by Roz Watkins
‘And did you find anything out about her? About the donor?’
‘Yes. I was right. She was a young woman who was killed in a car crash. She even loved garlic mushrooms and I have cravings for those now. I never liked them before. And I listen to Radio 1, can you believe? That was her favourite.’
‘So the dreams about being in the car. Do you think that was how she died?’
‘Yes, it was. It was a head-on collision and the other car was on the wrong side of the road. I felt so scared in the dreams.’ She touched her heart. ‘I feel bad that she went through that.’
‘It’s an incredible story,’ I said.
‘Is there anything more you need to know?’ She glanced at the door.
‘Do you take a drug called Immunoxifan? An immunosuppressant?’
‘Yes, I do. Why? Is there a problem? A man from the drug company already asked me that.’
The door was shoved open. Bill walked in and sat on the sofa next to Gaynor. ‘It’s in her mind,’ he said. ‘A young woman who was killed in a car crash. It’s not that surprising, is it? It’s not as if she told us anything we couldn’t have guessed.’
‘I don’t know why you’re being so obnoxious.’ Gaynor shifted away from Bill. ‘It’s not a challenge. I’m not trying to win the Randi Prize. I’m telling the inspector how I felt. That’s what she wanted to know. There are doctors who believe in this. I’ve read up on it. They have theories about how it works. The heart even has its own mini-brain.’
Bill made a spluttering noise.
‘Have you noticed any change in your wife?’ I asked.
‘She’s a lot more argumentative,’ Bill said. ‘I think her real personality must be coming out now she’s well. It’s nothing to do with the donor, that’s for sure.’
‘Honestly, Bill, you’re very irritating.’ Gaynor turned to me. ‘All I can tell you is what I’ve experienced. Why would I lie? I’m sure of it. I dreamt her death. Michael Ellis believed me. Even the mice experienced it.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I don’t know the details. You’ll have to ask him about it, but he said the same thing was happening in mice.’
*
I drove a few miles from the Harveys’ house, pulled over in a lay-by and sat staring at an odd lump of rock that stuck out of the hillside. It looked like an eagle, a dark smudge forming its eye and a crack in the stone outlining a hooked beak. I pictured Gaynor sitting on her sofa, sharing her story with me so eagerly despite her husband’s bad attitude. She was clearly suffering from terrible Survivor’s Guilt. Maybe this was her way of coping – to imagine that the donor was still there in some way, living inside her. That would probably help you feel better.
After Carrie had died, I sometimes used to feel her in the room with me. I’d turn to say something to her, and then it would hit me like a truck that she was gone. Guilt could do strange things to you.
And Bill had a point about there being nothing particularly unusual in Gaynor’s story, and nothing easily verifiable. We didn’t know if she’d really craved garlic mushrooms before she found out the donor liked them. In fact, there was no proof she thought any of it before she had the information from the donor family.
I remembered an experience with a supposed clairvoyant, when I’d been in my twenties. A friend had dragged me along for moral support. The Mystic Meg character had given me no concrete information, but for a while I’d been seduced by it. She’d told me she was in touch with a dead relative of mine. He was called John but oddly he wasn’t willing to share his surname. He wants you to have more confidence in yourself. You’re better than you think you are. Live your life to the full. Stop trying to impress people. She came out with a fair bit of this before I started to wonder why she wouldn’t have picked up on Carrie. A huge, gaping hole in my life where my sister should have been, and no mention of it. Just some random relative called John, who talked in platitudes. But my friends were willing to feed her information and then be stunned when she added a dose of flattery and bounced it back at them. People loved to believe.
This had to be the same. It was Gaynor’s way of coping, and I didn’t have a problem with that. It made a traumatic experience easier to bear. But it was all in her mind. She was more argumentative because previously she’d been too ill to argue. And it couldn’t be true about the dreams. She must have found out how her donor died before she had them. Or made some lucky guesses. That was the only explanation.
