On the other side of the road I notice two men and a woman. Two are filming the search team and the third is trying to talk to the cordon PC. Local TV news, I’m sure. I doubt national TV will be onto it yet. Not until they hear about the second nurse. I wonder how much has been put out to the public so far and have no doubt Winstanley will be up for a nice juicy press conference. Good for the CV.
O’Shea breaks in unexpectedly. ‘My first borough was with your father. Over in Enfield.’
With a pang of anxiety, I wonder if I should have remembered O’Shea from the old days. Paul often invited his team members home for drinks. I wait for what normally follows – how great my father was, how his men would die for him, what a shame he left as he did – but O’Shea simply says, ‘You remind me of him, sir.’ He doesn’t expand on this and I’m not sure quite how to take it. Is O’Shea talking about how Paul was in the force, or how he departed? Going for the positive, I give him a grunt of thanks.
It’s as if he was waiting for permission to continue, because now he clears his throat. ‘A year ago, when I first came to Camden, I took one look at you and thought you were an absolute bastard.’ I clearly look surprised, because O’Shea quickly adds, ‘Don’t get me wrong. I saw you call out DC Payne when he fucked up on a raid. You were right. Everything was too sloppy. And if Payne packed it in after, well, good riddance. Like you said, he probably shouldn’t have been in the job to start with.’
Yet more of my past I didn’t know. I change the subject. ‘What do you know of Winstanley?’
‘Not a lot,’ says O’Shea, rubbing his hands for warmth. ‘I’ve got a couple of mates who’ve worked with her. And what I’ve heard hasn’t impressed.’
I encourage him to go on and he doesn’t need much persuasion.
‘Not as clever as she thinks she is. Mind you, that could apply to many DIs, couldn’t it. On her way up, though. Knows how to climb the ladder.’
I tell him we can leave now and, as he turns the key in the ignition, I look once more towards the hotel with its line of crawling cockroaches.
Did I come here to try to save Amy Matthews?
No memory.
No memory.
Not a glimmer.
Before I joined the Met, Paul used to say he’d kill me with his own bare hands if I became a policeman, and Gerry always insisted Paul meant it – Gerry who was more of a father to me than my own father ever was. He helped me apply without Paul knowing and once I’d joined he had a word with him. Afterwards, Paul said he still wanted to kill me but that if I was going to be a copper he’d make sure I sodding well lived up to the Blackleigh name.
I said I was going to do this on my own.
Nevertheless, though I didn’t know it at the time, he had copies made of every promotion and award I won. I found out by accident, after he moved to his affordable solution trailer park. Before that, he’d still been living in the old house in Pinner, the one I grew up in. As it happens, Laura and I had bought our house in the road behind. I don’t know why. It wasn’t as if I had wonderful memories there. But I knew the area and the place was on offer at a good price.
Later, after Paul had to sell up, I was round at his new mobile home, bringing some box files I’d been storing for him. He was busy making himself lunch, so I carried the files into his bedroom and I saw this old leather briefcase lying open on his bed. Inside were nothing but squares of paper, fragments of photo, slivers of photocopies, clippings from local newspapers – records of my career. For a moment, I felt unusually proud. Paul had been following. Despite everything, he respected what I’d achieved. But then I realised what he’d done. He’d cut off everything except the three or four inches around my name. All he’d kept was my name: the one thing that wasn’t made by me.
That I remember.
By day, the hospital appears even more gaunt than in the dark. The rectangular tiers of concrete and glass that must once have seemed clean and modern now look weathered and harsh.
We meet Becks in the hospital reception area, which, at eight forty this Sunday morning, is almost empty. Regardless of the stitches on his face and hands, he’s in remarkably good spirits. He reminds me once more of a large bristly dog, full of energy and eager to play, and asks how I am. I do my best to reassure him I’m fine, although the truth is that I feel like death. However, I’m also worried about him. He seems rather hyped-up and very troubled about Crystal.
‘Is she sorted?’ I ask.
