Trauma: a gripping psychological mystery thriller Page 4

  The woman stops, waiting for my response. I try to read her expression and can’t quite decide if surprise or terror predominates.

  I stare back, desperately trying to decide if I should recognise this person. Eventually I say, ‘Yes, I’m Cameron.’

  She sucks in air, her hand flying to her mouth. I hear a stifled, ‘Oh My God,’ before she runs across the space between us, eyes lighting up. ‘I thought it was you. I saw you leaving the surgery and I… I had to follow. To see for myself.’

  I stare at her, glance down at her ID, but all I see is its white plastic back twisted tight against her blouse. Despite the heels, she’s smaller than I am and her age and stature makes me think she’s still more girl than woman. She sees my confusion, blinks, gasps, pulls back a little.

  ‘It’s me. Nicole.’ Her voice fractures with little intakes of breath.

  ‘Nicole. Right.’ So unconvincing.

  She blinks again before a kind of horrified disappointment dawns. She whispers flatly, ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

  I shake my head.

  She looks stricken. ‘They said you’d lost your memory. They said you almost died. But then I saw you at the surgery and–’

  ‘I’m trying to revisit places I’ve been to before. Or at least people tell me I visited before. Experiential triggering. To try to recall. It helps sometimes.’

  ‘Oh.’ A small word that does little to explain the tears that start streaming down her face.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  She half turns away, dabbing at the droplets accumulating on her chin. She turns back, trying to smile. But her bottom lip trembles. ‘Does it help?’

  ‘A bit. I’m remembering a room behind the desk. A consulting room.’

  ‘Room ten. That’s where Emma saw patients.’

  ‘You knew Emma?’

  Nicole lets out an odd sigh that’s half a whimper. ‘I worked with Emma. At the surgery. Admin mainly. Occasionally on the desk. I enjoy that more. We… Emma and I knew each other well.’

  ‘Did I know you too?’

  She laughs. A sound full of unspoken meaning. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry. My memory’s shot.’

  ‘I heard.’

  A gust of wind catches Nicole’s coat and tents it up behind her. She turns her back to it and pulls the coat about her. ‘Chilly here by the river,’ she says.

  ‘I wanted some space.’

  ‘How about some coffee instead?’ She smiles hopefully with hooded eyes.

  ‘Okay.’ Coffee sounds excellent. We don’t go back to the surgery. Nicole says it’s ‘manic’ and the coffee is terrible. She takes me to a little place two hundred yards down the Thames Path and away from the river. Bean There is all shabby chic with mismatched tables and chairs, home-made banana cake, chia seed muffins and a woman with a 1940s headscarf serving.

  Nicole strokes shoulder-length caramel hair behind her ears as she orders. I sit and study her neat features that remind me a little of a fox or a cat. But her eyes are more feline. Pale blue like a Birman’s. She gives the barista a wry smile when she asks for skinny milk in her cappuccino. I look out the window but catch Nicole turning back to check on me more than once. Each time she smiles, but just before it, as she turns, once again I spot that nervous desperation.

  She brings back two cups and sits opposite me. She’s taken off the lanyard and now sheds a large handbag and the coat. Her eyes drift to the little notebook I left out on the table.

  ‘Nicole,’ I say. ‘Surname?’

  ‘Grant.’

  I write it down. I write everything new down. Nicole Grant. Emma’s friend goes under Room 10.

  Nicole picks up her bowl-shaped, oversized coffee cup. Her knuckles gleam white where her fingers intertwine to stop them from trembling.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s much chance of you lot working from home, is there?’ A statement more than a question. My clumsy way of continuing the conversation. Because I do want to continue. This is someone from my past who knew Emma. And something about her fascinates me. It can’t be attraction. At least I don’t think so because I only met her a few moments ago. And yet her manner and her glances suggest I’m at a disadvantage here. A gut feeling that Nicole knows more than she’s letting on.

  ‘I’m not sure. We’ll be key workers. Although they are talking about online consultations for the GPs. And self-isolation for the vulnerable groups will not help with community nursing.’

