The Shadow Man

by Helen Fields

  Fergus stood up, reaching for the wall then fumbling his way to the exit, cursing as he went. Turned out that being dead was just as shitty as being alive. He left the woman and the girl in the dark.

  Chapter Twenty

  They sat in Connie’s hotel room, Baarda at the desk, her on the floor, and stared at photographs. On one wall, Connie had printed out a list of all the places Angela went regularly – supermarket, doctor, dentist, school, friends and family, bank. On the opposite wall the same had been done for Elspeth. There was no crossover. These were women at different ends of the financial, educational and social spectra.

  Yet, the photos of the two of them were remarkably similar. Not their faces or their clothing styles, just the types of photos. With the kids on a beach, at a playground, a horse ride, a play centre. First day of school. Family Christmas, Easter egg hunt, Halloween. They both kept themselves trim, ate healthy food. They each valued friendship highly and were careful not to drink too much. Neither smoked or took drugs. Each appeared to be the perfect wife.

  ‘What did you call this?’ Baarda asked.

  ‘A frantic information grab,’ Connie said. ‘We’ve hit a dead end, so we go back to all the information at once. We have certain links already. The key is that the same man was at the scene of both Angela’s murder and Elspeth’s abduction. No other crime scene similarities. But there’s something we’re missing. Like they both love ballet, or have the same favourite soccer team.’

  ‘Football,’ Baarda corrected.

  ‘If you knew what I meant, you didn’t need to correct me. The point is that he found them, stalked them, chose them. So there’s a link. It’s in here somewhere.’ She rearranged a pile of emails from the previous twelve months sent by each woman. ‘What keywords did the technical team search for when they were comparing the emails and messages?’

  ‘They went through everything including dates, place names, people, products, even online purchases. There was no crossover between the two women that we can find. If they were in the same place on the same day, it was a one-off and a coincidence. We can’t place them anywhere together. No mutual friends.’

  ‘Phone records?’ Connie asked.

  ‘Both landline and mobile. None of the same numbers were called by both women.’

  ‘That’s it, I’m calling down for room service,’ Connie sighed. ‘What’ll you take?’

  ‘Anything with salmon,’ Baarda said, pinning a map to the wall with a solid and a dotted line on it. Solid for Angela’s known movements on the day of her death, dotted for Elspeth’s the day she disappeared.

  Connie ordered and put down the phone. ‘Tell me about your first love. I’m guessing … university. Am I right?’

  ‘I thought we were here to work,’ he said.

  ‘Diversion helps shift my thought pattern on and off large amounts of data. Frantic information grabs work like those weird dot sequences where you can’t see them when you’re looking straight at them.’

  ‘So tell me about the time you spent unable to communicate. No reason we have to dwell on my private life, is there?’

  Connie sighed. ‘I’m not sure that’s very gentlemanly of you. Isn’t there some sort of British code that says you’re supposed to do whatever a lady asks of you?’

  ‘Given how well that’s worked out for me over the past year, I’ve decided to try a different tack, which was your advice to me.’

  ‘Yeah, shot myself in the foot there. What do you want to know?’ Connie threw herself on her bed and arranged the pillows beneath her head.

  ‘Comfortable?’

  ‘Just getting on the couch ready to talk to my shrink. Want to play?’

  ‘Is it a game?’ Baarda asked, turning round in his chair to watch her.

  ‘Actually no, now that you ask. It’s not a game at all.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Playing lacrosse,’ she said. ‘So often the moments that define your life are the ones you’re ignorant about at the time. Until you learn to deal, you spend countless hours rewriting history in your head. If I’d turned left at the roundabout instead of right, if I’d remembered to turn the gas off. In my case, it was if I hadn’t run quite so hard to take a shot at goal.’

  Freshman year, already accepted into a great college, aiming to study astronomy. The future had been nothing but a gleaming sunlit day. The lacrosse game had ended prematurely for her. She’d been tackled fairly, but her head had clashed with another girl’s, and they’d both ended up on their backs on the pitch. Her opponent had got up first with an egg growing from her forehead. Connie had sat up, staggered slightly, felt the world lurch beneath her and swallowed down the vomit that threatened to rise and embarrass her in front of the whole team plus spectators.

