Trauma: a gripping psychological mystery thriller

by Dylan Young

  I take the turn and follow Stamford. The stairwell fills with his big backside covered by black trousers that are shiny over the rump. His shoes have rubber soles, his white shirt has the cuffs rolled back to reveal thick forearms. One, on the left, has a tattoo.

  I follow him into an office with open windows facing the busy street outside. The room we enter has a paper-cluttered desk, filing cabinets, corkboards and three computer monitors. In the corner is a kettle surrounded by a handful of mugs and canisters. Beneath it is a mini fridge. The office chair is empty.

  ‘Mandy’s day off. She goes to college.’

  ‘Is she your assistant?’

  ‘Yeah. My sister Lucy’s girl. Purple hair and nose rings. Mandy, that is. She’ll grow out of that if she sticks. She says she has a taste for this. Before her it was all temps. We’ll see.’

  Stamford opens another door into a second room. This one has better furniture, a pale desk, the chair behind is more substantial and padded. Two armchairs squat on the other side of the room.

  ‘Take a seat. Coffee?’

  ‘Okay.’ I suppress the urge to ask what kind he has.

  Stamford disappears back into the outer room and talks to me with the volume up a notch through the open door.

  ‘It’s only instant.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say. No point being a coffee snob in New Cross.

  ‘Sugar and milk?’

  ‘Yes, to both. One sugar.’

  Certificates and licences pepper the wall behind the desk. Association of British Investigators. Information Commissioner’s Office registration number. Plus a photo of a younger, thinner Stamford in his Met uniform. All hung like hunter’s trophies to inspire confidence in the punter this side of the desk.

  I presume.

  Stamford brings the coffee, hands me a mug and then sits in an armchair. I follow suit. There’s a coaster on the desk and I dock my mug.

  ‘Biscuit?’ asks Stamford.

  I shake my head. This is cosy. We’re doing informal.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ he says. ‘And once again, I apologise for what happened last Saturday. I assure you it was not an ambush.’

  ‘But you still work for Harriet.’

  ‘I do. But what happened was… unacceptable. Unprofessional. Mandy and I had words. Though how many of them stuck is anyone’s guess. She’s feisty.’

  ‘Mandy or Harriet.’

  ‘Both,’ says Stamford.

  The coffee is nothing like my bean to cup. But it is warm and wet when I sip it.

  ‘So,’ continues Stamford, ‘I looked into the anaesthetist business. Not much joy, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No. I got it wrong.’ I tell him about my visit to Sergeant Keely and DC Messiter. About what they told me about Emma’s friend, the drug user.

  ‘More or less what I found out,’ Stamford says.

  ‘The police think I’m becoming confused.’

  ‘Are you?’

  I smile. ‘Why don’t we stop playing games? You know all about me. Even if you don’t, Harriet does. She must have told you about my fugues.’

  ‘You suffer from hallucinations.’

  ‘Very specific kinds of hallucinations. They’re highly repetitive. The people I meet in these hallucinations are always the same people. The place I meet them is the same place. I’m awake, but not fully, and I’m not aware of what I’m doing physically.’ I pause and then add, ‘but lately they’ve changed.’

  Stamford’s expression is neutral, wanting me to explain and I’m happy to oblige. I let the words pour out.

  ‘I had what they call an SBI, a severe brain injury, that left me with total amnesia. Ever since I became fit enough to walk and feed myself, I’ve been trying to fill the huge void in my head. Most of everything I do and have done for the last year involves trying to remember. I do this in several ways. The first is listening to people. Asking them to tell me, or better, show me photographs or videos. Most of the time these might as well be of a stranger. I can tell from looking in the mirror that these images are of me. But it’s like looking at someone else. Occasionally, a word or a sentence works. Something will click and I’ll remember a fragment which leads to another. Like dominoes.’

  Stamford sips his coffee. His mug is charcoal-coloured with the words GET SHIT DONE in big white letters.

