Can You See Her?: An absolutely compelling psychological thriller

by S. E. Lynes

  And at last she smiles, a proper smile with all her teeth. And I was right. It was worth the wait.

  ‘That’s very good,’ she says. ‘Good work.’

  ‘I comforted him.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I comforted him. I told him it was all going to be OK. We said goodbye. We had a little hug and I went on my way. I didn’t take the knife out of my bag – the knife wasn’t there. I could smell cigarettes even though there was no one else there. I don’t smoke. And he didn’t smoke. I didn’t put the knife in him. I just imagined it. I just imagined it. I didn’t kill him, did I? I didn’t kill that beautiful boy.’ My eyes fill.

  ‘Rachel, look at me.’

  I look at Blue Eyes. Amanda, that’s her name. She is called Amanda Frost and she can see me.

  ‘Rachel, are you listening to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t kill that boy.’

  ‘I didn’t?’ I stifle the sob in my throat.

  Her clear blue eyes are on mine. ‘You didn’t kill anyone.’

  55

  Rachel

  My head is throbbing. There’s a pain behind my eyes. I know what she’s said is true. I’ve always known it somewhere because it fits with the perfect click of a missing piece.

  ‘The tissues,’ I say. ‘The tissues in my rucksack. I’ve just remembered, I didn’t have a hot flash outside the leisure centre, I had a nosebleed. That’s why I leaned against the wall. I stuffed the tissues in the front pocket of my rucksack, and by the time I came out of the class, I’d completely forgotten about the nosebleed.’

  Blue Eyes takes a deep breath. ‘One thing at a time, but that’s good, that’s great.’

  ‘The knife. Oh my God, I did put it in my bag. After Jo, I woke up in the middle of the night and I went downstairs and it was in the cutlery drawer so I… I put it in my bag and I must’ve forgotten it the moment I’d done it, must’ve been half asleep, though when I brought it in from the garage is anyone’s guess. I’d felt scared walking home that night. I saw two lads vaping and I can remember thinking, what if they’re wrong ’uns, what if they come at me? But I must’ve been half asleep when I did that because what the heck is a knife going to do to protect me? I’d never be able to use it on anyone. I’d never have time to get it out of my bag let alone… But hang on, if I didn’t kill anyone, who did?’

  She holds up her hand. Patience, woman.

  ‘The police found the clip file in your kitchen,’ she says. ‘And Ian’s clothes in the washing machine and the cigarette butts in the garage. Cigarette butts were found near the scene of the attacks on Anne-Marie, Ian Brown and David King, along with fabric fibres and hairs. The DNA from the cigarette butts matched with DNA from other cigarette ends found near the car park of Brookvale Leisure Centre. These also matched one of the cigarette butts that you kept and hid in the garage.’ She meets my eye, holds my gaze. ‘Hair strands found in Anne-Marie’s car matched hair found in your house.’

  ‘What are you saying? It wasn’t Mark, was it? I know it’s always the husband, but it’s not, is it? It’s not my Mark – please tell me it’s not.’

  ‘No, Rachel, it isn’t.’

  ‘It’s not Lisa. Oh God, please tell me it’s not her. Please, Amanda.’ I meet her eye, see the almost imperceptible shake of her head. ‘Oh,’ I say, and suddenly everything is obvious. ‘Ingrid.’

  ‘Matching cigarette stubs, hair and garment fibres left at the town-hall crime scene were found in Ingrid Taylor’s flat along with calendar entries in her iPhone detailing your movements over the past eight months.’

  ‘Eight? But she only moved in in the summer.’

  ‘The police arrested Ingrid Taylor almost a month ago, Rachel. In questioning, she revealed a worrying fascination with your whereabouts as well as an inappropriate interest in your husband, Mark. She had apparently taken a selfie in her underwear and sent it to him. Your husband revealed that she had been pestering him. Not his choice of words, but it seems she was calling at your house whenever you were out. We did some digging, spoke to people she knew in Helsby. There was an… incident. A woman accused Ingrid of sleeping with her husband. Ingrid attacked this woman, held a knife to her throat apparently… it all happened at a cocktail party. It seems they struck a deal: Ingrid was to move away and no charges would be brought.’

