by Jack Jordan
She immediately disliked the man. She had come across his kind before when going through the treatment process for her insomnia: consultants with egos too big for their small frames, speaking over her before she had the chance to respond to anything they said. Every time, she had left appointments enraged, and sensed quickly that this would be another meeting that would make her blood boil. But one good thing: he had mentioned the investigation first. She had a way in.
‘You lost your brother,’ he said.
‘I’m not here to talk about him.’
‘You’re looking into the whereabouts of a man you don’t know because he shares a likeness to your brother, are you not? Perhaps we should talk about him.’
‘I’m looking into the case of a missing man because no one else gives a damn. A missing man you yourself were assigned to treat.’
He was silent for the first time, as though each of her words had lashed at his tongue, rendered him speechless.
The scent crept back to her again. Screams echoed in her ears. Her skin turned ice cold, as though she was there again, submerged in the water. She pinched her thigh to bring herself back.
‘Investigating Finn’s disappearance has unearthed others. There isn’t just one victim, there’re six. And what I find interesting is that you were assigned to treat every single one of them.’
‘Is no one safe from your suspicions?’ he asked.
‘Not everyone is connected to the missing men, or has had their names mentioned in police files, or had meetings with Detective Seb Clark, who has been trying to bury these cases for years.’
He sighed into his lap.
‘This is what I was afraid of,’ he said. He took off his glasses and huffed a breath on each of the lenses, rubbed them clean with the end of his tie.
‘It’s good for people to distract themselves from grief with other activities, recommended even, but only when the activity isn’t destructive. This. . .’ He waved his hand through the air, as though her efforts were flippant, a child’s game. ‘This isn’t good. You’re hunting people down to punish them in some way. I believe this is because you’re being punished by your own grief, a grief you cannot escape unless it is faced head on, in here, with me.’
She scoffed a laugh. ‘That’s quite a conclusion,’ she said. ‘You’ve only known me for five minutes.’
‘On the contrary, I’ve known of you a lot longer than that.’
At first, she thought he knew of her because of Christian, but as he continued to belittle her, she wondered if his information came from the police, the officers who he knew well from past cases.
He spoke again, before she could. ‘I’m concerned about your mental well-being. You’ve had to deal with a lot of grief in your life. Your brother. Your mother. Your daughter. Perhaps you see this man from the journal you speak of as the brother you lost. Maybe you’re trying to help a stranger, who may very well not even need it, to make up for your past failings.’ She went to speak, but he spoke over her again. He wasn’t talking with her, but at her. She wanted to scream, demand to be heard. ‘You suffer from insomnia, which inhibits mental processing and the ability to make good decisions, to see the truth for the truth, a lie for a lie. In fact, I’d say this game you’re playing, this wild-goose chase that has you running all over town, is more of a break with reality.’
She stood up quickly.
‘You don’t even know me,’ she scoffed. ‘You’re absurd.’
‘Am I? Or have I seen this countless times, and hope to strike before it’s too late? I would never usually jump to the core problem so quickly with a client, but I’m worried that if I don’t do this now, there will be no stopping you. I want to help.’
She picked up her bag and hooked it over her shoulder.
‘I see what you’re doing. You’re going to make me out to be insane, a fantasist, all with the help of the police. Well, it won’t work. I won’t give in. Goodbye, Dr Hunter.’
She headed for the door.
‘If you won’t look after yourself for you, then do it for your family. Your daughter is growing up fast. Your husband is suffering too. You all are. Perhaps you should focus on the problems closer to home, rather than running around after a man you don’t even know.’
‘Perhaps you should go fuck yourself.’
She left his office and strode for the stairwell, ignoring the receptionist as she called after her to pay, and raced down the stairs with her heart thumping hard in her chest, the smell of citrus stained into her airways and tainting every breath.
Either Dr Hunter was simply another arrogant prick, or he was trying to throw her off track. In this case, she suspected him of both.
THIRTY-THREE
As Rose sat in the cab outside the doctor’s office, she wondered if he was right, if she really was mad after all.
The meter had been ticking over for the last two hours, racking up a bill she couldn’t bring herself to look at.
‘You’ve got the money for this, right?’ the taxi driver asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, her eyes never leaving the door to the building.
‘I’ll need half of it now.’
She sighed and pulled her purse out of her bag. Thrusting the notes towards him she returned her eyes to the window.
She wasn’t sure what time the doctor finished for the day, but she would be ready. She had left the building and walked up the street, only to draw out as much money as she could, call a cab, and turn back the way she’d come. If he was hiding something, she was going to find out what it was.
The driver drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, turned up the radio as though she wasn’t there.
The door to the building opened. The receptionist stepped out first, keys in hand, followed by the doctor himself. She watched them make their goodbyes and lock up for the night before heading towards their cars parked up on the side of the road.
‘Follow the Mercedes,’ she said, as she watched the doctor get behind the wheel.
The cab driver hesitated.
‘I’m not looking for trouble,’ he said.
