“I don’t know,” she says finally, her beautiful features puckering into a well-groomed frown. “I don’tknowhow that makes me feel, Emma. Should I?”
I shift in my seat, crossing my legs the other way now, rearranging my notepad.
“That’s okay, Bahareh.” I let the rich sound of her Iranian name roll off my tongue. “Honestly, sometimes it’s okay not to know. That’s why we’re here today, after all.” I pause. “Why don’t you just tell me what happened at your mother-in-law’s this weekend. How did all of that go?” I urge her on.
She stares out of the window for a moment, her wedding rings sparkling in the refracting light as she takes a deep breath, and then she continues to tell me her problems.
People are endlessly fascinating. Bahareh’s been coming to see me for six weeks now. Her husband is cheating on her. But that’s not the problem as far as she sees it; the problem for her is that she doesn’t care about his infidelities—that’s what bothers her more than anything else. She’d said that in the stillness of our first session together. “Surely I should care, shouldn’t I?”
My private practice opened two months ago on Harley Street. It’s small but perfect, a beautifully furnished consultation room in buttery creams and taupe with state-of-the-art tech and an imposing marble lobby. I have twelve regular weekly clients already and my hourly fees are high, so I can pick and choose. And I only work nine to five now.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without the money I received from Peter and the government after Matthew’s death. The compensation money I got. Gratitude money. Hush money. Call it what you want.
It was four months ago that Matthew died cradled in my arms.
I look down at my hands resting on the notepad as Bahareh tells me about her nephew’s birthday. My right hand and wrist have permanent nerve damage. I’ve tried to hide the burn marks, the slashes of silvering scar tissue that loop my wrists, with bracelets and the sleeves of my cashmere sweater. I needed minor operations on both hands to remove the fused plastic from my burnt flesh. The joints in my right hand, though reset, ache at night, and when I grip anything too hard these days the pain sears right through me. It always will. A fitting reminder never to hold on to anything too hard in the future, I suppose—people, places, the past.
Bahareh lifts her low ponytail off one shoulder, smooths it onto the other, and pauses. No, she doesn’t want to talk about the conversation she had with her mother-in-law before the cake came out.
“It’s okay. This is a safe space,” I reassure her. “She’s not here. This is your time to talk about whateveryouwant. About howyoufeel.”
She nods, and her beautiful eyes continue to play across the London rooftops beyond my windows.
I fell asleep holding Matthew that day. Exhaustion, shock, adrenal fatigue. When I woke up, his body lay cold and heavy in my arms. I don’t know how long we’d been like that, his thickened blood pooling out around us, framing us against the snow in a circle of blazing red. The light was fading when Peter finally arrived, but the police who arrived with him weren’t any I recognized.
Chris was nowhere to be seen. Later I’d find out that he’d been searching for me for hours, along byroads and lanes; he’d even headed back to Cuckoo Lodge, checked the house. My phone was full of missed calls from him. And missed calls from Peter too.
Peter had been trying to track me down since that morning when I’d first left the hospital in the car with Rhoda. He called and called, my phone still on silent, and when he realized he couldn’t get hold of me he’d instructed the hospital to page me immediately. But that page came too late.
Richard Groves had alerted Peter to Matthew’s identity that morning. Richard had called Peter highly concerned; he’d finally had a free moment to look at the medical report that I’d emailed him two days before, my report on Matthew. At first, Richard assumed the CT scans I sent him were some kind of joke—that I’d sent him old scans of one of his own previous patients, the Unknown Young Male case. He recognized the placement of the pituitary tumor immediately and checked his old records: the scans were an exact match two decades apart. And that is when he’d realized that I hadn’t sent the scans as a joke at all, that I must not be aware, that I had no idea who my patient really was. And, given the unstable nature of the patient Richard knew twenty years previously, he’d called Peter immediately to warn him that I might be at risk.
The police I didn’t recognize carefully helped me out from under Matthew’s body. With gloved hands they’d bagged my clothes and given me new warm ones, erecting an incident tent around Matthew’s lifeless body. A medic in a dark uniform carefully dressed my wounds.
Peter took me back into the house for a “delicate” conversation, warm tea held in my confused and shaky hands. Options were given to me and I made my choice.
Damage limitation was agreed upon.
We decided on a story. Or rather Peter gave me his.
Matthew took his own life. He stole a car belonging to one of the nurses at Princess Margaret’s, Rhoda Madiza, he drove that car to the childhood home of his doctor, whom he’d become obsessed with and overly dependent on, and he’d taken his own life. Just a confused man, a desperate man with mental health problems. They could even arrange a typed suicide note. The irony smarts. I ended up doing to him exactly what he planned for me. He jumped from the roof of the house and didn’t even try to break his fall.
And my part in all of that story? After realizing Matthew was missing from the hospital, I’d headed to the wrong place to find him. The beach. The place I assumed he’d return to. By the time I’d worked out my mistake and made it to the house, a place I’d mentioned to him only the day before, Matthew was already dead. What could anyone have done? We didn’t realize until too late how unhappy he was, but sometimes it’s impossible to tell. Tragically, the story goes, Matthew died before we could find out who he was.
