by Steve Mosby
‘That sounds promising.’
‘Except, of course, they don’t really die. And from what you’re telling me, someone actually did die in that car crash.’
‘That’s true.’
‘What were your impressions of her?’
I leaned back in the chair. ‘Well ... I didn’t get the feeling she was lying to me. Her memory was very confused. But on a basic level, I think she really did believe what she told me.’
‘Was she fragile?’
‘A little.’ I thought about it; that wasn’t quite right. ‘She looked scared. A bit bewildered and overwhelmed by everything. But there was also anger there, especially towards the end. Frustration.’
‘Frustration?’
‘That people weren’t taking her seriously. And also that she couldn’t think clearly.’ I recalled what she’d said to me: I need to remember. ‘She seemed to believe there was something important she had to remember, and it annoyed her that she couldn’t.’
‘And aside from the story itself, did she appear delusional?’
‘No. Apart from the content of what she was telling me, I never got the impression she was delusional. She was angry with me for not believing her, but aside from the scars and the subject matter, she came across as fairly normal.’
‘Those are big asides, aren’t they?’ Eileen said.
‘Yes. They are.’
‘All right.’ She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘It’s hard to say without interviewing her myself, but it seems to me that there are two basic possibilities you’re dealing with here. To my mind, one of them is far more likely than the other. And that’s obviously discounting a third explanation altogether.’
‘Which is?’
‘That she really has come back from the dead.’
I thought of Lise, and replied far too quickly.
‘People don’t come back from the dead.’
‘No.’ Eileen gave me the slightest of smiles. ‘Of course not. Which leaves the next option: that she’s making it up entirely. Lying to you. You don’t believe that’s the case?’
‘No.’
‘Which leaves the possibility that she’s telling not the truth, but her version of it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When people undergo trauma, it’s often hard to face up to it, so they parcel it up, compartmentalise it. Recast it in their heads so it’s easier to deal with. Some experiences are simply too painful to face head on. The story she’s told you so far, and the things she might tell you as time goes on, may well all be her mind’s attempt to make sense of what’s happened to her. It would be genuine and honest from her point of view, but not necessarily literally true.’
‘Partly true, though?’
‘Yes. Not a total fabrication. She thinks she’s been dead. So wherever she’s been, maybe she was surrounded by religious iconography. I don’t know; I’m speculating. But the point is, the story could be an interpretation of something terrible that’s happened to her, rather than a literal account of it.’
I thought about it.
‘Could you make someone believe they were dead?’ I said. ‘Because she actually claims to remember going through the windscreen of the car. She’s sure that happened.’
‘You say she was tortured?’
‘She’s scarred: lots of cuts to her face. I don’t know if she sees it as torture.’
‘She might not, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t. And in answer to your question, yes, I think it’s possible in theory. I’ve never heard of it happening before, but torture, brainwashing, gaslighting, manipulation ... yes, of course. You see it in cults, certain oppressive regimes. It’s usually used to make people more compliant, but this is just an extension of that really. Same principles, same techniques.’
‘It’s far more extreme.’
‘It is,’ Eileen said, ‘but given two years, and with enough repetition and mistreatment, I think you could probably make someone believe almost anything you wanted them to. In the end, they would want to believe it.’
I nodded, thinking it over.
‘Some of the details would correspond to what really happened. So the thing to do would be to get as much information as possible.’
‘As carefully as possible.’
‘Of course.’
‘Because you have to be careful with vulnerable people.’
I nodded again, aware once more of the home beyond her office, and the way she kept glancing in that direction. Was John in there now? Presumably so. But I had no wish to see him, and it was obvious from Eileen’s manner that she didn’t want whatever peace he’d found since leaving the police to be disturbed.
‘Of course,’ I said again, then stood up. ‘Thank you for the coffee. And the advice.’
‘I’m not sure how much help I’ve been.’
She walked me over to the door. But as I opened it, I realised I was still wondering. That I couldn’t quite leave it.
‘How is he?’ I said.
‘He’s fine.’
But she said it too quickly, the same way I’d responded after her words had brought a flash memory of Lise to my mind. And it wasn’t so different, was it? Here I was, a ghost from her husband’s past, threatening the new life – the hard-won peace – that had been established over the past year and a half.
‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘Thank you again.’
As I stepped out, Eileen seemed to relent slightly.
‘He’s working on a new book,’ she said. ‘It’s about ... that man.’
Despite the warmth of the morning sun, I felt a chill at her choice of words. That man. I knew who she meant, of course. Even though he was dead and gone, we’d never successfully identified the 50/50 Killer; we had no idea who he was or where he’d come from. He stood anonymously at the focal point of the whirlwind of violence he’d unleashed on the city, and on John Mercer in particular.
And Mercer was working on a book about him? I didn’t know what to say. The thought of him revisiting that case -poring over it; maybe obsessing over it – was unnerving, and I now understood Eileen’s unease a little better.
