The Last Thing She Remembers

by J. S. Monroe

  “My studio?” he says.

  “Here in Berlin.”

  “You want me to take your photo?”

  “Just tell me the address.”

  He looks confused.

  “And give me the keys.”

  CHAPTER 101

  Silas studies the image of the young Tibetan boy, staring out at him from an A4 wanted-style poster. A headline reads: Help Find the Panchen Lama of Tibet. Below the photo, details of a financial reward for information about his present whereabouts. Silas hopes the poster might give them the break they need. German police are struggling to trace Maddie’s phone, and he senses they are not taking their concerns seriously. He met a lot of Tibetan Buddhists when he went on holiday to Ladakh. Conor was young, and it was the best family trip they ever had.

  He looks up at Strover, on the phone to South India. Strover should travel to the subcontinent. It might improve her patience.

  “I’d get a better line to Mars,” she says, dialing again. They’ve moved desks since the morning and are now by the window.

  The poster was brought into the squad room a few minutes ago, found by forensics in the lining of Maddie’s suitcase. Silas knew at once that he’d seen the face before, on his trip to Ladakh. It also reminded him about the recent online photo credit for Seahorse Photography, Tony’s business name, that Strover had come across. Tony had taken some press photos of a group of visiting Tibetan Buddhist monks. They were on a tour of English village halls, raising funds for a new kitchen in their monastery in South India, where they live in exile.

  Silas has checked out their website: their original monastery, in central Tibet, was founded by the first Dalai Lama and is the traditional seat of successive Panchen Lamas. The photo in Maddie’s suitcase is of the eleventh Panchen Lama, taken into political custody by the Chinese authorities in 1995, when he was six. He hasn’t been seen since. Another unsolved missing person.

  He remembers his own attempts to explain the basics of Tibetan Buddhist history to Conor, sitting around a fire one starlit night in Ladakh. Neither of them were any the wiser at the end of it. He looks at the poster again. Why would Maddie carry around a photo like that? And why hide it, unless she was traveling to China?

  All he knows is that it’s another link to South India, where her mother is from. She’d returned there ten years ago after divorcing James Thurloe. Maddie seems to have followed a year later. They have been trying to trace them via the police in India—he has put in an urgent request, via Interpol, to the Criminal Investigation Bureau in Delhi—but so far no joy. Now at least they have a connection between Tony and Maddie, something that might help to explain why she came to Wiltshire.

  Strover gives a thumbs-up and starts to talk.

  “Is that the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Bylakuppe?” she asks, struggling with the pronunciation. “In Karnataka?”

  A few uniforms look across at her. Why do people always talk in a strange way when they are speaking to foreigners? Silas knows he does. Loud and slowly, as if he’s addressing a half-wit. Five minutes and several pages of notes later, Strover puts down the phone.

  “Okay, so Maddie and her mother are regular visitors to the monastery,” she says, coming over to Silas with her notepad. “My man Lobsang Dorjee,” she continues, glancing at her notes, “described them as ‘kind friends’ of their community who live in a nearby town—Kushalnagar?—where they both teach at a local school. Maddie’s been up to the monastery’s prayer hall a lot in the past six months, more than usual. Learning to meditate apparently.”

  “You did say she’d become a nun,” Silas says.

  “The monk wouldn’t go into details, just that they were helping her to remember things from a long time ago.” Another glance at her notebook. “‘Cleanse her mind.’ Ten days back, she left in a hurry, saying she was going to see a friend in the Gulf. They were all quite worried for her, particularly her mother. They’ve given me her number—I’ll call her now.”

  CHAPTER 102

  Tony watches Maddie move the heavy sacks of cement, one by one, unable to stop her. It takes her a long while, but she doesn’t seem to be in a rush. Or maybe it’s just him. He knows she’s slipped him a sedative of some sort. Until the effects start to wear off, there is nothing he can do. Nothing he wants to do. The lethargy is killing him, a complete deadener. He’s just happy to lie down on the concrete floor of his cell and sleep. If only he could stop dancing to her tune. He has already watched himself give her the keys to his studio. He must stay awake, get himself out of here.

