Each Day I Wake: A gripping psychological thriller: US Edition (3 page)

My sister Marianne, flew in from Florida and we spent a long weekend reminiscing about our childhood.

The terraced house in Nottingham.

Marianne closed her eyes to bring back the scene. “The house was so small and we had so little. I think times must have been hard for Mom and Dad, raising two children on a health worker’s pay.”

“What did he do?”

“You really don’t recall?”

“I thought Janet told you I need to rebuild it all.”

She apologized. “I’m sorry, Tom. I didn’t need to say that. It’s just that I can’t get used to your knowing none of this.” She paused. “Dad was a nurse - and a good one, too. But the pay was poor and Mom couldn’t work. Something about her nerves. I think they kept most of it from us. They gave us a good upbringing and, look, we’ve both done well.”

I nodded as if what she was saying was second sense to me. “Yes, we owe them everything.”

Marianne moved on to talk about the Brogans, the Irish family next door.

Marshall Brogan, my boyhood friend and sparring partner.

“You and he were the same age and fought like demons. I can’t count the number of times you’d be locked together in mortal combat. He was a strong lad. There were times when I thought he might kill you. But somehow you survived. I guess that’s how you learned to step back to get what you want.”

I didn’t like what she was saying. “You mean I’m someone who compromises too much?”

She smiled. “I didn’t mean it to come out like that.” She paused. “How can I say it better? You, Tom, my brother, are the dearest person I know. And the biggest part of that is that you’ve learned to get on in life by avoiding the fight. Any kind of fight. I wish there were more people like you out there. The world would be a better place.”

“You mean I used that with Mom and Dad.”

“All the time. Drove me mad, seeing you getting what you wanted from them.”

“But you’re not still cut up about it?”

She smiled. “Course not! It’s just families. What they are.”

Marshall Brogan’s elder sister Della, the tomboy leader of our gang.

“I think you must have had a crush on her, like all the other boys in the street. She was so full of life, so quick to dare us to do what we knew we shouldn’t do and just as quick to give us a hard time if we refused.”

The times we had, marauding over the nearby Nottinghamshire countryside.

“You remember the oak we called the Bash Tree, the one on the far side of the farmer’s field at the rear of the street. The meeting place for our gang. The place we went to test our honor. The tree we climbed right up to that high branch from where we jumped to the ground to prove our right to belong. The place where we cut each other’s thumbs, pressed them together and swore we’d be blood brothers ‘til the end of time.”

The more Marianne described it, the more I could believe I was there. “I can feel the judder of my knees on my chin as I thumped into the ground. And the jolt of pain in my thumb.”

She smiled. “There, Tom, you
can
recall it. Recall it all. Just let it all back in.”

“What became of the Brogans?”

“We lost contact once we moved house, once we went to schools different to them. We went our own ways. I wouldn’t know where to look for them now or what’s happened to them. One thing’s certain, Della and Marshall won’t have had the life chances we’ve had and that’s a shame. They were good kids.”

I was reaching for a disturbing thought that wouldn’t quite form itself. “And the father, Jimmie Brogan, something happened to him?”

She looked away. “I hadn’t planned to tell you about that. He was larger than life. The father of the Brogan house, six foot four and a giant to us all. He was killed crossing the road on his way home from his work one misty September night. The immense sadness of Marshall and Della and their mother Caitlin stays with me to this day. The street where we lived and played was never the same again.”

I tried to recall it. “I remember their pain.”

“I don’t think the family ever recovered from the shock of losing him. I don’t think things worked out well for Della and Marshall.”

She moved the conversation on. She talked about the school friends we had in common, our lives as teenagers when it was as if the whole world was against us. Marianne had photographs, too. She pointed to the faces and gave a name to each.

“And here’s Bill Everett. The guy who became your best man.”

“You knew him?”

“Tom, I went out with him for over a year.”

The more my sister told me, the more I felt a part of what she was telling me until I began to say to myself,
yes, that’s me, I will remember it all
.

Marianne could stay no longer than that single weekend. She returned to her life in Florida.

I thanked her for all the help she’d given me in rebuilding my past. She’d shone a light on our childhood together and, with what Janet had told me, I was beginning to feel more confident that one day soon I’d be able to fill in more of the gaps myself. That I’d be the one to feel these people and places and times were part of me and not just a story about someone else.

And I thanked her for making the long journey to see me when she had so many commitments back home.

I fought the feeling of loss as I kissed her farewell as she walked out to the taxi that took her to the airport.

“Take care, sis.”

She kissed me back. “Just get well, Tom. Next time I see you I expect you to be your old self.”

If only I knew what my old self was. I tried to smile. “I’ll give it my best shot.”

Another girl.

Felicity.

Young. Twenty-one. Intelligent. A lover of sport.

We’re talking about how we met playing squash.

