Lucy Lockhart: The Awakening

by Bryce THOMAS

  ‘A hawthorn bush,’ Loanne answered for Lucy, not elaborating or offering any further explanation.

  Mrs. Lockhart nodded, still feeling Lucy’s arm, making sure that there was no remnants of the thorn left in the wound.

  ‘You will need a proper dressing on it,’ Loanne stated. Without any further comment, she went to a kitchen cupboard above the granite worktop and got out a first- aid box. She sorted out what was needed, closed the box and put it away again and then prepared two antiseptic wipes and a dressing on which she had already placed a piece of gauze. ‘Are your tetanus injections up to date?’ asked Doctor Murray, who had come back into the kitchen and was coming closer to have a look at Lucy’s arm.

  Lucy looked at her mother. ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs. Lockhart, understanding that Lucy would not remember.

  ‘She is always coming home from football matches with cuts and bruises. Goodness knows what goes on at her training sessions!’

  Lucy smiled. She was getting used to being fussed over. And somehow, all the fussing didn’t seem unfamiliar anymore, either. There was a warm feeling of belonging and a sense of being loved seeping gradually back into her memory. For the first time, it felt right. Mrs. Lockhart was her mother. She watched the face that was now only inches from hers and was suddenly drawn into a similar scene, a moment in her past when the same woman was tending to a severe cut on Lucy’s knee. She gave out an involuntary sigh.

  ‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ Mrs. Lockhart asked, her eyes looking into Lucy’s. ‘Was I hurting you?’

  A tear found its way onto Lucy’s bottom eyelid. She shook her head. ‘No, Mum,’ she said, and threw her arms around her mother’s neck.

  They hugged for a while and then Mrs. Lockhart gently gripped her daughter by the shoulders and held her at arms length. Her eyes too were brimming with tears. She realized that Lucy was beginning to regain her memory simply by the way she had addressed her; not just the words but the familiar tone in her voice.

  There was no longer any doubt now in Lucy’s mind, though why she had doubted it in any way before, she wasn’t sure. It unsettled her because there still remained the strong sense of being someone else, someone much older. And there were still disturbing memories linked to that other person. Those memories weren’t disappearing, despite beginning to remember her real self. If anything, she was remembering more. She still remembered how to ride a horse, and thinking back to the day in the hospital corridor when she spoke to the two Chinese people, she recalled exactly what they had all said and still understood every word.

  But worst of all, back at the old farmhouse she had known why she hated Detective Chief Inspector Norton and with that knowledge more memories were emerging. But how could they be real now she was beginning to remember being Lucy Lockhart, a thirteen year old girl that loved her mother and football? And how was she going to explain why she knew these things to her mother when she didn’t know why she knew and felt them herself?

  Doctor Murray had been watching from the doorway of the kitchen. He didn’t interfere. He could tell simply by watching them that Lucy’s mind was beginning to heal. It had been a good idea to invite Lucy and her mother to stay, despite two visits from the police and despite the fact that, inside, he sensed that Lucy was right not to trust them.

  He let Loanne be the one to dress the wound whilst he put some water in the kettle and set it to boil. A pot of tea and some food was what was required now. The sandwiches he had made earlier were still waiting, wrapped in foil.

  Tea is a brew that is always good to help recovery from shock, but it wasn’t just Lucy and Loanne he was thinking of. Despite what he saw in front of him, he was sure that Mrs. Lockhart was, like himself, deeply concerned that there would be a conflict of accounts once the children had settled down enough to explain their side of the story. There was something about those detectives, that didn’t ring true. All right, he and Mrs. Lockhart had politely listened to them, but he could tell from her face that Lucy’s mother was not swallowing their story any more than he was. Something wasn’t right, and he knew it.

  Loanne dressed Lucy’s wound and used another of the antiseptic wipes to clean the scratch on Lucy’s face. As it turned out, once the dirt and the blood had been wiped away, it wasn’t a very deep scratch and it had already stopped bleeding so Mrs. Lockhart decided that it would be best left open to the air, and in that manner, it would heal faster.