  ‘Then there are things I find out for myself. One of the best ways is experiential memory. Going back to places I’m supposed to have visited in the past. Seeing people or buildings again. Sometimes that works.’ I toy with telling him about Nicole. But that can wait. ‘And then there are the fugues.’

  I tell him about the rooftop bar, and Ivan and the dancing girls and faceless Emma and plunging off the roof into the water below. In my head I sound like a stuck record. When I finish, Stamford’s expression is pained.

  ‘Are they significant, these fugues? Can you make sense of them?’

  I shrug. ‘They’re more abstract than logical. But I’m convinced they mean something. Who is Ivan for example? And why did a statue I haven’t seen before suddenly appear and survive being sandblasted into oblivion by a storm whereas everyone else around her didn’t?’

  ‘Must be very frustrating,’ Stamford says.

  ‘Or a very convenient way of a guilty man hiding behind his illness.’

  He smiles. A thin, knowing smile that tells me he’s read the Harriet textbook of accusations. ‘It must be tough. Not knowing.’

  ‘Sometimes I clutch at drawers.’

  He frowns.

  ‘I meant straws. That’s another quirk of mine. My friend Josh calls me Captain Quirk of the sadship Mentalprise.’

  Stamford winces but is still smiling. ‘Josh sounds like a character.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘You’re never tempted to go back to Turkey? To where it all happened?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it. I had a lot of sinus pain for a while. Long plane journeys at altitude were not recommended.’

  ‘I’m sure the Turkish police would like to interview you.’

  I nod. ‘We’ve spoken. Sergeant Keely said I should. She was present when I did, but I couldn’t help them.’

  Stamford locks eyes with me. ‘I’ve been to Turkey. To the beach where Emma died, and to the hotel you stayed in. I taped it all. Do you want to see?’

  ‘Experiential triggers are one of the best ways to remember.’ More stuck record.

  ‘Okay.’ He walks around to the business side of the desk and jiggles a white wireless mouse. ‘Give me a second to set up.’

  I wait and sip the coffee. It’s too sweet. I think Stamford was generous with the sugar. Are teaspoons of a standard size, I wonder? Did he use heaped or level? Three minutes later, Stamford sits back from hunching over the screen. ‘Up and running.’

  He swivels the screen so that I can see it. For now it’s frozen, a smeared image of sand and sea. It could be anywhere. But it isn’t. It’s Turkey. Where Emma died and where I almost died.

  ‘Ready?’ asks Stamford.

  ‘Yup,’ I reply.

  Stamford presses play.

  32

  I watch the video, shot, Stamford explains, on a GoPro attached to a baseball cap on his head. There’s no sound, but Stamford provides a voice-over. He bobs along a stone and pebble beach that seems to go on for ever with the sea aquamarine and flat in a shallow bay beyond. Ahead, sand stretches in a long lazy yellow arc. He turns 180 degrees to face north. Here, the sand ends in some barren rocky cliffs. Then the view turns away from the sea, back towards the scrubby foliage behind, bordering a road that runs the length of the beach. Stamford walks forwards and stands at the edge.

  A car goes by; a dusty old Mercedes. A family walk past. Blond-haired children with towels around their waists and backpacks with snorkels poking out from the flaps. They look hot. Germanic or Scandinavian, I guess.

  Opposite is an entrance. The sign above an archway reads, Mavi Pansiyon.

  I see the world from Stamford’s viewpoint. But
nothing is familiar.

  Not the little garden with the outdoor seating area under a canopy: ‘This is the breakfast area,’ Stamford commentates as the video rolls.

  Not the pathway leading down past the office and through the garden with hammocks and swing seats in discreet areas walled off by tall plants: ‘Guest area.’

  Not the small blue bungalows lining the pathway where the video halts at number 31: ‘This was your room.’

  A hand reaches for the door handle. I glimpse a tattooed forearm. The door swings inwards to reveal a white room with tiled floors and a double bed with a blue eiderdown. Stamford enters, looks around, steps into a grey, tiled bathroom with modern chrome fittings.

  ‘Anything?’ he asks.

