Lock Me In

He bit the corner off a wry smile. ‘You don’t strike me as the woodworking type.’

‘Stronger than I look.’

‘Oh yeah?’ He grinned, ran his eyes over me. I let him do it, my hands on hips, weighing the hammer in my hands. After that, it was a matter of pride to prove it.

The memory of it split like a burning frame of celluloid the moment I heard the front door. I glanced at the time: Mum wasn’t due back for another half hour.

She burst into my bedroom. ‘Has he rung?’

‘No. I’d have told you—’

‘OK. All right,’ she said, slumping slightly.

‘What’s happened? How come you’re early?’

‘I swapped cleaning sectors with Angie so I could leave early,’ she said, then she told me how she’d gone to the photographic lab where Matt worked, to see if Matt had been there. ‘There were two blokes talking outside his office, one of them said Matt’s name, so I hung around. He said he’d been to find Matt, hadn’t got anywhere, so he’d called the police.’

It was probably Leon, I thought, the friend who’d called me before. ‘But the police weren’t actually there.’

‘No, but—’ she made a gesture with her hands, flustered. ‘Look – I just – are we still OK here? I mean, you’ve been careful, even with Matt, right? They’re not going to find the address?’

I tried to hold her eye, but I couldn’t.

She gaped. ‘Oh no, Ellie. What did you do?’

‘I’d been meaning to tell you,’ I said weakly. ‘It was when we were applying for the volunteering.’

‘You gave them our address?’

‘No, he did it. He didn’t know not to. I could hardly tell him not to, could I? How would I explain it?’

‘Well, fuck!’ She threw her free hand up. ‘Great! Wonderful, good work!’

I wanted to say sorry, but she hated me apologizing.

‘I said this would happen. I said, the first time you brought him round. It was too big a risk. Didn’t I say?’ She went into her bedroom and started to rush about, pulling off her tabard and stuffing it into the washing basket. Then as if remembering, she went out to the kitchen and returned with the bag containing the wet clothes from that morning.

As calmly as I could, I said, ‘Mum. Tell me what’s going on.’

‘Nothing! I just want to be prepared.’ She roughly pulled a shirt on and went to the dressing table, plonked herself down and pulled out her make-up. ‘They’re going to come here, aren’t they? The police. And they’re going to ask questions.’

‘So we answer them.’

‘Yeah?’ She spun round, a blob of foundation balancing on fingertip halfway to her face. ‘With what?’

‘How about the truth?’

‘We don’t know what happened! We’ve got no fucking idea what the truth is, have we?’

I bit into my cheek until I tasted blood. I wasn’t going to cry.

Mum applied the make-up, sighed and got up. She went to the bed and patted the place beside her.

I sat, and she put an arm around my shoulders. ‘Come on then.’ She squeezed. ‘They’re going to come, so let’s think what we’re saying. Where had you been, last night?’

‘The pub, but—’

‘Which pub?’

‘Mum, why are we even—?’

‘Which one?’

‘The Windmill. He had an IPA; I had a lemonade.’

‘And people saw you.’

‘Yes. No. Not people we knew.’

‘You weren’t arguing?’

‘No! Why would we be?’

She sighed heavily and went back to the mirror, flipped open a compact. ‘They’re going to ask you this, Ellie. You need to get this right. If they get a whiff that you might be hiding something, we’ve got trouble. They’re already going to have linked you to … what happened before. You do understand that, right?’

‘I’m not hiding anything!’

She raised her eyebrows, then moved her gaze pointedly to my neck. Gave a loose, open-handed gesture to my shoulder, my hip. Siggy shuddered in the aches, as if she was part of them, like they were hers.

Quietly, I said, ‘I’ll just tell them what happened.’

‘About the bruises?’ she said, incredulous.

‘He might be somewhere right now needing help, Mum!’

‘You can’t talk to them. Not yet. Not until we know what’s happened.’

‘But that’s what they do! That’s what the police do, they find out what happened!’

She said nothing to that, but the rise of her eyebrows said, not always. I looked away. If there was one thing I did not want to be talking about right now, it was Jodie Arden.

My eyes lighted on the bag of wet clothes from the morning. ‘What are you going to do with that?’ I asked, nodding to it.

