(1998) Denial (44 page)

He went over to the window and looked at the cloudless sky. ‘We’ll talk about them but some other time, all right?’

‘I’d like to know why you find it difficult to talk about them,’ he heard the psychiatrist say.

Thomas marched over to the door. Then he turned towards Michael and said, ‘We’ll talk about her, I promise you. Some other time. We’ll talk about her a great deal. We really will. I think our time is up now, isn’t it?’

Michael looked at his watch. ‘We have another ten minutes.’

Thomas nodded. He wanted to get out of here, he was scared that he had said too much already. It was dangerous to stay, Dr Tennent was outsmarting him, he was going to give too much away. ‘You can have these ten minutes as a gift from me, Dr Tennent.’ He smiled, some of his composure returning. ‘Enjoy them. Use them well.’

He opened the door and was gone.

Michael turned to his computer, logged on to the Net, entered a search command for ‘Dr Terence Goel’.

A website address appeared. Michael typed it in, then read it as it downloaded. It was a smart site, but a little showy, perhaps.

There was a colour photograph of the man, followed by his biography. Dr Terence Goel was cousin of the astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell. A member of the Scripps Research
Institute. A junior professor at MIT. A member of the Select Presidential Advisory Committee on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence for Ronald Reagan.

Michael decided he would ask him about his work on that committee at their next session, he was interested in UFOs himself.

He looked at the man’s list of hobbies. Food. Chess. He was a member of Mensa.

Dr Goel’s credentials were extremely impressive.

Far more impressive, Michael thought, than the man himself.

The actress, Natassja Kinski, breasts hanging free through her open négligée, was straddling her black lover, Wesley Snipes. They were both gasping, groaning, her lover was reaching up, holding those breasts, they were coming, they were both coming –

The television screen went blank.

‘Why are you watching that, Tom-Tom?’

Staring at her holding the remote in her hand, his face flushed, he had no answer. Because. Because.

‘She’s so thin, Tom-Tom. A beautiful clothes-horse, but that’s all. Skeletal. She reminds me of someone out of a concentration camp. Doesn’t she remind you of that?’

Images of skeletal figures in Auschwitz came into his mind. Natassja Kinski’s face transposed. Straddling him. He squirmed in revulsion. ‘I – I –’ he said. ‘It was just on. I was watching the film, a preview.’

‘My films were pure. We suggested, but we never showed. I could never have lowered myself. You understand just how low actresses have sunk, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said quietly, angry because she was right, angry because she had stopped him watching Natassja Kinski, angry because – because of the images she had put in his mind.

‘Can you imagine how you would feel if you were watching me on the screen doing that, darling?’

He looked up at his mother, confused thoughts swirling around inside him. What would it be like with Sharon Stone? Or Kim Basinger? Sigourney Weaver? Would they be thin, too, like concentration-camp survivors? Would they
laugh at him the way the nurse at medical school had laughed at him?

Then the guilt came up at him, like some dark shadow. His mother looked so beautiful; she was lovelier than any of those other famous actresses. Why was he thinking like this?

She would leave him if she knew he was thinking thoughts like this.

‘I love you, Mummy,’ he said.

Sternly. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

She released the sash cord on her dressing gown. Her breasts, larger, whiter, less firm but so much larger, so much whiter and softer than Natassja Kinski’s, fell free in front of him. ‘Show me how much your choo-choo loves your mummy.’

He opened his trousers, lifted himself in his armchair and pulled them down, and then his boxer shorts.

She stood, staring at his erection. ‘Dr Rennie tells me I spend too much time at home. Shall I do what he says, Tom-Tom? Shall I go out and do charity work for other people? Shall I leave you, like your daddy left you?’

He stammered, ‘No, please, I don’t want you to do that.’

‘Is your choo-choo for me, Tom-Tom, or is it for Natassja Kinski?’

He hesitated, confused, he wasn’t sure. He wanted to make love to Natassja Kinski but he did not want his mother to leave him, in case – in case –

Images of walking skeletons.

He hardened even more.

Images of walking skeletons.

