Lock Me In

by Kate Simants

  ‘We did try,’ she said. ‘But it didn’t work out that way for us. I’m sorry, Ellie.’ She lifted one of my hands and I let her do it, and her kiss was cold on the backs of my fingers. ‘But this is where we are. She has got bigger and badder than we thought she could get. Jodie is dead, because of her. And now Matt—’

  She broke off, settled herself with a breath. ‘We’ve got to leave, love. I really think we have to go. Really leave this time.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘I don’t know! Away! Anywhere!’

  ‘I can’t. We have to know what happened. I need … I don’t know. Proof.’

  ‘What more proof do you need? Look at everything we know. Look at your hand! Look at your bloody neck!’

  ‘I’m not just leaving, Mum. I love him.’

  ‘He’s gone, Ellie!’ she shouted. ‘For god’s sake open your eyes!’

  I’d had enough of her. I went into the living room and sank into the sofa. Try as I might not to catastrophize, the fact of the matter was that Mum, my one ally through all of it, had given up hope. I was bonetired, weary to the marrow, my thoughts clanging against each other.

  ‘Right,’ she said, coming in. ‘You need to sleep.’ She held her hand out and instinctively I took it, but then she was pulling me up.

  ‘I just want to sit for a bit,’ I told her.

  But she got hold of my other hand. ‘No. I need to put myself first for once. I need to have a bath, and a glass of wine, and to be able to relax.’

  ‘You can, Mum, go ahead.’

  ‘No. Come with me.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said, confused, trying to pull my arms back.

  But she held tight. ‘I need to plan. I can’t do anything if you’re still out here. You might fall asleep, and I don’t want to get punched again.’

  Her eyes flicked up suddenly to meet mine, shocked at what she had said, but then she hardened. I hadn’t seen the line in the sand, didn’t even know there was one. But I had crossed it now. We had both crossed it.

  ‘Do you know what? I have given everything to you.’ Her voice was controlled and firm now, but her face was flushed, and tears balled against her lids and broke down her cheeks. ‘I love you so much. So much, and you give nothing back. All I’m asking is to have one, safe evening in my own home. OK? So you’re going,’ she said, tugging me hard towards my room, ‘to come. With. Me.’

  Then, loud as a shout, Siggy sounded in my head.

  STOP IT

  ‘Stop it!’

  When it happened, we both gasped, and stood rooted to the spot. Panting.

  Something had propelled me forward. Something had lifted my hand, and hit her, hard, across the face.

  Mum clasped her hand across her temple. ‘Was that her?’

  I opened my mouth to speak, but then I saw the blood. On the corner of her eyebrow.

  ‘Was that her, Ellie?’ The blood welled, the droplet split, and a thin, red trail crept down her cheek.

  But it wasn’t Siggy. I was wide awake.

  It was me.

  33.

  Mae

  Just before Hammersmith, the District line train descended into the tunnel system. Mae’s window became a mirror in the darkness, his own eyes staring back at him where seconds ago there had been the terraced brick backs of houses. He looked away, massaged the aching masseter muscles on the angle of his jaw. A tube map near the curved roof of the train told him he had maybe a half hour journey. Seven stops to Green Park, change onto the Victoria line, short hop to Highbury & Islington, then a ten, fifteen-minute walk to the clinic.

  The last time he’d been up there, it had been after the search team had taken the place apart. Cox had tried to fight the warrant, citing patient confidentiality as if it would stand up against a charge of child abduction. The search had been in vain in the end: nothing was found that hadn’t already been established by the paper trail of Cox’s furtive seduction of his girlfriend’s daughter. What had started as just a bookending of Ellie’s sessions deepened into something far more regular, far more intimate. Dozens of receipts, scores of notes, hundreds of text messages built up a hedonistic story of late nights in bars Jodie shouldn’t have even been served in, hotels that should have raised the alarm, but whose receptionists invariably deferred to Cox’s immutable charm.

  Jodie never told her mother that she’d wound up sleeping with Cox. It had been up to Mae and Ian Heath to tell her that.