‘I don’t know if it’s healthy,’ she said, reading the expression on my face. ‘But he’s fine right now, and I’ll take that. It seems to be what he needs.’
‘Well, then. That’s good.’
‘And for now, he’s happy.’
But there was an undercurrent to the way she said that. And another one a moment later, when she closed the door gently but firmly without saying goodbye.
Mark
Mercy
As I sat down for my second interview with Charlie Matheson, I knew I was going to have to approach things very differently from the first.
The advice Eileen had given me remained fresh in my mind: there was no telling how much of Charlie’s story was true. Certainly, she hadn’t died in the accident. Beyond that, some parts of her account could be entirely accurate, while others might be fantastical elaborations with only a hint of basis in reality. It was my job to begin to delve into that. And I would need to be gentle with her while I did it.
Because you have to be careful with vulnerable people.
And of course another difference from yesterday was that this time I believed the woman really might be Charlie Matheson.
‘Detective,’ she said as I sat down in the chair beside the bed.
I switched on the camera on my lapel.
‘How are you feeling today, Charlie?’
‘Better. Thank you.’ She nodded once. ‘I’m sorry for my outburst yesterday, just before you left.’
‘You don’t need to apologise.’
‘Oh, but I do. That’s really not like me. At all. I don’t like losing control, and I was annoyed with myself afterwards. It was just that everything was – is – so confusing for me at the moment. This is all so overwhelming.’
‘Which is understandable.’ I tried to smile reassuringly. ‘And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry too if it seemed lik
e I wasn’t taking you seriously.’
‘You believe me now?’
‘I believe you’re who you say you are.’
‘Did you talk to Paul?’
‘Yes. He was very upset, as you can imagine.’
‘Oh? Not pleased, then?’
‘Well ... it’s complicated.’
‘I suppose so. How is he?’
‘He’s engaged.’ And just as when I’d spoken to Carlisle yesterday, there didn’t seem any point in sugar-coating the facts. ‘His new partner is pregnant.’
The look on her face when I said it was heartbreaking, but she only allowed the sadness a fleeting appearance before it was gone again. She knew I’d seen it, though, and after a moment she gave me a flat, empty smile.
‘Well. Of course. It has been two fucking years after all, hasn’t it?’
Just like the sadness a moment ago, the trace of anger vanished as quickly as it had arrived. She was more in control of herself than yesterday, I thought; where she’d appeared vulnerable and disorientated during that first interview, she seemed much more self-possessed now.
‘He always wanted children, Paul.’ There was a wry smile at that, then she shook her head. ‘And it makes sense that he’d move on, especially with me dead.’
‘You aren’t dead, Charlie. I don’t know where you’ve been for the last two years, but I do know that.’
‘I remember dying. In the car crash.’
‘Are you really sure about that?’
‘Yes.’ But I thought she sounded less certain than she had yesterday. ‘I remember the car. And I remember going over the embankment.’
‘But you must see that you’re not dead.’ I gestured around the room. ‘You’re in a hospital. You’re flesh and blood, not a ghost. Someone died in that crash, but it wasn’t you. I mean, how do you make sense of it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘People don’t come back from the dead.’ I almost added, I wish they did, but they don’t, but then I thought of Lise again, and I remembered the look on Paul Carlisle’s face yesterday. ‘And that’s where we have to start from. Something happened to you that night, and something’s been happening to you ever since, but you certainly didn’t die.’
She considered that.
‘So what do you think happened to me?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ I admitted. ‘I think it’s possible that someone’s worked very hard to convince you that you died in that accident, and that over time, with everything you’ve been through, you’ve come to believe it’s true.’
Again she was silent for a moment. I leaned forward.
‘Let’s forget about the actual accident for now. You told me you lost consciousness afterwards. Can you remember what happened next?’
‘Yes.’
‘But?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
I spoke as gently as I could.
‘I know you don’t. I don’t know for sure, but I think a lot of very bad things have happened to you over the last two years, and I understand how difficult it must be to think about them. But it’s important, Charlie. Unless you talk to me, there’s no way for us to work out where you’ve been.’ I leaned back. ‘You were on the embankment. You lost consciousness. What happened when you woke up again? Where were you?’
Charlie looked at me for a long moment, her scarred face blank. Then she seemed to gather strength from inside herself.
‘Hell,’ she said simply. ‘I woke up in Hell.’
*
Hell.
It wasn’t, of course – not literally – but as she told me her story, it seemed as good a word as any for the place she described. When she had woken properly after the crash, she told me, she’d found herself in a small room: a cell, effectively. The walls were fashioned out of stone and mud, and the air was damp and clammy. Despite a cooler current that drifted through occasionally, the heat was oppressive. The silence was profound, punctuated only by occasional dripping in the distance, like water dropping into a pool somewhere deep underground, the sound echoing.