  All the signs had been there, and the aspect of it that haunted her more than anything was that she’d known better. Truly. Concussion wasn’t an unusual side effect of a blow to the head. She’d seen enough members of the local high school’s American football team carted off the pitch to realise how seriously it should have been taken. But the nausea passed, then the dizziness wore off. The ice helped to reduce the bump, and the fact that the bruising was coming out not staying internal was a good sign – she’d read that somewhere, too. There was a party that evening. She had a few hours to sleep off the blow, get rid of the headache. Her mother was away, and her father would be in his study working. No one would notice. And they hadn’t.

  The school year had ended. Connie had graduated with an impressive grade point average. Her mother, father, brother and grandmother had celebrated with her. There’d been a party at their Martha’s Vineyard home and a long, hot summer to look forward to. The President had a daughter vacationing with him who her brother had a massive crush on and, as happened every June and July, normal social structure and restraints became meaningless. There was no snobbery on the Vineyard. You could and would rub shoulders with film stars, world leaders, fishermen and waitresses, and no one pointed or whispered. It was a typical summer.

  ‘Only by then I’d met Ruben. He lived in Edgartown, I lived on the outskirts of Oak Bluffs. I had a job in an ice-cream parlour during the day, and he’d come over to meet friends. God, I never reacted to anyone like I did when he walked in. I dropped the cone I was making him, my hands shaking, and I must have sounded like a complete idiot. He was nice about it. He could afford to be. I’m pretty sure every girl on the island had him at the top of their wish list.’

  ‘Was he everything you thought he was going to be, or an illusion?’ Baarda asked.

  ‘I never got the chance to find out.’ Connie closed her eyes. ‘He asked for my number, which I gave him, pretending it wasn’t a big deal. It was. I hadn’t really had a boyfriend. I went to an all-girls school on the mainland, and because so many girls got in trouble during the summer with tourists and parties, my parents were strict. Curfews, chaperones, endless rules. But I’d turned eighteen and I was going off to college anyway, so I guess they realised it was too late to keep me locked up. Ruben called me after a week. We agreed to meet on Squibnocket Beach at eight p.m. It would have been dark by then. We were going to take a couple of beers – his idea – I didn’t drink. You could light a fire in the sand on Squibnocket if you took your own wood and were careful about it. The track to the beach is hard to find at night and there aren’t that many passersby. You can swim in the dark and the water around you will light up with comb jellies if you bump them.’

  She’d spent the entire day getting ready. Waxing, washing, choosing clothes, making them more revealing than less. Messing her hair up so she didn’t look like a try-hard. It was more than halfway through the summer vacation, but if things went well with Ruben, they’d still have August.

  Taking the jeep, she’d thrown a picnic rug in the trunk, some wood for the fire, matches and a couple of blankets. Stopped before reversing out of the driveway to apply a final layer of lip gloss. It was called naked honey. Funny the things that lodged in your brain
. The note she’d left for her parents was that she’d be spending the evening with her best friend Gemma. Gemma, primed for the deception, was ready to make excuses if a phone call came. Every tiny detail was perfect.

  ‘It was a clear night. Really starry. They often are in the Vineyard during the summer, but this was particularly beautiful. We were going to watch the sun go down. The sunsets there are like Turner paintings. More a work of art than an event. God, I was excited. You know that feeling low in your stomach? I don’t mean just the sexual thrill of being in contact with someone you want. It’s the anticipation of breaching boundaries, the thrill of making yourself vulnerable to another human being. It was supposed to be a revelatory evening. I guess I got that bit right.’

  The knock at the door signalled the arrival of room service.