  It was fair to say, he could admit now, that Cox’s personality had contributed to the vitriol with which Heath had pursued him. The doctor was smug, arrogant, self-righteous even in the face of what most people would experience as crippling shame. But for every adjective Mae could fling at him, Cox’s complaint against Heath – and, by extension, Mae himself – offered an opposite claim. The police had been aggressive, Cox had argued, even after the CPS dropped the case. Insulting, personal, crass. Unnecessarily intimidating.

  Part of Mae said maybe Cox had a point.

  The other part was louder and it said, fuck him.

  Five minutes to six and Mae was emerging onto the black, rain-glossed pavements of N5. He kept to an easy pace, making the south corner of Highbury Park by the time the bells at the Christ Church a few blocks away rang the hour. Mae located the door, then depressed the buzzer next to the COX PSYCHOTHERAPY engraved in the polished brass plate beside the heavy-looking door.

  The receptionist cheerfully answered the buzzer, but her demeanour changed when he gave his name.

  ‘Oh, so it is you,’ she said when he arrived at the first-floor reception.

  ‘Samira, right?’ Mae asked, her name coming back to him in a rush. He hadn’t expected Cox to have retained the same receptionist – he seemed the kind to value anonymity over familiarity – but here she was.

  She nodded, anxiety edging across her face. ‘Yes, but, look. Does he know you’re coming?’

  Before he had a chance to answer, the door behind her opened.

  ‘Detective.’

  Unlike his receptionist, Cox had aged terribly. In 2006, he’d been the definition of dashing: all teeth and a smile that went from nothing to a hundred watts at every opportunity, as if he was expecting a film crew. Mae remembered him looking more like a corporate lawyer than a psychotherapist: silk shirts obviously selected to showcase the well-maintained pectorals beneath them; flashes of bespoke turquoise or violet lining to his charcoal suits.

  Not anymore.

  The blond in his hair was resigning itself to grey, and the former glow of his skin had abandoned him. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes dull, and as he brought his fingers up to rake across his scalp, Mae recognized the tell-tale tremble of the habitual drinker. It was true that the case against him had crumbled, but it only took a glance to see there were other ways to pay a price.

  ‘Do come in,’ he said, then, to the receptionist, ‘Samira, you won’t need to stay.’

  He showed Mae into his office, a tiny room with none of the pomp and prestige promised by the exterior.

  ‘What happened to the oak-panelling?’ Mae asked, looking around.

  Cox settled behind his desk in a high-backed leather chair that fitted the room even less in size than it did in style, and levelled him with a chilly glare. ‘You mean the parlour. First floor: I sublet it. Same as all the other rooms in the building, actually.’

  Mae folded his arms. ‘Business not what it was?’

  ‘Do you want to try that again without the glee?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Cox assayed him for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Business has been catastrophic, since you ask,’ he said, before pulling out a drawer of his desk. ‘A few patients a week if I’m lucky. Samira comes for a day here and there, primarily out of innate benevolence, given that I miss her payments half the time.’ He straightened, lifted a half-bottle of supermarket vodka on the table and without a hint of shame, unscrewed the cap and dumped a third of it into a mug. Then he sank it, eyeing Mae over the rim with a fl
ash of defiance. Swallowing, he said, ‘But I trust you haven’t come all this way to exchange pleasantries.’

  Something unexpected, uninvited, was eroding the sharp edges of Mae’s contempt, and it took him until Cox had refilled the mug to work out that it was pity.

  ‘I said on the phone why I was coming.’ Mae took the other chair, a plastic swivel not unlike his own back at the nick, and tented his fingers.

  Cox nodded. ‘You do missing persons these days.’

  ‘Looking for Matthew Corsham. You had a phone conversation with him shortly before he went missing.’

  Cox positioned the mug in front of him, lined the handle up just so. ‘You do understand, I hope, that I’m not able to divulge information about a client unless you have a court order demanding that I do so.’