  “If it was anyone else, I’d feel sorry for them,” Maddie says once she’s finished constructing her barrier. She’s standing in front of the bars, disdain in her eyes, sweat beading on her forehead from all the physical effort. “Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease. And in your case it can’t kill you quick enough.”

  She turns to go.

  “How did you remember?” Tony calls out, his voice still sloppy. The mental numbness is driving him crazy. “After all this time?”

  She hesitates for a moment, her back still to Tony, and walks on, leaving him alone in the building.

  “Hey, come back,” he shouts, hit by a sudden wave of paranoia. “We should talk more.” Silence. Tony’s frightened now. She’s too in control.

  After five minutes, he stands up, unsteady on his feet. The place is almost unrecognizable. GrünesTal was his best hunting ground in Berlin, favorite venue in Europe. Girls, boys, he wasn’t fussy. Just had to be his type. He’d carved out a niche as a nightclub photographer and knew all the DJs who played here, taking their publicity shots as he followed them around Europe’s top nightclubs, gaining backdoor access wherever he went. It proved the perfect cover. No one suspected a thing.

  And when people asked why his business was called Seahorse Photography, he would say he couldn’t remember. His private joke. He didn’t tell them that seahorses share a name with the hippocampus, where memories are processed. Or that he was terrified that he would die of Alzheimer’s, just like his father did. Or that by inducing temporary amnesia in his victims, he got off on the knowledge that his synapses were superior to theirs, at least for a few hours. His hippocampus might be rotting, but it was better than their benzo-soaked brains. He would remember everything, all that he did to them, and they would remember nothing. It doesn’t get much better than that. Not for a man who once harbored dreams at medical school of a being a neurosurgeon. For a man whose cortex is atrophying.

  Tony pushes against the bars. No give, nothing. Maddie has piled five sacks of cement on top of each other and stacked some old tires next to them. The gate will move. Sooner or later. He just needs to regain some strength. A sense of purpose.

  Maddie must have been one of the clubbers he brought back to the studio. It’s why he stopped in the end. New country, a fresh start. Too many were beginning to remember, that was the problem, no matter where he sourced his pills. And when they remembered, he had to wipe their memories. Forever. Seven at the last count. Somehow she must have slipped through the net. And he was always very careful, took precautions. Why hasn’t she rung the cops? No evidence, not yet. Distant memories don’t stand up so well in court. Unreliable or false, Your Honor? Christ, he wants to sleep.

  What’s she playing at, arriving in the village like that? Did she come specially to seek him out? To seduce him back to Berlin? If so, she’s playing the long game. Clever girl. He was right to be suspicious. Someone to show me around Berlin. Right to come out here with her, establish how much she knows about his old life. And make her forget if she knows too much. Except she’s spiked his drink and thrown him in a frickin’ cage. How come he didn’t recognize her when she turned up that day on the doorstep? She looked familiar—he just didn’t know why. And then he thought she was Jemma Huish. Wishful thinking. What a jerk. Too many plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.

  He tries the bars again, more determi
ned now. This time the sacks of cement move.

  Half an inch.

  CHAPTER 103

  Tony’s studio is in Schillerkeiz, a small neighborhood in northern Neukölln that borders Templehof, the site of Berlin’s old airport. I texted Luke the address as I left GrünesTal, told him to meet me there in an hour. Built by the Nazis, the airport’s hangars now house refugees, which somehow seems fitting. Grafitti is apparently banned on its buildings, unlike the surrounding streets, where the walls are covered in tags.

  Fleur and I used to come here when it first opened as a park. It was a rougher neighborhood in those days, full of edge and excitement. Fleur knew all the best places for Turkish coffee, which local artists were up and coming. We went to a lot of studio openings together, clutching bottles of Augustiner Pils as we nodded knowingly at conceptual art. The area has changed considerably in ten years, chichi cafés on most of the street corners, a boutique art gallery in what was once a laundry.

