(1998) Denial

by Peter James

  Michael churned over their session this morning. The dove pining for its mate. Again, he wondered, Am I reading too much into this?

  The dove pining could apply as much to his grief after Katy’s death as to his distress now over Amanda. It was just how he had felt after the accident. At times in a state of denial, unwilling to accept that she was really dead, convinced that somehow she would return.

  His patient, Guy Rotheram, a seriously rich thirty-five-year-old packaging tycoon who was suffering from panic attacks, was sitting on the edge of the sofa describing the feeling he kept getting that he was outside his own body. The man worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, that was the main reason he was having panic attacks, but he couldn’t accept this. He couldn’t accept being beaten by his own body.

  ‘Are you listening, Dr Tennent?’ he asked suddenly.

  Michael was aware that he was not giving Guy Rotheram his full concentration. But Guy Rotheram would be going home to his Chelsea home tonight to his beautiful wife and his adorable children. Guy Rotheram’s panic attacks made life uncomfortable for him, but they would eventually stop. Guy’s worries were big worries, but his own were even bigger right now. Today Guy Rotheram, along with the rest of his life, was on hold.

  Who are you, Dr Terence Goel?

  What is your real problem?

  How much do you know about me?

  As soon as Guy Rotheram left, Michael pulled out Terence Goel’s file and took out the original letter of referral from Goel’s GP, Dr Shyam Sundaralingham, bearing the address, 20 West Garden Crescent, Cheltenham.

  He dialled the phone number. It was answered on the third ring by a middle-aged male voice with a pukka military clip. ‘Dr Sundaralingham’s surgery.’

  Michael was surprised to hear a male voice. He assumed this was one of the increasingly common new breed of practice managers answering the phone. ‘My name’s Dr Tennent, I’m a psychiatrist. Dr Sundaralingham recently referred a patient to me, and I’d like to have a word with him about the patient.’

  ‘I’m afraid Dr Sundaralingham’s out at the moment. May I take your number and have him call you back?’

  Michael gave it, then hung up. The sun had moved past the window now, and he opened the Venetian blind to let more air into the stuffy room. His phone rang. It was Lulu.

  He logged back onto the Internet to check his e-mail while they talked. Lulu had no news, and sounded relieved to hear that Roebuck was taking the tape of Amanda’s call seriously.

  ‘Four days now,’ she said.

  There was a disturbing finality in her voice. And there was a disturbing finality in the number, also, he thought. As if to go missing for one day, or two days, or even three days was somehow all right. But after four days . . .

  Two hundred and fifty thousand missing persons a year. Roebuck hinted at a possible connection between Amanda’s disappearance and that of Tina Mackay. The publisher had been missing for three weeks, and he got the distinct impression from the detective that the police hadn’t yet found a single clue.

  Now with the tape they had something for Amanda. And they had hope.

  Amanda had spoken those words: there was no way of telling when, but there was a good chance she had been alive last night. He and Lulu had speculated on the way home from Beamish’s house about the edited silences on the tape. Lulu was convinced the editing wasn’t Amanda’s work. If Amanda had wanted to pull a stunt on the phone to embarrass him, she’d have had the guts to do it live, she insisted.

  Michael had agreed. And if it wasn’t her phoning him, but someone else, they must have a reason. Kidnap? A ransom? She must still be alive.

  ‘Where do we go from here?’ Lulu asked. ‘Are we going to wait to see what the police do?’

  For three fruitless weeks, like Tina Mackay? Michael thought but did not say. ‘No. We keep looking, we keep doing everything we can. I don’t know how much the police are going to do – I don’t know how much they can do.’

  ‘And us? What more can we do?’

  ‘I’m thinking. I’m not going to just sit and twiddle my thumbs. I can’t do that, I need to keep looking.’

  ‘That’s how I feel.’

  ‘Don’t lose that feeling.’

  He had a ton of correspondence and phone calls to deal with from his unscheduled day off yesterday. He suggested to Lulu they spoke at the end of the afternoon, hung up, then turned his attention to his e-mail.

