He shifted in his seat again. ‘Do you remember the people who died, Annabel? You were working on all those bodies that were found decomposed in their homes. Do you remember?’
I nodded, although I hadn’t thought about them for a long time.
‘You remember Rachelle? Do you remember Shelley, the woman you found in the house next door? And the two who were found just before they started the investigation? Do you remember that I had a phone call from one of the victims, telling me where to find another one?’
I frowned at these specifics, trying to grip the memory and stop it slipping away.
‘They’re still trying to find the man who’s responsible for all this, Annabel. I think he’s the man you met. I think he did something to you and you were heading the same way as all those other people.’
‘But…’ Why was this such a struggle? Why wasn’t my brain working; why couldn’t I think clearly? ‘But I was… happy.’
‘You were happy, starving to death?’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It was just like… I don’t know… it was like floating away.’
‘But you didn’t want to die?’
‘I don’t think so. I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I just wanted to sleep.’
‘But you would have died if I hadn’t found you.’
‘You found me?’
‘I tried to ring you but your phone was switched off. I sent you a text, and a few hours later there was a really weird reply saying you were thinking of going away and you wanted to be left alone. In the end I went round to your house. The back door was unlocked. Your cat was going mental.’
‘Cat?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ve been going to your house every day and feeding her. She’s a lovely cat. What’s her name?’
The cat. I tried to find the other word in my head, searched for it, nearly gave up – and then suddenly it was there.
‘Lucy. She’s called Lucy.’
‘Well, that’s better than Puss, which is what Irene came up with.’
The colours were too bright, the green of the grass and the leaves on the tree that were red and gold and brown and every imaginable colour in between. And the sky, so blue, a bright blue that hurt my eyes.
‘My mum died,’ I said. ‘It feels like years.’
‘It was just over a fortnight ago,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I know how hard grief is – I went through it too. You need time, and as much support as possible.’
‘I should be doing things, shouldn’t I?’
‘I can help you with it. It’s alright. I spoke to the family relations officer at the hospital, so they’re keeping your mum safe until you’re ready. Nothing to worry about.’
The sun went behind a cloud and the breeze felt suddenly cold. I shivered and folded my arms in front of me.
‘Do you want to go inside?’
I looked back over my shoulder at the fire door, at the ward beyond it. ‘No. Can I stay a bit longer?’
He smiled then, a big happy smile, and I found I was smiling back at him. ‘You’re going to be OK,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. There’s nothing to worry about.’
He reached across to me and rubbed my arm, then patted my knee.
Rachelle came into my life a month after Justine.
The time between them was spent on study, whisky and porn. The only class I attended in that period was Nigel’s NLP – and every evening, after work, I devoted myself to further study in the subject as well as expanding into such topics as hypnosis, mind control and suggestion. I stayed up until I was too tired to see the computer any more, and at that point I would put a DVD on in the bedroom and watch it to the inevitable conclusion.
I knew now what all this had been leading to. I knew and understood it all with an astonishing clarity – that this was my calling, this was what I had been born to do, and that everything that had happened so far in my life had been leading up to this moment.
I met Rachelle whilst I was walking in the country park in Baysbury one Sunday morning. It was a bright day, cold, sunny – the sort of day you’d expect to find a lot of people in the park, which is why I nearly didn’t go. I’d forgotten that there was a big football match on and as a result everyone was at home or in the pub watching the game. Everyone except for Rachelle and me.
I walked past her, sitting on the park bench halfway up the hill, and immediately I was struck by her physique and the fact that she was sitting on the bench wearing jogging pants and trainers, a shapeless hooded top that she seemed to be shrinking into.
She did not pay me any attention and so I felt confident enough to turn back and sit down next to her on the bench.
‘Hello,’ I said.
She didn’t reply but she cast a glance in my direction, a nervous smile. She wasn’t used to being spoken to. She wasn’t used to attracting attention. She was used to hiding.