  ‘Seat of the ants, stuff.’

  Nicole doesn’t seem to notice my gaffe. Or, if she does, she’s nice enough to ignore it. ‘It’s chaotic. One of the GPs went on holiday to South Africa on Sunday. Now he’s not sure he’ll be able to come back.’

  We both stare at our coffee.

  ‘I was so, so sorry to hear about what happened to you and Emma,’ Nicole says and then locks eyes with me. ‘I’ve been meaning to contact you but…’ She stops and looks away. ‘That sounds pathetic. I’m not proud of it. But someone at the surgery said recovery from your sort of injury takes time and I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I told myself to wait. For the right time. But then seeing you today…’ She pauses and the tears come again, flowing over her bottom lids. She dabs at mascara with a fresh napkin.

  I’m at a loss so I say, ‘I’m sorry if this has upset you.’

  Her voice is small and broken. ‘I’m not upset at you. It’s just so hard to think you don’t remember…’

  She drops her gaze again. I see a tear plop into her cappuccino.

  ‘It’s difficult for everyone I meet. No one knows what to say. I didn’t even remember my sister when I came around.’ I add a dry laugh to try to make light of it.

  ‘And you don’t remember–’ Another gasp that’s more a sob. Once more Nicole looks down. ‘You remember nothing about what happened?’

  ‘I can remember the hotel I stayed in in Turkey. That’s it.’ I try the coffee. There’s a hint of liquorice underneath the leaf the barista’s drawn in the froth. I take another sip.

  Nicole shakes her head. ‘Can you remember Emma?’

  A simple question with a simple answer. ‘I suffer from fugues, sort of mental absences if you like, where I’m with a girl that could be Emma. But I can’t see her face. I watch videos of us together. Studied countless photographs. But it’s as if I’m watching someone else. Weird.’

  Nicole’s hand goes to her mouth, and she lets out a small involuntary moan. She puts her coffee down and takes a breath. ‘There’s something I need to tell you, Cam. I should have come to see you, but everyone at the practice said you were so ill and with Emma dying I… it was suddenly so complicated. I convinced myself that it would only make things worse. And then you turn up today and…’ Her words tail off. But there are no tears now. Her big cat’s eyes are dry as they search my face.

  ‘What?’

  She reaches for her phone and her deft thumbs fly over the screen in a blur of movement. She swipes and slides and for a few seconds stares at whatever it is she’s found, contemplating it, deciding. She turns the phone’s screen towards me. A selfie. Two people outside on a windswept mountain. I recognise myself in a beanie hat with an affected dark stubble. I’m kissing a girl’s cheek. She’s holding the phone and is smiling towards the camera. She’s wearing a woolly hat with a fur bobble and a roll-neck jumper under another two layers. But I recognise the smile and the eyes. So I should, because they belong to the girl who’s showing me the photograph.

  I look up into Nicole’s face. I think I must be frowning. I realise my mouth is ajar.

  She nods. ‘For a month before you went to Turkey with Emma that October, you and I… we were seeing one another.’

  8

  All I can do is stare back at the screen and then at Nicole, my heart twitching. There’s music in Bean There but all I hear is the blood rushing through my arteries. I’m dumb for too many seconds. But then I focus again on the image and manage to dredge up some words. ‘I don’t remember. I don�
��t recall ever seeing this. I lost my phone in Turkey.’

  As excuses go this one is spectacularly vapid but it’s all I can come up with.

  Her mouth forms a thin, tremulous smile. ‘This is the only one we took. We decided against taking any others. Safer, you insisted. I wasn’t going to argue with a computing wiz. And I do know loads of people whose photos end up in the wrong places on other people’s timelines and…’

  I transmit my confusion with a well-practised raised eyebrow.

  ‘Until you sorted things out with Emma…’ She drops her gaze. ‘Softly, softly, catchee monkey, you said. I remember thinking it wasn’t like you to say something like that. It sounded racist.’ She offers a rueful smile.