‘If you want to make love to Natassja Kinski you can’t be my little boy any more. I’ll discard you. No more treats, Tom-Tom. Other people might laugh at you, Tom-Tom. You remember how that girl you took out at medical school laughed at you?’

Lucy
. The student nurse he had met in his second year at King’s, who had been friendly to him. They had gone out for a drink a few times. He’d brought her to meet his
mother, and his mother told him she was not good enough for him. He’d asked her when he drove her home after that meeting if she would like to play with his choo-choo. He could still remember her laugh, it was echoing in his head still, now, sitting in Terence Goel’s Ford Mondeo in the car park below Dr Michael Tennent’s office in the Sheen Park Hospital.

The way the prostitute, Divina, had laughed at him.

What is wrong with me?

He accelerated down the drive. Angry with himself. Angry with the psychiatrist. You think you’re clever, Dr Michael Tennent.

Will you still feel clever when you find Amanda Capstick’s breasts pushed through your letterbox packed in ice?

Circadian cycles. The human body is out of sync with the rest of nature. Humans live a twenty-five-and-a-half-hour cycle. Experiments had been done by people spending months in total darkness down mine-shafts, with no watches. All of them calculated they had been down a shorter time than they actually had.

Amanda had read about this a long time back and she was thinking about it as she worked away monotonously in the dark, slowly twisting and interweaving the spring she had removed from the mattress around the belt buckle, trying to make it into a sturdy handle, hammering every fraction of an inch into shape with the sole of the loafer. It was ready to test now.

‘Amanda darling, come here!’

Her mother’s voice. She spun round. The darkness swirled as if she had disturbed it. She tracked the silence with her ears. Nothing. Just her imagination.

She doubled the mattress once more against the wall, climbed onto it, reached up, found the grille, located the rim, then the first screw. Then she dropped the screwdriver. It rolled with a clatter somewhere below her.

‘Shit.’

Down on her knees, crawling forward, moving her hands in front of her like a swimmer. She collided with the latrine bucket.

Tears of frustration ran down her cheeks.
Sod you, damn you, fuck you, where are you?

Pull yourself together, Amanda Capstick. Survivors stay calm. Your screwdriver is in here, somewhere. Just work your way across the floor and you’ll find it
.

Within a couple of minutes, she did.

Back on the mattress, taking it more slowly, she got the blade into the groove, then turned. Nothing. She cautiously applied more pressure. Still nothing. Wobbling on the mattress, it was hard to remain steady. She twisted harder still.

The screw turned.

It felt like a valve had opened inside her.

Upstairs, in his den, on the World Wide Web, Thomas Lamark was studying photographs of a mastectomy that had been carried out at St John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. The pictures were good, but he needed more clarity.

Conveniently, there was a mastectomy being performed in the teaching theatre at London’s King’s College Hospital tomorrow afternoon. He had seen this on the list when he had dropped by there early this morning, to collect some things he needed from a store room to which he still had a key.

It would be good to attend this, he really wasn’t at all familiar with this operation. And he wanted to get it right.

After logging off from Dr Goel’s website, Michael just had time to put a call into Maxine Bentham before his next patient arrived. But Amanda’s therapist was able to shed no light on her disappearance.

She told Michael she did not consider Amanda to be depressive, and she thought it improbable that she would have disappeared like this of her own accord. She wasn’t surprised to learn that Brian Trussler had another girlfriend, and from all that Amanda had told her about the man, she didn’t feel he was likely either to have kidnapped Amanda or physically harmed her.

She asked Michael to keep her informed and he promised he would.

He sat through his next two sessions finding it difficult to concentrate on his patients. Terence Goel was drumming in his head.
The parallels
. The accident that had killed Katy. The dove separated from his mate.

During his session with Dr Goel he had dismissed these parallels as being connections made in his own fanciful mind, but now with Goel gone and time to reflect they weren’t going away.

Goel could have found out about the car smash easily enough, it had made the national press at the time. But Amanda’s disappearance? Could he know about that?