  Doctor Murray said nothing, deciding to leave the females to their task while he completed his own mission of setting out a late lunch, and eventually, after some small talk about things which really didn’t seem to interest anybody, he announced that lunch was ready. Dutifully, they all sat down and began to eat, Lucy and Loanne tucking in hungrily without a word, not prepared to make the first move towards raising the inevitable topic of conversation.

  ‘So, what really happened over at the old farmhouse?’ asked Doctor Murray, eventually. They had each eaten a good portion of his sandwiches and Mrs. Lockhart was already pouring a second round of tea. She was quite enjoying being mother, especially as the doctor had laid out cups and saucers. She thought it was all very posh since she and Lucy only ever used mugs, and although she had read nothing into the situation, nevertheless the newness of being in this family setting was quite appealing. The only downer was the fact that the two children seemed to be provoking a great deal of unwanted attention from the police and, just as she was beginning to daydream about certain possibilities, Loanne’s father had to go and spoil it. But the question had been inevitable.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Loanne answered before Lucy could ask just what events the detectives had alleged to have taken place, so Lucy decided to stay mute and see how the conversation spun out.

  ‘Oh? That’s not what we were told by your friend Detective Chief Inspector Norton,’ he responded, emphasising the full title of the senior police officer. ‘She seemed to be quite impressed with your actions.’

  Loanne shrugged. Lucy just watched as the play unravelled.

  ‘She said you had helped apprehend a serious criminal,’ Mrs. Lockhart said, prompting a response from her daughter.

  Lucy raised her eyebrows inquisitively, but still remained silent, delving into another of Doctor Murray’s delicious sandwiches, while simultaneously timing her bites to coincide with other people speaking and trying not to swallow too often so that she could not speak with her mouth full when or if anyone wished to interrogate her.

  Loanne spotted the strategy and smiled. ‘We’re not sure just what she has told you,’ she said, diverting attention from Lucy. ‘We didn’t think we had done anything in particular.’

  ‘Oh, so you didn’t disarm a vicious criminal or anything, then?’ asked her father.

  Lucy took in a deep breath and almost choked, putting her hand to her mouth and coughing violently for several moments, while Loanne slapped her on the back. Eventually Lucy regained her composure and took a sip of her tea before settling down again. ‘Sorry,’ she said, her voice still a little raspy. She cleared her throat and finally spoke. ‘We ran away,’ she stated flatly. ‘That’s all we did. No heroics or anything like that.’ She cleared her throat again.

  ‘But the inspector said that you had helped them catch a dangerous and elusive criminal,’ her mother insisted. ‘Apparently he was hiding in the old farmhouse and you flushed him out. They said he was so angry with you that he broke his cover and chased after you and that you’d managed to trip him up and run off, leaving them to apprehend him.’

  ‘Really?’ Loanne controlled her voice despite being angry.

  ‘So if they were so busy arresting this guy, how come they were round here faster than you can say Mary Poppins?’ Lucy asked, genuinely intrigued by the story that Norton and her side kick had spun, and sensing that she and Loanne had been wrong footed.

  Mrs. Lockhart shrugged. ‘Well, I’m just telling you what they said, sweetheart. It all must have happened just a little more quickly than you thought. You know how
time flies when you are enjoying yourselves.’

  ‘Enjoying ourselves!’ Lucy exclaimed. ‘Do you think that being…?’

  Loanne squeezed her arm beneath the edge of the table and Lucy paused for a brief second. ‘Being chased by criminals isn’t fun or exciting…’ she butted in, finishing the sentence for her. She knew that Lucy was about to say that they had been locked in a dark cupboard and that there was certainly no fun in that. ‘Contrary to general opinion, that is opinions of people who have never been chased by a thug,’ she qualified. ‘We’re just a bit surprised that they gave us any credit for it.’ She sipped her tea confidently.

