“You said it was forty-eight hours you lost. Did your wife know where you were? Or did she have an idea?”
“Apparently, I called her and said I was doing a run up north, that I was too tired to drive much further and that I was stopping in at a hotel. But apparently I’d told everyone at the depot I was going home.” He licks his lips, clears his throat. “And before you ask, I wasn’t having an affair. I know that much. I’m certain of that much.”
I don’t say that it’s interesting he chooses to mention that. The thought must have crossed his mind. I wonder if it’s why he and his wife are no longer together.
“Tell me about the dreams,” I say.
“Just flashes. Fragments. Images. I’m in the car. I’m driving. But everything is off-balance, like the world’s slipped to the side. I can’t hold the car straight on the road. And then, it’s like an earthquake, like the world crunches to a halt for a moment. I’m aware of something heavy pushing back against the car. And then…” He pauses, as though unsure of how to describe what happens next. “I wake up.”
I nod. “You want me to find out what happened to you. You don’t think the memory loss is down to work, do you?”
“No.”
“I can’t promise I can find the truth. Ten years is a long time.”
“I read about you in the paper. Back when you found that girl, the one who was being hunted by her mother’s psycho ex?”
Mary Furst. The case still haunts me. A missing-daughter case that turned into a nightmare of old domestic abuse and ended in a brutal murder.
I find myself shifting position this time. I wonder if he notices.
“You’ve got a reputation for these unusual cases, is what I’m saying. That story, it stuck in my head.”
I lay out my payment structure. He agrees with everything I say. I could double it, and I don’t think he’d bat an eyelid. But that’s not who I am. He fills out the form carefully, his handwriting neat and controlled.
***
When he’s gone, I draw up a plan of action. I’m waiting for some information to come in on other cases. Most of them are routine jobs. Can do them with my eyes closed. A lot of eye work is basically checking paper trails, waiting for people to get back to you. It’s dull. Cases like the Furst girl, they’re rare in the day-to-day.
I check the information he left behind. Look at the precise dates of when he blacked out.
I see the date he was found, with no memory, in his dented car.
Get a sick feeling in my stomach.
***
Driving out to Kirkcaldy, I pass through a small village called Dunshalt. From there, I hit a long road guarded by trees on either side. Driving during the daylight, I hope that this might make me feel easier. It doesn’t.
If I have to drive to Kirkcaldy, I tend to use alternate routes. But given what I realized when I saw the dates that Lucas Clayton lost his memory, I knew I had to come this way. Spark my own recollections. Convince myself that I’m being paranoid.
The car he drove—a gray Merc—was the same make and model I remembered driving Elaine and me off the road all those years ago.
Driving between the trees, I try not to remember the argument we had, instead focusing on the good times.
When I emerge from the trees, there’s a field to the left. I slow down, stop at a section of wall that was replaced a long time ago. It’s weathered now, no longer as new as it once was. I get out of the car, touch the stones. They feel too smooth and too new to me.
I look across the field.
Close my eyes. Remember the taste of blood in my mouth, the crushing weight of the car. I remember pulling Elaine out from the wreck, thinking there was a chance she was still alive.
No. Focus on breathing. On the here and now.
What’s the technique?
Focus.
Five things I can see
Four things I can hear.
Three things I can feel.
Two things I can smell.
One thing I can taste or remember tasting.
And breathe.
I open my eyes again. The field is empty, crops growing silently. They wave gently in the breeze. The sun shines over the hills in the distance.
The world has moved on.
I have moved on.
I stopped looking for the other car years ago. Someone told me long ago that I was killing myself by thinking the world worked out like it did in books. Closure doesn’t always happen, he said. You have to deal with it.
At the time, my response was to punch him in the jaw.
I consider him a friend, now. Back then, things were different.
***
Clayton’s wife still lives in the house they owned together when they were married. When I tell her I’m here to ask questions about him, she rolls her eyes. I tell her that he’s started to remember some things, and that I’m helping him piece together what happened.
We go through to the kitchen. I lean against the breakfast bar. She pours herself a coffee.
“So what does he remember?” Getting right to the point.
I almost appreciate the change of pace. Usually, I’m the one with the questions.
“He doesn’t remember much,” I say. “But he thinks that maybe the car… It was damaged in something more dramatic than a wee dunt down the street.”
“Oh, aye?”
“How bad was the damage?”
“Few hundred,” she says. “I mean, beating out the panels, replacing the headlights. Paintwork, too. Then there was resetting the tires. They’d been knocked out of sync. I noticed that, when I took it to the garage. Bloody thing kept listing to the middle of the road. Either there was something wrong, or I was drinking the same as him.”
“He was under pressure at the time.”
“That man’s always been under pressure,” she says. “Even when things go well, he finds an excuse to wind himself up. I think he gets off on it, like? Is that a thing? Like, a sexual thrill that comes from being under the cosh all your life?”
