Chapter 23
To:
[email protected] August 11
From:
[email protected] Subject: Need to talk
Dear Charles,
I’m sorry to bombard you with emails this week. I have to admit to feeling particularly low since my altercation with Jessica, and particularly vulnerable, if I’m allowed to admit to such a thing. I was wondering if you could find time this week to meet up for a drink? This would be friend to friend and not a professional call – not couples’ therapy – I wouldn’t want to drag our friendship through that thorny hedge. I just want to talk to someone who can get my point of view. From the damage she did, Jessica clearly didn’t understand me and never has. She was always very breezy when mentioning Emma, saying she was fine to discuss her with me. She did not realise that the problem wasn’t her feelings but mine. I can’t talk about something so vital to me. It’s like amputating my own arm, something you do only in survival situations like that mountaineer. In fact, you’ll recognise that this email is maybe the first time I’ve really mentioned it to you. I’ve tried to keep it all to myself, but now the pain of it all is just spilling out.
Sorry. I’ve got to maintain my sanity. I can’t let myself break – that would embarrass both of us. It helps me very much, though, that you remember Emma. So few people in my life now do. You remember what I was like after I met her at that conference in my college on youth psychology? I couldn’t stop talking about her, how she owned any room she walked into, how her wit enchanted me. Forgive the romantic widower and his nostalgia but I remember thinking at the time that the turn of her cheek, the style of her hair had a kind of pure beauty you find only in Renaissance portraits – a hint of something eternal. That’s why I loved that photo of her taken at her graduation years before I knew her: it captured all that in one quick click of the camera. I didn’t have a digital copy so it’s gone for good, I suspect.
As for what came next, line up the clichés because they describe exactly what I felt in her presence: struck dumb, love at first sight, instant connection, soul mate, a fool for love. I’ve struggled to find a less hackneyed phrase, something that plays in your context, and all I can come up with is how a dose of amphetamines makes you feel – focused, intent, hooked – like Dorothy entering Oz, going from greyscale to colour. Remember how we ate them like sweets when we were cramming for our finals back in the ’90s? Jesus, we were cavalier about our health in those days. Well, drugs were long in my rear-view mirror when I met Emma and she still gave me that same buzz. I knew within twenty-four hours that I wanted to marry her – so traditional of me but I told myself it would be the only way of stopping her going on to someone else – or back to that nutcase she had just dumped in the woods. I couldn’t bear the thought of that. I lived in fear that someone else would also notice how amazing she was and give her a better offer than I could manage as a rather old-for-her university don, so within a month I’d hurried her off to Las Vegas and we were married in a chapel there – not by an Elvis impersonator, I hasten to add, but by a decent officiator during a tasteful wedding vacation at Caesar’s Palace, two strangers as witnesses. You would’ve hated it but it suited us.
Am I looking back at Emma through rose-coloured spectacles? Probably. Undoubtedly. Over the past five years, when Jessica has been especially difficult, I’ve reminded myself that I’m attracted to that kind of woman: complex, clever, emotionally subtle. Emma and I had less than two years together so who’s to say I wouldn’t have found the strains emerging in our relationship too – I must be ruthlessly honest with myself. But fate would have it that I only had her for those glorious first year followed by the heart-wrenching final months. She’s destined to live on, preserved in my memory as a kind of perfection. I am not completely insensitive: I can understand how Jessica found my attitude difficult to live with and that might’ve sparked her jealous rage. But I can’t forgive her for turning on the few mementoes I had of my marriage. It’s unspeakably low of her.
Emma left me an emotional legacy that I couldn’t cope with at the time. Grief made me a complete mess and I’m forever grateful for your clear-sighted advice that I had to heal before I could do anything else. Today I’m realising that I never really mended because, when I emerged from mourning, I took on Jessica and look where that led.
Regards
Michael
To:
[email protected] August 11
From:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Need to talk
Dear Michael,
Thank you for your email – that seems a trite opening but I actually mean it when I write that this time. Despite the turmoil of the last few days, I’m relieved to see that your break-up with Jessica has been the catalyst to you opening up to talk about Emma. I’ve long worried that you’ve suppressed your loss and that it was making itself felt in other ways. If I’m allowed a cliché of my own, better out than in. I know you weren’t thinking of our meeting as a therapy session – God forbid: with whom am I able to talk PGA golf if not you? – but I would urge that you seek out a grief counsellor. I can give you some names if this feels right for you. I’ll say this much now, though: you aren’t to feel guilty for not being able to cope at the time of Emma’s death. I’ve never seen a man more gutted by someone’s passing. You weren’t able to take on anything more than the responsibility of getting yourself back in a fit state to function, and in many ways that is an ongoing situation. You couldn’t carry the burden Emma left you and you can’t carry Jessica’s when you are still weighed down by your own.
