‘Let me guess,’ I say. ‘I’m the first name on your interview list. I’m witness number one in the quest to fill in the memory blanks.’
‘You flatter yourself.’
‘The story can be told so many ways,’ I say. ‘I suppose it all depends on which angle you choose.’
‘You think so?’
‘All stories can.’ I think back to my old Hitchcock obsession and the danger hiding behind domesticity, the terrors of the everyday. I still play my favourites at night: Notorious, Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Knew Too Much (the original black-and-white version, not the glossier remake), North by Northwest, I Confess, The Lodger.
‘What are my options?’ she says.
‘First, the ordinary psychologist plunged into extraordinary circumstances. I become your main character. You approach the case through my eyes. You elevate the mystery of it, holding things back for the reader, torture them in God-like fashion by spreading clues like breadcrumbs.’
‘There’s a certain classical elegance to that, I suppose. What else?’
‘Alternatively, you could go for full shock and awe and use dramatic irony. The secret is revealed at the very beginning and the reader becomes complicit. The murderer confesses right at the start of the book. You make Harriet the anti-hero and see if she gets away with it. An open mystery rather than a closed one. The narrator isn’t God, but the Devil, corrupting the reader. The audience hopes the murderer gets away with it.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Or, of course, you could blend the two.’
‘Yes.’ There is a moment of hostility. Anna smiles again. One moment I am being watched with suspicious detachment; the next I’m welcomed back into the fold. I refuse to be beaten. I am cornered, but not eliminated.
‘Do you have a publisher?’ I ask.
‘Not yet. I want to start with the facts. Present the case to the reader so they understand the psychology of it rather than just the chronology.’
‘You make it sound almost easy.’
‘Psychology is the one thing true crime rarely does well. Everyone focuses on the who and the how rather than the why. A dry history of the case misses the essence of it. Only drama, art – fiction, if you like – gets to the emotional truth of things.’
‘Perhaps I should try it with some of my patients. Forget the Freudian couch, antidepressants or cognitive behavioural therapy. Just give them an A4 pad and a rollerball and get them to write the great English novel.’
‘You’re mocking me.’
‘No. I’m not.’
I see other wanderers on the beach now. We are no longer entirely alone. My stomach rumbles. I look at my watch and realise it’s already late afternoon. She has been here long enough now. Anna didn’t come to Grand Cayman for beachside chats. She isn’t waiting like the islanders for the storm and the rain. She is a hunter and I am the prey.
‘I was the one who missed her,’ I say. ‘If anything, you should be mocking me. I was so consumed with my own theories that I didn’t spot Harriet standing right there.’
Anna doesn’t contradict me. ‘She was convincing and vulnerable. Those two qualities don’t often go together. No one else spotted her either.’
‘Except for one person,’ I say, thinking back to that fateful conversation about Sally Turner and Medea. ‘Bloom knew. That’s why Harriet did what she did. Bloom saw something wasn’t right and was about to expose the whole thing. In the end she saw more than any of us. Perhaps she even saw that Harriet wasn’t working alone. That she was just one part of a bigger mystery. A link in the chain to the child she once treated. Patient X.’
Anna is silent for a second, as if caught by a stray thought. She doesn’t challenge my theory. She says, ‘There might be one way to honour Professor Bloom’s memory. To atone.’
Finally. After so much foreplay we are getting there. Slowly, dangerously.
I glance round the beachfront. Stillness all around. The furies knocking. The dementors ready. Sins can’t be outrun forever.
I glance at the sky and long for the storm to come and quench my thirst and wash me clean.
I breathe deeply. ‘How?’