by Tim Weaver
‘What were their names?’
‘Rory found me first. Rory Yarkley. He was one of the mechanics there. He called another guy over – Simon Griffin. He was one of the shore crew.’
‘And you were injured, right?’
He gestured to the scars on his face. There were five, all on his left side – two small ones dotted along the ridge of his cheekbone, two more at the angle of his jaw. The fifth and biggest was much harder to miss. I’d not seen it at the time he was found because, in the photos, it had been covered up with bandaging. But I saw it as soon as I met him, and I looked at it more closely now: a white, worm-like blemish stretching from the cleft of his chin to the corner of his lip. Police thought he might have been attacked, or had fallen very heavily on that side of his face, or both, and as he began to roll up his left sleeve, I saw that his elbow was marked with more scarring, his forearm too, the back of his hand.
‘It looks like you fell,’ I said.
‘Or collapsed. Or was attacked.’
‘Do you think you were attacked?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
It was said with a bleakness that was difficult to ignore. I glanced outside – the rain was getting harder, the mist thickening – and tried to gather my thoughts.
‘Did you have any broken bones?’
‘No.’
‘Just cuts and bruising?’
‘Yes. The smaller ones had already healed by the time I was found, but this one …’ He placed a finger against his chin. I could see star-shaped stitch marks tracing the line of the scar. ‘This one became pretty badly infected. The middle of my face was swollen and there was pus coming out of the wound. I got some sort of bone infection off the back of it as well. It was bad.’
‘Were you dressed when the RNLI guys found you?’
‘Yes. I had trousers on, a T-shirt, a fleece. One of my shoes was missing.’
‘What happened after that?’
‘They took me back to the lifeboat station, put a blanket around me, got me something hot to drink, and called the police. While we were waiting, they started asking me questions – who I was, where I was from, if there was anyone they could call for me, that sort of thing – and I couldn’t answer most of them. All I could really give them was my name.’
‘Are you still in touch with them?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Rory called me for a while, to see how I was getting on – if there was anything new, an update. I think, in a weird way, him and Simon felt this sense of responsibility for me, because they were the ones that found me.’
‘But they don’t call you any more?’
‘No. I still don’t know who I am and I still don’t know where I came from. What else is there left for them to ask?’
It was difficult to know how to reply to that.
‘Where did you go from there?’
‘A local charity paid for a bed in a hostel for me. I was very appreciative, don’t get me wrong, but I hated it. I had to share a room with three other people, they were all coming and going the whole time, it was noisy and disruptive, and I felt like some sort of alien there. I couldn’t talk to any of them about anything, because I knew nothing. I mean, imagine someone asking you what your full name is, or where you’re from, and all you can say to them is, “I don’t know.” The people I roomed with, they just ended up staring at me, like I was some car accident at the side of the road. The best thing that ever happened was when the newspaper coverage started, because Reverend Parsons saw it and that was when he asked to meet me.’
‘He helped set you up in this area?’
‘Yes. He’s been good to me.’
I looked down at my notes.
‘Do you know if there are CCTV cameras at Coldwell Point?’
‘One, apparently. It was on the side of the RNLI station, but it didn’t work. Police told me it was due to be repaired the following week. So even if someone came into the car park in a vehicle and left me there, or they approached by boat, or I swam all the way to shore from wherever it was I went overboard, none of it makes much difference. I can’t remember and there’s no CCTV to help me.’
‘You have absolutely no recollection of the lead-up to being found out there? You said you have these slivers of memory – like growing up by a beach.’
‘Probably growing up by a beach.’
I just looked at him as he shook his head.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I remember nothing about what happened to me and I have no idea how I ended up where I did. No one came to claim me after I was found. I was discovered out there, on that river, alone – and I’m still alone now.’
3
I made us some fresh coffee, even though he’d hardly touched his first cup, and after giving him a moment to recover some composure, I said, ‘That memory you have of growing up by a beach – why is it you feel it’s from your childhood?’
‘I’m not sure.’ He paused, trying to articulate his thoughts. ‘It’s difficult to explain. I guess that’s just how memory works, right? You remember something, an image or a feeling or whatever, and you attach some sort of timeline to it. You know when it was, automatically, without having to process it. I know it’s a memory from when I was growing up. I just know it. But I couldn’t tell you why.’
‘What else do you recall about it?’
He drew the mug of coffee towards him. ‘I’m standing at a window, looking out, and I can see a beach. The way I see it now, in my head, it goes on for ever, stretching as far in each direction as it’s possible to go. That makes it sound exotic, but it’s not like that at all. It’s not some tropical island paradise. It’s typically British. It’s like looking out of the window today. The skies are grey. It’s really miserable, it’s drizzling.’
He stopped, gazing into space, the light from the window dancing in his eyes as he tried to draw more details out of the black. Attempting to coax memories out of Richard Kite would be dangerous. I wasn’t a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and I had no training, so anything I tried would be rudimentary at best – and I’d interviewed enough people in my life to know that pressurizing them into remembering fine details generally didn’t lead anywhere useful. Interviewees like Richard, desperate for answers and keen to progress a search, would try their hardest to fill in blanks, and that was how witness statements became mangled. Recall got overstretched, memories got unintentionally tweaked, and then you spent the days and weeks afterwards chasing down bogus leads.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Anything else apart from that memory?’