I’m afraid I have some bad news on the Jessica front. She’s dismissed me as her therapist. My fear is that she won’t seek out another qualified psychiatrist and will end up just going to her GP to keep her prescription running. I doubt he will know how to treat someone with Jessica’s condition and he’ll just keep the pills ticking over. That would be a bad move. I tell you now in confidence that I was intending to develop the cognitive behavioural therapy part of her treatment to modify her impulsive tendencies and ease back on the pills as there were signs she was using them erratically. They do have potential side effects, including hallucinations and paranoia in some patients, so it may be that some of her behaviour is not a sign of further mental disorder but a reaction to her medication. It may have reached an extreme point if she’s taking her feelings out on things she associates with you, like the bed and belongings. In rare cases, the patients have periods of selective amnesia. I was going to explore that with her but now I can’t. If you can negotiate a peace with her, that might help me make these points without it appearing as me taking your part in your difficulties.
And yes, of course I can make time for you this week. Friday at my club?
Charles
Chapter 24
Jessica
The picture of Jacob, Emma and the child smiles out at me from Jacob’s desktop. It is the same as the photo in his house, the one where Emma is turning away as if she wants to avoid the lens. How had I never seen this at the office? Jacob was very familiar with the cat-who-looks-like-Einstein that I had as my wallpaper. Sitting with my tea cooling in the cup, I think back and remember those times sharing the same small office space. Jacob never left his computer open and always had it facing away from me. He was like Emma in that, trying to avoid the direct gaze. He probably got a thrill from the risk.
‘What were you up to, Jacob?’ I whisper.
It takes me a while to work out where he kept his work files. First, I have to open and dismiss a whole lot of documents in which he seems obsessed with corrupt global business, land grabbers and polluters. I’m interested in something much more local. I then have the idea – something I really should’ve thought of first – to see what he was working on most recently. Rejigging the files to ‘date modified’, a folder comes to the top called ‘Harrison’. I’m guessing this is nothing to do with the Beatle.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I cannot believe what I’m reading! I find that he has detailed, point by point, intersections between Michael’s life and the girls he asked me to investigate. Can this be real?
I read it through several times but the times and dates do seem to stack up.
With my pulse racing, I look further into the files. Oh Christ, he mentions me too, saying he wondered if I’d make the connection but notes that I didn’t, or at least, ‘not visibly’.
Of course, I didn’t, because there is no connection to make, is there?
Is there?
I’m being dragged into his crazy fantasy. Stop it, Jessica. You started this to find out more about his relationship with Emma, not to be dragged into The Insane World of Jacob.
But there’s nothing about Emma in there. Reading on, I discover that Jacob really has gone overboard. He thinks Michael is some kind of serial-killer-cum-sex-offender and the missing girls are in a shallow grave in a forest somewhere. Why would he think that?
I look up to find life carrying on around me, plates served, drinks poured. Wonderful, sane, ordinary life. I can’t believe this. This is mental! I wish I could say it’s like some psycho’s diary, only it’s not rambling and incoherent, it’s ruthlessly logical.
Oh God, there’s more on me in here too, in a sub folder. I click on that.
My jaw drops. Here is my pathetic application for the job, detailing all my personal information, no surprise there. But Jacob has also written what he calls ‘an assessment’ of me. In this, he admits that he knew about Eastfields and was only employing me to watch what I did. He was coming round to thinking I was complicit in Michael’s sexual perversions, either because I ‘wilfully turned a blind eye or because I actively aided and abetted’. Eastfields fitted with the second of these two theories. He doesn’t spell out the accusations against me but from his insinuations he knows things I thought only I and a select few were party to.
I feel sick and exposed. Ashamed.
Shaking, I try and sort out my confused thoughts. What have I learned? Jacob seems to have had some grand idea about Michael and me, seeing us as embodiments of evil. Me, he thinks morally evil, failing in my duty to protect the weak – meaning the girls who fall into Michael’s path; but it’s Michael for whom he saves his strongest words. In his last entry, on the very day he was murdered, Jacob writes that Michael, like so many wrongdoers, has ‘an egotistical sense that he is justified or allowed to commit heinous acts. He doesn’t scrutinise; he indulges himself in a false sense of entitlement.’ In sum, Michael’s arrogance means he takes what he wants without any consideration of the harm he does, and I’ve been shutting my eyes to it.
How could Jacob have thought that about me? He knew me better than that, didn’t he? So it must be total rubbish about Michael, right? Jacob has to be insane.
But now he’s dead. The police haven’t ruled out murder.
I’m so confused. I look again at his long final entry. Jacob clearly expects his life to be in danger if Michael hears of his investigation. Did I do that? Did I unwittingly tip Michael off that a private detective was coming his way?
I rerun in my mind my argument with Michael in Minorca. We’d been sitting over breakfast on the terrace, the ‘hello, sailor’ Mediterranean mocking us that we weren’t having as good a time as the brochure promised. Michael’s friend, a TV producer, owns a villa that is predictably fabulous – terracotta-tiled floors, biscuit-coloured walls, hand-carved furniture, a frozen explosion of bougainvillaea from pots, streams of purple stars over arbours, and an eternity pool that even I enjoyed swimming in. Michael had been looking particularly handsome in his sun-tanned god-man way in navy shorts and white shirt. If only it had been the beginning of our relationship and not the end, we could’ve put that pool to good use. I remember thinking that he would’ve made the advertising photo but I, with my sunburnt shoulders and not-beach-ready body, would’ve been airbrushed out. How unsuitable we have devolved to look as a pair. He’d turned away from me when I’d angled for sex that morning, which made me feel about as desirable as takeaway leftovers at the back of the fridge.
