by Kate Simants
‘I do.’
He nodded. ‘The tests they’ve run so far show evidence of flora: this kind of mould that you get in stored water sometimes. Aspergillus, it’s called. It’s not common in the river, so they tested the water in the boat’s tanks, and it matched. There were small amounts of detergent. Soap, residual chemicals you find in cleaning products.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Mae held my eyeline steady. ‘It looks like he drowned in his shower tray.’
‘You can’t drown in a shower tray.’
He drew a long breath. ‘There were traces of a powerful sedative in his system. Haloperidol: one of the drugs that they’d found in his locker at the hospital. We’re going on the theory that someone put those drugs there in his locker to get him sacked, and probably put the indecent images on his laptop as well. Wanting to discredit him, in advance of anything he might say. Whoever that was probably drugged him, then drowned him, and then …’ he paused, searching for a way to put it, as if there was any way to soften what he was telling me, ‘then put him in the river. They probably did it that way to keep the whole thing quiet, and to be certain he was … he didn’t wake up.’
There was more to come, I could tell from the way he paused, tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything.
Matt was dead, then.
And now I had no one at all.
I asked for a moment on my own, and Mae got out, saying he’d fetch some tea from the van.
What I didn’t know about grief back then was how random it could be, how moments that you didn’t think anything of at all, at the time, will come back and floor you with the force of a tidal wave.
I sat in that car, utterly alone, and what I recalled, what played out in real time in my mind’s eye with no conscious effort whatsoever was this:
Hyde Park, a month ago. Throwing chunks from the leftover heel of our baguette for the ducks in the Serpentine. Rain, fine as drifting ash, clinging in pinheads to the fine hairs of your face.
You turn to me, swing an arm across my shoulders, squeeze. You say, ‘This is good.’
I say, ‘Yeah.’
You throw a strip of crust at the water, and it splits the surface into rings.
‘Matt,’ I say, and I’m going to tell you I think we should call it off. Because this is the morning I woke to find the door of my bedroom kicked hollow from the inside, and Mum hurt and weeping.
But you look at me and I love you. So I don’t say it at all. But I watch those rings spread and the ducks bobbing gently in the wake and I know I’m going to hurt you. I know I’m going to be bad for you.
But you smile, and squeeze my shoulder again. And then, like you have a direct line to everything in my head you say, ‘It’ll be OK, Ellie.’
So I leave it all unsaid. Instead, I let this happen, I let that small swell of joy rise, and break, and I turn and I kiss you.
Because I believe you. It will be OK.
I believed you Matt. And now you’re gone.
There was movement, the car door opening, and Mae was back. He placed the two polystyrene cups carefully on the dashboard, lay his hands on his thighs, stared straight ahead, and told me the rest of it.
That Matt had been too close to the truth. About me, about all of it. She knew she’d lose me if I found out.
‘It seems to me that she wanted you to believe things about yourself so that you stayed dependent on her,’ he said after a silence. ‘Does that seem … possible, to you?’
I watched the steam curl and rise, fogging up the windscreen. There were a few moments when I could say nothing at all.
‘His car,’ I said eventually, hardly believing I was saying this out loud. ‘His car was outside our flat. She took it away because she thought I … I thought Siggy had driven it.’
He nodded. ‘Well, we can’t be sure yet, but my guess is that it was your—’ he stopped himself, then adjusted it: ‘it was Christine who put it there in the first place.’
He started telling me about the CCTV they’d found, but I wasn’t listening anymore. She parked the car there so I would find it. She must have known I’d been having lessons. I tried to picture her doing it, and found it wasn’t that hard to imagine, now. The woman into whom I had put my absolute, unquestioning trust, slipping outside when she knew I wouldn’t see her do it. Setting the seat, adjusting the mirrors, planting my coat in there, all so I would think …
So I would think I was a monster.
I lifted my tea, but my hands were shaking and it spilled. Mae took the cup from me, set it down and pulled out some tissues.
‘But she had an alibi,’ I said, barely above a whisper. ‘She was at work.’ Where else could she have been? She never went out. She didn’t have friends. All she had was me. That was the deal. Just us.
Mae folded the wet paper into a neat square and stowed it in the glovebox. ‘Her story fell apart. As long as she got her tasks done every shift, no one kept tabs on where she was.’
I shook my head. He was telling me that Mum – Christine – had gone out there and killed him. Held his head under the few inches of water. Watched the light go out.
I drank the tea without tasting it. When I finished it, I remembered the pictures. Bernadette’s little blonde niece.
‘What happened to her daughter?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Christine. She’s not my mother but she did have a daughter, Ellie. The one she pretended was me. I saw pictures of her. I think,’ I said, realizing how deep it went, ‘that all my stuff, my passport and my birth certificate and everything, it must be all hers. What happened to her?’
He spread his hands. ‘We don’t know that yet. We’ll find out, don’t worry.’
For a moment, neither of us spoke. Then Mae said, quietly, ‘Ellie, I’m sorry to have to ask you but we’re going to need your help with something.’
‘Like what?’
Releasing a slow breath, he reached for his tea, took a mouthful. Replaced it on the dash. ‘We can’t find her.’
