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CC: Anyone else close to you? Other family?
EP: I’m an only child. My dad’s dead.
CC: OK.
[pause: 11 sec]
CC: OK. And was that a long time ago that you lost him?
EP: Yes. Before I was born.
CC: I see. It can be challenging, growing up without—
EP: No. It wasn’t.
CC: You don’t want to talk about your father.
EP: No.
[pause: 31 sec]
CC: OK, Ellie, there’s a couple of things I’d like you to know. Sometimes therapists can be a bit mystifying. They can wait for you to work things out for yourself even if they have a good idea of what’s going on and what needs to shift in order to improve. But that can take a lot of time. In my experience I think it’s best to be up front and tell you what I think is happening, and what we’re going to do to put it right. Seems more honest, that way. Does that sound OK?
EP: Yes. I just want her gone. I want to be better.
CC: I hear you. So the first thing is, the aim of the psychotherapeutic work I’m going to do with you is to understand what’s happened. What I want to do is reduce the conflict between the different parts of your identity, help them cooperate.
EP: OK. I mean, I can’t see that happening, but OK. We can try.
CC: Good. So, the second thing I need you to know is that the kind of issues you’re having with Siggy, they’re something that almost always stem from quite a significant trauma, often something in early childhood.
[pause: 34 sec]
EP: OK.
CC: And so at some point in our sessions we’re going to need to talk about that. What you yourself think is at the bottom of it, how it all started.
[pause: 19 sec]
CC: Would you like us to come back to this at another time?
EP: No.
CC: OK. I understand. The reason I’m—
EP: I just … look, nothing happened, OK? There’s no deep dark secret. She’s just there. I don’t know why. I’m not going to come along here and just suddenly remember some massive, buried … it’s not going to happen. She’s always been there. I just want her gone. OK? I want her to leave me alone.
[pause: 22 sec]
EP: I just want her to leave me alone.
4. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Ellie (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
It felt like she was gone forever. I called Matt again and again but there was no answer.
I checked the time on the wall clock – three hours gone – and then saw the streak of pink highlighter on the calendar. I was supposed to be doing a shift that afternoon, volunteering in the children’s ward in the hospital where Mum cleaned, and Matt worked in the imaging lab. He’d set the whole thing up for me, sorting all the stuff out with the permissions, after I told him how one day I’d like to work with children. But after his effort, I’d managed to miss my slots twice in the last few weeks. The HR person had already come to see me about it, but I couldn’t explain to her what had really happened: that if I went back to sleep after a fugue, I was impossible to wake.
Matt said I should just come clean about it, explain that I had a mental illness. It was a hospital, he said – how could they not understand? I didn’t dare, but I knew then I’d made the right decision in confiding in him.
At first I’d been careful to stick to the rules, to censor myself. Mum knew how serious I was about him, and in his company at least, she approved of him. I’d come home once to find them roaring with laughter over a game of cards: he was genuine, polite, reliable, she said, and nothing like my father. She made me promise not to let myself fall asleep with him, no matter how tired I got, but she was still worried. There wasn’t a man alive who was patient enough, understanding enough, to be with someone who’d always sleep alone. Even good guys can break your heart,she said.
To begin with I said nothing at all about Siggy, but I couldn’t keep the secrecy up for long. There was no boundary where I stopped and she began, and after a few months, I realized I couldn’t be myself without telling him.
Matt had listened to it all. We’d been sitting in front of the log burner in his narrowboat, sharing a bottle of wine. I sat propped against his chest, and I told him the whole story. From the first time Siggy had got me up at night and taken me outside, until Mum, frantic at 4 a.m., found me lying underneath the car. I told him about the exhaustion I got the mornings after a fugue, the grinding headaches, the ten-tonne limbs. I told him everything.
No. Not everything. I didn’t tell him about Jodie.
After my very long monologue, there was a very long silence. And then he’d lifted my head from his shoulder and looked right into my eyes.
‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand this yet, but I’m going to. We’re going to make you OK.’
I told Mum later, and she was silent for a long while. Eventually, she just hugged me. ‘It’s your life,’ she said. ‘Remember to be careful, though. He’s a good guy, but I can’t protect him from her.’
The very next morning, there were bruises all up her arms. I had no memory of what Siggy had done – what I had done. How I had slammed my own mother against a wall and thrown her out of my way.
Like I was an empty coat, Mum said. But it wasn’t your fault.
I heard a sudden movement and I froze, listening, but it wasn’t Mum coming back. Just boxes being moved around downstairs, from what I guessed was the stock room. Our flat was above a shop, an off-licence, and from the way sound travelled it seemed Mr Symanski’s ceiling, our floor, was made from little more than cardboard.
I gave a start. Thin floors.
If I could hear him …
I pulled on my shoes and was at the front door before Mum’s warnings about him sounded in my head. Don’t talk to the neighbours. It only takes one person to suspect us.
What was I going to say? Did you hear me leave the flat in the middle of the night? Because I’ve got a whole load of unexplained injuries and I don’t remember what happened? I stood there for a moment, my forehead resting on the cold glass of the door. Then I took my shoes back off and kicked them sullenly away.
In the kitchen, next to the sink, Mum had left a beaker for me and a carton of orange juice. Forgetting the damage to my hand, I made the mistake of trying to twist the cap. I recoiled and knocked the whole box to the floor where it slopped out across the lino.
Irritated, I opened the safe cupboard under the sink and took out the homemade cleaning fluid and some latex gloves. We didn’t take chances anymore: everything harmful was locked away. I couldn’t even be left alone with a bottle of bleach. I tried all the other doors, out of habit. All locked. Knives, matches, bleach, all beyond my grasp. I snapped on the gloves and clenched and stretched my hands, feeling the thin scabs on the wounds split, reasserting myself over her.
My pain, Siggy. Not yours.
After I mopped up the juice I carried on cleaning, using the soft scourers to attack the rest of the floor, the dented metal sink, the wood-effect laminate of the worktops. I scrubbed until my jaw ached from gritting my teeth. Folded in a corner, Siggy eyed me.
My phone rang, and I pulled off the gloves, my heart leaping as I recognized the first few of digits of the number on the screen. It was the hospital.
‘Matt?’
‘Oh, hi,’ said an awkward voice, a man. Not Matt. ‘Ellie, right?’
I let my eyes close. If someone at his work was calling me, that meant—
‘Listen, do you know where Matt is? Only, we were expecting him in, and he hasn’t shown up.’
I told him – after swallowing the lump of lead in my throat – that I hadn’t. ‘Who is this?’
‘Leon. From the hospital. The imaging lab?’
‘Oh, OK. Leon.’ Matt had mentioned Leon: they’d been working together for a couple of months now and he’d gone for a pint with him after work once or twice, though I didn’t get the sense they were particularly good friends.
‘Did you see him yesterday?’ Leon asked, concern in his voice. ‘Like, in the evening? Because I can’t get hold of him on the mobile, and the guy at his moorings says he’s not there, and with yesterday being a bit … you know.’
‘A bit what?’
The wet sound of him opening and closing his mouth told me he was choosing his words. ‘No it’s … it’s nothing. But look, if you hear from him—’
‘It was a bit what, Leon?’
‘Nothing. Just, you know. Busy.’
Matt hadn’t mentioned anything unusual. Had I even asked? I told Leon I’d call if I heard anything and hung up.
I went to the window, pulling the net aside. The thick cloud of the early morning was gone now, swept clean to expose a sky of cold blue, scarred all over with sharp shards of white.
Wherever Matt was, he wasn’t OK. He wasn’t OK at all.
