Each Day I Wake: A gripping psychological thriller: US Edition (6 page)

DI Stephen Ives sat up straight and took one of the cups of coffee from the tray brought in by DS Lesley.

He welcomed these sessions with June away from the hustle and bustle of the main incident room. This was where he tested his ideas. He knew if he were off track, Lesley would be the one to let him know. “June, time to consider where we’re up to with Tom Markland. Is it worth interviewing him again?”

She took her drink from the tray and sat opposite him. “Hard to say, sir. It’s not easy to place him as a suspect when we don’t have any evidence that Cathy Newsome has been killed. Or, in fact, if any of the girls have come to a violent end. Yet, he seems to know more about them than he should. And, again, the hospital did find narcotics in his blood.”

“But that doesn’t seem to fit with how he presents himself as the upstanding, honest type of person he wants us to think he is. The drugs involvement still remains the most likely reason he ended up in the North Dock.”

“My thoughts, exactly.”

“So, maybe for that reason alone, we should spend more time looking in depth into how he might have got to know about the girls?”

“Wouldn’t that distract from the work we need to do in finding Cathy?”

“Time to get real, June. Unless she turns up, and that’s looking like a more remote possibility each day, the investigation is going nowhere other than being wound down. We may have nothing to lose.”

“Then what do you suggest, sir?”

“OK, just suppose that Markland knew those young women he’s been telling us about for real. And they’re more than a fantasy. Where and how might he have met them?”

“You’re saying that the whole
visions thing
is some kind of defense to throw us off, should the evidence start to point towards him?”

“Maybe. If he suspects that as soon as we start looking in detail we’ll find connections to him and the women, then, yes, perhaps that’s exactly what he is doing.”

“And that’s why you want to spend more time on him?”

Ives took another sip of coffee. “Call it a hunch. But let’s think again. If he knows the women for real, how might he have come to meet them?”

“Well, they’re all about the same age - younger then he is by ten years. Could be he’s in some position of authority in his spare time. Like a volunteer or a youth club worker?”

“Or he does some kind of charity work that brings him into contact with younger people.”

“It would be no more than a few hours to check it out.”

Ives was pleased he’d convinced her. That meant the idea must be worth pursuing, “Yes, the more I think about it, there’s more than enough here to make me feel we need to know a lot more about Tom Markland.”

Recalling the time we spent at the Grand Canyon didn’t mean that the dam broke. There was no sudden return of everything I’d known before. It was more like intermittent flashes of light, illuminating one train of memory for an instant, only to leave me again in darkness.

Josh Healey, in our next session, told me this was to be expected. “Don’t expect too much too soon. Concentrate on the fact that your memories are slowly coming back as you make progress in repairing your body. Given time, you’ll get there.”

“How long will that take?”

“There’s no way of being sure, Tom. Now you’ve started piecing things together, you can expect to make real progress. It may come in stages, bundles of recollections, set off by one particularly strong association, making their way to the fore. Leaving gaps. As time goes on there will be fewer gaps and more memories.”

“But there will be gaps?”

He looked up from his note taking. “I have to tell you that’s a strong possibility. Memories that evoke the greatest trauma may be lost forever. It’s a common pattern in amnesia. Victims of near death incidents such as a ’plane or car crash seldom recall the events that led up to the crash. It’s your mind’s way of protecting you.”

“So I may never recall what happened. How I ended up beaten and near drowned in the North Dock?”

He made another note. “Maybe not. And if that’s the case you may have to accept that your memories stopped at the point where the trauma of recollection would have been too great.”

“I need to know what happened. Who did this to me.”

“You should leave that to the police. They’re investigating?”

“They tell me they are. But I think that without help from me they won’t be able to take the investigation much further. They tell me there are no witnesses and if I can’t recall what took place, there’s may be little more they can do.”

“Well, you shouldn’t let that deflate you. You’re making excellent progress. Don’t let anything take that away from you.”

I heard nothing more about my accident.

Nothing about who nearly killed me.

My case joined the long list of unsolved, violent assaults taking place late at night in English cities where the police can find no witnesses and the victims are so traumatized by the events that they can’t offer evidence themselves.

I was becoming reconciled to the idea that the only way I was going to discover who attacked me was to be able to recall it myself. In the end I was the only witness. If there had been anyone else they would have been found by now.

I considered more than once contacting Cathy’s parents, to tell them I understood their anguish, that I knew something about what happened to their daughter. But what could I tell them? That I’d seen her die? Just that and nothing more. It would only make their agony worse.

I searched the media online for any links between Cathy and the disappearance of the others - Rebecca French, Margot West, Felicity Jenkins. I found none. No one but me was connecting the cases. None of them had been found. Three more added to the missing persons list. Three more families in agony.

Despite all that Josh Healey was telling me, despite how reasonable Janet was making it seem, I couldn’t stop believing that what I knew about those girls was real.

Yes, I was stronger now.

As I sat in the garden chair that I’d looked at with such hesitation when I’d first come home and lifted my head with such pain to look out from the bedroom window, I knew there were just two things that were important.

There was a killer out there who had killed four times and would kill again.

Unless I found a way to discover what happened and stopped him.

Six weeks earlier

Working security didn’t pay well. The hourly rate was just above the minimum but you could make that up by working the hours. How many was it this week? Seventy-two and counting?

Marshall Brogan turned towards the elevator that would take him to the upper floors of the Canada One Tower where, for the third time this night, he’d do the rounds.

