by Mark Edwards
‘Maybe they had an attack of conscience,’ Sargent said. ‘I read about this guy who stole a hundred quid from a pub, then twenty years later sent it back with a note of apology. But your repentant burglar got an attack of the guilts much quicker.’
‘I feel like you’re not taking this seriously,’ I said. ‘I reported this when it happened two days ago. An officer gave me a crime number for my insurance company.’
Sargent prodded a key on my laptop, making the screen flicker into life. ‘Does your computer appear to have been tampered with in any way?’
‘No. I scanned it for viruses and there’s nothing there. I checked the browser history too and there’s no recorded activity since I last used it.’
I had already told him about the fraudulent use of my bank card and how the woman at the bank had said it had probably been cloned by the burglar.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.
Sargent set down the cup of tea I’d made him when he arrived. ‘There’s very little we can do. Your bank is dealing with the card fraud. And as for the burglary, you should think yourself lucky.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Don’t forget to contact your insurance company and cancel your claim.’ He moved towards the door.
I stepped into his path.
‘I don’t think you understand. Someone is trying to mess with my head.’
‘A practical joke, you mean?’
A pain was blooming in my skull, a sharp, white stabbing sensation like fat needles penetrating the soft flesh of my brain. ‘No. More . . . sinister than that.’
‘Sinister?’
I opened my mouth. But what was I supposed to say? As well as this apparently phantom burglary, someone might have attempted to push Laura under a Tube train, and I thought I’d seen someone watching her. It all sounded very weak, and Sargent was already looking at me like I was unhinged. The only concrete part was the fraudulent use of my card, but as Sargent had pointed out, the bank were dealing with that and the police would deal directly with them. I could imagine what Sargent would say if I told him my card had been used to buy a new laptop, of all things. The same model, going by the price, as the one I owned.
‘Listen, Mr Sullivan, it seems to me like you’re under a lot of strain,’ Sargent said. ‘Maybe you’re working too hard. Either that or a friend played a practical joke on you.’ He pushed the front door open and went out into the hallway. ‘Take care.’
‘But . . .’
He descended the stairs. Seconds after hearing the outer door shutting I heard another door shut: the woman downstairs, stepping back into her flat after coming out to see what was going on.
I filled a glass with cold water and sat down. I needed to get everything straight in my head. There was a simple explanation for almost everything. Laura had imagined being pushed at the Tube station, and it was indeed a random person watching her in Camden. My card had been cloned and used here in London. It was a common occurrence, had happened to Jake once.
So one question remained: why had the thief brought my laptop back?
And would they come back again?
If they did, I wanted to be prepared. I went onto Google and searched for home security, finding what I was looking for. A simple CCTV system. I ordered it and wondered if it was possible to buy a mantrap or a device that shot poison darts. I smiled to myself. That was crazy thinking. And besides, if I bought a trap I’d probably walk into it myself.
Chapter Nineteen
Daniel—trying to get hold of you. It’s URGENT!! Call me.
The police had been gone for a few hours, and I’d been napping on the sofa when my phone pinged. It was a message from Erin. I groped for the phone, which lay on the carpet by the sofa, and the moment I read it a shot of adrenalin jerked me awake. My clothes were damp with sweat and there was a patch of drool on the cushion my head had been resting on.
I rang her immediately.
‘Daniel,’ she said, picking up after a single ring. ‘Oh God.’ Her voice was hoarse.
I sucked in a breath, dreading the worst.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s Laura. She . . . oh fuck.’ She was crying. My stomach lurched like I’d gone over a bump in the road. ‘She’s in hospital. UCL. I need you to come. Now.’
Erin was leaning against the wall in the ward that Laura had been admitted to, a plastic cup of water in her hand. Her bump was huge—I could barely imagine how she could stand up straight. I rushed up to her.
‘Where is she? Is she all right?’
Erin sniffed and grabbed hold of my hand. I wondered where Rob was. At work, I assumed.
‘She’s OK. She’s recovering. They pumped her stomach and the doctor I just spoke to said she’s lucky. If I hadn’t found her almost as soon as she took the overdose . . .’ She trailed off.
‘I can’t believe . . . What did she take?’
‘A mix of sleeping pills and anti-depressants. Something called Zopiclone and . . . Trazodone, which is apparently prescribed for anxiety.’ She held up her phone. ‘I looked it up.’
I stared at her. ‘Where did she get them?’
‘From her doctor, I guess.’
I knew Laura had suffered from insomnia ever since we’d returned from Europe, but she hadn’t been taking anything for it, not while we were together, anyway. Had she started taking pills after she left me? I hadn’t seen her take a tablet the other night, after we’d had sex, though that didn’t mean much. She’d been so drunk that she wouldn’t have needed one.
‘Oh, Laura,’ I said, my eyes stinging. ‘I want to see her.’
Erin and I had taken seats outside the ward. ‘You can’t at the moment. She’s asleep. The doctor said they’re going to keep her in for a couple of days for observation. He asked me loads of questions.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, had she attempted suicide before? Does she drink excessively or take illegal drugs? He wanted to know about her support network too.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘Well, I told him that her family live at the other end of the country but that she has friends here. I’ve called her mum already, but they can’t make it till tomorrow.’
