DAY ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
DAY TWO
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
DAY THREE
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
DAY FOUR
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
DAY FIVE
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
DAY SIX
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
DAY SEVEN
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
AFTER
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
For Sharlé
After it was all over, they let me watch the footage of her entering the police station. She seemed small, almost curved, in her green raincoat and dark court shoes, as if her spine was arched or she was in pain. The quality of the surveillance film was poor, the frame rate set low, which made it disorientating, a series of jerky movements played out against the stillness of the station’s front desk.
She paused at the entrance, holding the main door ajar so that light leaked in across the tiled floor and seemed to bleach one side of her face. The faded colours of the film didn’t help, reducing blacks to greys and everything else to pastels, and even when she let the door go again and it snapped shut behind her, her features remained indistinct. Her gaze was a shadowy blob, her blonde hair appeared grey. I couldn’t see anything of the slight freckling that passed from one cheek to the other, crossing the bridge of her nose, nor the blue and green flash of her eyes. Under the glare of the camera, she may as well have been just another visitor to a police station.
A stranger, nothing else.
Once she let the door go, she headed across the room to the front desk. On the timecode in the corner I could see it was just before 8 a.m. An officer was standing behind the counter, engaged in conversation with someone else, a kid in his teens with a black eye and bloodied cheek. The woman waited patiently behind the teenager until the desk officer told her to take a seat. She did so reluctantly, her head down, her feet barely seeming to carry her to a bank of chairs.
Ten minutes passed. The angle of the camera made it hard to see her, her head bowed, her hands knotted together in her lap, but then, after the desk officer finished with the teenager and told him to take a seat, she beckoned the woman back to the counter. I met the desk officer when I turned up at the station in the hours after: she had short black hair flecked with grey and a scar high on her left cheek, but on the film I couldn’t see the detail in either.
The woman stopped at the counter.
The desk officer bent slightly, so that her head was level with the woman’s, and even though the film’s frame rate was low and it didn’t record her lip movements in real time, I could still tell what she’d asked the woman.
‘You all right, love?’
The woman didn’t respond immediately. Instead, she reached into the pocket of her coat and started looking for something. It began as a slow movement, but then became more frantic when she couldn’t find what she was looking for. She checked one pocket, then another, and in the third she found what she was after.
As she unfolded the piece of paper, she finally responded to the officer.
‘Hello.’
I couldn’t tell what the woman said after that, the frame rate making it all but impossible to follow the patterns of her mouth, but she shifted position and, because the camera was fixed to the wall about a foot and a half above her, I could see more of her, could see there was just a single line on the piece of paper. Under the pale rinse of the room’s strip lights, her hair definitely looked blonde now, not grey, and it had been tied into a loose ponytail. Despite that, it was messy and unkempt, stray strands everywhere, at her collar, across her face, and even within the confines of the film, the way it twitched and jarred between frames, it was easy to tell that she was agitated.
Finally, her eyes met the officer’s and the woman held up the piece of paper and started to talk. I could see the teenager look up from his mobile phone, as if sparked into life by what the woman was saying. They told me afterwards that the woman had been crying, that it had been difficult to understand what she’d been talking about, that her voice, the things she’d been saying, had been hard to process. I watched the desk officer lean towards her, holding a hand up, telling the woman to calm down. She paused, her body swaying slightly, her shoulders moving up and down, and gestured to the piece of paper again.
This time I could read her lips clearly.
‘Find him.’
The call came on 28 December.
I’d spent Christmas with my daughter, Annabel, in her house in south Devon. She was twenty-nine and lived within sight of a lake at the edge of Buckfastleigh with her thirteen-year-old sister Olivia. I’d only known the two of them for five years – before that, I’d had no idea I was even a father – and although, biologically, Olivia wasn’t mine, her parents were gone and I looked out for her just the same. Liv had now gone past the point of believing that an old man with a white beard came down the chimney with a sackful of presents, but she was still a kid, and kids always made Christmas more fun. We opened gifts, we watched old movies and played even older board games, we ate and drank and chased Annabel’s dog across a Dartmoor flecked in frost, and then I curled up with them in the evenings on the sofa and realized how little I missed London. It was where I lived, where my work was, but it was also where my home stood – empty even when I was inside it. It had been that way, and felt like that, every day for eight years, ever since my wife Derryn had died.
The morning of the call, I woke early and went for a run, following the lanes to the west of the house as they gently rose towards the heart of the moors. It was cold, the trees skeletal, the hedgerows thinned out by winter, ice gathered in slim sheets – like panes of glass – on the country roads. After four miles, I hit a reservoir, a bridge crossing it from one side to the other. Close by, cows grazed in the grass, hemmed in by wire fences, and I could see a farmer and his dog, way off in the distance, the early-morning light winking in the windows of a tractor. I carried on for a while until I reached a narrow road set upon a hill with views across a valley of green and brown fields, all perfectly stitched together. Breathless, I paused there and took in the view.
That was when my phone started ringing.
