Trauma: a gripping psychological mystery thriller Page 3

  ‘God, that man is persistent.’

  ‘Should I ring him back?’

  ‘No, you should not. You have nothing to say to him and he knows not to pester you.’

  ‘But what if he–’

  ‘Cam. No. Not without me there. If he has anything new to tell you he should do everything through me. End of.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘If he harasses you while I’m stuck here, ring DS Keely,’ she adds.

  ‘Will do.’

  The rest of the conversation is about my pills and what I had for lunch and about Rosie’s recovering ear infection. Rachel says that she’ll text me every day or FaceTime me. We both know I’m not very good at remembering to do any of that stuff. Sometimes I think she thinks I use my post-injury forgetfulness as an excuse.

  Sometimes she isn’t wrong.

  5

  When she rings off I stay in front of my reminder wall. I study the photograph of John Stamford. By this stage of my recovery everyone on the wall is known to me and I will not forget who they are. But Rachel added little bios, especially of the black hats. There aren’t many, but Stamford is one… according to Rachel.

  Underneath a jowly headshot of a man in his fifties with a crown of dark hair around a smooth, hairless pate is Rachel’s stark reminder written in her neat handwriting. She likes using capitals for effect. In my head I hear her emphasising the words.

  John Stamford is a PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR employed by Emma’s family to dig into her death. He is an EX-POLICE DETECTIVE. If he contacts you, speak to me before speaking to him. Do NOT be intimidated by him.

  I’ve met him twice.

  The first time was in a coffee shop. He edged over to speak to me and gave me his card with a big meaty hand. He said he was glad to see that I was out of hospital and that he would appreciate it if I rang him at some point. I was with Josh, who suggested I should not ring any number on the card until I spoke to Rachel.

  The second time was when he came to the flat and I let him in. That time, Rachel came back from a Sainsbury’s shopping trip and found him asking me questions in the living room. She went very quiet and though her expression stayed neutral, the glare she gave him should have cut him in half. She made him leave and told him never to come back. I don’t think I’d ever seen Rachel so angry. But Stamford did not seem too bothered. Teflon-coated, like he’d seen it all before. But then he is an ex-policeman.

  In both instances I did not find him intimidating.

  But that was three months ago. A lot has happened since then. The truth is that I’m as keen to talk to John Stamford as he clearly is to talk to me. But I won’t tell Rachel that. She says that I need to get a lot better before we ‘cross that rickety bridge’.

  I think I’m a lot better already even if the occasional board still creaks on that bridge.

  I heat up a plate of lasagne that Rachel made. She fills the freezer whenever she visits. I don’t ask her to, neither do I object, because she’s a great cook and always bats away my feeble resistance of the ‘you don’t need to do this, Rache’ type, with her own set of justifications.

  ‘They’re leftovers,’ she says. ‘If I leave them in the fridge all that’ll happen is Owen will eat them. And he definitely does not need extras.’

  Total fabrication because the lasagne arrives neatly packaged in foil trays and Owen does 100k bike rides with a group of fellow spandex-wearers three times a week on a two-thousand-quid Cannondale.

  I rest my case. But as I say, she is my sister.

  I throw down my medication and sit down in front of the TV with a bottle of water. Aluminium, double-lined with images of dogs all over it. A Christmas present from Rachel’s kids. Keeps the contents cold for hours.

  I have a load of stuff to binge-watch. Josh says I’m a lucky bastard. No memory means a vast back catalogue of films that I may well have seen before but that I cannot recollect. Josh knows what I was into and curated both a Netflix list and an Amazon list and added some from a few of the more esoteric channels. Mostly thrillers, action movies and a ‘shitload of ace sci-fi’, to use his own words.

  Currently, I’m watching The Night Of. Josh said that I would like it. He did not elaborate but hinted at the fact that I would work out why for myself. I’m already into episode four and I think I’m on board with Josh’s thinking. Not a difficult equation. Riz Ahmed playing Naz wakes up next to a woman to find that she is dead but remembers nothing of what happened. It’s a stylish, intense, riveting watch and the parallels with my situation are obvious.