‘Just one other thing. I have this memory of a TV programme. It was animated and there was this television mast on top of a hill, and it was sending out all these signals into the sky. It could have been a kids’ TV show, I guess. It had that sort of feel about it.’
‘So you think it could have been part of an intro sequence?’
‘Like the opening credits or something? I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘Do you think you could draw it for me?’
‘Draw it?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I assured him. I turned my pad around and handed him my pen. ‘It doesn’t have to be a work of art. Just put down what you can remember.’
When he was done, I took the sketch from him. It showed a triangular TV mast, criss-crossed with studded iron girders, projecting crescent-shaped signals from its apex. The higher the signals got, the wider they became. It was like the universal symbol for Wi-Fi. He’d also drawn a few flowers at the foot of the mast.
I tried to think if I’d ever seen anything like it before, but if it was a kids’ show, I hadn’t come across it, and if Richard had watched it as a child, it could be a couple of decades old by now. I’d have to dig around some more.
‘Anything else?’ I asked. ‘Anything at all?’
His brow furrowed, the smaller scars whitening as the skin creased at his eyes. ‘I know how to swim. I’m actually a pretty good swimmer.’ He shrugged, and the rest of the sentence was there,
in his face: Like that makes any difference any more. ‘I’m good with my hands,’ he went on, quieter now. ‘I can fix things. That comes naturally to me. When I do stuff around here, when I do stuff at the caravan park up the road, it’s easy. Mike, the policeman who was looking after my case, he says he thinks I might have been a mechanic or a tradesman or something like that.’
I nodded. ‘What’s Mike’s surname?’
‘Barton. Detective Constable Mike Barton.’
‘From Hampshire Police?’
‘Yes. He’s based in Southampton.’
‘When was the last time you heard from him?’
‘Two, maybe three months ago.’ He sounded disappointed. ‘He called to give me an update, to say he’s still trying to piece everything together. Maybe he is, I don’t know. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. But, the truth is, I think I’m probably in a filing cabinet somewhere. I mean, why wouldn’t I be? I’m not in danger. I’m not a danger to anyone else. I understand why it’s happened.’
He spoke of acceptance, of understanding why his case had been relegated to a drawer, but his face told a different story. He was hurt, frustrated.
‘You work here,’ I said, trying to keep things moving, ‘and you talked about working at a caravan park up the road too.’
‘Yes. It’s about a mile away.’
‘So you’re working two jobs?’
‘Kind of. The job at the caravan park is just a basic park-assistant role – it’s everything from mowing the lawns to making repairs to cleaning out the toilet block. But it’s seasonal. April through to the end of September, it’s five days a week; October to March, it’s only twice a week. That’s why – over the winter – I’m helping out here a couple of days a week. I’m trying to make ends meet however I can, but I can only do it when the people I’m working for are kind enough to accept my situation.’
‘Your situation?’
‘They have to bend the rules.’
‘In what way?’
‘I haven’t got a National Insurance number, and I can’t get one. I’m a non-person. The government won’t issue me a new number because no one’s allowed to have two, and they must have already given me one before at some point. I’ve spent hours on the phone to them, trying to explain my situation. I’ve told them over and over that I don’t remember my name. I’ve sent them letters from the doctors who treated me, from Reverend Parsons, I’ve sent them cuttings from the newspaper coverage, but it’s hopeless. My applications get lost in layers of bureaucracy.’
‘Can’t they issue you a temporary number?’
‘I asked. They stopped doing that in 2001.’
‘So by “bending the rules”, you mean you’re being paid cash?’
‘Or I’m not being paid at all. I live at the caravan park, on-site. They let me live in one of the static vans for nothing – water, electric, gas, it’s all included. In exchange, I work the rental cost off in hours. Here at the church, it’s just a small job. Forty pounds a day. No one’s going to miss that. But the caravan park’s part of a chain. They’ve got sites all along the coast. They can’t get caught trying to avoid paying their taxes.’
Again, his words were even-handed on the surface, but it was clear that he’d been wounded by all of this. It flickered in his face the whole time, like a fire that didn’t go out. It made me think of someone learning lines by rote – sometimes, hearing Richard, it was possible to think that he had accepted his fate, the intransigence of government, the knowledge that he’d been cast adrift as some sort of refugee; but then you looked at him and the mask slipped. Without an NI number, he was a ghost in the system. He may have been flesh and bone, a living, breathing person sitting across the table from me, but because he wasn’t on a hard drive in Whitehall, he was just a mimic, an echo of someone who had existed at some point in history. Employers couldn’t hire him because he couldn’t pay tax. He wasn’t able to sign on, or claim housing benefit. If he walked into a hospital, if he got sick or broke a bone, he wouldn’t be seen as an NHS patient. It didn’t take much to imagine how traumatic that would become; a build-up of emotion and enmity and heartache, collecting on him like bruises.