  There was one with an address he did not recognise, and which had a JPeg attachment, a photograph or an illustration titled, LAST PIC OF AC INTACT.

  The e-mail message said, simply: ‘Wish you were here.’

  A burst of nerves confused his fingers. He struggled to move the mouse, to get the cursor on the attachment, then finally he succeeded and double clicked on it.

  It took several agonisingly slow moments to open. Then he could see it was a photograph. Dark. A hazy, greenish hue. In the middle, cowering, in a grubby white T-shirt and blue jeans, staring in stark, eyes-wide-open terror at the camera was Amanda.

  Thomas Lamark, at work in the garage, tackling the dismantling of the back axle assembly of Amanda Capstick’s Alfa Romeo, heard Terence Goel’s mobile phone ring. A few seconds later there were four short beeps from the machine, indicating that there was a message.

  Peeling off his greasy surgical gloves, he entered Terence Goel’s PIN and played the message back.

  He recognised immediately the clipped military voice of Nicholas Lubbings, sole proprietor of the Cheltenham Business Communications Centre.

  ‘Dr Goel, a Dr Michael Tennent just telephoned Dr Sundaralingham. He has – ah – left a message for the doctor to phone him about a patient he has referred.’ Lubbings’s voice was deadpan; if he had any curiosity about his clients’ activities, he kept it well masked.

  Thomas cursed. He had made mistakes with the psychiatrist this afternoon. Damage limitation was essential. He had not given Tennent sufficient for him to feel suspicious, but he needed to plan his next consultation with the man much more carefully.

  Heading from the garage, through the garden, back to the house to fetch a glass of water, Thomas wondered whether Dr Sundaralingham should call Dr Tennent back, but he was wary of the psychiatrist, and did not want to risk being tricked into making another mistake. He decided to think about it for a while.

  The Times lay on the kitchen table, open at the page on which was the announcement:

  Cora Edwina Burstridge. Much-loved mother of Ellen and grandmother of Brittany. Funeral service on Friday 1 August at 10.30 a.m. at All Saints Church, Patcham, East Sussex, followed by private cremation. No flowers. Donations instead to the Actors Benevolent Fund and the Royal Variety Club.

  The timing was good. He wanted to attend – his mother would be pleased to know he had watched Cora Burstridge being sent to the ovens. Afterwards, he would still have sufficient time to get to the mastectomy operation at King’s College Hospital.

  Perfect.

  You won’t be so cocky in our next consultation, Dr Michael Tennent.

  Chapter Eighty-five

  ‘She’s in the same clothes she was wearing on Sunday,’ Michael said, pointing at his laptop screen. ‘You see – the white T-shirt, jeans, those were what she was wearing.’

  They were in the small but immaculately tidy office of DC Roebuck’s two senior officers, his detective sergeant and his detective inspector. Roebuck had introduced them, but Michael hadn’t clocked their names properly. It was lunch-time, and he was back in Hampstead police station for the second time that day.

  DC Roebuck had ascertained through a colleague that the e-mail with Amanda’s photograph had been sent from the cybercafé Cyberia, off London’s Tottenham Court Road. With hundreds of people paying cash to use their computer terminals to send e-mails every day, there was only a slim chance of getting any description of the person who had sent this one. But Roebuck was still going to try.

  The detective inspector, a tall woman in her ear
ly forties, with tidy fair hair and an orderly manner, squinted at the screen. ‘Can you put the brightness up a little?’

  Michael increased it. The image was grainy, as if it had been taken through some kind of a mesh, Amanda’s red eyes adding to the demonic quality of the photograph. Jesus Christ, she looked so damned scared. He found it hard to watch, his mind churning up wild, disturbing images, memories. He thought of the films, Silence of the Lambs, The Collector; he thought of all the dozens of beautiful, innocent women’s faces that had stared from newspaper pages or television screens over the years. The stark words of those headlines that in the past had seemed so remote but now were frighteningly real. FOUND DISMEMBERED . . . MUTILATED BODY IN WOODS . . . SEXUALLY ASSAULTED . . . TRACES OF SEMEN . . .

