tree, though I can’t be sure because the leaves aren’t in the picture. Her long, wavy hair has plenty of volume at the roots, and is tossed back to show her large loop earrings. Her skirt is dangerously short, and her high-heeled boots reach almost all the way up to her knees. She is wearing a roll-neck jumper that swamps her chin. It’s a relaxed pose, like something you’d see on Instagram, but it’s obviously from the sixties with that fashion and her exaggerated eyeliner. George turns the photograph over, and I see a note in the corner: Mary, 1965.
“She’s pretty,” I note. “Is she a relative of yours?” I see something of George around the eyes and the shape of the nose, though I only recognise it because I’ve seen photographs of George when he was younger, and because those same features were visible when I met his grandson.
“She might be,” George says. “Truth is, I don’t know who she is. I received this photograph in the post on a Tuesday morning, April, 1984. There was no note. Only this.”
I gaze down at the photograph, my jaw looser with surprise. “Do you think this is Abigail?”
“Yes,” he says. “I do.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“It was a relief to see her like this,” he says. “Though the photograph was twenty years old by the time it reached me.”
“Did you take it to the police?” I ask.
He nods. “They tried to trace the postmark on the envelope, but I think they thought I was some sort of local nutcase. They had other things to deal with at the time, what with the miners’ strikes going on and whatnot. There was a pit closed five miles out of town. There was plenty of trouble in those days.” He puts the magnifying glass down and strokes the photograph. “I tried again a few years later. But I was married, had a daughter about to go to university and a life. I wanted to find my sister, I did, but there was nothing to go on. The post stamp was Leeds, and there were too many young women called Mary for a police detective to go through. I tried a private detective at one point, but Judy told me to cut it out. We needed that money for our mortgage.”
I gently take the photograph from George’s hand and examine the young woman in the picture. She appears happy and healthy. Did she know she’d been kidnapped as a child? Could she remember her life before? Did she remember George?
“There’s not much detail in the picture. It’s zoomed in too close. I can’t see any buildings behind her. They could be in a park, or a field, or a wood. It’s hard to tell. But the postmark says Leeds, which could be worth investigating. Maybe I could check out parks in Leeds and the surrounding areas? Maybe Mary lived somewhere close to the park in the photograph.”
“All these years and I never found her. If I’d had the money, I would’ve kept on with that detective, but I couldn’t. And then the years went by in a flash. I never stopped thinking about her, though. I wondered what she was doing almost every day. At least she seems happy here. Doesn’t she?”
“She does,” I admit.
“And that’s what matters.”
*
I take the photograph back to my desk and scan it. Then I drop the picture back at George’s room. By this time, George is tired, drifting in and out of sleep. I leave him be and return to my desk. Later on in the afternoon, I take visitors through the home, noticing that Mrs. Cartwright, who suffers badly with dementia, is wandering the corridors in her slip. I’m not sure how she got past the nurses, but I know that patients can be sneaky when they want to be, not that Mrs. Cartwright will have intended any malice by escaping her room.
“Let me take you to your room. Come on.” I put a gentle arm over her bony shoulder.
“Get away from me.” She shrinks away, shaking her head. “Murderer.”
Though I’m used to difficult patients, the venom in her voice shocks me, as does her accusation. I stand there aghast for a moment before pulling myself together. She’s a lady with dementia. Nothing more. “You must be confusing me with someone else. I’m Lizzie. I work on the reception desk. Come with me. We need to get you back in your room.”
“You’re not Lizzie,” she says. “Murderer.”
When I take a step closer, her arm swings out, and she hits me squarely with her palm on my cheek. The blow is hard enough for me to stagger back in shock. We stand there for a moment, face to face, me stroking the soreness of my face, tears springing to my eyes in shock—no matter how many times you get hit, a slap to the face is always such a shocking event that tears spring up immediately—and her, defiant, with her fists clenched. She looks strong, like a woman facing down a demon.
“Mrs. Cartwright”—my voice is small—“I’m not a murderer.”
She takes a step to the right and walks around me, all the time her eyes focused on me, challenging me. And then she continues along the corridor, leaving me alone, clutching my cheek.
*
I realise that Mrs. Cartwright is not herself, that she has been taken over by an illness that can change a person, change the things they say or even believe. It can change a person’s personality. And yet… Can truth come from madness? Out of the mouths of babes, they say, and right now Mrs. Cartwright is more like a baby than she has been for decades. She is the twisted fo
rm of a child moulded from an adult’s brain, with an adult’s experience, but without the ability to be an adult. She’s lost, but that doesn’t mean she can’t occasionally speak the truth.
