Kind of Cruel

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Unless the detectives I spoke to were lying, I’m their only lead,’ I tell her. ‘So it’s not really fine at all, is it, if I never manage to work it out? I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering whether a murderer who belongs in prison is swanning around feeling smug thanks to my crap memory.’

  I wait for her to tell me that I won’t be responsible for whatever happens or doesn’t happen, but all she does is grin. I’m disappointed and relieved. If she enjoys listening to me beat myself up, there’s plenty more where that came from; I could keep her entertained for weeks. I seem to spend half my life arguing with well-meaning people like Luke, like my team at work, who want me to go easy on myself and don’t seem to realise that I can’t. If I were to let myself off the hook whenever I felt like it, where would that leave my assessments of other people? I can’t think well of everyone I meet. Too many of them are annoying idiots, or worse. Since I don’t believe in nepotism, it’s only fair to judge myself as harshly as I would a stranger.

  It makes sense to me, anyway.

  ‘What’s wrong with trying to remember?’ I ask. ‘You might not succeed, but more things rise to the surface if you poke around in the water than if you don’t.’

  ‘Apparently not. According to Ginny, concerted effort repels genuine memories. Something to do with our conscious mind scaring away what we store in our unconscious, forcing all the repressed stuff to bury itself even more deeply.’ Sergeant Zailer turns to me, taking her eyes off the road. ‘Does that sound right to you?’

  I don’t have to think about it for very long. ‘No. Only if you believe in the unconscious as a kind of psychological detention centre: a self-aware storage facility with a built-in parole board deciding what to keep in and what to let out. If a brain surgeon sliced open your brain, or mine, would he be able to point to your unconscious and say, there it is, between the pituitary gland and the . . . patella?’

  ‘I think the patella’s your kneecap,’ Sergeant Zailer says apologetically, as if this might upset me.

  ‘Does the unconscious actually exist? Do buried memories exist, like moth-eaten clothes locked in a wardrobe that no one knows are there?’ I probably ought to stop ranting at her if I want to be driven all the way home. Sod it. ‘Let’s say tomorrow I remember where I saw that piece of paper. Remembering is a mental process that creates new thoughts, thoughts about experiences we had in the past. That’s not the same as saying that my memory of the page with those words on it is stored inside me now, in a container called “my unconscious” that I can’t break into, waiting to be pulled out.’

  Sergeant Zailer smiles again. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ she says, opening her window.

  I shake my head.

  She lights one, exhales into the night. ‘How cold is it?’ she asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Outside, in here. Is it cold? Warm? Has my opening the window had any effect on the temperature in the car?’

  I don’t know what she means. Then it occurs to me that she must mean exactly what she says; there’s nothing else those words can mean.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, a fraction of a second before I realise that the window’s not just a little bit open; she’s slid it all the way down. The car is full of smoke anyway, so she might as well not have bothered. My body chooses this moment to remind me of its existence by starting to shake. Sensations overwhelm me, all of them unpleasant. I’m starving hungry. My limbs, digits and eye-sockets ache. I’m exhausted, more so than usual. I feel as if someone’s implanted my brain in the body of a seventy-year-old.

  What does Sergeant Zailer see when she looks at me? A scraped-out hollow shell? I have no idea whether I look better or worse than I feel.

  As we drive out of Spilling on the Rawndesley Road, everyone we pass seems to flaunt their delight in being warmer than I am: cyclists in fleeces, well-wrapped pedestrians. I can tell even in the dark that they’re rosy-cheeked and glowing, bundled up in their chunky wool hats and scarves, their fur-lined boots. ‘Can you close the window?’ I say, as the penetrating cold makes straight for my bones.

  Sergeant Zailer presses the button and it slides up. ‘I was wondering how long it’d take you to notice you were freezing,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a theory. I’ve known you less than a day, but you strike me as an obsessive person. A brooder.’ Seeing that I’m about to object, she says, ‘I’m married to someone exactly like you. Actually, I’m married to Simon Waterhouse.’

  ‘Good choice,’ I say, on autopilot. I spot the flaw in my logic too late to take it back. ‘Sorry,’ I mutter. ‘That was a stupid thing to say.’