I had it strapped to my arm, the mobile mapping my route, and I awkwardly tried to release it, first from the headphones I had plugged in, then from the pouch it was secured inside. When I finally got it out, I could see it was a central London number, and guessed it was someone who needed my help, somebody whose loved one had gone missing. Very briefly, I toyed with the idea of not answering it at all, of protecting my time off, this time alone with a daughter I’d only known for a fraction of my life, and was still getting to know. But then reality hit. The missing were my ballast. In the time since Derryn had died, they’d been my lifeblood, the only way I could breathe properly. This break would have to end and, sooner or later, I’d have to return to London, to the work that had become my anchor.
‘David Raker.’
‘Mr Raker, my name’s Detective Sergeant Catherine Field.’
Thrown for a moment, I tried to recall if I’d come across Field before, or had ever heard anyone mention her name.
‘How can I help you?’
‘It’s a bit of a weird one, really,’ Field responded, and then paused. ‘We’ve had someone walk into the station here at Charing Cross this morning. She seems quite confused.’ Another pause. ‘Or maybe she’s not confused. I don’t know, to be honest.’
‘Okay,’ I said, unsure where this was going.
‘She doesn’t have anything on her – no phone, no ID. The only thing she brought with her is a scrap of paper. It’s got your name on it.’
I looked out at the view, my body beginning to cool down, the sweat freezing against my skin. My website was only basic, little more than an overview and a contact form, but it listed my email address and a phone number.
‘I expect she found me online,’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ Field replied. She cleared her throat, the line drifting a little.
‘So are you saying she wants my help?’
‘I’m not sure what she wants.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She says she knows you.’
‘Knows me how?’
Field cleared her throat for a second time. ‘She says she’s your wife.’
I frowned. ‘My wife?’
‘That’s what she says.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, my wife has been dead for eight years.’
‘Since 2009,’ Field replied. ‘I know, I just read that online.’
I waited for her to continue, to say something else, to tell me this was a joke at my expense, some bad-taste prank. But she didn’t. Instead, she said something worse.
‘This woman, she says her name’s Derryn Raker.’
‘What?’
‘Derryn Alexandra Raker.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No way. She’s lying.’
‘She seems pretty convinced about it.’
‘It’s not Derryn. Derryn’s dead.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s the other thing she said,’ Field replied, her voice even, hard to interpret or analyse. ‘She tells me she’s really sorry for what she’s put you through – but now she wants to explain everything.’
I didn’t get back into London until after four thirty, and by the time I arrived at Charing Cross the city was dark, its streets frozen. I felt numb as I climbed the steps, unsure of myself, angry, dazed. The phone call had created a hollow in my chest and I’d spent four hours on the motorway trying to close it up, trying to talk myself down.
It wasn’t Derryn.
It wasn’t my wife.
I’d buried her eight years ago. I’d been with her at the hospital when they told us she had breast cancer. I’d sat with her when she was going through chemotherapy. I’d been there, holding her hand the first time, the second, the third when she told me she couldn’t carry on with it, because it wasn’t working and she was tired, so tired, of all the medicine and the sickness and the hospital visits. She’d sat with me on the edge of the bed, in the house that we’d shared, as I’d cried, as we’d both cried. She was the one that started me along the path to finding missing people, sitting there in a chair on our back deck, telling me it was a perfect fit for who I was. She was the one they’d carried out of the house on a stretcher on the morning only one of us woke up.
The woman wasn’t Derryn.
And yet, as I crossed the tiled floors of the station to where the front desk was, I couldn’t quite let go of the idea that I wanted it to be. That somehow, for some reason, it really had been a lie; the past eight years had been a mistake, some sort of deception at my expense. I’d never loved another woman like I’d loved Derryn, and the women I’d met since her death, who I’d dated and tried to love the same way, had eventually fallen away because of it. What if it was her? Did that mean I was sick? Delusional?
‘Yes, sir?’
The desk officer was looking inquisitively at me.
‘I’m David Raker.’
The surname instantly registered with her and she told me to take a seat. A couple of minutes later, DS Catherine Field emerged from a security door beside the desk. She waved me over. I got up, my legs weaker than they should have been, my heart beating hard against my ribs, and we shook hands. She was in her thirties with sandy hair, clipped at the arc of her forehead and falling against her shoulders, and had grey eyes that matched the colour of her trouser-suit, the jacket buttoned up at the front.
She led me into a long corridor. I could hear telephones and the hum of conversation. Through a window, I glimpsed an office, a whiteboard with notes in blue and green pen, and a map of central London, pinned with pictures and Post-its.
At the end, we moved through a second security door, and as Field held it open for me she spoke: ‘Thanks for getting here so quickly. I know this is …’
She faded out.
I’d told her on the phone that it wasn’t Derryn. I told her everything I’d already told myself, except I’d left out the parts about wanting it to be her, much less the moments where I actually believed it might be. Closing my eyes for a second, I tried to clear my head. I needed to be lucid. When I faced this woman, when I tried to find out why she’d pretended to be Derryn, I needed my emotions pushed all the way back.
