Coffin Road (20 page)

‘What is it?’

Karen’s voice was small and hushed. ‘What if it wasn’t my uncle I friended at all? What if it was Ergo pretending to be him so they could keep an eye on me?’

‘Oh my God!’ Gilly’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Then you’ve just tipped them off that you know about your dad.’

Karen turned frightened blue eyes towards her friend. ‘How could we be so fucking stupid!’ She raised her eyes to the heavens. ‘Christ!’ Then, ‘We’ve got to find this Billy Carr guy. And fast.’

‘Okay, let me in.’ Gilly shoved her friend out of her seat and logged out of Karen’s Facebook. ‘First thing we do is disguise my IP address. Though that might just be shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.’ She pulled up a piece of software called VPN Unlimited, and connected to an IP address registered somewhere in the south of England. ‘Okay.’ Now she logged into her own Facebook account and typed Billy Carr into the search window. A long list appeared of Carrs and Carvers and Carrolls and Carringtons, and other variations on Carr. But there were fewer Billy Carrs than either of them had expected, and it didn’t take long to narrow the list down to three in Scotland. The second one that Gilly brought up to look at in detail elicited a yelp from Karen.

‘There!’ She pointed at the screen. ‘Studied genetics and neurobiology at Glasgow University, then won a research fellowship at the Geddes Institute of Environmental Sciences in Edinburgh. That’s him.’

Gilly scrolled through his personal details, but most of them were blank. Apart from his school. ‘He went to Springburn Academy in Glasgow,’ she said. ‘So the family home must be somewhere in that catchment area. Let’s see how many Carrs there are in Glasgow.’ She switched screens and brought up the home page of the online BT Phone Book, tapping in
Carr
and
Glasgow
. ‘Twelve,’ she said, then grinned from ear to ear. ‘And only one in Springburn. A certain W. Carr in Hillhouse Street. Balornock, actually.’ She swiped to another screen and initiated Google Maps. She typed in the Hillhouse Street address and watched as a map of Springburn and Balornock materialised. ‘And just about two streets away from Springburn Academy.’

‘That must be him.’ Karen’s mouth was dry. ‘W for William; that’ll be his father. Probably named after him.’

But Gilly was back on Carr’s Facebook page on another screen. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Look at this.’ She was scrolling through an album of photographs he had posted and stopped suddenly on a group of young men gathered outside a four-in-the-block house on a street corner. A tidy garden lay beyond a black, wrought-iron fence, and a shiny new red car sat at the kerb. The young men, most of whom seemed to be in their late teens or early twenties, were gathered around it, grinning and laughing. Billy’s post read,
My first car
. Billy, the proud owner, was at the centre of the group, with several of his friends pointing fingers at him.

Karen leaned in to get a closer look at him. It was hard to judge his age, but the pic had been posted about eighteen months ago, and he looked around twenty-two or twenty-three. Judging by the car, he had done alright for himself after leaving the Geddes. His hair was longer than fashionable and drawn back in a short ponytail, and he sported a sparse-looking beard and moustache. But she could see that he was a good-looking boy, and with a car like that wouldn’t have trouble pulling girls.

But Gilly was pointing at the street sign bolted to the railings behind the group. ‘Look,’ she said, and Karen refocused her gaze. The sign read,
Hillhouse Street
. Gilly turned a smile towards her friend. ‘I knew Facebook would come in useful for something one day.’ Her smile faded. ‘What will you do? Phone? He might not be living at home any more.’

Karen shook her head. ‘No. It’s too easy for someone to hang up on you. I’ll get the train to Glasgow first thing tomorrow and go knocking on the door.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Carr family home was situated on the ground floor of the four-in-the-block house on the corner of Hillhouse Street. It stood opposite half a dozen semi-derelict corner shops which had once served a community where most people did not have cars. Only three of them were still occupied. A launderette, a Chinese takeaway and a minimarket. The rest were shuttered up and covered in graffiti and old posters.

In front of the house, a neatly manicured square of lawn was surrounded by red chippings and framed by close-cropped hedges. The original windows had been replaced by brand-new hardwood and double glazing. Shiny red paint glistened on the stone sills and on a low wall leading to a door of polished mahogany with bevelled glass and brass fittings. Scrupulously pruned roses were still in bloom, red and yellow and white, in finely turned flowerbeds.