  It’s not racist. Imperialistic maybe, but not racist. Though these days it seems that’s almost as bad. Where I dig that morsel of knowledge up from is anyone’s guess. Another pearl from under the cloak of utter mystery that fogs my previous life.

  ‘Well anyway’ – Nicole shifts in her chair – ‘social media sites always ask for access to your photos and the cloud isn’t as safe as we all like to think. At least, that’s what you kept telling me and you’re the expert.’

  I shake my head. ‘That makes me sound like a real nerd.’

  Nicole shrugs. ‘You were. But I took this one. For myself. And promised not to show it to anyone. So I haven’t.’

  I stare at the image again, buying time to think. ‘You and me.’ My clumsy words come out rudely sceptical.

  ‘Is it that unlikely?’ Her brief laugh turns sour and her lip quivers again. ‘Am I that bad?’

  ‘No.’ I splutter an apology. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. You’re… you’re very pity. I mean pretty.’

  Her eyes widen and I plunge on. ‘All these months everyone has been telling me how so much together me and Emma were.’

  Nicole sighs. ‘The perfect couple. Only you weren’t. At least she wasn’t.’

  I swallow loudly.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she says. ‘See how that sounds? Emma’s not here to defend herself so I come across as the perfect bitch. What a mess.’ Her head drops. She clutches the coffee cup again in both hands. ‘We kept it a secret. A big secret with no photos or texts just in case. You didn’t want to hurt her, but she had already hurt you. You were going to confront her and then…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It happened.’

  It.

  ‘The accident. And I wanted to come and see you. But with Emma dead and you so unwell, whenever I ran it through my head it all sounded so sordid. And I was scared you might not want to see me and…’ More tears. Big, sorrow-filled dollops of them.

  ‘It’s been rough on you,’ I say because I feel I ought to say something if only to try and stop my heart thumping.

  ‘It has.’ She sweeps a finger around the rim of her cup and whispers, ‘Still is.’

  We sit there. Nicole and I. Ex-lovers. New strangers. ‘A shitload to take in’ as Josh would say. But I am desperate to understand. ‘So why would I go on holiday with her if all this was going on?’

  ‘It was messed up. You’d both paid for the holiday. She was looking forward to it. You had been too until a few weeks before. And you were worried about her. We both were. Something wasn’t right.’

  ‘So how did we…?’

  Nicole shakes her head. ‘You came to me for help. To try and understand what was going on with Emma, and what happened… happened. As for the holiday, I think both of us knew that everything depended on Emma. About how she’d react. Make or break I suppose.’

  ‘Make or break,’ I mutter. I ponder this. It sounds complicated. A minefield. But then relationships so often are.

  ‘I had hopes, but you and Emma had been together for a long time and so I tried to be realistic. I told myself I had to wait and see. I’ve sort of been waiting ever since.’ Nicole dabs her face with the mascara-blotched napkin, reaches into her bag and takes out a thin folder and hands it to me. ‘This was Emma’s. She didn’t keep much at the surgery, but there were a few bits and pieces she’d left around. The police took it all away but then brought it back once they’d finished. I’ve kept it on my desk because… I thought perhaps you ought to have it.’

  I open the folder. Inside I count a dozen bits of paper: Two letters from Southwark Health about accreditation. A handwritten letter from a patient. The rest, photocopies of receipts. Plus a small notebook, five inches by three with a purple cover and ring-bound with black wiring. I flip it open and see a few pages of handwriting that I recognise as Emma’s.

  Nicole watches me as I inspect the contents. ‘Most of it is rubbish,’ she points out. ‘She was a jotter. She never used her phone for notes because of data protection.’

  ‘Isn’t writing it down just as bad?’

  ‘People don’t steal fifty-pence notebooks. They steal 600-quid phones.’

  It makes sense. Nicole finishes her coffee and glances at her watch. ‘I need to get back.’ She stands and puts on her coat. I get up. Usually I’m careful. This time I’m not. I grab onto the chair to steady myself. The old cerebellum took a bit of a knock, so I’ve been told. As a result my gyroscope’s a bit ropey. If I move too quickly it decides to go on a waltzer ride of its own leaving the rest of me to hang on to whatever is at hand.

