Kind of Cruel (16 page)

With those particular team-mates, what intelligent person would be?

‘You said yourself: you’re the only lead they’ve got in a murder case.’ Luke struggles to sound unemotional. Like most men, deep down he believes that only illogical arguments can be put forward by anyone in the grip of a strong feeling. ‘If you stroll down to the nick and calmly admit to being a liar . . .’

‘I’ve got an alibi! Okay, it’s not the alibi I gave them . . .’

‘Why do they need to know that? You’ve got an alibi. That’s all that matters. You were somewhere else when Katharine Allen was killed.’ Luke groans. ‘I’m wasting my breath, aren’t I?’

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘It helps to hear you say all this, helps to convince me that you’re probably right.’

Luke throws up his hands. ‘Then . . . ?’

‘Telling Simon Waterhouse the truth might land me and Jo in the shit, and it won’t help the police to find Katharine Allen’s killer – true, and so what? It’s a murder investigation, Luke. The police are going to be asking a lot of people a lot of questions, and for each one they’ll want an answer that isn’t a lie. I can understand why that’s important to them. Can’t you? They want
all
the information, not most of it, not just the bits people don’t mind sharing with them. Who am I to decide that they need this fact but not that fact? I don’t have an overview of the case. I don’t even know where I saw those words written down. It’s their case, not mine. I’m a link in their chain, whether I like it or not. If I don’t tell them the whole truth, I’ll be prioritising my own selfish desire to stay out of trouble over their need to investigate Katharine Allen’s murder in the way that they’d ideally like to: not held back and misdirected by made-up stories.’

Luke sighs. ‘I just can’t see how it could make a difference,’ he mutters. ‘Jo’ll hit the roof, Neil’ll go mental . . . What?’

I’ve grabbed his hand. Something has unlocked inside my brain. At first I don’t trust it. Two eureka moments in one night? Is it because I was hypnotised today, for the first time? Maybe what I told Sergeant Zailer was wrong, and there is a container in my mind called the unconscious; maybe, thanks to Ginny, the lid’s a little looser than it was this time yesterday.

‘Amber? What is it?’

‘The headings,’ I say. ‘I made a connection: one piece of paper, another piece of paper.’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You have one thought, it leads on to another thought, linked to the first one. Free association. Shrinks use it all the time. Don’t they?’ If they do, I’ve no idea how I know they do, or why I’m asking Luke, who knows less about psychotherapeutic techniques than I do. Straightforward facts are Luke’s speciality, the kind that win you points in pub quizzes: the dates of famous battles, the highest mountain, where Einstein lived. ‘Except it’s not so free, because nothing’s free-floating, everything’s bound up with something else,’ I go on, talking mainly to myself. ‘With Ginny, when I said, “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” without knowing I’d said it or what it meant, I was thinking about Little Orchard. That’s what was in my mind, immediately before I said those words.’

Luke closes his eyes. ‘Amber, there’s no reason to think—’

‘Yes, there is.’ I don’t care about reason, only about what my instincts are telling me. ‘What if that’s it? What if I saw it at Little Orchard?’

But we’ve walked ourselves around Little Orchard how many times? And we can’t find the page with ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’ written on it. We can’t bring up a memory of having seen it in any of the bedrooms or bathrooms, in either of the two lounges, in the kitchen, dining room, games room or library. Not being ones to give up easily, we’ve been thorough in our examination of all the least obvious places: the utility room, the walk-in pantry, the wine cellar. We’ve imagined lifting jars of chutney and bottles of Vanish stain remover, but it’s got us nowhere. One bedroom – the one shared by Jo’s mother and sister, Hilary and Kirsty – has its own attached dressing room, a small windowless room lined with cupboards on both sides. We’ve opened them, all of them, and failed to find our piece of paper.