Field came to a halt in front of another office that – except for an interview room – was exactly the same as the first. There was a small Christmas tree on a desk in the corner, tinsel snaking through its fake branches, and a few token baubles hanging from filing cabinets and the corner of the whiteboard. Beyond that was the interview room, its door slightly ajar.
People in the office glanced at me, plain-clothes officers in the middle of phone calls or working at computers. I heard warm air being pumped out of a heating unit above my head, could feel it against my face. The longer I stood there, the more the heat started to create a haze behind my eyes, a blur, a fog that made me feel unsteady on my feet and vaguely disquieted: except it wasn’t the heat that was getting to me, and it wasn’t the detectives staring in my direction – it was the woman inside the interview room.
I could just see the slant of her back and some of her hair. Her legs were tucked in under a table, most of her face was obscured by the door, and the clothes she was wearing – a red jumper and a pair of pale grey tracksuit trousers – didn’t fit. I doubted if they were the clothes she had turned up in. Those had probably been bagged as evidence and replacements provided by the police. She’d had no ID on her, couldn’t remember her address when asked, and she’d been in a distressed state, so the minute Field met her, she’d have treated the woman like a crime scene: kidnapping, imprisonment, being held against her will – Field would have considered all of them. That made her clothes evidence, her skin, her nails. They would have used an Early Evidence Kit too if there were signs of sexual assault or rape. They would have been through the database looking for the woman, for a history, searching under the name she’d given them for any record she may have had, or connections to anyone. The only person they would have found was me. Derryn had never got as much as a speeding ticket, but I was different: I’d been arrested before, cautioned, interviewed about cases I’d worked and people I’d gone looking for. If Field was searching for a lead right off the bat, she’d have got it, and when I glanced at her, I saw the confirmation: my entry on the database had rung alarm bells, and now I wasn’t just here assisting.
I was a potential suspect.
I looked at Field and said, ‘My wife is dead.’
I wasn’t sure if it was an effort to convince her or myself.
Field glanced at me. ‘She died of cancer, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Breast cancer.’
‘Yes.’
‘And this was in 2009?’
I nodded.
‘Yeah,’ Field said, ‘like I said, I found that online.’
She might have found it on a database somewhere, but more likely she’d got the details from the Internet. I’d never sought out notoriety, never given a single interview, but it hadn’t stopped journalists from camping outside my door in the aftermath of some of my most publicized cases. And now the results of that were out there on websites: insects frozen in amber that I could never cut out or dislodge.
We looked at each other for a moment.
‘You don’t believe me?’ I said.
‘About what?’
‘You don’t believe my wife is dead?’
‘It seems to be a matter of public record.’
I eyed her, trying to understand her meaning.
‘You think I disseminated a lie?’
‘No,’ Field said, ‘that’s not what I said.’
‘That’s what it sounded like.’
‘Don’t get paranoid, Mr Raker.’
‘It’s not paranoia,’ I said. ‘I know what you’re thinking. I understand why. I know it’s your job to look at it from this angle. But I watched my wife die slowly over the course of two and a half years, and I didn’t imagine that, or make it up. I sat beside her in the hospital and slept next to her at night, and when she decided that she’d had enough, when she finally died, it took everything from me. It took everything.’ I turned to Field again and cleared my throat, trying to keep my emotions in check. ‘I don’t know who this woman is, or why she’s doing this – but the one thing I can tell you for certain is that it’s not Derryn.’
It was hard to tell if any of that had made any difference, because Field simply nodded again, her eyes on the interview suite, and said, ‘I told her what you said to me on the phone earlier – you know, that she’s lying about who she is – and she says you must be confused.’
‘I’m not confused.’
‘She also mentioned that she’d been missing.’
That stopped me.
‘Missing where?’
‘She didn’t say, but that’s one of the other reasons we have to get involved. She told us she’s your wife, she mentioned that she’s been missing for eight years, and she says she’s not going to say anything else until she’s seen you.’ Field already had a pad; now she removed a pencil. ‘She only wants to talk to you.’
There was a moment’s silence, the lull filled with the sound of phone calls and conversations from the office. Eventually, Field said, ‘You have a daughter, right?’
‘Yes. Annabel.’
‘Derryn wasn’t her mother?’
She eyed me. She was clearly asking if I’d ever cheated on my wife.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I never knew a thing about Annabel until her mother finally told me about her five years ago. Her mother and I, we went out for a year when we were both seventeen, before I left for university, and we split up – amicably – before I went. She was already pregnant by then, but she chose not to tell me. I married Derryn not knowing I was a father, and Derryn never met Annabel before she died.’
Field nodded. ‘Good to know.’
I looked towards the interview room again.
‘We’re not going to let you talk to her.’
I turned to Field. ‘What?’
‘Even though that’s what she’s requested, we can’t do that. You can probably appreciate why. We need to fully understand her reasons for being here, and putting the two of you in the same room before we even know what those reasons are … Well, that’s not going to happen.’ Again, she was underlining what I already knew.
I was a potential suspect.
She gestured for me to follow her and took me into an adjacent room where a bank of monitors was lined up on a desk. From the doorway I could see the image of the woman on one of the screens, and the closer I got, the shakier I started to feel: I was swaying, my heart hammering so hard, I could hear its echoes in my ears. It wasn’t hot in the room but I was sweating all the same – across my brow, along my top lip.
