The Likeness

Frank took me through the whole John Naylor saga, or anyway a version of it-not exactly the version that had originally happened, but definitely a version that made Naylor sound like a good suspect: soothing the others down, before we started detonating things. “I’m all impressed now,” I told him, tilting my chair back and giving him a mischievous sideways look. “I thought you’d given up ages ago.”

Frank shook his head. “We don’t give up,” he said soberly. “Not on something as serious as this. No matter how long it takes. We don’t always want to be obvious about it, but we’re always working away, putting the pieces together.” It was impressive; he should have come with his own soundtrack. “We’re getting there. And right now, Miss Madison, we need a little help from you.”

“Sure,” I said, bringing my chair down and doing focused. “Do you want me to look at that guy Naylor again?”

“Nothing like that. It’s your mind we need this time, not your eyes. You remember how the doctors said your memory might start coming back, as you recovered?”

“Yeah,” I said, uncertainly, after a pause.

“Anything you remember, anything at all, could help us a lot. I want you to have a think and tell me: has anything come back to you?”

I left it a beat too long before I said, almost convincingly, “No. Nothing. Just what I told you before.”

Frank clasped his hands on the table and leaned towards me. Those attentive blue eyes, that gentle, coaxing voice: if I’d been a genuine civilian, I’d have been melting all over my chair. “See, I’m not so sure. I’m getting the impression you’ve remembered something new, Miss Madison, but you’re worried about telling me. Maybe you think I might misinterpret it, and the wrong person could get in trouble? Is that it?”

I threw him a quick looking-for-reassurance glance. “Sort of. I guess.”

He smiled at me, all crinkling crow’s-feet. “Trust me, Miss Madison. We don’t go around charging people with serious crimes unless we have serious evidence. You’re not about to get anyone arrested all by yourself.”

I shrugged, made a face at my coffee cup. “It’s nothing big. It probably doesn’t mean anything anyway.”

“You let me worry about that, OK?” Frank said soothingly. He was about one step from patting my hand and calling me “love.” “You’d be surprised what can come in useful. And if it doesn’t, then there’s no harm done, am I right?”

“OK,” I said, on a breath. “It’s just… OK. I remember blood, on my hands. All over my hands.”

“There you go,” Frank said, keeping that reassuring smile switched on. “Well done. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” I shook my head. “Can you remember what you were doing? Were you standing up? Sitting down?”

“Standing up,” I said. I didn’t have to put the shake in my voice. A few feet away, in the interview rooms I knew inside out, Daniel was waiting patiently for someone to come back and the other three were slowly, silently, beginning to wind tighter. “Leaning against a hedge-it was prickly. I was…” I mimed twisting up my top, pressing it against my ribs. “Like that. Because of the blood, to make it stop. But it didn’t help.”

“Were you in pain?”

“Yeah,” I said, low. “It hurt. A lot. I thought… I was scared I was going to die.”

We were good together, me and Frank; we were on the same page. We were working together as smoothly as Abby and me making breakfast, as smoothly as a pair of professional torturers. You can’t be both, Daniel had told me. And: She was never cruel.

“You’re doing great,” Frank told me. “Now that it’s started coming back to you, you’ll have the whole lot remembered in no time, you’ll see. That’s what the doctors told us, isn’t it? Once the floodgates open…” He flipped through the file and pulled out a map, one of the ones we’d used during our training week. “Do you think you could show me where you were?”

I took my time, picked a spot about three-quarters of the way from the house to the cottage and put my finger on it. “Maybe there, I think. I’m not sure.”

“Great,” Frank said, doing a careful little scribble in his notebook. “Now I want you to do something else for me. You’re leaning against that hedge, and you’re bleeding, and you’re scared. Can you try and think backwards? Just before that, what had you been doing?”

I kept my eyes on the map. “I was all out of breath, like… Running. I was running. So fast I fell over. I hurt my knee.”

“From where? Think hard. What were you running away from?”

“I don’t-” I shook my head, hard. “No. I can’t tell what bits happened, and what bits I just… dreamed, or something. I could’ve dreamed all of it, even the blood.”

“It’s possible,” Frank said, nodding easily. “We’ll keep that in mind. But, just in case, I think you need to tell me everything-even the parts you probably dreamed. We’ll sort them out as we go. OK?”

I left a long pause. “That’s all,” I said at last, too weakly. “Running, and falling over. And the blood. That’s it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m positive. There’s nothing else.”