We’ve lifted broken slabs of paving in the garden, looked into the necks of earthenware pots and into a hole in a tree trunk that’s big enough to force a small female hand into – just. We’ve trailed our fingers through cold pond-water, checked the two outbuildings at least three times each: a hexagonal wooden summerhouse full of dusty garden furniture and a collapsed table-tennis table, and a detached double garage containing lots of matching kitchen units and a few car tyres, though no cars. Really, detectives searching the place couldn’t have done a more thorough job in person than we have using only memory. Would they have spotted that there was an electric blanket on the bed in the master bedroom, Jo and Neil’s room, and been canny enough to pull it back in case there was something underneath? We did. There was nothing, only a mattress.

We’ve been back to Little Orchard again and again and found nothing.

The normal response, at this point – and I’m attaching no positive value judgement to the word ‘normal’ here, I’m using it only to mean ‘most common’ – the normal response would be to give up and assume that, wherever Amber saw the words ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’, it wasn’t at Little Orchard.

That isn’t Amber’s response, and I’m pleased it isn’t. I’m delighted that Amber’s reaction to her memory not finding what it thought it would find is much more interesting than that, because it’s the interesting, weird things that really help us. The details that seem to make no sense at all are the ones that, once we understand their significance, make sense of everything and tell us all we need to know.

Amber will not budge from her certainty that Little Orchard is where she saw those unexplainable words. Why is she so sure? Because Little Orchard was what she was thinking about – lying in the same reclining chair she’s lying in now, with her feet up on that same footstool – immediately before she said, ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’ and accused me of having said it first. And, yes, sometimes one thought does lead on to another for a reason, because there’s a link between the two, but it’s just as common for the brain to flit randomly from one topic to another and for there to be no connection. I’ve told Amber this and it makes her impatient. In her case, she insists, there
is
a link, it isn’t random.

How does she know there’s a connection if she can’t say what it is? She can’t or won’t answer that question. She is sure that she didn’t see the Kind of Cruel page in any of the rooms we keep trawling, on our memory tours. It definitely wasn’t in any of the places we’ve searched, double-searched and triple-searched. Several times, I have asked the obvious question: then why do we keep looking? I never get an answer, so maybe Amber doesn’t know why. Or maybe she knows, but because the answer appears to be impossible, she’s too embarrassed to say it. Remember: embarrassment, guilt, shame and humiliation are the most disabling emotions we can feel, far more detrimental to our wellbeing even than hatred or extreme unhappiness, which are other-focused and therefore easier on our sense of self.

There was only one part of Little Orchard that Amber didn’t see: the locked study on the half-landing between the first and second floors. Locked, presumably, because the owners’ private possessions were in there. It’s not uncommon, if you rent a holiday house, to find a locked room or two, and not unreasonable for the owners of Little Orchard to be willing to make some of their home available to paying strangers – the vast majority of it – and yet maintain a degree of privacy in the form of one locked study that probably contains all kinds of private documents: bank statements, wills, important work files.

I
don’t think it’s unreasonable,
anyway. Amber seems to, though she never quite comes out and says so. I wonder why I hear anger in her voice whenever she refers to ‘the locked room’. She says it sarcastically, with audible inverted commas around it. Is she angry with herself, perhaps? She knows the locked study is the only room in which she categorically cannot have seen the elusive sheet of blue-lined paper. The door remained locked throughout her stay at Little Orchard and she never went in there. Yet she’s certain she didn’t see the piece of paper in any other part of the house, or anywhere else in the grounds, and equally certain that Little Orchard is where she saw it.

So, two possibilities, as far as I can see. One: Amber
did
go into the locked study, and knows what she saw in there, but doesn’t want to admit it. Unlikely, I think. Her need to find out where she saw those words strikes me as genuine.

Second possibility: against all logic, she’s got it into her head that the piece of paper we’re looking for must be inside that locked room at Little Orchard. But if that’s where it is, then she didn’t see it, end of story. Unless she’s psychic or telepathic – neither of which she would believe in – she can’t have had a vision of the inside of the study. Plus, Katharine Allen’s notepad bore the imprint of those words a month ago, in 2010. How likely is it that the words were written and the page torn off before Christmas 2003, which was when Amber was at Little Orchard?