‘Take a seat and put on the headphones,’ Field said.
I leaned in towards the monitor, trying to get a better look at her, at her face, and as I did, everything seemed to still. I pulled a chair out, sat, and realized Field was watching me, not her. Almost on cue, the woman half-turned in the direction of the camera, her eyes on the door, and I saw her properly for the first time.
No. No way.
‘Mr Raker?’
I glanced at Field, then back to the monitor.
‘She …’ The words stuck in my throat.
‘She what?’ Field asked.
‘She looks just like Derryn.’
I watched through the feed, headphones on. Behind me, the door was ajar, a uniformed officer stationed just outside, but I was barely even aware of him. I was barely aware of anything. All I could focus on was the image on the monitor: Field, and the woman facing her across the desk.
Derryn.
I closed my eyes, denying it was her – over and over again – as Field explained to the woman that she couldn’t let her see me until they’d figured out what was going on. ‘David will be made aware of what you tell me, though,’ Field assured her, and when I opened my eyes again, the woman was frowning, as if struggling to understand – or trying to work something out.
She looked around the interview room for a second, and then her gaze lodged on the camera. It was just above her eyeline, but it was obvious that she hadn’t realized it was there until now. The picture had been zoomed in slightly, the feed creating a crisp, clear image of her. As I looked at her, it was like we were in the same room for a moment, across the same table, breathing the same air.
‘Can David see me?’ she asked Field. I listened to her voice for the first time, replayed it in my head, tried to recall if it was the same voice I’d listened to every day for the sixteen years Derryn and I were together. But I wasn’t sure. It had been too long. And as I realized that, as I realized I could no longer remember my wife’s voice, I felt a crushing sense of loss: dizzy with it, shamed.
‘Tell him I just want him to take me home.’
‘Take you home where, Derryn?’
Derryn.
I snapped back into the moment. It’s not her. I looked at Field on the monitor. Don’t call her Derryn. That’s not her name.
‘It’s me, sweetheart,’ the woman said, and this time she talked directly into the camera. ‘D, it’s me.’
D. That was what Derryn used to call me.
No. I realized I was shaking my head. It’s not her.
‘It’s me,’ the woman repeated.
I glanced at Field. She was watching the woman.
‘It’s me,’ she said again, more softly, more defeated.
‘No,’ I muttered, the word so quiet, it barely formed in my mouth. I wanted to tear through the walls and ask her who she really was, and why she was pretending to be Derryn, but my head was just static, ringing like the impact of an explosion.
‘David says you’re not his wife,’ Field said.
She glanced at Field. ‘What?’
‘He says you’re not his wife.’
Tears instantly welled in the woman’s eyes. ‘Why would he say that?’ she said. ‘I’ve come back to him. Please just let me explain to him what happened.’
I was shaking my head again.
‘Please.’
‘He says you aren’t Derryn,’ Field repeated.
‘I am.’ She made a sound like she’d been winded. ‘I am.’
I closed my eyes again.
Derryn’s dead. She’s been dead for eight years.
‘All right,’ Field said.
When I finally opened my eyes, the woman was leaning forward at the table, her fingers spread out in front of her, as if she were trying to reach for the door.
It wasn’t Derryn, I knew it in my bones, but it was still hard to process the striking physical similarities between them: their eyes were so alike; the woman’s hair was the same colour and cut into the same style as Derryn’s had been; they were an almost identical size – same height, weight, build – and their faces were the same shape. But it wasn’t her. If I struggled to remember Derryn’s voice, I didn’t struggle to remember her face. I’d seen it in photographs, over and over again, for eight years. As much as I wanted to pretend that I would never forget her mannerisms, the timbre of her voice, the way she expressed herself, the truth was, time had rubbed some of those things away. The minutiae that I promised myself I’d never forget, I stopped remembering as often, and sometimes didn’t think of at all. But her face had never dimmed. I’d buried her, and I’d mourned her, and I’d felt every moment of it. I knew in every part of me that I hadn’t mourned a lie, just as clearly as I saw the minor differences in this woman’s face; the cracks in the fiction. Her physical similarity to Derryn was staggering – but it wasn’t exact. Not quite.
‘Please just tell David to come and get me.’
I tuned back in.
‘Can you tell him to come and get me?’ she asked Field again.
So if you’re not Derryn, who are you?
‘You know it’s me, D.’
She was looking at the camera again.
Why the hell are you doing this?
Field said, ‘I asked you where you lived earlier, do you recall that?’
‘Yes,’ the woman replied.
‘You said you couldn’t remember.’
The woman looked at Field blankly.
‘Do you remember now?’
‘I live with David,’ she said, as if it were another trick.
‘So what’s your address?’
‘My address?’
‘Yes. Where’s the house you share with David?’
‘Forty Aintree Drive.’
She knows where I live. It wouldn’t be impossible to find my address, but it would be hard: I deliberately kept it out of the public domain.
‘He says you don’t live with him,’ Field said.