I turned, wide-eyed. ‘What?’
He shrugged apologetically. ‘We’ve got half a dozen people looking for her. She’s not at home, she’s not at work, she isn’t anywhere else we know she has links to. She’s good at hiding. I know how you must be feeling Ellie, but—’
‘Do you? You’re telling me she murdered him. She tried to make it look like it was me, so I’d be scared of myself, even more scared than I already am.’ I shook my head, rage swelling around me like a rising tide. ‘You know how that feels? Really?’
I brought my knees up and hugged them to my chest. Sat like that for a while, saying nothing, just the sound of the rain tapping on the metal roof.
Eventually he hauled a breath in and shifted in his seat. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I can’t possibly know what that’s like. I can’t, I don’t. But we need to find her. We can’t do it without you.’
He reached over and took my hand, and squeezed it. I recoiled, crying out from the hot bolt of pain. I hadn’t even unwrapped the dressing for twenty-four hours, and the throb was now a steady percussion up my arm and into my shoulder.
‘You hurt?’ he asked, releasing the hand.
‘No,’ I said automatically, covering the hand with my good one. But I paused.
My whole life had been held together by lies. Lies I was a part of, lies I thought were truths. Lies I knew were lies but that we talked about as if they weren’t, and lies we admitted to ourselves. It was our default position: false until proven otherwise.
And I didn’t have to keep her secrets anymore.
I held my hand out in front of me, pulled the sleeve back and took off the glove. Mae frowned, watching me unwrap the dressing. As I did it, another recalibration: if Siggy wasn’t real, nor were the fugues. If the fugues weren’t real, then I hadn’t been outside that night.
And it wasn’t just the hand. I touched the place on my hip where the bruisin
g was still livid beneath the fabric of my jeans. ‘I was covered in injuries that morning.’
He frowned at my hand, then looked me in the eye. ‘Ellie, do you not remember getting hurt?’
I shook my head.
‘OK. Then I think we’re going to have to test you for the drugs we found in Matt’s system, too.’
I realized what he was saying. The bandage pooled in my lap, and I picked at the greying glue at the edges of the adhesive pad, finding a way in and peeling it away to leave a rectangle of white, saturated skin framing the raw wound. Mae pressed his lips between his teeth, shocked at the mess.
‘She said it was barbed wire. But it’s not true, is it?’
I’ve never seen anyone shake their head as sadly as he did just then. I nodded, let the hand drop into my lap.
‘She did this to me herself,’ I said, and I breathed a long, long breath in, as if I’d surfaced from a life underwater.
74.
Ellie
Mae wanted to take me to have the hand looked at before we did anything else, but I wasn’t having it. Later, I said. After. I needed to find her first. I needed her to tell me what she’d done.
I knew exactly where to take him.
A mist hung through the trees, the kind that seems to sag earthwards, thickening under its own weight. Several times Mae asked me if I was sure we were going the right way. He couldn’t see the trampled path through the brambles, or the track of her machete, the younger shoots from the branches she’d amputated on last year’s visit, or the one before that. This place beside the river was the one constant thing, unchanging through all the moves we’d had to make, all the upheavals. Our secret place.
I bent a young branch away from my face, twisted it limp.
Mae hung back, and when we got close I put my arm out to tell him, no further. Because there she was.
Our Welsh wool picnic blanket folded underneath her, a flask lying on the damp leaves at her back. The crisp, spikey shell of a fallen beech nut crunched under my step and she straightened, smoothed back her hair. But didn’t turn. The cherry tree was just beside her, to her right. Side by side, sharing the view.
As I got closer I saw that she must have been there a long while. Her hair was soaked, and she was opalescent with rain. She smiled lightly without looking up.
‘Here you are,’ she said.
‘Here I am.’
She patted the blanket beside her and reached behind her for the flask. ‘I really, really hoped you’d come.’
*
It had never been her intention to make me afraid, she said. She wanted me to forget what had happened to me in Bosnia, but I wouldn’t, and the only thing she could do was pretend that the memories were someone else’s.
I listened to all of it, sitting beside her, her low, smooth voice punctuated with the soft splashes of stored rain slip from the leaves above us.
About how much she loved me. About how she’d done everything she could to stop Matt from finding out, because she couldn’t bear the thought of losing me. Because I was all she had.
‘And now you’ve got nothing,’ I said.
She looked at me. ‘Baby, no. We’re going to find a way. I still love you. Nothing’s changed.’
I laughed, a single bitter syllable. ‘I have never been your little girl. There is nothing between us that I want to keep.’
She opened her mouth to protest it, but I hadn’t said it for a discussion. I could see the finality of it settle on her. Recognizing how completely she had lost, that the door had closed: I had never seen her beaten, but right then, she crumpled.
‘Ellie, please. I only wanted to help you. I wanted to love you and keep you safe and—’
‘No. No, you didn’t. That’s not how loving someone works.’