  Naz’s lawyer and the detective investigating the case soon find out this simple crime isn’t as straightforward as it first seems.

  Josh tells me that the series won all sorts of awards. I can see why.

  Maybe that’s why I want to talk to John Stamford, the PI who keeps gently pestering me. He must know things that I don’t. He doesn’t look like John Turturro who plays Naz’s eccentric lawyer. Not in the slightest. But Stamford, in our brief encounters, like Turturro’s character, struck me as someone very determined.

  That’s what I need if I am ever going to find out what happened to me and Emma on that beach in Turkey. I need a gnarled old detective to fight my corner.

  Rachel doesn’t want me to. Of course she doesn’t. She’s convinced that he’ll be fighting very much in the other corner and I’d never last a round. My argument is that we should at least start the bout.

  But I haven’t been brave enough to defy her. Not yet. Rachel’s been amazing throughout. In fact, I’d be lost without her. But her approach is to put up the barricades. I should say nothing, talk to no one, except Adam who is my doctor and Josh who’s a mate. But if I don’t ask questions how am I ever going to find any answers?

  On-screen, John Turturro is feeding the victim’s cat.

  I smile. The writers knew what they were doing by giving him a soft spot for animals. Redeeming features. Give the audience a reason, and a way, of liking the outsider. One who on first glance appears highly unlikeable.

  I wonder about that. Wonder what my redeeming features might be.

  But my life is not a story. It’s real. And reality is a lot messier than an eight-part series on a subscription channel with a beginning, middle and end. I’m tempted to ring Stamford there and then, but Rachel’s voice is still ringing in my ears. And just about now my evening quetiapine is kicking in. Now I don’t think I can concentrate well enough. So I park the idea.

  But I’m aware in my heart that despite Rachel I can’t hibernate for much longer.

  6

  TUESDAY 10 March

  My alarm buzzes me awake at 7.30 and I get up. This is a ponderous process. The physios at the rehab unit told me to stretch everything before I start my day. This I do with patience and perseverance. I’d fractured a humerus and chipped a bone in my pelvis as well as breaking my head in the fall. In bed immobile for almost two months as a consequence. I mobilised in stages for another two after that. It had a profound effect on my muscles and joints.

  So I do a bridge, downward dog, alternating cat/cow and lunges.

  My spine crackles as I do a last cobra stretch. I feel no pain and that’s one thing to be grateful for. I roll my neck, hear the ligaments click. I’m good to go.

  Downstairs, I scramble some eggs and throw in chopped peppers and cheese. Gap-filling more than gourmet. I add some toast and catsup from a local deli. Rachel bought me a coffee machine. It takes two espressos to get me going and I’ve become a bit of an expert in beans. Owen, Rachel’s husband, calls me a coffee snob. He even printed off a meme and the kids, on one of their visits to Uncle Cam, stuck it on the fridge. A spear of morning sunlight lances through the window and hits the very fridge magnet that holds this meme in place. I furrow a brow, but it draws my eye and tilts up the corner of my lip in a smile.

  OCD – Obsessive Coffee Disorder.

  Yeah, well I tried working with my eyes closed, and it is HARD.

  Owen may be right. My favourite beans
come from a little place near Spa Terminus called You Mug. They roast their own and I buy a kilo at a time. My choice is Brazilian, comes in a black bag and is ‘nutty and understated’. I drink it with oat milk – another Rachel suggestion. Another opportunity for Owen to make a stupid face behind Rachel’s back. I’m making it sound like he and I don’t get on. We do. He’s just a born cynic, but funny with it. Plus he makes Rachel laugh. And anyone who can do that gets my vote.

  When I’m fed, I fire up the laptop and check my messages. Strictly email. No Facebook accounts. No Twitter. No Insta. Rachel says I had them all BT and at one stage, when I was a teen, they considered taking me to a specialist to get my phone surgically removed from my fingers, so addicted was I.

  Allegedly.

  For now, we agreed that too much social media would be a terrible idea. Someone with my history – the accident, the lurid stories in the press about what went on in Turkey – was troll bait par excellence. Might as well dress in a goat skin, tie myself to a tree and wait for the T-Rex to arrive. Of course, I surf the net but with Rachel and Josh acting as my wing persons, so far I’ve managed to survive. I click on my Gmail account.

