I’ve barely slept. All night, I lay awake thinking about it, turning it over and over in my mind. Is this stupid, reckless, pointless? Is it dangerous? I don’t know what I’m doing. I made an appointment yesterday morning to see Dr. Kamal Abdic. I rang his surgery and spoke to a receptionist, asked for him by name. I might have been imagining it, but I thought she sounded surprised. She said he could see me today at four thirty. So soon? My heart battering my ribs, my mouth dry, I said that would be fine. The session costs £75. That £300 from my mother is not going to last very long.
Ever since I made the appointment, I haven’t been able to think of anything else. I’m afraid, but I’m excited, too. I can’t deny that there’s a part of me that finds the idea of meeting Kamal thrilling. Because all this started with him: a glimpse of him and my life changed course, veered off the tracks. The moment I saw him kiss Megan, everything changed.
And I need to see him. I need to do something, because the police are only interested in Scott. They had him in for questioning again yesterday. They won’t confirm it, of course, but there’s footage on the Internet: Scott, walking into the police station, his mother at his side. His tie was too tight, he looked strangled.
Everyone speculates. The newspapers say that the police are being more circumspect, that they cannot afford to make another hasty arrest. There is talk of a botched investigation, suggestions that a change in personnel may be required. On the Internet, the talk about Scott is horrible, the theories wild, disgusting. There are screen grabs of him giving his first tearful appeal for Megan’s return, and next to them are pictures of killers who had also appeared on television, sobbing, seemingly distraught at the fate of their loved ones. It’s horrific, inhuman. I can only pray that he never looks at this stuff. It would break his heart.
So, stupid and reckless I may be, but I am going to see Kamal Abdic, because unlike all the speculators, I have seen Scott. I’ve been close enough to touch him, I know what he is, and he isn’t a murderer.
My legs are still trembling as I climb the steps to Corly station. I’ve been shaking like this for hours, it must be the adrenaline, my heart just won’t slow down. The train is packed—no chance of a seat here, it’s not like getting on at Euston, so I have to stand, midway through a carriage. It’s like a sweatbox. I’m trying to breathe slowly, my eyes cast down to my feet. I’m just trying to get a handle on what I’m feeling.
Exultation, fear, confusion and guilt. Mostly guilt.
It wasn’t what I expected.
By the time I got to the practice, I’d worked myself up into a state of complete and utter terror: I was convinced that he was going to look at me and somehow know that I knew, that he was going to view me as a threat. I was afraid that I would say the wrong thing, that somehow I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from saying Megan’s name. Then I walked into a doctor’s waiting room, boring and bland, and spoke to a middle-aged receptionist, who took my details without really looking at me. I sat down and picked up a copy of Vogue and flicked through it with trembling fingers, trying to focus my mind on the task ahead while at the same time attempting to look unremarkably bored, just like any other patient.
There were two others in there: a twentysomething man reading something on his phone and an older woman who stared glumly at her feet, not once looking up, even when her name was called by the receptionist. She just got up and shuffled off, she knew where she was going. I waited there for five minutes, ten. I could feel my breathing getting shallow. The waiting room was warm and airless, and I felt as though I couldn’t get enough oxygen into my lungs. I worried that I might faint.
Then a door flew open and a man came out, and before I’d even had time to see him properly, I knew that it was him. I knew the way I knew that he wasn’t Scott the first time I saw him, when he was nothing but a shadow moving towards her—just an impression of tallness, of loose, languid movement. He held out his hand to me.
“Ms. Watson?”
I raised my eyes to meet his and felt a jolt of electricity all the way down my spine. I put my hand into his. It was warm and dry and huge, enveloping the whole of mine.
“Please,” he said, indicating for me to follow him into his office, and I did, feeling sick, dizzy all the way. I was walking in her footsteps. She did all this. She sat opposite him in the chair he told me to sit in, he probably folded his hands just below his chin the way he did this afternoon, he probably nodded at her in the same way, saying, “OK, what would you like to talk to me about today?”