Someone, Karen thought as she stepped from her taxi, cared about this place, and had lavished time and money on it. She opened the gate and walked up the path to the front door. Decorative blinds were half-drawn on the bedroom and living-room windows. She rang the bell and waited with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Behind this door lay what might very well be her last chance to connect with her father. And if that did not work out, she knew, there was nowhere else for her to go. No one else to turn to. She had cut the umbilical and cast herself adrift in a hostile world. And whatever happened, she would never go home again.

The door opened a crack and, from the darkness beyond, she was struck by a warm, antiseptic smell, like stepping into a hospital. The pale face of an elderly woman peered out at her. From buds that fitted into her nostrils, clear plastic tubing was hooked back over her ears, looping down to meet below her chin and then curling away behind her. Steel-grey hair was cut short around a thin face, prematurely lined, Karen saw now. The woman was not as old as she had at first appeared. Dark, sad eyes gazed up at her. ‘Can I help you, lassie?’ Her voice was the texture of sandpaper.

‘Mrs Carr?’

‘That’s me.’

‘I’m looking for Billy, Mrs Carr. We were research fellows at the Geddes Institute together.’ Karen knew she was taking a chance.

‘He’s not here. What did you want with him?’

‘Billy said if I was ever in trouble I should look him up.’

The woman chuckled. ‘That’s oor Billy. Generous to a fault.’ Then her smile faded. ‘Are you in trouble, lass?’

‘My father died a while back and my mother’s in hospital. The bank’s repossessed the house and I’m looking for somewhere to stay for a few nights.’ Karen had no idea where any of this was coming from. Spontaneous fiction. But she understood that she needed to win this woman’s sympathy if she was going to get any information from her.

‘Aw, jings, that’s tough . . . What did you say your name was?’

‘Karen.’

‘Karen. Your story’s not that different from mine. My man died, too, and I have cancer of the lung. But at least I’ve got my Billy to look after me. No idea what I’d have done without him.’ She opened the door wide. ‘Come away in.’ And Karen saw, as she walked into the hall, that Mrs Carr was dragging an oxygen tank behind her on a wheeled contraption not unlike a shopping trolley.

The woman closed the door and led Karen through to a small sitting room that gave on to a kitchen in the back. A gas fire sat in the original tiled fireplace, and although it seemed to be on low, the room was stiflingly hot.

‘Sit yourself down, lassie.’

Karen perched on the edge of an oxblood leather settee and looked around the room. Two leather recliners flanked the fireplace, and a sheepskin rug covered the carpet in front of the fire. A cat had stretched out on the rug and was fast asleep. In the corner by the window, a large flatscreen TV stood on a table next to a sleek, low cabinet housing a high-end stereo system. Mrs Carr parked her oxygen and eased herself into the recliner nearest the kitchen. Just that small effort left her breathless. An array of remote controls and an iPad cluttered a small table at her right hand, and Karen was shocked to see a packet of cigarettes and a lighter on it.

‘Not sure there’s much I can do for you, Karen. Billy’s away the now and I don’t know when he’ll be back.’ She tilted her head and gave Karen a good looking over. ‘Were you and he . . . ?’

‘Oh, nothing like that. Just friends.’

His mother seemed relieved. ‘He’s a good boy, my Billy. My only regret is he never finished his studies. He’s got brains that lad. Not like me, or his faither. Not sure where he gets it from. But he’s smart.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I don’t suppose you would have some notion of why he quit?’

‘The Geddes?’

‘Aye.’

‘I’ve no idea, Mrs Carr. He was there one day, and not the next.’ She recalled and repeated her godfather’s words. ‘Never did find out what happened to him.’

‘Aye, well, he got himself a job, that’s what happened to him. More interested in earning money than studying. But he’s done well for himself, the laddie.’ She looked around the room. ‘Got me all this. And a man to do the garden. And minicabs to take me back and forward to the Royal. I canny complain, Karen. He’s been good to his mammy.’

Karen nodded her appreciation of Billy’s sacrifices for his mother. ‘I don’t suppose you could tell me where I can find him?’

