(1998) Denial

by Peter James

  Feverish.

  The darkness smelt of concrete and of something else, like disinfectant, but not disinfectant. She knew this smell, it was familiar, an old smell that was triggering recognition but not memory.

  Am I dead?

  Let’s take this one step at a time.

  Amanda closed her eyes, the lashes crunching softly against each other in the silence, then opened them again. There was no difference. Darkness. Her throat was sore. Darkness. She blinked. Darkness.

  Too hot.

  I know this smell.

  She wondered, panic starting to unravel her calm, whether she had gone blind during the night. It happened. People went to sleep and woke up blind. Strokes. Detached retinas. Panic unspooling inside her now, she groped with a hand for the light switch. Her bedside table was on the right. On it were a glass of water, a handkerchief, a wrist-watch, clock radio and lamp.

  Nothing. Her hand found cold, coarse, hard . . . Now her brain was whipping up a blizzard of confused thoughts.

  Stone? Concrete?

  She blinked again, squeezed her eyelids shut and, in the silence, listened to her heartbeat. She could feel the muscles flexing away inside her chest, catching sometimes, vibrating, speeding and slowing. Blood hissing in her ears as if she had conch shells pressed over them.

  Oh, Christ, please, dear God, don’t let me be blind.

  She tried to concentrate her hearing, to listen for the sound of sleeping. For Michael? For Brian? She moved a hand through the darkness, searching for contact, but her fingers found only more cold, coarse stone.

  Tell me where I am, someone. Tell me what has happened. Tell me what this smell is that is like a hospital but not like a hospital.

  Am I in hospital?

  Please tell me I’m not blind.

  Her body told her she was on a mattress. Her hand told her the mattress was on a stone floor. The smell was her clue. She clung to it, a cloying, astringent reek that stung her eyes, her throat.

  There must be a light switch. A bell. There are always bells in hospital. Above the bed. She reached up her hand, but it found nothing, no wall, no switch, no bell. Just empty darkness.

  Her ears were hurting, popping, panic filling them with pressure, like going up in an aircraft, or down with a scuba tank. She found her nose, pinched it, blew. Her ears cleared but the panic threw other switches inside her. She was gulping air, her legs banging together. Starting to freak out.

  Calm down. Listen. Work this out.

  It was as quiet as a tomb all around her.

  Try to remember, she told herself. Work backwards. But from when? Now? She was in bed with Michael, they were making love, they –

  A car had been parked outside. A man in it had been watching them.

  Brian?

  She shivered. Her hand found her mouth. She sucked the edge of a finger and the flesh was warm. It was good to feel contact, a relief to feel something living in this darkness, even if it was only part of herself.

  I need to pee.

  I don’t know where the lavatory is.

  Oh, sweet Jesus, I can’t be blind.

  She pushed her bladder thought away. Got to figure this out, got to remember where I am. Then I will remember where the light switch is and I can find the lavatory. Not blind, it’s dark, that’s all.

  NOT BLIND.

  Can work this out from the clothes I’m wearing. She touched her left wrist, and the Rolex that Brian had bought her years back was still there. She cursed that the dial wasn’t luminous. Now she felt down her body. She was wearing a T-shirt. Her Versace jeans, she could feel the metal Versace bobble. Her favourite belt that she had bought in a shop in Menorca two years ago. No tights. Flat black shoes.

  Wearing these clothes – yesterday? With Michael, at the stock-car racing. It was all coming back now. Then she had gone on to Lara’s. Georgia’s fourth birthday party. The conjuror had produced a white rabbit from inside a glass jam jar.

  And then?

  Drove back to –

  Blank.

  Her hand found stone and air. Her need to urinate was worsening. Got to get up, stand up, find my bearings, this is ridiculous.

  Maybe I’m dreaming.

  Yes. Dreaming. Good. This is just a lucid dream, I will wake up in a minute.

  She rolled over onto her side, off the mattress, onto her knees on the stone floor, then stood up. Disoriented by the darkness she swayed, stumbled, then fell, hit the ground hard and cried out, her hand stinging from a graze.