  ‘Don’t move, I’ll get it,’ Baarda said, bringing in the food and setting it down on the bed. Neither of them began eating. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I woke up in hospital. My car was found in the woods on the lane out to Squibnocket. They assumed I’d become disoriented in the dark, taken a wrong turn and hit a tree. I have no idea if Ruben was waiting for me or not. I hope he was, but then he’d have spent the evening waiting for a girl who never turned up. My parents phoned Gemma when I wasn’t home by midnight. She admitted everything, and they sent out a search party. The problem was …’ Connie sat up on the bed and took the cover off the food, picking up a fork and shifting morsels around the plate. ‘When I regained consciousness I couldn’t speak or write. Couldn’t make myself understood at all. Trying to talk made my brain spin. Focusing on individual words was impossible. I could walk, eat, dress myself – do everything except communicate.’

  ‘But inside you were processing thoughts normally?’

  ‘Yeah. That was almost worse. It was terrifying. Frustrating, painful, isolating. I was locked inside my own brain.’

  Baarda stood up and walked to the window, looking down at the street and frowning.

  ‘I can’t even begin to imagine how terrible that must have been.’

  ‘The story gets worse before it gets better. Over the years, my grandparents had contributed substantial amounts to a hospital in Boston. They were great friends with a psychiatrist – Dr Webster – one of their own generation, not known for his empathy, although that was something I only learned later. My grandmother called him immediately. He assessed me, I had all the usual scans, and upon finding nothing physically wrong with me, he decided that having lied to my parents, intent on having my first sexual experience, I was suffering from teenage hysteria. His version of events was that I had crashed my car deliberately to avoid the sexual confrontation and to avoid becoming fully adult. He also decided that my decision not to communicate was wilful. He wanted me in intense therapy, open to treatments, and guaranteed that he would have snapped me out of it within three months. You’re not going to touch your food?’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ Baarda said. ‘Your parents didn’t get a second opinion?’

  ‘He was one of the most respected psychiatrists in Boston and an authority on teenage disorders. They had no reason to doubt him. That’s how I was admitted to a psychiatric ward, age eighteen years four months, when I should have been packing my bags for college. It was …’ She threw the fork to the end of the bed, lying back down. ‘It was like dying. I wasn’t a part of anyone’s life any more.’

  The unit was in Boston, her family were on Martha’s Vineyard. Dr Webster had instructed them not to visit too often, to avoid feeding her hysteria. Soon, he declared, without an audience to play to, Connie would conform.

  The hospital was a coin. There were two sides to it. In front of family and friends, doctors would issue concerned nods, studiously read charts. Nurses would be jolly and sweet, never in a rush. There was a sense of calm and of community.

  The flip side, when the doors were locked and the staff went unseen by those beyond their number, was of a curious form of discipline. Didn’t want to take your medication? Privileges were withdrawn, such as your choice of food, clean clothes, and privacy while using the bathroom. Get frustrated and show your temper? That was more serious. There were ways of giving sedative injections that were relatively painless, and alternative means designed to let you know you were having inches of surgical steel shoved into you. Decide not to comply with therapy? You’d be held down and stripped.

  ‘I learned fast. I watched. That’s all I could do, after all. Everything my brain did was input while it couldn’t output.’ She sighed and stretched her arms above her head. ‘My recovery wasn’t going as fast as Dr Webster had promised my grandmother, and he was concerned that I was making him look foolish, so he chose shock tactics. One day, he had a male nurse come in and shave off all my hair. It was the only time I saw my mother really lose it when she visited. She was furious. They told her I’d stolen a razor and done it myself.’

  Her hospital suite had comprised an uncomfortably thin mattress, a bedside table with no lock, a wardrobe with an open front, and a bathroom with a door that anyone could open any time. For her own safety, of course. Nothing sharp. Nothing heavy and blunt. Nothing she could ingest other than water. No media that might be upsetting. Decor in pastel colours that reminded her of old ladies’ hair. Food designed to be soft and slip down easily. She still couldn’t look at Jell-O. But what haunted her, and what had kept her alive, was her fellow patients. Studying them, knowing what would set them off and what would soothe them. Night-time in the teenage psychiatric ward was never a quiet event. It was as if the darkening was a trigger.