She peered into the mirror. ‘I am going,’ she said, lifting her lashes now with the mascara wand, ‘to incinerate it.’

I waited for her to face me, to grin. But she wasn’t joking.

‘What did you find, Mum? This morning?’

An infinitesimal pause. ‘Ellie—’

And then, from outside, we heard a woman’s voice. ‘This one. Over here.’

We both stood up, fast. She had turned towards the sound but swung back to face me, hands on my shoulders, pulling me into a hug.

‘Listen to me,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Let me talk to them. We can make sure they look for Matt properly, and maybe it’ll all be fine. But it wasn’t before, with Jodie, was it? And if something has happened to him, and if you – Siggy – had anything to do with it, we need to control this as best we can.’

Three knocks at the door.

‘You are a good person, Ellie. We are good people. We’ve done our bloody best. I will not allow that bitch to ruin your life, or mine.’ She brought her mouth right against my ear, and in a vicious whisper she said, ‘Do you hear me? Siggy? You’re not having her. You’re not going to take my daughter.’

From the other end of the corridor I could hear a second voice, a man, calling through the front door.

My mother touched my face. ‘Not. A. Sound.’ And then she left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

9.

Mae

Mae knocked again.

Cold spiked in the morning air, and the sky above Abson Street was a flat, formless grey. Kit, looking distinctly uncomfortable in a borrowed pinstripe skirt suit, took a step back to assay the building, intermittent clouds of breath forming in front of her face. She stretched, then pressed her fists into the small of her back, wincing.

He cocked his head. ‘Been fighting?’

She let out a small grunt and straightened up. ‘Roller derby.’

‘You’re kidding.’

Kit grinned. ‘Nope. You’re looking at west London’s fourth-finest blocker.’

He’d seen bruises on her legs before, at the gym, and wondered what her sport was. Hockey, he’d guessed, or rugby possibly. But roller derby was something else. Explained the tattoos, too. He tried extremely hard not to think about her in war paint and fishnets. Extremely hard wasn’t hard enough.

‘You play round here?’ he asked, bending to call through the letterbox. ‘Ms Power? Ellie?’

‘Sure. Another reason that I’ll hate you forever for making me wear this—’ she gestured at her skirt, ‘monstrosity. I look like I’m selling insurance. I’ve got a rep to protect. This is my “hood”.’ She accompanied that with some kind of gesture that he guessed was supposed to be gangsta.

‘Straight outta Acton,’ he offered, but she just frowned, too young for the reference. ‘Never mind.’

There was the scrape of several locks, and the door opened to reveal a lean, serious woman in her fifties. For just a moment, she gave them a warm smile that didn’t match the restless eyes, and he remembered her in her entirety: the feeling that she always had a mask up, was always trying to calm herself down, keep something in.

Christine Power.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked. Then she recognized him. ‘Ah. DC Mae.’ The finest splinter of ice in her voice.

‘It’s DS now, actually. How are you, Christine?’

She didn’t answer the question. This was the moment to say she looked good, that she hadn’t aged. But the truth of it was that every minute of the five years since their paths had last crossed was in stark evidence in each crease of her face, in the near-complete greying of her hair.

Kit cleared her throat.

‘This is DC Ziegler,’ he said. ‘She’s a Trainee Investigator.’

Christine pulled her gaze away from Mae and greeted Kit, turning on the smile that reminded him how she’d been semi-famous once. A reporter, back when women covering international stories were vanishingly scarce.

‘We’ve come for a chat with Ellie. Is she in?’ he asked, taking in what he could of the corridor behind her, given the lack of light. ‘We’re concerned about the whereabouts of a Matthew Corsham?’

Christine gave a tight shake of her head. ‘She’s not here right now, I’m afraid. Can I help?’

‘If you have a few minutes,’ Kit said, stepping forward.

The door opened a little wider as Christine stood aside, and Mae followed Kit into a square, magnolia-coloured living room. They were offered tea. Mae declined with a smile, but Kit groaned with relief.

‘Could murder one,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘Coffee would be great, if you have it.’

Christine nodded and turned away, closing the door behind her.

Mae turned slowly to face Kit. ‘Ordinarily we avoid using words like murder.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Figure of speech, man. Lighten up.’ She shoved her hands in her pockets and looked around.