  Today the airfield is full of families out in the summer sun. Teenagers skate past me on the former runway. A father flies a billowing pink kite on the grassy outfield with his son. Parents push prams, women practice yoga. I walk on in the direction of the address that Tony gave me. I don’t think he was lying: the Xanax was still making him compliant. I could have asked him to do anything for me. That’s what I find so terrifying.

  It takes me time to locate the entrance to his studio, tucked away down an alley that’s still to be discovered by the developers. No names on the intercom, just three buzzers. I look up at the old building: ground floor, two storys above. Tony said his studio was in the basement. I walk around to the back where steps lead down to a garage, its rusting door covered in graffiti. Beside it is a small entrance with a lock and letter box. I glance back up the alley and walk down the steps. One of the keys fits and I open the door, pushing against a mountain of leaflets and junk mail addressed to Seahorse Photography.

  I peer down the dark, damp corridor, flicking at a light switch that doesn’t work. Does any of this feel familiar? How did Tony get us from GrünesTal to here? By taxi? In his car? I don’t recognize anything. Closing my eyes, I breathe in and think of the Bodhi tree, letting its deep, reassuring roots help me to remember.

  I switch on my phone—the battery is low so I’ve kept it off since texting Luke—and wait for it to power up. Using its torch, I walk down to a second door at the far end of the corridor. Tony gave me three keys, and I insert the second one. My head spins as I shine the torch inside the room. I’m in the right place: a large studio space with whitewashed walls. A flicker of a memory. This is where it happened. I’m sure of it. On the wall in front of me, a giant stenciled seahorse stares down in the darkness, its crenellated body reaching from the floor to the ceiling. A surge of adrenaline and I turn away, unable to look at the ugly, ossified creature. Its bulging eyes.

  I remember. This is the image that started everything, stirred my memory, took me to a village in England, brought me to Berlin.

  I force myself to look at the seahorse again, thinking back to how it all began. Our local monks in South India had just returned from their European fundraising tour, exhausted but elated. Rural England had been wowed by their Tibetan Buddhist workshops and sand mandalas. There was a big meal that night, and we were invited up to the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery to celebrate. Their tales of village halls in rural England made me homesick for the life I had left behind. Photographs were passed around like holiday snaps, including one of an event at a village hall in Wiltshire. A row of young children, cross-legged and agog, watching the yellow-hatted monks as they chanted and danced.

  I’m not sure why, but I turned the photo over and that’s when I saw the logo for Seahorse Photography. The image triggered something so visceral that I struggled to control myself. I gave back the photo, my hand shaking, and ran outside into the courtyard to take some air. My mother followed close behind.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I remember.” That’s all I said. I remember.

  It wasn’t much but it was a start, a glimmer of light in the tranquilized darkness.

  I had talked to my mother over the years about the end of my time in Berlin, how a carefree few months of my gap year had been brought to a brutal halt by the disappearance of my best friend. I didn’t go into details about the clubbing or the drugs. Or that Fleur and I were lovers. There’s only so much a parent needs to know. The problem was that I couldn’t remember anything about one night in particular. My last night with Fleur. Now, with a name, an image—Seahorse Photography—I had a key that might help me to unlock memories that were never meant to be found.

  For the next six months, I worked closely with the monks, who taught me new ways to remember. I work at a local primary school in our Indian town, and went up to the monastery before and after school hours, studying meditation on the top floor of the Tantric college. It used to be the monastery’s original temple and I found it a good place to learn. Afterward, we would walk outside to the courtyard, where a beautiful Bodhi tree cast its cooling shade, just like it had done for the Buddha more than 2,500 years ago. I would sit beneath it, deep in meditation, for many hours at a time, joined by a succession of monks.

  At first the monks thought I wanted to recall past lives, but they soon understood. They began to train my mind to feel my way into the past and retrieve unprocessed, emotional memories. To recall what happened in Berlin that night. What happened to Fleur.