‘Everyone’s waiting to see if she responds to the operation.’
‘I mean, is she safe?’
‘There’s an armed guard from CO19 outside her room, like you asked.’
‘Good. Twenty-four-hour?’
‘Three eight-hour shifts rotating. Not even allowed to go and pee without cover, boss.’
‘Keep it that way.’
‘And another thing, we’ve found out her real name: Shannon Elizabeth Powney.’ He looks particularly pleased at that.
I desperately need to get to A&E to conduct an investigation of my own, so I send Becks and O’Shea off to find me as much information about the two nurses as they can.
It’s weird, returning to A&E at this time in the morning. There are no outside windows, so the bright strip lighting is exactly as it was, but there’s a new cast of characters. A woman of about sixty holds her head in her hands. An Indian couple bicker over a child. Like crime victims, they all thought they had control over their lives – and they are suddenly all afraid they don’t.
What about me? What am I afraid of? That my own mind is turning against me. I stop by the entrance and take a deep breath. I need to get myself together or I’ll be handing victory to a bent cop, a murderer whose name I don’t even know.
There’s no sign of the detective sergeant who Gerry said was investigating the attack on me, but I didn’t expect he’d still be around. In fact, I’m happy he’s not. I’ve enough problems without having him ask me why I was here last night.
I walk over to a woman on reception and ask for the results of my scan. She tells me to take a seat. I’ve done enough waiting. So I say, ‘Who normally deals with them?’
‘That depends. Could be radiology. Could be neurosurgery.’ Her voice has a lilt. She’s Latin American I’d guess.
‘Where do I find them?’
She smiles winsomely. ‘You still need to wait your turn.’
Rebuffed, I go to sit down. There’s a man two rows from the front, thin as a needle, rocking and moaning to himself and rubbing his shoulders – I can’t tell if it’s some kind of prayer or dementia. Then the door to the triage room opens like it did last night and a couple come out, arguing. A new triage nurse, a young woman this time, stands holding a slip of coloured paper, preparing to call out a name. Before she can though, I walk over to her, projecting a self-assurance I’m not sure I have.
‘Sir?’ she says. ‘Were you called? We have a system.’
‘I know the system,’ I say and go straight through to the ward on the other side.
She follows me. ‘Sir, you have to wait until you’re called.’
‘Police.’ I hold up my warrant card. ‘I’m looking for a neurosurgeon.’
‘There’s no neurosurgeon on duty, sir. Only the on-call psychiatrist. But you can’t just walk in.’ She indicates the way back to the waiting room.
A doctor in a white coat is entering a cubicle on the left, brandishing a kidney dish. I point. ‘Is that him?’
‘No, sir.’ But as she speaks she can’t stop herself glancing in the other direction, towards a tall man leaving a cubicle on the right.
‘Okay. I have to see him now,’ I say, walking over.
The nurse apologises to him, calling him Mr Nathan, and Nathan stoops to peer at my card. He asks me if there’s been a crime.
‘Yes, one murder, one attempted murder and a stabbing.’
Telling the nurse it’s all right, he takes me into an empty cubicle and turns to me. ‘How can a psychiatrist help?’
/> I’d put Nathan in his forties, a large-boned man in a Hugo Boss jacket and surprisingly awkward in his movements. There’s something forbidding about him that makes me nervous, but I’ve gone too far to give up now.
‘I was the one stabbed. In this hospital, last night after I had a scan.’
He perches on the trolley and stiffly rotates one of his feet. ‘I wasn’t on duty last night. What’s this really about, Mr Blackleigh?’
I tell him it’s not about him, it’s about my lost time – my Forgetting. Even as I speak, it feels bizarre, brainless, as if I’ve made it all up. I’m a policeman. I should be certain of myself, not rambling and self-conscious as I am now.
He takes out a pad of paper and jots down notes, scritch-scratch with a cheap pen, as I try to convince him of the reality of what I’m saying, and maybe even convince myself too. It all sounds so impossible under the matter-of-fact lighting of the A&E ward.