Sometimes I think I am a murderer, and not because I let Isabel live. Not just because of that. No. There’s more. More that I don’t even want to admit to myself.
Can I trust any of this? Mrs. Cartwright’s ramblings… my own thoughts, feelings, and dreams. What’s real and what isn’t? Alfie leaning against the wall of Crowmont Hospital smoking, telling me about the serial killers who lived in the hospital. He wasn’t real. He was a figment of my imagination. I know this because I checked. There was no one called Alfie working at Crowmont.
My cheek stings from where Mrs Cartwright hit me, but can I trust that feeling? Can I trust my memory of what happened? Did she call me a murderer? Or did I call myself a murderer?
*
Dr Qamber scribbles her notes as the oppressive silences presses on my chest like a bowling ball resting on my ribcage.
“I thought I was better,” I say, desperate to break the silence.
“Better than what?” Dr Qamber replies with a smile. “I know it’s difficult. This whole process is difficult, and you’ve been through extensive emotional and physical trauma. It could be that the patient you mentioned did say those things, but because of your past, you assumed that it was a hallucination.”
“If it was real, why did she say that? Do you think she knows who I am?”
“You’re not a murderer, Lizzie, are you? Isabel Fielding is the murderer, and you can’t control the things she does. This is all about the guilt you’ve felt since Alison Finlay was murdered. But that guilt is not your guilt, it’s Isabel’s. She’s the person who has chosen to kill other people. She’s the one who takes lives. Not you.”
“She’s ill,” I reply. “And my actions led to her escape from Crowmont. And then I allowed her to escape by not thinking quickly enough. I just wanted to get Tom out of there, out of that house. But if I’d tied her up even—”
“And what if Isabel had regained consciousness as you were restraining her? What if she’d then found the strength to hurt you? What if she’d murdered you both? You didn’t know what would happen if you did try to restrain her. It was too risky. You made a decision and chose the safest option available, which was to run away to safety and call the police. You’re a citizen, not a police officer. You have no obligation to restrain or kill a murderer. None of this is your fault.”
I glance down at my hands to see that my fingers are trembling. When Dr Qamber says this to me, I know that she’s right. But I also know that once I’m home and I’m upstairs in bed, my thoughts will flood in and I’ll begin to doubt myself again. There are things she doesn’t know. That I’m afraid to tell her.
For the rest of the session, we discuss medication, and she writes me a new prescription. There’s no red mark or bruise on my face, which means it’s inconclusive whether the slap actually happened or not, though Dr Qamber does mention that it might be unlikely for me to feel a slap if it didn’t happen. Most people with psychotic disorders experience auditory hallucinations, which is where we get the “hearing voices” stereotype from. Not everyone sees things. But the brain is complex and individual. There are no two brains that are exactly the same. We all experience mental illness in a slightly different way, which is why these illnesses are hard to diagnose. We’re all unique beings. In that sense, we’re all alone in the world, if you stop and think about it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ISABEL
I need to admit something to you, Leah. You’re not the only one on my mind. I’ve been thinking about someone else this whole time, and I suppose I should tell you who that is. I’ve been thinking about my mother alone in that house, all her children gone, her husband dead. How did her husband die? Oh, yes, you killed him, Leah. You.
You made my mother a widow. Dirty little murderer. Filthy little life-taker. Do you still see his blood on your hands when you’re cooking for your son?
Why is it that none of the newspapers tell me what happened to Daddy? They won’t tell me the details. All I know is that I woke up and found his heart stabbed through, and I know you did it. Admit it.
But I still love you. That’s strange, isn’t it?
Anyway, the point is, I still think about my poor mother all alone in the house with no one to talk to, and that is why I send her my sketches. I liked to think that when I was rotting away in that drab and lifeless hospital, my mother was still proud of me because I was talented. I think she was, you know. She never said anything. She never visited. But I think she was proud of me, because what mother wouldn’t have been proud of a daughter who could create beauty out of nothing?
So I send her beautiful things. Magpies, of course, but also wrens, finches, crows, blackbirds, tits, swallows, sparrows, all your various garden birds. I want her to know that I’m thinking of her, and I’m thinking of the birds that visited our garden when I was a little girl. Because we all think about that time, don’t we? Some of us are still stuck there.
