by Tim Weaver
‘So – what? – the infection’s to blame for this delusion?’
‘That’s not what I said at all.’
‘Even if you’re right, even if the cut’s bad, why not go to a doctor, rather than a pharmacist? And why not go straight from there to a police station in south-east London?’
‘She says she did try to find a police station out that way, but then she walked to Woolwich Arsenal, noticed the Charing Cross train, and something sparked.’
‘ “Something sparked”?’
‘She said she remembered finding some notes you’d left at the house once, and the words “Charing Cross” had been written on them.’
‘Are you kidding me?’
‘You’re saying that’s not correct?’
‘What do you think?’ I paused, looking at Field. ‘Come on, surely you can see how crazy this sounds?’
‘She told me it was’ – she checked her notes – ‘ “a spontaneous action”.’
‘What was?’
‘Getting the train to Charing Cross.’
‘And you’re buying that?’
‘I’m not buying anything. I’m trying to get to the truth.’
The subtext was obvious. The woman was carrying an injury and she’d implied that I’d put it there. Field had asked her if it was a knife injury, but either way it was a deep, infected wound, and that was ringing alarm bells. The woman’s refusal to apportion blame to me, the deference in many of her answers, the way she spoke about me – in Field’s experience, in my experience too, they were all warning signs. So Field had to make certain I wasn’t a threat in this instance – a kidnapper, an abuser, a rapist. She needed to find out who the woman was, why she felt she should use the police as a first port of call, and why she didn’t know where our house was located. She needed to find out why the woman had come to Charing Cross and not gone to a police station somewhere closer to Woolwich – and then why the woman was even in the Woolwich area in the first place. There were simply too many questions now for Field to dismiss it all out of hand.
As for me, I needed to try and get on top of my emotions, because I didn’t want her thinking that I really was the type of man who scared women; worse, one who was violent and abusive to them.
‘Does she have any ID on her?’ I asked.
‘No. She says she has some at home.’
‘At my home, you mean?’
‘That’s the obvious assumption, isn’t it?’
‘Does she have a mobile phone?’
‘No.’
‘So no ID and no mobile phone?’
Field could hear the cynicism in my words.
‘That’s pretty convenient, don’t you think?’
‘How’s that?’
‘You don’t think it’s odd that she doesn’t have a mobile phone? Everyone has a mobile phone. This way, she’s not making any calls and she’s not sending any texts.’
‘So?’
‘So she doesn’t have a contract, there’s no paperwork with her name on it, and there’s no way to track her movements and prove what she’s saying – and we can’t see who she’s contacting.’
‘You wouldn’t be privy to that information anyway,’ Field said coolly. ‘Or, at least, not professionally, and not legally.’
It was a dig – at the fact I wasn’t a police officer, and at the way she imagined I went about solving cases.
‘Is she even on the system?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, is there a Derryn Raker on the system somewhere?’
A long pause. ‘No.’
‘So she hasn’t got an NI number, but she works as a nurse?’
Field didn’t say anything.
‘That makes zero sense, and you know it.’ I waited for a response, didn’t get one, so pushed on: ‘Have you taken her prints?’
Field smirked this time. ‘Are you leading this investigation now?’
‘I’m just asking.’
‘Yes, we took her prints.’
‘And?’
‘And they’re a dead end.’
‘So which hospital does she say she works at now?’
‘Queen Elizabeth.’
Field gave me a blank look but I knew exactly what she was thinking: Queen Elizabeth was in Woolwich. That might explain why the woman was in the area.
‘Have you phoned them?’ I asked. ‘Or the people she works with?’
‘I’m waiting on a call back.’
I smiled to myself.
‘It’s Christmas, David. Medical staff are stretched and most of the people in admin roles are at home with their families.’
‘Right. So there’s no easy way of backing up her story is what we’re saying.’ I paused, rubbing my eye. ‘Did she have any cash or cards on her?’
‘Your point being?’
‘How did she afford the train to Charing Cross?’
Field seemed to be weighing up whether to respond.
‘No cards,’ she said eventually.
‘So she teleported here from Woolwich?’
‘No, she had twenty-two pounds on her in change.’
‘No ID, no cards, no phone, no confirmation from the hospital yet that she’s even an employee there.’ I looked across the table at Field but she had her head down, making indecipherable notes. ‘Nothing here feels right. You know it too.’
She eyed me. ‘How does she know so much about you?’
‘I’ve genuinely no idea.’
‘All the stuff she’s saying, it checks out.’
‘In what sense?’
‘Well, she knew about the flat you had in Holloway, she knows about your wife’s illness. You said that was all correct. She seemed to know a hell of a lot about your life in America. I was talking with her in there and it seemed …’ But she didn’t continue.
