I remembered the letter I’d found in the spare room’s cupboard, and wondered if Dear Penny had been this man’s wife or daughter. I knew I couldn’t possibly ask. Everything about their correspondence screamed strictly confidential.
‘We all thought that would happen, when she grew up,’ he went on. ‘There was no question that she’d ever offend again. Well, there was one dissenting voice at the time…but the years have proved him wrong, I’m very pleased to say.’
‘Who was that?’ I asked, startled.
‘Oh, some junior psychiatrist from the local authority—Donald Hargreaves, his name was. He came into the unit to talk to her once a month from the day she arrived, and that went up to once a week in the year leading up to her leaving us. There was some debate as to whether she should be sent to the low-security prison I’d recommended, or an altogether more secure one, hence his increased visits.
‘Maybe she told him more than she ever told the rest of us—the final decision had nothing to do with me, so I never got to see his findings in any detail. I do know that he was adamant she should go to the highest-security institution possible. His report was overruled by the powers that be, I’m glad to say, so it couldn’t have been all that conclusive. Still, misguided or not, he certainly believed in it himself—he actually resigned from the local authority over the issue, I heard shortly afterwards.’
‘My God,’ I said slowly. ‘What did you say his name was?’
‘Donald Hargreaves.’ I jotted it down quickly on the phone pad. ‘Well,’ he said pleasantly, ‘that’s very much where my knowledge of Rebecca ends. It feels rather strange, remembering it all again… I hope it’s been some help to you in your research.’
‘It certainly has,’ I said. ‘I can’t thank you enough for calling—you’ve cast an awful lot of light on things for me.’
Off the phone, I hurried up to the spare room, sat down at the computer and did a search on Google for Donald Hargreaves, lighting a cigarette absently. Pressing Enter, I waited for a couple of seconds, feeling my heartbeat loud and fast in my ears.
Two results. The first was a listing from the British Medical Council; a name in a long column of names, informing the reader that Donald Hargreaves was a registered psychiatrist. The second was an article on autism, dry as old leaves, from a mental health publication I’d never heard of. A small photograph at the top showed a middle-aged man with shrewd dark eyes and a neatly clipped black beard; a few lines were written beneath it, in italics. Dr Donald Hargreaves has been a practising psychiatrist for thirty-eight years. He is currently affiliated to the South London and Maudesley Healthcare Trust, where he works as a consultant in the Ashwell Unit.
I checked the date at the bottom of the article. It had been posted three weeks ago.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
IT WAS EASY to get the number I wanted. After I’d dialled it, a receptionist answered almost instantly. ‘Ashwell Unit. How can I help you?’
‘May I speak to Dr Donald Hargreaves, please?’
I’d anticipated further questions, but none came—it seemed that public sector psychiatrists were less well-guarded than Heads of Services. A new ringing tone began, continued for some time before a male voice came on the line.
‘Don Hargreaves.’
‘Oh, hello. I wonder if you might be able to help me. My name’s Anna Jeffreys, and…’
The familiar speech again. He didn’t speak immediately after I’d finished, and embarrassment kept me talking. ‘Of course, I understand if that kind of information’s confidential. But, if you were able to discuss it with me—’
‘Don’t alarm yourself, Miss Fisher’s new identity leaves all that side of things null and void.’ Another silence; he seemed entirely comfortable with it. ‘I’d be happy to discuss the case with you, as it happens. I could spare roughly an hour, at a prearranged time. When would be a convenient date for you to come to the unit?’
I’d initially anticipated an interview over the phone, was about to say so when something held the words back. Every instinct I had told me this man knew more about Rebecca than the rest of my sources put together and, even at this early stage, I found him difficult to talk to over the phone. A face-to-face meeting could make all the difference, could unlock some crucial discovery. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘the sooner the better, to be honest. Is there any chance that I could interview you next week?’
Another silence. ‘How does next Tuesday sound? Shall we say two o’clock?’
‘That sounds fine. Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘Could I have the address of your unit?’