My eye was caught by movement. I recognized Mr Symanski’s son, Piotr. Maybe a little older than me, mid-twenties and already paunchy. He was a sullen figure, shuffling up the road. I watched him bend to scratch a passing cat behind the ears, and let it weave between his ankles a few times. When he stood, he saw me. Stock still, nothing on his face, staring straight at me for five seconds, ten. More. Then as if he’d suddenly come to his senses, he looked away, got out his keys, and went inside.
I dropped the corner of the net curtain, and stood there blinking, thinking only of that stare. Did he know something? I thought again of going down, speaking to them. But before I could make a decision, I heard movement on our steps outside and the clatter of fumbled keys against concrete.
5. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mae (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
The Snoop Dogg was damaged worse than he’d thought, so he felt around in the side pocket for anything CD shaped and slipped it in. Turned out to be a demo from a mate of a mate, who Mae vaguely remembered wanting to punch. White guy, gangster lean, called everyone bruv. Mae gave it until after the first refrain, pressed eject, checked for witnesses, and windowed it.
He took a little detour and got a coffee from a new Cuban place on the corner by Acton Central. He ordered short and black on the grounds that it would be fastest and bounced on the balls of his feet as the barista made it up, feeling the snip of unspent energy amassing in his blood. A muted newscast on the screen above the counter was wringing the final drops from an American school shooting, a week old and almost forgotten.
After paying, he got out of there, and had emptied half the scalding caffeine into his mouth before he’d even pulled away. Needing the buzz, needing the lift, because there hadn’t been a chance for a run that morning, either.
He tolerated the flack he got about his thing for exercise. If it made his colleagues feel better about themselves to call him vain, call him a poser, that was their business. But to Ben Mae, exercise had never been optional. Without a run in the morning, without an hour of circuits or weights or anything else in the evening, the noise in his head got too much and he knew where that ended. These days, he could trust himself to recognize that inevitable build-up of whatever-it-was and burn it off in the gym. But age as he might, those years after his dad died of finding himself prowling, angry without provocation, skulking around for a fight or a fuck never seemed that far behind him.
Objectively, he thought, as he slowed for the barrier and flashed the fob at the reader, it was doubtful that coffee helped. Objectively, the right thing to do was to deal with the anger, understand it. Go right back to that dark six months when he changed from a normal teenage boy and into a thug, to the point where his life could have gone either way. Tear the thing out by the root.
But who would he be then?
Leaning back in his desk chair, Mae transferred the phone to the other ear, then rubbed the stubble on his head up and down hard with the palm of his hand. Around him, the office was already in the full throes of post-briefing activity.
‘But he’s still missing,’ the woman at the other end of the line was saying, her voice rising towards the inevitable crack. ‘He’s still gone. We can’t cope with this not knowing. My poor kids—’
Her name was Charlotte, wife of Damien Hayes. Widow, almost certainly, of Damien Hayes. Mother of his four kids. Six months previously, Mr Hayes had left the final shift of his job at the vehicle plant just outside Uxbridge, driven his car half the way home, abandoned it, and disappeared. He left no note but, as it unravelled, it was a tale that told itself. The poor bastard had been in the red by almost forty grand, had defaulted on his last half a dozen mortgage payments and then, just to kick the man while he was down, the plant had laid him off. Mrs Hayes had only discovered in the weeks following his evaporation that he left behind no savings, no pension, and no insurance.
‘Mrs Hayes I promise you we’ve done everything we can—’
‘Done? Done?’
Mae winced. ‘Doing. We’re doing everything—’
‘Are you? Like what? What have you done, since you made this call a month ago? On our last weed date,’ she said, bitterness curling at the term.
He lifted the top sheet of the stack of paper in front of him and stifled a sigh. Four more calls exactly like this one, scheduled for today, but there was no news, no concrete developments in a single one of them. Thing was, in this business no news was bad news, even if – especially if – it wasn’t the kind of bad news that had an event attached, a clear and obvious trauma that could at least heal cleanly. In the majority of the cases he had the misfortune to head in his current role, the misper was there and then they were not. No stages of grief to work through, no ritual to mark the end of the life. The family around them remained in stasis until eventually, secretly and ashamedly, they started to long for news of a body being found.
