The Second Life of Amy Archer

by R. S. Pateman

  I emerge from an overheated Selfridges, blinking at the light and bustle of Oxford Street and shocked at the number of bulging shopping bags in my hand. For a moment I think about turning around and taking all the clothes back, but I can’t. I’m tired and need some fresh air. Besides, they will all suit and fit Esme as well as they would Amy.

  I drift across Hyde Park and find myself just around the corner from Belgrave Square. The door to the Spiritualist Association is open. Inviting.

  The receptionist looks up and smiles.

  ‘Mrs Archer! How nice to see you again,’ she says. She narrows her eyes and frowns. ‘Have you changed your hair? You look . . . different.’ Her eyes drop to the cluster of bags in my hand. ‘Making the most of the sales, I see.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right . . . It’s time for a makeover.’

  ‘You’re looking good on it. How can I help?’

  ‘I was just passing and I remembered I still haven’t paid Ian for the readings he gave me.’ I put my bags down and open my handbag. ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘I’m not sure, actually,’ she says, rustling through some papers on her side of the desk. ‘I don’t know if we have a rate for telephone readings or if it’s extra for him working over the holiday. But I can ask him.’

  ‘He’s here?’

  ‘Came back yesterday.’

  I’d lost all track of time.

  ‘Would you like to see him?’ she asks. ‘He’s got a few minutes before his next reading.’

  He looks surprised to see me, sheepish even. The blue of his eyes seems darker, the angle of his off-kilter gaze more acute.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you about your friend’s telephone number,’ he says. ‘Requests for such specific help never really work. But I hope the photo I sent from New York meant something to you.’

  ‘Yes, though I’m not sure what.’

  He smiles ruefully.

  ‘That’s the way of it sometimes, I’m afraid. Maybe it will be clearer in time.’

  ‘It will be clearer even sooner after a session of past-life regression,’ I say hopefully. ‘I know you don’t do it, but could you recommend someone who does?’

  He frowns at me.

  ‘I know a few people,’ he says. ‘But I’d be happier to put you in touch if I felt you’d really thought it through. It’s a . . . unique kind of therapy. Not something you should do for fun.’

  ‘It’s not for me. I think it might help my . . . niece.’

  ‘Even so.’ He coughs. ‘Does she know what’s involved?’

  ‘No. She’s only ten.’

  ‘Ten?’ He blinks and leans forward. ‘Like I say, it’s not really my area, but before you go ahead, you really need to give this some serious thought. Is your niece distressed?’

  ‘I’m afraid she is, yes. I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise.’

  ‘And you think she could cope? It can be traumatic.’

  ‘No more so than it is now,’ I say. ‘For all of us. Believe me, in her state of mind it would be riskier not to do it.’

  He looks doubtful.

  ‘If you can’t help me,’ I say, ‘maybe I should ask at reception.’

  ‘They don’t do regression therapy here.’

  I take out my chequebook and ask him how much I owe him. I rip the cheque from the book and slide it across the table.

  ‘Someone will do it for us,’ I say. ‘I wish it could be you, as we seem to have some kind of connection. But if you won’t help . . .’

  He takes the cheque.

  ‘It’s not a case of won’t, Mrs Archer . . .’ His voice trails off and his eyes begin to dart around the room. Eyelids flutter, cheeks twitch.

  ‘There’s a man right behind you,’ he says in a flat, faraway voice. ‘A big man. Not tall. Fat. In his thirties? Younger possibly. Jet-black hair. I . . . I . . .’ He shakes his head and cocks his ear towards me. ‘He’s talking . . . His lips are moving but I can’t hear him. No words are coming out.’ He shakes his head once more. ‘Ah, he’s drawing something now. An . . . exclamation mark. Think. He’s telling you to think, Mrs Archer. Think.’ He screws his eyes up. ‘There’s something else. Oh, I see. He’s put the exclamation mark in a triangle. Now he’s painting a red line around the edge . . . Ah, right. It’s like a traffic sign. Caution. Warning. Beware.’

  His body shudders and his eyes refocus.

  ‘Will you take it?’

