I Choose You

by Gayle Curtis

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Once upon a time there was a house, a particularly banal-looking 1970s building, one of many clustered on an estate; which, during the mid-1980s, was becoming quite an unpopular structure.

  Within the rounded curve of the dead-end road I would sit and watch this one particular house, which stood out from the rest. Even though they resembled a pack of cards fanned out across a table, this one was different. I was drawn to it because of Anna, the woman who lived within. She was a mesmerising manifestation; a rarity amidst the usual. She was to be my next participant. Unconsciously calling me to join her, I could hear her whispers through the walls.

  The ink-black hair, which shone like the deepest fathoms of the ocean, hung down on either side of her face. She had soft, small features with gently rounded cheekbones, all accentuating her green eyes, which I had the pleasure of discovering were flecked with gold.

  The most memorable of my participants, she was a symmetrical being to me and I was fascinated with her, by her, for her.

  The day I entered the house, she’d been crying; her eyes were red and there were smudges of black make-up beneath. It did not detract from her beauty, and the pull I felt towards her was even greater.

  Once we had spoken, there was a quietness throughout my stay and it was as though she’d been expecting me, like we were old souls, familiar to one another. There had been an initial look of surprise when she first saw me and then she silently, submissively allowed me to take her towards her next path.

  Let me explain something to you. When you hold someone at gunpoint and tell them they are, without doubt, going to die – shoot yourself or be shot – they become hysterical. They are unable to see the beautiful transitional journey upon which they are about to embark, a gift from me to them. And they are most definitely going to die, but I never actually said when, did I?

  But Anna was different, this masterpiece before me, and I spent many years in her company before she died, watching the transition of life within her being.

  The inevitable was about to occur, although neither of us knew when, and she embraced it, without panic or fear or expectation. It was a moment filled with relief, a palpable peace that I have never known before or since. From that moment, I fell in love with her. Prominently, in a lascivious way, you understand. I longed, thereafter, to watch her again through the window. The only time I’ve ever seen someone’s true emotions are through the glass when they’re pondering, alone and unwatched. Within her face was a magical beauty that I will probably never encounter again.

  It wasn’t the wrong time for her to go – it was ultimately her decision and I’m not sorry – but the strong essence of her stayed with me for a long time after. It’s still with me now, but it’s taken on other forms. There is a familiarity with any love affair as it matures over time. She is and always will be my quixotic paramour; I understand she now belongs to another.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THEN

  Elise wasn’t with Ida when she died. A new day was just breaking, and Elise had wandered down to the hospital café for a hot drink to keep herself awake. She’d been distracted by the piles of morning newspapers that had just been delivered – the top one’s headline read: SURVIVING VICTIM OF THE SUICIDE WATCHER REVEALED.

  The man behind the shop counter had given Elise a copy when she’d asked if he could cut the wrapping tape holding the tabloids together. He recognised her – everyone did, and she’d barely paid for anything since the news had broken about Ida. She wished they’d treat her normally, rather than handing freebies to her that were tainted with her family tragedy.

  The shop assistant didn’t say anything when she took the copy, just smiled at her sympathetically.

  When she sat down with the newspaper, she hadn’t been expecting to see her mother’s name printed in big black capital letters on page four. She returned to the front page, suddenly realising the large photo there was of her mother, exhaustion having clouded her sight.

  Controversial psychiatrist Dr Ray Coe is being questioned about his possible involvement with the Suicide Watcher cases. In the late 1980s, Dr Coe led family and friends to believe his wife, Ingrid Coe, had committed suicide and was a possible victim of the infamous killer, but a source has revealed the seventy-nine-year-old is very much alive. The news comes as the police’s cold case team reopens the unsolved murders, following a vicious attack on Dr Coe’s granddaughter at his home less than a week ago.

  It is unknown how many Suicide Watcher victims there have been. Suspicion was first cast in 1988 when a man in his early thirties was found dead at his farm in the Oxford countryside. Left-handed and an experienced rifleman, John Tilney was found with a single bullet wound to the side of his head and gun residue on his right hand. He had a seven-year-old son, Benjamin, who disappeared the same night. Police officials believe he is also dead, but his body has never been found.

  It is as yet unconfirmed where Mrs Ingrid Coe has been residing all these years and the police are eager to locate her . . .

  Elise skipped paragraphs until she found the piece about Ingrid’s so-called death. It was like reading, verbatim, what Ray had told her all those years ago. Elise returned to the front page and then back to the article inside. There was a small passport picture printed at the bottom, with Ingrid’s head pushed towards the camera as if she were peering at an onlooker. Even though it was black and white, there was no mistaking the sharp blue eyes, identical to Elise’s, and the blonde hair. She remembered the picture from when she was a child.

  Picking her phone up from the table, Elise began to dial Ray’s number but quickly changed her mind and hung up. Was Ingrid alive? If so, he must have known all along, and that’s why he was in Norway now, because the story was going to leak. He was with her mother in Norway, Ingrid’s home country, preparing her for what was to come.