‘Good, neither am I.’ She took the rest of the notes from her purse. The total amount of money she had given him added up to £250. ‘The Mercedes.’
He took the money and started the engine, following the doctor’s car as it left the parking space and headed up the road.
Her heart began to race. She didn’t know what she expected to uncover, but she wouldn’t find all the answers in the journal or the police reports. If she had a hunch she had to follow it, no matter where it led.
‘He your husband or something?’
‘No,’ she replied, sternly enough to keep him from asking any more questions.
The taxi followed the Mercedes down every street, hanging back a car or two behind, speeding up when the Mercedes got too far out of sight. For someone who wasn’t looking for trouble, he seemed to have done this before.
They followed the doctor through the night, out of the town and into the country, down dark, unlit lanes winding through the fields.
It was thirty minutes before the doctor stopped. He pulled into a cul-de-sac made up of seven large homes, each with double garages and expensive cars outside. The Mercedes pulled into an empty driveway. The taxi driver pulled up two houses away.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.
‘Will you wait?’
‘I’m not staying here if there’s going to be trouble.’
She watched the doctor leave the car and head inside the house.
‘Wait for me down the road. I’ll call you.’
‘All right.’
She took his number and looked up at the house again. The cul-de-sac looked familiar, but she couldn’t place why. She sat in the back of the cab and considered asking the driver to take her home again. This was her stupidest idea yet. What was she going to do, peer through the window and watch the man eat his dinner?
‘I can’t be on this job all night,’ he
said.
It was the push she needed. She stepped out and crossed the road towards the house.
The taxi drove away and left her in the dark. She stood before the house, watching as lights were turned on from the inside as the doctor settled in. It was a large house, too large for one person. For someone who seemed to exude confidence, she wondered if it was all an act, whether he was lonely.
Another car pulled into the cul-de-sac. She jumped behind the nearest hedge in the doctor’s front garden and peered between the leaves. The car pulled up right outside the house. The headlights split through the branches and shone in her eyes. She covered them with a protective hand until she was thrown into darkness again. Car doors slammed shut. Voices edged closer.
She peered through the branches and gasped.
Christian and Heather both whipped around at the sound.
She covered her mouth with her hand, held her breath.
‘Come on,’ Heather said and took his arm, but Christian hung back with his eyes on the hedge, as if he could see right through it. Her lungs burnt for air. She clamped her hand down and begged for him to move along.
‘Christian,’ Heather said, pulling at him softly until he followed.
They headed up the path and rang the bell, spoke too quietly for her to hear. When the front door opened the doctor greeted them like old friends. They stepped inside, shutting the door behind them.
Her heart was racing, her mind quicker still. Why would Christian and Heather visit the doctor together? Christian truly did have another life that she had no idea about. She remembered the pair of them sitting in her kitchen, falling silent when she entered, the guilt in Heather’s eyes. Perhaps they were seeing the doctor to help them bring their affair to light without breaking Christian’s deranged wife for good. The doctor seemed convinced she had broken from reality; she wondered which of them had planted that seed in his mind.
She got up and crossed the lawn, stopping before the lit window on the ground floor. The curtains were drawn but for a small crack between them. She moved left to right to take in the whole of the room.
The living room was similar to the doctor’s study: an impressive array of books, large armchairs, furniture she knew would feel as expensive as it looked. The doctor was sitting in an armchair with his legs crossed and his hands in his lap. Christian and Heather sat together on the sofa, taking it in turns to speak.
‘What’re you doing?’
Rose whipped around to the sound of the voice.
Adeline.
Immediately Rose felt like a school mum again, turning up to football tournaments to be met by Adeline’s judgemental glare. She had always been the ringleader. If she had been kinder to Rose, the rest of them would have been too.
Rose hadn’t seen or spoken to her since the day of the crash. She was sure she had caught glimpses of her in town over the years: whipping down an aisle in the supermarket, driving past her in a blur. By the tautness of the skin of her cheekbones and the sockets of her eyes, she’d had work done. Her face was so smooth it reflected the light from the window. Her eyes had a slight slant to them now. She remembered why the cul-de-sac looked so familiar: Adeline lived here, directly next door to the doctor.
‘I asked you what you’re doing,’ Adeline said.
‘I. . . I’m sorry.’
She stumbled away with her head down, her heart caught in her throat.
‘Come back here!’
Adeline grabbed her arm and spun her round.
‘Rose, I asked what you were doing, peering into the window of someone else’s home.’
Adeline dropped a black bin bag from her hand to the lawn.
‘It doesn’t concern you.’
Rose took a step back. Adeline took a step forward.
‘Maybe I should call the police.’
‘Do what you like,’ Rose said, and yanked her arm away.
Then she stormed off and broke into a run, almost fell as she turned the corner and stopped down the lane, panting in the dark. She pulled out her phone and called the cab driver. Knowing Adeline, she would knock on the doctor’s front door and tell him what had happened. If Rose was going to lie her way out of it, she had to get home before Christian.