  Jesus.

  Her head was spinning. She got back onto her knees. Then upright again, more slowly this time. Upright now. Steady. Stand still and hold it there. Good girl.

  My throat is sore.

  I drove back to London after Georgia’s fourth birthday party. I arrived at home, I parked the car, I took my handbag, locked the car, unlocked the front door of the building, went into the hallway, checked for any mail even though it was Sunday.

  And then?

  Blank again.

  Fogged film.

  Dark, murky liquid slopped around inside her mind. A sheet of bromide paper clacked from side to side in a tray, an image forming. The image was a man coming down the stairs that led up to her flat, a tall, good-looking man, his hand outstretched in a greeting. Big easy smile on his face, the smile of an old friend, yet she couldn’t place him, couldn’t remember ever having seen him before.

  ‘Amanda! Great to see you! What on earth are you doing here?’

  He shook her hand. She felt a light prick in her palm, as if perhaps a ring he was wearing had dug into her skin. She still couldn’t place him.

  ‘I live here!’ she remembered saying.

  Then blank.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  North London. Heavy lunch-time traffic, people on the move, the whole city caught by the sudden weather shift, jackets off, ties loosened, sodden armpits. Like his own. All traces of yesterday’s rain had gone and the wide avenue with its grimy Victorian houses felt as arid as it looked. Already the leaves on the trees looked dusty.

  Michael’s shirt clung to his chest and there was just one cool area in the small of his back where his sweat lay pooled. He crawled up Rosslyn Hill in the Volvo, behind a smoky lorry, his A–Z open on his lap, regretting now that he hadn’t gone for the air-conditioning option when he’d bought the car. He had the windows down, the roof open, the fan going full blast in his face. Pages of the map riffled in the draught, and every few seconds the brochure that lay beside his mobile phone on the passenger seat flapped open and shut.

  It had been biked over to him by Amanda’s assistant, Lulu. It advertised the services of 20–20 Vision, and contained two pictures of Amanda. One, two inches high, had a brief career resumé beneath it, the other was an action long-shot and Amanda’s face was scarcely bigger than a microdot.

  Amanda, where on earth are you? What has happened?

  She could be lying in her upturned car in a ditch. Brian might have kidnapped and killed her in a fit of rage. Jealousy turned people’s minds. She could have drowned, or lost her memory and be wandering around. People flipped, sometimes they lost their grip on reality.

  Or –

  He pushed the thought away that some stranger might have abducted her. Fred and Rosemary West had been caught, but there were still other monsters out there every bit as bad.

  Oh God, Amanda, please be all right.

  It was ten to one. Thelma, his secretary at the Sheen Park Hospital, had come up trumps: she’d managed to reschedule his last patient of the morning and the first two of the afternoon, which gave him a three-and-a-half-hour window before Terence Goel, whom she had been unable to contact, arrived at three forty-five. Michael had calculated that he should be comfortably back by then. He would have to be. He would never let a patient down.

  As he drove up the hill he saw the police station immediately ahead of him across the road, a rather grand-looking red-brick building sporting a massive flagpole with nothing hanging from
it. Hampstead was the most local police station to Amanda’s flat, and the detective he had spoken to required him to come in and make a statement. He wasn’t prepared to take it over the phone.

  Michael parked in a side-street, pocketed his mobile phone, hoping that at any second it was going to ring, hoping desperately to hear Lulu’s voice saying that Amanda had turned up and everything was fine.

  He buttoned his collar, straightened his tie, then climbed out and pulled on his lightweight navy suit jacket. Then he scooped up the brochure, entered the station and went up to the side of the counter marked ‘Detailed Inquiries’. There was a bell with a sign saying ‘RING FOR ATTENTION.’ On the wall was a crime-prevention poster warning GRASSED UP, BANGED UP, AS A MUGGER YOU ARE NEVER SAFE. Beside it was another poster, with a colour photograph of a small boy and across the top, the words MISSING – HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?