“I’m a detective, not a psychologist,” I say.
She shrugs. Makes this face, then folds her arms. “Does he remember who the tart was, at least?”
“You thought he was having an affair?”
“I never believed that shite about not remembering. I always thought it was his way of getting out of something.”
“I’ve seen the doctor’s reports,” I say. “The amnesia is genuine, even if the cause is unclear.”
She makes a face. The kind that doesn’t believe a word of what I’m telling her.
“If he did have an affair,” I say, “why do you think that person never came back into his life?”
She turns away from me, and looks out the window to the back garden.
I change tack. “How were things between you, otherwise?”
“You mean, in terms of our marriage? We still slept in the same bed. Slept, mostly. Not much else. He’d been having problems getting it up. But he didn’t beat me, if that’s what you mean. He wasn’t a violent person. Even stepping on a bug concerned him, you know?”
That bit hits me hard in the stomach. I want to tell her I have my suspicions that his amnesia is related to a blackout from drinking. I want to tell her that I think he might be responsible for killing the woman I loved.
I want to tell her these things, but I say nothing, and excuse myself from her home.
***
What I need to be sure about is how he got from the depot to his home. There are a number of possible routes, but where did he go for two days?
He told me he usually kept a good wad of cash on his person in those days. He’d never been a big fan of cards, and liked to pay for things in cash where he could. It was, he said, how he funded his drinking. Funny little detail; after he lost h
is memory, he also lost his taste for the booze.
Cash. Great. Makes him even more invisible.
I mark the boozers and hotels between the depot and his old home. Google Maps gives me information, but I know that ten years could see any number of pubs and hotels close and open. What I’m doing is looking for a needle in a haystack.
There’s a phrase I read in a novel years ago. New York detective, used to be a policeman until he accidentally shot a kid. Leaves the force, becomes a private eye, and also an alcoholic. Should have been cliché, but something in the way the author wrote rang true as anything I’d ever read. Both the investigation work and the drinking.
There’s a scene that always stuck with me, where he’s explaining how you start looking for something when you have no idea where to start. How he had this word for the method: GOYAAKOD.
Stands for Get Off Your Ass And Knock On Doors.
Of course, in the modern world, you can sit on your arse and get the same results. I let my fingers do the knocking.
It’s a big list, so I narrow it down by keeping them to within a mile or two of the depot, and then looking for the cheapest rates. If what Clayton remembers about his behavior during those days is accurate, he’d be spending more on the booze than the accommodation.
Six tries, then someone says, “Are you from the police, then? Fuck me if you aren’t the slowest bunch of arseholes in the universe.”
“I’m not police,” I say. “But I guess what I said rings a bell?”
“This is my place, I remember every dickhead who stayed here. This one, he paid for his room, then he got pissed in the bar. And then I threw him out on the street. No refund, either. He blackened my eye. I called the police, they came round, then said because I couldn’t give them a name that there wasn’t anything they could do.”
“Are you online?” I ask. “If I was to send through a picture, do you think you could identify him?”
“Christ,” he says. “They can barely keep the phones working here, never mind the internet.”
“Okay,” I say. “Then I’ll come to you.”
***
When I walk into the bar at the Minstrel and Raven, the first thing I think is how the place probably hasn’t changed since the day it opened. There’s a bar with Tennents, McEwans, and an alleged selection of wines that runs to one red and one white. A couple of no-brand whiskeys. There’s a sign up behind the bar about how rooms are available at decent rates. An old duffer looks up as I enter and says, “You’ll be McNee, then.”
Which means he must be Mr. Newman, the hotel’s proprietor.
He nods to the young girl who’s cleaning glasses, and then comes out from the bar. He says, “You drinking?” and, when I shake my head, says to the girl, “Get me a pint, and this one’ll have…?”
“A black coffee,” I say. “I’m driving.”
“The new laws,” he says, “have been a killer for passing trade.”
“Good for road users, though.”
He shrugs. We grab a table in a corner.
“This guy,” I say, “he must have made an impression. You say you hadn’t seen him before?”
“Look, it’s over a decade ago, but even then I hadn’t seen him that I’d remember. He could’ve been in before, but most of the ones I remember are the ones who want to be remembered, you know what I mean?”
Our drinks arrive. I sip at the coffee. Tastes like dark water served at boiling point.
Newman says, “Show me the picture.”
I bring out my phone. “Bear in mind,” I say, as I show him an image of Clayton, “that it’s been ten years since—”
“That’s the prick.”
“You’re sure?”
He taps just above his left eye. “I know, son. Like I say, I remember the ones who want to be remembered. And he wanted to be remembered. Making a bloody scene, looking to start a fight.”
I thought about what Clayton had told me about his drinking, about how he felt it dulled his anger regarding his position at work.