‘Seemed what? She’s not my wife, okay? That woman in there, she’s a fantasist, or she’s ill, or she’s just a pathological liar. She’s not Derryn.’ I leaned back in my chair. ‘Come to my house. It’s all there. I’ve got the death certificate. I’ve got the receipts from the funeral director in the attic somewhere. It’ll take about ten minutes for me to show you it all.’
‘What about this breakdown she says you had?’
I frowned. ‘Surely you don’t believe that as well?’
‘You’re saying it never happened?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘You don’t remember it?’
I let out an exasperated breath. ‘Don’t remember it? Why would I remember something that never even happened? Whatever she’s told you in there, it’s lies. I never spent fifteen months being treated at a hospital, let alone one I’ve never even heard of until today. I try to spend as little time as I can in hospitals. What she’s saying is insane. She’s delusional. And the worst bit is, you’re actually willing to believe her.’
Field went to speak, then stopped.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘I called this doctor she says treated you at St Augustine’s. Erik McMillan.’
She studied me.
‘And?’
Field leaned towards me. ‘And he backed up everything she said.’
9
‘That’s impossible.’
‘McMillan said you’d deny it.’
‘I’m denying it because it didn’t happen.’
‘He said the denial, the belief it never happened, is part of your condition. He said you had depression, anxiety. You had headaches. He said you went through a period of blacking out frequently.’
‘That’s bullshit,’ I said. ‘I’ve never blacked out in my life.’
But then I stopped.
I’d just lied to her, automatically, instinctively: I had blacked out once, three years ago – and, judging by her face, either Field knew all about it, or she knew enough.
She tapped a pencil to her notes. ‘We’ve put in a request for your medical records, and I’ll be speaking to your GP, Dr Jhadav,
once we get the relevant sign-off. But is there anything else that might help us in the meantime?’
‘You getting all this from McMillan?’
‘All of what?’
‘Depression, anxiety, blackouts – is he feeding you all of this? My medical records are protected. He’s breaking the law by discussing them with you.’
‘He wasn’t discussing them.’
‘That’s not what it sounds like –’
‘He was talking about some of the initial challenges we might face in trying to deal with someone who has the type of condition you do.’
‘I don’t have a condition.’
‘Okay,’ she said softly, holding up a hand to me as if trying to reason with a child. ‘Okay, that’s fine.’
And then I realized what she was doing. It was a clever piece of bait that I’d been too emotional to see coming: either I’d get angry, lose focus and behave like the man McMillan had painted me as, or I’d try to explain my way out of these lies by giving her some of my medical history. Ultimately, she was more interested in the second one than the first, but both would tell a story of who I was.
‘Look,’ I said, trying to draw the ire from my voice, ‘I haven’t seen Jhadav for a year – maybe more. I had one blackout. It was the case I was working. I was tired and I was stressed. That’s it. That’s all it was. So, yes, I blacked out once and I get a few headaches, but that’s not the same thing as having a complete breakdown, is it?’
‘Were you ever prescribed anything?’
‘I got prescribed Cipralex, but never took it.’
‘That’s for depression, right?’
‘But, like I said, I never took it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t take pills I don’t need to.’
Field paused for a moment, staring at her pad.
‘So everyone’s lying except you?’ she said.
‘Not everyone, no.’
‘Just the woman in there and this Dr McMillan at St Augustine’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happens when your medical records turn up and your treatment at St Augustine’s is in there?’
‘What happens when they turn up and it’s not?’
She looked up at me. ‘I saw you in there.’
‘Where?’
‘In front of those monitors. You looked shocked, disorientated. You reacted like she was actually your wife.’
‘So? What does that prove?’
‘But you take my point, right? She looks enough like your wife that you thought it might actually be her, even if it was only for a moment. She knows all about you, even about the things the two of you talked about in private. She says she’s Derryn Raker, she looks like Derryn Raker, and now you’re telling me you’ve had problems with depression and stress –’
‘I didn’t have problems with depression –’
‘– and you’ve had blackouts and headaches, and a doctor – Dr McMillan, a doctor of some renown from what I’ve been able to find out about him – tells me you were so sick they had to treat you as an inpatient. He says you have something called Capgras delusion. It’s –’
‘I don’t need to know what it is.’
‘It’s a condition where people believe that a husband, a wife, a child, someone close to them, has been replaced by an exact duplicate.’ She paused, looked at me. ‘An impostor.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘He tells me it can sometimes be brought on from head trauma.’
‘I’ve never even met this guy.’
‘Have you suffered head trauma in the past? Did you ever suffer any before that, in your days as a journalist? I read that you worked in Iraq, that you went to Afghanistan. You were in South Africa during the elections –’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does if it’s relevant –’
‘It’s not relevant if it’s not true.’
She didn’t come back at me this time, just stared.
‘It’s not her,’ I said again, trying to sound as calm as I could.
‘Okay,’ Field responded. ‘It’s not her.’
There was no cynicism in her voice, no judgement, but it was clear I hadn’t done enough to convince her. I looked at her wedding ring and said, ‘You’re married, right?’
