Lock Me In

by Kate Simants

  I could not allow her to come to me tonight. Not here.

  Under a panel of the foredeck I found a bunch of cable ties. I tested one, poking the thin end through the eye at the other, yanking it taut the way I had seen the police do it on something Mum and I watched once. I made a bracelet of one and slipped my hand into it, pulling it tight enough that I couldn’t get it off again. Then I threaded a second tie through the loop on my wrist and was just putting my hand into the circle when a last spark of wakefulness kindled a realization.

  If Siggy could drive his car, she could find her way out of a pair of plastic handcuffs.

  I knew what I had to do. I grabbed an empty Ikea bag from the bedroom cupboard and started my collection. From the kitchen: all the knives, scissors, forks. His sharpening steel, the skewers. Then razors from the bathroom: an unopened pack of the disposables that he always managed to bloody his beautiful face with, which I found wedged in behind the sink. I checked every cupboard and drawer from bow to stern: hacksaw blades from the tool cupboard, a chisel, a hammer, screwdrivers. Wire coat hangers, two corkscrews.

  And when I was sure I had everything, I crept onto the aft deck and slipped them one by one into the black water.

  37.

  Mae

  His breath turning to steam, Mae stood shivering on the steps of Ealing Town Hall, checking left and right for any sign of the cab. Beneath the grand, castellated building was the Central Control Room of the area’s council-managed CCTV, and it was there that Mae hoped to get some answers about the fate of Matthew Corsham’s car.

  He set the two coffees he was holding down beside his feet and checked his watch. On the face of it seven thirty was a fairly unsociable hour. But Rod, his good friend and contact at the council, was an ex-squaddie, so Mae inferred this meant he was not unused to an early bugle. Admittedly he hadn’t been exactly thrilled to hear from Mae at 6 a.m., but a job was a job.

  Mae’s phone rang, and he retrieved it from his pocket. Colleen McCulloch. His thumb hovered over the green circle but didn’t connect: She wants us to hand it over to someone else, Kit had said. Something about history.

  He’d call her back. It would be fine.

  On the opposite side of the road, a woman shepherding a cluster of hi-vis vested kids along the pavement. He watched their slow progress, lunch bags swinging from their fingers, and the feeling that he had forgotten something edged slowly from the back of his mind and into the front.

  Shit and fuck.

  School trip. Bear wanted him to do the school trip.

  He got out his phone, realized he had a message from Kit, sent last night maybe ten minutes after he’d made his escape from the Hounslow Hellcats the night before.

  All it said was: Yum yum yum

  And then another one beneath it, sent seconds later: (disambiguation: that’s us eating the dinner you left behind)

  Mae smiled, the mortification softening slightly, then called the school office and left his message about helping with Bear’s trip, wondering whether it might involve an introduction to the boy – the ‘dickhead’ – who’d been bothering his baby.

  Eventually the big mobility-adapted cab came crawling into view behind a string of buses. The driver got out, lowered the ramp, and Mae straightened from his lean and went over to greet his friend.

  ‘You, my dear, are a barbarian,’ Rod told him once he’d wheeled himself clear of the taxi and paid. But his annoyance wasn’t enough to come between him and the flat white that Mae held out to him, which he took with a flourish of fake indignation and deftly stowed in a holder at his hip. ‘Also, your call woke the wife, and she’s on nights. So if you see her you better watch your bollocks.’

  Mae apologized and followed him up the ramp. ‘New rig?’ he asked, taking in the streamlined, brushed aluminium frame of Rod’s wheelchair.

  ‘This old thing?’ Rod glanced down at it with evident pride. ‘Worth losing one’s legs all over again for.’

  Mae showed his badge at the desk, and they headed up the corridor, strip lights crackling into life above their heads.