Michael churned over their session this morning. The dove pining for its mate. Again, he wondered,
Am I reading too much into this?

The dove pining could apply as much to his grief after Katy’s death as to his distress now over Amanda. It was just how he had felt after the accident. At times in a state of
denial, unwilling to accept that she was really dead, convinced that somehow she would return.

His patient, Guy Rotheram, a seriously rich thirty-five-year-old packaging tycoon who was suffering from panic attacks, was sitting on the edge of the sofa describing the feeling he kept getting that he was outside his own body. The man worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, that was the main reason he was having panic attacks, but he couldn’t accept this. He couldn’t accept being beaten by his own body.

‘Are you listening, Dr Tennent?’ he asked suddenly.

Michael was aware that he was not giving Guy Rotheram his full concentration. But Guy Rotheram would be going home to his Chelsea home tonight to his beautiful wife and his adorable children. Guy Rotheram’s panic attacks made life uncomfortable for him, but they would eventually stop. Guy’s worries were big worries, but his own were even bigger right now. Today Guy Rotheram, along with the rest of his life, was on hold.

Who are you, Dr Terence Goel?

What is your real problem?

How much do you know about me?

As soon as Guy Rotheram left, Michael pulled out Terence Goel’s file and took out the original letter of referral from Goel’s GP, Dr Shyam Sundaralingham, bearing the address, 20 West Garden Crescent, Cheltenham.

He dialled the phone number. It was answered on the third ring by a middle-aged male voice with a pukka military clip. ‘Dr Sundaralingham’s surgery.’

Michael was surprised to hear a male voice. He assumed this was one of the increasingly common new breed of practice managers answering the phone. ‘My name’s Dr Tennent, I’m a psychiatrist. Dr Sundaralingham recently referred a patient to me, and I’d like to have a word with him about the patient.’

‘I’m afraid Dr Sundaralingham’s out at the moment. May I take your number and have him call you back?’

Michael gave it, then hung up. The sun had moved past
the window now, and he opened the Venetian blind to let more air into the stuffy room. His phone rang. It was Lulu.

He logged back onto the Internet to check his e-mail while they talked. Lulu had no news, and sounded relieved to hear that Roebuck was taking the tape of Amanda’s call seriously.

‘Four days now,’ she said.

There was a disturbing finality in her voice. And there was a disturbing finality in the number, also, he thought. As if to go missing for one day, or two days, or even three days was somehow all right. But after four days . . .

Two hundred and fifty thousand missing persons a year. Roebuck hinted at a possible connection between Amanda’s disappearance and that of Tina Mackay. The publisher had been missing for three weeks, and he got the distinct impression from the detective that the police hadn’t yet found a single clue.

Now with the tape they had something for Amanda. And they had
hope
.

Amanda had spoken those words: there was no way of telling when, but there was a good chance she had been alive last night. He and Lulu had speculated on the way home from Beamish’s house about the edited silences on the tape. Lulu was convinced the editing wasn’t Amanda’s work. If Amanda had wanted to pull a stunt on the phone to embarrass him, she’d have had the guts to do it live, she insisted.

Michael had agreed. And if it wasn’t her phoning him, but someone else, they must have a reason. Kidnap? A ransom?
She must still be alive
.

‘Where do we go from here?’ Lulu asked. ‘Are we going to wait to see what the police do?’

For three fruitless weeks, like Tina Mackay?
Michael thought but did not say. ‘No. We keep looking, we keep doing everything we can. I don’t know how much the police are going to do – I don’t know how much they
can
do.’

‘And us? What more can we do?’

‘I’m thinking. I’m not going to just sit and twiddle my thumbs. I can’t do that, I need to keep looking.’

‘That’s how I feel.’

‘Don’t lose that feeling.’

He had a ton of correspondence and phone calls to deal with from his unscheduled day off yesterday. He suggested to Lulu they spoke at the end of the afternoon, hung up, then turned his attention to his e-mail.

There was one with an address he did not recognise, and which had a JPeg attachment, a photograph or an illustration titled,
LAST PIC OF AC INTACT
.