  ‘He was a client, you’re saying?’

  Cox gave him a weary look. ‘We don’t have to dance around the common denominator here. Eleanor Power. That’s why he came to me, that’s why you’re here now.’

  ‘No. I’m here to establish his whereabouts, Dr Cox.’

  He leaned back. ‘I can’t help you.’

  Mae reclined too, mirroring him. He wasn’t in any rush. ‘Let’s look at this another way. Our mutual friend Ellie—’

  ‘She calls you a friend now, does she?’

  ‘Says she had no idea you and Matthew knew each other.’

  ‘As it should be. This is what we in the trade know as confidentiality. It’s a code of conduct thing. Oh,’ he said with hand held up in mock apology, ‘forgive me, jargon. A code of conduct is a—’

  ‘I know what a code of conduct is.’

  Cox refreshed his mug, swallowed. A silence followed that Mae could have chucked a fridge into and never heard a splash.

  Eventually: ‘What were you discussing with him, Charles?’

  ‘I fail to see how that could be of interest to you. Ben.’

  ‘No? Well, let me set that out for you. He wasn’t a big one for talking on the phone. Girlfriend, work, takeaway: that was pretty much it. But he did talk to you a few days before he apparently vanished. And it so happens that you played a major part in a missing person case involving the same witness five years ago.’

  After an admirable battle, Cox set his jaw and broke eye contact.

  ‘So I’ll ask you again,’ Mae went on, ‘before I have to go away and get your goddamned court order as you know perfectly well I will. What were you talking about? Ellie?’

  ‘Eleanor Power has not been a client of mine for a long time. Years. There’s a little breach in my confidentiality for you: she’s not under my care anymore.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Mae leaned back. He had plenty of time. ‘Because the way I understood it, when she was released from hospital she was discharged specifically to you.’

  The bafflement Mae felt when he discovered Ellie’s mental health section had been lifted had only been compounded when he discovered she’d been discharged from hospital, with Christine’s permission, into Cox’s care. Cox, who’d seen Ellie for months without Christine’s knowledge. Who had, in Christine’s words, set Ellie’s progress back by years. It made precisely as much sense now as it did then.

  ‘That was a long time ago.’ The doctor sighed and examined his hands. ‘Even if I was predisposed to breaking my clinical oaths, I would have informed Matthew that the policy of this clinic is to destroy all patient records two years after discharge.’

  Mae sighed. But there was more than one way to skin a cat. ‘What I want to do here is eliminate you from my list of people to be concerned about. I want to go home, and say, right: Dr Cox isn’t a red flag. But I can’t do that if I’ve got you sitting here being obstructive about a fairly simple question, can I? That sort of thing means I have to get other people involved. I’d have to get a local bobby round to park outside your house in a police car and ask you a lot of questions, which would hardly be a good thing if you still live on that nice street. Which was it, Tongdean Road? Even worse if it happens while your neighbours are all out getting their kids into the car for school.’

  A single note of a bitter laugh. ‘I live in a one-bed above a Ladbrokes. I sold that house five years ago to pay my legal fees.’

  ‘Right.’ Mae clicked his neck.

  After a wait: ‘This sounds a lot like blackmail.’

  ‘Does it now.’

  Cox brought the items on his desk into orderly lines, then met Mae’s eyes. ‘And you’ll go away if I give you the simple answer.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I will,’ he said, trying not to sound too keen. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Matthew Corsham had an interest in my field.’

  ‘Dissociative disorders?’

  Cox flinched, nodded. ‘And I told him I no longer have anything to do with that.’

  Mae frowned. ‘How come? You’re the country’s go-to man, right? One of?’

  ‘Was.’ He refreshed his vodka, drank it off like it was milk. ‘Ellie Power was my final case of that kind. Haven’t touched it since.’

  ‘That sounds like a very short conversation. What else did you talk about?’

  ‘He was concerned about her mental health. He wanted access to her records, but I had to refuse. So we talked in general about symptomatology, causation, pharmacology.’