  Her father and Mrs. Lockhart said nothing, eager and determined to hear the entire story.

  ‘We got the feeling they were going to accuse us of interfering’ Loanne added after putting down her cup and turning it in the saucer as she thought about what she was going to say next.

  Lucy remained as quiet as a mouse. Loanne was doing admirably.

  ‘After all, we thought we’d got in their way,’ Loanne finally said as if to indicate that she thought she had fulfilled their expectation of a full and complete explanation.

  ‘Not at all!’ Mrs. Lockhart said proudly. ‘They said you were instrumental in bringing this fugitive out into the open. They said they had been watching the house for weeks because they thought the man had called there, but it turns out that he had been there all the time, and the man you called to see yesterday had been hiding him. That’s why they called around early this morning. They thought you had upset a long investigation, but as it turned out, the chap they were waiting for had already run to ground there. Right next door to you, Doctor Murray,’ she said, turning her head to him and revelling in the moment of notoriety.

  There was a long silence while they all looked from one to the other. Lucy sighed. She was inwardly relieved that there hadn’t been a showdown, but she didn’t feel at all happy. There was no way those detectives had had time to arrest Ackley, and they wouldn’t have done that, anyway. Loanne just carried on sipping her tea, her face quite unreadable. Lucy admired that. Mrs. Lockhart smiled proudly, but she too was wondering just what in the world had happened today. Doctor Murray just frowned.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  The first and primary problem was, how was Lucy going to explain what she knew when she didn’t know why she knew it? It was three hours since their late lunch had finished, during which time they had all watched a film on the television. Lucy sat at the end of the large three- seater sofa. To her right, Loanne sat next to her, and Doctor Murray was at the other end. Lucy’s mother sat quietly on a single armchair to her left.

  The film was an old Bruce Willis once-again repeat, and nobody was taking particular notice of it. Each and every one was thinking their own thoughts, not the least Lucy. The fact that she recalled seeing some of the film before and knew what was going to happen, indicated that her memory was recovering quickly. It’s funny how a film or, often, a piece of music can link you to something at some specific moment of time in your life. But it does, and Lucy was suddenly seeing things in her mind, memories of specific events when she had first heard the theme song. But it was confusing because, strangely, she was remembering two different times. Remembering when Lucy Lockhart first saw the film and heard the music wasn’t hard to come to terms with now, but remembering when Dianne Derby first heard the theme music was harder to reconcile.

  She bit her bottom lip, nervously trying to work out if she was going mad. She knew she was Lucy Lockhart, everything fitted. She was thirteen and, in the last couple of hours, she had remembered her grand parents and how they took her shopping at the supermarket where her mother worked. She also remembered the school she went to and her close friend Megan whose parents moved to the area from Colwyn Bay three years ago; and the way Megan’s accent and mannerisms amused everybody until they got quite used to it. She remembered the football team, too, and the training sessions, and matches they played and the team mates she played with. As she stared at the screen, blankly, it was all coming back to her, one thing after another, building, not just a picture, but painting a full landscape of a life she had once forgotten.

  She couldn’t remember the accident though, or anything in the few hours leading up to it.

  And then there was a different life as well. But memories of that existence weren’t coming back fast at all. Those memories had only surfaced after the accident and most of those had returned only after she had seen and recognised Detective Chief Inspector Norton. But, in her memory of Norton, the detective wasn’t a detective chief inspector. She was a detective sergeant. A bad one.

  Now, the theme music to the old film was reminding her of someone else that she had known, someone who was no longer in this world. He had died. But it wasn’t a natural death. He had been murdered. And the worst of it was, the murderer was none other than Dirty Looker herself. Yes, she was sure of it, Norton was a killer.

  The second problem was what to do about Norton. She knew what Norton had done in the past, but Norton could not possibly know that Lucy knew. To her, Lucy was just a nosy and interfering brat and she probably thought that she had put an end to the matter by being so nice, polite and sickly, during her visit to Doctor Murray. Doctor Murray would keep the kids away from the old farmhouse and Norton could carry on just as before. But Lucy knew it wouldn’t stop there.