  My chin is on the floor, manner of speaking.

  ‘Blimey,’ I say, breathless.

  ‘She was watching you, Rachel. And she was following you. Sometimes she would simply follow you, sometimes she would double back and call in at your home, knowing you to be out. She knew you were at a spinning class and called at your home moments after you’d left, eventually persuading Mark to give her a lift to the leisure centre so that her car wouldn’t be picked up on CCTV. We have captures of Ingrid following you into St Michael’s cemetery and on the road near the leisure centre. Fibres matching her clothing were found under David King’s fingernails. Footage of her was also taken from the CCTV outside the Red Admiral pub late on Saturday evening, the night Ian Brown was attacked.’

  ‘I can’t… I can’t take it in.’ The information hovers. I have heard it, I know I have, but it’s not made its way into my brain yet.

  ‘In interview, Ms Taylor exhibited several traits of narcissistic personality disorder.’ Amanda leans forward. ‘Arrogance is one of those traits, Rachel. She offered herself as a witness, convinced she’d been one hundred per cent successful in framing you for the murders. She didn’t request a lawyer until very late in the questioning, by which time she’d tied herself in knots. She’s not as bright as she believes herself to be – it’s completely in keeping with her personality disorder, the belief that others are less intelligent than herself. It appears that while other traits manifested strongly – a refusal to take responsibility for her actions, a strong desire for status, particularly through material goods, and a failure to acknowledge boundaries – it was arrogance that did for her in the end. She simply could not imagine that her story would not be believed. And so she did not get her house in order, so to speak.’

  ‘I can’t take it in.’ But my body knows it. My shoulders have lowered. There’s an ease in my spine, a looseness in my jaw.

  ‘If you remember, Mark helped her with a passport form.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it seems she’d booked herself a little holiday to the Seychelles, which she fully intended to take. She’s been charged with stalking with malicious intent, and with the murders of Joanna Weatherall, Anne-Marie Golightly and David King, and the vicious attack on Ian Brown. She claims she is innocent, which is textbook – the failure to take responsibility for one’s actions and the consequences of those actions. We tried to tell you, to explain it to you, but you were too ill.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Everything I’ve told you in the last two sessions is information you’d already been given. But you were convinced you were responsible for the attacks. Nothing could dissuade you, nothing.’

  ‘But I was there. For all the attacks I was there. How do you know it was Ingrid?’

  ‘Because she was there too. That’s what I’m telling you. There was CCTV footage, there were blood traces on her clothes and shoes matching three of the victims, mud samples taken from the soles… I could go on. There were notes in her phone, including the date of your spinning class, and the date of the anniversary of Kieron’s death, which she claimed not to know about even though your husband said he told her. But it appears she followed you regularly and often. She followed you the night you crossed the churchyard. It’s possible she knocked your head against the gravestone or hit you with something, but she hasn’t confessed to that and we have no proof.’

  ‘And you’ve told me all this before?’

  She nods. ‘When you gave your statement you were suffering from delusions caused by overwhelming levels of stress, but also, I believe, from a form of menopausal psychosis, which took us longer to diag
nose but which ties in with the postpartum psychosis you suffered when Kieron was born. There is also the great weight of grief.’

  I nod. Tears fall down my face as usual, but they’re different tears somehow.

  ‘Rachel, are you clear that I’m not a detective and I’m not a lawyer but a forensic psychiatrist?’

  ‘Yes. But I thought you were building a case. Studying a murderer for insight or something. I didn’t care. I just wanted someone to listen to me. To see me.’

  ‘Of course. I understand completely. But once it became clear that reasoning with you would not work, my chosen course of therapy was to let you tell your story from beginning to end according to your truth, without interruptions or corrections. I wanted to listen to it as you lived it and see if I could gain insight into the roots of these strongly held delusions and how I might help you overcome them. We’ve discussed how every attack tied into elements of your life that troubled you, have we not?’

