by Kate Simants
I glanced around the room. It seemed to me that every face was turned towards me. I got up, suddenly. ‘Can we – would it be OK to do this – somewhere else?’
She got to her feet. ‘Sure thing.’
Outside, the cold air bit through my layers. I felt Siggy slip down to the soles of my feet and turn away.
We headed north. The low light made the unbroken grey cloud look solid, a huge undulating shell hanging over the city. Last time I’d come through here it had been summer, with Matt. We’d got sandwiches from the Boots a few streets away, made a picnic of it. But the flower beds were empty now and the well-tended grass was slipping into winter patchiness.
DC Ziegler stopped at a bench, brushed someone’s crumbs from the peeling green paintwork and sat. ‘Take a pew?’
She put her hands on her knees, took a deep breath and said, ‘The first thing to say is that we really appreciate you calling about Cox. Telling us what happened when you were there.’
I’d transferred the envelope I’d stolen from him into my bag, but I could feel it in there, and my cheeks burned with paranoia. Did she know? Could she?
‘But we need you to stay clear of what we’re doing, all right? Trying to get hold of his laptop like that before we got there. I mean, you knew we wanted to see that computer, right?’
I tensed my jaw, looked away.
‘You have to back off. If we find that we’re—’ she paused, obviously taking great care over the words she used, ‘we’re not just looking at a case of a person going missing, anything we find might end up being used as evidence. We can’t have you tampering with that.’
‘I wasn’t tampering!’ I said, anxiety winding its shaking arms around me and sending my voice high. ‘I’m just trying to find out what the hell is going on.’
‘OK. I know. But we need to have an understanding, all right?’
I forced a smile, nodded. ‘All right. Fine.’
‘Good.’ She got a notebook from her pocket and flipped to a clean page. ‘So, let’s have an amnesty here, yeah? Is there anything else you want to tell me?’
I blinked. I can’t account for my actions the night he disappeared, and my mum destroyed his car because she thinks I killed him. ‘No.’
She nodded, made a note. ‘OK. Here’s a question. How did you know to go to the hospital?’
‘I didn’t. Lucky break. I was there to pick something up from my mum.’
‘Yeah? And how’s she doing?’
‘Fine, I think. I don’t know.’
‘How come?’
I shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen her since …’ I paused, thinking, how long was it? Had I ever gone this long without seeing her?
‘Fallen out?’
‘No,’ I said urgently. ‘No, nothing like that. I went to find her at work, but she was halfway through her shift, she could have been anywhere. And her shift pattern, you know? It’s unreliable, and I didn’t have my phone so …’ I trailed off, realizing I was protesting too much.
‘OK. Sure.’ She waited for a moment, watching me.
‘So, how are you doing? You want to tell me how things are going with your mental health?’
I must have flinched.
‘I’m not here to judge you about it.’
‘I don’t—’ I started, ‘it’s got nothing to do—’
‘Look. I know you lost your friend, before. I’m just saying, it doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to guess that you’re going to be struggling right now.’
She wasn’t smiling, not in the conventional way, but there was something about her face. I could trust this person. I knew it instinctively.
‘Her name’s Siggy, right?’
My jaw tightened involuntarily at the mention of her name. I opened my mouth to reply but then I just shook my head. I was five years old, mute. My fists were balled in my lap and I just wanted to go home. I had to get home, because if I started talking to this woman, I might never stop.
I stood up. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, and I started walking, but she matched my speed. ‘OK, I’m going out on a limb here. I’m speaking as a person who knows about trauma, and mental health, and not as a cop, OK?’
I didn’t slow, but I was listening.
‘Ellie, if the last contact you had with a psychotherapist was Dr Cox, all those years ago, I really think you might want to consider finding someone else for a time. Because I can spot how badly this … this thing is affecting you, and I sincerely don’t believe you have to suffer like this.’
