The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (18 page)

‘Thank you for coming.’

He nodded to himself, but didn’t seem to be listening. Instead, he was looking around the room with a sense of wonder. Despite his physical frailty, there was still some kind of life in his eyes. The smile now was a little more genuine.

‘My, my,’ he said, taking in the decor. ‘Haven’t you all moved up in the world? If I’d only been able to hang on a little while longer, I could have experienced such riches too.’

There was no reproach in his voice, but even so, none of us said anything, and Pete looked as awkward as I’d ever seen him. Mercer was still looking around the room, his eyes settling finally on the plasma screen on the wall and the two photographs of Charlie Matheson.

‘And this is her, then? The young lady who wants to see me?’

‘Yes,’ Pete said. ‘Would you like a seat, John?’

‘I’m fine, but thank you.’

Eileen touched his arm. ‘I think we should both have a seat.’

If the intervention offended Mercer, he didn’t show it. Instead, he just nodded, acquiescing with apparent grace. When they were both seated, he looked at the screen again.

‘Tell me everything.’

Pete glanced at me, so I took over the briefing. Unlike the ones yesterday, this time I didn’t go into too much detail. While it was possible Mercer could help us with the investigation, it was important to bear in mind that he was a civilian now. He didn’t need to know everything that was happening, and it would have been remiss to share it. But if he was going to talk to Charlie then he needed to understand the basics of the situation, so I took him through the accident itself, the bare bones of the story she’d given us, and the details of her reappearance three days ago. As I finished, it was the former that he remained interested in.

‘The accident was on the third of August, two years ago,’ he said. ‘Which is
after
I returned to work and
before
I left again. But it’s certainly not something we would have had anything to do with.’

‘No,’ I said. Back then, this had been one of the top teams in the department, and they wouldn’t have been brought in to deal with a straightforward car accident: a non-criminal matter. ‘I’ve gone through the file in depth, researched everything as much as possible. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing that would link Charlie Matheson to us. At the same time, it’s possible that the connection isn’t with
us
. Because it was
you
she asked for specifically, John.’

He frowned. ‘Are you sure? What were her exact words?’

‘
Ask for Mercer
. That was something she’d been told to do. It’s likely she was drugged, and it was hard for her to remember the message she’d been given. But whoever was holding her, they wanted her to ask for you when she regained consciousness.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s what we’re hoping to find out.’

‘I don’t think I know any Charlotte Matheson.’

‘I’m not sure she knows you either. If she did, she would have known to ask for you straight away. To begin with, she thought she was meant to ask us for
mercy
.’

Mercer stared off to one side, his expression blank now. Thinking it over. Trying to work out what it might mean.

‘There’s another explanation,’ Eileen said. ‘While this woman might not know John, whoever took her and held her all this time clearly does.’

Her tone implied she didn’t like that one bit, and I sympathised. Her husband had already had one breakdown, after half a lifetime spent in the heads of killers, and that was before the 50/50 Killer case had nearly destroyed him for a second time. Whatever peace now lay between them was no doubt as tentative as Mercer’s fragile mental state. She didn’t want him here at all, and she certainly didn’t want to imagine that there might be someone out there who had unfinished business with her husband that they were intent on concluding.

Like it or not, there was no way of getting around it.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s a possibility.’

If Mercer himself was bothered by it, he wasn’t showing it; his face remained blank, and he was still staring off to one side. Considering the case, I imagined. Although perhaps he was having the exact same thought as Eileen. I noticed that she had moved her chair slightly closer to him and rested her hand over the back of his.

‘And it’s definitely her?’ he said finally.

‘If not, it’s her twin.’

‘Have you identified the actual victim? The woman who really died in the crash?’

‘Not yet. I’ve gone through missing persons for a couple of months around the date, but haven’t found any matches as yet.’

‘You need to go further back than that.’ Mercer looked at me suddenly, and the intensity in his eyes was alarming. ‘Two months isn’t good enough at all.’

‘I’m going to, yes.’