‘Don’t you tell me what love is. Don’t you dare.’ Tears gathered in her eyes and she rubbed furiously at them. ‘I gave everything for you. Do you not think I wanted anything else in my life? But you needed me. You were a mess. A total write-off, I’m not kidding. When I found you, you had zero chance of a decent life.’ Her voice wavered with the effort of controlling it. ‘You were a shell, you were just – empty. Couldn’t speak a word. You’d shake like a blind little rat every time I started the car. But I didn’t ever give up on you. Not ever.’
‘But I wasn’t yours to take!’ I shouted, pointing a shaking finger at her. ‘I wasn’t yours.’
I stood up, walked a few paces off, putting space between us because even through the deafening rage, I couldn’t bear to see what was happening to us.
She cleared her throat and called my name. I kept my back to her.
‘Ellie,’ she said again, softly. ‘Please. I need to explain.’
‘What?’ I leaned against the smooth bough of a beech, my hands behind me to hide their shaking.
‘I did an awful thing.’ She lifted an arm towards me, palm up, wanting me to go to her. I stayed where I was. ‘Come on, love.’
‘No.’
‘Please, Ellie.’ A sob burst out of her. ‘Don’t do this. Don’t make me lose you too.’
I watched her bend forward, pressing her fingers into the damp, leafy mulch of the ground. I saw a bone-deep, aching sadness pass over her face, slow and dark as a storm cloud.
As her eyes fluttered shut, the realization of where we were hit me like a glancing juggernaut. I moved my feet back instinctively, suddenly aware of what was beneath them.
My whole life, I’d thought we had come to this place for Siggy, to hold a space for her. But as this woman I hardly knew any more touched her hands reverently, desperately to the ground, I understood that we hadn’t come for Siggy at all. We hadn’t even come for me.
Our place in the woods was more than just a randomly chosen place of stillness. This was where she came to visit the child she had tried to replace with me.
‘She’s here, isn’t she?’ I asked. ‘Your daughter. Ellie.’
I didn’t get an answer, but I didn’t need one.
All this time, we’d been visiting a grave.
She got up. ‘I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I just wanted you to love me back.’
‘I did love you back.’ I held her gaze, but I had nothing else to give her. Not even here, where she had buried her own child. The heat in my eyes, the tears, they weren’t for her. They were for Matt, for the little brother I could hardly remember, for my mother, the real mother I’d had and lost. For all the things I had lost because of her. But I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t let her believe that I would cry for her.
We were never going back. I watched the truth of that settle on her. Up to that point, there was still a part of me that wouldn’t believe that she could have done what they said she’d done. Looking at her now, I realized I didn’t know her at all.
‘Good God,’ she said. ‘To think what I sacrificed. And for what? Look at you. You’re broken. On your own you’re nothing at all.’ For the first time, I saw contempt in her face. ‘I should have seen you for what you were. I should have left you where I found you.’
There was the sound of someone approaching.
‘That’s probably true, Christine.’
Mae. Hands in his pockets, looking past her, out towards the river. He brushed his hand across my shoulder as he passed me, before stepping across the broken branches and dead leaves, closer to her. ‘She would probably have been better off, all things considered.’
For a moment she looked around as if she was going to run.
‘You need to come with me, now,’ he said, one hand towards her. Gentlemanly.
She glanced at me, the swagger all gone. Then she dipped to pick up the blanket and the flask, not a trace of emotion in her movements, and tucked them under her arm. Before she turned away, she lifted her hand towards the cherry tree, and let her hand trail along one of its branches.
Then she shook back her hair, and walked off towards the path.
75.
Mae
Once Christin
e was booked in, Mae headed straight back up to his desk. Kit had been assigned to Ellie for the rest of day, sorting out somewhere for her to stay, and a first meeting with a specialist trauma psychotherapist.
McCulloch had told him to check in with her, but before he went to find her, he spent a few minutes at his desk, checking something out that he’d been putting off. He called Nadia. She cut him off the first time – he knew she would still be at the hospital where phone use was discouraged – but rang back a minute later.
‘Bear’s awake. Swelling’s going down, and the antibiotics are working.’ She sounded tired, but happy. ‘She’s asking for you, too.’
‘Good. Does she remember anything more about what happened?’
‘Kind of. She said she got really angry and she wanted to hurt them. But the collision with the sink was an accident. Seems like all of them agree.’
‘She’s not been forced to say that?’
‘Don’t see how she could have been, she was knocked out, and since then she’s been in here.’ There was a pause. ‘She did say one thing though.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Your friend. Kate, is it?’
‘Oh, Catherine. Kit.’
‘That’s it. Well, Bear asked if she might come over to visit too, when you do.’
‘Right,’ he laughed.
‘So, who is she?’ his ex-wife asked archly. He could hear the little twist of a smile in her voice.
‘Nadia, come on.’
‘What? You’re allowed to have someone in your life, Ben. It’s been a long old while.’ He tucked the phone between his shoulder and his ear, and on the screen in front of him he brought up the website he’d been looking at, one of those places that compares the prices of international travel for you. He put some dates into drop-down boxes and hit return.
‘I don’t think I’m her type, to be honest. We’re really just colleagues.’ Pretty much. Most of the time.
‘No? Worth a bit of an effort though? Only, Bear’s really taken with her. Says they’re going to go to some roller-skating thing together?’