‘It’s a lovely day today,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said. Her voice sounded wheezy.
‘You’re out for a run?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I can do this hill in thirty-five seconds,’ I said. I had no idea if such a thing was even possible; it was a random guess at a number that completely did the trick: as if I’d flicked a switch, she engaged.
‘Really? Thirty-five? I can only manage sixty. That was last week.’
‘You’re fit,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m too…’
She’d stopped herself from saying it.
‘You’re on a journey,’ I said. ‘Every day is a step towards your goal.’
She looked up at me with astonishment in her eyes, blue eyes that looked too big for her pale, gaunt face.
I put a hand – tentative, but it felt like the right time – on her arm. She winced slightly but did not move away. I could feel the bones under my hand, as though the grey fleece fabric was the only thing between me and her skeleton.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Everything you think and feel is right. You’re choosing the right path.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘You can make the decision,’ I said. ‘You can choose what happens, how it happens.’
‘Can I?’ She was wavering.
‘You know you’re right,’ I said, keeping my voice even, keeping the eye contact with her. ‘You need to do the right thing at the right time.’
‘I need to know it will work,’ she said.
‘It will work. You can make that choice. If you decide it, it will be. You need to know this.’
A few minutes later she took me to her flat, which was a few streets away. We walked past a pub which was so full of people that some had spilled out onto the street, plastic pint glasses in hand, all focused on the big screens inside. The progress of the game – whatever it was – could be determined by the collective whoops and sighs. As we got to her front door I heard yells of delight from various properties and even, possibly, from the pub.
We had not spoken since she had stood up slowly from the park bench and started walking, but still she stood aside to let me into her flat. She was utterly defeated by life. Complicit with me in every possible way. I helped her to find the path she had already, unconsciously chosen. I helped her to bring her miserable existence to an end, simply by giving her the permission she felt she needed to do it. I helped her to transform.
They discharged me, in the end. They hadn’t managed to get to the bottom of what had happened to me but since I was clearly recovering they said I could go, as long as I stayed with a friend to begin with. There was talk of a referral for therapy, regular outpatient appointments. I had a letter to give to my GP.
Sam came to collect me and drove me to his house in Keats Road. I remembered looking up at the house from my car, the day my mum was in the hospital and I was giving him a lift home. It felt as if a lifetime had passed since then.
I didn’t speak at all. He tried to ask me questions but when I didn’t answer I think he gave up. I was afraid of everything, scared of the medicated numbness in my head which meant I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t focus. The hospital was a bad place but in a way the outside world was worse.
I shouldn’t be here
, I kept thinking.
I’m supposed to be dead. Am I a ghost now? Is this what it feels like
?
Sam lived with his dad, Brian, a former serviceman who spent most of his time at the Legion drinking with his friends, and Brian’s wife, Irene. She was everything my mum hadn’t been: bright, vivacious, full of life. She’d been Sam’s mum’s carer, once upon a time. They both welcomed me into their home without question, offering up their small spare room – Irene apologising for it just as I expressed my profound gratitude that I’d been let out of the hospital thanks to them.
Sam showed me the room upstairs, a single bed with a floral bedspread on it and a soft toy on the pillow.
‘I’ll leave you to settle in,’ he said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Maybe later,’ I said. ‘I’d like to sleep.’
He left the door open when he went downstairs. I pulled it to and lay down on the bed and closed my eyes.
The next day Frosty phoned to ask if I was up to talking to someone. Sam had gone to work, leaving Irene with me. Without him I felt a bit lost, cut adrift.
‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything.’
He came round with a female officer I’d not met before, whose name I forgot the minute she introduced herself. We sat in the living room. Irene made the tea and put a tray with home-made apple cake on the table in front of us, all the while talking about the weather and the roadworks in the town centre and the line-up for this year’s
Strictly Come Dancing
. When she finally went and left us with just the ringing in our ears, it felt as if we’d all gone deaf.