  He could see several desks and phones on the far side of the counter, all unmanned. The only other person in here was a grubby-looking girl, late teens or early twenties, sitting sullenly on a chair in the waiting area, holding an equally sullen-looking dog, a boxer-collie cross, he guessed, on a short chain.

  He pressed the button, which vibrated hard with a sharp ring. After a few moments a door opened and a WPC came up to the counter. ‘Are you being seen to?’

  ‘I have an appointment to see Detective Constable Gilpin.’

  ‘And your name please?’

  ‘Dr Tennent.’

  ‘Right, I’ll see if I can find him for you. I have a feeling I saw him go out.’ She looked at a chart of numbers, lifted a phone and dialled. After a moment she said, ‘Hi, it’s Sue at the front desk – is Roger there? No, I thought so. There’s a Dr Tennent who has an appointment with him.’ She nodded, then turned to Michael. ‘I’m afraid he’s been called out on an emergency. Did you especially need to see DC Gilpin, or could someone else help you?’

  ‘I want to report a missing person,’ Michael said, swallowing the rise of anger he felt. This was an emergency. Amanda could be in extreme danger. Equally, he’d had several patients over the years whose children had gone missing, and he was only too uncomfortably aware of how little the police could do to find missing people, unless there was clear evidence of a crime.

  A couple of minutes later the door opened again, and a gentle-looking bear of a man came through it, in an open-necked yellow shirt. He was in his early thirties, with a hefty rugby-player’s frame, but overweight and uncomfortable in this heat, Michael judged from the sweat streaming down his cheeks and his sodden shirt front. He had fair hair cropped to a fuzz and a big, slightly rubbery, baby face.

  He looked quizzically at Michael. ‘Dr Tennent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, DC Gilpin has been called out, can I help you?’ He had soft, kind eyes, and a quiet voice, but looked nonetheless like a man well able to take care of himself in a fight.

  ‘Yes, I want to report someone missing – it’s serious. There is something very definitely wrong.’

  The officer frowned. ‘Dr Tennent? You wouldn’t by any chance be the Dr Tennent that’s on the radio?’

  ‘Yes.’ Michael was pleased at the recognition: this might help him to be taken more seriously.

  The officer smiled. ‘My fiancée’s a great fan of your programme! Never misses it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Michael said.

  ‘She really rates you. She’ll be well chuffed when I tell her I met you! Come through to an interview room. Would you like a tea or a coffee?’

  ‘I’d love some coffee,’ Michael said. Then, although he never normally took sugar, he added, ‘White with sugar.’

  They sat in a small, claustrophobically hot room, with one tiny frosted-glass window high up that didn’t open. It reeked of stale cigarette smoke. There was a fan, which the officer switched on, then he seated himself opposite Michael at the battered metal table, opened a notepad and took out a biro. The room reminded Michael of the radio studio; it even had the same brown colours. The fan pushed the air around, without cooling it much.

  After he had taken down Amanda’s basic details, the officer asked, ‘Was Miss Capstick depressed at all? Or suffering from any mental disorder?’

  ‘Not in my opinion, no.’

  Watching Michael’s face carefully. ‘Was there any disagreement between you?’

  ‘Absolutely not. We . . .’ Michael checked himself then decided the officer should know the truth. ‘I don’t think either of us could have been in a happier frame of mind when we last saw each other.’

  ‘All right. Can you tell me what happened the last time you saw her?’

  Michael gave the officer all the details he could; it was a laborious affair, waiting for him to write everything down. When he had finished, Michael handed him the brochure, showing Amanda’s photographs inside it.

  The officer looked at them. ‘Very attractive young lady.’ He handed back the brochure.

  ‘Don’t you want to keep it?’ Michael asked, surprised.

  ‘Not at this stage, sir.’

  Michael looked at him angrily. ‘What do you mean, not at this stage?’

  ‘Sir, with respect, it has been less than forty-eight hours. Obviously we want to help all we can, but this isn’t a long time for someone to be absent. Miss Capstick is not suffering from any mental illness. For all we know she might have decided she needs a little space on her own.’

  ‘Forty-eight hours is plenty long enough for her to have bled to death if she’s in a wrecked car somewhere, or to have been murdered.’