‘I do.’ She looked into the camera again. ‘Of course I do. I’m his wife.’
I glanced at Field, who was looking at the woman.
Stop this now. She’s ill.
‘You told us earlier that you were missing,’ Field said.
‘Did I?’
‘For almost eight years.’
The woman frowned. ‘I don’t think I said that.’
‘You did.’
‘I’m sure I didn’t.’
‘You did. But you say you’re living with David. So how is that missing?’
‘It’s not,’ she responded. ‘I said we got separated, not that I was missing.’
‘You and David got separated?’
‘Yes. Perhaps that’s where the confusion comes from.’
‘Where did you get separated?’
‘At the pharmacy.’
I saw Field’s gaze drift to the woman’s right arm. Just inside the sleeve of the jumper she was wearing, almost hidden from view, was evidence of bandaging, the gauze dotted with blobs of blood. I hadn’t noticed it until now. Field must have seen it already.
‘You were going to get your arm looked at?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘How did you cut it?’
‘Oh, it was a silly mistake. D was concerned and told me we needed to get it seen to, so he drove me to the pharmacy. He parked up and told me to go and show it to someone.’
This is insane.
‘What pharmacy was this?’ Field asked her.
‘I, uh …’ She paused. ‘I’m not sure what its name is.’
‘Do you remember where it was?’
‘No.’
‘Not the street necessarily, just the general area.’
The woman shook her head again. ‘No.’
Field continued making notes in silence. The woman looked between her and the camera as if she didn’t understand the silence, or why Field might be having doubts.
‘Okay,’ Field said. ‘Let’s go back to the start.’
The woman nodded.
‘Can you give me your date of birth?’
‘Yes,’ the woman said, ‘I was born in Guildford on the 3rd of March 1975.’ She glanced at the camera, and I knew why: all the details were correct.
‘When did you first move to London?’
‘End of August, beginning of September 1993, when I was eighteen. I moved to London to study Nursing at South Bank, and then did a postgrad at King’s College.’
This was Derryn’s history. I remembered her graduation ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall. We were living in a flat in Holloway at the time.
‘And how did you end up here today?’
‘I came by train.’
‘From where?’
‘Woolwich Arsenal.’
‘South-east London?’
The woman shrugged.
‘You look confused,’ Field said.
‘I don’t know London that well. What’s east, what’s west, all of that.’
Field tapped her pencil against her pad. ‘You live with David but you don’t know London?’
‘No,’ the woman replied innocently. ‘Not really.’
‘But Ealing is in London.’
‘Ealing?’
‘Where you and David live.’
‘Oh,’ the woman said. ‘Oh, right.’
‘So why would you go to a pharmacy in Woolwich?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Because it’s on the opposite side of the city to where you say you live.’
This time, the woman didn’t respond.
‘Did you know it was on the opposite side of the city?’
‘I, uh …’ The woman halted. I felt relief start to wash through me. Whatever the motivation for this, it was starting to fall apart.
‘What do you do for a living?’ Field said, changing tack.
‘I’m a senior nurse,’ the woman said.
‘So why did you need a pharmacist?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, couldn’t you have just treated that cut on your arm yourself? You presumably know how to treat wounds?’
‘Yes, of course I do,’ she said, but didn’t answer the question. Instead, she leaned forward at the table. ‘I’ll feel so safe once I’m back with David.’
Silence in the room.
Field looked between her and the camera, as if some unspoken message had passed through the wiring, through the walls, from one room to the next.
‘What do you mean, “safe”?’ Field asked.
The woman didn’t move.
‘You said you’d feel safe once you were back with David.’
A shrug. ‘David’s my husband.’
‘He’s says he’s not.’
‘Why would he say that?’
‘Because he says his wife died eight years ago.’
But she was already shaking her head. ‘No. No, that’s not right.’ She looked to the camera. ‘Why is he doing this? You said you would always keep me safe, D.’
‘What do you mean, “safe”?’ Field repeated. She’d come forward on her chair. ‘Are you saying you felt unsafe before this? Who was making you feel unsafe?’
‘It’s just a figure of speech,’ the woman said.
Field didn’t seem convinced. ‘Did someone try to hurt you?’
The woman saw that Field was looking at her arm again. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It was just an accident. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t mean it.’
Even from here, I could sense the air in the room change.
‘I was just being stupid.’
I leaned away from the monitor, repulsed, knowing where this was headed.
‘Did David do that to you?’ Field asked.
‘It wasn’t his fault,’ she said again, almost robotically. ‘He didn’t mean to.’
‘Did he cut you with a knife?’
The woman looked down at the table and started shaking her head. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, her voice quiet, and linked her fingers across her lap.
‘So you were going to get it looked at today?’
‘Yes. That was why David took me to the pharmacy.’
‘Why didn’t you treat it yourself?’
‘Because it’s hard dressing your own wounds.’
‘So why not go to a doctor or A&E instead of a pharmacy?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘David just said to me that a pharmacist would be the best place to start, and I trusted him. So he dropped me off outside and said he’d wait for me in the car.’
‘Why didn’t he go in with you?’
‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.’
‘And you got separated from David?’ Field pressed.
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘Just as I was about to go in, I looked back at the car and saw a traffic warden speaking to David. They were arguing. So I wandered a little closer to see what was happening and, as I did, I saw David start to pull the car out of the space, and then he drove off and left me.’ She looked at her hands, flat on the table. ‘I waited for a while, and then started to walk down the road in the direction I saw David go. But I couldn’t see him anywhere – and he never came back.’ Tears began pooling in the woman’s eyes again. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said to Field, her voice breaking up. ‘Why doesn’t David remember that?’
Field’s head dropped, eyeing her notes. Eventually, she said, ‘Why not just go straight back to your house?’
The woman wiped at her eyes.
‘I wanted to,’ she replied.
‘You could have got the Tube out to Ealing.’
Except she doesn’t know where Ealing is.
‘I don’t ride the Underground much,’ the woman said, still dabbing her eyes with a finger. ‘I’ve only been on it a few times. I’m not confident on it. But when David drove off, I didn’t know what else to do, so I went to the nearest station and the man there helped me buy a ticket to Charing Cross.’
‘Why Charing Cross?’
The woman screwed up her face again, as if pained. ‘Please,’ she said quietly, ‘I just want David to take me home. He knows that I get sick if I’m out too long.’
‘What do you mean, “sick”?’ Field asked her.
But the woman had started to sob. For the first time, I felt a stir of sympathy for her. She was like a lost child. I didn’t know who she was and why she was pretending to be Derryn, but it was obvious that she was ill – and not physically.
‘I don’t know why this is happening to me,’ she said, tears starting to fill her eyes again. ‘David’s my husband. We’ve been married for twenty-two years.’
We were married for fourteen years. It would have been twenty-two if Derryn had still been alive.
‘I started living with him at nineteen,’ the woman said, and broke into a smile. ‘Ask him about our first flat in Holloway. He’ll remember that. It was so small, but we loved it. We used to live directly behind an old cinema.’
The cinema wasn’t there any more, so how could she know? I started to wonder if Derryn had had a sister she hadn’t told me about, some close relative – a cousin perhaps – who looked a little like her. But that would have meant that she’d deliberately lied to me for the entire time that we were together and that her family had done the same, that they were all in on some secret that they’d decided to keep back from me, and I knew that wasn’t the case. I’d got on so well with her parents, and when her brother was home I’d got on well with him too, it was just none of them was around to ask now: her parents had died within a year of each other in the late nineties, and her brother had been killed in Basra in 2004 when an IED went off under his truck. There were no nieces, no nephews, no cousins. It had just been her and me.
‘David says you’re not Derryn,’ Field told her.
‘I don’t understand why he’s doing this to –’
But then she stopped; and a second later something sparked in her face, as if a light had snapped on.
‘Wait,’ she said, ‘he’s had these moments before.’
Field leaned closer. ‘Moments?’
‘These moments of denial.’ She turned to the camera again, her lips pressed together; saddened. ‘He’s needed medical help before. He must be confused again. That’s why he drove off and left me there. It’s come back.’
‘What’s come back?’
‘He had a nervous breakdown.’
‘This is bullshit,’ I said into the monitor, but the only reaction I got was from the officer at the door, who turned and looked in at me.
‘You’re saying David’s ill?’ Field asked.
‘He might try to deny it,’ the woman replied, ‘or might have forgotten entirely. But it’s his sickness talking. It’s returned.’ She put a hand to her mouth and started to cry properly. ‘Please don’t let it be this,’ she whimpered, her words barely audible now. ‘Please don’t let his mind have gone again.’
‘I’m not sick,’ I said, my words lost in the silence of the room.
Onscreen, the woman blinked, saying nothing else, her eyes wet, her face pale, and then Field came forward at the table, a deep frown on her face. She glanced at the notes she’d made. ‘David says his wife died of breast cancer in 2009.’
‘It’s his sickness,’ the woman told Field. ‘It must be.’
No. No, it’s not a sickness, it’s the truth.
Field, pencil poised above her pad, glanced at the camera, as if waiting for an answer. What? I thought, looking back at her. Are you seriously asking me this? I glanced over my shoulder, towards the door, anger humming beneath my skin. I didn’t want to be in here, in this cramped, overheated room, listening to all of these lies on headphones. I wanted to be inside that interview suite. I wanted to know what the hell was going on.
‘Everything that happened,’ the woman said, ‘it just destroyed him.’
I stared Field down as she looked at the camera again, even though I didn’t blame her for any of this: she was only asking the same questions I’d asked myself. Across the table from her, the woman sniffed, wiping her nose with a crumpled tissue, and as the audio feed became quiet, I closed my eyes and repeated what I knew to be true: On 26 November 2009, I woke up and Derryn was lying next to me in bed. She’d died in her sleep. I was due to take her to the hospice that day, because the doctor said she only had a week, maybe two at the most. I opened my eyes again. I felt tears coming. I tried to blink them away, tried to find some measure of control. She was so ill I didn’t know what to do for her. I couldn’t make her comfortable. She was in so much pain, it was … I was just … I …
‘David says his wife died in 2009.’