  I don’t know who the man is. None of my family, former friends or colleagues fit the description. And it seems a little convenient that this warning from a spirit I don’t recognise should turn up just as Ian is trying to dissuade me from something he considers ill-advised.

  I stand up and collect my bags.

  ‘I think maybe we’d better leave it there, Mr Poynton,’ I say.

  ‘But you’ve got to take it,’ he says. ‘You said yourself we had a connection. You can’t pick and choose what you want to believe just because it doesn’t suit.’

  I open the door.

  ‘Be careful, Mrs Archer,’ he calls out as I walk down the corridor. ‘Beware.’

  I don’t stop at reception to ask for details of any pastlife therapists. I’ll find them elsewhere. I don’t need Ian. Not any more.

  His reading was too timely, too pointed to be credible. His job as a psychic is to facilitate, mediate. He’s just crossed the line into blatant interference. Abused his gift and undermined my trust in him.

  Maybe I was wrong to believe in him at all. Perhaps his prediction about the little girl being close was just a lucky guess. And having seen that he’d scored a bullseye, ambition made him send me the picture of the light switch, hoping to hit the target once more. Hoping to make a name for himself.

  Another possibility creeps into my head, one I can’t believe I haven’t thought of before. Wishful thinking blocked it. Now it rushes at me, an endless wave of logic so cold and powerful it knocks the breath from me.

  He could be a friend of Libby’s, a lover perhaps. An accomplice in an elaborate plan.

  It’s easy to see how they might have come up with the deception. Ian is the new boy at the Spiritual Association. The other psychics could have told him about the desperate mother who comes back repeatedly in the hope of talking to her daughter. They might have too much integrity to fool me into thinking they’ve contacted Amy, but maybe Ian isn’t so principled. Maybe he’s more ambitious.

  Libby saw an even bigger picture. Ian could soften me up with his prediction and she’d move in for the kill with her daughter, who just happens to bear a more than passing resemblance to mine.

  They could do some research and drill whatever facts they could find into Esme’s head. Esme would be rehearsed until her performance was perfect and natural. Believable enough to convince a sad, suggestible middle-aged woman with a valuable home, large divorce settlement and no one to leave it to.

  Then there’s the reward. Brian sold some of his shares in the agency to raise the one hundred thousand pounds for information leading to Amy’s return or the conviction of her killer. The money is still unclaimed.

  I see it all so clearly I stop in the street and start laughing, softly at first, then louder, until my mirthless shrieks degenerate into sobs. The bags in my hands suddenly feel too heavy to carry. Clothes spill on to the pavement; arms reach out towards me, legs run away. There are snide smiles in metal zips, sly winks in buttonholes. A facsimile of Amy’s body sprawls in a suit, a silhouette at a crime scene.

  I bundle the clothes back into the bags, hold out my hand to hail a passing cab. I don’t know who or what to believe. Everything. Nothing. No one.

  ‘Where to, love?’ the cabbie says, setting the meter running as I slam the door behind me.

  I need clarity. Once I looked to Ian for that. Now I have to go back to the last place where I thought things made some kind of sense. I can’t tell dark from light, the truth from a lie. A lost sheep from a hungry wolf.

  I need God to show me the way again. Flick
the switch of understanding. Now I know what the message in that picture means, even if I don’t know who it’s from.

  ‘Southwark Cathedral,’ I tell the cab driver. ‘Hurry.’

  The cathedral’s main turret looks like an extracted tooth, the spires its redundant roots. A gargoyle over the doorway shows a dragon clinging to the edge with its talons. I know how it feels. The music I hear as I open the doors makes me wobble even further.

  It sounds like an oboe, the signature of the duck in Peter and the Wolf. I tell myself it’s not really there. But it is. And it grows louder as I step into the cathedral.

  I’m relieved to see that there’s a group of musicians at the front of the church, the gaze of the stone saints above them indifferent to their performance.

  A woman near the door puts her finger to her lips and hands me a sheet of paper. Lunchtime Concert Recital, it says, featuring a quintet of students from a local music school. It lists the pieces to be performed but all I can hear is music from Peter and the Wolf. The cat as the clarinet, cagey and comic. Peter, youthful and playful in the exuberant strings. Grandfather’s grumbling bassoon. Worst of all, the anxious, melancholic oboe, prescient of the duck’s fate.