  Michael could see Amanda standing on a floor, he could see a wall behind her and another to her left, and what looked like the edge of a mattress on the floor.

  ‘Strong shadows,’ said the detective sergeant, a solid-looking plodder.

  ‘She could be in darkness,’ the DCI said.

  ‘Darkness?’ Michael asked sharply.

  The DCI touched the screen with a well-manicured finger and moved it around to illustrate her point. ‘She had red eyes from the flash, and she’s lit brightly on her upper body, but the brightness falls away rapidly down towards the bottom of her jeans – that indicates a flashgun aimed high. But we can barely make out anything else in the room apart from Miss Capstick. If there is a light on in the room, why can’t we see anything?’

  Michael nodded grimly. Darkness. Oh, my God, you poor darling.

  ‘I’d like a copy of this picture on disk – we’ll get it enhanced and see if anything else shows up on it,’ she added. ‘They have some very powerful new digital enhancers. If there are any clues on this, they’d have the best chance of finding them.’

  The detective sergeant now touched the screen. ‘Bare floor, some kind of hard surface, might be a cellar or a garage.’

  ‘How long will it take you to get it tweaked up?’ Michael asked.

  The detective sergeant said, ‘We’ll have to get it to the photographic lab in Birmingham – we can get it overnighted.’

  ‘Overnighted!’ Michael exploded. ‘Jesus! That means another twenty-four hours is going to go by – we don’t even know that we have twenty-four hours. It’s a two-hour drive, for God’s sake! Give me the address and I’ll take it up myself now, I’ll –’

  Roebuck interrupted, ‘We can send it as an e-mail attachment. They’ll have it instantly.’

  The sergeant gave Roebuck the bewildered gaze of a man still not quite there with technology. The DCI looked at him approvingly. ‘Good idea. You won’t lose any picture quality?’

  ‘None at all,’ Roebuck said.

  The inspector and the detective sergeant both handed Michael their cards and direct-line numbers. The DCI told him that they were going to print posters and put them up in petrol stations and other places along Amanda’s likely route to London on Sunday night. They were also putting her name and picture out on the missing-person slots on regional and national television, and planning to interview everyone who lived in her building or close to it.

  Michael headed back to the office. He’d let two patients down, but he might just make it back in time for the third.

  She was being kept in darkness.

  Some monster out there had Amanda, the lovely, beautiful, incredible Amanda.

  He pulled over to the side, put on the handbrake and closed his eyes. Amanda, darling, we’ve had so little time together. Please be all right. Be strong. I’m looking for you. I’m going to find you. You are going to be all right. You are going to be fine.

  At ten past five, just as Michael was about to see his last patient, Thelma told him that DC Roebuck was on the line.

  The detective had a report from Birmingham. ‘Dr Tennent, I don’t know if any of this will help. The place Miss Capstick is in would seem to be some kind of underground chamber, or a vault, from the absence of any natural light. There’s a mattress, and the edge of an orange bucket is visible. The floor and walls both appear to be made of concrete. The technician says that Miss Capstick’s T-shirt looks dirty and her hair’s matted.’

  The detective held back that there were bloodstains on the T-shirt and that her jeans were torn.

  ‘She’s normally very neat,’ Michael replied. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No, I have the number of the technician, who’d be happy to speak to you, and I’m having a print sent down here. We can meet at nine in the morning and take a look, see if there is anything you recognise. I’ll bring it to you if it’s not convenient for you to come here, and I’d like to take another statement from you.’

  ‘Of course.’ Michael wondered if he was still considered a suspect. If he was, he wanted to get that thought out of Roebuck’s mind so that the police didn’t waste any precious time on him. Could he account for his movements on Sunday night after he had left the track? He’d gone home, read the papers, worked on some notes for a talk he was giving in a fortnight, then gone to bed. No alibi. Anyhow, surely Amanda’s call to the radio station was evidence enough?

  He was so desperately tired it was hard to stop his brain from rambling. Forget it, you’re not a suspect. Concentrate!

