The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (7 page)

The kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it. There were plates
piled on the side, a stack of old pizza boxes, a toaster resting in a sea of burned crumbs. The floor was only half tiled with cheap plastic squares, many of which were peeling up, and a line of crumbs and hardened cheese and old garlic skin ran along the base of the counter. I had to edge around a box filled with empty wine bottles gathering dust just behind the door.

‘Sorry about the state of the place. We’re run off our feet at the moment. Come on through.’

We
.

It had been two years since his wife died, and it was hardly surprising that he’d moved on. Even so, I felt a twinge of awkwardness. This was going to be an even more difficult conversation than I’d expected.

Beyond the kitchen, the rest of the downstairs was open-plan: a double room with bare varnished floorboards. There were whorls of cat hair around the legs of the furniture, and the back of the nearest settee was coated with it; the creature must have been nearly bald. That settee, which divided the room roughly in two, was also covered with a pile of coats. The other settee was pointed at a wall-mounted plasma screen. Carlisle had been watching football. As I followed him over, he picked up a remote and muted the screen.

‘Have a seat, if you can find one.’

He sat down on the free settee – or rather, half collapsed in the middle – but made no gesture towards clearing the other for me. I scrunched the coats up a little, perched as best I could and clicked on my camera.

‘Before we start, I want to say that this is more of a courtesy call. Although I’m also hoping you might be able to help me with something.’

‘Right.’ Carlisle massaged his eyes and suppressed a yawn; it really was as though I’d woken him up. His whole manner struck me as odd. A visit from the police usually livens up an ordinary person’s day somewhat. At the very least, it flicks the on switch.

‘Am I interrupting?’

‘No.’ He gave a sigh and leaned forward. ‘No, sorry. I’m just exhausted. We’re not sleeping well at the moment.’

‘You live with your girlfriend?’

‘Yeah. Fiancée. We’re engaged. Not married yet.’

Fast work
, I thought. But again, who was I to judge? It made me think of Sasha, and of course of Lise. I forced myself to stop doing so.

‘You used to be married to a woman named Charlotte Matheson. Is that right?’

I had his attention now. He stared at me.

‘Yes. Yes, I did.’

‘And she died in an accident.’

‘A couple of years ago. Yes.’

Each
yes
was accompanied by a blink and made to sound final. I felt sorry for him, because I recognised that particular strategy. When you lose someone, people mention it all the time; even if they don’t say it out loud, you know they’re thinking about it. They express concern, they ask questions, they offer condolences. It’s all meant well, but it can feel like a carousel of attention: each person coming forward not to help you, but to take their turn saying the right thing in the spotlight of your loss. Eventually it becomes easier just to shut it down.

‘Yesterday afternoon,’ I said, ‘a woman was found on Town Street in the north of the city. She was very confused and disorientated, and had suffered some injuries.’

‘Okay.’

‘She gave her name at the hospital as Charlotte Matheson.’

Carlisle continued to stare at me. I tried to read his expression, to see if there was anything there: shock; surprise; fear. But there was nothing. It was the reaction of a man who hadn’t been expecting anything like this, and still didn’t fully comprehend what I was saying.

‘More specifically, she claims to
be
Charlotte Matheson. Your wife. This woman named you as her husband and gave us this address as her place of residence.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Neither do I. She also claims to remember the accident itself.’

‘What is that supposed to mean,
she remembers the accident?
’ He glanced at the door in the far corner of the room, then back to me, and almost whispered, ‘My wife
died
in that car crash.’

‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry. This woman knows all the details of the accident. And she claims that she died in that accident too.’

Again I watched the expression on his face.

Horror dawning now.

‘Why would she do that? I just ... I don’t ...’

‘I know. I really can’t say at the moment why she’s claiming this. The woman clearly isn’t very well. At all. But what she
is
is adamant. So the first thing you have to be aware of is that it’s possible she will, at some point, seek you out.’

‘What?’ The horror was absolute now. ‘You can stop her. Can’t you?’