Amber knows all this, and has tried to give herself a good talking-to, I would guess, and it makes no difference: her instincts keep screaming at her, ‘It’s in the locked room’. She won’t admit it, especially not to the police, because it makes no sense, and she’s frightened to find her beliefs making so little sense. She wouldn’t admit it to me if we were alone, even though I represent all things nonsensical as far as she’s concerned.

It doesn’t matter if she never admits it. That’s not what I’m about, forcing people to admit to things they’re ashamed of. This isn’t a show trial. Though I’d love it if I could encourage more people to feel less ashamed of their irrationality and be more tolerant of what they perceive to be the rubbish clogging up their minds. Every crazy superstitious belief has a purpose and can be reformatted and turned into something wonderful and liberating. Whenever you’re scared, it means you’re getting somewhere, or you have the chance of getting somewhere, if only you’d take it, if you don’t let your fear shut it down. Scared without an obvious cause, I mean, not scared because you’re in the sea and a huge shark’s swimming in your direction.

So . . . Amber isn’t denying any of what I’m saying, despite being someone who loves an argument more than anything else, so I’m going to risk making two more observations. She’s presented us with a truly impossible mystery. If she saw the piece of paper at Little Orchard, then she can’t have seen it in the one room she didn’t go into. That’s simply not possible. And yet she’s sure she saw it in none of the rooms she
did
go into, and she’s unwilling to accept that she didn’t see it at Little Orchard at all but somewhere else.

Why might Amber want to tie us all up – including herself, especially herself – in the knots of an impossible riddle?

Earlier, I mentioned the way one mystery might hide behind another: a vulnerable, easily solved mystery sheltering in the shadow of one that’s tougher and more resilient. I presented a theory, which attracted neither agreement nor disagreement: that the important question is why it matters so much to Amber that she still doesn’t know why Jo’s branch of the family disappeared and then reappeared. I suggested a few possible ways into answering the question, only to have it seamlessly replaced with a new and far more dramatic one. I’m not saying Amber did any of this deliberately or knowingly, but I’d be surprised if her unconscious mind doesn’t know very well that the words ‘locked room’ act as a pretty powerful attention magnet.

The impossible mystery behind the impossible mystery. Impossible in very different ways, though: one impossible of content, the other of form. The mystery we mustn’t allow anyone to solve because it would cause too much pain and suffering all round, hiding behind the one we can’t solve because there is literally no solution, not unless the terms and conditions have been incorrectly presented. Still, we beaver away at trying to crack it, hoping we’ll be clever enough to find a way of making it all come good, making the impossible possible. We’d feel Godlike if only we could do that. And we forget all about the unglamorous simple-to-solve mystery hiding in the shadows that offers us no psychic visions and no locked rooms. Who needs more pain and suffering in their life?

You need to tackle all the questions you want to answer least, Amber – one by one. That’s the only way to make the impossible riddles in your life disappear.

Let’s start with an easy one. How did you know there was an electric blanket on Jo and Neil’s bed at Little Orchard? And paper drawer liners in the drawers in Hilary and Kirsty’s dressing room, and a bowl full of cotton wool balls in Pam and Quentin’s en-suite shower room?

Do I need to go on? A hole in a tree trunk in the garden, a grey plastic cutlery divider in one of the kitchen units in the garage? Katharine Allen was still alive in 2003, and you weren’t an insomniac. You had no idea you would one day consult a hypnotherapist who would ask you to go over every inch of Little Orchard in your memory in search of a sheet of A4 paper that might prove to be an important part of a murder investigation.

You weren’t making those details up, were you? They were genuine memories, vivid ones. If you deny it, I won’t believe you. I could see the concentration on your face, and how much it mattered to you to get the particulars right.

You were remembering searching the house and garden for real.

What were you looking for?