  I nod, reach for the tissues.

  ‘And how you were working through these things, but that what lay at the base of all of it was your son’s death, your feelings of loss and guilt relating to that and the subsequent loneliness you felt at the further loss, as you saw it, of your family – your husband and daughter – who were struggling to cope in their own ways, and your best friend, who couldn’t figure out how to be close to you.

  ‘Your empathic nature made this very difficult, Rachel. Empathy without boundaries is dangerous. It can make us ill. It made you very ill indeed. Quite simply, from the moment Kieron died, you felt the pain of every victim whose story you read and printed out. You felt their pain and the pain of their families as if it were your own, because in a way it was your own. On top of that you felt guilt for every one of them, which was your own terrifying guilt at not being there for your son in his last moments. And as if that wasn’t enough, you made yourself responsible for all those deaths because you felt on some deep level responsible for your son’s death, do you see? Your own failure, as you saw it, to protect him. When the attacks and deaths happened close to home, that responsibility you felt, coupled with Ingrid Taylor’s campaign of hate against you… well, eventually it became a reality. You took full responsibility. You turned yourself in.’

  I press the wad of tissues to my eyes. ‘We drove straight to the hospital, but Kieron was…’

  ‘It was too late. I know. And that has been more than you or your family could bear. It’s more than anyone should ever have to bear. It broke you into pieces, but you were not aware that it had done so. You carried on as if you were whole because your family were relying on you to be whole. You wanted to take your own life but you felt trapped by the responsibility of staying alive for those you love and who love you. All three of you carried on, your husband, Katie and you; you carried on with no real idea how or why or what you were doing or how to talk about it to one another, and so, quite simply, you didn’t.’

  I hear her chair creak. She slides my notes onto the coffee table. I can see her hands clasped on her knees. ‘Emotions are like water, Rachel. Didn’t you tell me that? Anger is the leak in the bathroom and hate is the water that escapes through the kitchen wall? You have described yourself as water more than once. All feelings are water. They can be and often are misdirected.’

  ‘I did say that.’

  ‘Yes. You had the answers all along. The hate of the world, hate for others, prejudice, bigotry is often no more than misdirected anger for something altogether different. Our own pain. Our own dissatisfaction. Our own failure. We can’t control our pain and often we can’t identify where it’s coming from. We drink it or gamble it away, find comfort where we can. Whether it’s true or not, your reflection on David King having tattoos done because it was a pain he could at least control was very perceptive. The same with Phil, your customer. He gambled for the stress of it because it was a stress he understood. So when you believed that no one could even see you, you were alone with your pain, with all of it, do you understand? And when you picked up loneliness in everyone you met—’

  ‘It was my own loneliness.’

  ‘Precisely. So you see, I had to let you tell me what you thought had happened in its entirety, almost as a story, and together we’ve had a think about what that story means. And it occurred to me that the only attack you never claimed was David King and the reason for that was simple. You didn’t know about it.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that you, or your mind, only claimed your victims after you’d read about them. You can’t take responsibility for something you know nothing about. If you’d killed David King, you would have known about it. The others you read about. And because you’d read about these people, and met them and spoken to them, your empathy for them and sense of responsibility towards them, which had been raised to harmful levels since your son’s death, combined with a difficult hormonal mix, not to mention a dangerous woman who had misdirected her anger towards you and attempted to ruin your life, well, all that was enough to create chaos.’ She sits back, an expression almost of satisfaction on her face.

  ‘Wow.’ I shake my head. If it’s possible to blow a mind into repair, well, that’s what this feels like, like an explosion in reverse. ‘I can’t take it in, but at the same time it makes perfect sense.’

