The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (14 page)

I watched as a crowd began to gather around her.

‘Okay.’ Greg tapped his tablet, and the film paused. ‘Like I said, we’re running through the footage we’ve got from around the park, looking for any vehicle that resembles an ambulance. An ice-cream van. Anything. But to reiterate, we’ve only got coverage on two of the roads. If she was dropped off via the third, we won’t get the vehicle.’

‘Then something tells me we won’t get it,’ Simon said. ‘Given the level of organisation required to fake a car accident and hold someone hostage for two years, this is not an individual who is likely to fall at the dismount.’

None of us said anything. Because assuming all that, he was quite right.

I was up next. Unlike Simon and Greg, I didn’t really need to use the screen; the interviews were on file, and they could watch them at their leisure. But I did click through so that the display returned to the two images of Charlie Matheson’s face side by side: one clean and clear and slightly fierce, the other scarred and confused and frightened. Then I talked through the scant details that she’d given so far about her period of incarceration and the time around it, concluding with my general impressions of her.

‘I don’t think she’s lying,’ I said. ‘ Whatever actually happened to her, she genuinely believes she’s been dead for the last two years. She still claims to remember the accident.’

Pete frowned.

‘Is it really possible to convince someone of that?’

‘If they’ve been placed under enough duress, and had the story drilled into them over and over again, then it’s possible they would give in and accept it as true. Torture, sensory deprivation, repetition. It all plays a part, and that’s what she’s been describing to me. Taken as a whole, and carried on for long enough, it would give someone a powerful incentive to go along with what they were being told.’

‘What about asking us for mercy?’

‘No idea. She didn’t know what it meant either. Or else she can’t remember.’

‘And
why?
’ Pete folded his arms. ‘Why do all this to someone?’

‘Lots of sick people in the world,’ Greg said.

It was my turn to ignore him. Instead I explained what Eileen had told me: that the story might touch on the truth without necessarily being entirely accurate; that some of the details might be true, but not the whole.

‘If the ambulance story is right, there’s at least two people involved: the “kind” man in the back, and the driver, who could be the one who cut her. For the rest of it, all I’d be prepared to say is that I think it’s likely she was abducted by someone, probably held underground somewhere – a basement, perhaps – and the scars speak for themselves. Beyond that ...
possibly
a religious element, but I wouldn’t be confident.’ I felt a bit awkward, as though I were attempting a profile. ‘I have this on advice, by the way.’

‘From who?’

‘I talked to Eileen Mercer. I don’t have a background in counselling, and I wanted an expert opinion before I went back for a second interview.’

‘Eileen,’ Pete said. ‘Right.’

‘Charlie Matheson is vulnerable, possibly delusional. I decided I needed some advice.’

The room was silent for a moment. I could see that the mention of his former boss’s wife had rattled Pete a little. He and John had been friends once; I wondered whether they’d
even stayed in touch after the events of a year and a half ago. Or perhaps Pete was thinking of all the ways he didn’t quite measure up to the shadow Mercer had cast. The rest of us were silent with him. I had no idea what Greg and Simon were thinking. For my part, I was thinking that I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it.

Eventually Pete shook his head slightly.

‘Okay. We’ve all got our actions and priorities. We’ll resume at five, unless anything changes in the meantime. Let’s find out who the original victim was. And where the real Charlie Matheson has been all this time.’ He looked up at the plasma screen, talking almost to himself now. ‘And let’s find out why.’

Mark

The missing

Shortly after the briefing was finished, I got a call through that Paul Carlisle had arrived in reception. I went down to meet him. Despite being dressed in jeans and a jumper now, he somehow looked even more dishevelled than yesterday. They hadn’t been sleeping well, he’d told me then, and if anything, it appeared that the situation had worsened. His hair was in disarray, and there were dark rings around his eyes. The man looked haunted. I supposed he was.

‘Thanks for coming in, Paul,’ I said, when we were safely ensconced in an interview room. I’d got a glass of water for him, but so far he’d left it untouched on the table between us. ‘And thank you for this.’