No, not really
.

‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Perhaps. It depends on her behaviour. The issue we’d be facing at the moment is that she’s not obviously dangerous.’

‘She’s obviously
deluded.’
Carlisle shook his head. ‘What is wrong with her? Why would someone do this? I don’t...’

‘Well, that’s the other reason I’m here.’ I leaned forward. ‘The
why
. Obviously this woman is not Charlotte, but there must be a reason why she has fixated on your ex-wife the way she has. So it’s possible that you know her in some way, or that Charlotte did.’

‘I don’t know anybody fucking crazy enough to do this.’

‘No, I understand. But like I said, she has some injuries. It’s possible this woman has been through some kind of trauma, and that might explain the confusion she’s suffering. She might be somebody you knew once.’

‘What does she look like?’

A fair bit like Charlotte Matheson
.

‘The most obvious thing,’ I said, ‘is that she has some facial scarring.’

‘Okay.’

Carlisle looked off to one side, thinking it over.
Trying
for me. Which was immediately disappointing, because it meant he didn’t know her – at least not as she was now. He was trying to remember women with facial scars, but if this woman had ever been part of his life, and looked then as she did now, he wouldn’t have had to think very hard about it.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘That’s okay. Aside from that, she does look a little like your wife – similar height and build, similar curly brown hair. Did Charlotte have any extended family who resembled her?’

‘No. Only child. There were cousins, I
think
, but not that she ever saw or talked about.’

It was something to explore, maybe, but already I wasn’t holding out much hope.

‘What about close friends?’

‘Not that I know of. She had friends, obviously, but none that looked much like her. Not that I can think of, anyway.’ He frowned, then rubbed his forehead with the heel of his palm. ‘Christ. No. I don’t think so.’

‘Okay.’ I tried to hide the disappointment from my voice. ‘That’s fine, Paul, honestly.’

‘I have absolutely no idea ...’

‘Do you have a photograph of Charlotte?’

‘I—’

But then we both heard a noise on the stairs, and he stopped mid-sentence. Someone was making their way down, very slowly. The wood made careful creaks.

He lowered his voice again. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

I nodded conspiratorially. A moment later, the door at the far end of the room opened, and a woman came in. She too was in her early thirties, with short mussed-up blonde hair, and she was also wearing a dressing gown, along with the same look of bleary tiredness as Paul Carlisle. She was clearly very pregnant, her belly swollen out front in an enormous sphere. Nearly full term, I imagined.

I’m just exhausted
, I remembered.
We’re not sleeping well at the moment
.
At the same time, I couldn’t help doing the maths in my head. Carlisle’s fast work was even speedier than I’d first thought.

She noticed me. ‘Oh. Hello?’

‘Good afternoon.’ I gave what I hoped was a casual smile. ‘Sorry to interrupt like this.’

‘No, that’s okay. What ... ?’

‘Police. Nothing serious, honestly. I was actually just on my way out.’ I stood up, turning back to Carlisle. ‘I think we’re done, Mr Carlisle. Thank you for your time.’

‘No problem.’ He looked sick. ‘If you could just wait outside for a moment ... ?’

‘Yes, of course.’

I kicked my heels slightly down the path and waited, feeling bad for the man but also – perhaps bizarrely – just as sorry now for the woman in the hospital. Thinking back on our conversation, as crazy as it had been, she had seemed genuinely to believe the story she was telling me. If she really did think she was Charlotte Matheson, how was she going to react to the knowledge that her former husband was now not only engaged to someone else, but also expecting a child with her?

Not very well, I imagined.

Carlisle emerged a minute later, pulling his dressing gown around him and holding a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and a piece of paper.

‘She just gets upset about all that, you know? My past life.’

‘I understand.’

He handed me the paper. I looked at it for a long time. It was a straightforward head-and-shoulders shot: a passport photo, I guessed, that had been blown up in size and printed out. He wouldn’t have had time to do that just now, which meant this was something he’d kept, despite all the more obvious ways he’d moved on. People are complicated.