  I shake my head. On-screen, Stamford fast forwards the video. Back out to the road, right, and then back over to the beach. To a bar with scattered tables and chairs arranged haphazardly under parasols on the beachfront. I read Flames Bar on sun-bleached signage. On-screen, Stamford sits, the view out to sand and sea, then swinging left up the beach to the north end and the cliffs.

  ‘You were both here the night it happened,’ Stamford explains. ‘I’ve spoken to two couples who were also there. One, a German couple with good English, were on the next table. They said you and Emma were relaxed. Together until Emma got up and walked up the beach alone. You stayed seated for ten minutes after she left. Then you got up and followed.’

  I’ve heard all this before. On-screen, Stamford is looking at the bar, which, in reality is more a small shack with bar stools and bottles on shelves and a chest freezer under an awning. Very basic.

  ‘Why did Emma leave the bar alone?’ Stamford asks.

  I don’t know. I communicate that with a shake of my head.

  Stamford continues. ‘You were maybe forty yards from your hotel back over the road. You could have gone there for a drink.’

  ‘But it had no sea view,’ I say.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe Emma forgot something.’

  ‘But you’d been out to eat. You were seen in Cirali village at a place called Yoruk’s. It was about ten when you arrived at the Flames Bar. My guess is you were calling in for a nightcap. Emma left her beer half drunk.’

  ‘Did they play music?’

  ‘Yes. The owner was Dutch. People go for the view and the music. Chilled-out jazz funk. I think I heard some Leonard Cohen when I was there. Not an oud in sight.’

  ‘Oud?’

  ‘A kind of traditional guitar. You’d know it if you heard it.’

  His words distract me. From somewhere, from the deep dark depths of my mind something shifts. ‘Toilets,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They have no toilets. Emma wanted the loo. That’s why she left me alone.’

  Stamford freezes the video.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No. But something came back to me then.’

  ‘It would make sense.’ Stamford grabs a pen and scribbles something down. ‘It also might explain why the German couple thought you became restless and kept looking at your watch.’

  ‘When she didn’t come back, you mean?’

  ‘You left half your beer, too.’

  ‘But then what?’

  ‘North. To where it happened.’

  33

  He presses play and the video speeds up again. The beach flies past as he heads up towards the north end.

  ‘Quieter up here. Farther away from the village. Mostly campsites. Boats moor in the bay here, too.’

  He slows the video to normal speed as, on-screen, he approaches the jagged stones that make up the sea cliffs jutting out into the bay and cutting off the beach. A few yards from where the cliffs begin, he turns inland, follows a path in and then up along a very narrow switchback sand trail to the very top. There’s a superb view of the beach to the south and the mountains behind. Then the scene shifts forwards towards the cliff edge. Finally, we’re at the precipice and the camera view tilts dizzily down towards the water and the rocks beneath. Where Emma was found.

  ‘If you want me to stop at any time?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  The camera pans right, back towards the incongruous, fractured stone and concrete jetty standing proud of the water along the beach. A different view of it from the clifftop. I’ve seen this view many times before but only in police photographs. Seeing it in real time like this is very different.

  ‘That’s what I fell off. They found me somewhere around that jetty.’

  ‘You were in the water, bleeding from a head wound. Emma’s body was washed up against the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs below where I am standing with the camera.’

  Stamford freezes the frame. The jetty is rough and ready, patched and uneven, the rocks on which it is built piled beneath it. A high, jerry-built platform with no barriers or fencing. I’ve seen images of the party boats tied up here. Brigs with sails that are never unfurled, disembarking passengers from their top decks along wooden gangways they keep on the boats on this jetty. But never images of anyone jumping or diving from it. Too dangerous because of the other, older collapsed structures beneath it. Not big on health and safety is this part of the Turkish coast it seems.

  Stamford unfreezes the video and lets it pan back to the viewpoint from the cliff, freezes it again. I stare at the screen for a long time; at an azure sky and parched rocks, the blue-green sea below. ‘It makes no sense either of us being anywhere near that path.’ I shake my head.