‘Typical.’
‘But . . . Daniel, I need to talk to you about what she was like when I found her.’ Her voice dropped to a near-whisper. ‘I heard her shouting, so went up to her room and knocked. When I went in she was sitting on the bed, staring at the window. I didn’t notice the empty pill packets at first. They were on the other side of her.’
I waited for her to continue, heart thudding.
‘She kept staring at the window. And then she started . . . jabbering, muttering and pointing towards the garden. It was really hard to work out what she was saying. Something about being followed, about a ghost. That’s what she kept saying. And she said something weird about her skin, something about tarantulas and how her skin wouldn’t grow back. Her eyes were blank, kind of . . . cloudy. It was really scary. And then she crumpled, just fell sideways on to the bed. That’s when I saw the pill boxes and called an ambulance.’
Erin turned her head towards me. Her hands rested on her belly as if she were trying to protect her unborn child from all the horror and pain in the world.
‘Daniel. What the hell happened to you and Laura on that trip?’
Chapter Twenty
Laura lay in that grey space between waking and sleeping, lingering voices from her dreams merging with sounds from the real world: somebody coughing, something beeping, a wheel squeaking across a hard floor. She thought she could hear babies crying too, which made her bury her head beneath the pillow.
As she emerged from sleep she could hear two women talking, but she couldn’t make out their words and it took her a minute or two to work out who they might be. Nurses, that was the answer. Be
cause she was in hospital. And with that memory came the jolting realisation of what she’d done.
Her insides felt poisoned, her stomach and throat sore from where they’d stuck the tubes inside her. The doctor who’d talked to her when she’d woken up, after the drugs had been pumped from her body, had been soft spoken but behind his soft words she could sense reproach: there are hundreds of genuinely sick people in this hospital, people who want to live. You are wasting our time.
‘If it wasn’t for your friend . . .’ the doctor had said.
Erin had saved her. Good old Erin. Her best friend, the friend she could count on, the person who’d given her somewhere to stay without asking too many questions, who was gentle and kind and compassionate.
The bitch.
Why had she interfered? If she’d left Laura alone, it would all be over now. She’d be free. It had come to her yesterday—in a flash, not of light, but of darkness—that her idea about going to Australia was foolish. Because the other side of the world wasn’t far enough away. Sunshine and distance couldn’t heal her, protect her or make her hate herself any less. Nor, she realised, could time. The skin she had shed was never going to grow back. She had lain on her bed in her tiny room and stared at the wall, and as she listened to her heart pounding in her chest, the darkness creeping through her veins, cold and shivering and not aware she was crying until she felt the wetness on her face, she knew what she had to do.
She must have been sobbing when she took the pills. That was her big mistake because the noise had brought Erin to her room, and there was still time for her to be saved. Though saved wasn’t the right word. No, Erin had condemned Laura to more suffering.
She had seen Daniel here earlier. He had come onto the ward, sat beside her bed. As soon as she saw him coming she had shut her eyes, pretending to be asleep. She knew exactly what he would say and she didn’t want to hear it. Seeing him reminded her of why she felt like this. She wished she hadn’t encouraged him by getting drunk and sleeping with him the other night. When he had leaned over her bed this afternoon and whispered that he loved her, and she could hear the thickness of tears in his voice, she had expected to feel the urge to cry herself. But she’d felt nothing. At least that part of her had gone numb.
All she wanted to do was sleep. But it was no use: she was as wide awake as if she’d ingested a bag of speed. It wasn’t helped by the conversation between two nurses she’d overheard after darkness fell: an old man had been spotted hanging around the maternity unit, hovering around the sick babies who were kept apart from their mothers. When staff challenged him, he strode off. The images this conjured up, of somebody stealing babies, harming them, made Laura’s insides churn with dread.
She opened her eyes and squinted at the clock on the bedside cabinet. It was 2.20 a.m. All the other women in the ward were asleep, one of them tossing and turning, another snoring. Laura tried to sit up and recoiled from the flare of pain in her head, like she’d been struck by a hammer, falling back again. She pulled the sheet up over her face.
As she lay there, listening to the faint snoring from the other end of the ward, she became aware of a presence close to her bed.
Strange—she hadn’t heard anyone enter the ward. Nor had she heard any of the other patients get out of their beds. But what other explanation could there be? As a tendril of cold crept beneath the hospital sheets it felt like someone had opened a window and let the frigid February air enter the room. Goosebumps rippled across her flesh. She was about to get up and find the window so she could close it, when she heard the voice.
‘Laura.’
She went rigid beneath the thin sheet. The voice was soft, close to a whisper.
‘It’s me.’
She knew exactly who it was. It was a voice she would never forget, a voice she had last heard rising in a scream, then abruptly falling silent. It was the voice of a dead woman. And she realised, in that moment, that the glimpses of black clothes and white skin that she’d seen following her, that she thought she’d imagined, must be real. The presence she’d sensed in the central London streets and among the trees at the end of Erin and Rob’s garden. It wasn’t her imagination. It was real. It was a ghost.