The place was as tidy as it could have been, but everything was shabby. The carpet was in tiles, worn down in places to the foam backing: decades of service had left the curtains with vertical streaks sun-bleached almost to white. Elsewhere: chipped paintwork, bare lightbulbs, no photos, no clutter of any description. And it was cold in there. He touched a radiator. Hadn’t been on that morning, and the dust on the control tap at the bottom said it had been longer. Like last year. This was more than slumming it.

‘They just moved in?’ Kit whispered, looking around. ‘I’ve been in homelier bus stations. Who doesn’t even have a single photo on the wall?’

She turned to the single line of paperbacks, standing on the deep sill of the single-glazed window, and bent her head to read the spines. Mae looked, too: Dissociation and Me; A Child of Many Parts; Fugue State: A Carer’s Guide. She glanced back at him, confused. He knew what was coming.

‘Yeah. Ellie’s … she’s not well. Mentally.’ Said it casually, like he was telling her Ellie was fond of horses.

‘OK. Like how?’

He lifted a shoulder, dropped it. There wasn’t time to explain properly. ‘Complicated.’

‘Try me.’

Mae checked round the doorway, then said, quickly, ‘It’s called DID. Dissociative Identity Disorder.’

Kit nodded. ‘Makes sense she still lives with her mum, then. Poor bastard,’ she added with a shrug, an unfazed gesture that made him suddenly conscious of how diametrically different their back-and-forth was from the relationship he’d had as a TI with his own mentor. One sniff of mental illness back then would have been enough to release a feverish tirade – sometimes delivered out of earshot of the target, sometimes not – about snowflakes and limp-wristed millennials. It would all be easier to stomach now if Mae could have convinced himself he’d stood up for the victims of DS Heath’s vitriol. But it hadn’t happened like that, had it?

And wasn’t that why he was here in this flat, right now?

He turned back to the books, ran his finger along the titles until he came to a slim paperback, cheaply made, well-thumbed. Its spine was peeling away to expose the glue beneath, but Mae knew it immediately. He handed it to her.

‘“A Splintered Soul: Collected Essays on Dissociation, Fugue and Recovery”,’ she read, whispering.

‘Chapter seven is Ellie.’

‘Seriously? What does—?’ Kit started, but she was interrupted by the sound of Christine coming back with the drinks. Kit put the book back and affected a smile.

The coffee was distributed, and Christine perched on the arm of the angular sofa. She folded her arms over her chest, crossed her legs at the knee. Mae thought of a Transformer toy he’d had as a kid. Bend and fold and click and bam, suddenly you had something totally different.

He cleared his throat. ‘So where’s Ellie right now, do you know?’

‘She’s not feeling good. Gone for some air.’ Then, to Kit, in a woman-to-woman tone, ‘She has anxiety.’ And to Mae: ‘As I’m sure you’ll remember.’

Kit nodded, sympathetic. ‘That’s no fun.’ She glanced at Mae, who gave her a slight tilt of the head: go ahead, your interview. ‘Mrs Power, we—’

‘Ms,’ Mae corrected her.

‘Ms Power, my apologies,’ Kit said. ‘We received a call from a workmate of Mr Corsham’s saying that he’s potentially gone missing, so we wanted to talk to Ellie about him.’

‘I see.’ She ran her hands over her face, stretching the skin under her eyes for a moment. She looked tired, but not the kind of tired that went away with a good night’s sleep. ‘I’ll ask her to call you, if you like? Although I’m not sure how much she’s been seeing him lately. She’s young. Keeping her options open.’

Kit smiled. ‘Do you know Matthew at all yourself?’

‘A little. We both work at the same hospital.’

Mae pulled out his notes. Frowned. ‘Really? Because I—’

‘Yes. Hanwell. I’m just a cleaner there. He’s in the photographic lab.’

‘That how Ellie met him?’ Kit asked brightly.

‘She was waiting for me in the canteen one day. They got talking.’

‘Sweet.’

Kit made a note, took a long slug of her coffee, then stood. ‘We’ll need to speak to Ellie as soon as possible. Could you give her this card, ask her to call?’

‘Of course.’