‘You’re looking well, Annabel,’ Frosty said then. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Fine,’ I said automatically.
‘You don’t need to worry,’ the young woman said. She was smiling at me. ‘Anything you can remember at this stage is useful.’
‘I don’t remember anything,’ I said.
‘Sam told us you said there was a man. An angel. Do you remember that?’
I thought about it, closed my eyes. I wanted to help them. I wanted to remember.
‘He was just ordinary. Just a normal man. But he said things that made me feel calm. He was kind.’
‘Did he go home with you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I drove home. There was a rainbow.’
I wanted to add about the rainbow being a sign from my mum, a sign that I could trust him, that she’d sent him to take care of me, but I kept that bit back. They wouldn’t have understood. They would have laughed.
‘What happened when you went home?’
‘Nothing. I went out again the next morning. I spoke to you on the phone,’ I said to Frosty.
‘I remember,’ he said. ‘Where were you, when we spoke on the phone?’
‘I was in the car park. I was going to the funeral directors.’
‘Do you remember going in to see them?’
‘No,’ I said. I closed my eyes again, struggling to picture it. ‘I remember walking towards the office and he was there waiting for me.’
I looked across to Frosty. He was sitting forward, his hands gripped tightly between his knees. Seeing him like that reminded me of something Sam had told me, on one of his daily hospital visits. He said he’d been out the night before with Ryan Frost. Ryan had told Sam that his dad had been preoccupied, miserable, worrying that he’d missed the signs during the phone conversation he’d had with me that morning, when I’d been standing in the car park at the shopping precinct. Apparently I had sounded ‘odd’. He thought he should have done something, come to find me.
‘Can you tell us what he looked like?’ The woman had taken over asking the questions. I felt embarrassed that I couldn’t remember her name.
He was an angel,
I thought.
You can’t describe angels. And he would have looked different, to everyone else
.
I shook my head. ‘No. He was just – ordinary.’
‘Was he taller than you?’
‘I don’t remember.’
Frosty was busy tucking into Irene’s apple cake, his mouth full of crumbs. I watched him.
‘What did you talk about?’ the woman asked.
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Did he ask you to go with him?’
I felt tears starting, then, not at the frustration of not being able to remember, but at her insistent questions. I felt as if I was failing them: failing Frosty, failing Sam and Brian and Irene who had all been so kind to me.
‘Annabel?’
‘I don’t remember anything.’
‘It’s OK,’ she said, the woman, whoever she was. I didn’t like her. She was giving me a headache with her sympathetic smile and her shiny hair and shiny white teeth.
‘I want to go back to sleep,’ I said. ‘I’m really tired.’
I stood up and left the room. Irene was in the kitchen, standing in the doorway looking awkward and fidgety. I thought she had probably been listening at the door and had jumped back when I’d come out, and hadn’t had time to arrange herself into an appropriately innocent activity. I looked at her and went upstairs. I didn’t mind if she had been listening; I had nothing to hide from her, except my own pathetic brain and its inability to remember what had happened to me.
I lay on the bed, listening to them talking about me downstairs.
‘It’s very early days,’ Frosty was saying. ‘I thought she was doing well, though.’
‘She
is
doing well,’ Irene said. ‘She’s had a terrible ordeal. She just needs a bit of time.’
‘We have to ask,’ the woman was saying. ‘We can come again, tomorrow maybe. See if anything’s come back to her.’
‘No,’ Irene said. ‘We’ll call you if she remembers anything.’
‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘This is a murder investigation, Mrs Everett. We need to gather as much information as we can. We know what we’re doing.’
‘Not with that poor girl, you don’t,’ Irene said. ‘I won’t have you pestering her.’
‘Look,’ said Frosty then, ‘this isn’t helping. Thank you very much for your time, and for the cake. Will you give me a call, let me know how she is? She can take as much time as she needs.’
Irene let them out of the front door after that and I heard it bang shut, with force. I wondered if she was angry with me.