Find Me

by J. S. Monroe

  ‘Then I thought I’d have a go at genre fiction, see where it leads me. I’m a big fan of Le Carré,’ I added. ‘Spy fiction in general.’

  ‘Le Carré’s interesting. The story’s central, but we all remember Smiley the character.’

  ‘Of course, when I was your age, I was more into the Beat Generation, the influence of psychoactive drugs on creativity, that kind of thing. I’m sure you know that Kesey wrote the first three pages of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest after choking down eight peyote.’

  ‘Wasn’t he working on a psychiatric ward at the time?’

  ‘As a night watchman. He claimed the little cactus plant had inspired his narrator. Ten to twenty grammes of dried peyote buttons yields enough mescaline to induce a state of profound reflection that can last for up to twelve hours.’ I paused. ‘So I’m told.’

  Just as we were beginning to get into our stride, Rosa came into the room and linked her arm through Jar’s. ‘How’s it going?’ she said, looking at Jar with the uncomplicated affection of youth, and then at me, surprised, perhaps, by how well we were getting on.

  ‘We were just assessing the medicinal benefits of writing,’ Jar said, raising his whisky glass in my direction.

  57

  Dad wants to head for Old Delhi first, which is fine by me. Anything to take my mind off what’s really been happening to me here. We start at the top of Chandni Chowk and weave our way down the road, turning off into Wedding Street, an old favourite when I was younger.

  ‘Can we go to the jalebi wallah?’ I ask. ‘Please?’

  The pain has been unbearable, despite the medication.

  ‘Of course we can,’ Dad says.

  ‘Please stop,’ I sobbed, but he never listened.

  I try to taste the jalebi in my mouth, the sweetness of the crystallised sugar, but the memory of the wet cloth being pushed so far down my throat means that I can’t taste anything.

  ‘It’s sweet, isn’t it?’ Dad says, oil dripping down his stubbly chin. I love it when he forgets to shave – a sign we are truly on holiday. ‘The sweetest thing I ever tasted.’

  Dad loves it even more than me. And he always chats to the man who sells it, perched on his plastic chair behind a deep bowl of bubbling oil, happy to serve tourists as well as locals.

  I reach out for Dad’s hand.

  ‘Look at your nails,’ he says, turning my fingers over. ‘Aren’t they pretty?’

  They nearly drowned me.

  We’re no longer in Old Delhi. We’re rafting down the mighty Zanskar, our rubber dinghy spinning in the rapids. Dad, laughing, tells me to hold on as we rise up over the surging water and crash down again. And then we’re both in the river, swimming beside the dingy, holding the rope that runs down its side. The water is calm now, but so cold, even with our wetsuits on. Our instructor is urging us to let go of the rope. There’s no danger, he says, nodding at his Nepali friend, who is in a kayak, downstream, watching over us. And we do, floating down the river on our backs, one of the happiest moments of my life.

  But not even Dad could save me from him.

  ‘Stop,’ I tried to cry, the icy water flooding my lungs. ‘Please stop.’

  58

  Jar pushes open the door of the lock-up, checking the street in both directions. He knows something’s not right: Nic, the photographer on the floor below, had tipped him off when they met at the bottom of the towerblock a few minutes earlier. At dawn this morning, he said, while Jar was still in Cornwall, police had been seen taking away a computer from one of the lock-ups, along with several boxes. Nic is the only person who knows that Jar rents one of them.

  The padlock has been broken but made to look as if it’s working. Jar braces himself, but he is still taken aback by the sight that greets him inside. Everything has been removed from the walls – all the maps, photographs, newspaper cuttings. The computer has gone, too, and the drawers of the desk are open, their contents taken. Whoever was here – Cato’s people, he assumes – was interested in anything that might be linked to Rosa and her disappearance. There’s no vandalism, no sign of violence, apart from the broken padlock. Why doesn’t Cato want to talk to him in person any more? Why didn’t his men on the train pick him up when they reached Paddington?