THIRTY-FOUR
Rose stepped inside the house and called Lily’s name. Her voice echoed through the empty rooms.
The house was freezing, enough for her to see her breath. The lights were on but there was nobody home. The air seemed to move like a breeze, slipping between the open doorways. She put her keys in the dish on the side table and caught her breath.
The cab driver had sped all the way home. Every time a pair of headlights had appeared behind them, she thought of Christian gripping the steering wheel and pressing his foot down on the accelerator. But she had been paranoid. Each time, the suspected car turned off the road and down another. But she knew he wouldn’t be far behind. If Adeline had exposed her, Christian wouldn’t hesitate to chase after her.
She would take a plate of leftovers from the fridge, scrape it in the bin and leave the plate in the sink so it looked as though she had been home all along. She made to rush down the hall for the kitchen and stopped before the doorway to the living room. The door was open, revealing uneven shadows that didn’t fit her memory of the room. She flicked on the light.
The room was trashed.
The sofa cushions had been slashed, the white filling torn out and scattered across the room in clouds. Drawers hung open with their contents spewed all over the floor. Someone had flipped over the rug, presumably to look beneath. Nothing was untouched.
A burglary.
She turned from the room and raced up the stairs to her bedroom. The mattress had been cut open, the memory foam topper cut away in chunks. Feathers covered the carpet where the pillows had been searched. The wardrobe doors were ajar; clothes lay crumpled and shoeboxes were turned over in front of them. She rushed to her jewellery box, knocked to the floor beneath the dressing table. Each piece was accounted for, chains and jewels tangled together on the carpet.
No, this wasn’t a burglary.
She shook her head. This seemed different from the attack on Shane’s home. There were no words cut into the walls, no messages for her to take as a threat. But then the sight of her home ripped to shreds might be the message in itself. Or maybe the person who did this was looking for the journal. She felt her bag hanging over her shoulder and touched the notebook’s cover through the fabric. It hadn’t been an opportunistic burglar. If it wasn’t the police, it must have been about Finn’s journal. The intruder’s frustration was etched into his handiwork: each slash and cut and emptied drawer messier than the last, as if he was getting his revenge with every thrust of the knife: she had taken something from him, so he had to take something from her.
Her stomach dropped instantly.
The study.
She rushed back downstairs, slipping as she turned the corner by the foot of the stairs and bolted along the hall.
Each kitchen drawer and cupboard was left open, the contents littering the floor in a sea of steel and smashed crockery. She stopped in her tracks.
The study door was open.
Her legs threatened to buckle. He had destroyed everything in the house, no room left unscathed. She knew what she was going to find. Tears bit at her eyes. Her heart jumped in her chest. She pushed the door open all the way and instantly fell to the floor.
The paintings.
Violet’s face had been defiled with the knife again and again, holes in the material where her eyes should be, stabbed directly in the heart, her lips cut into a sinister smile.
She sobbed and tore her eyes away, staring down at the carpet through tears.
Jay too. She had almost forgotten how many paintings she had of him; they had been buried behind the layers of Violet. He had been dragged out of the past and into the middle of the room, stabbed in the face and chest again and again in such a violent attack that only she would ever know who
the paintings had depicted before. All except one. It was her favourite painting of him, worked from a photo taken in a field of corn, the gold of it shimmering in his eyes, the sun lighting his hair in white-blond and copper strands. The painting rested against the pile of others, his eyes on the door, waiting for her. She met them through the tears; he stared back at her.
The bay window had been smashed, and the curtains were billowing and whipping up with the breeze. Glass littered the carpet, reflecting the glare of the moon above the river. The wind carried the sound of it until she could hear the water chopping in her ears.
She lay down on the carpet and sobbed, the fibres bristling against her cheeks. She clawed at it, thrust her fists against it until the skin was red raw with burns and she heard a loud click from one of her knuckles. A scream ripped from her chest and echoed through the house.
‘What have you done?’
She sat up and whipped around. Christian stood behind her, keys in hand. The front door was left open, swaying with the through-breeze, and slammed shut until the whole house seemed to shake. He stepped around her and froze.
‘Why?’ he asked croakily. His face was an ashy-white. He stepped deeper into the room, glass crunching under the soles of his shoes, then sank to the carpet and cradled a painting of Violet to his chest, the wooden frame snapped and dangling from his grasp. ‘Why?’
‘I didn’t do this!’ She stood as she spoke, stumbling on shaking legs.
‘You’ve gone mad,’ he whispered. Tears rolled down his face and zigzagged through the stubble along his jaw.
‘I didn’t do this, Christian! How could you even suggest—’
‘Do you blame me?’ He let the canvas go and stood as the anger rose. ‘What you’re doing, it’s madness!’
‘Someone broke in. . .’ she stammered. She pointed to the window. ‘Someone broke into our home and did this!’
‘Because of you,’ he spat. ‘Because of everything you’ve done. Why were you at the doctor’s house tonight, Rose?’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘Don’t lie to me!’