‘You mustn’t do it,’ the dead woman whispered. She was standing right by the bed now. Laura kept her eyes shut tight, the thin sheet forming a barrier in case the ghost turned hostile. ‘You mustn’t kill yourself yet.’
Laura was crying now. Crying from the memory of a decision that had changed everything.
‘I need you,’ the ghost said. ‘I need you to stay alive,’ and Laura threw the sheet forward, jerking upright, the pain in her skull gone.
The ghost was gone too.
Chapter Twenty-One
I trudged home through the freezing London streets, reeling from seeing Laura in her hospital bed, so pale and fragile, with dark circles around her eyes. She had been asleep during visiting hour, despite the chatter around us in the ward. Erin went home, angry with me for refusing to answer all her questions and needing to rest.
After murmuring to Laura, and fighting back tears, I sat and waited for a while in case she woke up. Tomorrow, her mum and dad would arrive in a cloud of self-importance. Erin had phoned them and, knowing them as I did, I was less than shocked to learn that they weren’t planning to rush straight to London from their home in Cornwall. They had an important dinner, something to do with work. I had warned Erin not to tell them that Laura had talked about ghosts.
‘What happened to you on that trip?’
I didn’t—couldn’t—answer. I tried to make sense of what Erin had recounted. Skin, tarantulas, ghosts . . . I looked back at Erin.
‘Do you know about Laura and her ghost?’ I asked, keeping my voice low so the other people in the waiting room wouldn’t hear. I waggled my fingers as I said ghost, putting the word in inverted commas.
‘A ghost?’
I took a deep breath. I had to tell her this much. ‘Yeah. I know. When I first went down to visit Laura’s parents, after we’d been together for a few months, Laura’s mum made a sneering joke about Laura believing in nonsense. When I asked Laura what her mum meant, Laura completely clammed up. But I eventually got it out of her.’
‘Go on.’
‘When she was twelve, Laura started to believe that there was a ghost living in her house—the ghost of another pre-teen girl, one who had apparently died there. This ghost—her name was Beatrice—would come into Laura’s room at night and talk to her. Laura told me that she was terrified at first but then realised the girl didn’t mean her any harm, that she was sad and lost and that she wanted Laura to be her friend. I think Laura’s mum eventually heard Laura having conversations in her room and that’s when Laura told her matter-of-factly about Beatrice.
‘Laura’s parents took her to the doctor who said it was all connected to the onset of puberty, that they shouldn’t worry. But Laura’s mum then took her to see a psychiatrist who, according to Laura, was pretty harsh . . .’ Laura had refused to give me all the details, but I was sure this was one of the reasons why she refused to see a therapist now. ‘In the end, Laura pretended that she knew the ghost wasn’t real, that Beatrice had stopped visiting her.’
‘But she still believed Beatrice was real?’
‘Yeah. And get this—she went to the local library and found out that a twelve-year-old girl had died in her house thirty years before. Was murdered, actually, by her dad.’
‘My God.’
‘I know. Laura said she was convinced for a while that her own parents were going to murder her. You’ve met them, haven’t you?’
‘Unfortunately.’
‘Well, then you have at least some idea. They were horrible to her when she was a kid. Just before this whole Beatrice thing happened, they took her out of the school she loved, where all her friends went, and made her start going to this awful, strict girls’ sc
hool. They made her break contact with her best friend, because they thought she was “common”. It was all pretty traumatic for Laura. That’s why I think she started to believe in Beatrice. A kind of imaginary friend. Something her parents couldn’t take away from her, no matter how hard they tried.’
‘I guess that makes sense.’
‘Yeah. Eventually Beatrice stopped visiting. Laura was fourteen by then—I mean, this went on for a long time—and she says that Beatrice told her that she was going to “the next place”. And that was it. Laura’s parents thought their daughter had stopped believing long before. But Laura still believes now that Beatrice was real. She still believes in ghosts.’
Erin exhaled. ‘So what, you think she’s seeing Beatrice again?’
‘I don’t know.’ A chill ran through me as I thought about the trauma Laura had suffered recently. ‘I think she’s probably imagining a different ghost.’
Erin took out her phone again. ‘One of the drugs she was on, Trazodone—apparently it can cause hallucinations.’
I shook my head. Had Laura been warned about these possible side effects? Hopefully after her overdose she would stop taking them. I resolved to talk to her about it.
The situation with Laura had made me temporarily forget the mystery I was grappling with, but it came back soon as I stepped into the relative warmth of my flat and saw my laptop. I poured myself a drink and was shocked to see how much my hand shook as I raised the glass to my lips. The inside of my head felt like a hive in which the bees were at war. My next session with Dr Sauvage was scheduled for tomorrow, thank God. I am by nature a reticent person, but right now I badly needed to talk to someone.
I was too wired to go to bed, so I switched the TV on and sank into the sofa with my MacBook on my lap. A horror film was starting on Channel 4, one in which a group of teenagers go into the woods and meet a grisly end. I quickly turned it off but it was too late, the memories were triggered.