‘How can I remember clearly what happened years ago but not the last year and a half? What’s going on with my head?’
‘Amnesia is not a simple thing,’ he says, flipping over a page.
‘I’ve worked that out for myself.’
He waits for a long time, pondering his words, until I want to shake him. Finally he speaks. ‘Your brain is trying to make sense of things that don’t appear to make any sense at all. You’re going to get confusions and misleading recalls.’
‘Do you think I’m a nutjob?’
‘Do you think you’re a nutjob?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think maybe it’s just I had a bang on the head.’
He scratches another note. ‘You say you’ve had a scan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wait here.’
He goes off, closing the cubicle curtain behind him so I can’t see out. And I wait, growing increasingly nervous.
After around five minutes I half open the curtain. High on the opposite wall a small CCTV camera is pointing straight at me. I don’t like this. He’s been gone too long. I slip out of the cubicle as quietly as I can, but then Nathan appears, ambling towards me, holding a manila file. He calls out, ‘Where are you going?’
‘Where have you been?’
‘I thought you wanted to know the result of your CT scan.’
He brings me back into the cubicle, then opens the notes and inspects them, hunching his shoulders, making a drama of it, though I know for sure he will have read the file when he pulled it.
‘Mr Blackleigh, you’ve got no significant relevant physical trauma. Nothing to indicate any cause of amnesia.’
‘I’m not lying about my memory.’
‘I’m not saying you’re lying.’
‘Then what’s going on? Am I going mad?’
Nathan closes the notes and takes out a card and writes on it. ‘My clinics are on Fridays. This is my secretary. She’ll be in first thing tomorrow.’
This is not good. ‘I can’t wait till tomorrow. There’s got to be something you can do.’ I follow him out of the cubicle. ‘I want a second opinion.’
‘Go get one then,’ he says. ‘They’ll say the same. There’s a process and it takes time.’
‘Speed it up.’
‘No,’ Nathan says. ‘You don’t tell me how to handle your illness.’
I have this horrible feeling that it’s all slipping out of my control. ‘I need someone who can do something now. A neurosurgeon, someone.’
Nathan walks across to a nurse and asks her to get me to leave the ward.
‘I’m not mad,’ I say, ignoring her.
‘No, from what you describe, you sound sane. Amnesia is a dissociative disorder,’ Nathan says tersely. ‘Whatever it is will take a great deal of work. For you as well as for me. A number of sessions to get to the bottom of what’s causing it.’
I try to explain to Nathan that I don’t need ten years of talking about how I hated my mother or never got over the death of my pet gerbil, but he doesn’t seem to understand the horror of it, the urgency, the need to catch the murderer before he kills again. I’m getting a sick feeling in my stomach. Like all of them, he has his own agenda. The nurse is trying to lead me back to the waiting room and I tell her forcefully to stay away from me. Everyone’s looking.
Then Nathan loses the plot. ‘Okay. Forget phoning my secretary. You’re going to have to find someone else. I’m not dealing with you.’ He jerks his head at me, his face flushed with anger, which he immediately tries to conceal. ‘I’ll tell you one thing for free. This will have happened before. It won’t have been the first time. You need proper help or it will get worse.’
He turns and I try to follow, but a hospital security guard has arrived, so I back away, hands in the air, apologising. Calling out to Nathan. Trying yet again to get him to change his mind. But he disappears up the corridor and out of sight.
21
Kentish Town police station is a clumsy inelegant place, created decades ago by jamming together houses that were never designed to be joined. In the centre, you can still stumble across the hallway of the original station, lined with lonely black-and-white photos of long-dead borough commanders and visiting mayors. The surrounding buildings connect by way of winding corridors, like a warren; but in this warren works someone who knew I was in the hospital last night and told the man with the knife.
A thick Sunday morning silence has settled in as I limp up the back stairs to a small office I remember sharing with two other DIs, and assume I still do.
