by Tim Weaver
Now I was digging it all up again.
I cut along the packing tape.
Inside, box files were stacked on one side, manila folders – secured with elastic bands – on the other. I turned the files, trying to read the spines, and dust swirled in front of my eyes, the smell of old paper carrying up to me. It wasn’t just Derryn in here, it was both of us: there were documents from our house move, copies of visa applications for the States, nursing manuals, pay slips, contracts and insurance forms. I took out each of the box files, unable to remember which of them I’d put the certificate in. I had to go through them one by one, sifting through reams of paper. Finally, I found what I was looking for: a file with Derryn Estate on it. I looked at my handwriting, the colour of the ink faded, and then opened it up.
My heart stopped.
Everything was gone.
19
There was no death certificate.
No legal letters, no official record that Derryn had died or that she’d had a funeral, no will, no proof that I’d ever laid her to rest. All of it was missing.
I brought the box file closer but it was no illusion: it was empty. I had no documents to help back up the statements I’d made to Field; none of the paperwork that I promised to deliver to her, or the evidence I was going to use to halt the lies. It was all gone.
Or it was never here in the first place.
I ignored the nagging voice in my head and started going through the other files again, emptying them out on to the floor, frantic, desperate. I dropped to my knees, swiping things aside, tossing them away. When I couldn’t find the certificate, I returned to the other cardboard boxes, unloading them, ripping open new folders, poring over sheets of paper, clothes, photos, things I hadn’t even thought about once in all the time they’d been here. By the time I’d gone through everything, my head was banging and my eyes felt like they were on fire. The light bulb swung gently as a faint breeze passed through the loft space, light scattering and re-forming, scattering and re-forming – and every time it did, my headache became worse.
Someone’s been inside my house.
I searched for obvious signs of a disturbance, images from the night before flashing through my head. The heart on the window. The hint of white in the dark that could have been a face. I’d unstacked the boxes, opened them up before setting them aside. It was a mess. There was no way to tell now if someone had left a trace of themselves; I’d trampled over evidence that might have been left in the wake of a break-in. Now everything was spread around me like the aftermath of an explosion.
I stopped, drained by hours of searching, and glanced down at a pile of books inches away from my feet. I’d emptied them out of a box in an act of desperation. Even if none of these had been her favourites, Derryn would have been horrified by the way I’d treated them, discarded them, their covers turned, a couple of them torn. But then my eye was drawn to one on top, its pages browned and corners curled.
No One Can See the Crows at Night by Eva Gainridge.
The sight of it gave me pause. Gainridge had been Derryn’s favourite writer. Her books shouldn’t have been up here. I picked it up, examining the front: the image was of a crow sitting on a branch, its beak black except for the tip, which was stained with blood; in its eyes, ringed a faint grey, was the reflection of a Normandy cemetery, rows of pale crosses fading into the distance. I began to go through the rest of the pile, trying to see if there were any other Gainridge novels here. There weren’t. The rest were downstairs, on the shelves in the spare room. Derryn had devoured every single thing the author had written, reading and rereading her work until the covers began to slough away and the spines began to fracture. No One Can See the Crows at Night had been her favourite. When she was still alive, she hadn’t kept her copy of that on the shelves in the spare room, she’d kept it next to her bed. So why was it up here now?
I lingered on the question for a second longer and then snapped out of it. What the hell difference does it make? In the context of what had happened here, of the missing death certificate – and the possibility that I was either crazy or had been robbed – a misplaced book was staggeringly irrelevant.
But then I started reading the back of the book.
No One Can See the Crows at Night is Eva Gainridge’s 1975 debut, a remarkable and powerful story of loss, set in the aftermath of the Second World War.
When Caroline welcomes home her husband William, scarred by his experiences on the battlefields of northern France, she starts to realize something is very different about him. It’s not just his flashbacks or the way he wakes up at night sobbing and screaming. It’s not the way this previously placid man now scares her with his temper and seems unable to hold even the most basic of conversations. It’s that Caroline genuinely believes the man who came home from the war isn’t William. It’s someone else entirely.
He’s an impostor.
An impostor.
I thought of what Field had said to me after speaking with Erik McMillan: He says you have something called Capgras delusion. It’s a condition where people believe a husband, a wife, a child, has been replaced by an exact duplicate.
I’d always been aware of No One Can See the Crows at Night, although I’d never read it myself, because I’d seen it so often on Derryn’s bedside cabinet. She’d told me it was set after the Second World War. She’d told me it was about a marriage. But I’d never bothered to find out any more than that. If Derryn had described the story in any detail, I’d forgotten it. If I’d ever read the synopsis before, it hadn’t stuck. Now, though, I saw my reflection.
This story was my story.
And as that hit home, as I wondered again why this book was up here, I started to flick through it. On the first page was a stamp in red ink: four letters, or maybe a set of initials. PCCL. I kept going, trying to think straight, but there were no other stamps, no dedications, no notes in the margins or things underlined. Then something fluttered out from between the pages.