I passed him the piece of paper that he’d given me yesterday: the photograph of his wife.

‘I wanted to show you a picture myself. It’s of the woman in the hospital. Do you mind?’

It felt polite to ask even if we both knew he didn’t really have much of a choice.

‘No. Let me see.’

‘I should warn you, the injuries she’s received might be a little shocking at first glance.’

‘It’s fine.’

I handed him a printout I’d taken from the interview footage. It was the image Greg had singled out, where Charlie
now
was holding her head in the same position as Charlie
then
. I thought the resemblance was incontrovertible, but then I hadn’t known her two years ago, and I wanted to see the reaction of a man who had.

Despite the apparent bravado, Carlisle took the piece of paper hesitantly. I watched his face as he looked at it, noting his obvious determination to remain impassive. Perhaps he thought there was no way this could really be Charlie, not after everything that had happened, but he seemed set on denying it regardless, as though by pretending this wasn’t happening he could somehow make it go away. The realisation that he couldn’t hit him immediately. I watched him struggle to control his emotions. Maybe he could keep his expression blank, but there was no way to hide the way the colour drained from his face.

He was silent for a few moments.

‘It looks like her,’ he said finally. ‘But I can’t be sure.’

‘No? Take your time, Paul, please.’

‘I don’t need any more time.’ He handed the printout back to me. I waited a second before accepting it. ‘It looks like her, but it’s impossible to tell from a photograph.’

‘Would you be prepared to see her in person?’

‘No.’

It had been an off-the-cuff idea – I hadn’t been planning on taking him to the hospital, not necessarily – but the speed of his reply surprised me.

‘I know this is hard,’ I said.

‘Do you? Do you really?’

For a moment I considered saying
actually, yes
, and telling him about Lise, but I stopped myself. It was too personal to divulge, but more to the point, did I really know? Lise hadn’t returned from the dead. If she was haunting me now, it was as a memory, and while that might be disruptive in its own way, at least a memory didn’t threaten to turn up on your doorstep.

‘I know this isn’t going away,’ I said. ‘And I think we both know that the woman in the photograph I just showed you is your wife, Charlie Matheson.’

‘You’re
telling
me now? You were asking me before. And I’m saying I’m not sure.’

‘All right.’ There didn’t seem any point in pressing it, especially as I couldn’t force him to go to the hospital. ‘But I want you to understand what I said. This isn’t going away, Paul.’

‘I know.’

He sounded utterly miserable. While I understood and sympathised, it took me back to what Charlie had said in the interview this morning about his reaction to the news.
Oh? Not pleased, then?
She might as well have said,
The man who I loved, and who loved me, would prefer that I was dead
. And the harsh reality was that that was probably partly true.

As if reading my mind, Carlisle started talking.

‘I mourned for her, you know? I grieved. It felt like the heart had been ripped out of my life. At the funeral, I tried to speak – to read a speech – and I couldn’t because I was crying so much.’

‘I understand.’

‘And what the fuck was I supposed to do? Do that for ever? I moved on. Jesus, I’m sorry, it feels like I should be sorry, like you’re expecting me to be sorry, but what else should I have done?’

‘Nobody’s blaming you for that, Paul.’

‘And now ... this.’

‘I understand,’ I said again.

‘How? How can this have happened?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

I ignored his tacit admission that it really was happening. He gestured to his face, moving his hand around to indicate the scars he’d seen. He spoke quietly.

‘Why would someone do
that?
’

‘We don’t know,’ I said again. ‘And so I have to ask. Paul, can you think of any reason why someone might want to hurt your wife?’

He lowered his hand, looking aghast now.

‘God, no.’

He talked a little more about how ridiculous the idea was, and I believed him. On the surface, there was nothing there to go on. I already knew that neither of them had ever been in trouble with the police before. Charlie had been a postgraduate secretary in the sociology department at the university; Carlisle was a manager at a pharmaceutical company. As far as I could tell, they were both above board. Just normal people.