  “When our minds are quiet, old memories rise to the surface,” one of the monks once said to me. “We forget things when our souls are troubled.”

  They detected a great fear inside me, dark and suppressed, and introduced me to the teachings of Machig Labdrön, an eleventh century Tibetan Buddhist teacher who was a renowned yogini. Associated with enlightened female energy, she is most famous for her “Chöd” prayer, a visionary practice that encourages you to confront inner demons and detach yourself from the body and ego. It was scary at times, but purging too, and I eventually reached a state of clear, unattached awareness. My mind felt more subtle, my perception clearer, particularly of the past. But it wasn’t enough. I still couldn’t remember that night in Berlin.

  It was then that a visiting monk suggested I try some powder, made from the fruit of the Bodhi tree. I knew that the leaves and bark of the Bodhi—also known as the peepal tree—are revered for their medicinal properties but I was unaware that its figs are said to improve memory. As well as being rich in amino acids, they contain high levels of serotonin and, as I soon discovered online, scientists in India have shown that the figs, in powder form, can reduce anterograde and retrograde amnesia by “modulating serotonergic neurotransmission.” It was worth a shot.

  One morning, when a light mist hung over the monastery courtyard, I had a breakthrough beneath the tree, unlocking a few words from the deep vaults of my brain. I don’t know if it was the powder or the meditation but I realized our strongest memories are wrapped up with emotions as much as images. And I suddenly remembered the feeling of revulsion in my stomach as Tony’s voice echoed around the studio I’m now standing in.

  “You know what really turns me on? Someone who forgets everything, every morning. Day after day. All nice and wholesome and chemical-free. Now that would be a fine thing.”

  I’m sure his exact words were different—it was a long time ago—but I remember the appalling gist of it. Someone who forgets everything, every morning. It implied such evil. Not only was Tony turned on by the drug-induced blackouts of his victims, but he was seeking something else, a more permanent amnesia in them that would allow for indefinite abuse. Day after day.

  I had enough to begin hatching a plan, spurred on by the fragments of memory that continued to surface beneath that fruitful Bodhi tree. Frightening snapshots of Tony. Of Fleur. Slowly I pieced them together and worked out what I needed to do. It was a dark, devious plan, worthy of its target.
Tony would struggle to resist me if I turned up on his doorstep in Wiltshire, claiming to have lost my memory. I knew I was his type—I’d proved that once before. And this time there would be no need to slip me some Xanax. All nice and wholesome and chemical-free. A natural amnesiac. Organic. What not to like?

  I identified the address in Wiltshire easily enough, once I had found his name on a new Seahorse Photography website and Googled his career in the UK as a wedding photographer. He seemed to have moved recently from the Surrey Hills, and I guessed he must have bought a house. I knew which Wiltshire village the monks had visited, and the rest I found on Google Maps and the Land Registry website. An estate agent’s online details gave me the house’s floor plan—I thought it would help my story if I had distant memories of living in the property, knew the exact layout of the rooms, the downstairs bathroom, the garden office outside. Amnesiacs can often recall things from their childhood.

  The one thing I couldn’t have foreseen was being mistaken for Jemma Huish. I had no idea that Tony was obsessed with her. So much so that he had even bought the house where she once lived, hoping she’d one day return; that my visit would coincide with the anniversary of her mother’s death. As a boxer once famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

  I look around the deserted studio, shining my light on old storage boxes. There’s very little here now, no pictures. He must have removed all the furniture and photographic equipment, taken it back to England. Just the hideous stencil on the wall. Another memory flickers into life. Fleur lying on a bed in the corner, staring at me with bewildered eyes as Tony does whatever he likes to her. I still can’t remember what he did to me.

  There’s another door in the corner. I walk over and use the third key to unlock it, feeling dizzy as I shine the light around the walls. I’ve been here before too. I can feel it. The small room is empty except for a solid central surface, like a kitchen island. Or an operating table. And there’s the rolltop bath in the corner, where Fleur sat sobbing, clutching her knees.