  The officer put down his pen and leaned forward, studying Michael’s face intently. ‘What do you think might have happened, sir?’

  The man’s scrutiny made him feel uncomfortable. He knew the police would be bound to have some suspicions about him, as one of the last people to see her, and for reporting her missing.

  Michael told him about Amanda’s relationship with Brian, and her concern about the car that had been sitting outside his house, and the officer made notes about this.

  ‘She had no enemies, so far as you were aware, sir?’

  ‘Not that she mentioned.’

  ‘Did she appear in any of the documentaries she made? As an interviewer or narrator?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Why?’

  The officer shrugged. ‘Celebrities often get targeted by stalkers. It’s only a thought at this stage. I wouldn’t get alarmed.’

  ‘It’s very hard not to be alarmed. Amanda is not some flake, she’s a very bright, very together, sensible person. Even if she never wanted to see me again in her life, there is no way she would fail to turn up to business meetings and not make contact with her office.’

  ‘I’m afraid it happens more frequently than you think, sir. People disappear, then turn up days later with perfectly acceptable explanations. I’m sure as a psychiatrist you must have encountered people who have done this.’

  Michael had, but he was reluctant to acknowledge this. He stared back at the man, not wanting to give him any leeway. He wanted the police to get out there and start searching for Amanda. Right now.

  ‘So what are you going to do? Anything?’ he asked, testily.

  ‘At this stage, sir, we’ll circulate details to other police forces in Sussex and London that Miss Capstick has been reported as a missing person.’ He smiled to try to give Michael some reassurance. ‘Dr Tennent, I’ll keep a special eye on this for you and make sure that everyone knows about it, but beyond that there isn’t much more we can do at this stage.’

  ‘When can you do more about it?’ Michael asked, frustration fuelling his anger now. ‘When you find her body?’

  The officer had the grace to blush a little. ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand people are reported missing every year, sir. Most of them turn up again. I’m sure she will and that she’s fine, sir.’ He fished in his top pocket and pulled out a card. ‘Any time you need to contact me, day or night, it has my direct line and my mobile.’ Then he tur
ned it over and wrote on the back. ‘I’ve added my home number, sir, as it’s you. Please call me if you hear anything – or if you just want to talk more about it.’

  Michael took the card and looked at it.

  The name printed on it was Detective Constable Simon Roebuck.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Dresses. Shoes. Hat boxes. Wigs. Silk scarves. Jewellery boxes. Two entire rooms in Cora Burstridge’s flat were full of nothing else. Glenn found it hard to believe how many clothes the star had had.

  He found a diamond-studded antique Cartier watch in one box that was just sitting on top of a chest of drawers, and more fine jewellery lying around in cupboards and drawers.

  Everything was generally tidy – or as tidy as this massive jumble of stuff could ever be. There were certainly no tell-tale signs that an intruder had been rummaging around. Not until he opened the door to the broom closet in the kitchen.

  There was disarray in here. A bucket and pail had been knocked over; the handle of a carpet sweeper lay awkwardly on a crate of sherry bottles; several cloths had come off their hooks and fallen onto objects below them; a dustpan and brush had been dislodged and lay on the floor alongside a tin of Brasso, which had leaked out its contents.

  A gleam of light shone above his head. It was coming through a loft hatch that was very slightly ajar.

  Was someone up there now?

  He froze.

  The hatch cover was only a foot above his head. He could reach up and touch it easily with his gloved hands. Listening, he stood still, held his breath. His radio crackled and he switched it off, tuned his ears into the loft. Nothing. Music playing faintly under him, a piano tinkling – maybe the flat below?

  Reaching up, he placed his palms against the cover. He was over six foot tall, Cora would have needed a step-ladder. Where was it? When did you last go up here, Cora?

  He pushed the cover further open. In the stark light he could see up into the rafters. They looked in OK condition, a few flaps of roofing felt hanging down, that was all. Moving the wooden cover carefully aside, he gripped the edges of the hatch and hauled himself up.

  As his head rose up into the loft, he saw the figure towering above him, looking down icily.