‘There was light,’ she said, ‘but not much. The door was metal, and it had a hatch in it – a letter box that had been cut out at eye level. Like you see in prison on the TV, except this one was always open. I could look out.’
Not that there was anything to see when she did. It was a thin corridor of some kind, with another stone wall opposite the door. It was illuminated by dim lights in dirty plastic cases, strung along the wall. They were always on.
‘There was a television too,’ she said.
‘A television?’
‘Yes. Just a small screen, embedded in one of the walls. There was no control, though – no buttons or anything. It would just come on suddenly, bright and loud, like something snarling at me from the side of the room.’
‘And what did it show?’
‘The news sometimes. And ... other things. Things I didn’t like to look at. Videos of horrible things. Not the sort of things they’d ever show on normal television.’
She looked awkward, as though she didn’t want to talk about what she’d seen, what had been shown to her. Which was fine; from what she’d said, I could imagine. And in my head, taking her story at face value for now, I was beginning to work my way down a checklist. Isolation. Sensory deprivation. Visual and audial disruption. They were the kinds of things that Eileen had mentioned earlier as key components of mind control and brainwashing.
Of course, another obvious one was torture.
‘You told me someone cut your face,’ I said.
She didn’t reply, and I had to prompt her.
‘Your scars, Charlie. You said someone did that to you. Who was it?’
‘I don’t want to talk about him.’
A man, then. Hardly unexpected, but it was something.
‘Was it the same man who was speaking to you in the ambulance the other day?’
‘No, no.’ She looked horrified at the idea. ‘The man in the ambulance was gentle, kind. Not like ... the one who did the cutting.’
‘Can you describe him, Charlie? The one who wasn’t kind?’
She shook her head.
‘It’s important,’ I said.
‘I can’t.’
The way she said it was final, and propped up in bed now, she looked exhausted. I knew I was going to have to wind the interview up soon and allow her to rest.
But I was also trying to run everything she’d told me through the filter that Eileen had suggested. What was real and what was fantasy here? It was entirely possible that someone really had held Charlie Matheson captive, and that they had tortured her, brainwashed her. I knew from experience that such men existed. But then the type of man who would do that didn’t normally let his victims go. And what to make of the story about the ambulance, and the other man – the kind one – who had been talking to her?
Where had she been held?
‘How long were you in the ambulance for?’ I said. ‘Before you woke up on the field?’
‘I don’t know. I was asleep.’
‘But the man was there, you said. The kind man who was telling you things. You must have been awake for some of it.’
‘I was drifting. It’s hard to remember.’ She closed her eyes and pressed her palm to her forehead. ‘And I need to. I know that I need to.’
‘Were you hungry or thirsty?’ I said. ‘Did you need the toilet?’
She shook her head, her eyes still closed.
‘I ate a meal before we left – sandwiches and an apple. I don’t remember much after that. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty when I woke up. I’m guessing it was an hour or two. I don’t know, but that feels right.’
‘Okay.’
Again, it was something, I supposed, but not much. A couple of hours’ driving meant she could have been held a hundred miles or more away, which was a hell of a search perimeter. A lot of basements. But it was obvious from her expression that we were done for now.
I stood up
.
‘Thank you, Charlie. You get some rest and I’ll see what I can find out.’
‘Mercy,’ she said.
Her voice was urgent enough to make me pause in the doorway and look back at her. Her eyes were open now, and she was staring at me with something close to relief.
‘Mercy?’ I said.
‘That’s part of what the man was telling me in the ambulance. I remember now. That’s what I need. I think he wanted me to ask for mercy.’
I took it in.
‘He was going to hurt you?’
‘No, not him.’ She shook her head, as though it made even less sense to her than it did to me. ‘He wanted me to ask you for mercy.’
Merritt
God’s work
‘There’s nowhere else for them to go,’ Jennifer Buckle told him. ‘It’s no surprise what happens out there on the streets. And so what we do here, as much as we can, is give them a safe space.’
A safe space. He could have laughed: as if there were any such thing. But instead Merritt nodded politely, listening as Jennifer continued to talk about the drop-in centre she ran. It was a place where children could come, she explained. Where they knew they’d be listened to. Where they’d be treated as people, not just a problem for society to overlook. Merritt did his best to pretend that he was the slightest bit interested in what she had to say.
Jennifer was middle-aged, with curly hair that was greying slightly, and she was dressed plainly: a dark floral dress. On the street, most people would have passed her without a second glance. This place too, probably.
Merritt looked around the office as she carried on talking. Due to the scrupulous research he had undertaken, he knew that Jennifer Buckle had dedicated the last two decades of her life to helping others, and that while the surroundings here might be drab and shabby, it was still one of the last volunteer-based youth drop-in centres left in this part of the city. He also knew that she ran the place at the expense not only of her time but, frequently, her own personal finances. The centre had faced closure a number of times in the last two years alone. Each time Jennifer had dug deep and kept it alive.
