‘He is, he’s wonderful. It’s not his fault, exactly. It’s just…’ Again, there was nowhere to go but straight ahead, and I steeled myself for the ultimate, shameful confession. ‘He thinks my research is…well, unbalancing me. It happened once before, or something like it happened. He didn’t know me at the time; it was years before we met. When I told him about it, I don’t think he really understood. He seemed to see it as something inside me, something that could just flare up again for no reason. But it wasn’t like that at all. Everything was different, back then…’
I fell silent, and she looked at me. ‘It’s a long story,’ I said awkwardly.
Her face didn’t change at all: Go on, her eyes said, just like they had when I’d confided in her before, if you don’t mind talking about it.
‘I was eighteen, at the time,’ I began quietly. ‘In my fresher term. Remember what I told you a while ago, about my family? How much I wanted to get away from all that, how I deliberately chose the university furthest away from them? Well, anyway, that was how it was. I was so happy on the train there, on my own. Scared, but happy. It’s hard to describe. As if I was on the brink of something wonderful. A whole new life.
‘Only—when I got there—everything changed. I thought I’d feel free, far away from it all, but I didn’t. I felt scared. Lost. I’d never belonged at home, and I knew that, but knowing it just seemed to make things worse. There wasn’t really anywhere to go back to; I was on my own. It’s the worst kind of homesickness, that feeling…that there isn’t anywhere you can call your own, that you’re just adrift…
‘Because I didn’t seem to belong at university, either. I’d thought there might be other people like me there, but I had nothing in common with any of them. They all reminded me so much of Emily and Louise and Tim, my half-sisters and brother. Happy families, parents who’d wanted them. They didn’t know what outside meant. We talked at first, and we were friendly, but it felt so strained to me. I couldn’t tell them how scared I was, how anonymous the hall of residence felt—they’d never have understood in a million years, they all thought it was great fun. And the more scared I was, the more I moved away from them. And the more I moved away from them, the more scared I became…
‘I started spending most of my spare time in my room. At first, I hated that room more than anything—it was anyone’s room: cold, soulless, sterile. But gradually, I still hated it, but I was scared to leave it. I started feeling terrified of people. It’s so hard to put into words. To begin with, it was just shyness and feeling out of place. Then…it just snowballed. Day by day. Week by week. I didn’t want to go out, and then I was afraid to go out, and then just thinking about going out petrified me. And I knew how irrational that was, and that was the worst thing of all. Having a little bit of you looking out, watching your mind slip away…’
As I spoke, that terror came back to me, and I felt it all over again. I wasn’t conscious of Liz’s presence at all, and spoke as if in a trance. ‘Three weeks into that term, I only left my room for lectures and seminars. Four weeks in, just seminars. By that time, I wasn’t even going for meals. It was a catered hall, and there were meals three times a day in the canteen, but I just couldn’t make myself go in there. Once or twice, I remember telling myself I’d have to, trying to force myself to come back—there’s nothing to be afraid of, I’d say to myself, they’re all nice people, what the hell’s wrong with you? And I’d just freeze up inside that horrible room, and listen to all the strangers trooping down the corridor to lunch or dinner, and I’d only dare open the door when the last of the voices had gone. And I’d take a few steps towards the canteen, and I’d just…scuttle back into my room. As if something was chasing me. I can still remember the way my heart felt, at those times. Hammering. Sometimes, I thought it was going to explode.