  The day she’d heard the gunshot coming from the bathroom blasted through her mind again, always so readily there whenever she thought of her mother. The time had read 16.43 on her Swatch, the timepiece Ray had bought her as a birthday present. She never wore it on her wrist, just carried it around with her, using the stopwatch to time everything. Ingrid had tried to take her own life before, had even fired a gun at the mirror in the bathroom, but she’d never gone through with it. That day, outside the bathroom, Elise had timed the minutes until her mother would emerge, but that day she never came out.

  There was a feeling lurking within her now that maybe she’d known all along that Ingrid was still alive.

  Elise folded the newspaper, collected her coffee and made her way to the lift, too fatigued and upset to walk up the stairs. She was completely unaware of the commotion that had occurred in the last hour while she’d been away from the ward, and all was still again by the time she wandered back in.

  One of the consultants came out of the family room further down the corridor, a pained look on his face, and she knew straight away he was looking for her.

  ‘Mrs Munroe.’ He walked towards her, hands held out. ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ The consultant had mistaken the tears falling down her face as a sign that someone had already spoken to her.

  ‘There was nothing more we could do.’

  Elise pushed past him and ran to Ida’s room, where she was stopped by DC Chilvers.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Munroe. Your daughter has been taken for a post-mortem examination. We need to preserve as much evidence as possible.’

  ‘But I haven’t given my consent.’

  DC Chilvers frowned. ‘We don’t need it. This is now a murder enquiry.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THEN

  Ray sat in the airport lounge waiting for Sonny to collect him, as various people came and went amongst the orange chairs. Staff members enquired after his welfare, because he’d sat there overnight, but he assured them he was fine. He had slept in the airport seats many times, in those previous years when he’d bought a ticket a
nd never boarded the plane. This time, it had nothing to do with being fearful of boarding; that particular phobia seemed to have been conquered.

  The fear had been mild at first: elevators, crowded shops and public transport were all places he could manage, but as he’d grown older it had become more intense. Then, on a small jet to the Channel Islands with his parents when he was twelve, the turbulence had been terrifyingly extreme. He’d developed claustrophobia, and it had kept him company for so many years now that he’d petted and fed it like a dear old friend. A psychiatrist with a disorder – one of many, he told himself. He also believed that claustrophobia had saved his life once. Saying this out loud to himself one day, he realised the utter ridiculousness of it, although he still believed it was partly true. It had been 1982, 1983 maybe, he couldn’t recall the exact year, but he could clearly remember staring through the enormous glass windows and watching the aeroplane he was supposed to have boarded turn and line itself up on the runway, regret beginning to pinch his skin as he realised he’d wasted yet another ticket. Another chance to spend time with one of the most important people in his life.

  Ray had turned from the window and faced the multitude of empty orange chairs – not unlike now, the endless empty rows still giving the sensation of nuclear warfare having wiped out the entire population. Maybe it had been an exaggerated premonition that day, because as he began his deflated walk from the airport, his hand luggage weighing even heavier on his shoulder, one of the cylinders in the engine of the plane caught fire and it crashed back on to the runway. The sound it made when it hit the tarmac rattled the glass in the airport; the odd scream erupted from the few looking in that direction. And then there were a few moments of eerie silence before the whole situation turned into mass panic.

  When the pathologists finally started the arduous task of doing the post-mortems, they found that it wasn’t the crash that killed the passengers, it was the toxic fumes from the burning material on the seats within the plane – it had incapacitated many travellers and most of them died from inhalation. The whole tragedy was to change the design and safety of plane interiors forever.

  That day had a monumental effect on the course of events his life would follow. If he’d boarded the plane he was supposed to get on, everything would have been very different. He often wondered what his parallel life looked like – if, of course, one existed.

  The day after arriving in Norway, Ray had woken up to find a letter saying she’d read the papers and it was time for her to go. He’d waited for her, tried to contact her, even looked in places he vaguely knew of, but no one had seen or heard from her. Ray knew it was time to leave and be with the people who needed him, especially after he received the sad news from Sonny that Ida had passed away. As soon as the plane had landed in the UK, Ray had been so grief-stricken he was unable to call and tell anyone he was home, and instead had sought sanctuary in the airport.

  Now he watched Sonny walking towards him across the terminal, until he was standing in front of him.

  ‘Please tell me you haven’t been sitting here all this time and you did actually go to Norway? Why didn’t you call me? I would have picked you up.’ Sonny looked concerned, and it reminded Ray of how roles had reversed so quickly in the time they’d known one another.

  Ray now wanted someone else to give him the answers for a change. Ray was tired, and uncharacteristically weak.

  ‘This isn’t like you.’ Sonny sat down next to Ray, the chair optically reducing in size as his tall frame descended. He was calm but imposing, something Ray thought had become more prominent a few months into his sobriety. ‘Elise badly needs your support.’

  ‘I stupidly thought if I didn’t leave the airport, you’d come and tell me Ida had woken up and everything was okay.’