Chloe and I stole a car. Now, I won’t say that it was as fun as decapitating a blogger, but it was quite a rush. Don’t get all high and mighty on me, Leah—we stole that car from a car thief, so really it wasn’t stealing at all.
After I rescued Chloe from the sex-pest who cornered her in the alley, I learned that she was in fact a drug dealer as well as a prostitute. A common drug dealer, how about that? I’m no expert on the underbelly of the criminal world, but what I gleaned through overheard conversations at Crowmont, the word “dealer” may be a slight exaggeration in this case. It seems to me that Chloe delivers drugs to punters. A go-between from dealer to customer. A middle man. She doesn’t carry an awful lot of the stuff in one go, because if she’s arrested, she’ll serve less time that way.
We had a little conversation, Chloe and I, after I saved her life and her dignity (though I think that may have been stolen from her long ago), and I proposed that this little drug transportation deal might not be in her favour, and why didn’t she set up on her own? The conclusion to that conversation was that perhaps she should. That’s how we ended up driving around in an old Ford Escort with a collection of bags of various pills and powder. She did explain to me what each one was, but I have no interest in narcotics. I’m more interested in other thrills. There is some cocaine, speed, meth. The others have silly names. Molly. Ket. I’m not sure what else. They were stolen, too. And now we’re in danger.
But it’s all rather Thelma and Louise. (I watched that in the lounge at Crowmont. Everyone stood and cheered when they drove off the cliff. Death is better than prison.) We drive around in our car peddling our wares, moving swiftly on to another area, buying petrol with drug money. Selling drugs in little folds of paper to bug-eyed boys chewing their lips. We sleep in the car at night, parked in laybys, caravan park carparks, quiet country roads. We’re travelling all around the country together. One day I’m in Liverpool, the next I’m in Wales.
It’s liberating, Leah. But don’t for one moment think that I’ve forgotten about you.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
#justiceforalison
When Twitter goes for blood, the knife slices the jugular. They believe that I’m responsible for her death, that I’m the one who needs to be punished.
But what do I think? When I’m alone in my room at night, isolated from my son, isolated from the people who were once my friends, does my mind drift to places of love and light? Or does it fall into darkness? My dreams are not what they once were. They’re bloody and bruised. I see a knife slicing through flesh. But whose hand holds the knife?
My mind goes to places I don’t care to admit to. And then I wake and I’m somewhere else.
Today, I’m in a field staring out to sea across the cliffs. Skin chilled by the early morning air, hair tangled in weeds as though I’m growing out of the earth. My scars ache like they’ve been raked with fingernails. For t
he first time in a long time, Isabel feels close to me again. With breath still caught in my chest, I stand and turn to face away from the cliff. There’s no one there, but for a moment I believed there was.
The fragments of my dreams come back to me as I wake up properly. I was being chased by faceless people holding placards with the phrase #justiceforalison. Alison’s corpse was being paraded around like a blow-up doll, passed from one person to the next as though she were a prop on a stag do.
And then the hands on the knife…
And then Isabel.
And then darkness.
And then the sea.
I’m trembling from cold and shock as I start walking towards the house, hoping that Tom isn’t awake yet. This is something he doesn’t need to know. But unfortunately, as I enter the house through the back door, Tom is sat at the dining table trying to feed water to a magpie. The shock of it makes me pause, and my stomach flips with disgust.
“Where did you wake up this time?” Tom asks.
“Near the cliff. I guess the medication isn’t working.”
Tom merely nods. He isn’t the same boy who begged me to stop drinking, who cared about keeping us together as a family. If I were Tom, I’d worry about my big sister going back to her old habits, but he doesn’t seem to care anymore.
The bird? Tom knows about my fear of magpies after what happened in the psychiatric ward. He knows that I have nightmares. How could he bring one into our home?
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I found it outside. I think its wing is broken or something. I thought I’d try to save it. Doesn’t seem like it’s working, though. Have we got an empty shoe box?” He’s all innocence and light, as though last year never happened.
I force myself to lean in for a closer examination. “Tom, that bird is dead.”
He prods it with an index finger, and I cringe back. In my mind, I see Isabel’s pet magpie land on her shoulder. I see the way she used to flick her hair and smile a broad, genuine smile, hiding her true nature. The way Isabel was incredibly gentle with animals and yet so sadistic deep down makes it difficult for me to see Tom engaging in the same sort of act of kindness. Then I have to remind myself that he isn’t Isabel and he probably just wanted to help a wounded animal.
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