  ‘Don’t apologise. Stupid or not, I liked the sound of it.’

  What does she think I meant? That I find him attractive? I don’t, but it wouldn’t do any good to say so and would probably offend her. I meant that Waterhouse was a more appealing prospect than Gibbs or that poisonous ghoul Proust. I forgot for a second that Sergeant Zailer’s choice of husband was unlikely to have been limited to the three detectives I met today.

  Luke thinks I ought to talk to our GP about my impaired brain function, though he never calls it that in case it offends me. He gets really upset about it sometimes. ‘Just ask her to put you in a chemically induced coma for twelve hours, so that your synapses or whatever have a chance to reboot,’ he says, or something similar. I’m never sure if he’s joking. A coma can’t be the same as sleep, from a restorative point of view – though I have to admit, it sounds pretty good. Maybe I ought to chuck myself under a lorry.

  There can’t be many people who find the idea of a coma appealing. I wish that made me feel special in a good way.

  ‘Amber.’ Sergeant Zailer clicks her fingers in front of my face. The cigarette’s in her other hand; for a second, neither hand is on the steering wheel. I try not to think of Ed’s daughter Louise shattering the windscreen. I wish I’d kept their story to myself; I have no right to know it, and shouldn’t have repeated it.

  Maybe not sleeping is my punishment. For everything.

  ‘Amber! You’ve drifted off into your own little world again. Simon does it all the time. He also wouldn’t have noticed that the window was right down and the car had turned into Siberia. He lives inside his head, barely notices the world around him. Which makes me wonder . . .’

  I wait for her to carry on. Am I supposed to guess?

  ‘Are you a nostalgic person?’ she asks me eventually.

  A bizarre question for a bizarre day. ‘Isn’t everyone? I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the past, if that’s what you mean.’ It would upset me too much.

  The day I met Luke, the joke he made that turned serious when I told him what a brilliant idea it was. Him wanting to chicken out, me egging him on.

  A good secret. Before I let the bad one happen.

  ‘Tell me,’ says Sergeant Zailer. How does she know there’s anything to tell?

  ‘I was thinking about the first time I met my husband.’

  ‘I like how-I-met-my-husband stories,’ she says encouragingly. Stubbing her cigarette out in the car’s ashtray, she lights another one. I’m going to stink by the time I get home.

  ‘Luke’s a stonemason. He was working on a terraced house in Rawndesley, putting in a new bay window. I was renting the ground-floor flat of the house next door. One day I was on my way out to work, and I overheard Luke having a screaming row with my neighbour, the woman he was working for. She was the one doing the screaming – hysterical. He was trying to get her to calm down.’ Good training for being married to me. ‘I couldn’t make sense of it: she kept yelling at him that she couldn’t give him the go-ahead if she didn’t know what it was he wanted to do, that he needed to be clearer.’ What was her name? I’ve forgotten. Would Luke remember? To us, she’s Trained Monkey. If I’d wanted someone with no creativity or initiative to work on my house, I’d have hired a trained monkey. That was her best line and it stuck in our minds.

  ‘Luke was trying to explain the situation as clearly as he could. I’d
got the gist by the time I’d locked my front door, but this woman was a cretin. Eventually, she snapped at Luke that she didn’t have time to discuss it now and she’d talk to him later. She stormed off, swearing under her breath, leaving Luke and me to stare at one another. Luke . . .’ I break off, smiling. This is my favourite part of the story. ‘Luke turned to me and carried on with his impassioned justification speech. He barely paused for breath. Didn’t introduce himself, didn’t stop to wonder who I was. Never mind that I was nothing to do with anything. It was as if he thought, “Right, that woman’s stomped off in a paddy, so I’ll present my case to this one instead.” He was totally in the right. He’d made her a new bay window, and wanted to check before he put it in whether she wanted any carvings on it. Some people do. Usually they want whatever was carved into the old, knackered stone to be replicated. Sometimes, even if there were no decorative carvings on the old one, people want them on the new one to make it look grander, or in some cases they want their initials carved on.’