  ‘I wish I did have news like that for you . . . but no, I’m sorry. The consultant said her head injury was too extensive for her to recover from.’ Sonny leant forward, resting his arms on his knees. ‘Ray, the thing is—’

  ‘I’ve been giving some thought to the work I’ve done all these years – not the TV stuff, or any of that, but the clients who have come to me. Patients, I suppose.’ Ray was talking at Sonny as if he weren’t there.

  ‘Ray, can we talk about this later?’

  ‘I’ve realised that for forty-five minutes I engage with a stranger, listen to their deepest thoughts and emotions, and the truth of it is, I don’t really care. Because dead on the three-quarters of an hour, I stop them, they pay me and leave.’

  ‘It’s a service, Ray. We all need to make a living. I’m a barrister, I get paid to defend criminals I know are guilty. Get over it.’ Sonny stood up, clearly expecting Ray to follow.

  ‘That’s different.’ Ray pulled his coat around himself and folded his arms, deep in thought, wanting to avoid whatever it was Sonny wanted to say.

  ‘Ray, I really need to get you back to the house. The police want to talk to you.’

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of clients who’ve lost children. I even counselled a couple whose child was never found, dead or alive. For years, one or the other came to see me. We would go over every possible scenario about what had happened to their son. Eventually, I began to have a lot of thoughts about why they couldn’t move on, that they were wasting their entire lives pondering on what might have been and ultimately missing out on so much with their other children. Everything was halted . . . why would they do that when their son’s life had presumably been cut short through no fault of his own?’

  ‘I have no idea. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’ Sonny rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘We need to go.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have lied, Sonny. I’ve protected my patients over my family. I’ve been too confident in my abilities and assumed I was totally in control.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I put my family in danger.’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous, and I’m not going to indulge you in this self-absorbed crap. We need to get back to answer some questions. The police think you’re in Norway with Ingrid. You can’t just drop a bombshell like that and disappear. That is where you went? To see Ingrid?’

  ‘What do they want to talk to me about?’

  ‘I’m not sure, you’ll need to speak to them about it.’

  ‘How did Elise take the news that Ingrid is alive?’

  ‘How do you think? She read about it on the front of a newspaper. You should have told her. It doesn’t affect me like it does her. I had a different life somewhere else.’ Sonny sat down again. ‘Ray, your client, James Caddy, has been arrested.’

  Ray looked down at his lap, clenched his jaw and linked his dry fingers together. He knew the moment he heard the news that Ida had been attacked; he had known there could only be one person who had murdered his granddaughter that day. Ray knew Ida would have talked to James when he was leaving his office, engaged him in a conversation. Ray and Ida had the same mind – Ida was a female version of himself and, as a teenager, he would have been curious too. She had always made him feel like he was reversing time, watching himself grow up; they shared so many interests.

  Sonny stood up, ready to leave, and Ray followed him out of the airport.

  ‘I’ve told them.’ Sonny accelerated on to the main road out of the car park, bringing Ray back to the present.

  ‘Told who what?’

  ‘I’ve told the police about my past. It’s best to be up front.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Ray replied quietly.

  ‘The thing is, Ray . . . The thing is . . .’ Sonny took a deep breath and abruptly swung the car into a layby.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ray grabbed the door handle to steady himself.

  Sonny laid his head back on the seat and exhaled.

  ‘Spit it out, lad,’ Ray snapped, fatigue and stress affecting his normally patient demeanour.

  ‘There’s something I haven’t told you . . . another reason I was on your doorstep that night.’
/>   Ray stared at Sonny, seeing a stranger amidst the all-too-familiar face.

  ‘I’m not the surrogacy child. I’m not your son, and the police will match the DNA and find out we’re not related.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that, Sonny?’ Ray hissed through gritted teeth. ‘I know exactly who you are.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was 1976 when I met Cheryl. If you saw her in the street or on the station platform you would assume that she was uneducated, shallow and unambitious. Whenever I saw Cheryl she always looked dishevelled, like her clothes were doing her a favour. Her shoulders slumped forward, her face expressionless, indifferent. It was strange how someone could just stand out amongst a mass of people.

  It was raining heavily outside, and I ran into a carriage where I was surprised to find Cheryl reading a book. Dirty blonde hair hung limply around her face; food stained the front of her clothing.

  Cheryl was a playwright, I discovered during our third conversation. Not a successful one, but a few pieces of her work had been staged. Like many women of her era, she was pulled down by children and a husband she didn’t care for anymore.

  Most of the time, Cheryl only travelled on the train during the school holidays, so she could get away from her children. She rarely got off at any of the stops, just rode as far as she could go and back again. She was crass, abrasive, and said whatever she was thinking with no care of offending anyone.

  ‘I want my life to change but I keep putting it off.’ Cheryl said this quite often, as if she were validating the excuse for herself.

  ‘What changes would you make?’

  ‘That’s easy. I’d leave my family – just disappear one day and live a solitary life somewhere in the country.’

  Cheryl made her choice and changed everything shortly after that. Beyond that harsh, rough exterior was a lot of fear, and she cried at the end – they usually do. We all leave the party eventually.