He read it out, and I wrote it down carefully. ‘The nearest tube station’s Balham, if you’re not driving,’ he said. ‘I’ll look forward to seeing you then.’
The hours passed slowly—I finished off the hoovering with anticipation churning inside me. My mental image of Rebecca had been blurred and shadowy for so long, I’d begun to think it would never alter. But suddenly I felt the picture sharpening, the sheer speed of the change inspiring something close to vertigo. Specific details of the Southfield Unit seemed to bring her to life, lending her that crucial third dimension that had previously been so elusive; for the first time, I could see her clearly in the context of different settings. Tense silences over a table in the visiting room, cinema trips with Tom’s wife and eldest daughter, that oddly incongruous fight in the unit’s common room. Imagining her in those places, I was startled to feel her becoming as real as anyone I’d ever known, as real as she’d been four months ago, when she’d shown us round this house.
I wondered what Donald Hargreaves had known about her, or thought he’d known. Whatever it was, he’d ultimately resigned over it and, from our brief conversation, he hadn’t seemed the hysterical over-imaginative type at all. He must, I understood, have seen a completely different side to her, far beyond the girl Martin and Tom had both described—that demurely feminine, politely amenable housewife-in-the-making, fond of home economics and keeping a tidy room. Whatever else he’d seen, it had been disturbing, invisible to the naked eye. Potentially dangerous.
I wondered if she’d told him anything about her relationship with her adoptive parents. As she grew clearer in my mind, that side of her life became more tangled and ambiguous than ever. From Tom’s descriptions and Martin’s comments, I’d built a vivid picture of Dennis Fisher, but I knew it couldn’t even be close to accurate—the man I envisioned would have severed all links with Rebecca the second that the police arrived to arrest her, and scandal threatened. Long before a community turned against him by sheer power of association, before his factory was petrol-bombed by residents hell-bent on a blurred and incoherent revenge. The man I envisioned would have no genuine love for anyone in the world.
Even his wife, Rita. The minor heiress he might and might not have married for her money, whose every possession expressed naked longing for a beauty she’d never had herself. Brittle, snobbish Rita, utterly oblivious to other people’s feelings. This was the same woman who’d adopted a five-year-old with utter selflessness, denying herself the beguiling maternal illusion of a brand-new baby. Who’d gone out of her way to give Rebecca the perfect childhood, who’d loved her so much that she’d committed suicide two days after the verdict was announced…
It was all wrong, maddeningly wrong. I seemed to be thinking about two completely different couples; it was like trying to solve a jigsaw, not knowing that half the pieces came from another box. Next Tuesday, I told myself, the answers might all come at once. I could see the truth at last, tiny in the distance, moving inexorably closer as I watched.
‘I’ve made us a chicken salad for dinner,’ I said to Carl as he came in that night. ‘I thought it’d make a nice change.’
‘That’s great. I’ve had a nightmare of a day at work. I’ll just go and slip into something more comfortable, be down in a minute.’
At the kitchen table, he discussed his colleagues and the events of the day. It all seemed strangely unreal to me, somehow, as i
f Rebecca and the people surrounding her were draining colour and depth from the present. They leapt out in vivid technicolour, whereas the world he described looked greyish, hazy, dreamlike. ‘So Roger was going to complain to the MD,’ he was saying, ‘but I managed to talk him out of it. It would have been a bad mistake for him, more than anything else. That sort of thing never looks good on a store manager’s CV.’
‘Well…that’s good.’ I struggled to conceal my alienation from his story, to maintain a pleasant housewifely façade. ‘I’m sure that was the right thing to do.’
‘I hope so. Anyway, it seems to be okay now—when I talked to him this afternoon, he said it had pretty much sorted itself out. From where I stand, it looks like—’
The phone started ringing in the living room, and he broke off. Thinking of Tom Hartley and Lucy Fielder, I willed myself not to move a muscle, not to let my expression change. ‘Want to get it?’ I asked.
‘Sure. Back in a minute.’