  Inside the control room, Mae paused to acclimatize to the gloom. They were the first to clock in. The room, about the size of your average primary school hall, was much like any other office – mess, paperwork, printers and desks – but much darker. The front wall was a bank of screens. First time he’d seen inside one of these rooms, he’d been struck by how they really did look the way they did in films. It couldn’t be healthy, working five days a week in the semi-darkness, but it didn’t seem to bother Rod, who had joined the council straight after his medical discharge after losing both legs to a landmine at twenty-two.

  Rod propelled himself to his station front and centre, shook off his coat, and reached underneath the console to flick a switch. Ahead, twenty-five by about fifteen feet of screens fired up, illuminating the room.

  Grinning up at him, Rod said, ‘Love that bit.’ All trace of the grumpy routine of the pavement was gone. ‘What is it you need then, that’s important enough to interrupt my favourite dream?’

  Mae pulled up a chair. ‘Need to trace the final movements of a car before it got burnt out.’

  Rod heard him out and nodded. ‘Time and date?’

  Mae reeled it off, and Rod got to work. In additional to his military-induced love of order and precision, he knew the borough like the back of his hand. Mae had seen him follow cars on these screens in real time, switching between views, pre-empting direction like a seer, bringing up the next feed and the next as easily as dominoes.

  ‘Problem you’ll have is that your blocks up here and here,’ Rod told him, indicating areas with a laser pen, ‘aren’t council anymore, got sold off about ten years ago. I’d’ve given you about fifty different views when it was ours, but now it’ll just be a couple of cameras up poles to cover the whole stretch.’

  It was a fallacy oft repeated that you couldn’t go anywhere without being recorded. Sure, there were a lot of cameras, but it was a rudderless patchwork of coverage, not the huge centralized network people imagined. Reality was, if you wanted exterior footage, your best bet was to literally look up. See what cameras might have caught anything, and then go round finding out who owned them. Maybe half of your longlist would be actually connected to anything, and of those, only a small proportion would have been recording.

  Rod squinted at the screen embedded in the desk in front of him. ‘This the place?’

  ‘That’s it.’ The Feltham site had been earmarked for a major new leisure development in the nineties, and the cinema had been flattened, but the funding had been cancelled and the whole site had sat dormant ever since. It was still fenced off, a mixture of chicken wire and hoardings ringing the entire perimeter with the usual half-arsed warning signs about trespassing.

  ‘Best I can do is this one,’ Rod said, showing Mae a truncated shot of the top of the road leading up to the derelict site, ‘or this one,’ which was a higher angle and covered the gate, one half hanging open and unsecured.

  Mae leaned in. ‘Cue up the first one. My guy was last seen at about five o’clock, so run it from then and we’ll see what turns up.’

  Rod loaded the footage and set it to run at 10x speed, walked Mae through the controls, and headed off to the gents. By the time he’d returned, Mae was exactly fifty per cent less optimistic than he had been.

  ‘No sign of it?’ Rod said, reaching for his coffee.

  Mae sighed. ‘Try the other angle.’

  On the recording, Feltham got dark. The streetlights came on, the frequency of the car stripped right back, and then … nothing. An hour of footage that could have been a still image, bar the occasional flash of a plane coming in from the east for Heathrow. The timecode flew along, and the on-screen midnight became one, two in the morning. Rod yawned, leaned his elbows on the desk.

  And then, he abruptly sat up. ‘Gotcha.’

  Mae had seen it too. Tracking in from the left of the screen was the unmistakable two-tone of Matthew C
orsham’s soft top. Rod ran his thumb slowly over the control wheel.

  ‘Right, 3.09 a.m.,’ he said. They watched as the car turned into the entrance, then crept into the site and out of shot.

  ‘Run it again.’ Mae was on his feet now, peering up close. But even running it a frame at a time, there was little else to be gleaned from the image. ‘Bloody glare,’ he muttered: there was no hope of identifying the driver thanks to the light reflected off the windscreen. But the height of the wheel arch told him there was no great weight inside – one person at a guess – and the timing was something, at least.

  ‘You said the car gets burnt out, right?’ Rod asked him, looking up.

  ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘Right, so the driver’s got to leave at some point.’ He pointed to the shuddering freeze-frame. ‘And that’s the only exit, so …’

  ‘So let’s wait.’

  And wait they did. But by 5 a.m., when the blackness started to dissolve into a grey day and the traffic rose and shone, it became apparent that the driver wasn’t coming out the way they’d gone in.

  Mae scoured his hands against his scalp. ‘Bollocks.’ Then he thought of something. ‘What about if we follow the car backwards?’

  ‘Ah. Trace it back to the source.’ Rod poked his tongue into his cheek, smiling, then turned back to the console. ‘You might want to get us some refills, mind, it could take a while.’

  All told it took Rod about an hour to put it together, but when he’d finished the job, it was a thing of patch-worked and slightly disorientating beauty.

  ‘Try to just watch the car, instead of the environment,’ Rod said, calling Mae back from where he’d been googling for ideas on decorating bedrooms for pre-teen girls. ‘The shots vary a lot in height and orientation so it’s hard to follow, but we get there in the end.’

  They watched the car move backwards in space and time, exhaust-first out of the derelict yard and into the road.

  ‘It backs up towards the Staines road here,’ Rod said, narrating it for Mae, ‘and then here, it cuts up north and goes towards the motorway.’ A beat. ‘Exciting stuff, surveillance, huh? Shits all over Game of Thrones.’

  Mae watched as the car slipped under the M5 around Heston, then looped back down before finally turning off the Boston Manor Road just past Elthorne Park and disappearing.

  ‘Afraid it basically peters out around there. Coverage is super patchy around the residential bits there.’ Rod paused the sequence and turned in his seat. ‘That help at all? This where the guy lives?’

  Mae shook his head. ‘Good couple of miles away.’ He reached for the A to Z poking out of Rod’s in-tray. ‘What road is that, though, where it goes offline?’

  Rod punched in a command and the map in the screen to the right switched from satellite to map view. He leaned in. ‘Top of Abson Street,’ he said.

  Abson Street. Where Ellie lived.

  ‘That mean something to you?’

  Mae got up. ‘Could do.’

  ‘Hold on, big guy,’ Rod said, watching Mae lift the coat from his chair. ‘You’re not leaving until you tell me when you’re taking me out next. It’s been months. I lie awake at night, dreaming of the day I get a call—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Been up to my eyes.’

  Rod regarded him with something approaching concern. ‘What’s this one about, then?’

  Mae weighed up telling him. Rod had been a colleague from way back, when Mae had worked security before he’d even started on the force. He was one of the few to keep in touch when Mae had taken what Rod euphemistically referred to as his sabbatical. He’d had some stuff to say about DS Heath, Mae remembered now: the two of them had served together, and Rod had a long memory for a grudge.

  ‘You remember Jodie Arden?’

  ‘Yes.’ A slow nod. ‘Yes, I most certainly do.’

  Mae hesitated. It was an active case, confidential, but Rod was as solid as they came. ‘Our misper is the boyfriend of Ellie Power, who was the—’

  ‘… best mate, yeah, I remember,’ Rod finished, frowning. ‘Bit of a coincidence.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Mae said, shrugging on the jacket and downing the last cold inch of the coffee. ‘And I don’t know for sure but it looks like that fucker Charles Cox has got something to do with it, too.’

  Rod’s eyes widened, but before he could respond, Mae’s phone rang.

  It was Kit. ‘I’m outside,’ she said. ‘Come down.’

  He thanked Rod, said goodbye, and headed out to the stairs. Kit was on the double yellows, engine running, with her phone to her ear.

  ‘Are you there now?’ she said into it as Mae got in beside her. She gestured urgently for him to close the door, then let the handbrake off and moved out into the traffic before she’d cut the call.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Be with you in ten minutes.’ She laid the phone back in the recess above the stereo. ‘Well, it’s news, but I’m not sure if it’s good, bad, or very fucking weird.’

  ‘What happened?’