I bent down and picked it up. It was a square piece of paper, three inches on all sides, almost certainly from the type of memo block people kept on desks. One side of it was blank. On the other was a handwritten message.
The ink had faded, but I could still read it.
And, as I did, it felt like my ribs had clamped shut.
Derryn:
Thank you for our special time together x
20
I stared at the message, stunned.
The longer I looked, the more nauseous I felt.
There was one, immediately obvious interpretation of what it meant, but I could barely bring myself to form the thought, let alone seriously consider it. The idea that Derryn had kept a previous relationship secret from me, one she’d never told me about at any point, was bad enough; much worse was the idea that she’d had an affair, something illicit, a relationship she’d kept buried in the background of our marriage.
No, I thought. No way. There’s no way in hell that ever happened. As my grip tightened, I slid the paper back inside the novel, hiding it deep within the pages.
Think.
I headed for the ladder, my legs barely carrying me.
Back in the hallway, I made an immediate beeline for the spare room, for the bookcases in there. One of them was packed with files, missing persons cases I’d worked and put to bed; the other housed the rest of Derryn’s books, crammed in tight, vertically, horizontally, filling every inch of the shelves, and stacked two deep.
I found all her Eva Gainridge novels, their spines lined, and pulled them out. Among them was a copy of No One Can See the Crows at Night. The moment I had my hands on it, I could recall her reading this version. It was a newer edition than the one I’d found in the loft, in hardback instead of paperback, and had a different cover: a man stood in a doorway, cast into silhouette by the eaves of a house, with an ominous line of crows on the guttering. Beneath Gainridge’s name and the title of the book, it said ‘30th Anniversary Edition’.
So the edition I’d found in the loft wasn’t the copy I remembered her reading, which – combined with the note inside – had to mean that someone had given it to her. I thought about the message again, the choice of words. Who would give her a gift like that? What did they mean by ‘special time together’? Who would be familiar enough with her to know she loved Eva Gainridge? Did the fact that she’d relegated it to the loft mean that she didn’t like this person and, by association, hadn’t ever appreciated the gift?
I found some instant comfort in the idea, but then it began to crumble again as the same doubts returned: what if the reason it was in the loft was because she was trying to hide it from me? Even if it was true, and I absolutely believed – in every part of me – that it wasn’t, and that Derryn had never cheated on me, it was just a distraction. It barely mattered at this point. For now, what mattered was the death certificate.
What mattered was that someone had stolen it.
I drank two mugs of coffee in the kitchen, looking out at the frost-flecked driveway. Ordering another copy of the certificate from the register office was one possible route, but it was Christmas week and everything was shut down until the new year, and anyway I wasn’t even sure if that was the most immediate issue. My house had been broken into. Things had been stolen from me. A woman was lying to the police about who she was, and a doctor was lying to them about my mental health. When I tried to still my thoughts, all I could feel was a repetitive thudding, a series of gunshots behind my eyes.
The minute I tried to ignore the pain, something else filled the gap: the same insidious thoughts, thriving like weeds – that there wasn’t a death certificate, no proof that Derryn had died, because she hadn’t, because she was still alive; and if I went to the cemetery, to her headstone, beneath me would be nothing, just endless earth.
I pushed all of it back, as far into the darkness of my mind as it would go, and my eyes returned to Derryn’s copy of the Gainridge novel. There was no description on the rear of the jacket, not like the version in the loft, because this one was a hardback. Instead, there was a short extract.
‘Who are you?’ she said to him.
‘I’m your husband.’
‘No. No, you aren’t. I don’t know who you are.’
He was absolutely still except for his eyes, as green as dragon scales, which moved around the room, stopping on the walls, on the exits, the shelves, the furniture, as if he could hear someone calling his name but didn’t know where from.
‘You aren’t my husband.’
‘I am, Caroline. You’ve lost your mind.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘In my heart, I know you’re not him.’
I thought of the previous night, of following the glimpse of something – someone – into the darkness of the alleyway and finding nothing, no one, not even a hint. Was I really seeing things? The idea I’d hallucinated, that I might have suffered some acute lapse of perspective, didn’t tally with how I was feeling physically this morning, despite my headache, but I couldn’t deny things were stacking up. Either I was correct, and someone was toying with me, or I was so sick I had no concept of it any more. Like the woman in the book, I believed in my heart that that wasn’t true. But now, in order to convince myself and do the same to the police, I had to prove it. And I could only really see one way of doing that.
I had to do what I’d promised myself I wouldn’t.
I had to go to the source of the lie.
#0633
The doctor came around an hour after you left my bedside for the final time, just as you said he would. He was a disinterested Asian man in his fifties with an accent I could barely follow. I listened to virtually nothing he was saying, except when he finally told me I could go, and then I got up and headed out of the cramped, sterile room I’d been in for three days, and into the corridor where the nurses’ station was located. You weren’t there.
‘Is Derryn around?’ I asked one of the nurses.
She looked up. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Derryn. Is she around?’ The nurse looked at me properly this time, as if I’d said something offensive. ‘I just wanted to thank her again for her care,’ I added.
‘She’s on a break at the moment.’
‘When will she be back?’