Rising from his seat, he walked out. ‘Hello?’ I heard him saying, then, slightly more irritably, ‘Hello?’ Then he was hanging up, came back into the kitchen shrugging. ‘Wrong number, apparently. They just put the phone down a second or so after I answered. No bloody manners, whoever it was.’
Foreboding stabbed me hard in the chest—I’d been superstitiously convinced it could never happen in the evenings when he was here, was equally convinced it just had done. If I’d answered, I thought, I’d have heard that ragged breathing for a second time. I became aware he was looking at me strangely.
‘What the hell is the matter?’ he asked abruptly.
I took a mental step back, as if threatened all over again. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Look, just stop it, Annie. You know exactly what I mean.’ His voice was full of frustration and concern, reaching boiling point together to create anger. ‘You’ve been a different person for the past week or so, maybe even longer than that. I know you, I’m your husband, I can see when things aren’t right. I kept thinking you’d tell me on your own sooner or later, but this is getting beyond a joke—trying to pretend everything’s fine, when I can see in your eyes that it isn’t at all. Do you honestly think I haven’t noticed how you’ve been acting lately?’
His too-serious expression belonged nowhere but a boss’s office—I felt as if I’d been called in for a formal warning on a routine day, and a nightmare out-of-nowhere feeling plummeted my stomach ten floors down. I’d thought I’d been hiding my preoccupation expertly all week.
‘It’s this research of yours,’ he went on forcefully, ‘I’m sure of it. Just because you haven’t been talking about it recently, it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten. It seems like it’s really getting to you, Annie, it’s not doing you any good. I think you should draw a line under it. Forget about it. Start the book with what you’ve already got, for your own sake.’
The distress in his voice frightened me more than the silent phone calls had done. I remembered his mother’s too-solicitous kindness on the rare occasions we’d met, as if I were something that had been broken and mended and still needed to be handled with the utmost care. Fear made me aggressive as if in self-defence; all he knew of that time was what I’d told him, I urged myself, and he had no idea what the reality had been like. ‘It’s not the research,’ I said hotly. ‘For the last time, I’m fine. Why can’t you just accept that?’
The flat contradiction effectively stalemated our argument; there was nowhere else it could go without meandering into the endless desert of are not, am too. Seeing the knowledge in his eyes, I felt the full weight of his love and helplessness, and forced myself to speak again, more gently. ‘I’m just about finished with the research, anyway. There’s nothing to worry about, Carl. Honestly.’
The rest of our evening passed in a quiet, resigned atmosphere of mutual denial. Over dinner, it occurred to me that I hadn’t told him about my imminent trip to London, my interview with Donald Hargreaves on Tuesday. I certainly couldn’t tell him now, when his distrust of anything to do with my research was palpable. I’d leave soon after he’d gone to work, I told myself, and should be home a good hour or so before he returned. Enforced secrecy pressed in around me, tight and hot and claustrophobic. As we sat and watched television, random images from the screen took on the disturbing quality of omens: flickering rain through a car window, a wax-white hand unearthed from black soil, dirty-yellow police tape flapping in a hard wind.
Our smouldering truce with the subject continued all that night and throughout Saturday, while I tried my hardest to be myself, the silent phone calls were a constant, niggling distraction at the back of my mind. I wondered if and when a third would come. A growing urge to tell Petra about it began to take hold of me—she knew at least some of the background, would be able to see it in context and advise me accordingly. But there was no privacy to do so on Saturday; I couldn’t possibly risk Carl overhearing our conversation, and we were together all the time.
On Sunday afternoon, however, he went out to mow the back garden. I hurried upstairs seconds after the deafening, high-pitched whine began, into our bedroom, towards the phone. While the lawnmower’s noise was muted in this room, I could still hear it clearly, would be ready to make a quick plausible excuse and hang up the second it stopped. I pressed out her mobile number quickly, praying she’d be free to talk.
She was. ‘Anna, great to hear from you! I just got back from my parents’ house. How’s it going?’