  And that was the third problem. Lucy had a pretty good idea what they intended to do to The Thin Man when they found him and for that reason she had to find him first and find him fast. She couldn’t just leave things as they were, she had to warn him. And she couldn’t help feeling that the key to resolving that particular problem was The Thin Man’s disappearing moggy.

  And finally, the fourth problem was the most distressing of them all. Failing any satisfactory resolution of problems two and three, it looked as if Norton was, once again, going to get away with murder, and there was nobody to whom Lucy could turn who could do anything about it. She couldn’t explain it so, who would believe her?

  She glanced across the sofa, looking at Loanne and her father. Loanne was deep in thought as well. She was looking at the television screen, but there was a definite distant look in her eyes.

  Mrs. Lockhart’s face was easier to read. A few hours ago, Lucy might not have been able to tell anything from her expressive features, but now that she had at last come to recognise her mother, she could read her like a book. And no doubt, her mother was just as able to do the same with her daughter. No wonder Mrs. Lockhart had seemed so disturbed when Lucy had shown no recognition of her at all. Lucy knew now just how close they had been and how close they were again. It was obvious that her mother wanted to say something to her about the events of the day. She kept looking first at Lucy, her eyes meeting Lucy’s and almost asking the question that was on her lips; but then she would glance across at Doctor Murray, as if pleading for him to ask the questions. But Doctor Murray didn’t seem to notice. His face was much harder to read. When Lucy actually watched him for any length of time, she could see that his eyes weren’t really on the television screen at all; they were looking somewhere through the wall and out into dark evening air. His face seemed more serious than she had seen it before. He too, looked like he might be about to say something.

  But in the end, it was Lucy that spoke first.

  ‘I’m almost better now,’ she stated, breaking the silence so unexpectedly that all eyes turned to her, surprised expressions on all the faces as if she had abruptly and noisily broken wind. The eyes continued to look at her, waiting for her to continue, knowing that there was more to come.

  ‘I remember my school and my friend Megan, and the football team and David Stoddard…’ she continued, her eyes turning to her mother.

  Mrs. Lockhart smiled, her eyes becoming a little watery all over again. She sniffed, swallowing a tear. ‘It’s been good for you, coming to visit,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t know just what’s been going on, but if it has
helped to heal you then that’s all that matters.’ She reached across and squeezed Lucy’s hand. ‘We can deal with anything else, whatever it is.’

  Lucy looked across at Loanne. There was a resigned expression on her face. It had been nice being Lucy’s only friend for a short weekend. Now she was going to have to share her.

  ‘Loanne and I have discovered something.’ Lucy smiled at her friend and then looked at Doctor Murray.

  ‘Those police officers were lying to you,’ she continued.

  Doctor Murray looked straight at Lucy. ‘Are you going to tell us what really happened now then?’ he asked seriously, but totally unsurprised. ‘I know there is something they didn’t tell me. I don’t know what, but it is just a feeling I get when people become patronising.’ He looked at his daughter.

  Loanne looked at Lucy. If Lucy wanted to tell them the whole story then it was all right with her. She tilted her head as if to say, Carry on. It’s up to you.

  ‘And I can tell that you haven’t told me everything,’ the doctor said to his daughter. ‘I always can, you know that.’ Avoiding looking directly at her father, Loanne continued to gaze into Lucy’s eyes, waiting for her friend to be the one to decide when to tell them and what to tell them. After all, she knew that Lucy knew things about Norton and Albright, and although she hadn’t yet worked out just how Lucy knew them, she was confident that her friend was a hundred percent right.

  ‘And you Lucy. Apart from my daughter, and although you are something of an enigma, you are probably the most interesting young girl I have come to know in a long time. In fact I think I began to know you better than you knew yourself until you regained your memory.’