I did wonder how Immunoxifan fitted into it all. And the mice. I needed to talk to Michael Ellis again. But first I wanted to see Rachel Thornton. What did she know about Elaine Grant? And poor Ollie?
18.
Rachel’s voice hardly penetrated the front door of her mother’s bungalow. ‘Who is it?’
‘DI Meg Dalton. Can I have a word?’
The door inched open and butted against a chain. Rachel’s eyes appeared, flicking to and fro as if she was searching for someone else behind me. Finally, she looked at me, but stared for a moment as if she didn’t know who I was.
‘Are you alright?’ I asked.
‘No.’ But the chain slid and unlatched. Rachel pulled the door wide and gestured me in.
She locked the front door behind us, before heading down the hallway.
She led me into a dining room at the front of the house. It was dominated by a dark table and upright wooden chairs with stripy green padded seats. ‘We’ll have to go in here,’ she said. ‘I’m sleeping in the living room for now. Abbie’s in the guest room. I mean, she’s sleeping in the guest room. She’s out now with my mother. Tea?’
‘Please.’ I didn’t want more sodding tea but sensed it was necessary.
While Rachel bustled in the kitchen, I looked around the room. It was gloomy, in the manner of traditional dining rooms, as if the pleasure of food had to be offset by the grimness of the surroundings to avoid the risk of too much fun being had.
A sketch pad lay at the end of the table. Someone had written Abbie’s on it in marker pen, together with a No-Entry sign. Not taking the hint, I tentatively reached over and lifted the cover. A drawing of a cantering horse, its mane flowing out behind it. Very good for a ten-year-old – she’d got the legs and the feet right, which I remembered from my childhood artistic endeavours wasn’t easy. I lifted the page but the next was blank, as was the rest of the note-book. I let the cover drop again.
A shiny-veneered dresser housed a set of photographs. A gilded frame surrounded a formally posed Phil and Rachel at their wedding, both looking as if they’d forgotten to turn the gas off. A more casual shot showed two children on a climbing frame – Abbie and another girl. I leant closer and squinted at the girl’s faces. Abbie looked wary – her grin toothy but her eyes nervous. The other girl gazed out confidently, with no sense of her future, reminding me of the photos of Carrie from before the cancer. For years I hadn’t been able to look at those photos.
‘Half of them are dead now.’
I jumped. Rachel clunked the door shut behind her with a foot, put two mugs on the table, and sat opposite me.
I took one of the mugs. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Someone’s watching me again, but I don’t expect you to take it seriously.’
‘Of course we take it seriously. What have you seen?’
‘I just have a feeling someone’s watching me.’
I caught her eye. She must have known we could do nothing with that.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I’m probably imagining it.’
‘Let me know immediately if you see anything definite. Shall I get someone here to keep an eye on the house?’
She settled in her chair. ‘No, no, it’s fine. I’ll let you know if I see anything.’
‘I need to ask you a few more questions.’
‘Right.’ She folded her arms.
‘Phil was involved in a trip to the seaside, where a child had an accident, and the child is brain-damaged. Did he share this with you?’
> ‘What?’ She sat up straighter. ‘You think this is to do with his murder?’
‘Not necessarily. But we were told Phil was supervising the children when it happened.’
‘No. That’s wrong. He told me there’d been an accident but it wasn’t his fault. He was with another social worker and she’d had a drink. It was her fault. She was supposed to be supervising the children when it happened.’
I felt events slotting into place.
‘Oh God,’ Rachel said. ‘It was her, wasn’t it? It’s that Karen woman. That’s who he was seeing. And he covered up for her. She would have been sacked if it had come out that she’d been drinking, so he took the rap. The stupid idiot. You think this could have got him killed?’
If Phil Thornton had covered for Karen, that could be what he’d been threatening to reveal, after their affair ended. That was quite a motive, if it could cause her to lose her husband and her job, and she was already in a financial mess. I felt a little twinge of hope.