‘There was a snacks machine in the ground floor lobby—crisps, chocolate, that sort of thing. Pretty soon, it was the only food I got. I can remember how it was, sitting in my room, watching it get dark. It wouldn’t be safe for me to go down till the small hours—there’d be people coming in and out of the hall bar till half past twelve or so. And just looking at the clock, watching it inch past seven thirty—and wanting to eat so badly, I’d dream of food. And too damned scared to go downstairs and buy it. Even in the small hours, when the whole hall was in bed, it was like stepping into no-man’s-land. And all the time—walking down those stairs on tiptoe—part of me knew I was losing my mind—
‘I couldn’t even go down there, soon. I’d stopped going to my seminars, too. I just stayed in that room. I can’t really tell you how I felt then—it was so hard to think straight, I was literally dizzy with hunger all the time. I just knew that I couldn’t go out any more, it terrified me even to think about it. There was a little shower-room alcove in my room, and I drank water from the tap. I’d stockpiled a few chocolate bars and bags of crisps, and I tried to ration them as well as I could. It was only a week or so I spent like that, but it seemed far longer—and no time at all. I couldn’t really keep track of time, by then. The whole world was just slipping away from me…’
I broke off for a second, lit a cigarette before continuing. ‘It was Petra who first got worried about me. She’d been one of the girls I hung round with for the first week or so, and she noticed I wasn’t around. Everyone else just assumed there must be some normal explanation for it, I suppose—that I’d been called home unexpectedly, or I’d made new friends in another hall, and was spending most of my time round there instead. But Petra wasn’t just in the same hall as me, she was on the same course—we were both studying English Lit. I suppose she’d heard that I’d missed a few seminars in a row. She came and knocked on my door a few times, that week. I only knew it was her later. At the time, it could have been anyone. Of course, I couldn’t bring myself to answer; the sound of that knocking froze me up inside. I just sat there as quietly as I could, till she guessed I must be out somewhere, and went away.
‘Then, after I hadn’t been out of my room for six days, I heard voices outside, in the hall. One of them was Petra’s, the other sounded like the hall warden. At first, I didn’t really take in what they were saying, but, as they got closer and closer to my door, I realised they were talking about me. “I’m getting really worried about her,” Petra was saying. “What if something’s happened?” And the warden said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got the spare key to her room right here.” Then, I heard it turning in the lock.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life, even now. This huge, senseless fear, like a panic attack, only a thousand times worse. And I wasn’t exactly equipped to cope with that physically… I’d had a couple of Kit Kats and bags of Wotsits in the past six days, and I felt so dizzy all the time. When I heard the warden opening my door, I blacked out. Just like that.
‘When I woke up, I was in the medical centre just off campus. They had some private rooms in there, and I’d been out like a light for about twelve hours. Petra had stayed with me there practically the whole time, and she was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. She asked me what the hell I’d been doing, and I found myself telling her as well as I could. It was funny, really, but that was how we first became real friends. When we’d first met, I hadn’t thought we’d ever be at all close…
‘It changed everything, somehow. Just being able to talk to someone. It turned out I had some kind of minor-league malnutrition, but nothing serious. Petra and the doctor talked me into going for counselling sessions, to sort out the real problems. But I honestly don’t think those sessions made any real difference. As soon as I woke up, I knew I was cured, as if I’d been pulled back from the brink just in time. All that terror of people had just snapped off. I’d never had anything like it before, never in my life. And I’ve never had anything like it since…’
I fell quiet; for the first time in long minutes, I became aware that Liz was looking at me. There was no patronising fake sympathy whatsoever in her expression, just something grave, understanding,
sincere.
‘It was a nightmare time for me,’ I said, ‘but it was nothing like this. I was terrified of going out just because it was going out. I never thought someone was dreaming up elaborate plots to hurt me, and I never thought of any specific person as the enemy. Carl just didn’t understand that at all—he can’t see that there’s any real difference between that and paranoid conspiracy theories.
‘But there’s a real threat here, Liz. You can see it, and you don’t even know the full story. Soon after I went to see Mr Wheeler, I saw him outside one afternoon. He was just standing there by the road, watching the house. And I got a silent phone call a couple of weeks ago—just breathing down the line for a few seconds, then someone hung up. Carl’s convinced it was just a wrong number, but I swear to you it wasn’t anything like that…remember what the policeman said last Tuesday, about Rebecca getting silent calls here herself?’
‘Oh, my God.’ Liz stared at me, appalled. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said quietly. ‘I didn’t want to tell anyone—just kept it to myself, and hoped it would all blow over. But then, with the break-in—’
‘I agree with your husband,’ she interrupted. ‘You should stop this research of yours, Anna. Now.’