  Jar’s first thought is that he no longer has any photos of Rosa, nothing to stop her fading away from him. He has deliberately kept all traces of her out of his flat, away from the life he presents to the world. Every material connection with her – letters, photos, newspaper cuttings about her death – has now been taken from him.

  A week ago he would have been distraught, but it doesn’t bother him now. The empty lock-up, the efficiency of the sweep, is confirmation that someone is trying to stop Rosa from returning – and him from finding her.

  Back at his flat, he is almost disappointed to find no evidence of a break-in. The books are all on their shelves, not in any order but present and correct. His guitar, too, is still underneath his bed. He’s about to slide it out when he remembers the photo that fell from a book the night his flat was raided. He goes to the shelf and retrieves it from a copy of Finnegans Wake. She has aged, he realises; when he saw her yesterday, she looked like another person.

  Jar pours himself a large Yellow Spot, one of his da’s favourites. He won’t call him about his Cornish encounter, not yet; he knows it will only upset him, suggest that he is far from over his grief. And he won’t call Amy. She is too unstable already and Jar wants to know more before he tells her.

  He knocks back the whiskey and pulls the tent peg from his jacket pocket, placing it on the kitchen surface. The piece of floral fabric has frayed and the peg is buckled a bit in the middle. He wonders if Rosa swore as it hit some granite in the Cornish earth. She could swear with the best of them, Jar remembers, smiling to himself, thinking back to the time when he averted his eyes as she stepped out of the Cam, frozen to the core.

  His phone rings.

  ‘How was Cornwall?’

  Jar recognises Miles Cato’s measured Scottish tones at once. How the hell did he get his new number? Someone must have talked to Morvah, after he boarded his train.

  ‘I am trying very hard to eliminate you from our investigation into Martin, Jar,’ he continues, ‘but you aren’t making it easy for us. Have you heard from Anton?’

  Jar runs his fingers along the shelves as he listens, bringing errant books into line, standing the idle to attention.

  ‘How did you get this number?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m a policeman, Jar.’

  He’s good, Jar thinks. Sticking to his script like a leech. He recalls Rosa’s warning in her email: Tread carefully with MC. I’ve learnt enough over the past five years to know that he will be the one who approaches you, if he hasn’t already. He will probably be using police cover, plain clothes. And he loves a good Scottish accent. I have no idea what story he will spin, but don’t believe a word of what he says. He’s trying to find me, just like the others.

  ‘We now think Martin may be into torture videos,’ Cato continues.

  Their cover story is getting more ludicrous by the day, Jar thinks. Why not accuse Martin of something more plausible, like an unhealthy interest in beatniks? Or being addicted to Strava?

  ‘I know who I saw yesterday in Cornwall,’ he says.

  ‘Another one of your hallucinations?’

  ‘Are we done here?’ Jar is annoyed now. Cato’s pretence has gone on long enough.

  ‘Don’t run away again – and call me on this number as soon as you’ve made contact with Anton. I’m sorry about your computer. Routine procedure. You’ll get it back.’

  Jar walks out on to the balcony and looks across towards Canary Wharf, blinking in the night. Nic, the photographer in the flat below, is playing his sax. If only the selfie of the two of them together, taken yesterday on Gurnard’s Head, had got through to Carl. Then he thinks about the emails again and pulls out his phone.

  ‘It’s Jar, Jarlath Costello. Still working?’ Jar h
opes that he has found Max Eadie at his office. A lot of the lights in the tower are still burning.

  ‘Always working, twenty-four hours a day. You’ve read the website. Where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you for two days.’

  ‘Can we meet? A lot’s happened.’

  *

  ‘Your lift’s out of order,’ Max says. ‘Had to take the stairs, which stink of camel’s piss, by the way.’

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ Jar asks, closing the door and taking in the strange shambolic sight of Max in his flat. For a moment, he fears for the man’s health.

  ‘Some of that, no water,’ he says, gesturing at the whiskey bottle on the table. ‘Is your head OK?’

  ‘Max, I saw Rosa,’ Jar says, keen to cut to the chase as he pours himself another whiskey. ‘Yesterday, in Cornwall.’