‘Well…’ My voice tailed off uncertainly. ‘I’m a bit worried, to be honest. That’s really why I’m calling. You know what we talked about, when you were here—that vet, and Liz’s cat dying, and all the rest of it?’
I could sense her sudden alertness all the way down the line. ‘What’s happened now?’ she asked sharply.
From the back garden the lawnmower droned on, insect-like. It hit me that I couldn’t possibly tell her about the first phone call, the breathing, the terror. She’d demand to know why I hadn’t told her before, and worse, why I hadn’t told Carl. ‘Last night…we got a weird phone call,’ I said. ‘Carl picked it up. There was just dead silence for a couple of seconds, then someone hung up.’
I fell silent. An expectant pause continued for several seconds. ‘And?’ she asked at last.
‘That’s it.’ Realising how anticlimactic it sounded, I found myself faced with an insoluble problem—making her realise its importance, while leaving out any reference to its forerunner. ‘Of course, Carl thought it was just a wrong number, but I’m really not sure. He doesn’t know about Mr Wheeler and all that; I do. I keep thinking it might have been him, trying to scare me…’
Another pause. When she spoke again, I caught a chilling echo of Carl’s own voice, a wary note that tried and failed to conceal itself behind pragmatism. ‘Anna… I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about there. It probably was just a wrong number. Why would Mr Wheeler want to do something like that?’
I felt horribly wrong-footed—she’d been the prophet of doom last Saturday, had suddenly turned into the spokeswoman for hard reason. ‘Why would he want to hurt Socks?’ I demanded. ‘Why would he want to kill Socks, come to that? You were perfectly prepared to believe he’d done all that.’
‘Oh, I was probably just being stupid. It scared me at the time, but I think just about anything would have done after you told me about Rebecca Fisher. It does pretty weird things to the nerves, thinking a psychopath was in a house before you.’ Even in the grip of disbelief, I was about to correct her on the word—Rebecca had been no psychopath, whatever else she was—but then she spoke again, sounding sheepish and slightly guilty. ‘If I freaked you out about it, I’m really sorry—you were right, Anna, I was wrong. Like you said, he’s a vet, there’s no way on earth he’d have done those things.’
It felt like betrayal, as if she’d bailed neatly out of this disturbing situation, leaving me entirely alone in it. ‘So don’t worry about it,’ she went on soothingly. ‘Especially not that phone
call. Jesus, it was just a wrong number—no need to lose sleep over that.’
‘I suppose not.’ Suddenly, her voice seemed to have come from a very long way away. I spoke to reassure her, as if she was a psychiatrist with the power to classify me sane or otherwise. ‘I’m sure you’re right, come to think of it—I overreacted badly. I’m feeling quite embarrassed. I’m a bit jumpy about that whole Rebecca Fisher thing, as well…thinking she used to live here, and everything.’
‘I can’t blame you for that. Still, it’s such a gorgeous house—even if it was Rebecca Fisher’s, you got a good bargain.’ She laughed, and I tried my hardest to join in. ‘By the way, how’s the research going?’
‘Not bad. I’m definitely getting there. Slowly but surely.’ The steady background noise of the lawnmower snapped into sudden silence behind me and I spoke quickly. ‘Listen, got to run—there’s someone at the door. Thanks for calming me down.’
‘Any time. You’re welcome.’
I hurried downstairs. Through the open back door, I could see Carl lugging the lawnmower back into the shed. The sweet, sleepy smell of fresh-cut grass hung heavily. Watching him from the kitchen, an icy hand gripped my heart. For the first time in almost ten years, I felt alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
IN AN ASTONISHINGLY short time, Liz had become very important to me. Perhaps it was partly by default, as the most crucial things in my life couldn’t be shared with Carl or Petra. But there was far more to it than that. A new element seemed to have entered our relationship, something vaguely parental that I knew she’d be as embarrassed to acknowledge as I would—indulgent and protective on her side, considerate and slightly deferential on mine. As if each of us was becoming what we knew the other missed most.
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