  She kept her eyes on the road. ‘That was Jupp. Matthew Corsham’s rent’s just been paid.’

  38.

  Charles Cox Psychotherapy Ltd.

  Clinical audio recording transcript

  Patient name: Eleanor Power

  Session date: 17 September 2006

  CC: I’d like to spend some time following up from the session last week, if that’s all right with you.

  EP: OK, I suppose.

  [pause: 21 sec]

  CC: I’m getting the sense from your body language that you’re finding the idea of doing that distressing.

  EP: It was … I can’t stop thinking about it. I keep seeing it, sort of … feeling it, all the time. I don’t want to feel it.

  CC: It was a very difficult session.

  EP: I’m fine.

  [pause: 31 sec]

  EP: Seriously, I’m fine.

  CC: OK. Sure. So at the end of our last session we agreed that if you could, you would have a conversation with your mum about your scars.

  EP: Yeah, all right, I suppose. If you think it’ll do anything. But honestly, look, I don’t remember it. I just don’t. What you said last week, that you think my accident has to do with Siggy though? It’s just not, I just don’t think that’s the case.

  CC: You don’t, you’re saying you don’t think there’s any connection?

  EP: I honestly don’t. I had an accident.

  CC: But you don’t remember it.

  EP: Well … no. I was really young. But that thing with – whatever we did last time, that was – something else. Siggy can … I mean, you don’t have to believe everything she says.

  CC: Except we ended up accessing something, that sensation of pain, and fear, that seemed to offer another explanation of the injuries you sustained when you were very young.

  EP: No. What happened when I was a kid was a pan of boiling water. That thing last week – that dream, or whatever it is – that’s Siggy in a fire. It’s just a dream. A nightmare. It’s not real.

  CC: Ah.

  [pause: 31 sec]

  CC: But Ellie. Do you remember that you mentioned a fear that someone was coming? That it was necessary to hide. There was a man.

  [pause: 22 sec]

  EP: It was a dream.

  CC: OK.

  EP: Look, this thing about her being scared of something, like the whole soldier thing: it’s made up. I’ve asked my mum, we don’t know anyone in the army or anything, never have. It’s nothing to do with me.

  [pause: 40 sec]

  EP: OK, go on, then, what? Why are you just saying nothing about that?

  CC: I just want to remind you that when we talk about Siggy is that she is essentially a part of your own identity that has split off from your dominant self.

  EP: Yes, I understand that.

  CC: She doesn’t … it’s not as if she is a separate person. She doesn’t exist outside of you.

  EP: I know that.

  CC: So any
… details, any fears she has that are in some way stuck for her, as if she is experiencing them all of the time, these are not random. There are experiences that have shaped her: moments that she’s hanging on to because of how crucial they are to her identity, OK? Things like the dreams that you’ve told me about: the mention of a soldier, a little boy, and this long building that you’ve said about a few times—

  EP: They’re Siggy things, they’re not me.

  CC: OK. Listen, I do understand that if you haven’t had therapy since you were a small child that you might not have had any frank conversations with any professionals about this. But you’re coming to see me independently now, essentially as an adult, so I’m telling you what I know and what I believe as frankly as I can: dissociation doesn’t work like that.

  EP: You said before that the mind can do anything. More than once. That’s what you said.

  CC: I did. I did. But there are patterns, and … OK, look. What we are talking about, these images and events, they have been buried, split off from your psyche. Siggy is the identity who’s become like a gatekeeper to this … information.

  EP: No. No.

  [pause: 1 m 12 sec]

  CC: OK, look, here’s some tissues, here. Can you look at me? OK, good. Ellie. What you talked about last week, that was not your imagination. What you were describing, the pain, being scared, not wanting to open your eyes: all of that. This is a traumatic thing that happened.

  [pause: 23 sec]

  EP: It’s not.

  CC: All right. There’s a lot at stake for you there, isn’t there? Letting it be real, admitting that there’s a chance it could be real: that’s dangerous for you.