Everything about him was warm: his hand, when I shook it; his eyes; the tone of his voice. I searched his face for clues, for signs of the vicious brute who smashed Megan’s head open, for a glimpse of the traumatized refugee who had lost his family. I couldn’t see any. And for a while, I forgot myself. I forgot to be afraid of him. I was sitting there and I wasn’t panicking any longer. I swallowed hard and tried to remember what I had to say, and I said it. I told him that for four years I’d had problems with alcohol, that my drinking had cost me my marriage and my job, it was costing me my health, obviously, and I feared it might cost me my sanity, too.
“I don’t remember things,” I said. “I black out and I can’t remember where I’ve been or what I’ve done. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve done or said terrible things, and I can’t remember. And if . . . if someone tells me something I’ve done, it doesn’t even feel like me. It doesn’t feel like it was me who was doing that thing. And it’s so hard to feel responsible for something you don’t remember. So I never feel bad enough. I feel bad, but the thing that I’ve done—it’s removed from me. It’s like it doesn’t belong to me.”
All this came out, all this truth, I just spilled it in front of him in the first few minutes of being in his presence. I was so ready to say it, I’d been waiting to say it to someone. But it shouldn’t have been him. He listened, his clear amber eyes on mine, his hands folded, motionless. He didn’t look around the room or make notes. He listened. And eventually he nodded slightly and said, “You want to take responsibility for what you have done, and you find it difficult to do that, to feel fully accountable if you cannot remember it?”
“Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it.”
“So, how do we take responsibility? You can apologize—and even if you cannot remember committing your transgression, that doesn’t mean that your apology, and the sentiment behind your apology, is not sincere.”
“But I want to feel it. I want to feel . . . worse.”
It’s an odd thing to say, but I think this all the time. I don’t feel bad enough. I know what I’m responsible for, I know all the terrible things I’ve done, even if I don’t remember the details—but I feel distanced from those actions. I feel them at one remove.
“You think that you should feel worse than you do? That you don’t feel bad enough for your mistakes?”
“Yes.”
Kamal shook his head. “Rachel, you have told me that you lost your marriage, you lost your job—do you not think this is punishment enough?”
I shook my head.
He leaned back a little in his chair. “I think perhaps you are being rather hard on yourself.”
“I’m not.”
“All right. OK. Can we go back a bit? To when the problem started. You said it was . . . four years ago? Can you tell me about that time?”
I resisted. I wasn’t completely lulled by the warmth of his voice, by the softness of his eyes. I wasn’t completely hopeless. I wasn’t going to start telling him the whole truth. I wasn’t going to tell him how I longed for a baby. I told him that my marriage broke down, that I was depressed, and that I’d always been a drinker, but that things just got out of hand.
“Your marriage broke down, so . . . you left your husband, or he left you, or . . . you left each other?”
“He had an affair,” I said. “He met another woman and fell in love with her.” He nodded, waiting for me to go on. “It wasn’t his fault, though. It was my fault.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, the drinking started before . . .”
“So your husband’s affair was not the trigger?”
“No, I’d already started, my drinking drove him away, it was why he stopped . . .”
Kamal waited, he didn’t prompt me to go on, he just let me sit there, waiting for me to say the words out loud.
“Why he stopped loving me,” I said.
I hate myself for crying in front of him. I don’t understand why I couldn’t keep my guard up. I shouldn’t have talked about real things, I should have gone in there with some totally made-up problems, some imaginary persona. I should have been better prepared.
I hate myself for looking at him and believing, for a moment, that he felt for me. Because he looked at me as though he did, not as though he pitied me, but as though he understood me, as though I was someone he wanted to help.
“So then, Rachel, the drinking started before the breakdown of your marriage. Do you think you can point to an underlying cause? I mean, not everyone can. For some people, there is just a general slide into a depressive or an addicted state. Was there something specific for you? A bereavement, some other loss?”
I shook my head, shrugged. I wasn’t going to tell him that. I will not tell him that.
He waited for a few moments and then glanced quickly at the clock on his desk.
“We will pick up next time, perhaps?” he said, and then he smiled and I went cold.
Everything about him is warm—his hands, his eyes, his voice—everything but the smile. You can see the killer in him when he shows his teeth. My stomach a hard ball, my pulse skyrocketing again, I left his office without shaking his outstretched hand. I couldn’t stand to touch him.