At the same time, the question Pete had asked at the end of the briefing had stayed with me. Never mind for a moment what had happened to Charlie Matheson;
why
had it happened? Not in the specific sense of the perpetrators’ motives for putting her through what they had, but the question of why they had targeted
her
in particular? Because it seemed clear that she hadn’t been chosen at random. There had to be a reason why, out of all the possible people who could have been abducted, they had singled her out.

But if so, Carlisle didn’t seem to know.

‘She had no enemies,’ he said. ‘Ask anyone. She could be quite forthright. She had a temper, you know? But it was more confidence than anything else. Nobody hated her.’

I nodded.
Ask anyone
. Tomorrow I would have people do just that. Friends, colleagues, the lot. But for the moment, I thought Carlisle was telling the truth, at least as far as he knew it.

‘There’s one more thing,’ I said.

‘Oh God.’ He looked at me with a mixture of exhaustion and anger. ‘What?’

‘The day of the accident. She left for work as usual in the morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘But she called in sick.’

‘Yes. I know that.’

‘And you have no idea where she went that day, or what happened to her?’

‘No.’

He leaned back and folded his arms. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen a man look so tired and defeated. For a moment he seemed almost scared. But then he delved into the blackness of that past time, and when he spoke next, I saw a trace of the man who had loved and grieved and mourned.

‘I guess none of you cared enough to find out.’

Let’s find out who the original victim was. And where the real Charlie Matheson has been all this time
.

Easier said than done, of course. By the time we reconvened in the operations room at five, we were hardly any further forward than when we’d started.

‘It would have been a bit of an ask anyway, after two years,’ Greg said, ‘but there’s no CCTV along the stretch of ring road where the accident took place. More depressingly, the park’s also a total bust.’

He’d worked through all the gathered footage and come up with nothing. Plenty of vans, of course, and even two actual ambulances, but none that appeared suspicious or that stopped anywhere nearby. While it was still possible that one of them was our vehicle, Charlie had clearly been dropped off from the road with no camera coverage. It seemed to confirm what Simon had said earlier about the organisation and attention to detail of whoever was behind her abduction and reappearance. They – and I was assuming at least two perpetrators for the moment – weren’t about to make a trivial mistake like being caught on film.

Of course, that didn’t mean they hadn’t been caught at all.

I said, ‘I’ve got two officers working the nearby blocks of flats. Wherever the van stopped, someone would have had to carry her on to the field, and that’s the kind of thing people would remember if they saw it.’

‘It’s also the kind of thing people would have reported at the time,’ Pete said.

‘True. But it’s still our best chance now the CCTV’s come
back clean. We’ve also got a placard out for witnesses on the high street. Early days, but we’ve had nothing back yet from either action.’

I’d also had someone compile a list of all the hospitals within a radius of roughly one hundred miles and begin calling round. Although Dr Fredericks claimed to have checked this, I doubted he’d have cast his net quite so wide, and I was keen to eliminate the possibility that Charlie really had been a patient somewhere all this time, and that the story she’d given us was a total concoction. It wouldn’t explain the scars, of course, or the victim found at the original scene, but I wanted to open up every route available to me. Nothing had come down that one so far.

‘In terms of the identity of the victim found at the scene of the accident, again I’ve drawn a blank. I’ve looked at the missing persons reports from a couple of months around that date. There are a lot.’

A surprisingly high number, in fact, but once I’d filtered for age, sex and physical appearance, there were far fewer to deal with: only three women who might conceivably have been mistaken for Charlie Matheson after receiving such a head injury and being found in such circumstances. But all of them had since been accounted for.

‘So either I’ve not gone back far enough,’ I said, ‘or we’re looking at a victim who for some reason wasn’t reported missing at the time – or at least not until much later. So that’s the next stage. Expanding it out along those lines.’

Which would not be easy. The sort of people who could go missing without being reported tended to be the ones who had already dropped off the radar of society: the lower edge of the sex industry; the homeless; immigrants without official records. It wasn’t a task I was relishing.