She paused, as though lost for words.
It was her first moment of silence since she’d arrived. I don’t think she’d drawn breath before now, having hotfooted it from London by taxi and resenting the imposition every step of the way. Or resenting something. Her normally pristine little red bob looked vaguely disarrayed and her language so far, though couched in terms of Martin’s irresponsibility, had come dangerously close to using some very interesting words to describe me – elusive, troubled, and I thought but couldn’t prove that she had been within a hair’s breadth of calling me ‘manipulative’ fifteen minutes ago, but pulled back just in time.
I was disappointed, as by then I was in the mood to have a proper stand-up row with her.
Insane as it sounds at such a moment, a quiet little corner of me suspected that the thing Greta so resented might be the attention Martin was paying to the crazed lunatic with the selective forgetfulness. As she pointed, shouted and slammed down her bag on the desk, I couldn’t help feeling – from her cold glaring and the way she talked over my head, as though I were some kind of sentient vegetable – that I had achieved in a week or so what months of working lunches with Martin and jokey/borderline flirty email exchanges had not.
Furthermore, I could tell that Greta was the sort of person who considered herself relentlessly professional, because she lacked the insight to distinguish her own desires and prejudices from the diktat of authority.
As a consequence, her grudges carried to her the semi-divine fiat of law, and I had no doubt that she would go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they also carried its force.
This made her very, very dangerous, so I needed to watch my step.
I let my gaze rise to Martin’s face as he placed the coffee before me – to his tired eyes, the little creases bracketing his mouth.
Oh, Martin. You need to watch your step, too.
‘We need to start the DNA testing,’ he said, and not for the first time.
The detective raised his head, as though a bell had rung. ‘Test her against what?’
‘The blood on the nightdress,’ replied Martin. ‘I know a sample was pulled off that years ago.’
‘At the very least it wouldn’t hurt,’ I threw in, despite the fact that everybody was refusing to look at me. ‘But I’m also betting that these things take a little while to be processed.’
O’Neill dismissed this as of no consequence. ‘We’ll do it. But if Martin’s right, Katie Browne is in danger right now.’ He uncrossed his arms, crossed them again. I was left with the impression of him as a huge, impenetrable fortress, and nothing useful would issue forth out of the gates until he was quite ready. ‘I don’t pretend to understand this whole dissociative amnesia thing. I always thought the trouble with bad memories is that you can’t get rid of them, not that you could forget them all wholesale.’
I opened my mouth, to attempt to reply-
‘You can’t forget them wholesale,’ snapped Martin, and there was a sharpness, a protectiveness in his voice and, wonder of wonders, I think it was meant for me. ‘That’s the point. You live in terror of remembering them. You have to work and keep working so that they remain forgotten.’ He pointed at Greta. ‘Am I right?’
‘Martin, there are a lot of factors-’
‘Perhaps there are,’ he said, and now he was getting angry. ‘And maybe none of this is anything to do with Margot. But as she keeps trying to tell you, that’s a question for another day. What I want to know is, what are we going to do next?’
‘What about hypnosis?’ I said. ‘We could do it now. You see it on the TV and in movies all the time…’
Greta exchanged a glance with O’Neill.
‘What?’ asked Martin.
‘Several things,’ said Greta. ‘Firstly, the use of hypnosis in such cases is… controversial. And possibly dangerous, in terms of Margot’s therapy…’
‘We’re not doing it for my therapy,’ I burst out. ‘We’re doing it to solve a crime and find a missing girl.’
‘Secondly,’ she continued, as though I hadn’t spoken, ‘you’d need a specialist – a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. There are medical implications.’
‘Yes, Martin said as much. Handy that we’re in Cambridge then,’ I replied, ‘as there’s bound to be one knocking around.’
‘And you’d be looking at using an injected opiate or barbiturate-induced semi-hypnotic state rather than a hypnotic trance.’
I went absolutely numb. ‘Injected?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Martin.
Greta pushed a long strand of her bob behind her ear. ‘The risk of false memory creation is too high with ordinary hypnosis. You’d require something like sodium pentothal or some kind of benzodiazepine, which doesn’t eliminate the risk of false memory or confabulation, but makes it less likely. And I say again, though nobody wants to hear it, that there would be serious psychological risks for Margot in such a procedure. If Margot really is Bethan Avery, she will experience all the emotions that grew out of the original trauma all over again. And if she isn’t… all of that will be doubly true, as I have no doubt that some trauma is present – just not the one we need.’
‘You’ll have a go though anyway, won’t you, Margot?’ asked Martin.
I did not reply. I could not open my mouth.
‘Margot?’
Martin’s expression had changed. Something was wrong.
I was shaking. I was shaking so hard that the very floor was vibrating beneath my chair, and I was astonished that they could not feel it.
‘I can’t… I thought you meant pills.’
Greta glared at me, as though I were talking in some incomprehensible language. ‘What possible difference does it make?’ she snapped.
‘I… I can’t have needles injected into me.’ I felt frozen with horror. ‘I hate needles. It’s a gigantic problem at all the hospitals when they try to treat me. I just can’t do it.’
Martin blinked at me. ‘But that’s… Margot, you told me that when you were on the streets you were an injecting heroin addict.’
I couldn’t think of a single thing to reply. There was nothing inside me but a dumbstruck amazement, a confusion, but something… something was becoming suddenly very clear.
‘Except that… that you weren’t, were you?’ he asked.
At that moment, I finally got it.
I had tried to comply, to take that leap of faith, but I had been resisting. I had not believed. Yes, my past was a muddy patchwork of experiences, frequently misremembered and often poorly understood, but still, you could say that about a lot of people’s lives.
The woman in Wastenley this morning may or may not have been my mother, and after so long doing without her did it really matter? Did she disown me because she was angry with me, with my sudden appearance, the way I bellowed at her like a crazy person, yet another victim of that fathomless rage that keeps looming like a shark’s fin out of the dark waters of my subconscious; an emotion I can neither enjoy nor control?
Or did she really just not know me?
I was quite sure I didn’t know her. But that was not true. I remembered… I remembered knowing about her. More to the point, I knew about her husband.
I remembered sitting on a street sign this morning, but does it follow that it was that particular one, on that particular street? Did I just want to make Martin happy, so my hungry, needy mind sought out this tiny detail – after all, I already knew that Bethan Avery had lived there – it would stand to reason that she would know this street corner.
But Martin didn’t ask me to sit on the sign.
I had learned not to ask questions, to live in the moment, and I’d been doing it all of my life.