  Nicole waits for me to recover and comes around the table and hugs me. It lasts a good few seconds longer than I expect it to. ‘Lovely to see you, Cam,’ she whispers in my ear. She smells fresh. Her cheek is soft against mine. A dangling earring presses hard and cold on my skin.

  She pulls away without looking at me, heading for the door.

  I ask, ‘Would it be all right to contact you again?’

  She stops with her back to me and then swivels. Her expression is questioning, her breathing fast and shallow. ‘I don’t want you to take pity on me.’

  ‘I’m not. You’re a part of this, obviously. A part of what’s happened. So is Emma but she’s not here. You are and I’d like to get to nose–’ I stop, realise I’m prattling, recalibrate. ‘I’d like to get to know you.’

  An awkward three seconds of frozen nothing before her eyes widen and her hand reaches out to squeeze my arm. ‘You have no idea how long I’ve…’

  There are only a few other people in Bean There. They’re taking no notice of this little drama, but the woman in the headscarf behind the counter is grinning.

  Nicole’s words dry up. I help her out. ‘Let me give you my number.’

  I read it out and Nicole punches it into her phone. I hear mine ding a message alert as she sends hers back, eyes shining. ‘I’d ask you back to the surgery–’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’d rather not.’

  She gives me one of those million-quid smiles and then turns and walks out of the door, leaving me alone with a thousand thoughts stampeding through my head, and Emma Roxburgh’s file on my lap.

  9

  I order another coffee and sit back down with the folder.

  The letter from a patient is heartfelt; a note thanking Emma for treating her son’s mastoiditis and for putting him at ease during her examination. Dozens of people have told me that Emma was a superb doctor. I add another fragment of corroboration to the ever-growing pile.

  I shuffle the receipts. Two are for fuel, four appear to be meals. Expensive meals at restaurants I don’t know.

  Then I turn to the notebook. There are only five pages with Emma’s handwriting. I peruse the last few entries. My guess is that they’re patient references with dates, initials and queries. Most have a line drawn through them. I assume because they’re things Emma had dealt with.

  5/07/18 MR JW — chase up MRI.

  7/07/18 Jane D — biopsy result.

  11/07/18 Mrs FT — FUP new drug regimen, eye clinic.

  11/09/18 Millie’s tonsillectomy — private referral.

  02/10/18 Mr GM –– Gallstones data sheet.

  I riffle through the rest and find nothing. But when I get to the end page there’s a fi
nal isolated note.

  02/10/18. Cam’s do with Quantiple.

  Pants on fire?

  That’s it. Just the one entry. But I read it a dozen times. The dates and the names mean nothing to me. But pants on fire does. The tail end of a childish phrase that starts with ‘liar, liar’.

  I’m told that my background in maths and programming helped me take a very logical approach to relearning. I adopted a structured pathway of my own. When I found out that I had a degree and how qualified I was, I knew that the journey back would be a lengthy one, but I started at the beginning. As if I was back in school.

  After four months I was playing sudoku. But that was maths. Language was a different thing. I went back to basics, researching words and sayings, writing them down, testing myself. I used the internet to cleave back knowledge that I once had. Of course, I still get things wrong. Goat for ghost is a glorious example. And I once told my therapist that elephants didn’t live in rooms and shouldn’t live in zoos, either.

  But pants on fire I know and understand from Dana, my speech therapist. It was she who made me recite nursery rhymes and practise sayings to tease out abstract meaning, rhyme, metaphor.

  Liar, Liar/ pants on fire/ nose as long as a telephone wire!

  I finish my coffee and walk back out into morning light. It’s still as blustery as earlier but the rain has held off. In two minutes I’m back on the Thames Path looking out over the water, my mind as restless and full of swirling eddies as the flowing river. I find a sheltered spot and sit, staring. And as I stare, the world around me fades.