Sanctuary

by Lisa Appignanesi

  22

  Four evenings later, Leo waited impatiently for the bell at the loft to ring.

  Bar the occasional walk, she had spent much of the last days here, recuperating and talking to Martha, whose tears flowed more uncontrollably than her own.

  The woman’s misery was compounded by guilt and the sense of a double loss - not only of Isabel, but of the nostalgic core of her youthful dream of Morgenstern. She had wanted to see him, but Faraday had prevaricated. Maybe he had sensed, as Leo did, that the confrontation and the ensuing rage would destroy her in its ferocity.

  Leo had tried to help her find solace in the fact that however devastating the circumstances which had cut Isabel’s life short, she had at least lived it to the full. She had told herself that as well, over and over again. It didn’t fill the abyss of loss. But it helped a little.

  Norfolk had driven Martha back from Devon. He had hugged Leo tightly on his arrival and brought news. Hilton aka Morgenstern was in custody. The staff of the Sanctuary together with the guests who had been there during Isabel and Jill Reid’s stay were being questioned.

  ‘Some of our little white-clad birds are singing very happily,’ he had laughed. ‘His assistant, or adminstrator, that Heather woman had a lot of grudges. Only too happy to get them off her chest. And we found a letter locked in his desk. It was signed with my name, though in Isabel’s handwriting. It threatened to expose his illicit activities, as well as his alleged bigamy. Not to mention child abuse. Since he assumed she had written it, he had motive for his heinous acts. Plenty of motive, given that he was planning to open big in Australia.’

  ‘Odd that she signed it in your name.’

  ‘Probably thought she needed back-up. A double Aussie threat. Here. You’ll want these.’

  He had presented Leo with a pile of diskettes copied from Isabel’s computer, as well as her own machine. ‘Now we know who our burglar was, Holland. I imagine he was trying to keep us off his trail, laying false clues so that we’d have reason to pursue Isabel along the Green path, which he knew about from her files or hypnosis or whatever. More crucially, he was sniffing out any other evidence there was here of his paternal links to Isabel. So that he could destroy them.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I guess he didn’t want his empire rattled. He’d whitewashed his credentials and couldn’t face another attack of smut, one that might actually scupper the whole enterprise, this time round.

  Leo had nodded, ‘I’ve been thinking and thinking about it. He must have decided to send the diskette with the ordnance map coordinates and the lists here after the burglary alerted him to my presence. To deflect us. I suspect he organized for Isabel’s suitcase to be delivered too. To muddy the scent. Send us veering off in all directions. Hence the Bioworld brochure inside it.’

  ‘A good break for me though, Holland. That and your phone call. It sent me looking back through my e-mails from Isabel. There was a slightly cryptic one early in April, asking me if I knew anything about Progene and Ritter Pharmaceuticals, telling me to look into any charitable donations they may have made, in particular to the Morning Star Foundation. It was all amidst other stuff. I never pursued it, since my main brief is GM and agriculture.’

  ‘All this time, we’d been following the wrong bogey. We got caught up in the press hysteria.’

  ‘That’s not quite fair, Holland. Isabel had been investigating the GM sector and she came up with some valuable stuff. Though I grant you, it wasn’t what led to her death.’

  ‘And if fate and the tides hadn’t deposited her body at Lynton, he might have gotten away with it. Isabel would have become another missing person statistic.’

  Saying it, Leo had wondered again if that wouldn’t have been preferable. Some kind of hope of Isabel’s return would have been kept alive. Yet, even as the thought played through her, she knew that that would have been utterly to contradict Isabel’s spirit. The person who she was. The woman who had to know at all costs.

  ‘You wouldn’t have allowed that, Holland,’ Norfolk surprised her by grumbling. ‘You’re as stubborn as a mule. No, no, I’ve got my creatures wrong. A veritable bloodhound. Just like our friend.’

  He had ruffled her hair then, kissed her gently. ‘I don’t know how many of Isabel’s files you managed to get through, but I think you’ll find she was very fond of you.’

  Leo had sat down to read and reread journal, deep into the night.

  Once again, she felt Isabel’s vertigo, not unlike her own over these last weeks, but more devastating. Her friend had been buffetted by the ghosts which had surfaced in her analysis with Daniel and then more savagely in her therapy with Paola Webster. Each one of these flailing presences murmured different accounts of a buried history whose truth was probably not single. The sudden materialisation of one of them in the person of Morgenstern or Hilton - with his charming surface and his deeply amoral malevolence - had filled her with the sense that she wanted to eradicate everything that had made her. She wanted to destroy the incarnation of the past which was also embedded in her. Half hoping for salvation, for sanctuary, she had found its opposite.

  When she read the latest entries invoking her own name, Leo was overcome by sorrow. It was clear that Isabel felt Leo couldn’t understand the extremities of emotion her friend was now prey to, the painful obsessive swirl that had become her mind. It was easier to confide in relative strangers. Like Jill Reid.