‘She could have killed him,’ Rachel said. ‘Phil might even have given her a key to our house. He was stupid like that. She could have set Abbie up. Girlfriends often hate the kids – they’re inconvenient.’
Could it have been Karen? I ran through it in my head. But there was so much I couldn’t explain. Abbie’s dreams, the screaming about her father, the drowning.
‘Did anyone else have a key?’
Rachel twisted her lower lip. ‘We kept one under the stone cat by the door.’
‘Even though you thought someone was stalking you?’
She paused a minute. I couldn’t read her. ‘I forgot it was there.’
‘So, anyone could have let themselves in?’
‘Yeah.’ She sounded defiant, as if she thought I was going to have a go about her lack of security. ‘If they looked under the cat.’
‘Okay. I need you to talk me through exactly what happened in relation to Abbie’s heart, and the approach from Michael Ellis.’
‘Why do you need to know about that?’ Rachel dug her finger into a scratch in the wood of the dining table. ‘Aren’t you going to question her? It sounds to me like she had a motive.’
‘We’re looking into it.’ I took out my notepad. ‘But I also need to know about Abbie’s heart. Something was bad enough that you believed your little girl had killed your husband. Talk me through it.’
‘But it’s more likely to be this woman he had the affair with. I was wrong about Abbie. She must have set her up.’
‘Just talk me through it.’
The dining room had a bay window with a wide padded seat, which overlooked a neat front lawn surrounded by a low hedge. In the centre of the lawn was a stone bird bath. A robin perched on it. I had a fleeting daydream about swapping places with him. Flying away over the snow-topped hills and leaving him to sort out this mess.
Rachel sighed loudly, ending my robin-fantasy. ‘Okay. Like I said, soon after the transplant, Abbie started having nightmares. She was screaming, Daddy’s a murderer. Stuff like that. Severe nightmares. It was terrifying. And totally out of character. At first we thought it would go away in time, but it didn’t and I was at the end of my tether. Phil too. It was horribly upsetting for him. So I started wondering about all the drugs she was on and if they could be causing problems, because I know night terrors can be a side effect. I found out what they were and googled them. And I found an article about this drug she takes – an anti-rejection drug – and how it had caused psychological problems in some patients. It gave a name – Michael Ellis – so I got in touch with him.’
‘You definitely contacted him, rather than the other way round. And Abbie was already having nightmares before you met him?’
‘Definitely. Well, unless he’d been in touch with Phil earlier. I’m realising I had no idea what Phil was up to.’
‘Okay, so you contacted Michael Ellis.’
‘Yes. He won’t talk to people now but he was more open then. He was from the company that made the immunosuppressant drugs. And he started asking us these weird questions about Abbie’s behaviour.’ She wiped a hand over her forehead. ‘Anyway, he gave us the impression that the drug could be causing her problems. Which I suppose was a relief in a way. We told him about Abbie screaming all these weird, awful things, and he was, well, he didn’t want to say at first . . . I didn’t tell you all this before because, seriously, everyone already thinks I’m mad.’ Rachel’s face flushed. She looked less scared, more angry.
‘It’s okay. I don’t think you’re mad.’
‘Alright. Well, Michael Ellis seemed really worried about Abbie. About the effect of that drug.’
‘What exactly did he say?’
‘He thought the drug might make her be affected by something that had happened to the donor. I know how it sounds, but with all her nightmares and everything, we listened to him. I mean, calling her dad a murderer. Scared of being killed. There was nothing in Abbie’s life that could possibly have caused that. And he told us there have been lots of cases where people took memories from their donor. I googled it and he was right.’
‘But could Abbie have been remembering something from early childhood, perhaps? Did she ever nearly drown, for example?’