The building was almost empty now at two in the morning yet he’d learned not to be surprised at finding traders who’d worked so long and so late that they’d decided not to go home and instead sleep at their desks. As long as they belonged, he wouldn’t disturb them. Everyone knew they shouldn’t be here but a blind eye was turned as long as the building was secure. It was a fine line. One night, for sure, something would go wrong and the wisdom of being easy on the stayers would be called into question. But everything he’d now learned told him to go with the flow, to give those around him what they wanted. Life was more manageable that way.

It hadn’t always been like this.

As he emerged from the elevator and began the long walk around the corridors on Floor 34, he thought back to those earlier times.

His days in the children’s homes he’d been sent to were a time of ever building hatred. Hatred of those who had placed him there. Hatred of those who told him what to do, how he should behave. Hatred of the unknown driver who’d killed his father. And, yes, hatred too of the mother who’d allowed her children to be taken from her and separated from each other.

He still had to fight back the tears as he thought about Della, the sister he’d lost. Nothing had been more terrible than being parted from her.

It had made him angry and determined to fight. Anyone and everyone who crossed his path. By the time he was sixteen he was well-enough known to the police and the magistrates for them to send him to juvenile prison. The two years he spent there hardened him the more. It was what you did to survive. What else would anyone expect if you crammed together the toughest, most deprived and drugged-up section of the youth population in such a place?

When he was released at eighteen, his first thought was to find Della. But she was lost, sent to homes who knows where and, being three years older than him, she would be out there living a life of her own. He’d realized then that she could be anywhere. Living with a new name, in another country for all he knew. And in any case, what had he to offer if he was ever to find her and come back into her life? He was a mess, a ball of anger about to explode as it flamed down a mountainside. He understood this truth about himself, more than ever now.

Back then he’d blamed
them
. All those well-meaning, self-serving types who’d made a living out of his distress. Now, looking back, he knew that much of the blame rested with him.

It had taken nine years as a merchant seaman to understand that. He’d travelled the world, seen the misery out there in Africa, in the Far East and South America and discovered that this world is founded on despair and suffering, the exploitation of one man by another - of many women by many men - and understood that in comparison his suffering was not so great. It was the norm. It was those who lived with happiness and in peace and who knew only love that were the exception. They were the ones who failed to understand that the happiness, peace and love they took for granted was only made possible by the suffering of the many out of their sight. Just as he’d taken those things for granted and expected them as a right before that night when his father failed to make it home from work.

And, yes, he’d done his share of hurting others. In fist fights in dockside bars. With women in the loneliest of lonely nights. It had made him feel better – but not for long enough. After fighting his way through it all, he realized that nothing he could do to others would ever take away the anger and the hatred he was now destined to feel. Yes, he’d somehow found the strength to hide these things from view. At least that’s what he was trying so hard to believe was true.

When he returned to London, the time spent in the merchant navy had given him a past he could talk about. It was enough to get him this security job. And here he was, patrolling one of the most prestigious buildings on Canary Wharf.

He stopped. He could hear movement in one of the offices ahead. He’d have to check it out.

He used the master key to open the plate glass front door of OAM Securities and stepped inside.

He shouted out. “Someone working late?”

A scuffling noise came back. Coming from the CEO’s office. Tyrone Montague’s door.

Someone hastening to stop what they were doing, perhaps?

Brogan moved closer and waited. “I know you’re there.”

These situations were always difficult. There was no question of allowing him or anyone else in security to be armed. All he had was the two-way radio that connected him to the command center and, if matters necessitated it, the heavy torch that was slung from his belt.

Brogan moved through the trading area, its workstations empty now, and into the CEO’s office. It was more a suite than an office. The area outside the inner sanctum had three desks that would have been manned by assistants during daytime. The area was also empty now. Nothing suspicious.

In the inner office, Brogan found few signs of disturbance. The drawers of the CEO’s desk had not been opened. There were no papers lying scattered around. On the far side of the office there was a second exit, a door left ajar. Whoever had been here had left that way and would be heading back out to the corridor on the other side of the floor.

Brogan prepared to head off in pursuit but then he noticed something.

The table-top computer had been in use just moments before and had not yet gone back to sleep.

Brogan stared at the screen.

His heart stopped.

He rubbed his eyes to make sure he was seeing this.

There on the screen was the image of a beautiful woman. Dark hair, bright, brown eyes that the years of deprivation had not dulled.

He was looking at an image of his sister. Della Brogan. The first time he’d seen her in all these long years.

He forgot about the intruder. Whoever it was, whatever they had been here to find, mattered little to him now.

Sitting in the CEO’s chair, in Ty Montague’s seat of power, he stared at the picture of Della, taking in every detail of her appearance.

She looked happy. Her smile and the sparkle in those brown eyes told him that. And she was no longer poor. The jewelry at her neck was proof enough. Yet there was an absence in that face. A something missing in her look that meant all was not as it seemed.

Brogan clicked the mouse. The image disappeared.

He tried all he could to bring Della back but nothing worked. He’d seen her and now she was gone. But it didn’t matter. He knew she was alive. He knew she’d survived. That was worth more than anything to him.

The radio beeped. The automatic check on his position.

Brogan returned to awareness of the situation.

Should he log this as an incident? There would be an internal investigation. The police would be informed. But there had been no external breach of security. He would have been alerted to that. The intruder was almost certain to be someone already in the building.

Brogan wasn’t quite sure why, but it was something about having seen the image of his sister that meant he didn’t respond and, instead, took his time to turn off the computer.

Something in Della’s look had told him this was the thing to do.

He spent the next two hours on his rounds, combing though the building, floor by floor. He found over twenty night-time sleepers who’d decided not to bother going home. Any one of them could have broken into Ty Montague’s office. He noted the names of those he knew. But keeping record was not uppermost in his mind.

He was thinking of Della and how he was now certain he could find her.