When Laura’s gone, Mary stands in the hall and glares at the silent phone, the letter from Geoffrey Johnstone on the hall table, the Yellow Pages still open at Grand Hotel. She picks up the phone and starts to dial, then hangs up with a sigh.
In her consulting room – where the velvet curtains remain annoyingly half-drawn, to accommodate the lighting requirements of Ian’s damn camera – the sun slants in like an accusing finger, spotlighting the box of old files she carried down from the attic.
She picks up the box and humps it over to her desk, only to remember that Ian moved her anglepoise over to the other side of the room because it ‘cluttered the view of the bookshelves’. Damn. Restless and irritable, she dumps the box back where she found it, then decides to put her agitation to good use by getting on with ‘this lodger business’, as she has already begun to think of it. After all, she tells herself bracingly, she can put a stop to it at any time if no one suitable turns up.
Extracting a biro from her cardigan pocket, she starts to draft an advert on the back of Mr Johnstone’s envelope.
SINGLE ROOM IN NORTH SHIELDS WITH SEA AND RIVER VIEWS. AVAILABLE IMMEDIATELY. SHARE KITCHEN, BATHROOM, SITTING ROOM, GARDEN.
She hesitates, wondering what else to write. All mod cons? That might be stretching the truth a bit. And which room should it be? Whichever it is, she’ll have to organize some furniture before showing anyone around.
She plods up the stairs to survey her spare rooms, starting with the one on the first floor, which is jam-packed with furniture from her parents’ old house. She’ll have to convert this into a sitting room, she realizes, because she can’t have the lodger lolling about in her consulting room, can she? Mary sighs. This is turning out to be rather more complicated than she’d envisaged.
She continues up the stairs to the second floor, to the room she’s always thought of as ‘the spare bedroom’, though all it contains is an ironing board and a wardrobe of old clothes. How would she feel having the lodger sleeping here, just one floor below her own bedroom? Would she disturb whoever it was when she tiptoed downstairs to the loo in the middle of the night? And what about vice versa? Computer games and Radio One, or, worse still, Radio Two; or one of those dreadful local stations, where the presenters shout about carpet sales and traffic jams the whole time. Would it be unreasonable to impose a sound curfew?
Then there’s the thorny issue of significant others. Mary sighs again. She’s not sure how she’d cope with a lodger with a sex life. Some kind of cordon sanitaire would definitely help, she muses, reaching her own little sanctuary on the next floor up and sitting down on the bed. Perhaps she should move into the attic? It would mean a longer excursion to the loo, but that might be worth it for the sense of separation she’d get from any youth culture and carnal activity on the second floor. She gets up and wanders over to the window.
Looking down at the Fish Quay, at a view that resonates to her very bones, she wonders whether she’s ready to move on from this room yet. Perhaps it’s time to contact Karleen after all, to see if she can help explain the hold it has over her.
Pressing on to the attic, Mary pauses at the threshold and tries to imagine it transformed into a bedroom. It would need painting, of course, and carpeting; and she’d have to find a new home for her ‘archive’. But because the staircase terminates here, it’s significantly larger than the rooms below and the view, of course, is magnificent. But what’s that? She crosses to the far side where there’s a spreading brown stain on the bare boards beneath the radiator. Damn. That explains an equivalent spreading brown stain on the ceiling in her bedroom, that she keeps vaguely noticing, then forgetting to investigate.
The leaky radiator rather takes the wind out of her sails and leaves her feeling thwarted and oddly forlorn. It seems she has a choice of two irksome tasks: organize some plumbing person to fix her leaking radiator, or embark on a possibly disturbing examination of the tape transcripts of her hypnosis sessions with Karleen. Call the plumber or open the box? After traipsing back downstairs and flicking through the Yellow Pages to ‘P’, she opts to call the plumber.
But before she’s even started trying to decide among the hundreds of contractors listed, the phone rings.
‘Hello? Dr Charlton speaking.’