Hot, angry tears split down my cheeks and I wiped at them roughly with the back of my gloved hand. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
She took a long breath, like she was psyching up for something. Then she put her hands on my shoulders. ‘You can get better, if you work at it.’
Siggy started to solidify in my arms, growing heavy but vibrating. I wrenched myself away, and in one moment the warmth I’d felt for this total stranger fermented, turned into indignant fury.
‘You don’t know a thing about me. Not a thing. You think it’s just some silly little game I’m playing?’
‘No. No, that is absolutely not what I mean.’
I was shaking now, fear and rage and bitter sadness seizing up inside the fibres of my muscles. ‘Who the hell do you think you are, making judgements about me? About who I am?’
She folded her arms, gave a long, slow, nod. ‘OK. All right, Ellie, I’m sorry.’ But then she said, ‘Last chance then. Whatever it is you’re not saying. The next stop is a formal interview and I know you’re not going to want to go there. I don’t want to go there.’
It came into focus clearly then, right in front of me, the choice I was making. In one bowl of the scales sat the right thing to do, the real truth, and justice, whatever that would mean for me. All crammed into a dish the same size as its opposite, which held only one thing: my mother, and the sacrifices she had made for me, was bigger and denser and weightier than any and all of those things.
‘Ellie.’
‘Yes, I heard you. I haven’t got anything else to tell you.’
‘All right then. Have it your way. I’m going to have to call you in to the station, all right? Call this number,’ she said, handing me a card, ‘and we’ll work out an appointment, today or tomorrow, latest. In the meantime, you need to stay out of our investigation. Is that clear?’
I said nothing.
Her head tilted to the side, she said again, ‘Is that clear?’
‘Yes.’
I watched her walk out of the park and cross the road. My teeth were chattering. The cold had got into me, it had threaded up over my legs and proliferated. All my fingers were numb with it, and I flexed them without thinking. A sickening bolt of pain crashed through my bad hand and I reeled for a moment, eyes shut, riding it like a boiling wave, and when it subsided, I was aware of a buzz in my pocket.
Two texts in succession. A message first:
Sorry for the delay, we’ve had the police here. But I found your aunt’s number. Keep safe, Samira.
And then an electronic business card.
Power, Bernadette. Followed by a number.
I held it in my hand for a long time, after the screen went dark.
Thinking, did you lie to me, Mum?
Who are you?
Who are we, really?
48.
Charles Cox Psychotherapy Ltd.
Clinical audio recording transcript
Patient name: Eleanor Power
Session date: 17 September 2006
CC: So – come and sit at the table this time – how are things with you?
EP: Fine. What’s all this … [laughs] are we doing art this week?
CC: I wanted to try something new with you.
EP: Uh, OK?
CC: So a few sessions ago we did that piece of work where we held the space for Siggy to come to the foreground—
EP: I don’t want to do that again. I don’t … no, sorry—
CC: O
K, Ellie – just sit down a moment – we’re not going to do anything you don’t want to do. All right? Trust me. Do you trust me?
[pause: 21 sec]
EP: [whispers] Yeah.
CC: Good. Good, Ellie. So. I understand that you’re reluctant to make these connections between what Siggy shows you, and your own experiences.
EP: Yeah.
CC: But … look, the other way we can look at it is that – and remember the mind works in some incredible ways, it really can do anything – we could see that possibly this part of your identity is creating a narrative, like a story, in a way. Like a way of understanding something that is traumatic, that it wasn’t able to make sense of when it happened.
EP: Right.
CC: [laughs] OK, you don’t sound sure. That’s OK, it’s a new way of looking at it, might sound a bit outlandish. But, so what I wanted to do with you was to have a think about some of the details in the dreams you’ve talked about a few times. Does that sound all right to you?
EP: I suppose so.
CC: Great. So … hold on, let me just find them. I made some notes from our previous sessions about the dreams. Here. So you’ve talked before about a dream that you’re trapped – that Siggy is trapped – and there’s a fire.