‘You need to go back at least two years.
At least
. Possibly even further. Assuming all this is true, then whoever these individuals are, they’ve shown they’re capable of holding a woman captive for that length of time. There’s no reason to think they couldn’t have done it before. Every reason, in fact, to imagine that they have.’

‘I know. John, we’ve got this covered.’

And yet actually, I realised, that was only half right. As a team, we’d been so intent on Charlie Matheson, and the unique aspects of her abduction and reappearance, that none of us had got as far as to imagine that there might be others.

Whoever had taken her had done so with care and planning, pulling off both the abduction and the return perfectly. The police at the time had been convinced by the evidence they found at the accident scene, and for two years the world had believed that Charlie Matheson was dead. Controlled and manipulated, she had even come to believe the same thing herself.

It took skill and willpower to achieve that. It also took
practice
. That had always been one of Mercer’s guiding principles: that sophisticated criminals rarely arrived fully formed; that crime, like any other activity, required an education, and there would be stumbles and falls along the way. Whoever had taken Charlie Matheson hadn’t done so out of the blue. It was likely there had been other victims beforehand. It was possible there had been others since.

‘We’re checking,’ Pete said. He sounded subdued.

‘What about the abduction itself?’

‘She doesn’t remember it,’ I said. ‘Whoever took her, they managed to convince her she’d actually been in the accident.’

‘When she was probably nowhere near it.’ Mercer shook his head. ‘What was the last known sighting of her?’

I glanced at Pete, but he had folded his arms and walked over to a nearby desk, which he was now looking down at.

‘The morning of the third,’ I said. ‘Her husband reported that she left for work, but she’d called in sick. There’s an anomaly in
the case file there – her whereabouts for the day are unknown. She doesn’t remember. We’re going to pursue that today.’

‘Right.’

There was a despondency to the way he said it – not a criticism of our lack of progress so much as a realisation that he’d lapsed into old patterns and tried to take hold of the case, then remembered it didn’t belong to him. He glanced at Pete, who was still looking away, and then back to me.

‘Right. And what is it you want from me?’

I took a deep breath.

‘Well, first off, to see if her name meant anything to you. Obviously, it doesn’t.’

‘No. I would remember.’

‘What about Paul Carlisle?’

Mercer thought about it. ‘Again, no.’

‘Okay. Well, then, I was wondering if you might consider coming with me to the hospital this morning. To talk to her.’

Mercer just stared at me for a second.

‘Nothing major,’ I said. ‘Nothing heavy. But she was told to ask for you. We don’t know why. It would be good to figure that out, wouldn’t it?’

‘I—’

‘No,’ Eileen said. ‘Absolutely not.’

She still had her hand over Mercer’s – pressed there tighter than before, either for reassurance, or perhaps to send him a message – but she was looking directly at me.

‘Eileen,’ I said.

‘It’s completely out of the question.’ She looked at her husband, and then back at me. From her expression, she couldn’t believe we were asking Mercer to do this. ‘After everything that happened? John isn’t a policeman any more, in case you’d forgotten. And for very good reason. If you think I’m going to let him put himself in a place where he could get hurt again, you’re mistaken.
Sadly
mistaken.’

I stared back at her, not knowing what to say. On the one hand, I completely understood her reaction. In her shoes,
I’d have wanted to keep Mercer as far away from a police investigation as possible. On the other hand, we needed his help. And as unwelcome an intrusion as this might be, just as with Paul Carlisle, it wasn’t going to go away. I looked at Mercer instead.

‘John,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

The whole time Eileen had been talking, Mercer had been sitting beside her with apparent equanimity, his expression giving nothing away. If he was bothered by the way she was speaking on his behalf, making the decision for him, then he wasn’t showing it. He sighed to himself now, looked at Eileen and then me.

‘My wife is right,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘John—’

Eileen had already got to her feet, and was helping Mercer to his.

‘We need to go, John.’ Beneath the anger and steel in her voice, there was the faintest trace of panic. ‘We should never have come in the first place. I told you that. But we did, and you’ve done everything you can, and now it’s time for us to go home.’

