by Steve Mosby
Groves stared down at the remains for a moment, struck as always by the distance between the living and the dead. The spark that just went: a beat of time in which everything changed. What had once been a man now resembled a snuffed-out candle.
‘Sir?’ Sean clicked his fingers above the figure in the settee. ‘Can you hear me, sir?’
‘There’s the ashtray.’ Groves gestured with his foot to a chunky glass bowl near the corner of the settee, then looked around. There were shards of glass and broken cups by the walls, some of the shapes still recognisable. ‘Bottles everywhere too. I’m guessing he passed out rather than fell asleep.’
‘No wonder it’s so hard to wake him up.’ Sean stepped back and sniffed. ‘Am I imagining that stink of booze in the air?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even so, I’m thinking the commander called it right.’
‘Me too.’
Groves took another look round, puzzled by the lack of furnishings. Aside from the broken television, the settee and the bottles, the room was bare. It must have been a sparse existence. He imagined the man, drunk enough to pass out with the television flickering in the corner, the cigarette falling from his hand. A sad image.
‘Been and seen,’ Sean said. ‘Happy?’
Groves leaned closer, peering at what was left of the dead man’s face. The blackened cheekbones looked strange.
‘Have a look,’ he said.
Sean did so, inclining his head.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘I don’t know.’ Groves gestured at a thin ridge across the man’s cheek. ‘Something cut into the bone?’
‘Old scar, maybe. Like Action Man.’
‘There’s more than one.’
‘Eh. Leave it to the coroner for now.’
They walked back to the doorway, Groves still wondering about the cuts in the bone – but Sean was right. He took a last glance behind him, at what was left of the man’s legs pointing out from the settee. Utterly still.
‘Not how I’d like to go,’ he said.
‘It’s not like we get to choose, David. Besides, look at the guy. Seems pretty comfortable to me. Chances are the lucky bastard didn’t even wake up.’
That was true: when the fire caught, the smoke probably killed the man before he even surfaced. So yes, it could have been worse. At one fire scene, early on in his career, he’d found the remains of an old lady curled up at the base of a walk-in wardrobe. He couldn’t imagine the fear and confusion and pain she must have gone through.
Even so, part of him thought that when it came to it, he personally would want the chance to at least fight to stay alive. That he’d want to feel something for as long as possible, even if it was only pain. To cling on and not go gently – all the way to the bitter end.
But then Groves thought about Jamie. And he figured that if he didn’t feel that way, he’d have given up on the world a long time ago.
Mark
Charlie Matheson
As I walked into the room, the woman claiming to be Charlotte Matheson was lying on her side, facing away from me. The bed took up most of the space, with just enough room for small anonymous cabinets on either side of the headboard, and a plastic chair near the door.
She had the covers pulled up to her shoulders, so that all I could really see of her at first was a mass of brown curly hair – and that only barely. On the other side of the bed, the blinds had been drawn on the window, and the overhead light had been dimmed right down. In the gloom, and without being able to see her face, I couldn’t even be sure if she was awake.
‘Excuse me.’ I closed the door. ‘I’m with the police. I’m Detective Mark Nelson.’
For a moment, the woman didn’t respond. Then she nodded slowly, rolled on to her back and hitched herself up into a sitting position. The covers bunched around her waist, revealing the hospital gown she was wearing. I presumed the doctors would have kept the clothes she’d been found in. It was possible we’d need to examine them. Unlikely, but possible.
Her hair was hanging forward over her face, but she pulled it back, tucking it behind her shoulders, revealing her face in the process.
The sight of the cuts there stopped whatever I was about to say next.
Her face was almost entirely covered in them. There were whorls around her eyes, and lines and patterns of scarring across her forehead and nose. A complex web of cuts swirled down her cheeks, all the way to her jawline, before joining together in a single passage across the cleft of her chin. As far as I could tell, staring at her, the injuries were perfectly symmetrical.
Amidst all that, her eyes seemed unusually bright in the dimness of the room, as though they were catching a light source unavailable to the fixtures and fittings. But they also looked bleary and confused. Scared. I supposed that was fairly understandable.
I sat down on the chair, and her gaze stayed on me, the way a cat might watch a nearby stranger, ready to bolt for safety. Then I switched on the camera that was attached to my lapel. It had been departmental policy for years now that all field interviews were recorded, the footage beaming straight to a secure cloud and then logged into the relevant file, immediately accessible to any other officers working on the case. Not that there were any on this one, nor were there likely to be.
‘How are you feeling?’ I said.
‘Better than yesterday, thank you.’ Her voice was soft, but there was a surprising amount of resolve there. While still wary of me, she was also quiet and to the point. ‘It was a difficult transition, but I think I’m getting there slowly.’
A difficult transition. If she was referring to her supposed return from the dead, it seemed a strangely formal way of describing it.
‘What are you looking at?’ she said.
There didn’t seem to be any point in denying the obvious.
‘Your face. Your scars.’