  More than ever, Leo wished that she could embrace her friend and tell her that she did understand. Now she did. Understood viscerally. They all carried their own quota of ghosts who occasionally surfaced to give them a taste of madness, to unravel the cloak of sanity and place them at the mercy of the elements. Some of them were lucky enough to escape merely with the bitter memory. Though no escape was necessarily permanent. Except, perhaps, death.

  She also wished that she could tell Isabel that Morgenstern had been apprehended, that Leo’s blood test had shown a sizeable quantity of the same compound they had found in Jill Reid’s and Isabel’s, though Isabel’s also carried traces of some as yet undesignated drug. Too late, Leo had been able to help her friend.

  In the journal of Isabel’s last months, Daniel made a sporadic and not always happy appearance. Isabel’s anger at his ‘know it all’ state, replicated what Leo had felt. But there was more. One note read:

  ‘I had to leave him. My feelings about men are always so extreme. Love. Hate. Longing. Fear. We began to untangle that together, but I still had to go. Basta.’

  Towards the end of the file, Isabel referred to him again, almost whimsically, as if it was she who had failed him and not the other way round. She quoted him, too, a little enigmatically, saying that some boundaries, after all, were worth preserving.

  Of analysis or therapy as a whole, Isabel’s notes seemed to have no general view to offer, except to say, with a touch of acid, that it was probably as good or bad or sound or treacherous an edifice as the practitioners who lived in it.

  Leo thought all this through once more as she waited for her guest. Martha had located an old friend and, on Leo’s urging, had gone out for the evening. Beast purred round her legs and she picked him up and went to stand by the windows which gave onto the now desolate car park. Rain splattered across the panes bursting into rivulets. Like tears. Tears for Isabel. She let out a sigh and stroked the cat’s fur. ‘Do you want to come and live in Manhattan, Beast?’

  The cat leapt out of her arms and bounded across the room. She smiled after him. A Beast as wilfully independent as his mistress.

  That first evening on their return to London and after the hospital visit, Daniel had insisted that Leo spend the night at his place. Martha was still in Lynton and Leo couldn’t stay on her own. There might be flashbacks, hallucinations, fear. He couldn’t in good conscience leave her.

  Leo had taken it for the medical injunction that it was, though she had sensed that there was another note underlying his insistence, one she couldn’t altogether make out
. She thought it had something to do with making amends to Isabel.

  They had spent what she could only describe, despite the circumstances, as a cosy evening. Robbie had entertained her with chit chat, had insisted that they draw together. Their joint creations had made them both smile. Afterwards she had joked with Daniel that his son was a far better therapist than he was. And Daniel had looked at her a little oddly, then laughed, and said that his wife used to say that too.

  Only when the lights went out and she was dropping off to sleep in another strange bed did the full horror of the last days attack her - bounding, dizzying images, playing on her eyelids so that she had to open them to chase them away. A huge, salivating, dog-like face coming too close, a constricting mask being forced down on her, needles jabbing at her arm. Most of the holes had been filled by conjecture, if not yet altogether by memory. She didn’t think Morgenstern had penetrated her with more than the needle. The latter was more his style. And maybe there were some things it was better not to know. She had escaped, after all. And she didn’t feel she was in flight. Sex was hardly the worst thing. She would say that to Daniel.

  The doorbell rang at last and she rushed to answer it. He was up the stairs quickly and she remembered that he had that other side to him, the ball player.

  ‘Not late, am I?’ Daniel smiled.

  ‘Don’t think so. I still haven’t got my watch back. It’s the one thing that’s missing.’

  ‘If that’s all, you’re in luck.’

  She returned his smile and ushered him in. She suddenly felt shy, as if this was her own house and he might judge her by it. A bizarre thought, Leo reflected, given everything she had already spewed out on his couch, let alone since.

  He was looking round curiously, pacing the large room, taking in its various perspectives. ‘Yes, I see,’ he said at last.

  ‘What do you see?’

  He grinned. ‘Sometimes I think analysts should be like old-fashioned GPs and make home visits. To get a look at the stage on which some of the internal landscape plays itself out.

  ‘And what do you make of this?’

  ‘It’s new. It’s bare. It’s waiting to be written on. How are you, Leo?’ He surveyed her with critical appraisal.

  ‘All right, everything considered.’

  ‘Yes, everything considered.’ His voice turned grim. ‘Are you managing to sleep?’

  She nodded. ‘And to dream.’ A shrill laugh came out of her. ‘Sometimes I’m surprised he didn’t kill me too. I imagine it was the magic aura your name provided.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put too much value on that. I suspect he simply over-estimated his not inconsiderable powers and under-estimated yours. He assumed you wouldn’t remember your conversations. He didn’t know you’d found Isabel’s computer. Then, too…’ he stopped abruptly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Another few weeks…’ He stumbled for words. ‘Another little while on the drugs and your hold would have become precarious…’

  She nodded sagely, as if he were talking about someone else. She handed him a glass of wine. ‘I still don’t really understand why he wouldn’t acknowledge her as his daughter. I can’t think of a better one.’