  ‘Their initials?’ Sergeant Zailer sounds horrified. ‘On a stone bay window?’

  ‘People want all sorts of things,’ I tell her. ‘Once Luke was asked to carve lines from Beatles songs onto the windowsills of a Grade II listed house, one line for each sill. He refused.’

  ‘People are barking,’ Sergeant Zailer mutters.

  ‘Anyway, this horrible woman didn’t want anything carved on her new window, but she misunderstood Luke, decided he was trying to tell her she ought to. She asked him what he was thinking of specifically, and, since he wasn’t thinking of anything, and nor should he have had to . . .’ I close my eyes. ‘You get the idea.’

  ‘I hope you forgave him on her behalf.’

  ‘I told him she was an evil witch in serious need of a comeuppance. Her new window was fitted complete with a carving she knows nothing about. It’s on the underside of the sill. She’ll never see it, not unless she lies flat on her back under the window and looks up.’

  I’m surprised by how much Sergeant Zailer seems to like my punch-line. I have that weird sense, though I’m not performing, of having won over my audience. ‘What was the carving?’ she asks.

  ‘“This house belongs to a . . .” and then a very rude word. The rudest. In tiny letters.’

  She laughs. ‘Excellent.’

  ‘We based it on the bookplate model,’ I can’t resist adding. ‘You know: “This book belongs to . . .” Like you put in your books when you’re a kid.’

  ‘I’d love to see it. I wouldn’t mind lying flat on my back under a window. I’ve done stranger things. What’s the address?’

  Is she serious? She’s too keen; it puts me off. I’ve given her the story she wanted – now it’s my turn to ask for something. Might as well strike while I’m popular. ‘I’d like to look at the files, any notes you’ve got. Katharine Allen’s murder.’

  This time, when Sergeant Zailer laughs, it’s a different sound altogether.

  ‘Can you make copies for me? I won’t show them to anyone. Not even Luke.’

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ She shakes her head. ‘Bookplate model: this plan belongs to a highly unrealistic person.’

  ‘I know you can’t do it officially. But unofficially, could you?’

  ‘Why would I want to copy confidential case files for you?’

  ‘I need to know more about her. If there’s a connection between her and me, I might see something that leaps out: the name of a friend, something that overlaps with—’

  ‘Sorry,’ Sergeant Zailer cuts me off. She sounds tired. I’ve infected her with my exhaustion. ‘Look, it’s great that you want to help, but . . . it’s not your job to find the link, if there is one. It’s Simon’s job, and his colleagues’. I’m sure he’ll be pestering you soon for every microscopic detail of your life so that he can cross-check it against what they know about Katharine Allen, but . . .’

  ‘I get it,’ I say, turning off the charm, aware that some might say I never turned it on. ‘I’m an inferior, not an equal. I get to tell everything and ask nothing.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sergeant Zailer snaps. ‘You’re not police, there’s this awkward document called the Data Protection Act, and both those things are exclusively my fault.’ She sighs.

  I miss her good mood. ‘You said you had a theory,’ I remind her. Has she decided that talking to me is risky? That I’m the type it’s better to say nothing to, in case I ask for everything? She’d be right: I am that type. I don’t care whose job it is to find the connection between me and Katharine Allen. However informative and cooperative I am when the police interview me, I will always know more about my life and history than Simon Waterhouse will. I need to see the names of everyone they’ve interviewed, every note they’ve made, every photograph they’ve taken – all the things they can’t show me in case my alibi’s a lie and I killed Katharine Allen myself.

  If I were a detective and I really wanted answers, I’d risk it.

  ‘Simon’s nostalgic,’ Sergeant Zailer says. ‘He’s never in the moment. Always somewhere else in his mind – another place, another time. A theory about whatever case he’s working on that takes him out of space and time altogether. What he doesn’t give a crap about is right here, right now. He’s willing to make the present moment horrendous for everyone in it for the sake of understanding the past in the future. I was just thinking, if he’d seen the words you saw on a piece of paper and couldn’t remember the context, I’d probably think it was because he’d been locked in his own little world at the time.’ She turns to face me. ‘Maybe you’re the same. Maybe you were obsessing about something else when you saw the words, and you can’t picture the rest of the scene because you were there in body only.’