A shadow flitted briefly across her face. ‘I’m very sorry, Karen, but I canny. He made me promise.’

Karen frowned. ‘Promise what?’

‘Not to tell anyone where he was.’

‘Why?’

‘Och, lassie, I’ve not the foggiest idea. He can be a funny one sometimes. He’s working up north somewhere, and he told me if anyone came looking for him I wasn’t to say a word about where he is.’ She stole a guilty glance at Karen. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean you, right enough. But I wouldn’t like to give out his address or phone number without asking him first.’ She nodded towards the iPad on the table beside her. ‘He got me that so we could keep in touch by email.’ She said
email
as if it might be some foreign, and therefore highly suspicious, word. ‘I’m not very good at it. But I’ll send him one tonight to ask if it’s okay.’ She seemed embarrassed by having to put Karen off and eased herself out of her chair. ‘You’ll take a wee cup of tea?’ A distraction.

Karen said, ‘Oh, don’t trouble yourself, Mrs Carr. It’s alright.’ She started to get up, but Billy’s mother waved her back into her seat. ‘No trouble at all. I was just about to make one for myself anyway.’ And she dragged her oxygen off into the kitchen.

Karen sat awkwardly on the edge of the settee and wondered what she was going to do now. Billy would know immediately that Karen wasn’t a fellow student from the Geddes. She stood up and glanced almost sightlessly around the room, a sense of panic rising inside her. This was her last hope.

Mrs Carr was gabbling to her through the open door, and she could hear her banging about in the kitchen. There was no point in staying for tea and meaningless conversation. This was a dead end. In every possible way. She was about to turn and slip quietly out of the door when she spotted a postcard sitting prominently on the mantelpiece next to the clock. It was a Highland scene. A loch. Mountains rising up behind it. Pine forest. On an impulse, she lifted it down and turned it over. It was addressed to Mrs Agnes Carr, and the message was written in biro by a spidery hand.
Hi Mum, here are my new home and email addresses. Keep them safe . . .

When Mrs Carr came to the kitchen door to ask if Karen took sugar or milk, the girl was gone. And so was the postcard.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I hate hospitals. I don’t know why. Some bad experience in my past, I expect. But there it is, an odd mix of feelings. Fear and sadness. No. More than sadness. Depression. And that smell. Always that smell. Antiseptic. But something else, too. Something sharp and unpleasant. If death had a smell, then maybe that’s how I would describe it.

They gave me a CT scan earlier. Looking for brain damage to explain my memory loss, I guess. They have poked and prodded and X-rayed and asked me endless questions, and now I have been sitting here in someone’s office for the last half hour or more, staring at posters on piss-yellow walls. Looking at them, but not seeing them. I couldn’t tell you what a single one of them was declaiming, or selling, or warning me to avoid.

There is a desk and a filing cabinet, and a window looking out over a car park. Beyond that, I can see the road rising up to the great interior expanse of the Barvas Moor. When you drive that road, it seems as if there is no end to it. The moor stretches off as far as you can see in every direction. Flat, featureless, except for the scars of the peat-cutting near the roadside. In the very far south, the mountains of Harris are just visible on the distant horizon. And when you have driven for half an hour, you will see the Atlantic washing up along the west coast in a fury of white froth whipped up by a wind that has blown itself in anger across 3,000 miles of uninterrupted ocean.

It is strange how I am remembering these things now. Things I must have seen and done. And yet I am still without any sense of who it is that I am.

The door opens and a man in a white overall steps into the room. He is quite tall, and maybe around my age, or older. I can see that beneath his overall he wears a T-shirt and jeans. His hair is unconventionally long for a medical man. Reddish in colour, and luxuriant once, perhaps, but thinning now a little across the top. He has a warm smile, and the freckled complexion of someone who spends time out of doors. I have not seen him before.

As I rise, he waves me back into my seat, shaking my hand and telling me not to disturb myself. I would have thought I was probably pretty disturbed already, without any further prompting, from myself or anyone else. He has an odd accent, almost imperceptible, and his English is just too perfect to be British. ‘Dr Wulf Kimm,’ he says. ‘I am the resident psychiatrist. You’ll excuse me if I don’t use your name, since neither of us seems to know it.’ He smiles as if this is a joke, and I return the smile to humour him. Germans, and their sense of humour.