Pete said, ‘All right, John. We understand.’

‘Yes,’ Mercer said. At the door, he turned back to us, looking confused now, as though events had moved too fast for him to follow and he was having trouble keeping track. ‘I’m sorry. But she’s right. I’m sorry.’

And with one last curious glance at the images of Charlie Matheson, he was gone.

Mark

The wearing of sins

When I arrived at the hospital, Charlie Matheson was sitting alone in an enclosed garden to the side of the Baines Wing. I stepped out. There was a stone patio, and beyond it, on the grass, wooden benches. A busy main road was only about fifty metres away, past a stretch of neatly trimmed grass and a fence, but it was partially obscured by a row of trees, reducing the traffic to flashes of colour between the leaves. The noise was audible but bearable.

This trip outside had been Fredericks’ idea, apparently. Given Charlie’s initial reaction when she’d been found – the sensations that had overwhelmed her – it made sense for her to acclimatise herself to the real world gradually. This was as peaceful an area as any to start that process.

As I reached her, she didn’t look up. She was leaning forward slightly on the bench with her hands between her knees, her head bowed a little.

‘I think it’s going to rain,’ she said.

I glanced at the sky. ‘Do you?’

‘Yes. You can smell it, can’t you? And there’s a kind of pressure to the air.’

It was clear blue overhead, without a cloud in sight, but I did know what she meant. The day was warmer than yesterday,
but it was beginning to feel like the kind of escalating heat that couldn’t sustain itself for much longer: a gathering problem that could only be resolved by a thunderstorm.

‘You might be right,’ I said.

‘I like rain.’

‘It must have been a while since you’ve seen it.’

She shook her head. ‘It rained in the other place too.’

I frowned at that, because from what she’d told me before, the period of her abduction had been spent in an underground cell. But I filed the thought away for a moment.

‘Mercer wouldn’t come,’ I said.

She looked up immediately, her hair falling backwards. In the sunlight, the scarring on her face appeared fresh and raw, and was newly shocking to see. The injuries stood out so badly that I had to resist the urge to wince at the sight of them.

‘Why not?’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘Why did you want to see him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘No. I’ve no idea who he is. I was just told to ask for him. By the man – the doctor in the back of the ambulance.’

‘How did you know he was a doctor?’

‘I’ve ...’

She hesitated, and I knew immediately that she was censoring herself: working out what was safe to say. I was getting the feeling now that there was a lot she wasn’t telling me.

‘I’ve seen him before,’ she said finally. ‘In the place. It was obvious he was a doctor because of what he did there, how he helped me. But he wasn’t someone in charge.’

‘The man who cut you was in charge?’

She nodded.

‘And what was supposed to happen when Mercer came to see you? What were you meant to tell him?’

‘I’m not allowed to say.’

‘Charlie.’ I sat down beside her, fighting back the exasperation I felt. ‘You’re
allowed
to tell me anything. This man can’t
hurt you any more. And if you talk to me, we can catch him. We can stop him doing this to anyone else. But I can’t do that unless you cooperate with me.’

‘It’s not as simple as you think.’

She sounded angry, and I told myself to back off slightly. I wouldn’t get anywhere if I pressed from this angle, not when she was clearly so adamant. But I couldn’t leave her story alone entirely.

‘You said it rained in the other place too?’

‘Yes. Sometimes.’

‘But you were underground, weren’t you? It doesn’t rain underground.’

More silence. I looked sideways to see that she was staring at me, unsure what to say. I was thinking about Stockholm syndrome: the phenomenon where a captive bonds with the person holding them, becoming loyal, brainwashed – willing to defend them, even. Was that what was happening here? If so, I was woefully underprepared at this precise second to deal with it.

‘Talk to me, Charlie,’ I said. ‘Help me to understand. There’s nothing to be afraid of now. Nobody can hurt you here.’

She almost laughed.

‘You have no idea what he’s capable of. None.’