I lied. On the record, in my statements to the police, to everyone. Peter led me back outside and I said what Peter told me to say to the officers, in the driveway of my old family home, shivering in the sharp January evening. Damage limitation, Peter called it. I think of the press, of the mistakes I made, and the errors made by Peter, Groves, Rhoda, Nick Dunning, and Dr. Samuels, the military psychiatrist. Matthew slipped through all of our fingers. It’s understandable that some people wouldn’t want the truth to come out. Who would the truth benefit, anyway? I lied—for Peter, yes, but mainly for myself.
Mr. Nobody’s case was investigated, though. Two days after the incident, once I was safely back in London, Peter arrived with plainclothes officers at my flat. They asked questions and Peter told me to tell them everything I had told him. I would not be implicated and any information relating to open cases would be unconnected with the official Matthew story. They wanted to know about Mr. Nobody. So I told them everything Mr. Nobody had told me, about the murders he had committed, about his past, the missing soldier, how I got to the top of Richard Groves’s list in the first place. That afternoon the real Stephen Merriman’s body was found in his tiny bedsit off Russell Square. He had been dead for over two months, his remains shoved into a suitcase in a closet. The murder was reported in the news but not in connection to Matthew.
Matthew killed the real Stephen before taking his identity and moving to Norfolk. The officers said he may have found Lillian first before choosing to take Stephen’s identity. Matthew needed someone that no one would miss but that had a strong connection to Norfolk. Everyone knew Lillian had a son, but he was in London and they’d never really met him. With Lillian in the late stages of dementia, it was easy for Matthew to take Stephen’s place in her affections. Matthew had chosen the perfect identity for what he needed. He moved into Lillian’s empty house as her son, and while she was away in her care home he started to gather information on me, on all of us; he planned each step out meticulously. Knowing he wouldn’t recall hardly anything from before his self-inflicted reset, he laid a careful trail for himself before he set it all in motion. He left addresses for Lillian’s house and my old house on a phone that he buried on an evening visit to the hospital just before Lillian passed on the elderly care ward. Later the officers investigating his case would tell me Matthew’s phone showed he had been to Cuckoo Lodge, the night Chris was there, the night the news broke about my real identity. Thankfully, I was protected; it was the one night I wasn’t there alone. It was only luck that Zara broke her story that evening and I suddenly had police protection; she made me safe without even realizing it. Matthew remembered just enough and needed to get me on my own. He must have collected whatever he needed from Lillian’s and headed out to find me. But he couldn’t get to me that night, so he had to head back to the hospital. If I didn’t know what I know about Matthew, I might wonder at how he got in and out so easily, but if you spend your whole life disappearing you’re bound to get good at it. He knew what he needed to do. He lined up the dominoes, stepped back, and tapped them. And all to find me, to get me to fix him somehow.
No one believed Nigel Wilton’s suggestion that Matthew was Stephen. A story flared briefly in theBrancaster Timesand had a sideline in some of the more salacious tabloids but quickly disappeared. It was easy for people to disregard Nigel’s version of events as the well-meaning but befuddled ramblings of a sweet old man. And when Stephen’s decomposing body was discovered in his London bedsit, Nigel’s story was roundly dropped.
Stories have surfaced since about other murders. I am still in contact with Peter and receive the odd fact-checking phone call from the officers I spoke to with him. They found the remains of missing Royal Anglian Regiment soldier Phillip Andrews about three weeks after our chat. He was found in woodland at Thetford Forest Park, twenty miles from the military base he signed out of on leave over a year previously. Another one of Matthew’s identities. When I saw his face on the news I couldn’t help see the similarities. Of course, that’s why he chose him. No wife, no kids, one-bed flat, kept himself to himself. Neither the base nor Andrews’s extended family had seen him since he signed out. The situation was bound to raise a few eyebrows at the MOD, an officer returning from Afghanistan and disappearing off the face of the earth, a court-martial-able offense and certainly worth investigating. Whether the MOD thought Andrews had deserted or defected the day they arrived at the hospital I do not know, but when they didn’t find Andrews in that consultation room but instead just a man who looked vaguely like him, their work there was done.
And I found out what Matthew did to get me to the top of that list. To ensure that Groves picked me. The investigation has yet to find the missing doctor, Tom Lister; he disappeared after returning home from a backpacking holiday in Sri Lanka last October. Although, looking at Tom’s photograph online, I seriously wonder if he made it onto that plane back to Heathrow. Looking at him with Matthew’s eyes, he would have been a good match. The last CCTV footage of him leaving Heathrow Airport is grainy, and perhaps it’s my imagination, but the tall, dark-haired man caught on film has the same familiar set of shoulders, the same familiar gait, and I can’t help wondering if Tom ever actually came back from his trip.
But I kept quiet. It was surprisingly easy to lie, although I hated lying to Joe, to Mum. I’ve put them through enough over the years, the least I can do is protect them from more fallout.
Thankfully, Mum has been all right since the news about our family broke. Her friends were so supportive when they found out who Mum’s husband used to be, they rallied around her, protective and unimpeachable. I can’t believe how wrong I got them. They were there for her, her rocks, and they couldn’t understand why she’d kept something so big a secret from them.