What am I doing here?

We’re back in that book-lined room.

There’s no lovemaking this time because she’s refusing, saying that she’s not like that.

I’m pushing her back onto the couch and she’s starting to scream.

My hands over her mouth to quieten her.

The tattoo. The single red rose on my left forearm.

This can’t be me. Can’t be me.

Yet I see those hands gripping poor Felicity by the neck.

I see the life leaving her body, her eyes bulging, her face reddening and then darkening.

I knew I couldn’t keep this to myself.

The last return of memory had come out of nowhere, in the afternoon, while I was sitting reading. It had invaded my thoughts.

I should have felt relief that memory, true memory was coming back. But this was all in truth I could recall. The killing of those girls.

How many was it now?

Four. Four women murdered.

How many more?

I told Janet everything.

She didn’t believe what I was saying. “They’re fantasies, Tom. I know you. I’m sure about the man I’m sharing my life with. You’re a kind, compassionate man who’d do anything to avoid any kind of confrontation, let alone the terrible acts you’re describing. These are things you would never do.”

“But, Jan, I see them. I see those girls dying. I was there. I must have been there.”

“It’s the shock of the accident, the harm that was done to you, nothing more.”

I told her about the tattoo. “On the left forearm. A single red rose.”

She leaned back. “There, that proves it. You’ve never had a tattoo, would never want to have such a thing. So these fantasies are just that, fantasies brought on by the trauma you were put through.”

I was struggling to believe what she was saying. “But it feels so real, Jan. These thoughts are the only memories I have that I know are true. Everything else is what I
should
know about who I am.”

I could see I was worrying her. She must have been hoping that her care in taking me back through my past would have started to rebuild our life together by now. Though she was trying to hide it, my confession had come as a shock.

She took me by both hands and looked into my eyes. “It’s just a setback, Tom. I’ll ask for an appointment with Josh Healey. He was quite emphatic that if we ran into problems we shouldn’t hesitate to see him again.”

She returned from the phone. “He can see you first thing tomorrow.”

Janet drove me to see Mr. Healey.

He listened as I told him about the girls, how I saw myself seducing them, killing them.

He was taking notes and looked up only when I told him about the tattoo.

When I’d finished, he asked me to relax while he told me about false memories.

“You see, Tom, the mind works in unconventional ways when it’s trying to compensate for the disruption caused by the kind of trauma you’ve been through. It needs to find space to recreate the past, to allow you to rediscover yourself, who you are. And that can lead to experiences like this.”

“But, Mr. Healey, they seem so real.”

He smiled. “Call me Josh, please.”

“OK, Josh, these things I’m telling you about are more real than anything else right now. I see myself doing these things, hear and taste and smell it all, every second of these terrible things I’m doing.”

“I know it’s going to be difficult to believe me, but these are nothing but false memories. Think of it this way, you’re taking the worst fears about yourself, your darkest fantasies and experiencing them as real. Making them into memories that you take as real as a way of compensating for the fact that the memories of your real self that you so desperately wish were there just won’t appear. But ask yourself this – would you ever have done anything like this? Being unfaithful to your wife? Killing those women?”

I wanted to accept that what he was telling me was true. “I know that I’m not the kind of person who would do any of that. But you have to believe me when I say that what I’m recalling is real, so real I can touch it.”

“Don’t get caught up with the notion that what you’re experiencing is so unusual. Normally, there’s a filter to such thoughts coming to the surface, to your waking consciousness. Because of what happened to you, because of the trauma you’ve been through, that filter is damaged, has stopped working, for awhile at least. The primitive urges and desires we’ve taken millennia to tame come bursting through. Experiences that you wouldn’t think any of us would be capable of having appear like bad dreams.”

“That’s what they are. Bad dreams that I experience as real?”

He nodded. “While your memory repairs itself.”

“I will get it back?”

“In time.”

“How much time?”

He stopped to scribble a further note. “That all depends. I’ll be honest with you. It could be weeks. It could be months. But once the memories of your true self begin, they’ll come flooding back. And they’ll displace these false memories that are currently filling the void, send them scuttling back where they belong in the subterranean world they’re meant to inhabit.”

He was making me believe him. It would take time but I would find a way back. For things to be as they were with Janet. To go back to my job with the newspaper. To start to live my life again. And to banish these terrible visions once and for all, to recognize them for what they are.

I had one more question. “Tell me, Josh, what’s the significance of the tattoo, the rose that I’m seeing on my forearm?”

He looked up from his notes once more. “If you need to know, I think that’s a kind of transference, a kind of compensation. You’re shocked at what’s happening, what you suppose you’re recalling from your past. You need a sign to tell you that it can’t be you doing these things and you know that you don’t have any such tattoo. So you invent it, place it on the killer’s forearm so that when you see it you can prove to yourself that it can’t be you.”