She frowned. ‘That really is irrelevant.’
‘Imagine if your partner had been dead for eight years and then all of a sudden someone who looks like them turns up out of the blue, pretending to be them. How do you think you would feel? Do you think you would have walked into that room earlier today and not reacted?’ I stopped, the anger starting to hum in my veins again. ‘I reacted to her because, yes, she does look like Derryn. Not exactly the same, but very similar. And yes, she seems to know a lot of stuff that she shouldn’t. But do you know why I was really in tears watching that?’ I paused again, looking at Field. ‘It’s because I buried my wife. I watched her die slowly and painfully over a long period of time, and I couldn’t do a single thing to stop it. And I’ve spent every day of the past eight years crawling through the darkest hole imaginable trying to get out the other side. And now I’m finally here, now I’ve finally managed to get my life back into some sort of order, this woman appears out of nowhere and razes everything to the fucking ground.’
Field’s face remained blank.
When I saw I was going to get no response from her, I said, ‘Can I go now?’
‘It’s your right to do that.’
I got to my feet, looking at Field, at the room I’d been sitting in for hours. I’d been with my daughter this morning. I’d been happy, maybe the happiest I’d been in years. And now all of that was rubble. It was just this.
‘One thing,’ Field said.
I returned my gaze to her.
‘I know the instinct to play detective is probably running hot right now, but I need you to steer clear of her. I’m not going to sit here and read you the rulebook, because I think you’re pretty familiar with it already, but I’m asking you not to make things complicated.’ She paused, watching me for a moment. ‘Is that clear enough?’
‘She and this doctor are lying.’
‘Regardless, I can ask you nicely like this, or I can go and get something signed and make it shiny and official – but I’m sure I don’t need to go to all that trouble, do I, Mr Raker?’
Mr Raker now, not David.
‘I want you to remain contactable,’ she said.
I didn’t reply.
‘Mr Raker?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait for your call.’
‘You do that.’
Except, after a day of lies, I’d just told her another one.
10
The woman left thirty minutes later.
A taxi pulled up at the station entrance, beside a female police officer who had come out to speak to the driver. The night was calm so I could hear snatches of conversation, and managed to pick up that they were putting the woman into sheltered accommodation for the evening. The officer was giving the driver directions.
I took a couple of steps closer, trying to hear where exactly the hostel was located, but I was still too far away to get it all, and then the woman finally appeared and I was forced to retreat into the shadows again. I watched as she got into the back seat, the officer returning to the station, and the taxi pulled away.
It got to the end of the street and stopped, its brake lights flashing red against the night. But it didn’t make a turn. It just idled there at the junction. I waited for it to go, to disappear out of sight, but it just stayed where it was.
Something’s wrong.
A few seconds later, the woman’s door opened. Automatically, I took a couple of steps forward, trying to understand what was going on. She got out again, and I saw the driver gesturing at her, turned in his seat. But whatever it was he was trying to say, she wasn’t listening. Instead, she headed in the direction of the police station. I retreated, conscious of being seen by her
, and waited for her to take the steps back up to the entrance. Maybe she’d forgotten something. Maybe something had spooked her.
Instead, she bypassed the police station completely.
I was half shadowed by four elm trees, marking the end of Agar Street. When she got a little closer to me, I crossed the Strand, the night air suddenly filled with light and noise – engines and horns and sirens, Christmas decorations hanging from street lamps and blinking in shop windows. As I watched her, she headed to her right, in the direction of Trafalgar Square.
Where was she going?
As she walked, she glanced behind her, and then dug around in her coat pockets and removed a scrap of paper – a Post-it note. She read it, slipped it back inside her jacket, then removed a digital watch and checked that.
She picked up her pace.
I tried not to let the utter surreality of this moment – of following a person who looked like someone I’d loved and lost and mourned – distract me from tailing her but it was hard. As I crossed the road again, back to her side of the street, I had a weird moment of déjà vu, a second where it felt like I’d done this before in a past life – the one I’d shared with Derryn. Had we ever been on the Strand together? Was it the Christmas lights that had set me off? Or had there been a time when I’d been hurrying to catch up with her somewhere? I couldn’t remember, and when I fell into line behind the woman, sixty feet back, I forced the thoughts from my head entirely.
This wasn’t Derryn.
She kept going, head down, hands in her pockets, but just as I thought she was about to cross the road to Trafalgar Square, she surprised me and headed down into the Tube. I held back for a second, confused, conscious of being spotted, and watched her disappear into the bowels of the earth. Where was she getting the Underground to? Waterloo? Was she heading back to Woolwich, where she claimed I’d dropped her outside a pharmacy and then driven off?
If she was, this wasn’t the route she’d used this morning, and getting the Tube there was going to take longer than the mainline. There was something else too: she’d told Field she didn’t like the Underground. She said she rarely used it.