“Do you remember anything else?”
“Aside from the black eye?”
“Aside from that.”
“I remember thinking he shouldn’t even have been capable of driving.”
I nod. “Look,” I say, I gave you two dates when I called. I need to know if you remember specifically which night it was that you threw him out, that you saw him drive off the way he did.”
He tells me. He’s certain.
I think that I wouldn’t be able to finish my coffee, even if it had a taste to it.
***
Back in the car, I do the maths. Work out how long it would take him to drive from the pub to the stretch of road where Elaine was killed.
At one point, I start to shake. Close my eyes. The Five to One technique. But I don’t even get to four. For the first time in years, I see Elaine’s face clearly behind my eyelids. I’ve never forgotten her, but over time her face has become less defined in my mind. To see her so clearly, it’s a shock to the system. My heart beats faster. My breathing catches in my throat.
Her lips move.
She’s saying something.
I open my eyes. Focus on the task.
Do you want this to be true?
I don’t answer the question. I can’t. If I stop to think, I know I’ll break down.
I track the route. Work out the average speed.
I think about Clayton bombing along the road. What was going through his mind? Was he finally ready to tell his wife the truth about what he’d learned that day? Or was he drunk enough to think he could pretend nothing had happened?
She told me earlier that day that he was the kind of person who got high on being nervous, on being in situations that made him wired. The way she spoke, he enjoyed being the underdog, the one that everyone was kicking around. Maybe that was why he turned to drink.
Did it matter? Alcoholics don’t always need a reason to start drinking.
I’d seen the doctor’s notes about his memory loss. Although they didn’t have a definitive answer, they made it clear they believed that his drinking could have affected his memory, could have been responsible for a mini stroke or similar that somehow affected his recall of those two days.
I trace the journey over and over again. He could have taken other routes. Anything could have happened that night.
And yet it seems too much of a coincidence.
I open the door of the car and vomit on the side of the road.
Lucas Clayton was driving the car. The car that ran us off the road.
Lucas Clayton killed my fiancée.
He’s the man they never found.
And he doesn’t even remember.
***
Two days later.
I pick Clayton up outside his flat in the Blackness area of Dundee. He gets in the passenger seat, says, “You have something to show me, you said?”
“I’m piecing things together,” I tell him. “Slowly. But… those memories you told me about… what do you think was happening?”
“They were dreams more than memories,” he says. “I mean, dreams represent something, but I’m not so sure they’re always literal.”
Or maybe he doesn’t want to admit what we both know. “You said you didn’t dream for years.” I start up the engine, pull away slowly, heading toward the town center, and from there the Tay Bridge that will take us over to Fife. “I have to wonder.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’ve been trying to figure out what you did for two days,” I say. “No one’s really sure about what causes this kind of complete memory loss, but you’ve seen the doctor’s reports. Your drinking… combined with physical factors… there’s a good chance that maybe you just blew a gasket that night.”
We both go quiet for a whi
le. On the bridge, we race seagulls to the other side.
When we’re across, I say, “You were trying to do the right thing, I think. You came out of the meeting, like you told me, and then you decided to go to the closest pub and drink away your worries. Maybe thinking you’d try and gather your thoughts. Maybe a little Dutch courage for talking to your wife.”
“Not a huge stretch,” he says. He looks out the window as we talk at the countryside flashing by.
“But you overdid it. You already told me how you were drinking more and more due to worrying about the stability of your employment. So what I’m thinking is that night was a real bender. You got in a fight,” I tell him. “You were chucked out. You’d actually paid for a room for the night, but they weren’t having it.”
“Jesus,” he says. “So where did—”
“You drove off. Half-cut and all, but you drove.”
“Jesus,” he says again.
I press the accelerator down just that little bit harder.
***
I don’t think about that night as often as I used to. There was a time I relived it every time I closed my eyes. We were driving home. We were arguing. Something stupid. That was what hurt so much later. What we were arguing about, there was no need for it. And I’d been the one at fault, even if I didn’t see it at the time.
Then the car came out of nowhere. Wrong side of the road. Beams on high.
Crash.
Flip.
Flip.
Crash.
In the field. Crawling out of the wreckage. Looking at the road. Seeing that gray Merc parked there. Trying to call out. Watching it drive off.
Going back.
Pulling Elaine out of the wreckage.
Realizing that she was already gone.
I wanted to find whoever was in that car. I wanted to find them. I wanted to show them what they had done. I wanted them to see the woman I had loved lying there, her face bloodied, her clothes torn. I wanted them to see her, to understand what they had done.
And then I wanted to beat them to death.
***
For a long time, I wasn’t grieving so much as I was angry. Anger kept me going. It allowed me to feel like I had a sense of purpose.
The Book of Extraordinary Amateur Sleuth and Private Eye Stories Page 26