For a second, I just looked at her, caught in the slow dawn of betrayal. Then she spoke again, more gently. ‘I believe you, dear, I believe every word you’ve told me. What happened to you all those years ago could have happened to practically anyone; it’s certainly no reflection on your stability these days. But this research of yours sounds far too dangerous to carry on with…it’s too close for comfort, the links with what happened to Rebecca. If Mr Wheeler’s behind it all—and I can’t help suspecting that he is—he’s almost certainly not going to rest until you’ve given it all up.’
‘But there’s no way he can know whether I have or not. Like I said before, how could he know what I’m doing with my time?’ Across the table, Liz looked worried, and baffled, and older—I watched her shrug helplessly. ‘Anyway, I can’t give it up. Not now. There’s not much more of it left to do, but I still don’t know everything I need to. The full picture’s out there somewhere. I have to know what it is.’
The worry in Liz’s eyes was clearer than ever. ‘I don’t understand, dear. Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. ‘It just seems like it’s the only thing left that still makes sense.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I HADN’T ALLOWED myself to remember the details of that fresher term in a very long time. It was as though I’d painstakingly installed a circuit breaker in my mind when it was over, cutting off any thought as soon as it threatened to spark specific memories. Over the years, they’d all come together and merged into something huge and amorphous, a loathsome, freakish something that scuttled, now and then, through random byways of my subconscious. The second I saw a hint of it in the distance, all I could think about was driving as fast as I could in the opposite direction. I had no desire to look at it more closely; the moment’s glimpse told me everything I needed to know.
After Liz had gone home, however, I found myself consciously looking back to it, steeling myself to reach for detailed memories. It felt like being blindfolded and extending cautious fingers into the unknown, encountering something slimy, and gelid, and pulsing. Frozen tableaux returned to me. I remembered creeping down the starkly lit, institutional back stairs at two a.m. Silence behind the buzzing striplights, black nothing beyond the windows, nothing else moving. Fear stuffing my throat at the thought that something might do. The empty foyer, the big clock ticking out the seconds with flat indifference as I tiptoed towards the snacks machine. I’d try to get enough for the next couple of days, I’d thought. I couldn’t bear to do this again tomorrow…
I thought about it and was back there—I could feel how cold the floor was under my bare feet, that towering and undirected fear which found its focus in everything around me. Remembering was as appalling as I’d known it would be, but, at the same time, became staggeringly conclusive evidence in my own defence; even if nobody else could see it, the fact that I could had become all-important. For all my conscious certainty that the threat here was real, a tiny part of me that punched far above its weight had begun to doubt that—had been afraid Carl knew me better than I knew myself, that his concerns might hold some chilly shard of truth.
As I recalled that nightmare time and compared then to now, the more utterly convinced I became. Everything I’d said to Liz had been true. This was no blank terror, but rational fear of a flesh-and-blood enemy, an enemy as real as I was, as the drifts of glass had been in this kitchen last Tuesday, as Socks’ corpse had been on the path beyond it.
Suddenly, my longing to desert this house for Bournemouth had vanished without a trace. For the first time in almost a week, I found myself thinking about Rebecca, and her oddly ambiguous relationship with her adoptive father. The prospect of research was a blessed distraction, but seemed far more important than that. If I knew everything there was to know about her life, I thought, I might be able to gain some crucial insight into the situation here. I knew I was clutching at straws, but there was nothing more solid to hand. Just a riddle of fear and guesswork and unanswered questions; the exact nature of Rebecca’s connection with Mr Wheeler, exactly how far he might be prepared to go.
Liz’s warnings hadn’t worried me. There was, I knew, no way that the vet could know what I did in this house, who I did and didn’t contact. Like me, she’d simply been trying to make sense of the situation, create some neat, reassuring and illusory way out of it all. In the living room, I went over to the telephone and dialled directory enquiries. I asked for the number of Sandwell Prison in the West Midlands, and jotted it down on the phone pad as it was read out to me.