  ‘Luckily you’re not him.’ Daniel raised his glass to her. ‘Too much denial, I imagine,’ he continued. ‘Hilton had to believe fully in who he was at any given time in order to keep the balloon inflated. Maybe, too, he could only conceive of her overture in his own image. Could only think, if she was a relation, that she was out to get him in some way. The way you told me he had gotten at that uncle in Chicago. I suspect that for him any return of the past constitutes a danger to his present identity.’

  Leo reflected for a moment. ‘I don’t think he set out to… to murder Isabel, you know. It just turned into an expedient and fortunate accident, from his point of view. He would have preferred to win her over by charm or change her intent to expose him by adminstering drugs, by hypnotism, threats… whatever. But the opportunity presented itself and he was having trouble mastering her. Isabel was never particularly good at saying yes to authority. And she hated him. Had plunged from idealising him from a distance to loathing him for what he really was.

  ‘An entire childhood trajectory compressed into a few weeks. Too much to bear,’ Daniel murmured.

  Leo caught the culpable note. All of them floundering in guilt, except Hilton himself. Because they knew the past mattered, whereas he had the capacity for stamping it out. Until Isabel came along…

  She rushed on. ‘What puzzles me is Jill Reid. Why concoct an accident for her? I’ve worked out what he did, you know. Pictured it, anyhow. He drove her over to that spot. She was sedated up to the gills, over-sedated. He pushed the car over the verge and smashed the windows for good measure. To make it look right. Then he walked back. But why not just have done what he tried to do to me. Obliterate the memory.’

  ‘Maybe there wasn’t time. She was due to leave, remember, and his assistant, that blonde woman, would have suspected if she’d haphazardly been converted into a long-stay patient after Isabel had left, so to speak. Others would have wondered, too. He couldn’t allow that.’

  Leo shivered as Frederick Hilton’s bulk seemed suddenly to fill the room. ‘His own daughter. Two women. They shouldn’t have died.’

  Daniel put his arm round her shoulder.

  ‘No. They shouldn’t have,’ his voice cracked. ‘Power run amok. It was brave of you, you know. Very brave. To put yourself at risk in that way. To care so much.’

  Leo shrugged. ‘I couldn’t have done it, if I’d thought. And without Isabel guiding me, taking me over. A little like possession.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now, I’m just my small mourning self.’

  ‘Not small. And with a life in front of you.’

  ‘Hope so.’ She met his eyes.

  They were silent for a moment and then he handed her a sheaf of paper. ‘I’ve brought you something.’

  Leo glanced at the typed sheets. ‘Notes Towards a Case History’, the title stated.

  ‘Not me?’ She said apprehensively.

  ‘Read it. Tell me what you think.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Not now. Now I’m taking you out to dinner.’

  ‘I don’t think I could eat with it hanging over me.’

  ‘You may not want to eat after. With me.’

  ‘We’ll both have to take our chances.’

  Daniel laughed softly. ‘Yes. That’s right. We’ll both have to take our chances.’

  About the Author

  Lisa Appignanesi is the London-based author of seven best-selling novels and thrillers. She has also written prize-winning historical work, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800; and Freud’s Women with John Forrester. A Visiting Professor in English and Medical Humanities at King’s College, London, she is former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum London. She has been awarded a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She writes for The Guardian and The Telegraph and can frequently be heard on the BBC.

  PRAISE FOR LISA APPIGNANESI’S THRILLERS

  ‘I stayed up till 3am reading right through.’ Globe & Mail

  ‘An intriguing novel… richer and stranger than a mere thriller.’ Guardian

  ‘Guaranteed to linger in your mind long after reading it… Elegantly plotten and beautifully written, this atmospheric read comes very highly recommended.’

  Prima

  ‘Lisa Appignanesi skilfully manipulates the reader through a maze of suspicion and fear to a tense denouement… (she) writes so well that she sweeps you along, prepared to believe in the events.’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A compellingly moody psycho-thriller. Appignanesi paces the mounting emotional atmosphere beautifully. The Dead of Winter becomes, gradually and grippingly, not just the tale of a search for a women’s killer, but an exploration of obsession and guilt that l
eads to a shocking conclusion.’

  The Times

  SANCTUARY

  When investigative journalist Isabel Morgan disappears, colleagues and lovers see this as just another gambit in an ever-dramatic life. But her closest friend, Leo Holland, is filled with a sense of dread: something terrible has happened to Isabel. She is more certain of this than of much else in a life that is teetering close to the edge. In desperation, she flies from New York to London to try to trace the woman she realizes has become her sustaining force. But how well does anyone know their best friend? Convinced that Isabel’s analyst holds the key to her disappearance, Leo masquerades as a potential patient. In the process, she discovers more than she set out to know.

  Set in a world of competing therapies, Sanctuary is a sophisticated psychological thriller, which probes the workings of memory and friendship and the slippages in identity which intimacy can produce.