by Tim Weaver
It was a London postcode, with a street address on Earls Court Road. I stuck it into Google and it came back with the URL of a storage company called Eaz-E-Stow. I clicked on the link to their website. They had four facilities in south-west London, nine in the city as a whole. One of the facilities was 64,000 square feet and built on three floors, but the one on Earls Court Road was much smaller, more like a post office, with mailboxes, and design, print and copy services.
Somehow, I doubted McMillan was driving five miles across London to get some photocopying done – and if he wasn’t using the print and copy services, I could only see one other reason for using Eaz-E-Stow.
He was storing something there.
58
From the outside, Eaz-E-Stow was just a cramped single-door unit wedged between a chemist’s and a money exchange, but its size was deceptive. The moment I entered, I saw that it extended back a long way. At the front was a bank of computers, printers and photocopiers, and a woman behind a desk, her head down, reading something; at the back, through another door, I could see brass mailboxes – hundreds of them – in towers six feet high.
The woman looked up and said hello.
I smiled. ‘Hi, how are you?’
Over the desk counter, just behind her, I could see a computer. I needed to try and figure out which mailbox was McMillan’s.
‘I had a phone call about my mailbox,’ I said.
She frowned. ‘A phone call?’
‘Yes, someone left a message saying there was a problem with it.’
Understandably, she had no idea what I was talking about. ‘What is your name, sir?’ she asked.
‘Erik McMillan. That’s Erik with a k.’
‘Okay. Just give me a second.’
I told her that was fine and pretended to look away, at the photocopiers. As soon as she swivelled on her chair to face the computer, I glanced at her screen. She put in an access code, which I struggled to follow, and clicked a couple of options on the next page.
McMillan’s account came up.
I saw his name at the top, and his address below that. I scanned the lines and numbers underneath those, trying to see what might be a box number, and right at the bottom, beneath confirmation that he was paying £30 per month, I saw it: D–2888. When I looked towards the mailboxes, I could see signs hanging from the ceiling, arrows pointing off either left or right into A, B, C and D sections.
‘I can’t see anything here, sir,’ the woman said.
‘Oh.’ I made a show of looking at the screen briefly, as if it were the first time, and then in the direction of the mailboxes. ‘Oh, that’s strange.’
‘Do you know who called you?’
‘Maybe it was one of those scam calls.’
She leaned back in her chair, nodding. ‘It could be. We have had some issues with that sort of thing. You did the right thing to come in here and check, though.’
We talked politely about scammers for a moment.
‘It says here you’re paying by cash every month,’ the woman said. ‘Would you prefer to switch to direct debit? It’s a lot more convenient.’
‘I think I’m fine for now,’ I replied, and told her that as I was here now, I may as well check my box. But all I could really think about was McMillan’s decision to pay in cash every month.
He didn’t want anyone to find the mailbox.
I headed down to D section. It was as far back as you could get, but I still had to be careful. Because the banks of mailboxes ran in straight lines all the way down, the woman could still see me from where she was. When I got to 2888, I checked she wasn’t looking my way, got out my picks and started trying to spring the door. It was fitted with a simplistic tumbler, probably because most people were using these things as mail drops, not to store valuable items. And maybe that was what McMillan was using it for as well.
But somehow I doubted it.
I heard the woman coughing, stopped what I was doing and checked she still wasn’t looking, careful not to move my hands, and then gave the lock a final twist.
The door bumped out towards me.
There was only one thing inside.
An unmarked brown envelope.
59
I took the last seat in the end carriage on the Tube back to Ealing, well away from anyone else, and opened up the envelope. Inside was a series of A5 lined pages, their tops frayed, and stapled in the corner to keep them together. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting but it wasn’t this: fourteen pages of written notes in a hand that was near-illegible. At an initial glance, the most I could do was make out some dates: 21 October 2011; 3 May 2012; 19 August 2014.
I went back to the first page, wondering if the notes might be a combination of bad handwriting and shorthand, but if this was shorthand it was a system I didn’t understand. As a journalist, I’d learned to read and write Pitman, and had learned to read Gregg during my time in the States, but it was neither of those. It could have been another system entirely, or it could have been something that McMillan himself had developed, one that only he could read properly. The more times I went through the notes, the more likely that seemed: he’d kept them locked away in a mailbox five miles from his house because he didn’t want anyone to see them; and if anyone did come across them, like now, he didn’t want them to be interpreted easily. He wanted to be the one to do the interpreting. Which made these notes what? A way for him to protect himself? An insurance policy of some kind? Was this the rabbit he’d pull out of the hat at the end when he had nowhere else to go?
I grabbed a pen and started at the beginning, circling any words that I could read or felt that I definitely understood. His system seemed to use a combination of different techniques: regular words, properly spelled; abbreviated versions of things – reocc instead of reoccur, or i/n instead of illness; similar curves to the ones used for consonants in the Pitman shorthand as well as the straight lines of its vowels, but not necessarily applied to either consonants or vowels here; and then some of the punctuation techniques used in Gregg.
It was a total mess.
I got to the end, grabbed a separate pad from my bag and wrote down every word I thought I could read properly. By the time I was done, the train was pulling into Ealing Common.