  Instead of taking a seat in the nave, I hurry down the aisle to the left, towards the Harvard Chapel. But the door is closed. A sign says it will open to the public again once emergency repair work has been completed. I turn the handle anyway and the door opens.

  The chapel is dark, the rack for votive candles empty, the window covered by tarpaulin and framed by scaffolding. The funereal gloom makes me shiver.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’

  A man appears behind me. He’s as grey as his cassock, his body stooped. He points at the door.

  ‘The sign is quite clear,’ he whispers.

  ‘But I had to come in. I need to find the truth.’

  My eyes fly around the chapel. I can just make out the limp red flag above the door. Veritas. And the red panel in the ceiling, its gilding dull and flat. Veritas. But the pane in the window below the image of Jesus is masked by the grubby tarpaulin.

  ‘Well I’m sorry,’ the man says, placing a hand on my arm. ‘You’ll have to pray elsewhere.’

  ‘But the window . . .’

  ‘I know. It’s very sad. We hope to get the crack repaired soon.’

  ‘Crack?’

  ‘Quite a lot of them, it seems,’ he says. ‘As you can see, we’ve got the specialists in, checking for more damage. We don’t want to take any chances, which is why we’ve shut the chapel to the public. If we could lock the door, we would. The sign is enough to keep people out – usually.’ He glares at me. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave.’

  The pressure on my arm becomes more insistent and doesn’t let up until I’m standing outside the chapel. The man closes the door, straightens the sign, nods his head at me and walks away.

  So much for the truth revealed by the light of God. I’m lost in a murky, maddening twilight. I want Esme to be Amy, but that is not enough. I need to believe it. Just like I believed Ian. Just like I believed God. But I can’t trust myself to believe anything, not even myself.

  Ian has to be a fraud, in league with Libby and Esme. He can’t risk a past-life regression as it won’t reveal anything about Amy’s fate or where her body is. How could it? No one knows. And Esme wouldn’t be able to make up details so convincingly if her conscious mind was slumbering under the spell of hypnosis. No wonder he tried to put me off.

  But the whole notion of a fraudulent plan is hard to believe too. The scam is elaborate and risky, dependent on a child to succeed. And yet Esme knows things about Amy she couldn’t have found out anywhere else.

  Through the fog in my head I see Esme listening attentively to Jill as they neared the end of their ride on the London Eye. I remember the hours Jill has spent sitting at my kitchen table or on my sofa. Holding me. Passing tissues. Listening to me talk about Amy. She knows every anecdote, every little detail, as well as I do. Sometimes she even finishes them for me.

  She’s word-perfect.

  Realisation hits me in a hot rush. Jill is the mole who has been leaking details to Libby.

  I can’t even begin to imagine how they know one another, but I’m sure they do. When they came face to face for the ‘first time’ at the London Eye, maybe Jill feigned her surprise at Esme’s resemblance to Amy.

  She could have helped set up the rendezvous and taken me there me to make sure I turned up. Why else would she have had her car with her that day? Jill is a better actress than I ever suspected. Maybe one of the many groups she belongs to is an amateur dramatics society and she’s never let on.

  I run along the cathedral aisle, chased by the notes from the oboe. The duck laughing, mocking. Seeing everything through the eyes of the wolf.

  I bundle myself into a cab and give the driver Jill’s address.

  When Jill opens her door, she’s got a pad and a pen in her hand.

  ‘What’s this?’ I sneer. ‘Making more notes for yet another essay? Instructions?’ I push past her and slam the door.

  ‘Essay? Beth, what’s—’

  ‘You bitch! How could you do it, Jill? How? After everything I’ve been through.’

  Jill sinks into a chair in the hallway, winded by shock. The pad and pen slip from her hand to the floor.

  ‘Beth,’ she says, her voice shaking, ‘whatever’s the matter? Calm down. Please. You’re upset.’