Kit thanked Christine and opened the door, making to leave. She made small talk as they passed to the hall, but it dried up at the front door. There was an awkward silence as Kit tied her shoes.

‘Christine,’ Mae said. ‘What happened before—’

She held up a hand. ‘It doesn’t matter. All I need is for you to treat her carefully. All right?’

He nodded, handed her a card. There was nothing else to say. ‘Could you have Ellie call us as soon as possible?’

Christine Power looked Mae full in the face. ‘Be gentle. Do you understand? My daughter is not like the rest of us. If one good thing came from the …’ she paused, skewering the word, ‘mess, back then, I hope you at least learned that.’

10.

Ellie

I waited in Mum’s room, too scared of making a noise to even move.

I would have known that voice anywhere. Ben Mae. I could make him out clearly as they came down the hall, but the moment they closed the living room door all I could hear was low, muffled and intermittent, and I could hardly catch a word.

Siggy breathed static in my head, watching me. She knew exactly what had happened last night, but she would never tell me. All I could do was imagine, and that was the worst part: the inability to differentiate between mine and hers. Between real memory and my own terrified imagination doing its best to fill in the gaps.

When I lost Jodie, I told the police the same story every time they asked, the story that Mum and I had gone over and over. What I saw that last night before she disappeared. Jodie got into Cox’s car. It was red. They were fighting. That was the last time I saw her.

I’d rehearsed it so many times by the time I told the police, I’d almost believed it was true.

Dr Charles Cox had been in his mid-forties when they’d got together. She was seventeen. It wasn’t illegal, as Jodie reminded me almost every time we talked about him, even though it was never me who complained about the age gap. What I was bothered by was the fact that he was dating her mother. But even that was something I could overlook, under the circumstances. The fact was that, apart from my own mum, Jodie was the only friend I’d ever had.

Our friendship lasted four months. From the day I met her to the day she died: 121 days. It was a Tuesday, the first time we met. I’d seen her around before, but she went to the big comprehensive the other side of Hove and wasn’t around much. But that Tuesday morning in April, colder than she was dressed for and drizzly to boot, she was there in the stairwell outside our flat like she was waiting for me. Legs draped widthways across the step, smoking. I tried to go past her and when she didn’t move I turned to go back the way I’d come, backing away from confrontation like I always did. But then she held out the cigarette. Hand-rolled, lipstick on the filter.

‘You’re the home-school kid.’

I nodded.

‘Missing your GCSEs?’

My GCSEs, if I was going to take them, would have been two years off, but I didn’t correct her. Looking at her I knew she had to be sixteen, seventeen at least. If I told her my real age, she’d have been up and out of there. So I just folded my arms, affecting nonchalance, and said, ‘Whatever.’

She smiled, blew the smoke in a thin, elegant stream from the corner of her mouth. ‘Just you and your mum in there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Your dad turn out to be a bastard, like mine?’

I shrugged, but the answer was an indisputable yes: he’d only been with Mum a few months when she found out she was pregnant, and promptly disappeared when she told him the happy news. The news that he’d died of an overdose found its way to her a week before I was born. I used to ask her about him, what he was like, but I learned to accept her reluctance in the end. From the shadow that came over her face whenever I mentioned him, I guessed bastard didn’t even come close. But somehow, I’d never quite given up hope that she was wrong: that whoever told her he was dead had made a mistake. I still found myself checking the eyes of every man I saw who could, conceivably, have been the right age to be my dad, looking for the mismatched irises that Mum said I’d inherited from him.

Jodie waved the cigarette again, offering.

‘No thanks,’ I said, almost inaudibly.

She looked at it and shrugged, then tossed it into the void at the middle of the stairwell. I gasped, leaned over the railings to see if there was anyone down there, and she laughed.

‘Fuck ’em,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Going for a walk. The pier. Coming?’

She was on a suspension from school – one fucking joint and they reckon you’re Amy Winehouse, she said – and things were brittle with her mum. Jodie drank, she smoked, she did drugs occasionally. After she disappeared there were even claims that she’d sold sex, though I’d never heard that from her. For all these reasons, I kept my friendship with her from Mum. Although I knew it was an unthinkable betrayal, lying by omission over and over: having a secret was the most delicious liberation, too. Jodie and I saw each other nearly every day, always at hers, always arranged the day before, to coincide with Mum being out.