‘If you’re worried about how I’m going to be able to afford to pay you,’ he said, a sudden panic in his voice, ‘I made some money from all the publicity at the start of the year. I’ve saved a bit. The church are sponsoring me too. I’ll be fine.’
‘I wasn’t worried,’ I said, holding up a hand to him, playing it down, but I had started to wonder how and where the money would come from. I watched him take a long drink of his coffee, and then continued: ‘So you have no form of ID at all?’
‘No, none.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t get a passport because I don’t know what my name is, or where I was born, or what my birthday is. I don’t know who my parents are. I can’t get a driving licence because you need another form of ID – like a passport – and an NI number.’
‘Which means you have no bank account either?’
‘No.’
I didn’t press him any further on it, but it underlined how desperate his situation was. Storing banknotes in a drawer in a caravan was his new reality. He needed ID in order to do anything, but he couldn’t apply for ID because he didn’t know who he was.
‘Would you mind me taking a look at your caravan?’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Anything that will help.’
‘Do you have a mobile phone?’
‘Yes. I bought it in a supermarket – a Pay-As-You-Go plan. That was all I could get.’
‘Email? Social media?’
‘I have an email account, and the people here at the church set some social media things up for me after I was found – Facebook and Twitter and all of that stuff – to help try and spread the word. But I don’t use any social media myself.’
‘So you have a computer?’
‘A laptop. But not a very good one.’
‘I’ll need access to that as well. Is that okay?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Everything was back to front. Normally, financial trails, emails, texts and phone calls were how I began building a picture of a missing person – who orbited their life, where that person may have gone, the decisions they made along the way, contacts they forged. With Richard Kite, the person I was trying to locate was sitting two feet in front of me. I wasn’t exactly sure what I expected to find on his laptop, but if I didn’t go through it I risked missing something.
‘You mentioned you’d undergone hypnosis earlier.’
He nodded. ‘Yes. With Naomi, my therapist.’
‘Is she a psychiatrist or a psychologist?’
‘I’m not sure I know what the difference is.’
‘Has she ever prescribed you medicine?’
‘No.’
‘Has she ever talked about doing so?’
‘Not that I can remember.’
‘Psychiatry’s a medical specialism, so she could prescribe you medicine if she wanted to. It sounds more like she’s a psychologist. What’s her surname?’
‘Russum.’
I wrote it down. ‘How often do you see her?’
‘Twice a month now.’
‘But it was more often to start with?’
‘Yes. To start with, I was seeing her twice a week. We did long sessions in an effort to help me try and remember. Like I said, she put me under hypnosis, but I didn’t really respond to that. We also go through photographs of people – figures from recent history, politicians, landmarks, that sort of thing – to see what I remember, who I’m aware of, and who I’m not. She does it to try and narrow down my exact age, where I’m from, where I was brought up.’
‘But she hasn’t got anywhere?’
He shrugged. ‘No.’
‘Where’s Naomi based?’
‘London. But she comes here. I can give you her address.’
I definitely needed to speak to her, and her being based in London made it convenient to where
I lived in Ealing, but she wasn’t going to release records of their sessions to me, and I seriously doubted that she would be prepared to give me an overview of them either.
‘How do you afford to pay for the sessions with her?’ I asked.
‘She does them for free.’
‘She doesn’t charge you anything?’
‘No.’
‘So she instigated contact with you?’
‘Yes. She called me about five weeks after I was found.’
‘Did she say why she got in touch?’
A fleeting smile. ‘I think she sees me as a challenge.’
Or she sees you as a meal ticket. I wasn’t necessarily saying I blamed her – a case as extreme as Richard Kite’s was big news within the sphere in which she operated. With his permission, she could probably write papers, columns, maybe even go on TV. But her charging him nothing for her time instantly made me want to talk to her. I didn’t doubt that she wanted to help him, and I didn’t doubt that she was doing the best possible job. But, these days, people rarely did something for nothing.
‘So the sessions haven’t really got you anywhere?’ I asked.
His head dropped, his fingers opening and closing around the mug. ‘No. Naomi tells me they’re worth it, but what good is it when all I have to fall back on are vague recollections of things that don’t even matter? How is my memory of that beach going to help? Or that show with the TV mast? What difference does being a good swimmer make?’ He stopped again. ‘It’s worthless.’
‘It might not be.’
‘But it probably is.’
‘Don’t lose heart before we’ve even started.’
He smiled at me, as if grateful for the words of support, for the fact that I’d agreed to help him in the first place. But, soon, the smile was gone again, and all that was left behind was the sound of the rain.
4
Richard said he still had some jobs he needed to finish up at the church, so he gave me the key to his caravan and suggested he meet me there. I headed out to the car and then sat there for a moment, listening to the rain, trying to clear my head. I’d been sucked in by his story, by the things he’d been through, and I was already committed to helping him. But I felt discomfited too, not only because his experience was a complete inversion of a missing persons case, but because, in truth, I felt uncertainty about where to start. I couldn’t begin with him, with his family, with his job. I couldn’t start with any relationship he’d ever held with anyone. Basically, the only things I had to work with for now were where he’d been found, the condition he’d been found in, the few memories he held on to, and the people that he’d interacted with.
