The Final Minute (3 page)

‘You’re going to get better, Matt,’ she said, touching my arm briefly before stepping away from the bed as if she thought I might grab her at any moment if she stayed put. Of course I’d never mentioned the fact that I occasionally had inappropriate thoughts about her, nor had I ever put any of those thoughts into action. If anything I was very much the other way, avoiding any physical contact, just in case. But I wondered then if she had an inkling that my view of her wasn’t entirely brotherly.

I sighed. ‘Yeah, I know. I’m sure I will eventually. But it just seems to be taking a long time.’

‘Dr Bronson said there’s been some progress this week. That you might actually be getting the first memories back.’

I wasn’t sure that it was entirely ethical for Dr Bronson to be discussing my condition with Jane, especially as he always liked to inform me that anything I said would never go further than the four walls of my sister’s study where we always had our meetings, but I let it go. ‘I’ve had a few,’ I said, ‘but nothing substantial.’ There was no way I was going to tell her anything about the dream, and I was hoping that the doc hadn’t either. I didn’t want my sister thinking I was some kind of psycho.

‘He also says you didn’t want to do the hypnotherapy today,’ she added, wearing a vaguely reproachful look.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘Did he now?’

‘You know, you’ve got to trust him, Matt. It’s costing me a lot of money to hire his services – these things don’t come cheap. He’s one of the best therapists in the country. So please, try to cooperate.’

‘I will.’

‘He’s still here if you want to see him. It seems daft for him to come all this way from London and not manage to get a full session in with you. Especially when you’ve been making progress.’

‘I don’t think I can face it today. I’m sorry, Sis.’

‘It costs me six hundred pounds every time he comes here,’ she said, the frustration showing on her face.

I didn’t want to upset her, and I could see I was doing a pretty good job of that, but there was no way I was going under today. ‘Well, as I said, I’m sorry, but I’m really not feeling up to it.’

She breathed out loudly in a show of exasperation and, with an angry shake of the head, left the room, shutting the door behind her with something close to a slam.

I’d never seen Jane like that before. She always went out of her way to be nice to me. But then, I thought, I’d always cooperated in the past, and now I was standing up to her. I remembered her words to the doc earlier:
How much longer?
They hadn’t sounded like those of a caring sister.

I looked down at the cup of tea and decided there was no way I was going to drink it. God alone knew what Jane had put in there but I was sure it was more of the drugs they’d been feeding me these past two months, the ones that had always seemed to sap my energy. The irony right now was that, far from feeling sick, I actually felt better physically than at any time since I’d arrived here.

A thought struck me then with absolute clarity. I had to get out of this house. I needed to breathe in some fresh air, to walk and to think.

To remember.

I waited for a few minutes until I heard Dr Bronson’s car pulling away on the gravel driveway, then got up and went over to the old-fashioned sash window. I flicked open the catch as far as it would go, which was only about eighteen inches. The view looked straight out on to a beech tree, the outer branches of which were tantalizingly close.

Not even thinking about it, I crawled through the gap in the window and manoeuvred myself round so that I was half in and half out, before slowly letting myself down so I was hanging from the ledge. At this point I had no choice but to drop. The distance from my feet to the grass was probably about eight feet. It was a long way, especially given that spending the last few months sitting around had left me seriously unfit, but it was too late to worry about that now and I felt an unusual sense of exhilaration as I let go, as if I was finally doing something worthwhile after a lifetime of wasted opportunities.

I hit the ground hard and rolled on to my side, gritting my teeth against the jarring pain in my Achilles tendons. I lay still for a couple of seconds, waiting for the pain to subside before slowly getting to my feet and peering in through the utility room window. The door was open and I could see into the kitchen where Jane was talking with Tom. He was leaning back against a worktop nodding as she spoke to him animatedly, moving her hands a lot. She looked stressed. Tom didn’t. He looked calm. But then he always did. He was a big man with a big presence, the kind of guy who didn’t need to raise his voice to get what he wanted. As I watched, he put a hand on her shoulder and smiled. The gesture seemed to calm her, and she leaned up and kissed him, jabbing me with a most unwelcome shard of jealousy.