  No thanks, JD Sports. I don’t need new Nikes. Leon says my black Reeboks are fine. Even if he did so with a rictus smile.

  No thanks, Sharon, who has an urgent message for me and will no doubt be delighted to send me some unnecessarily revealing photographs if I so much as waft a pixel of interest her way.

  Another half dozen depressing, unavoidable and unwanted ads go to trash.

  But I pick up one message from Josh. He’s been helping me with getting back up to speed with my coding. Josh runs a software team at Whoneedspensions.com; a company that merges pensions and provides financial advice and support for millennials. ‘Yawnsville Central, right?’ in Josh’s own words. Not that what the company does has much to do directly with Josh’s role. He’s in the back office caretaking the software that runs their website and systems.

  ‘Backroom boffin then,’ I once said.

  ‘Is that a noun or a verb?’

  That’s Josh. He happens to be a very old friend from uni – according to him.

  He’s easing me back in by letting me analyse problems that arise on his team. Purely academic, of course. Totally unpaid. And the weird, the really bizarre thing about all this is that unlike the absent memory of much of my life, the maths side of my brain is still functioning. I can still program. We, or rather I, decided to try three months ago as a natural part of my recovery. When I did, I was surprised to find it was like discovering I could speak another language. I just… could.

  ‘That’s maths for you,’ Josh said. ‘Bit like music. Uses a different part of the brain.’

  Who am I to argue?

  I’m not ready to go back to work yet though. Josh suggests I should consider going freelance. Maybe a little web development or a small Android app. Stuff I can do at my own pace without the commitment of a nine-to-five. I’m not even sure I could cope with a part-time job in an office environment. That, Adam says, I am not yet ready for. The reasons are complicated. Something to do with sensory overload and my inability to filter out the world in general. Not at all unexpected after an SBI, of course. Josh loved that when I first used it.

  ‘Don’t tell me, Stupid Bloody Idiot,’ was his suggestion, delivered with a smug boffola.

  When I explained it stood for Severe Brain Injury, he showed no contrition, preferring, still grinning, his version. As I say, Josh keeps me grounded.

  So, I’m not in a work environment yet because my SBI-induced disinhibition could get me into non-woke trouble very easily. But I am working on it.

  Josh’s message reads:

  Spot on with that Pull Request, mate. We’ll get you in to give a talk on code quality. LOL. Fancy a beer later?

  I ponder his offer and make a mental note to text him. He won’t be up yet. Whoneedspensions are lenient when it comes to hours. Clocking on and off is becoming a thing of the past.

  I let myself out of the flat and step out into a bright but blustery day. By nine I’m in the car and heading east towards Woolwich. The streets are fairly quiet this Tuesday. Good day for an eight-mile drive. According to the satnav I’m avoiding traffic but it still takes half an hour. I can’t remember any of the streets so I gaze up and around as I go. Taking it all in. Adam calls this experiential triggering. A much better tool for me than trying to recall things abstractly. The idea is that I visit places I’m supposed to be familiar with, hoping it will pull out a memory. Pull out sounds strange, but I embrace that term because Adam says they are all in there, those memories. Merely a question of dragging them kicking and screaming to the surface.

  Thanks to two cups of You Mug’s understated Brazilian blend, by the time I arrive I’m all eyes and ears. Ready for anything.

  How wrong can a man be?

  7

  I drive slowly around the area, eyeballing, waiting to see if anything clicks.

  Nothing does.

  Not even when I see the sign a second before the satnav’s soothing voice tells me I’m ‘arriving at your destination on the right’.

  Mulgrave Surgery is an ugly grey building that looks more like a detention centre than a surgery given there are three storeys and not many windows. But there is parking nearby down a side street. Must be an omen.

  I find a spot, lock the car, cross the road and walk in through the entrance to a reception area. No one takes any notice of me. There’s a waiting area with fifty chairs in rows and I walk in and sit. I scan my surroundings, hoping that something might make one of those loose fragments of windblown recall constantly floating through my head snag and fall into place.