At the surface, I took a detour to a Chinese on Uxbridge Road, grabbed some crispy chilli beef and noodles and hurried across the Common. The smell trailed me as I walked, and I realized I hadn’t eaten properly all day. I was famished.
Once I was home, I fired up the central heating, pulled a floor lamp in close to the living-room table and laid everything out in front of me.
As I wolfed down my meal, I went through the list of words that I’d understood – or thought I had – in McMillan’s notes. It was like reading the answers to a spelling test, or orderless extracts from a dictionary. There was no coherence to any of it. They were just random words; unrelated.
Or were they?
I’d lifted twenty-seven different words from the notes, which wasn’t much from a total of fourteen pages, but there was a lot of repetition – such as his use of i/n for illness – so I’d only included duplicated words once. Illness. Presenting. Treatment. Milligrams. These were all terms he’d repeated a lot and that he might also use in his capacity as a doctor – so did that make these medical notes? Why would he use such scruffy paper, and why lock them away in the mailbox? I paused, trying to think, and remembered what Roy had told me at the community library about the woman pretending to be my wife, and the man claiming to be her husband.
Could these notes be related to them?
Could they be about them?
I looked through the pages again, trying to get my head straight. If McMillan had treated them, why were these notes here and not in a steel cabinet somewhere in St Augustine’s with the rest of the patient records? Where were their actual files? Why would their medical histories be handwritten on sheets of paper that looked like they’d been ripped from a spiral notepad?
; I spun back to what I’d been thinking about on the train home: I’d wondered if these might have been some sort of insurance policy, perhaps leverage of some kind, a way for McMillan to protect himself.
Or maybe they were a way for him to fight back.
He’d pretended to be my doctor, had told the police he’d treated me, had been willing to sacrifice his entire career to sustain that lie, for however long it held firm – but what if he hadn’t done it out of choice? What if his hand had been forced?
What if he’d been blackmailed?
I thought about the doctor I’d seen in the photograph at McMillan’s house. Bruce Dartford. The man who’d made the call to Caitlin from the payphone in Plumstead had told her to ask her father about Dartford. It seemed to be a suggestion to dig into McMillan’s past; a suggestion that there might be something waiting there, interred and forgotten. Could that be why McMillan had lied about me? Was it because someone was threatening to tell the world his secret – whatever this Dartford thing was – and he didn’t want it to come out?
As that slotted into place, a flash of a memory resurfaced: in the seconds before I’d blacked out in his office, McMillan had dropped to his haunches at my side.
I’m sorry, David.
I thought of the woman pretending to be Derryn, and then of the man in the CCTV footage. The wife and her husband.
They had to be the ones blackmailing him.
Blackmail explained why the notes were so difficult to interpret. It explained why he kept them locked up. If this was how he hoped to fight back, he had to make them impenetrable, just in case they fell into the wrong hands. What it didn’t explain was why, if these notes were his reprisal, the way he went on the attack, he hadn’t utilized them as a weapon. Why wasn’t he threatening to release the information contained here?
Was it because he’d never had the chance to come back for the notes?
Was it because he was already dead?
I tried not to let the thought derail me and went back to the pages, reading from beginning to end, making sure I’d written down every intelligible word I could pick out. By the time I was done, I still had the same twenty-seven words. I went through them again individually, counting how many times they appeared in the notes, cross-checking everything. The house faded to black around me, the only source of light the floor lamp angled in above my head, like someone leaning over me. Out of the twenty-seven, one word bothered me.
Malady.
McMillan had used that word seven times, including twice on one page under the date 3 May 2012. It wasn’t that the word didn’t belong here; if a synonym for illness belonged anywhere, it was in a set of medical notes, however unconventional. It was more that the word was hard to read. I wasn’t sure it was even malady.
I went over the notes yet again, trying to gain some sort of context, anything that might give me a steer on what the word might be if it wasn’t malady, and then I noticed that the first a was different from the second a. He hadn’t written them the same way. Each was a different style, the first a much less obvious than the second.
Because the first a isn’t an a.
‘It’s an e,’ I muttered.
As I realized that, I could suddenly see it so clearly. There were no a’s at all here – because the word wasn’t malady.
It was Melody.
It was a woman’s name.
#0806
I went to see Erik this morning and he showed me your medical records.
Oh, Derryn.
I didn’t realize this was the third time you’ve had cancer. Back in January, when I was on the ward with my skull fracture, it had only been five months since you were given the all-clear the second time around. I never would have guessed. That smile of yours, it hid no hint of anxiety or unease. And now here we are again, in July, and it’s back, and in your medical records it says you’re not going to have chemotherapy again. It says you don’t want it, that you’ve had enough. I suppose I understand now why your house looks so boring. It’s because you’ve been sick or in treatment, on and off, for the last two and a half years. When would you have had the time to decorate, to think about that sort of thing? Maybe, if your husband had any vision, any competence beyond the use of his fists, he could take the lead, change things, improve them, but he hasn’t. If that was me, Derryn, I’d turn that house on its head. I’d bring you home, and I’d show you inside, and you’d have tears in your eyes when you saw how wonderful everything looked. You’d say, ‘Thank you so much,’ and – despite being weak – you’d throw your arms around me and you’d touch your lips to mine.