‘Not for another hour.’
I walked out of the ward, wondering where you would spend your lunch break. In a staffroom somewhere? Outside in one of the insipid green spaces? The hospital was like a maze, so trying to track you down would have been impossible. I did a quick circuit of the immediate area, and – when I couldn’t find you – returned to the doors of the ward and waited. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty. Forty. An hour.
You finally returned after seventy-five minutes, reading what looked like medical notes. You didn’t notice me until you were almost at the doors of the ward, your fingers already on your security card, ready to buzz yourself in. I took a step forward – into your field of vision – and you stopped, looking up at me.
‘Oh,’ you said. ‘Hello again.’
I swallowed, my response catching in my throat. I actually felt nervous. ‘Hello,’ I managed.
We looked at each other for a moment.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and held up a hand. ‘Yes, sorry.’
Why was my mouth so dry?
‘I just wanted to say thank you.’
You frowned. ‘For what?’
‘For the care you’ve given me.’
You broke into a smile: that wonderful, luminescent smile. ‘Oh,’ you said. ‘That’s very sweet of you. Thank you. I was just doing my job – but I appreciate it.’
I glanced at your ring finger again.
There was still no ring.
‘I didn’t mean to offend you earlier.’
You frowned again. ‘What do you mean?’
‘With my comment about you not wearing a wedding ring.’
You looked at me blankly.
It had only been a couple of hours since we talked but you clearly had no recollection of our conversation. Had you already forgiven me and forgotten my mistake? Or had what we’d discussed really not stuck with you at all? Had it meant that little to you? I’d told you about Nora but I’d never got to hear anything from you in return. I’d never got to find out whether there was someone in your past, in your life, who’d hurt you like Nora hurt me. I didn’t know – yet – why a person like you wasn’t married.
‘Well, I’d better be going,’ you said.
Almost immediately, the doors to the ward buzzed open and a male nurse emerged, and you and he started talking about something – a patient, a case. You looked back at me, smiled again, and said, ‘I hope your recovery goes well. I really appreciate what you said. We don’t often get people making that kind of effort.’
Any frustration I might have felt for you vanished instantly. You didn’t remember the specifics of our conversation about the wedding ring, about Nora, but it hardly seemed to matter now. Your smile, the way you spoke to me, the way you looked me in the eyes, was like a magnet: I wanted to reach out and touch you; I wanted to feel my fingers on your skin.
‘Goodbye, Derryn,’ I said after you were gone, watching you through a small glass panel in the door as you walked away, giving instructions to the male nurse.
Goodbye.
But only for now.
21
The wind ghosted across the playground at the front of the Chalk Farm flat as I made my way up the stairwell. I could hear the swings squeaking as they rocked back and forth, saw a roundabout turning gently in the breeze, and then the walls closed in around the stairs and all I could see was foot-thick concrete, wet with leaking water.
I kept an eye out for cameras, just in case, but I didn’t expect there to be any on the stairs or out on the walkways where the flats were. Any cameras would be at ground level, in the streets that circled this part of Chalk Farm, and I’d been careful to avoid as many as possible on the walk from t
he Tube. I’d thought about going to Hammond’s to pick up a key, but had then decided against it: it would have been easier and less stressful than the alternative – breaking in, if she wasn’t there – but my visit would be remembered by Gavin, the agent who looked after the flat, and by the cameras they probably had inside the shop. If the police went through the footage in the coming weeks, they’d place me there, Gavin would tell them I’d pretended to be a cop, and it would become a lot harder to paint myself as a victim.
So, instead, as soon as I’d left the Tube station, I’d flipped up the hood on my top, tilted the peak on the baseball cap I was wearing and, whenever a camera came into view, dropped my gaze to the floor. It wasn’t foolproof but it made it tricky to ID me easily if I kept my head low, and I knew – from experience – that all I’d need, in order to push back at any future allegations from the Met, was for there to be enough doubt about who I was.
At the fifth floor, the building opened up again and, below me, a vague grey in the morning fog, I saw the roundabout was still on a listless rotation and a gang of kids had gathered. Their cigarettes flickered orange in the dull light and they were laughing about something. Conscious of being seen, even five floors up, I took a step closer to the flats, and hurried down to the end. At the penultimate door, I stopped. It was the same one I’d seen the woman go into.
I flipped down my hood and knocked twice.
As I waited, I could hear my heart in my ears. What was I going to say to her when she answered? How was I going to prove she was lying? But my knocking went unanswered, a third time too. The door was peeling and old, its frame warped, rotten, smeared with mud and grime. I knocked again, harder.
Nothing.
I felt around in my coat pocket for a packet of sterile gloves – lifted from a pile I always kept at home – and then paused. However careful I was, I was going to leave trace evidence behind. Skin flakes. Fibres. Hair. Fragments of who I was. Maybe that wouldn’t matter if the Met had no idea the woman had come to the flat, but if they ended up here, it would matter a lot. If they matched one skin or hair sample to me, they would know I’d accessed the property. Worse, they might begin to believe I’d genuinely come here to hurt the woman.