‘My darling girl, it’s grand to hear your voice.’
‘Karleen? How very strange. I was just thinking of you.’
‘Isn’t that so often the way of it? There now, and I’ve even got my coat on to go to the Post Office, but my hand reached for the phone instead of the doorknob.’
‘I was about to phone the plumber,’ says Mary, smiling into the mouthpiece. She pictures Karleen in her red duffle coat, propping her walking stick against the wall.
‘You know why I’m calling, I suppose?’
‘Actually, no. I’ve no idea. But I was going to ask whether you’d mind conducting another series of sessions with me. A couple of issues have come up recently that I think need exploring.’
‘Well, now you’ve got me confused. I’d be delighted, of course – it would be a joy to work with you again. But that BBC man said you’d probably need some convincing.’
Mary tenses. ‘Ian called you?’
‘Didn’t you know? I assumed that was how he got my number.’
‘What did he say?’ Really, the man is incorrigible. How dare he contact Karleen when she’d expressly asked him not to?
‘Only that he was making a documentary about past life regression and wanted to rope me in – as a witness for the defence sort of thing. He was on about getting me to regress you again too, though I couldn’t follow his logic there. The film’s about some little boy you’re treating, am I right?’
‘Ian Campbell has his own agenda,’ says Mary grimly. ‘And he doesn’t always tell me what that might be.’
‘Ian Campbell. Now why does that name ring a bell?’
‘He’s quite a celebrity, I’m told. Hard to avoid, apparently, if you’re a fan of BBC2.’
‘Isn’t that the name of that boy you had a fling with way back? The one that started all the trouble with Peggy?’
‘How on earth do you remember that?’
‘My hips may have seized up, but I still have a full set of marbles.’
‘I told him not to contact you.’
‘I suppose I might come over as rather doddery on the telly,’ says Karleen without rancour.
‘Don’t be silly. That’s not what I meant at all. I would just prefer not to be hypnotized for this documentary. Anyway, how are you keeping?’
‘Oh, creaking along as usual. Still seeing a few clients. Trying to balance the painkillers with the side-effects. But what about you? What are these mysterious “issues” you want to explore?’
Mary settles down on the bottom stair and pulls her cardigan across her chest with her spare hand. ‘I am beginning to suspect that I may have been involved with the boy they’re filming, in his previous incarnation as a herring girl.’
‘Ah,’ says Karleen. ‘And you fear the involvement might have ended in tears.’
‘It looks like she was murdered.’
‘I see. Which might prove embarrassing if it was revealed in the course of this film?’
‘Yes – which is why I’d prefer not to be hypnotized. But what’s really worrying me is not knowing. Having something like that in my unconscious and being completely unaware of it.’
‘So what makes you think you were the murderer of this girl?’
‘Images, flashbacks, that sort of thing. The fact that I’m thalassaphobic and the girl’s killer was almost certainly a fisherman. The fact that I feel so protective of Ben now. I’m getting such a strong sense of karma with this case.’
‘Would it matter? Surely Peggy suffered enough to have worked through several lifetimes of bad karma?’
‘It makes me feel as though I’ve lost my way. I thought I was on one path – you know, working through all those issues around infertility and solitude, my dislike of being touched; beginning to make some progress. Then I discover there might be a whole other journey I’ve yet to embark on.’
‘As the wise women say, these things are sent to try us.’
‘But I’m worried, Karleen. If I was the man I suspect, there’s a depth of violence there that I never encountered in my sessions with you.’
‘I’d have thought something like that would have made itself felt at some point. But I suppose we never really got around to exploring your other incarnations, did we?’
‘Then yesterday I remembered a knife. Fishermen used to carry their filleting knives in their caps, to avoid accidents at sea. I had a flashback of reaching up to my cap and then seeing the knife in my hand.’ Mary shivers.
‘What else do you remember?’