  ‘What struck me most was the people in my unit who shouldn’t have been there. Teenagers suffering from depression who simply needed a better form of care. Not that I was qualified then, but when you watch day and night, it becomes possible to identify the sad versus the mad and the bad. The issue was the few genuinely dangerous kids there whose parents had been able to divert them out of the criminal justice system, probably by making the sort of generous donations to the hospital my grandmother had. Kids who couldn’t be treated and who posed a lifelong risk to society.’

  It had been a rude awakening, feeling the bouncing of her mattress as a fellow patient had sneaked into her room to stand on her bed. He’d found or fashioned a blade that flashed in the dim glow of the light from the corridor, and he was attempting to cut a section from her ceiling.

  ‘They’re coming,’ he’d told her. ‘They want me to give you to them. As a sample.’

  Connie had attempted a scream. He’d dropped to his knees on her bed and shoved a sweaty palm over her mouth.

  ‘Don’t do that. Not that anyone will come. Someone brought in cakes for the night shift, and they’re all stuffing their faces in the staff room. My friends up there,’ he pointed at the space beyond the ceiling, ‘saw you. They chose you. They think you’ll taste nice.’

  With that, he’d removed his hand and extended his tongue, licking her face from cheek to cheek, pushing into her mouth and out again. She tried to shove him off, but he was stronger – far stronger, almost an impossible force – and he knew it.

  ‘Mmm, they’re right. You do,’ he’d panted. ‘You do taste good. Maybe just a little bite for myself before they come. There’s plenty of you to share.’

  He’d bitten into her earlobe before she’d had time to consider whether or not the threat was serious. That time the scream wouldn’t be stopped. Her pillow was a bloody mess in the seconds between him biting, sitting up and beginning to chew. Three or four minutes later, the nurses had become sufficiently cross that they’d decided to see what was happening, syringe in its neat little kidney tray, ready to enter her thigh. It was their faces in her doorway that had reinforced her horror. The fact that they’d backed away rather than enter, calling for backup from the male nurses before tackling the monster sitting astride her who was taking his time, rolling the morsel of flesh around in his mouth to properly savour the flavour before swallowing.

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nbsp; It was resolved in a fight, after he’d lurched for her other ear and been tackled off her bed, smashing his head on the radiator and spraying a further dose of blood up her wall. Connie had sat shaking in her bed while they’d wrestled him first into submission, then medicated unconsciousness.

  She’d heard him whispering to the strange beings he saw above her ceiling for weeks before the attack. He’d had an odd habit of licking his lips when he passed her in the corridor. Sometimes he could be seen standing in corners of rooms, staring intently into the walls, muttering then listening for a reply. Connie had been determined never to leave herself vulnerable to attack again.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Baarda asked.

  She shook free of the memory, giving a small fierce smile and lifting her hair away from her left ear. Baarda walked to the bed and sat gently on the edge, pushing the hair back further with his fingertips to inspect what was left of the lobe. The ragged edge was still clear. He ran his thumb over the rough scar tissue.

  ‘It’s helpful,’ Connie said. ‘Every mirror is a reminder of why I do this job.’

  ‘They allowed male and female patients on the same ward?’ Baarda sounded horrified, rightly so.

  ‘The door between the wards was supposed to be locked at night, only it was a shortcut to the outside for staff to take breaks, so it was often left unlocked. Safety came second. There were a lot of attacks and abuse, but the staff didn’t report it up the chain for fear of reprimand.’

  ‘Is that why you decided to become a forensic psychologist?’

  ‘At that point I was thinking of something more active and interventionist. I wanted to join the FBI. Get trained, get tough, if I ever learned to communicate again, which by then had become a matter of survival.’

  Baarda’s mobile rang. He dropped Connie’s hair and stood up, walking across the room before answering. He gave a variety of commands while Connie wandered into the bathroom, splashing cold water on her face, flushing the recollections down the sink with the drips.