‘I didn’t know her when she was very young but Phil racked his brains and he couldn’t think of anything. And as for her being terrified of him and calling him a murderer . . . it makes no sense. He’d never laid a finger on her. I’m sure of that. And she only started having the dreams after her transplant. And I started to think, maybe something really did happen to the donor child, and that’s why she was scared. Because she’d never been scared of Phil. Anyway, we knew she needed help. So we started going to Dr Gibson. We decided to tell him everything. Obviously at first he didn’t think it was anything to do with her heart donor. But the nightmares got worse. She was definitely screaming that her dad was a murderer. And she’d never been scared of Phil before. Never. It was awful.’
‘And did she scream anything else?’
‘Don’t kill me. Daddy’s a murderer. Awful things like that. And then something about water. About drowning.’
‘Did you hear all this yourself or did only Phil hear some of it?’
‘I heard most of it. I think Phil heard her mention drowning. Honestly, it was terrible.’
‘Did she usually call Phil Daddy, or Dad?’
‘Actually she calls him Dad, but in the dreams it was Daddy. I wondered if the other child, the donor child, called her father Daddy.’
A prickle on the back of my neck. A wave of sympathy for this woman who’d had to listen to her child screaming and terrified, thinking her own father was trying to kill her. This woman who’d lost her child and her husband, and who might lose her remaining child too.
‘Did Abbie ever seem scared or worried about anyone else or anything else?’
‘I don’t think so . . . ’ Rachel gave me a sudden, sharp look. ‘You’re taking this seriously. Have you found the donor child? Does her death fit with Abbie’s dreams? Oh God . . . ’
I hesitated. ‘I’m just trying to find out all the facts. When she talked about her daddy being a murderer, is there anyone else she could have been talking about other than Phil?’ Rachel licked her lips nervously. ‘I wondered if something could have happened with Dr Gibson. I tried to ask Abbie, really carefully, and she doesn’t remember anything. But he hypnotised her, and she absolutely screamed when he regressed her. I assumed she was remembering the donor child’s death, but then I wondered. Although he seemed fine, not a weirdo, or I would never have let him be alone with her.’
‘Did you see a drawing Abbie did when she was hypnotised?’
‘No. They don’t show you them. Dr Gibson said it was better not to – if she or I saw them, it could consolidate the memories and make them seem more real.’
‘And did Abbie ever say any names when she was screaming?’
‘Not that I remember. It was hard to tell. Why are you asking all these questions
? Do you believe me about the donor heart?’
‘Why were you so sure it was her heart that was causing the bad dreams?’
‘It all started after her transplant. And then the stuff Michael Ellis said.’
‘Did Abbie ever have nightmares after her sister died?’
Rachel jumped. ‘No. Um, not really.’
I pictured the top attic window in that strange house of hers. Rachel’s daughter falling from it. ‘Tell me about what happened to Jess,’ I said. ‘How exactly did she die?’
Rachel crossed her legs and her arms and hugged herself as if it was cold. ‘Why? That was years ago. It’s got nothing to do with this.’
‘I’m sorry. I need to know.’
She dragged a strand of dark hair across her mouth and spoke in a monotone, as if she’d said this too many times already. ‘The girls were playing upstairs. The attic was locked with a padlock and they knew they weren’t supposed to go up there. I was out and Phil was downstairs.’
‘Phil didn’t realise they were up there?’
Rachel sighed. ‘I try not to blame him. It was a bad time for him. We’d recently found out that Abbie was going to need a heart transplant. I mean, Phil had known for a couple of years that she would need one at some point, but she’d started having symptoms, so suddenly it was real. I suppose he was distracted.’
‘But it was another few years before Abbie had her transplant?’
‘She was quite ill by the time she had it. She wouldn’t have lasted much longer.’
‘It must have been very hard for you.’
Rachel nodded. She didn’t seem keen to carry on telling me about Jess.
‘So, the girls were playing upstairs?’ I said.
‘They must have broken the padlock and gone up. I’m not sure which one of them was responsible. Actually, Jess was probably the one who broke the lock but I’m not sure. The cat went up with them – that would have been Abbie’s influence.’