Never reheat rice, I remember my mum saying. Never try to reheat a relationship, I might now add. It only ends with a horrible feeling in the pit of your could-lose-a-few-inches stomach.
‘It would be nice if for once you took me out for dinner,’ grumbled Michael, still fretting about the expensive seafood meal we’d consumed in Mahon the night before.
‘Did you know that Mahon is the origin of mayonnaise?’ I quipped, hoping to change the subject away from my economic failure.
‘Can’t you stay on topic for two minutes, Jessica? Are you remembering to take those pills Charles gave you?’
‘Mother’s little helper.’
‘What?’
‘Rolling Stones, Michael. Their song on housewife addiction. It’s really quite famous and even before your time.’ I wafted my heated cheeks with the floppy sunhat that hadn’t done well in the suitcase.
‘You’re not a housewife. I don’t know what you are, but I know you’re not that. Our house is in a continual state of mess. I spend all my time tidying up after you.’ He stabbed at his phone, checking emails even though we were on holiday and we’d both pledged to dump the electronics.
‘You do not.’
‘Mud on the stairs? Who was that? I always take my shoes off in the porch.’
I rubbed my temples, feeling the headache slink out of hiding and steal the best seat in my brain like an early-bird sunbather covering a poolside lounger with his towel. ‘OK, OK, I admit it, m’lord, yes I did forget to take my shoes off last week. I’d forgotten my handbag and I was late for work.’
‘Late for work? Jesus, Jessica, why don’t you just drop the charade! You sit in a cafe and make yourself look busy. You no more have a proper job than I’m a Buddhist monk.’
‘Then prepare to say Om. It’s a part-time profiling job, as you well know, and I’m very lucky to have it.’
‘Stop this. Just admit that you invented it.’
‘How can I have invented it? I have a salary.’
‘Really? How much?’
My wage was just above the minimum level and Michael scoffed at even that.
‘I just don’t believe anyone would take you on, not after what you did.’
Would he never let that go? Hadn’t I paid enough already, both career-wise and mentally? ‘Jacob has. He didn’t even ask about that.’
‘Jacob Wrath is a chimera.’
‘He is not.’
‘Then explain why I’ve never met him, why no one has ever heard of him when I ask around, why he never answers the so-called office phone when I ring.’
‘He’s… he’s busy.’
‘No, he’s a phantom of your overheated imagination. Looking for runaways? That’s not even a very convincing invention, Jessica. You can do better than that!’
‘Michael, if you’d just come with me to work one day, right into the office, I’ll prove he exists. And the work – it’s real.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Look, I developed the website.’
‘Anyone can make one of those.’
‘And he’s got me investigating these four cases of missing girls.’ I reeled off the names, not noticing then that Michael went quiet. ‘I think I might even have made a breakthrough on one of them.’
He stood up, throwing his napkin on the breakfast table, a gauntlet challenge. ‘You are fucking kidding me. You think you’re some kind of FBI profiler now?’
‘Don’t rubbish my work just because you don’t understand it!’ I stood up, a shade too late to look strong and sure of myself.
‘Of course I understand it. I’m the expert in this area.’ Out came the accusatory finger, pointing at me. ‘You wouldn’t have a clue how to do it. I’ve had enough. You pack in this whole pretence or we’re through.’
‘You can’t stand anyone else sharing your limelight, can you?’ I folded my a
rms.
‘Limelight? Jessica, don’t kid yourself. You are in the dark and getting more and more lost.’
‘I’m not, you egotistical ape! I’m getting myself together but you just want to push me back down.’
‘I’ve not pushed you anywhere. It’s you, trying to cling to my coattails the whole time, living off me, not supporting me in my career but asking me to baby you in yours.’
‘I’m not asking to be babied. I occasionally ask for help but that’s normal. That’s what couples who love each other do.’
He skated over the mention of the ‘L’ word. ‘And where did your vocation in teaching lead? Disaster. You are frankly a liability to any employer – a complete fucking waste of space!’
There were so many untruths in that statement, I didn’t know how to begin a rebuttal. ‘I suppose you’re going to say it’s all about me?’
‘Isn’t it? You’re totally obsessed with yourself and can’t see the damage you do to others.’
‘Right back at you, mate.’
‘Shut the fuck up, Jessica!’ He strode away and we didn’t speak again unless there were others present.
I agonised about his accusations, of course, for the rest of the week, wondering if I had been unreasonable in my demands on him, if I was a liability. I knew already I was hell to live with, that I had gone very wrong at Eastfields, but I thought Michael had realised what he was taking on when we moved in together. He was a psychologist, for God’s sake! He should’ve recognised I was always going to be prone to impulsive mistakes. I didn’t get why he was so sure I was inventing my job.