EP: Yes.
CC: And she won’t cry out.
EP: No.
[pause: 41 sec]
CC: Ellie? I’m sensing some real reluctance about—
EP: No, look it’s just … I just hate them. The dreams. Even just talking about them, now, I can feel her right here—
CC: At the front of your head?
EP: Trying to, I don’t know, crowd me out. You know?
CC: She’s very intrusive right at the moment.
[pause: 23 sec]
CC: This would be a great time to access some of the visual information that might be hidden there—
EP: OK give me the—
CC: Paper’s here, OK, and the pencils—
EP: Right. Here’s the fire. [scribbling] There’s stairs or steps here.
CC: That’s great Ellie. Is that Siggy there?
EP: Crouching. She crawls under something, like this, like a piece of wood or a door or something, I don’t know.
CC: And she’s on her own?
EP: In there she is, yeah but … out here—
CC: The other side of a wall, or a door?
EP: Yes, I don’t know … out here, there’s someone else.
CC: Who is it?
[pause: 14 sec]
CC: OK.
[pause: 11 sec]
CC: Ellie you can keep your eyes shut like that if it helps, but I’m putting just a plain pencil into your hand and the paper is right in front of you. If you can draw anything about this person—
EP: I don’t … I’m sorry. I don’t know. It’s a man. Don’t know him.
[pause: 33 sec]
CC: Shall we have a little break? Some water?
[pause: 56 sec]
CC: Ready to try again? Good. This is really great work Ellie
EP: OK. Can I-I want to draw to the building.
CC: The building from?
EP: The other dream. I see this building like, every night, pretty much. Can I have another piece of – thanks. So it’s long and – like this – but there’s a section right at the end here that’s fallen down.
CC: OK. So what’s this … out the front?
EP: Like … it’s like a big field.
[pause: 25 sec]
EP: Not grassy though, something, darker, I don’t know.
CC: Great. Is that – are you finished with that one? OK. So. What is the feeling that comes with this building?
EP: The feeling?
CC: How you … how Siggy might feel about this place. Is it comforting, seeing this picture? Scary? Something else?
EP: I-I don’t know.
[pause: 22 sec]
CC: Does this place have a connection with the fire, do you think?
EP: I don’t think so. No I think the fire is somewhere else.
[pause: 35 sec]
EP: I don’t know.
CC: You’re doing great. Ellie? This is great, we’re really getting somewhere. Can we have a think now about what this building might be for? It looks … I mean, I’m guessing it might be a little too big to be just one home?
EP: No, it’s not a home. I mean, people live there but …
CC: Right … so is that a lot of people? Anything else you can say about this place?
[pause: 24 sec]
CC: I mean, might it be a … I don’t know, like a hospital? A boarding school?
EP: No. I don’t think so.
CC: Like a hotel or …?
EP: No, nothing like that, it’s all broken up, you know?
CC: OK sure.
[pause: 14 sec]
CC: And is this where the little boy is?
EP: No. He’s not … he’s never at the building. He’s … somewhere else.
CC: Do you think you could draw something—–
EP: No.
[pause: 38 sec]
EP: I think I’d like to finish now.
49.
Mae
After dropping Kit at the café to talk to Ellie, Mae raced down to Abson Street. The patrol car he’d sent ahead parked round the corner, tucked out of sight the way he’d instructed. But when Mae parked up and tapped on the window, the constable inside confirmed what Mae had already suspected. There was no sign of either Cox or his van.
Mae thanked him and sent him on his way, then radioed Control for an update. Cox wasn’t at his home address either, and the woman in the bookie’s beneath his flat said she hadn’t seen him since he’d left that morning.
He thanked the operator and got her to take Cox’s plates and description again. ‘Any sign of either, get back to me straight away,’ he told her.