  Max pauses before answering, his face more serious now, respectful, the bluster gone. ‘Properly?’

  ‘It wasn’t another bereavement hallucination, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Whereabouts in Cornwall?’

  ‘At a place where we once agreed to meet in a crisis.’

  Jar goes on to tell him everything: the emails, the meeting with Cato, the man who tried to board his train, their secret rendezvous agreement in Cornwall, how he inadvertently led Rosa’s captors to her. ‘She didn’t even know my name,’ he says, his eyes welling.

  Max listens intently. He doesn’t seem surprised by the encounter, nor that Rosa struggled to remember everything about her past.

  ‘I found this, too, in the rental car that took her away.’ Jar picks up the bent tent peg from the kitchen table, looks at it and then tosses it back down again. ‘She’d been camping on the cliffs.’

  ‘And you think Miles Cato’s behind all this?’

  ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about. I’m worried about the emails Rosa sent, asking me to meet her,’ Jar says, handing Max his phone. ‘Something’s not right about them. She would have mentioned the meeting place by name. Read this one.’

  He watches as Max lifts his glasses up on to his eyebrows and peers at the phone. ‘It’s not from Rosa,’ Jar says. ‘It’s from someone pretending to be Rosa, who didn’t know where she was hiding, where she’d go if she was on the run – “if the world ever slipped off its axis”.’ Jar hesitates, can sense his voice is about to crack. ‘They knew I knew where this place was and waited for me to show them, to lead them to her. Which I went and did – like a stupid eejit.’

  Max glances up at Jar as he walks over to the window and looks out.

  ‘You think Cato sent them?’ Max asks.

  ‘Read the second email,’ Jar says, trying to regain his composure, his back still to Max. ‘“Tread carefully with MC” – that’s Miles Cato. “He will probably be using police cover, plain clothes.” Why would he want to raise suspicions about himself? Whoever sent them was trying to frame Cato – to divert attention away from themselves.’

  Jar knows what Max is thinking, that he was right when he suggested someone was playing him. ‘I still believe the diary was written by Rosa,’ he says in anticipation, but Max stays silent, turning the whiskey in his glass.

  ‘While you were away, I went back over all my old research files. For that article I wrote.’

  ‘Did you discover anything?’

  ‘Only that I was a lazy sod. No wonder I never made it as an investigative journalist. Christ Almighty. I did discover one thing, though. The retreat’s just been put on the market. I was planning to call the owner tomorrow, pay them a visit. Want to come?’

  59

  Cromer, 2012

  After A finished FaceTiming Kirsten again, she put her iPad on her bedside table and went to the bathroom. I switched off my light and turned away to sleep, but there was something about A tonight – the way her cotton nightie moved against her buttocks. We haven’t made love since I lost my job, since she started to reduce her daily medication. And we now often sleep in separate bedrooms. Tonight, though, she asked if we could be together – new beginnings, she said.

  Benzodiazepines affect people in many different ways. Long-term use generally depresses sexual activity, but there are exceptions. In an interesting case study by Fava and Borofsky from 1991, a woman with a history of drug and alcohol abuse and sexual promiscuity as a teenager (not dissimilar to A’s own experience) led an abstemious, almost monastic life as an adult until she started to have panic attacks. She was prescribed clonazepam, a potent anti-anxiety benzo, and became sexually disinhibited, with a particular fondness for striptease.

  Benzos have helped to control A’s general anxiety disorders, eased her insomnia and, it’s fair to say, made things simpler in the bedroom. In the early years, I switched her between diazepam and alprazolam, chlordiazepoxide and clobazam, swapping in fast-acting compounds such as flunitrazepam (aka Rohypnol) when I needed to be sure she’d forget what had happened between the sheets.

  When I changed jobs from Huntingdon to Norwich, we began to test a variety of new benzos with very long half-lives, one of which fell at the last phase of regulatory trials because its side effects included sexual disinhibition and memory loss – a potent combination perceived as making it too dangerous to be licensed. It was a shame, as it was a decent product (similar to clonazepam, with one chemical arm of the molecule substituted), but I had access to our warehouse and made sure we had almost a lifetime’s supply of the drug at home. (There have been many advantages, not least that it doesn’t show up in blood tests whenever A visits her GP.) It wasn’t easy, but I managed to take away other benzos, too, powerful new ones that were awaiting first-in-human trials.