‘Yes. I am marked.’
Again she sounded matter-of-fact about it.
‘You are marked,’ I said. ‘Yes. What happened to you?’
‘Do you like them?’
‘I don’t know.’ I wondered what the right answer was. ‘They’re a little too elaborate for my taste, if I’m honest. They’re very detailed, though, aren’t they? I imagine they must have hurt.’
‘Yes, they did.’ The memory seemed to make her sad, then her expression brightened slightly. ‘But it was like childbirth. It hurts, but very quickly afterwards you forget how much. And you end up with something that makes it all worthwhile.’
I nodded sympathetically, even though I didn’t think the two things were remotely similar. After childbirth, you ended up with a baby, a child you loved, whereas this woman was scarred for life. Whenever people saw her, they would always draw breath and look twice. She would forever be asking What are you looking at? while already knowing the answer.
And yet, as extensive as it was, I realised that there was something oddly beautiful about the scarification. Perhaps it was the sheer intricacy of it. There was clearly a careful design to the damage that had been done.
I said, ‘I wouldn’t want them myself.’
‘It doesn’t matter what you want. One day you’ll have them too. That’s how it works.’
‘How what works, Charlotte?’
‘Charlie. Not Charlotte.’
‘Okay.’ A small detail, perhaps, but it was obviously important to her, and since the question of identity was underpinning all this, I was happy to go along with it. ‘How what works, Charlie?’
She shook her head, as though I couldn’t possibly understand. I thought about her choice of words. It doesn’t matter what you want.
‘Did you do them yourself?’
‘No, of course not.’ She pressed her palm to her forehead and the scarring wrinkled as she contorted her face. ‘I can’t remember it all properly. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about them any more. Not right now.’
I very much wanted to talk about them, but there was a hint of distress there, and
I needed her to stay with me.
‘All right, then. Let’s start at the beginning instead. You told the doctor your name was Charlie Matheson. Is that right?’
‘Yes. Nobody believes me, but I’m really not sure what else I’m supposed to say, or what everyone wants to hear. I’m Charlie Matheson. I’m twenty-eight years old and I live at 68 Petrie Crescent. My husband’s name is Paul. Paul Carlisle.’
The mention of her supposed husband’s name caused a look of upset to cross her face, as though she had just remembered something painful to her. But then she blinked it away and shook her head.
‘I’ve been through all this a hundred times already.’
‘I know. And you say you were in an accident.’
‘Yes. Everything else is a blur right now, but I remember the accident like it was yesterday. I was driving on the ring road. It was late, and I was going too fast. There was a corner, and the wheels locked. I lost control. The car went over the embankment.’
This was good. These were all details I could check – see what she was right about and work out how she might have known about it.
‘And then?’
‘I didn’t have my seat belt on. So stupid. I remember thinking that – and then that the airbag would save me, but it didn’t. I went through the windscreen.’
‘You remember that?’
‘Yes. I didn’t die right away. Not long. But I was on the grass for a while. Flickering in and out. There were voices, angels, I think, but they kept fading and coming back. And then ... I died.’
‘Two years ago.’
‘Yes. According to the doctors.’
‘And you’ve been dead ever since.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’
I leaned back.
The thing was, she sounded so reasonable, and yet it was obviously a crazy thing for a person to believe. I found myself looking at the scars again. Hard as it was to imagine, it wasn’t impossible that she had done them to herself – and if something’s possible, you can work backwards from that. The kind of person who would do that to themselves, what kind of story would they tell you, and how would they present themselves? This kind of story, I decided, and probably very much like this. Confused. Vulnerable. On the verge of being angry.
Thanks again, Pete.
At the same time, the cuts bothered me. Someone else had done them to her, she claimed, and I could hardly ignore that. While the whole thing seemed an utter waste of time, and almost certainly would be, I had a duty to pursue it at least a little further.
So I suppressed the sigh I wanted to give.
‘I believe something happened to you. And I want to understand what.’
‘Everything’s hazy right now.’
‘Well ... let’s see about that.’ I thought about it. ‘Do you remember what happened yesterday, before you were found?’
‘I was in an ambulance.’
‘No, before that.’
‘I mean I was in another ambulance, before the one that brought me here. A kind of ambulance, anyway. It was white – really white – and there was a man with me.’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘Not really. He’s old. He’s some kind of doctor.’
‘You’ve seen him before?’
‘Yes.’ She hesitated. ‘I think so.’
‘And what was he doing in the ambulance? Did he speak to you?’
‘Yes, but I can’t remember what he said.’ She frowned at that. ‘And I need to, because it’s important. I was awake for a bit, and he was trying to tell me things. But I must have gone back to sleep again.’
Drugged? I wondered – but then realised I was taking the story at face value. There probably never was an ambulance or a man. Nevertheless, I presumed the doctors would have done blood tests, and even though they wouldn’t necessarily be conclusive, I reminded myself to ask Fredericks about it on the way out.