My thoughts fell away as Field started speaking again.
‘That’s not what happened,’ the woman said in a low voice. She gathered herself for a few seconds longer and, more controlled now, looked across the table at Field: ‘I was diagnosed for the first time in March 2007. I went through chemotherapy and it was successful – really successful – and I was given the all clear in October that year. After that, David moved to the States, to LA. The paper wanted him to cover the run-up to the election, first from the West Coast and then from Washington. He didn’t want to go, and the paper said he didn’t have to, but then I told him I would quit my job at the hospital and come with him, so I flew out to join him in November. I’d always wanted to go to America, especially Los Angeles. I’d barely been further than Europe.’
I realized I was holding my breath.
All of this was true.
‘We lived in Santa Monica,’ she went on, turning in her chair and looking up at the camera, as if she knew I was watching. ‘David will remember that. That place we rented just off Wilshire Boulevard, D?’ She glanced at Field. ‘It was a couple of blocks from the clinic that I worked in. It took me time to adjust to LA, but I loved it eventually.’
Field looked sideways at the camera. I’d given her a brief history of my marriage, of the time Derryn and I had spent abroad – and this was it. This was what I’d told her – more than what I’d told her. The woman knew everything.
‘How do you know all of that?’ Field asked the woman, echoing my thoughts.
‘Because I was there.’
‘David says you can’t have been.’
‘Because I’m not his wife?’
‘Right.’
‘This is crazy,’ she replied. ‘He knows I was. I came out to the States with him and we loved it. We were so happy. Then, in March 2008, the cancer came back a second time.’ She paused, swallowed; looked at Field. ‘I got my treatment in America for that, because the oncologist where I worked – Leon Singer, a man who went on to become a great friend of ours – pulled some strings and did the treatment for virtually nothing – and, again, I beat it. We moved to Washington in late September, early October, so that David could cover the elections from there, and then – after the elections were over – we moved back home to the UK, in late November.’
Silence.
Field looked sideways at the camera again and I saw conflict in her eyes, a mirror image of how she’d looked in the moments before leaving me to go into the interview suite. There were clear signs of doubt now as she started to wonder if it was the woman telling the truth, not me.
‘The cancer came back in April 2009,’ the woman said softly, looking down at the table, the fingers of one hand gripped at the edge of it. ‘It had spread. Things were a lot worse this time. I didn’t know if I could go through another round of treatment. I told D I wasn’t sure I could face it. I was so tired.’ She looked up, tears glistening in her eyes. ‘He kept saying I should do it, over and over: “You should do it, you should do it.” We sat in the bedroom, on the edge of the bed, and he took my hand and he begged me to do it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to live, it was just I was so tired of it all. The doctors, the hospital visits, the sickness, the recovery, the constant fear that it would come back again. It had hollowed me out. I loved David more than anything in the world, but I was so tired.’ She wiped at an eye. ‘So I started it, but then I changed my mind. I told him I loved him, but I couldn’t go through it all again. I just couldn’t do it.’
I could hardly rip my gaze away from the woman. How was this possible? I looked at her in the monitor, my throat tremoring. How the hell did she know all of this? There was no way she should have been able to recite this stuff. Most of it had been private conversations.
Unless she’d known Derryn somehow.
Onscreen, she turned and looked up at me.
‘See?’ she said. ‘It’s me, D. It’s Derryn. It’s time to take me home again.’
I tried not to cry. I tried not to let her get to me. However she was doing this, I didn’t want it to work. I knew she wasn’t the woman I loved – I could see that, I could feel it – and yet I couldn’t stop myself. She looked enough like Derryn, seemed to speak enough like her – she knew everything we’d done together; the things we’d said – that finally, reluctantly, it became too much: I felt a tear break from my eye.
‘I know why he thinks I died,’ she said.
‘Because he’s sick again?’ Field asked, a hint of scepticism lingering in her voice.
‘Yes. Even now, he can still get confused sometimes.’
‘About what?’
‘About everything. I didn’t die. It’s true, I stopped the treatment for a short time, but then I started it again when I saw how it was destroying him, just like he wanted me to. And it worked this time. It really worked. The cancer hasn’t come back.’
‘He says that’s not true,’ Field said.
‘It is.’
I felt more tears falling.
‘After that third time, after I told him I wasn’t going to carry on with the treatment, that I couldn’t face any more of it, he had a breakdown – and by the time I started the chemo again it was too late. I thought I would be saving us both, but he was already too far gone. He was already in treatment himself by that time and spent the next fifteen months being seen at St Augustine’s. Do you know where that is?’
‘No,’ Field replied.
‘It’s on the river,’ the woman said.
‘The river? Do you mean the Thames?’
‘Yes. About a mile from where the planes take off.’
There was only one airport by the Thames: London City.
I shook my head, trying to clear my eyes, impotent in front of the monitor, unable to affect the direction or flow of the conversation. She doesn’t know the name of the river or the name of the airport, I wanted to tell Field. How can you trust her?
‘He saw a doctor there.’