  Concentrate on Amanda.

  After he had hung up, he sat, thinking. DC Roebuck said she appeared to be in an underground chamber or vault.

  His mind flashed back to his session with Dr Terence Goel.

  ‘You are stronger than the dove – you can put it in the cellar, but what about the feelings of the dove in the cellar?’

  ‘Fallout shelter.’

  Goel had fumbled after saying fallout shelter. As if he had let something slip.

  Fallout shelters were made of concrete. Lead-lined concrete. Underground.

  Ordinarily, he would not have had enough here to justify breaking the patient/client confidentiality code, but right now he didn’t care about that. He wanted to explore every possible area, even if it meant being hauled over the coals by the British Medical Association Complaints Bureau.

  He rang DC Roebuck back. ‘I have a patient who is bothering me. It might be nothing, but there are things he said in a consultation with me this morning that tally a little with what you are describing in that photograph.’

  ‘In what way exactly, sir?’

  ‘This is a little delicate. He’s an eminent scientist and everything he has said to me is confidential, but I feel you should know. I’d be grateful if you could be very discreet – perhaps just check him out? I’m trying to get hold of the GP who referred him and I might get some more information from him.’

  ‘Shall I wait until you’ve got that?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Can I have his name and address? You know where he works?’ Roebuck asked.

  ‘His name is Dr Terence Goel.’ Michael spelled it out. ‘He works at GCHQ.’

  ‘The government intelligence surveillance headquarters?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’d have gone through extensive positive vetting before getting a post there.’

  ‘I know. But I’m not at all happy about him. Although this could just be me clutching at straws.’

  Michael explained his concerns in more detail. Roebuck listened to him and then said, ‘You’re right to be concerned. It may well turn out to be nothing, but we should definitely take a closer look at this man. I’ll go and have a word with him myself.’

  ‘I don’t want him to know that you’re seeing him because of my concerns.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll find some excuse.’ Good-humouredly he said, ‘I’ll tell him his car was in the vicinity of an accident and we’re looking for witness statements, something like that.’

  Michael gave him Dr Goel’s address and mobile phone number, thanked him and hung up.

  Dr Sundaralingham had not rung back. He dialled the doctor’s number, and it was answered by the same man as before.
r />   ‘He does have your message,’ the man assured him. ‘I spoke to him a short while ago, but he’s busy. He asked if you have a home or mobile number he could call you on after office hours.’

  Michael gave him both, and stressed that it was urgent that he spoke to Dr Sundaralingham. The man promised to convey this to him.

  Thelma buzzed to remind him that his patient had now been waiting for fifteen minutes.

  Suddenly he had a thought. There was someone who might be able to help. A patient who had hinted he knew something. A total long shot, but it was worth a try. Hurriedly he opened a drawer in his filing cabinet and thumbed through the headings under the flagging ‘D’.

  Then he lifted out the file, opened it at the first page, and wrote down the address. A visit would get a better reaction than a phone call. He would go straight after his last patient.

  Chapter Eighty-six

  The tenth screw almost slipped from Amanda’s fingers, but somehow she managed to grip it between whatever was left of her nails. A burst of light flashed in front of her eyes. The headlamps of a train coming out of a tunnel. Somewhere in the darkness around her she heard her mother call her name. Then she heard rising laughter as if she was walking past a crowded pub.

  She swung her head, staring out: a spark like a firefly shot through the darkness and died. Then Lulu appeared and disappeared like a spectral figure on a ghost train. An oceanic swell of anxiety heaved up inside her chest then dropped away. More voices. Her mother again, now Lara.

  Quiet, please leave me alone, not now, don’t do this to me now. Darkness crashed over her, dragging her, like undertow, away from the wall. She leaned forward against it, the mattress tilting away beneath her feet, tried to steady herself.

  She pocketed the screw then slid both hands up the wall to the edge of the grille and, using the blade of her screwdriver, pried the bottom surround of the grille away from the wall.

  It was far heavier than she expected, and before she had a chance to do anything, she was overbalancing backwards under the weight.