In life, Charlotte Matheson had had an appealing face, with freckles across her nose and cheeks. She wasn’t wearing any make-up for the photograph, but she was smiling slightly, and
there was a trace of fire in her eyes. Just looking at her, you could imagine her taking no nonsense from anyone. She stared out of the photograph with an expression that said:
I’ve got your measure, and you know what? I’m not impressed
.

It was hard to be sure, what with the scarring. But it looked a lot like the woman in the hospital. The eyes especially.

Maybe too much like her.

‘Any help?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘But thank you anyway. May I take this? I’ll return it, obviously.’

‘Of course.’

As I walked down the path, I heard the click of a lighter behind me, and then he said:

‘There’s something else too.’

‘Oh?’

I turned back and saw him blow smoke out of one corner of his mouth.

‘You said she gave her name as Charlotte Matheson. The woman in the hospital? So that’s definitely a lie.’

‘A lie?’

He nodded.

‘She would never have done that. With her, it was always
Charlie
. Even on our wedding day in the vows.’

He tapped some ash off the cigarette, and sounded sad and faraway.

‘Even then.’

Groves

A little boy and his Bear

By the end of the day, they’d attached a name to the man they’d found in the burned house.

The property had been rented to an Edward Leland a month or so previously. He had a file – minor drugs offences mostly – and the last address they had for him was one he’d shared with his partner, Angela Morris. Former partner, presumably. The coroner had sent through a cursory note – a question mark – about the cuts Groves had seen in the body’s cheekbones, but pending the results of an overnight post-mortem, that was that. The end of Edward Leland, and the end of their involvement.

After work, Groves went to pick up Caroline.

His ex-wife didn’t live in the most salubrious area of the city: most of it was rows of red-brick terraced houses running down a steep hill. As he drove there, Groves was still thinking about Leland. About how it must have been for him not just to die the way he had, but to
live
that way. An endless, jobless cycle of television and alcohol and sleep, all of it soundtracked by the percussion of kids banging a football against the side of your house. It wasn’t how he’d have wanted to live.

Looking around him as he turned in to Caroline’s dilapidated street, Groves wondered how far his ex-wife was slipping in that direction herself. Even as she came down the path to meet
him, he could tell she’d been drinking already. Trying to dull the painful reality of Jamie’s absence.

But then, just as Sean had said earlier, there were a lot of things that people didn’t get to choose.

One summer day – several years ago now – an eight-year-old girl called Laila Buckingham was playing outside her house in the back garden. It was warm and sunny, and Laila’s mother, Amanda, was working in the kitchen, a pan of potatoes bubbling away on the hob. There was background music playing quietly on the stereo, but the patio doors were open, and Amanda was keeping a sporadic eye on her young daughter.

Laila was a happy child, but shy, with few friends, and content to play alone.
She bad such a good imagination
, her mother would tell the police later.
She was happy with her own company
. The back garden was fenced off, but not high, and it edged a road, although not a busy one. By all accounts Laila was a clever girl, and could be trusted to be careful. She often played outside. And yet that day there had come a point when Amanda Buckingham had craned her neck to check on her, and Laila was not there any more.

The search for the girl began within ten minutes of her going missing. It was extensive. As time went on, it was also increasingly fraught, because it was obvious to officers within minutes that she had been taken. Every lead was followed and exhausted, while the local community rallied around the family, with hundreds of volunteers searching recreation grounds, parks, riverbanks and outhouses. Trained rescue teams went methodically through the edges of the woods. Laila seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.

Groves had been a junior officer back then, and his role in the search was door-to-door interviews. It was painful work, in that it was monotonous and achieved nothing, but he wanted to do it anyway. If he was a tiny cog in a huge machine, he was still determined to play his part in its turning. His son, Jamie, was not quite one year old, and he could barely imagine the
pain the Buckinghams must be going through. So he tried not to let the consistently empty and useless witness statements dissuade him. He prayed that Laila would be found, and tried to keep hope.