  ‘It’s quite a load. Your mind created memories that would support your idea that you were to blame for the injuries and deaths because you felt that you were to blame for your son’s death. But they weren’t memories, they were horror. The horror you felt at what happened to your son. You weren’t to blame for your son’s death and you weren’t to blame for the deaths in the newspapers and you weren’t to blame for Joanna’s or Anne-Marie’s or David King’s deaths either. That glass globe you were carrying on your back? It’s no wonder it was too heavy. You were quite simply trying to bear the weight of the entire world, which you felt was being destroyed by hate. Single-handedly and in a very fragile state, you were trying to stop hate from breeding hate by using love.’

  ‘Love on steroids.’

  ‘Exactly.’ She smiles. ‘Love on steroids. And meanwhile, Ingrid Taylor had made you responsible for all her woes. She was disgraced, ostracised. Her husband had left her. She was looking for somewhere to put her pain and humiliation. Do you see the difference? You took on responsibility for the world; she made you responsible for hers. Her unhappiness, her divorce, her childlessness…’

  ‘But she said she didn’t want children.’

  ‘She lied. People like Ingrid Taylor lie with no problem whatsoever. They rewrite history, they reinvent the world so that it fits with their very problematic subjectivity.’

  ‘My subjectivity was hardly a walk in the park, though, was it?’

  She laughs. ‘Well, no. But hers was devoid of empathy, the principal trait of the narcissist. They simply cannot conceive of how their behaviour causes pain to others, or rather, they know it does but they don’t care, not really, not in any depth. To Ingrid, you were a thing. A thing to be moved out of the way.’

  ‘Moved?’

  ‘Well, yes. It seems that in her hate campaign against you, she… how can I put this… realised that there might be some spoils for the taking.’

  ‘Spoils?’

  ‘Your husband. Mark.’

  ‘So I was right?’

  ‘Mark was an unforeseen bonus of her hate campaign. In trying to frame you, she realised she would have Mark to herself.’

  ‘Why not just kill me? That would’ve got me out of the way much quicker.’

  Blue Eyes pauses, bouncing the tips of her fingers together.

  ‘She was already cultivating her relationship with Mark,’ she says after a moment. ‘She knew she’d be a suspect, possibly the main suspect. She knew the neighbours would have seen her in Mark’s car, seen her calling at your home while you were out. She’s been a victim, she claims, of gossip before. I’m sure she realised Katie had her eyes on her, that Katie didn’t trust her. If she
played the sympathetic friend, if she made sure to report back to Mark on your evening wanderings, she could build up a picture of you as unstable and sinister – mad, if you like – making sure that those close to you would have no choice but to believe you’d committed these crimes, even making you believe it, ultimately.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Indeed. Not that she admitted to any of this. Narcissists reinvent the world and find evidence where none exists, often despite evidence to the contrary.’

  I shake my head. ‘I suppose I’m guilty of reinventing the world to fit my delusions.’

  ‘I guess. But the truth was there underneath. You knew it was there, that’s why you didn’t turn yourself in until… until you didn’t know it. The moment you truly believed you’d committed a crime, you called the police.’

  ‘You said Ingrid had been charged with the murders of Joanna, Anne-Marie and David. What about Ian?’

  ‘Ah.’ She leans back in her chair and crosses her legs before meeting my eye once again. ‘What the news report actually said was that he was “fighting for his life”. Like Kieron was. The exact same phrase. You jumped ahead, could see no other outcome for him but death. But Ian didn’t die, Rachel. He survived.’

  ‘Oh God.’ My eyes fill. I press my hands to them, a great sigh escaping me. ‘Oh, that’s wonderful. That lovely boy. Oh, that’s so…’

  I look up, meet her eye. A cloud passes over the sun.

  ‘Wait a second,’ I say. ‘You said Ingrid waged a hate campaign against me. Why the heck would anyone single me out for a hate campaign? What did I ever do to her?’

  56

  Ingrid

  Transcript of recorded interview with Ingrid Taylor (excerpt)

  Also present: DI Heather Scott, PC Marilyn Button, Ms Janice James (solicitor)