‘The next thing I remember is lying in a field. I was on my back, and I could feel the damp grass around me – it was overgrown enough to be taller than me lying down. There were birds singing, and the sky hurt my eyes. It wasn’t too bad at that point, but it was still too much. I knew it was going to be too much.’
‘Too much?’
‘The detail. The everything.’
I looked around, understanding now why the room around us was so dimly lit.
‘Because it’s dark where I’ve been,’ she said. ‘I remember that much about it. Everything’s very dark when you’re dead. Being back wasn’t so bad at first when I was lying there in the field, but as soon as I stood up, it got worse. When I walked for a bit.’
‘How long did you walk for?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes? It’s hard for me to judge. Not long. I came to the road, and the cars ... I walked a little way along, but it was all yammering at me.’
She cupped her hands over her ears now, wincing, as though even the memory of all that noise and static was difficult for her.
‘I couldn’t carry on. I sat down. People started talking to me, and I just wanted it all to stop, to go away. I could only cling to a couple of things. I knew who I was. I knew what I needed to say. Some of it, anyway.’ She looked worried by that. ‘I need to remember.’
My head throbbed suddenly. I took a sip of the water I’d brought in with me, but it tasted warm and metallic now, and it didn’t help. Something had clearly happened to this woman, but that didn’t mean that anything about the story she was telling me was true. I was trying to think about the man, the ambulance – at least two people involved, then, as there would have to be a driver – but then this woman wasn’t Charlotte Matheson, and she hadn’t died in a car crash two years ago. Since everything else she was telling me was built on those shaky foundations, there was no point assuming that any other part of the structure was solid.
‘You don’t believe me,’ she said.
‘I want to help you,’ I said. ‘I want to understand.’
‘No, you think I’m crazy.’
‘Charlotte—’
‘Charlie,’ she spat at me. ‘I’m Charlie Matheson. Get my fucking name right.’
And there it was – the outburst of anger. I’d interviewed numerous people with psychological problems over the years, and the flare-up immediately ticked every single box on my internal list of warning signs. I’d seen this behaviour a hundred times before.
Yes, I thought. You’re right, whoever you are.
I do think you’re crazy.
‘Okay, Charlie.’ I stood up. ‘I think we’re done here for the moment.’
‘I lived at 68 Petrie Crescent with my husband Paul. We married on the third of February, in a church in Hardcastle. I kept my maiden name. We went on honeymoon to Italy. We spent a week each in Venice, Florence and Rome.’
I opened the door.
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘I want to see Paul. I need to see Paul.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
As I stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind me, I took a deep breath.
Thank you again, Pete.
Thank you very much indeed.
Mark
The accident report
Back at the car, my hangover kicked in harder. The afternoon sun was coming through the windscreen at a painful angle, right into my eyes.
Through the windscreen.
Just like Charlotte Matheson. The real one, at least.
There was a bottle of water and a half-used strip of paracetamol capsules in the glove compartment. I fumbled for both. Then I flipped the sun visor down and logged into the department’s computer system on my tablet.
I swiped through to the search screen. While it was nice of Pete to give me the paper files, I found technology easier to deal with. The connection was fast, and a minute later I’d downloaded the entire file on the real Charlotte Matheson’s accident. I transferred it to the current case file, then scanned through the details.
They seemed basically to fit with what she’d told me. There had been a car accident, late at night on the ring road to the north. The weather had been bad, and it looked as though she’d lost control on one of the corners and gone over an embankment and down the far side. Bang. She hadn’t been wearing a seat belt for some reason, but there had been no obvious suspicious circumstances.
I didn’t have my seat belt on ... I went through the windscreen.
So she was right about that.
I didn’t die right away. Not long. But I was on the grass for a while. Flickering in and out.
That part didn’t fit. The real Charlotte Matheson had been dead when the police and ambulance crews arrived on the scene. There were photographs on file showing the car lit up from within, angled up from the tree it had struck. One headlight was still working, a splay of light revealing spits of rain and the body further down the embankment. Matheson had gone through the windscreen, which had done catastrophic damage to her head and upper body. One photograph showed the blood over the bonnet and on the grass. Another, illuminated further by torchlight, revealed a muddy swirl of hair, and injuries to her head that resembled a shotgun blast. She would have died instantly. No flickering in and out for the real Charlotte.
The file contained no photographs of her in life, but the post-mortem shots had been included. Her body, even more brightly lit in the autopsy suite, was a vivid sight. The head was crumpled in and partly flattened, with a jagged split bisecting the face, so that the bruised eyes looked like split plums lying eight inches apart. The glass had torn off swathes of skin – a world away from the careful scars of the woman in the hospital – and there was a wound to one shoulder so deep that the arm had been nearly severed.
For very obvious reasons, this was not the woman in the hospital. But at first glance there was a definite similarity in body type and age, and from what I could tell, the hair, brown and curly, was identical. In life, Charlotte Matheson would have at least slightly resembled the woman I’d just talked to.