  Something flashes and dissolves in my mind. A fraction of a second later, no traces are left, apart from a vague sense of movement quickly swallowed by stillness. The first stage of remembering, or nothing? Probably nothing, I decide. Naïve to assume that a memory would lay itself bare in stages, like a stripper.

  What do I obsess about? Sharon’s death. What’s going to happen about Dinah and Nonie. Little Orchard. Sleep. What I need to tell Luke but can’t.

  Was I brooding about one of those things when I saw a page with ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’ written on it? If so, that hardly helps to narrow it down.

  ‘Ginny made an interesting point about nostalgia,’ Sergeant Zailer tells me. We’re nearly in Rawndesley; more car horn beeps here than in Spilling, more impatient people. The smell is different too, especially here on the purely functional side of town: exhaust fumes, takeaways. ‘She said nostalgic people yearn for the past for a good reason – because they missed it, they weren’t fully there when they should have been, when it was the present. They deprive themselves of the “now” experiences that are rightfully theirs. Then they feel cheated and try to recapture what they missed, and miss more of the present in the process. It’s a vicious circle.’

  ‘Too neat, too formulaic,’ I say dismissively. ‘Has to be made up, like the conscious/unconscious mind stuff. Did she share any other impressive theories?’

  Sergeant Zailer smiles. ‘A few.’ She pulls another Marlboro Light out of the packet, lights it.

  ‘You didn’t spend the whole session talking about me, then – the strange woman you found in your car.’

  ‘No offence, but at seventy quid an hour . . .’

  ‘What did you go and see her about?’

  ‘Giving up smoking.’ Sergeant Zailer pretends to be shocked by the sight of a cigarette between her fingers. ‘Shit!’ she says. ‘I guess it didn’t work, and that’s why I have to go back next week. No, to be fair, she covered herself, gave us both a get-out. She told me I wasn’t ready to stop yet. For the time being, I’ve got her official permission to light up whenever I feel like it.’ She sounds pleased. ‘Before she can give me the hypno-suggestion that’ll send the craving packing, I need at least twelve sessions of hypno-analysis.’

  ‘Th
at’s eight hundred and forty quid,’ I say. ‘The “at least” sounds expensive too.’ Ginny’s the criminal Sergeant Zailer should have been keeping her eye on this afternoon, not me.

  ‘Apparently I don’t smoke because I enjoy it, as I’ve always thought.’

  ‘Death wish?’ I suggest.

  ‘Compensation. Ginny says there’s something weighing heavily on the negative side. That’s why I need to treat myself all the time. The fags are my treats, and for as long as they do the job of making up for whatever’s wrong, I’m going to continue to smoke them. Why wouldn’t I? I’m not going to give up something I like in exchange for nothing. That’d be irrational.’

  ‘How about the treat of not dying young?’ I say.

  She shakes her head. ‘Avoiding illness in the future’s too abstract, Ginny says. It’s not a concrete perk to put in place of the fags, so it has no effect. Want to know why I’m telling you all this?’

  It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder. Why must openness always be justified, when withholding everything that matters is taken as standard – polite, almost? I’m the odd one out, surrounded on all sides by people who spend their days trying to say as little as possible. People like Jo.

  I want to be told the truth and I want to be able to tell it.

  ‘Ginny said I shouldn’t talk about our sessions or even think about them in between,’ says Sergeant Zailer. ‘I’m rebelling. I hate doing what I’m told. Viewed alongside my compensatory smoking, it all adds up to a picture of someone whose needs weren’t met in early childhood.’ She laughs. ‘I kind of agree with you – it’s probably all bollocks. We’ll both get fleeced and be no healthier or happier. Why did you go for hypnosis, if it’s not too personal a question?’

  ‘I don’t sleep.’

  She nods. ‘Because you’re repressing a painful memory,’ she says in an overly earnest voice. Her grin makes it clear she’s impersonating Ginny.

  ‘No, I’m not. Trust me, my painful memories are real extroverts. It’s the next road on the right.’