I understand, I do. I can see what Megan saw in him, and it’s not just that he’s arrestingly handsome. He’s also calm and reassuring, he exudes a patient kindness. Someone innocent or trusting or simply troubled might not see through all that, might not see that under all that calm he’s a wolf. I understand that. For almost an hour, I was drawn in. I let myself open up to him. I forgot who he was. I betrayed Scott, and I betrayed Megan, and I feel guilty about that.
But most of all, I feel guilty because I want to go back.
I had it again, the dream where I’ve done something wrong, where everyone is against me, sides with Tom. Where I can’t explain, or even apologize, because I don’t know what the thing is. In the space between dreaming and wakefulness, I think of a real argument, long ago—four years ago—after our first and only round of IVF failed, when I wanted to try again. Tom told me we didn’t have the money, and I didn’t question that. I knew we didn’t—we’d taken on a big mortgage, he had some debts left over from a bad business deal his father had coaxed him into pursuing—I just had to deal with it. I just had to hope that one day we would have the money, and in the meantime I had to bite back the tears that came, hot and fast, every time I saw a stranger with a bump, every time I heard someone else’s happy news.
It was a couple of months after we’d found out that the IVF had failed that he told me about the trip. Vegas, for four nights, to watch the big fight and let off some steam. Just him and a couple of his mates from the old days, people I had never met. It cost a fortune, I know, because I saw the booking receipt for the flight and the room in his email inbox. I’ve no idea what the boxing tickets cost, but I can’t imagine they were cheap. It wasn’t enough to pay for a round of IVF, but it would have been a start. We had a horrible fight about it. I don’t remember the details because I’d been drinking all afternoon, working myself up to confront him about it, so when I did it was in the worst possible way. I remember his coldness the next day, his refusal to speak about it. I remember him telling me, in flat disappointed tones, what I’d done and said, how I’d smashed our framed wedding photograph, how I’d screamed at him for being so selfish, how I’d called him a useless husband, a failure. I remember how much I hated myself that day.
I was wrong, of course I was, to say those things to him, but what comes to me now is that I wasn’t unreasonable to be angry. I had every right to be angry, didn’t I? We were trying to have a baby—shouldn’t we have been prepared to make sacrifices? I would have cut off a limb if it meant I could have had a child. Couldn’t he have forgone a weekend in Vegas?
I lie in bed for a bit, thinking about that, and then I get up and decide to go for a walk, because if I don’t do something I’m going to want to go round to the corner shop. I haven’t had a drink since Sunday and I can feel the fight going on within me, the longing for a little buzz, the urge to get out of my head, smashing up against the vague feeling that something has been accomplished and that it would be a shame to throw it away now.
Ashbury isn’t really a good place to walk, it’s just shops and suburbs, there isn’t even a decent park. I head off through the middle of town, which isn’t so bad when there’s no one else around. The trick is to fool yourself into thinking that you’re headed somewhere: just pick a spot and set off towards it. I chose the church at the top of Pleasance Road, which is about two miles from Cathy’s flat. I’ve been to an AA meeting there. I didn’t go to the local one because I didn’t want to bump into anyone I might see on the street, in the supermarket, on the train.
When I get to the church, I turn around and walk back, striding purposefully towards home, a woman with things to do, somewhere to go. Normal. I watch the people I pass—the two men running, backpacks on, training for the marathon, the young woman in a black skirt and white trainers, heels in her bag, on her way to work—and I wonder what they’re hiding. Are they moving to stop drinking, running to stand still? Are they thinking about the killer they met yesterday, the one they’re planning to see again?
I’m not normal.
I’m almost home when I see it. I’ve been lost in thought, thinking about what these sessions with Kamal are actually supposed to achieve: am I really planning to rifle through his desk drawers if he happens to leave the room? To try to trap him into saying something revealing, to lead him into dangerous territory? Chances are he’s a lot cleverer than I am; chances are he’ll see me coming. After all, he knows his name has been in the papers—he must be alert to the possibility of people trying to get stories on him or information from him.
This is what I’m thinking about, head down, eyes on the pavement, as I pass the little Londis shop on the right and try not to look at it because it raises possibilities, but out of the corner of my eye I see her name. I look up and it’s there, in huge letters on the front of a tabloid newspaper: WAS MEGAN A CHILD KILLER?