Back in the driving seat with a decent view of the flat, he cranked the window a bit to stop it steaming up. Christine wasn’t going to like the news he was about to break to her. He’d wait for Kit, he decided, twisting in his seat to remove whatever was digging into his hip.
It was the bloody watch, obviously. What was he supposed to do with it? His granddad had made such a thing about giving it to him: his sixteenth birthday, when he hadn’t seen his mum for what, three years?
He passed it from hand to hand now, snaking the links around his fingers, clicking and unclicking the clasp. To remind you she loves you, Jobu had said, not a hint of irony about it. It had been just the two of them that afternoon. Mae had discreetly nipped out for a cake to replace the blackened disaster his grandad had attempted, and neither of them had mentioned the switch. Jobu had lit candles, and they’d eaten the cake from paper plates and shared the bottle of Stella that had been bought especially weeks earlier. Once the festivities were over and Mae had helped Jobu to wash and get ready for bed, the first thing he did was ride down to Gipton to pawn the watch. After that, he scored a half-ounce of resin from his guy Paul and didn’t resurface until he’d turned the whole lot into curling blue smoke.
It was a testament to humanity how, three weeks later when Jobu died, the pawnbroker had taken one look at Mae’s swollen face and handed the unsold watch back to him without a word.
A car horn sounded, right next to him, and Mae jumped half out of his skin. It was a black cab: and Kit was in the back seat, laughing her head off. It pulled in just ahead of him, and she got out.
Mae dropped the watch into his jacket pocket and met her on the pavement.
‘Having a bit of a snooze, Sarge?’
‘No, I was just – nothing. Ellie OK?’
Kit shrugged, handed her driver the fare and slapped the roof. ‘Lockdown, basically,’ she said, folding the receipt into her wallet and pocketing it.
Something about her manner was off. ‘Something happened?’
She tutted, as if at herself, shook her head at the sky. ‘No, I just got a bit involved, you know? Tried to talk to her about
her health. Turns out she doesn’t really like talking about it to complete strangers.’
‘Right.’ Stood to reason, he supposed.
‘Yeah. Then I read her the riot act and got her to book in at the nick. She wasn’t happy. You?’
Mae shook his head. ‘If he was here, he’d gone by the time we arrived. I’ve got an APB: nothing so far, but it’s early doors.’ He indicated the Powers’ flat with a jerk of his head. ‘Shall we?’
Christine opened the door to her home and invited them in without a word.
‘Are you going to wait for Ellie?’ she said, hovering in the hall as they went into the living room. ‘I don’t know when she’ll be back.’
Kit shook her head. ‘Couple of questions for you, actually,’ she said.
Christine went through and perched on the arm of one of their threadbare sofas, crossing her hands and her knees. ‘Go ahead.’
‘We have reason to believe Matthew was in touch with Charles Cox.’
Her eyelids fluttered closed. She muttered something inaudible.
‘Sorry,’ Kit said, softly, ‘could you—?’
‘I said, I knew this would happen. I knew it.’
‘What do you mean?’
A long sigh. ‘Matt is very interested in Ellie’s condition, but he can also be very controlling. He wanted to know everything about her. He wanted to keep an eye on her all the time.’
Mae and Kit exchanged a look, thinking the same thing, but Mae was the one to say it. ‘Why did you not mention this before?’
She touched her fingers to her temples and pressed. ‘I mean, it was nothing … dark, exactly. Just that Ellie has very specific needs, and Matt, lovely as he is, does like to challenge them. I did find out that he was speaking to people from her past.’
‘How did you find out?’
She stared at him. She was measuring her words.
‘I need to know this please, Christine. What you found out and how.’
She turned and spoke to Ziegler. ‘I’ve heard him on several occasions call her Siggy.’
‘The name of her—’
‘Her alter, yes, exactly. That’s very, ah, triggering, for her. I got the sense that he enjoyed her weakness. It’s not uncommon.’
Ziegler did an admirable job of remaining impartial but he could feel the indignation coming off her in waves.