‘A doctor?’
‘Yes. Erik McMillan. Erik with a k.’
The scepticism was gone now: the naming of the hospital, the doctor – Field’s doubts were back and they were absolutely real.
‘Over time, it got so bad that he stopped recognizing me. He kept telling me that I wasn’t his wife, that his wife had died. I begged him to stop it, tried to tell him I’d decided to have the treatment after all and it had worked, but he wouldn’t have it.’
‘You’re lying,’ I said, my fingernails digging into the desk.
‘He kept saying I was dead.’
I stared at Field, willed her to hear me. She’s lying. It’s all lies.
‘David’s records will still be at St Augustine’s,’ she said to Field, ‘so you’ll be able to see I’m not making this up.’ She looked at the camera again, her head tilted to one side as if she could actually see me; as if she felt sorry for who I’d become. ‘He had his breakdown, and he stopped recognizing me. When I was around him, he would say I wasn’t his wife, I wasn’t Derryn. He would say I was an impostor. He wouldn’t sleep in the same bed as me. He used to scream at me sometimes, asking me who I was and what I was doing in his home. It was only after working with Dr McMillan that he got better.’
None of this is true.
‘All of it’s true,’ she said, as if she’d actually heard me, and then she repeated herself more forcefully, ‘all of it’s true. In the years since his treatment, ninety-nine per cent of the time he’s been fine. But, occasionally, he has lapses. Occasionally, he’ll still have these terrible, hurtful moments. I walk into a room sometimes and he goes a little crazy. He starts shouting and screaming at me for no reason.’
She held up her bandaged wrist.
This was who I’d become, according to her.
This was her evidence.
‘Sometimes he still says I’m not Derryn.’
Field took me to an interview suite.
It was large and cold, the walls plain, the heating yet to kick in. She got a uniformed constable to make me a coffee and then asked if I was okay to wait. I could have walked away and gone home, I wasn’t under arrest, but there seemed little point. I needed to find out who this woman was, why she was lying, and how she knew so much about my life with Derryn – and the best way for me to do that was by quizzing Field.
As I waited, I tried to get my thinking straight.
If the woman genuinely believed that she was Derryn, for whatever reason, that suggested some kind of mental health problem. It was possible the woman had spent all, or part, of the eight years that she claimed to have been living with me being treated at a facility somewhere. It was possible it had been St Augustine’s, the place she’d mentioned to Field, and this was why she’d brought it up. Or it could be much simpler than that: she could be a liar and all her lies were to serve some other purpose. For now, I couldn’t imagine what.
There was so much about her that I found disconcerting, and not just the fact that her resemblance to Derryn was genuine and striking. Grief had turned the memories of my wife into a sort of photograph album, individual moments pinned in my mind; clear snapshots of occasions and the way the two of us had felt about them. After so long, I didn’t recall where every freckle on Derryn’s cheeks had been; rather, what I remembered of our marriage were things like the two of us going to Brighton one summer and laughing so hard that Derryn accidentally snorted candyfloss up her nose. I remembered, as a journalist, working all night on a story about corruption in the Home Office and thinking it was so important, then meeting Derryn for breakfast the next morning and finding out that she’d had four children die in A&E overnight. Seeing the anguish on her face, I realized my story didn’t matter at all, not compared to that, and even now I could recall the sadness of that breakfast, like a prickle in my skin. I had no memory of what she looked like that morning, though she would have been in her uniform and probably had her hair up, but I’d never forget the way it felt, the sadness of it, the helplessness that came with knowing I could do nothing to comfort her.
When I’d looked at the woman in the interview suite, I’d seen an echo of my wife. It was why, at first, my legs had almost given way, why my heart had felt like it was escaping my chest. But it wasn’t her. I’d seen the differences physically – they were minor, but they were there in the lips, in the shape of the nose, in the jaw – but I’d felt them too. None of the memories of my wife reverberated back to me when I heard the woman speak; I didn’t feel the tingle in my skin, the unspoken, automatic charge of electricity that Derryn and I had shared for the sixteen years we’d been together. And that, as much as the physical disparities, was why I knew. That was why I knew I’d shared nothing with this woman – not a single memory; nothing like that day in Brighton, or the heartache of that breakfast. I knew it in my blood.
So who was she?
She knew about conversations Derryn and I had had, the pet name my wife had given me, the things I’d said in private. She knew all about Derryn’s illness, when it had happened and where, even the name of Leon Singer, the oncologist we’d become friends with in the US. The account that she gave of our time in America, Derryn’s work at the Santa Monica clinic, the way – four months after we got back to the UK – the cancer returned for a third time and I begged her to go through the chemo again, it was all true. And if she knew that much, it was a fair bet that she knew more.
Perturbed, I checked my watch.
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A few moments later, Field entered.
‘Well, this is a bit of a mess,’ she said, and handed me a coffee.
‘Only if you actually believe what she’s telling you.’
Field didn’t respond.
‘Do you believe what she’s telling you?’
Field pulled the chair out from under the table, its legs making a dull scratching sound on the carpet.
‘All I know for sure is that one of you is lying to me.’