To my relief, there’s no one there. Clutter covers two of the three desks. One must still belong to Sam Eskins, because I recognise the photo of her husband next to her computer. But the other DI must have changed as I don’t remember the pictures of the smiling woman placed around the second. On my desk there’s almost nothing. A small photo of Laura, standing in front of the High Court. A sparkling clean mug, upside down. A computer monitor. A single yellow Post-it. It’s not like me to be so tidy.
I read the Post-it. It says: Turn off monitor.
I’m about to sit when I hear a movement in the corridor. Footsteps approaching. I stiffen, but they pass and go off into the distance. Once they’ve gone, I pull a chair across and jam it under the door handle. On a bookcase lies a confiscated baseball bat with what seem to be dark bloodstains on the barrel. I take it down and lean it beside my desk, ready for use. For the first time in my life, I feel afraid in a police station.
Meanwhile, I phone Laura – but her answerphone kicks in. It’s only a little after half nine, so she could still be in bed. We don’t normally go to church until later. I leave a brief message, avoiding mentioning the car – saying I skidded into a tree might not be the most diplomatic thing to do, even with the most understanding wife. I remember she said something about needing to drive somewhere this afternoon, so I’d better find a way to organise a breakdown service.
For a minute, I stare blankly at the empty desk, at a loss as to where to turn next, before I shake myself. One step at a time. It’s the only way I’m going to remain sane. Assuming I still am. I need to find out what’s going on in my brain.
I turn on my computer. It asks for a password and I enter the first two I can think of but neither works. The desk drawers are locked, but I remember earlier I found some keys in my pocket and experiment until I find one that fits. However, the drawers are almost as bare as the desktop. A variety of blank forms. A pile of old case files that seem to have no connection with Amy Matthews, and underneath them a scribbled note, which reads: Ross – forgotten password: contact Routine Updates.
I shiver. Have I forgotten things before? Did I sit here once and write a reminder to my future self? That was what Nathan said, wasn’t it: it’s not the first time.
Finding the number for Routine Updates on a list blu-tacked to the wall, I get through to a woman who takes my details and says it will be dealt with as soon as possible.
‘What do you do – when you deal with it?’ I ask. ‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘We send a new password to your line manager.’
That’s Gerry Gardner. I could do without him knowing I’ve forgotten it, but apparently there’s no other way.
‘And we’re short-staffed today. What with it being the weekend, sir. And all this snow…’
So I send a text to Gerry about the new password, apologising for interrupting his Sunday morning again, but avoid saying why I’ve not remembered it. I’ll work out an excuse when I can clear my head.
Then I google ‘amnesia’ on my phone. I’m not a habitual reader of medical websites – people who want to get sick, get sick, my father always said – and some of the sites I find scare me. I learn that amnesia can have physical or psychological causes. That the memories may come back fast or slow, may come back only in part or may never come back at all. I’m afraid to look further, but I must.
The physical causes include brain damage, cancer, a stroke. None of these sound nice. So I move on to the websites that describe possible psychological causes. I read about amnesia brought on by emotional trauma, military combat; sexual abuse; victim of crime. Take your pick. Many sites use the term dissociated – and I remember this is the word Nathan used. I google Dissociated and find stories of people who say they’ve jumped in time.
Jumped in time… I feel a strange fear. This has happened to others. There are people who’ve lost a single period in the past and people who’ve jumped many times. There are people who’ve disappeared, wandering for days, months or years thinking they are someone else. There are people who say they have different people inside them and people who can’t remember their own names. I read this with a growing unease, as many of the writers sound seriously insane. Do I really want to be part of this family?
I turn with some concern to the potential cures. It seems these run from the hi-tech to the weird. There’s surgery, long-term therapy (ideally over a period of many years), looking at pictures of your loved ones, listening to your favourite music, smoking marijuana and eating almonds. Not necessarily all at the same time.
Room 15: a gripping psychological mystery thriller Page 12
