I charged through the forest like a wounded buffalo, bewildered and terrified, making enough noise to deafen the dead, but adrenaline can only last so long, and soon it had faded from my blood and my legs softened, exhausted and leaden.
I nearly fell to my knees at one point, and the temptation to stop and rest was almost overpowering, but I forced myself to keep walking. I didn’t know in which direction, or where I was going, I was just walking to get away, to try to think and somehow, survive.
My wife wasn’t Susie Fleming. She was a woman called Rachel Daisley. Susie had said Rachel Daisley was her agent in the Mayfair Group. That Rachel was a cleaner. Undercover. But Rachel had been my Susie all along.
Had killing Tony Abbott been an MI5 operation?
I couldn’t understand how Rachel had joined MI5. They had personnel checks and security verifications, records, DNA…
‘No,’ I said out loud. I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t. But then I remembered her raising the gun and shooting the Saint, shooting Rob and Barry Gilder. I’d seen how her eyes had been empty pools of black. As emotionless as ink.
I kept walking, remembering things that had been lurking at the corner of my senses, things that had disturbed me only a little at the time, that I had talked myself out of. Things that now took on a different light.
Susie’s father. The pain in his eyes as he spoke honestly to me.
I tried my best, hoping the little girl I loved was going to get better and come back to me. But that’s not how it works with traumatic brain injuries. It’s like they have a complete personality change. It’s not their fault. They think they’re the same person, but they’re not. I couldn’t cope with it. I felt awful, but when the doctor said we should return home, I was relieved.
Susie’s mother.
She looks the same, but different. It’s like everything’s just a bit off, you know? I know she had to have her face rebuilt, along with her jaw and teeth, but she’s still not the same. She can’t remember anything about when she was young. She used to love playing dress up with my clothes. All that’s gone.
Dear God, how were they going to handle knowing their daughter wasn’t their daughter? The next thought came crashing through like a freight train.
If my Susie was Rachel, then where was the real Susie Fleming?
I stumbled to a stop.
I was picturing the woman who’d been shot with Tony Abbott, her face bludgeoned into pulp. I could hear Susie’s response when I showed her the photograph, her decisiveness that it was Rachel.
Yes, it has to be her. Same height, nice figure, great tits. Whoever did this to her was really, really angry. This wasn’t someone in full control of their emotions. They went berserk. They wanted to obliterate her. Smash her to pieces. Literally.
Had my Susie obliterated the other Susie’s features so she wouldn’t be recognised? So she could take on her identity? Rachel’s body had never been found. The Saint had taken it, in order to protect his family, and disposed of it, God alone knew where.
Rachel, I guessed, then slipped into her role as the real Susie as smoothly as milk being poured into a glass. She’d made up the mugging to explain away her cosmetic surgery bruises, and invented her brain injury to cover her memory loss and personality change.
My muscles and joints had begun to stiffen in the cold and as I shifted slightly to walk again, hearing my shoes suck in the mud, the squish of liquid, another squelch came from close by.
‘Nick,’ she said.