  Stamford looks at me, his head bobbing. ‘No. Not in the dark. Would have been pitch black.’

  ‘It seems mad. But we must have had a reason.’

  Stamford checks his notes. ‘Emma left the hotel before you got back. Maybe fifteen minutes had passed. When you saw she wasn’t there, you asked the manager’s son if he’d seen her. He told you she’d turned left out of the hotel and walked north.’

  ‘Did I follow?’

  ‘Yes. Two hotel guests saw you running up the road. You went onto the beach. A short time later, someone moored on a boat forty yards out in the bay hears a scream and splashing. Then more shouting. They used lights from the boats and they saw you floating. Someone jumped in and fished you out. By the time police arrived, they’d found Emma’s body too. But it was the rocks that killed her.’

  I squeeze my eyes shut. Try and remember. The story is one I’m horribly familiar with but all I see behind the blackness of my lids is more blackness. A void. I open my eyes.

  ‘Harriet thinks Emma and I had a fight. That I was chasing her.’

  ‘That isn’t how I read the narrative. It’s more that you were worried about her, trying to find her.’

  ‘But what if she’s right? What if we fought and I pushed her?’

  Stamford stares. ‘Did you?’

  I want to believe that I couldn’t do that. I avoid answering with another question. ‘Did the German couple at the bar think we’d been fighting?’ I ask.

  ‘No. They didn’t.’

  ‘Then why did Emma leave that hotel alone?’

  ‘Why do you think?’

  I shake my head.

  Stamford prompts me. ‘Why does anyone go anywhere in a hurry?’

  I run with it. ‘Either to get away from someone or something, or to meet someone or something.’

  Stamford looks pleased. ‘Deductive reasoning. Ying and Yang. So if Emma wasn’t trying to get away from you–’

  ‘Perhaps she was meeting someone.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But who? Cirali is a sleepy beach resort. Emma wanted a complete break. She was searching for her inner hippy. At least, this is what I’ve been told.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘If she wasn’t running from me, and I hope she wasn’t, if she was going to meet someone, who could it have been?’

  Again Stamford nods. ‘You were in the middle of nowhere. I will state the obvious now, but I find it sometimes helps to vocalise these things. If she was meeting someone, then it
was either a local or a visitor. The Turkish police did a good job of eliminating locals. Cirali isn’t an enormous place without tourists. They knew everyone who lived there.’

  ‘Then that leaves the visitors.’

  ‘And everyone who stayed in Cirali had to show their passports. They’ve all been traced and more or less ruled out.’

  ‘So where does that leave us?’

  ‘With the one group of people you haven’t mentioned.’

  I ponder. My research on Cirali suggested it attracts all sorts but those that spend any time there fall into two camps. The younger set: Scandinavians, Russians and other Europeans, looking for the simple life. Perhaps hiking the Lycian Way with backpacks. Or hippies and surfers willing to go off-grid and camp out on one of the many beaches further along the unspoilt coast.

  And then there’s the other lot. The socks-and-sandals brigade. An older set decked out in safari suits with wide-brimmed hats. History buffs clutching guidebooks as they clamber over the crumbling stones of the ruins of Olympos; the ancient city that sits incongruously at the south end of the beach. A mecca for Marcus Aurelius fans hoping to pay homage to his burial place. This same group would also be drawn to the Chimaera. The eternal flames that burned all year round from trapped gas escaping up through fissures in the rocks. Greek mythology there, as it was then, still doing its thing for all to see. I’ve read that one thing to do in Cirali is to trek up to the Chimaera to see the flames still alight after dark. Some people in the YouTube videos I’d seen were even toasting marshmallows.

  As you do.

  So Cirali wasn’t just a laid-back beach. It attracted day trippers by the score. I share this with Stamford. He listens, impressed.

  ‘Correct. And people who came for the day in coaches and minibuses would not need to show identification to anyone. But the busloads from Antalya had long gone by the time you were sitting in the Flames Bar on the beach. Too dark to visit Olympos then.’