“And why a rose"?”

“It symbolizes your love and loyalty to Janet. It’s a visible sign that you wouldn’t be unfaithful to her.”

He ended the session by saying he would like to see me again in a week.

When I returned to Janet, waiting for me in Healey’s outer office, she wanted to know if I now felt better about the memories.

I told her that they were false, that given time I would understand that.

But deep down I knew this was more what I hoped for than what it was.

Mr. Healey gave me hope that, in time, I would come to see that the memories haunting me could be understood for what they were.

My relief that this was the course I was on pleased Janet.

The visions – that’s what I was now calling them – were appearing less often.

Cathy.

Rebecca.

Margot.

Felicity.

I saw them and what I was doing to them and I couldn’t look away. But I knew these visions would fade and take their place in the recesses of my mind once my true memories returned.

That was the day I was setting all my hopes on.

Janet was filling in more of my past, showing me more images on her tablet and talking me through them.

“Here we are in London.” She pointed to the screen. “You were spending so much time staying up there for the paper that you thought I should join you for the weekend.”

I stared at the photograph. It showed Janet and me, arm in arm, smiling and looking tipsy outside a bar. “Looks like we were having a good time.”

“We were.”

I only had questions. “So, when was this?”

She paused to think. “It must have been just under three months ago. Back end of summer.”

“And who took the photo?”

“I think that must have been Jason. Jason Blair, from your team. You were both there as part of the paper’s investigation into banking corruption.”

She stroked the tablet screen and showed another image. It was the same scene but with four in the picture now. Janet, me and two others.

I recognized the bearded man as Jason Blair from when Janet first pointed him out to me.

She smiled. “Before you ask, I think the photo was taken by one of the waiters.”

I saw the funny side. “OK. Who’s Jason with?”

Janet rubbed her chin. “One of his conquests from the office. I think her name was Carrie, something like that. We had a good time together that weekend, as a foursome. Went to the theatre. Saw a brilliant production of a Tennessee Williams. It was
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
. I saved the tickets. I have them somewhere.”

“But you don’t sound as sure about Carrie?”

“Like most of Jason’s trysts, I don’t think it lasted long. He would have moved on, from what I hear. You don’t recall her?”

“I’m sure I’ve never seen her before.”

“Do you recall that weekend?”

I shook my head. “I wish I could say
yes
, Jan. But I have to be honest with you. I don’t. It still feels like I’m hearing about someone else.”

She gave me a reassuring hug. “It’ll come. Just give it more time.”

There was something else I needed to ask. “Jan, you said I invited you up there because I was spending so much time away from you. How much time?”

“You were staying up in London a lot. Sometimes weeks on end if you couldn’t get back home for the weekend.”

“And you got used to it?”

She smiled once more. “Tom, believe me, if I was the kind of woman who couldn’t trust my man, I’d never would have married an investigative journalist. I knew what I was in for. You have to go where the story takes you. Your work was intense at that time. Your journalism would have suffered if you’d had to come shuttling back and forth each day.”

“And that was just when there’s a crisis?”

“No, that’s the normal way. When you’re following a strong lead, chasing a new exclusive, it’s all hands to the wheel. Not just you. The whole team.”

“And it was like that right up until the accident?”

“You were busier than ever. But I knew I’d get you back when things quietened down.” She looked down. “And when you went missing, I thought at first you’d been so caught up in a story you hadn’t time to get in touch with me. But when you hadn’t called for over twenty-four hours, I knew something was wrong. When I contacted the paper, they assumed you were home with me. That’s when I called the police.”

I kissed her on the cheek. “It’s good you were looking out for me.”

She kissed me back. “But not soon enough to stop what happened to you.”

We spent the remainder of the day going through more of our life together.

Janet was patient and understanding. She knew that she shouldn’t push me too hard or too fast. Yet I think she must have been working on the idea of water breaking a dam, of piling up so much behind the dam wall that my memories would come flooding back once the first breach was made.

I was feeling exhausted by all she’d told me.

She understood. “That’s enough for today. Take a break. Watch some TV while I make dinner.”

She turned on the set and chose a news station before heading for the kitchen.

I stared at the screen.

Journalists were presenting their stories from around the world.

I tried to think myself inside the skin of each and every one of them, trying to remember how it felt to work like that, to be one of them.

The coverage cut to a press conference.

A distraught mother was appealing for information from the public on her missing daughter. Beside her, the father sat silent and ashen faced.

The girl had been missing for too long.

Someone must know of her whereabouts. The family was holding on to the belief that she would be found alive but their faces told that they’d spent too many sleepless nights trying to convince themselves that this could be true.

A picture of the girl appeared on the screen.

I shook my head. I closed my eyes and opened them again, trying to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing.

I knew that face.

It was Cathy.

One of the women in my visions that Mr. Healey had told me were false.