He sits down on the other side of the desk, opens up a folder that he has brought in with him and lays it before him, spreading the several sheets it contains across the desktop. He takes a pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses from the breast pocket of his overall and puts them on to skim-read the notes in front of him. Then he removes them, letting them dangle from his thumb and forefinger as he looks at me thoughtfully.

Quite unexpectedly he says, ‘I was a junior doctor at this hospital more than twenty years ago, you know. Best days of my life. I spent most of my time, when I wasn’t working, riding around the island on my motorbike. Of course, it was a pretty rackety old thing in those days. Now I have a Honda CB1000R.’ As if this should mean something to me. ‘I went on to specialise in psychiatry back in Münster. You can imagine my joy when this job popped up on the online noticeboards. I jumped at the chance to come back.’

‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘the past doesn’t live up to your memory of it when you revisit.’

He cocks his head and looks at me curiously. ‘And you know this how?’

I shrug. ‘Experience, I suppose.’

‘But you can’t recall the experience that taught you it?’

‘I wish I could.’

He takes out a large spiral notebook from a desk drawer and opens it up. Selecting a pen from the same drawer and replacing his reading glasses on his nose, he scribbles some notes in it, then looks up again. ‘My colleagues can find no physical reason to explain your loss of memory. Neuroimaging reveals no brain damage.’

‘Which is why I have been handed over to you.’

‘Indeed.’ He pauses. ‘I am going to ask you a few questions, sir. I would appreciate it if you would answer me as honestly as you can.’

‘Of course.’

‘But first, let me establish . . . You remember nothing at all about yourself?’

I think about it. ‘I can remember feelings. Emotions. Over the past few days I have had some fleeting fragments of recollection. Mostly from my childhood. My mother. Another child. I’m not sure whether it’s a brother or a sister. But nothing concrete or detailed. It’s like dreaming. You wake up and the detail of it is gone, like a mist evaporating in sunshine.’ I scratch my head. ‘You know, it’s weird. When I washed up on the beach, I had no idea at first where I was. And yet, now, the island seems very familiar to me. But I’m not sure if that’s a familiarity I’ve learned or remembered.’ I turn towards the window. ‘Just a few minutes ago, I was looking out across the moor. I know it’s the Barvas Moor, and I know that I have driven across it sometime in my past. But I don’t actually remember doing it.’

He nods and makes some notes.

‘Later, we’ll go over the experience of finding yourself on the beach, exactly as you remember it. But for the moment I’d like to focus on other parts of your memory. Have you ever, to your recollection, had blackouts? Blank spells? Memory lapses.’

I shrug and smile at the irony of it. ‘I don’t really remember.’

He doesn’t smile. ‘What about time? Do you ever lose time? You know, have gaps in your experience of time?’

And suddenly I remember driving. It was night. I was going home. From work, perhaps. Things on my mind. And when I turned my car into the drive, I couldn’t remember a single thing about the journey. Not one gear change, not one set of traffic lights. Nothing. Just as if it had never happened. So I tell Dr Kimm and he makes some more notes.

‘From what you remember about yourself, would you say you were someone preoccupied with details? You know, rules, lists, schedules, that sort of thing.’

‘I know that detail is important to me,’ I say. ‘Just from my experience of the last few days.’

‘To the point, perhaps, of losing sight of the reasons for having them in the first place?’

‘I have one single preoccupation, Doctor. And that is to find out who I am, and why I am here. So, of course, every detail is important. But I’m not likely to lose sight of why.’

‘And the detail of what happened that led to your being washed up on a beach with no memory, that is just as important to you?’

‘Of course.’

‘You
want
to know what happened.’

And for the first time, I hesitate. Do I? Do I really want to know? What if I killed that man? Is that something I want to find out about myself? That I am a murderer. That I am capable of taking the life of another human being by smashing his head in. I look up and find the doctor watching me closely.

‘What did you think when you found the body of that man on that island?’

I can’t even bring myself to answer.

‘Did you think you had killed him?’

I did. It was the first thought that went through my head, and I can barely make myself meet the doctor’s eye as I nod my head.