But at least they hadn’t noticed me. I turned and ran across the lawn, into the welcoming embrace of the trees. I didn’t know where I was going, or how long I was going to go there for, but it just felt good to be out of that house, which had seemed to resemble a prison more and more these days.

As soon as I was well into the trees I slowed to a walk, taking in the sounds and smells around me. It was a sunny, warm mid-September day with a feel of summer about it. Jane had lived out here on the peninsula for ten years now, ever since the death of her husband. He was older and had left her a lot of money in his will, and she’d decided to come here to retreat from the world. She’d shown me photos of the husband – apparently we’d met a few times over the years, and he’d liked me – but needless to say, I had no memory of him whatsoever.

I hated what I’d become. An invalid, a slave to the vagaries of my mind, a husk of a man with nothing to talk about and, apart from a woman who may or may not have been my sister, a nurse who looked like a soldier, and a shrink who I wasn’t at all sure wanted to cure me, no one in the world to talk to.

I was completely and utterly alone.

Gingerly, I touched the four-inch scar that ran in a flattish diagonal line from the tip of my hairline across my forehead before turning down towards my left temple. It was the width of a child’s fingernail and a direct result of the injury that had made me lose my memory. No one knew what I’d been doing out on the road that night. The car I was in hadn’t been my own. No one knew whose it was. It had been so badly burned out that it was impossible to ID from the plates; apparently even the serial number had been erased by the flames. The fact that I’d been carrying no ID on me when I’d been found unconscious and alone twenty feet away, following an anonymous 999 call, only added to the mystery. It was only when Jane reported me missing and actually started contacting hospitals that she’d managed to find me, over a week later – which now, when I thought about it, seemed a pretty big coincidence.

I had other scars too on various parts of my body, at least two of which didn’t look like the result of any kind of an accident (and which Jane hadn’t been able to explain either), but I was always drawn to the one on my head. It was a little tender to the touch after the tumble in the cellar, and still looked too new to be a scar. I kept it hidden from the world under a floppy fringe but I inspected it regularly – five, ten, twenty times a day, as if I was hoping that I’d look one day and it’d be gone, and my memory miraculously returned to me.

I heard someone call my name from somewhere back in the direction of the house. It was Tom, and there was an urgency in his voice. So they’d discovered I was missing. That had been quick. I wondered if Tom had gone up to make sure I’d drunk the tea and discovered me gone.

I broke into a run. I knew it was never a good idea to piss Tom off. One time I hadn’t wanted to take my medication. I’d genuinely felt sick and had asked him if he minded me doing it in my own time. He said he’d wait, and I’d said there was no need, he could trust me. But he’d insisted, and not in a nice way either. His exact words, delivered in slow, harsh tones that seemed to require all his self-control, were: ‘My job’s to make sure you take those fucking pills, so that’s what I’m going to do. OK with you?’ I’d looked in his eyes then and seen a coldness there that made me think that nursing had definitely been a poor career choice for him. It had also made me decide against arguing.

But I was going to risk his wrath now because I wanted to be alone. No, scotch that. I
needed
to be alone.

I quickened my pace. Within the space of a minute I got a burning sensation in my lungs and my breaths turned into long, laboured pants, but even so, I felt good. I was alive. I was free. Even if it was just for a few hours. Unfortunately, the woods didn’t provide much cover. Plus, Tom was a hell of a lot fitter than me so it wasn’t going to take him long to catch up. And then he was going to be mighty pissed off. I could hear him continuing to call my name. He was still some distance away but not as far as I was expecting, and there was an edge to his voice now.

I needed to make a choice. I could skirt the edge of the woods heading in the direction of the mainland. I’d walked there before with Jane. There was a farm about half a mile down with a number of outbuildings and a rundown garden which offered plenty of hiding places, but there was no guarantee I’d get there before Tom ran me down. Alternatively, I could head left and make for the end of the peninsula where the land tumbled down sheer cliff faces to the sea; but it was too exposed out there, and that made me wonder what the hell I was thinking about, running away like this. It wasn’t like there was anywhere for me to go. I had no money. No friends. Nothing. I was always going to have to head back to the house eventually.