‘I’m afraid without new information, there’s really not much else—’
‘So you’ve given up?’ And right on cue, the sob. ‘If you had any idea of what this is doing to us.’
Mae pressed closed his eyes. They always said that. Every one of them, and not just in Missing but in everything he’d ever been assigned. Murders and rapes and robberies, beatings, the lot. Nearly always, they were right. No, he’d never been sexually assaulted. Hadn’t suffered the violent death of someone he loved. Since he’d been leading Missing, though, the accusation that he didn’t know how it felt had been harder to take. But he never let it out, never put them right, not even to McCulloch when she’d given him the gig. Especially not then.
He was going to need that run, he decided.
‘Look, Mrs Hayes,’ he said, quietly. ‘Charlotte. I’ll put some calls in to the charities again, OK? See if there’s anything new there. Sometimes there are delays with them putting stuff through to our systems. I’ll see if I can extend the hospital checks a bit. I’m not promising anything,’ he added as he heard her intake of breath, but the hope had already returned to her voice.
‘Yes. Please.’ She paused to delicately blow her nose. ‘Anything you can do.’
A red light started blinking on his desk phone. Mae straightened, dispatched Mrs Hayes as sensitively as he could, and answered it.
‘Should I send down a written invitation?’ The gentle Hebridean lilt of DCI Colleen McCulloch.
Mae glanced at the time. Shit. ‘Sorry, ma’am. On my way.’
He bombed it up the back steps and made McCulloch’s floor in about thirty seconds flat. He slowed to a stroll as he passed her glass-fronted office for the sake of some semblance of cool, then went in.
‘Sorry ma’am,’ he muttered, ‘difficult call to a—’
‘Spare me,’ she said, nodding over her glasses to the door, which he dutifully closed. Standing at ease the other side of the room was a statuesque, stony-faced uniform, a woman. He nodded an acknowledgement: he’d seen her swinging kettlebells around in the basement gym. She had cropped, bleach-blonde hair and had to be a good 180 lbs and rising six foot. The kind of woman who occupied every inch of herself. Lot of tattoos, he’d noticed: not that they were visible now.
McCulloch cleared her throat. ‘How’s it been going downstairs these past few weeks, Ben? Haven’t seen you since I went to Egypt. Ooh, talking of which,’ she said, turning to dig something out of a drawer, ‘got you one of these. From the pyramids.’
He caught the paper bag just before it struck him on the head – she was nothing if not a good shot – and opened it. Inside was a small, stuffed camel, made from some kind of felt. He closed the bag. ‘Uh, I’m honoured?’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t be, it’s cursed. Paid the extra, thought why not.’
The uniform bit back a grin.
McCulloch had arrived on the force six months after Mae: they’d both started out in Sussex, albeit at very different levels of seniority. She’d been a hard sell to the whole department, straight in from civvy street to detective inspector, leapfrogging not only a whole generation of CID sergeants who’d been waiting in the wings – some of them – for literally years, but also sprinting past the two long years of uniform service. She was part of a new Philosophy of Recruitment, they’d been told, which recognized outside skills and combatted red tape. Translated: stuffed suit. Decoded: clueless leg-up wannabe. The entire team had been rooting for her to fuck up her first major job, but she’d steered the investigation to a solve with the cool, effortless ease of a seasoned skipper. Those who still remained unconvinced waited, hoping for a trip up to ratify their prejudices. It never came. Problem was, she might have come from some woolly sounding NGO background, but she was also bulletproof. She was bright as a supernova, knew her PACE back to front, her Murder Manual inside out and recited her CPS guidelines with her eyes closed. She bit only when antagonized, and she called every single decision with blistering speed and perfect judgement. What made all of that worse was that she was the most eminently likeable boss any of them had ever had.