  Did A forget to take her dose tonight? I usually substitute it for one of her innocent sleeping pills, which she takes like clockwork an hour before bedtime.

  She slid into bed next to me and nibbled my ear. I lay there for a few seconds, eyes open. For as long as she’s been on benzos, it’s always been me who has initiated, her response compliant rather than enthusiastic. A tear ran down my cheek as her fingers circled my stomach before they descended. I should have slept in a separate bedroom, or gone down to the shed.

  I turned towards her, feeling her face in the dark with my fingers, slipping my thumbs between her lips. Her mouth was warm, her excitement arousing something in me that had no right to be remembered in any conscious mind.

  ‘Gently,’ she whispered.

  I knew I should stop, make my excuses, but I told myself I could control what was about to happen, as I have done so many times before. And for half a minute, maybe longer, we were like any normal couple, evenly matched.

  It was only when I turned her over on to her front and pinned her arms above her head, my fingers circling her thin wrists, my knees pushing her thighs apart, that she cried out.

  ‘Martin, what are you doing? You’re hurting me.’

  She tried to wriggle free from beneath me, but for a second I held her there, martyred on the bed, legs and arms splayed like St Andrew. Then I let her go and rolled away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘No, I’m not OK. What the hell were you doing? You nearly broke my wrists.’

  ‘I said I was sorry.’ I was sitting on the edge of the bed now. But she was already walking to the bathroom, where she slammed the door behind her.

  60

  What makes me human has flown this bruised body of mine and is perched at a safe distance, looking on, wings folded, waiting one day to return.

  ‘It’s just resting,’ Dad says. ‘The underwing markings help to keep it unnoticed.’

  My guard visits in the afternoons, bringing me a daily dose of pain, and a clean orange jumpsuit once a week. He refuses to give me any underwear, but at least he’s now accepted the need for sanitary towels (my periods have almost stopped anyway).

  Today’s visit began like all the others: a test on what I had memorised the day before, followed by new entries that I must commit to memory.

  ‘Si
lent Retreat, Herefordshire, Spring Term, 2012: It’s the last day of our briefing in Herefordshire. Tonight we return to our colleges to put our affairs in order.’

  ‘Start to put our affairs in order – and wait,’ he shouted, emphasising ‘start’ and ‘wait’.

  ‘Tonight we return to our colleges, start to put our affairs in order – and wait.’

  He punishes me when I make mistakes, beats and abuses me, but is any human company, even his brutal presence, better than the isolation that follows when he is gone?

  61

  It’s as they are driving over the Severn suspension bridge that Jar decides that he can trust Max. For the first few hours, he slept – Max had picked him up from outside his block of flats at dawn in his navy blue Land Rover Defender – but he stirred somewhere between Swindon and Bristol on the M4 and they have been talking ever since.

  Perhaps it was Max’s opening remark that convinced him: ‘You should write a novel – I enjoyed your short stories.’ When Max went on to say he’d ordered copies of his book for several friends, Jar knew Max was wasted in corporate PR. It also became apparent that Max has unfinished business as an investigative journalist and that his article about Oxbridge students means more to him than he at first let on. He’s keen to help Jar, but he also wants to nail the story, prove to himself once and for all that he has what it takes to write a front-page scoop.

  Jar confided in him that he was working on a novel when Rosa disappeared – she was the only one that he’d told – and hasn’t written a word of it since. They went on to discuss their favourite collections of short stories – everything from Joyce’s Dubliners to Saunders’ Tenth of December – before Jar returned to his meeting with Rosa on the cliffs in Cornwall forty-eight hours earlier.

  Once again, Max said nothing to suggest he didn’t believe him. He just listened. As he is now, to Jar’s account of Rosa’s uncle and aunt in Cromer, the weekends away they spent there together, Cato’s ongoing investigation into Martin.