  No one talks, everyone whispers, like church. Except for some staff in a back room who carry on like normal people, talking and laughing, oblivious to the suffering masses outside. Some people might find it unseemly. I don’t. Surgeries can be depressing places. No one’s here to plan a party. I’m glad of the distraction even though I keep half an ear tuned for anyone coughing. Ready with my accusatory stare. No one does and so the stare stays holstered.

  I look for clues, study the posters on the walls. Dire warnings about handwashing for two choruses of ‘Happy Birthday’ sit next to details of free flu jabs for the over-sixty-fives and special offers from the nearest pharmacy on incontinence pads and mouthwash.

  That’s the old and the new world right there.

  I sit for a jittery half an hour observing patients come and go, hearing their names called out and appearing on the big TV screens on the walls in a vertical scroll. A growing discomfort tugs at me. The press and TV are full of requests that people do not visit their surgeries unless absolutely necessary, but it’s business as usual here, and I feel a fraud.

  I don’t want to introduce myself. I don’t want a fuss. That’s not why I came. It’s only then I realise that I may not have come here many times to meet Emma or to pick her up. Perhaps no one here would remember me. I never worked here. I may not have ever spent much time in the building at all. What I’m certain of is that I don’t recognise anything or anyone in this room.

  It comes then, a strange sense of displacement. As if the walls are closing in on me. The whispered conversations are suddenly jarring.

  I get up. Too quickly. The receptionist picks up on the awkward way I stand. Or perhaps she’s triggered by the look of confusion on my face. She asks, ‘Are you all right?’

  Her words startle me. I glance up, caught out. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’m fine.’

  But I’m not. I need to be outside in the cool air. I need a quiet spot.

  I walk out and start to half jog. I’m heading towards the river. The day has gone to leaden crap again. The sun has scarpered, drizzle threatens. I’m vaguely aware of a church across the road. It seems incongruous here in this part of London. Then I’m crossing roads near a roundabout and I see a big car park and a sign that says Thames Pathway. There’s a buzz of traffic and the smell o
f diesel fumes before a welcome calm descends as I reach the pedestrianised walkway. I stare out over the brown muddy river and the open space reassures me. Calms me. No buildings, just sky above the water and the north shore on the other side.

  Then I remember.

  The reception desk at the surgery has a hinged entry that lifts to allow access to the inner sanctum. I visualise walking through into the corridor behind and a small, brightly-lit room with a desk and a computer screen. On one wall is a curtain rail with the drapes pulled back in front of a bed with an impervious mattress covered by disposable paper sheets and a lamp on a long thin neck.

  I gasp and blink.

  I’ve been there before and why else other than to meet Emma because my own GP’s practice is miles away and I know for certain what his room is like. I’ve been there for too many check-ups in the last few months not to be familiar with the sour-faced receptionist and the smell of chlorhexidine.

  But here, within spitting distance of Mulgrave Surgery, still no Dr Roxburgh in my mind’s eye. Still no clear picture of Emma.

  I search the image in my head for more detail, staring at the brown water below lapping up against the muddy bank. Something juts out of the mud. An upside-down boot that once was a Doc Marten. I can see the tread quite clearly from my vantage point thirty feet above. I wonder if there’s a leg still inside that boot, part of a body lying head first in the silted-up Thames.

  It’s a ridiculous thought and I curse Josh because his TV viewing recommendations are what feed my lurid imagination. While I’m cursing someone calls my name.

  I swing around and a response springs unbidden from my lips. ‘Emma?’

  But it isn’t her. Of course it isn’t.

  ‘Cameron? It is you, isn’t it?’

  A woman is walking towards me. She’s wearing a pink puffer coat against the blustery weather, unfastened but clutched around her with arms across her chest. As if she’s put it on in a hurry. Her blonde hair is windblown into a mask across her face that she brushes away with a finger. I note a lanyard around her neck with an NHS ribbon. An ID of sorts over a plain white shirt. Underneath, she wears tight, black, cropped trousers and patent leather boots. She’s breathing hard. Like she’s run to catch up with me.