  Mae’s text alert sounded, and he brought the phone out to silence it. But the message was short enough for him to read on the home screen: from Kit, saying just:

  Glug glug glug!

  He supressed a smile – weird way of inviting someone for a drink, but he wasn’t going to complain – and pocketed the phone. ‘You spoke to him over the phone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And in person?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘OK. I don’t know isn’t going to be enough, you see. Was it once? Twenty times?’

  ‘A few,’ Cox said, shaking the hair back from his forehead and raising his eyes to the ceiling. ‘The last time would have been around week ago.’

  ‘And that was where, here?’

  ‘No. At my flat. I told you, he was persistent.’

  ‘And you maintain that in these few conversations you discussed general psychology?’

  ‘Yes. That and the principles of privacy.’

  Taking the strategic decision to stand, unball his fists and lock his hands behind his back at this point, Mae said: ‘Seems to me we’re done here.’

  ‘Seems that way.’

  Mae made to leave, then remembered something.

  ‘Did he bring a laptop with him, when you saw him?’

  Cox frowned, touched his fingertips to his temples as if divining the answer. ‘I don’t know, possibly. Why?’

  ‘Did he have it the last time you saw him?’

  He squinted. ‘Apologies, I—’ he started, casting a glance at the bottle on the desk. ‘My memory’s not exactly …’

  ‘Fine. Never mind. But there’s nothing else that you can think of that would help us? Nothing at all?’

  It only took a split second, an almost undetectable movement of Cox’s eyes, towards the floor and back up again.

  Then, ‘No. Nothing else.’

  Mae could have not seen it. But he did.

  34.

  Ellie

  In the end I went quietly. We didn’t even say goodnight. It was far too early to turn in but by the time she’d come out of the bathroom, I was in bed. She glanced through my door long enough for me to see the butterfly stitches she’d stuck across the cut on her eyebrow, and then she locked me in. There was the sound of something heavy dragging across the hall carpet, its journey ending outside my door, and then silence.

  I turned to face the wall and bunched my knees up, listening, knowing I was hours from sleep. I read, tidied, painted my toenails. Twenty minutes before ten, I heard the sound of the flush, her footsteps pausing briefly outside my door. Her bedroom door closing softly.

  My indignati
on subsided, I was seized with a moment of terrible sadness for her: a bath and a glass of wine being her greatest vice. There had been no hint of a romantic relationship since my dad. Once, I’d suggested dating again, even with a false name if she was worried about our anonymity.

  ‘I know everything I need to know about men from your father,’ she’d told me darkly, and that was the end of the conversation, full stop.

  I played around with my phone for a while, trying out possible passwords to get into Matt’s email, but without success. After a while, the battery died, and I flipped the covers back and got up to hunt for my charger before remembering it was in Mum’s room. No way was I going to ask.

  Suddenly aware of the cold, I went back to my bed. I reached out to pull the duvet back over myself when a noise made me freeze. Quiet, urgent knocking. The front door.

  A squeak, and then ‘Miss’, whispered loudly through the letterbox.

  I put my ear to my door, breathing shallow and silent through my mouth. My first thought: the police. They’d found Matt. But the police don’t whisper through letterboxes. Fingers flat against the door, I weighed up my options. If I shouted, would they hear me? And even if they did, what would I say?

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ the voice said again. A man, but I couldn’t place the age. Not a native Londoner. ‘Miss. Are you there?’

  Then I got it. It was Piotr, Mr Symanski’s son.

  I was about to call out when I heard the slam of the letterbox’s metal flap against the door, and feet on the steps. Another voice, a low-voiced exchange further from the door that I had no chance of deciphering, and after that, a door closing. Mr Symanski’s door.

  I stayed where I was, unmoving, listening. Movement in the flat below, a door slamming, and muffled bursts of voices. I dropped to my knees, lay down with my ear against the carpet. I could make out what I guessed was Mr Symanski’s voice and that of his son, but though I could hear the heat in their altercation I couldn’t understand a word.

  I went to my window.