I spent most of the day sitting at my desk with the lights off. The telephone rang a couple of times, but I left it, listening to it echo around the office. A year ago, to the day, Derryn had been carried out of our house on a stretcher. She’d died seven hours later. Because of that, I knew I wasn’t in the right state of mind to consider taking on any work, so when the clock hit four, I started to pack up.
That was when Mary Towne arrived.
I could hear someone coming up the stairs, slowly taking one step at a time. Eventually the top door clicked and creaked open. She was sitting in the waiting area when I looked through. I’d known Mary for a few years. She used to work in A with Derryn. Her life had been fairly tragic as welclass="underline" her husband suffered from Alzheimer’s, and her son had left home six years earlier without telling anyone. He eventually turned up dead.
‘Hi, Mary.’
I startled her. She looked up. Her skin was darkened by creases, every one of her fifty years etched into her face. She must have been beautiful once, but her life had been pushed and pulled around and now she wore the heartache like an overcoat. Her small figure had become slightly stooped. The colour had started to drain from her cheeks and her lips. Thick ribbons of grey had begun to emerge from her hairline.
‘Hello, David,’ she said quietly. ‘How are you?’
‘Good.’ I shook her hand. ‘It’s been a while.’
‘Yes.’ She looked down into her lap. ‘A year.’
She meant Derryn’s funeral.
‘How’s Malcolm?’
Malcolm was her husband. She glanced at me and shrugged.
‘You’re a long way from home,’ I said.
‘I know. I needed to see you.’
‘Why?’
‘I wanted to discuss something with you.’
I tried to imagine what.
‘I couldn’t get you on the telephone.’
‘No.’
‘I called a couple of times.’
‘It’s kind of a…’ I looked back to my office. To the pictures of Derryn. ‘It’s kind of a difficult time for me at the moment. Today, in particular.’
She nodded. ‘I know it is. I’m sorry about the timing, David. It’s just… I know you care about what you’re doing. This job. I need someone like that. Someone who cares.’ She glanced at me again. ‘That’s why people like you. You understand loss.’
‘I’m not sure you ever understand loss.’ I looked up, could see the sadness in her face, and wondered where this was going. ‘Look, Mary, at the moment I’m not tracing anything — just the lines on my desk.’
She nodded once more. ‘You remember what happened to Alex?’
Alex was her son.
‘Of course.’
‘You remember all the details?’
‘Most of them.’
‘Would you mind if I went back over them?’ she asked.
I paused, looked at her.
‘Please.’
I nodded. ‘Why don’t we go through?’
I led her out of the waiting area and back to my desk. She looked around at the photos on the walls, her eyes moving between them.
‘Take a seat,’ I said, pulling a chair out for her.
She nodded her thanks.
‘So, tell me about Alex.’
‘You remember that he died in a car crash just over a year ago,’ she said quietly, as I sat down opposite her. ‘And, uh… that he was drunk. He drove a Toyota, like his father used to have, right into the side of a lorry. It was only a small car. It ended up fifty feet from the road, in the middle of a field; burnt to a shell, like him. They had to identify him from dental records.’
I didn’t know about the dental records.
She composed herself. ‘But you know what the worst bit was? That before he died, he’d just disappeared. We hadn’t seen him for five years. After everything we’d done as a family, he just… disappeared.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘The only thing he left me with was the memory of his body lying on a mortuary slab. I’ll never get that image out of my head. I used to open my eyes in the middle of the night and see him standing like that next to my bed.’
Her eyes glistened.
‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ I said again.
‘You met Alex, didn’t you?’
She took out a photograph. I hadn’t ever met him, only heard about him through Derryn. She handed me the picture. She was in it, her arms around a man in his early twenties. Handsome. Black hair. Green eyes. Probably five-eleven, but built like he might once have been a swimmer. There was a huge smile on his face.
‘This is Alex. Was Alex. This is the last picture we ever took of him, down in Brighton.’ She nodded towards the photograph and smiled. ‘That was a couple of days before he left.’
‘It’s a nice picture.’
‘He was gone five years before he died.’
‘Yes, you said.’
‘In all that time, we never once heard from him.’
‘I’m really sorry, Mary,’ I said for a third time, feeling like I should say something more.
‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s why you’re my only hope.’
I looked at her, intrigued.
‘I don’t want to sound like a mother who can’t get over the fact that her son is dead. Believe me, I know he’s dead. I saw what was left of him.’ She paused. I thought she might cry, but then she pulled her hair back from her face, and her eyes were darker, more focused. ‘Three months ago, I left work late, and when I got to the station I’d missed my train. It was pulling out as I arrived. If I miss my train, the next one doesn’t leave for fifty minutes. I’ve missed it before. When that happens I always walk to a nice coffee place I know close to the station and sit in one of the booths and watch the world go by.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Anyway, I was thinking about some work I had on, some patients I had seen that day, when I…’ She studied me for a moment. She was deciding whether she could trust me. ‘I saw Alex.’
It took a few moments for it to hit me. She’s saying she saw her dead son.
‘I, uh… I don’t understand.’
‘I saw Alex.’
‘You saw Alex?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you mean, you saw him?’
‘I mean, I saw him.’
I was shaking my head. ‘Wh— How?’
‘He was walking on the other side of the street.’
‘It was someone who looked like Alex.’
‘No,’ she replied softly, controlled, ‘it was Alex.’
‘But… he’s dead.’
‘I know he’s dead.’
‘Then how could it possibly be him?’
‘It was him, David.’
‘How is that possible?’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said, ‘but I’m not crazy. I don’t see my mother or my sister. I swear to you, David, I saw Alex that day. I saw him.’ She moved forward in her seat. ‘I’ll pay you up front,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s the only way I can think to persuade you that what I am saying is true. I will pay you money up front. My money.’
‘Have you reported this?’
‘To the police?’
‘Yes.’
She sat back again. ‘Of course not.’
‘You should.’
‘What’s the point?’
‘Because that’s what you do, Mary.’
‘My son is dead, David. You think they’d believe me?’
‘Why did you think I would believe you?’
She glanced around the room. ‘I know some of your pain, David, believe me. My cousin died of cancer. In many ways, the disease takes the whole family with it. You care for someone for so long, you see them like that, you get used to having them like that, and then, when they’re suddenly not there, you lose not only them, but what their illness brought to your life. You lose the routine.’