“And who is Mr. Murphy?”
“Mickey says he owns the building, but I think he's just the caretaker.”
“Mickey didn't come down.”
“No.”
“How long did you wait?”
“Ages and ages.” She fans her face with her hand. “Can I have an ice cream?”
“In a minute . . . Did anyone come past you while you were waiting?”
“No.”
“And you didn't leave these steps—not even to get a drink . . .”
She shook her head.
“. . . or to talk to a friend, or to pat a dog?”
“No.”
“What happened then?”
“Mickey's mum came down with the trash. Then she said, ‘What are you doing? Where's Mickey?' And I said, ‘I'm still waiting for her.' Then she said she came down ages ago. Only she never did because I've been here the whole time . . .”
“What did you do then?”
“Mickey's mum told me to wait. She said not to move, so I sat on the stairs.”
“Did anyone come past you?”
“Only the neighbors who helped look for Mickey.”
“Do you know their names?”
“Some of them.” She counted quietly on her fingers and listed them. “Is this a mystery?”
“I guess you could call it that.”
“Where did Mickey go?”
“I don't know, sweetheart, but we're going to find her.”
3
Professor Joseph O'Loughlin has arrived to see me. I can see him walking across the hospital parking lot with his left leg swinging as if bound in a splint. His mouth is moving—smiling, wishing people good morning and making jokes about how he likes his martinis shaken not stirred. Only the Professor could make fun of Parkinson's disease.
Joe is a clinical psychologist and looks exactly like you'd expect a shrink to look—tall and thin with a tangle of brown hair like some absentminded academic escaped from a lecture hall.
We met a few years back during a murder investigation when I had him pegged as a possible killer until it turned out to be one of his patients. I don't think he mentions that in his lectures.
Knocking gently on the door, he opens it and smiles awkwardly. He has one of those totally open faces with wet brown eyes, like a baby seal just before it gets clubbed.
“I hear you're suffering memory problems.”
“Yeah, who the fuck are you?”
“Very good. Nice to see you haven't lost your sense of humor.”
He turns around several times trying to decide where to put his briefcase. Then he takes a notepad and pulls up a chair, sitting with his knees touching the bed. Finally settled, he looks at me and says nothing—as though I've asked him to come because there's something on my mind.
This is what I hate about shrinks. The way they create silences and have you questioning your sanity. This wasn't my idea. I can remember my name. I know where I live. I know where I put the car keys and parked the car. I'm tickety-boo.
“How are you feeling?”
“Some bastard shot me.”
Without warning his left arm jerks and trembles. Self-consciously, he holds it down.
“How's the Parkinson's?”
“I've stopped ordering soup at restaurants.”
“Very wise. Julianne?”
“She's great.”
“And the girls?”
“They're growing up.”
Swapping small talk and family stories has never been a feature of our relationship. Usually, I invite myself around to Joe's place for dinner, drink his wine, flirt with his wife and shamelessly milk him for ideas about unsolved cases. Joe knows this, of course—not because he's so bloody clever but because I'm so transparent.
I like him. He's a privately educated, middle-class pseud but that's OK. And I like Julianne, his wife, who for some reason thinks she can marry me off again because my track record shouldn't be held against me.
“I take it you met my boss.”
“The Chief Superintendent.”
“What did you make of him?”
Joe shrugs. “He seems very professional.”
“Come on, Prof, you can do better than that. Tell me what you really think.”
Joe makes a little “Tsh” sound like a cymbal. He knows I'm challenging him.
Clearing his throat, he glances at his hands. “The Chief Superintendent is a well-spoken career police officer, who is self-conscious about his double chins and colors his hair. He is asthmatic. He wears Calvin Klein aftershave. He is married with three daughters, who have him so tightly wrapped around their little fingers he should be dipped in silver and engraved. They are vegetarians and won't let him eat meat at home so he eats meals at the station canteen. He reads P. D. James novels and likes to think of himself as Adam Dalgleish, although he doesn't write poetry and he's not particularly perceptive. And he has a very irritating habit of lecturing rather than listening to people.”
I let out a low, admiring whistle. “Have you been stalking this guy?”
Joe suddenly looks embarrassed. Some people would make it sound like a party trick but he always seems genuinely surprised that he knows even half this stuff. And it's not like he plucks details out of the air. I could ask him to justify every statement and he'd rattle off the answers. He will have seen Campbell's asthma puffer, recognized his aftershave, watched him eat and seen the photographs of his children . . .
This is what frightens me about Joe. It's as if he can crack open someone's head and read the contents like tea leaves. You don't want to get too close to someone like that because one day they might hold up a mirror and let you see what the world sees.
Joe is thumbing through my medical notes, looking at the results of the CT and MRI scans. He closes the folder. “So what happened?”
“A rifle, a bullet, usual story.”
“What's the first thing you do recall?”
“Waking up in here.”
“And the last thing?”
I don't answer him. I've been wracking my brain for two days—ever since I woke up—and all I can come up with is pizza.
“How do you feel now?”
“Frustrated. Angry.”
“Because you can't remember?”
“Nobody knows what I was doing on the river. It wasn't a police operation. I acted alone. I'm not a maverick. I don't go off half-cocked like some punk kid with ‘Born to Lose' tattooed on my chest . . . They're treating me like a criminal.”
“The doctors?”
“The police.”
“You could be reacting to not being able to remember. You feel excluded. You think everyone knows the secret except you.”
“You think I'm paranoid.”
“It's a common symptom of amnesia. You think people are holding out on you.”
Yeah, well that doesn't explain Keebal. He's visited me three times already, making false charges and outrageous claims. The more I refuse to talk, the harder he bullies.
Joe rolls his pen over his knuckles. “I once had a patient, thirty-five years old, with no history of neurological or psychiatric disorders. He slipped on an icy pavement and hit his head. He didn't lose consciousness or anything like that. He bounced straight up onto his feet and kept walking—”
“Is there a point to this story?”
“He didn't remember falling over. And he no longer knew where he was going. He had totally forgotten what happened in the previous twelve hours, yet he knew his name and recognized his wife and kids. It's called transient global amnesia. Minutes, hours or days disappear. Self-identification is still possible and sufferers behave normally otherwise but they can't remember a particular event or a missing period of time.”
“But the memories come back, right?”
“Not always.”
“What happened to your patient?”
“At first we thought he'd only forgotten the fall, but other memories had also gone missing. He didn't remember his earlier marriage, or a house he'd once built. And he had no knowledge of John Major ever being Prime Minister.”