‘Just fragments. A tobacco tin, for some reason. A woman laughing nervously, as if she’s afraid – or guilty, perhaps. I don’t know.’
‘Do you remember stabbing her?’
‘No – but that doesn’t mean I didn’t do it.’ She closes her eyes for a moment. ‘What will Ben think if he finds out I’m the one who killed his herring girl?’
‘Oh, Mary, I’m so sorry. I wish I could help.’
‘You are. I mean, it’s helping already, just talking to you like this.’ In the silence that follows, Mary hears her friend grunt softly, either with pain or effort, and pictures her pulling out a chair and easing herself down on it.
‘What makes you think the woman laughing was this herring girl?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know who she was. I don’t even know it was a true flashback. All I remember is him wanting to slit someone’s throat – it might not even have been her throat he wanted to slit.’
‘And that’s all you remember.’
‘Pretty much. That’s why I wanted to see you.’
‘So you have no idea what might have led up to that point, or what happened afterwards?’
‘He’d been drinking. The knife was in his hand. It’s obvious, isn’t it?’
‘You don’t know. Perhaps it was the man he was after. Perhaps he was provoked.’
Karleen’s right, of course. A single flashback of a drunken fisherman with a knife doesn’t mean she was Tom Hall in a previous incarnation. She needs to keep an open mind until she’s worked systematically through all the information she has. And then, if it starts looking likely, she’ll set off to Lyme Regis with her rucksack and ask Karleen to regress her.
‘Is there a good B and B near your house?’ she asks.
‘My darling Mary, you’ll stay with me and I won’t hear a word of an argument. I have a young girl that helps me these days, so it’s no trouble. And there’s a bottle of Bushmill’s in the cupboard with your name on it.’
‘It will have to be next month, if that’s all right with you. I can’t see Ian agreeing to me absenting myself for a week in the middle of filming.’
‘So how will you manage in the meantime?’
‘I’m going to look through all my old transcripts now, to see if there are any clues there. With any luck I’ll find something to disprove my suspicions. And it’s possible that some more evidence will emerge from regression sessions with Ben and various other people who were a part of Annie’s life.’
‘What other people?’ Karleen asks sharply, and Mary can just imagine her friend sitting forward with interest.
‘I’ll explain when I see you. I’ve been trying something completely new with this case. Time will tell whether it will prove fruitful.’ Then: ‘I can’t believe Ian phoned you! He offered to fly you up here, I suppose.’
‘He can be very persuasive, your Ian.’
‘He’s not “my Ian”.’
‘But I said I’d have to discuss it with you first.’
‘Oh, Karleen. I would so love to see you. It’s just—’
‘You’d rather I had nothing to do with this film. Look, I’ll call him now and tell him no. I’ll play the sweet old lady and say my back’s giving me gyp.’
Mary lets out a long sigh of relief. ‘Don’t you want to be on the telly? According to Ian, it’s all that seems to motivate people these days.’
‘I won’t grace that with a reply. And I’m sure you’re more than capable of holding your own against Hester without my help. It’s a shame, though. I was rather looking forward to the chauffeur-driven car.’
Mary stiffens. ‘What’s that about Hester?’
‘Oh, this documentary’s all her idea according to her. She says it’s a pilot for a series about paranormal phenomena she’s cooked up with some BBC producer – your Ian presumably. That’s why I was so pleased to be invited to take part. I thought you could do with someone batting for your side.’
‘He never mentioned Hester was involved.’ She grips the phone tight.
‘In retrospect it occurred to me that might have been why she wrote such a stinging review of your paper. To impress the BBC and set out her stall, as it were, as an opponent. For what it’s worth, I didn’t get the impression that your Ian was trying to set you up. On the contrary, he seemed genuinely concerned to give you a fair crack of the whip.’
‘I’m not sure that “fair” or “genuine” are appropriate adjectives in this case,’ Mary says tiredly. ‘And for heaven’s sake stop calling him “my Ian”.’