I rang up at once. The initial voice down the line put me straight through to someone else as soon as I’d run through the too-familiar introductory spiel, and I waited a long time for them to answer. When the second voice finally greeted me, they hadn’t been told who I was, and I had to reel off the speech again. After some questioning that felt more than a little like cross-examination, my credentials were apparently accepted; I was told to ring back in a few hours’ time, and given an extension number to dial.
Time passed very slowly till the clock told me I could return to the phone. The ringing tone ran on endlessly before a woman answered, a woman I hadn’t spoken to before. Again, I explained who I was and what I wanted, was about to say that I’d called earlier when she interrupted.
‘Oh, yes—Elaine told me about you. She was the lady you spoke to; we work in the same office. She asked me if I’d mind talking to you—I was here when Rebecca Fisher was.’ It was a voice made for complaining in, passive-aggression translated into sound—at once martyred and subtly belligerent. ‘It’s very busy here, you know. I can’t just sit around chatting for long.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said quickly, ‘it won’t take long. Just a few minutes, that’s all.’
‘I suppose that should be all right. I only knew her for a few months, mind you—and not at all well, even then. She wasn’t any more than a face in the crowd to me, notorious as she was.’
As a witness, she couldn’t have sounded a great deal less promising—everything about her tone was harassed, grudging, irritable. It was an effort to keep my discouragement from showing in my voice. ‘Were you a prison officer, at the time?’
‘That’s right. I gave all that up quite a few years ago, moved into the admin office here instead. If anything, it’s even more troublesome on this side of things. Thank God I’m coming up for retirement.’ The theatrical sigh had an entirely serious undertone of nobody knows how much I suffer. ‘Before I moved jobs, I worked on Rebecca Fisher’s wing for three and a half months. They were short-staffed on it, and I was moved from another one to help out till they could recruit more people of their own. Typical shoddy management; it’s a disgrace the way they organise thi
ngs here.’
I sensed she’d be happy to follow this side-turning off the conversation for upwards of half an hour, and struggled to return it to its intended route. ‘Did you ever talk to her?’
‘Not that I can recall. I didn’t have any patience with my colleagues who went out of their way to be all matey with the prisoners—they were only paying us to guard them, we certainly didn’t get any extra for chatting with them right, left and centre. Speaking of which, I’m afraid I’ll have to get on. Like I said, it’s very busy here.’
‘Just one more thing. Please. Quickly.’ It was the only question that really mattered to me, and I’d been trying to reach it circuitously, now rushed towards it as fast as could. ‘I’ve heard her adoptive father came to see her regularly. Did you ever notice him at visiting times? A middle-aged man, dark-haired, wearing glasses.’
‘Can’t say I did. You really ought to be speaking to her old personal officer, if you want to know things like that. I certainly wouldn’t be able to tell you.’
I sat up. ‘Does she still work there?’
‘She certainly does. Her name’s Patricia Mackenzie, and she’s Chief Officer on C Wing now. God only knows how that woman sticks it.’ The martyred sigh again. When she carried on speaking, it was either with conscious helpfulness or the desire to pass an irritating distraction over to someone else. ‘I’ll transfer you to her office, if you like. I have to warn you, she’s likely to be very busy herself.’
Once transferred, another phone rang for some time before Patricia Mackenzie answered in person. As predicted, she was too busy to talk right now but, when I’d explained who I was and what I wanted, she told me she’d be able to spare ten or fifteen minutes the following morning. We arranged that I’d call back at half-eleven then. Taking down her extension number, I thanked her, and hung up.
Carl got home that night at half past seven, and we had dinner together in the kitchen. I found myself thinking how strange it was that it hadn’t quite been a week since the burglary. After our conversation last Tuesday, a distinct atmosphere had characterised these evenings together, the kind that felt painstakingly distilled and double-distilled over a period of months or years; tension like an unwavering electrical hum, a constant presence in the room with us.
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