  ‘Upset!’ I scream. ‘That doesn’t even come close. I thought you were my friend, and all the while you’ve just been collecting information. Grooming Esme.’

  ‘Esme?’

  ‘Or should I say Amy?’

  ‘What?’ She rubs her eyes and shakes her head. ‘Beth, you’re not making any sense.’

  ‘Come on, Jill,’ I say. ‘You’ve taken me for a mug long enough. Denying it all now will only make you look as foolish and desperate as I’ve been.’

  ‘Denying what?’ Jill says, her hands stretched out, pleading with me.

  ‘Amy. Reincarnated. As Esme. What is it, Jill? Your way of being cruel to be kind? Jolting me back to life? Like Amy has been – apparently.’

  Jill stands up and her legs wobble. She reaches out to the wall for support.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ she says. ‘Esme says she’s Amy and you think I put her up to it. Is that right?’

  ‘You and Libby and Ian.’

  Jill reaches out and takes my hand. I pull it away.

  ‘You can’t honestly believe that any of that is true,’ Jill says. Her voice wavers and her hands are shaking. ‘I’d never clapped eyes on Libby and Esme until the other day at the Eye . . . And who’s Ian anyway? And reincarnation? Come on, Beth. It’s ridiculous! Almost as ridiculous as you thinking I could possibly come up with such a cruel idea. Even if I could do it, why would I want to?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she cries. ‘Because I wouldn’t. Not to anybody – and certainly not to you.’ She pulls a tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan and wipes her eyes. ‘It kills me you could even think I’d do anything so heartless, let alone accuse me of it.’

  ‘But how else could she know all the things she put in her essay?’

  ‘Beth, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What essay?’

  ‘The one Esme wrote, of course,’ I say. ‘You know, the one with all those memories. Details. All the things I’ve shared with you.’

  Jill jabs her finger at me.

  ‘Whatever is in this essay is clearly a pack of lies,’ she says, her voice stronger and more composed now. ‘And let’s not forget, Beth, you shared those memories with Brian, too. First-hand.’

  My eyes narrow and skirt around the hall. The blood in my veins is suddenly cold. Frozen by an awful realisation.

  ‘Brian must be involved as well!’ I say. ‘He’s as bored with my grief as you are.’

  Jill rolls her eyes.

  ‘Listen to yourself,
Beth,’ she says. ‘It’s pitiful. You’re tired . . . overwrought by the anniversary. I understand that. But you need help. You’re deluded. Paranoid. Christ, you could have written that claptrap essay yourself for all I know. It’s the Mother’s Day cards all over again.’

  A card has appeared on the mantelpiece several times over the last few years. I don’t remember buying them or writing them. But apparently I did. I can’t believe I’ve done the same thing again. Won’t believe it.

  My mind replays the moment I first saw the essay on my doormat. I’d been cleaning shortly before. Tidying up my desk. Then I was on the stairs, staring into nothing. Somewhere between the two memories, the envelope appeared.

  ‘I didn’t write it,’ I say, trying to sound certain. ‘Esme put it through my letter box.’

  ‘You saw her do it, did you?’

  ‘No, but . . . She wrote it at school – supposedly.’

  ‘So it’s in her handwriting, then?’ Jill says.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Typed,’ I say. ‘On a computer.’

  Jill snorts with derision.

  ‘So you could have written it,’ she says. ‘I know your psychiatrist told you to write things down, Beth. To get things out. But not like this. Not making things up.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  I try to remember if Libby or Esme mentioned the essay when we met. I thought they did, but now I stop and really think about it, I realise they didn’t. My eyes search the room, looking for something to hang on to, something to stop me going over the edge.

  ‘It’s not beyond the realms of possibility, is it, Beth?’ Jill says. ‘Only a few days ago you had it in your head that a vicar killed Amy. You can’t go around shooting your mouth off, accusing all and sundry. Someone less understanding than I am could tell the press, sue you for slander or defamation of character or something, and God help you then. Do you really want all that on top of everything else? I dread to think what the papers would make of it. They’d probably say you were just trying to shift the blame or attempting to redeem yourself.’ She puts her hand on my shoulder. ‘You haven’t told the police any of this, have you?’