‘I love you,’ you’d say.
I’ve actually been in your house a lot. When you and your husband are out, I get inside and wander around. I just like running my fingers over things. I look in your drawers and your wardrobe. I lean in and smell the perfume that lingers in your clothes. Sometimes, I pick up photos of you and your husband and I drop them on to the ground, so the glass in the frame shatters. I twist and break the frames so there’s no way they can be used again. I leave them on the floor, making it look like they fell off a sideboard, or a dresser, or the wall. I do it well and I don’t do it a lot, otherwise you might realize someone has been snooping around, but I do it just enough so that, when I return, there are fewer photos of you and your husband together. I like coming back and seeing empty spaces where he should be. It’s just better like that.
It’s better when it’s just you and me.
I’ve studied your movements over the past couple of months, and today you went to a cemetery in north London to choose a plot for yourself. It was hard for me to see that. I didn’t follow you in, although I very much wanted to. I felt that, if your husband spotted me, it would become a distraction, so I left the cemetery and went to work and tried to concentrate on what I was doing. I got a little done, but not much. We had a few people in, a few homes to go to, and I sorted some paperwork out. It wasn’t busy, but even if it had been, I doubt I would have been able to focus.
Later, I went and saw Erik again, and as I walked through St Augustine’s, I started to realize something: all the doctors working in here, all the people – like McMillan – who get paid all this money to help others, to be the very best in their field, and not a single one of them is any use to you whatsoever. They’re the wrong doctors. They specialized in the wrong thing. They’re as worthless as the fly that buzzes behind the curtain in summer, bashing against a locked window, over and over again, trying to reach the sky. If I ground all of these doctors into paste, if I chopped every one of them into pieces, and dumped their remains in the same place I once left Nora, if I let the crows and the buzzards and the gulls peck at them and feed on their bodies, what difference would it make?
It wouldn’t make any to you.
They can’t help you.
So, by the time I got to Erik, I was angry, I couldn’t stop myself. I got hold of him, punched him, kicked him. When he started begging me to stop, I just carried on. It’s not his fault, really, I know that. But I hate him for his inadequacy.
I hate everyone.
When I feel like that, I go back to your house and watch all the old home videos of you. I like watching them. They can be corny and sentimental at times, but I like watching you in motion. You really can be so beautiful. Just the way you move, the way you speak, the way you hold yourself. A few weeks ago, I took one of the tapes home with me and made a copy of it, and then returned it the next day. When I realized neither of you had noticed it was gone, I took more. Tonight, I’ve just finished copying the very last one. I’ve got them all now, and I watch them constantly. I’m starting to know what’s coming – what you’ll say, how you say it, what your reaction is going to be. I like seeing you well, healthy, because it’s hard seeing you as you are now. When you leave the house now, you’re grey and fragile. You look like a baby bird, featherless and blind.
I don’t want you to die, Derryn.
I want everything to be normal again, n
ot to have to pretend that it is. Even though I know you’ve decided against the treatment, that there’s only one way we’re going from here, I’ve had to make out that I’m fine, and I hate it. Inside, I’m a wreck, I’m ruined, but outside I just look the same as ever. I maintain this horrible façade. Because no one knows about you, Derryn. No one knows what we have.
Well, no one except Erik.
He became my doctor after Nora fucked with my head. He did help me back then, I admit that much. He helped get me out of a deep spiral. After he worked with me, I could see clearly again. In fact, Erik helped me realize that, in order to move on, I needed to redact Nora from the pages of my past.
So, after I got rid of her, I told him what I’d done, what I’d done with her body, and he was horrified. He said he never meant for this to happen and that he would have to call the police. I told him he wasn’t to do that. I told him, instead, that he was to continue treating me, but he would have to stop writing things down. See, I never make a point of walking in blind. I always make sure I know people’s secrets. When you know people’s secrets, you can get them to do anything; and I can get Erik to do anything for me.
But, sometimes, even secrets can’t help us.
I don’t want you to die, Derryn.
Please don’t die.
60
It didn’t take me long to find her.
In a search for Melody on the website Missing People, I discovered three females registered by their families with the charity. One was under eighteen, a kid who’d run away from home and had never been seen again; another was a woman in her late sixties, suffering from dementia, who’d been gone two days. The third was a woman in her forties who’d been missing since February 2010.
Her name was Melody Campbell.
I clicked on the link. Next to her entry was a photograph. At a quick glance, it was hard to identify her as the same woman who’d turned up at Charing Cross four days ago, except in the eyes. But, even then, you had to look hard. Physically, she was like a different person. The accompanying text said she’d been missing almost eight years, and that tallied, just about, with what the woman had told Field that first day at the police station. I turned to my notes, went right the way back to the start and tried to remind myself of exactly how that conversation had gone. Field had told me that the woman had mentioned once – and only once – that she’d been gone for eight years, but then, in the interview I’d watched on the monitors, the woman had put it down to a misunderstanding. I’d managed to note down a rough transcript of it.