Everything was easy with Jodie. I was happy. I’d never had a friend like her, someone I could truly be myself with. So, despite the promises I’d made to Mum, despite her warnings, eventually I told her about Siggy.

I told her everything. All of it. Not just the fugues but about the dreams that repeated until I knew every thread and wisp of them: the long, low building, just flashes of it; being trapped, a fire; the little boy bleeding on the ground; the cell-deep of the man in a uniform. These dreams – nightmares – were so vivid, their details so constant even in my waking thoughts that they felt like memories.

I explained to her about the panic attacks: terrors that would burst out fully formed, whose triggers I could pin down no more easily than puffs of smoke. Over the years, Mum had helped me understand that these fears lodged in my mind weren’t mine but Siggy’s, and that was a distinction that helped me make sense of them. And even though it couldn’t have made sense to her in the way I wanted it to, Jodie had listened.

The next day, she took me to see her mum’s boyfriend. Dr Cox. Charles.

I didn’t want to go, of course. I refused all the way along the prom to his office in east Brighton. ‘It’s not going to make any difference,’ I insisted.

‘Oh yeah? How do you know? You psychic, too?’

‘No,’ I said grumpily. ‘I’ve done psychotherapy before.’

‘When?’ She clunked her jaw, trying to perfect her smoke rings.

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was a kid. Little.’

‘Can’t have been great if you don’t remember it.’

‘Well yeah,’ I said, making an effort the way I tried to back then to give as good as I got. ‘Obviously, it wasn’t great, because it didn’t work, did it?’

She pulled on my sleeve, rolling her eyes. ‘He’s gooood,’ she wheedled. ‘You’ll like him. Come on. It’s got to be worth trying again.’

We found a way of me going to sessions with him, and she came along. I ran with the lie I’d told Jodie about my age because it meant that Dr Cox would see me without parental permission. He waived his usual fee too, claiming I was an interesting case, though we all knew it was really because I was Jodie’s friend. To start, she’d sit in and listen, not saying anything. No one, not Mum, not Cox, not even Matt, ever listened to me like Jodie did. Like she was storing it all away, cataloguing it, fitting the pieces of my fragmented pasts together. I believed she would solve it.

Maybe she would have done.

There was a click from the living room door, and the voices were clear again. Right outside the bedroom where I was hiding, crouching like a shamed dog. I mouth-breathed, absolutely silent, quiet enough to hear Ben Mae’s deep breath before he said, ‘What happened before …’

What happened before. I pressed my hands against my temples, and Siggy grinned.

Don’t think about it, I told myself.

The only images I have in my head of the night my friend died are Mum’s, just hand-me-down mental pictures appropriated from her description. The problem was that these appropriated visual details are lodged so close to my own memories – of the endless summer before it and the black-hole horror of the months after – that I sometimes feel that it was me who was there, not just Siggy. But that would mean the lines between her and me had started to blur, and if that could happen …

Just don’t think about it. Calm down. Breathe.

Mum found her down by the river, where we go on Cherry Tree Day, to mark a special day for Siggy. I’d never taken Jodie there before, and it’s a secret place, inaccessible, overgrown and wooded. But I – or Siggy – had taken her there that night. It was days until Mum admitted to me what she’d found.

The missing belt—

I can’t breathe.

The missing belt from my—

Shit. I can’t breathe!

The police were still in the hall, just a couple of inches of plasterboard separating us. I tried to force myself to think about something else, because this couldn’t happen, not with them there – the police! – right outside the bedroom door with my mother lying to them.

Breathe. Breathe. Please just breathe.

Everything rotated. A slow, dark tornado, twisting around me, and the vacuum in my chest got harder, tighter. My vision darkened at the edges and my skin started to burn, and the insides of my lungs started to curl up from the heat and this was it but right at the last second, the pressure broke, and I was breathing but

Calm. Calm down.

Too fast now. I couldn’t stop.

Deep breaths. Slow. You are having a panic attack. Slow down – breathe slowly – but I couldn’t stop. In and out and in and out and too shallow, not enough, not enough air, and all the time the only thing I could think was all the things Mum had eventually told me—