And yet my gut was telling me that I’d never get better if I stayed there.

I came to the edge of the woods. Ahead of me was a stretch of wild grassland about a hundred yards long that ran to the edge of a cliff. I’d stood there a number of times taking in the view of the bay and the headland beyond. It was a wild, isolated place, barely touched by civilization, with only a handful of whitewashed cottages dotted across the horizon. Today the sky was a hazy pale blue with a handful of clouds drifting across it, bathed in the gentle rays of a bright sun.

But there was no time to enjoy the view. At least not yet. I glanced back over my shoulder and, seeing no immediate sign of Tom, ran across the grassland in the direction of the cliff edge, careful to avoid the bumps of knotted grass and rabbit holes that littered the route but keeping as fast a pace as I could muster. Halfway across I looked round again. Still no sign of him. I was going flat out now, and as I reached the edge I slowed up and looked down. On this stretch of the peninsula, the cliff was actually more of a grassy, rock-strewn slope that meandered down to the sea in several angled steps before becoming sheer for the last thirty or so feet. It was steep enough of course, but if you fell, you were likely to roll rather than hurtle through the air.

Carefully, I climbed down a short way, resting my feet on rocks a couple of feet apart so that my head was level with the top and I could peer over without being seen.

I didn’t have to wait long for Tom to appear out of the trees. He was at almost the exact same spot where I’d emerged but I could tell he hadn’t seen me. He looked round angrily and called out my name again, real frustration in his voice. Then he did something I really didn’t expect. He started walking purposefully in my direction, like he knew exactly where I was, even though he couldn’t have seen me. Only the top of my head was visible, and even that was obscured by the long grass. And yet still he kept coming.

I looked down. I suppose one of the advantages of amnesia is that you can’t remember whether you had certain phobias or not, like a fear of heights. I was guessing I didn’t because the view below didn’t disorientate me. About twenty feet down the land flattened a little for a couple of yards before dropping again, and there was a tangled gorse bush there that I could hide behind so that Tom wouldn’t be able to see me from the top. It looked safe enough, so I started to clamber down the slope.

Which was the moment it all went wrong. The rock my right foot was resting on came loose at the same time that I lifted my left, and suddenly I had lost my balance and was falling backwards through the air. I was doing an aerial somersault, and the ground, in the shape of wind-bleached rocks jutting through the grass, was racing up to meet me. I threw out my arms to break the fall, hit the gorse bush, its thorns ripping at my flesh, and then landed hard and bounced on to my side, coming perilously close to the edge of the ledge.

But for once I avoided banging my head. Groaning in pain, I crawled under the gorse bush so I could no longer be seen from the top of the cliff and lay still. I could hear Tom calling my name again, but at last he stopped and turned away.

I got myself comfortable and settled in to wait until he’d finally given up the search for me, already shutting my eyes and thinking about a nap.

Three

Carl Hughie, known simply as Mr H to those who worked under him, or owed him favours, had three bad habits – smoking, gambling and prostitutes – and he was currently indulging in all three. The prostitute was in the hotel bathroom getting herself ready and Mr H, dressed only in the complimentary bathrobe, was sitting in a tub chair making a phone bet with Ladbroke’s, a copy of the
Racing Post
spread out on his lap, while puffing away on one of his cheap cigars. Life at that exact point was good.

In his own way, Mr H was a powerful man. He had access to the machinations of the establishment, and his star, like that of the man he ultimately reported to, was rising fast. At fifty, and a lifetime bachelor, he was still young enough to enjoy it. The woman in the bathroom was costing him a grand for the night – a sum that would have been well out of range of his official salary but which he could now easily afford. And by God she was worth it. Her name was Magdalena and she could do things to a man he hadn’t even known existed.

Unfortunately, as he placed his last bet, he saw a photo of a grey-haired man appear on the TV screen on the far wall, with a caption underneath saying that two British nationals had been murdered in St Lucia.