Chapter Fifty-Three
Diane slammed on the brakes, she’d almost driven through a red light. The car stopped, marginally over the stop line, and she slumped back in her seat and closed her eyes. What was she going to do? Emma was her daughter and she did love her, even though she’d had problems relating to her following Jade’s disappearance. Now she didn’t even know whether Emma was Emma, or whether she’d been Jade all along.
The car behind her honked and she caught a glimpse of a furious face in her rear mirror. The traffic lights had turned to green and she hadn’t noticed. She rammed the car into gear and drove off.
Reaching the bed and breakfast place, she drove up the narrow entry lane at the side and parked the car in the tiny car park at the rear of the building.
Her room was empty. She wandered along the corridor to Ryan’s room, but that was empty as well. Her breathing quickened. Maybe they’d already been taken away by the police to be interrogated. Maybe she was too late and Emma was already languishing in a police cell.
Her thoughts ran riot and she started to pace again, backwards and forwards in Ryan’s room, then several times along the length of the corridor.
She heard feet on the stairs and hurried to the top, but it wasn’t her son or daughter, just a young girl who looked as if she should have been at school, pulling a toddler along by the hand. The girl avoided Diane’s eyes, but turned round to stare at her before she entered one of the rooms.
Diane cringed. There had been fear in the girl’s eyes. She went into her own room and looked at herself in the floor length mirror on the back of the door. She wasn’t a pretty picture. Her clothes were wet and stained, her hair stuck out from her head where she’d been tugging it, and her face was white and haggard, with inset eyes staring back at her with a manic look. No wonder the girl had been afraid.
She pulled a chair over to the window and slumped into it, there was nothing she could do until Emma came back, or she had information where to find her.
* * * *
Kate replaced the phone with a sigh. It was as she thought. The procurator fiscal was against arresting Patricia Carnegie. ‘There’s not enough evidence to stand up in court,’ she’d said. ‘We’ll never get a conviction so it would be uneconomic to prosecute, and it would be another charge the public purse would have to bear.’
‘Damn,’ Kate said, leaning back in the chair. Her eyes felt full of grit, and she closed them, opening them again when she felt sleep threatening to overcome her. She stood up, because she knew if she remained seated she would give in to the desire to sleep, and walked to the door of her office. Bill was back, sitting at his desk. He had the dejected look and demeanour of a much older man. The drug overdose had evidently left its mark on him.
She walked over to his desk. ‘You should go home,’ she said. ‘You look terrible.’
Sue looked up. ‘I’ve already told him, but he’s a stubborn blighter.’
Bill shrugged. ‘What’s to go home for? I’m better off here.’
Kate couldn’t help feeling sympathy for Bill, he had such a pathetic look on his face. Realizing she didn’t know anything about him other than he was an officer in her team, she wondered if her initial disapproval of his sloppy appearance had got them off to a bad start. She would have to rectify that, find out more about him, and maybe they might find some common ground.
‘What happens now?’ Bill fiddled with the pencils on his desk.
‘The PF says we don’t have enough evidence to charge Patricia Carnegie, and she wants us to wait until the information on the alibis comes back before we arrest Emma. She wants a watertight case against her.’
‘Isn’t there enough already?’
‘There’s enough, but it’s this confusion between Emma and Jade that’s worrying her. I suggested she commission a report from the psychologist, and she’s thinking about it. In the meantime she wants a full report with all evidence detailed before we make a move.’
* * * *
Emma and Ryan walked up the street.
‘We’ve done all we can. We’ve looked all over and she’s nowhere to be found.’ Emma had difficulty keeping the tremor out of her voice.
Ryan shrugged.
The bed and breakfast place looked like a small hotel or an old fashioned boarding house. They walked up the path, went in and climbed the stairs. Ryan kept on walking along the corridor as Emma opened the door to the room she shared with her mother.
‘She’s here.’
Ryan stopped and came back.
‘Thank goodness you’re safe,’ he said. ‘We were worried.’
Diane looked at him with the glimmer of a smile. ‘Of course I’m safe, but I need a word with Emma, in private. D’you mind?’
‘That’s OK, I’ll be in my room if you need me.’ Ryan closed the door behind him.
Diane sighed. ‘Sit down, we need to talk.’
Emma dragged a chair over and sat. Her mother looked dreadful. She looked older than her years. Her hair was a mess, her complexion had an unnatural pallor, and her eyes were sunk into her head and dark-rimmed.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘You expect me to believe you don’t know what’s wrong?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’
‘You were the one who attacked Bill Murphy, and left him for dead.’ Diane’s voice was flat.
‘That’s not true.’ Emma stared at her mother, a look of horror on her face. ‘I was at a lecture, I met you off the bus.’
Diane didn’t look at her.
‘Are you sure about that?’ Diane’s eyes brimmed with tears. ‘When you were thirteen, after Jade vanished, you had an episode where you acted like a zombie. You wouldn’t speak to anyone, or do anything. All you did was lie in your bed and stare at something no one else could see. Do you remember?’
‘No, that’s not what happened. I was the one who supported everyone else.’
‘No, Emma, that’s what you’ve always thought, but what I’m telling you is the truth about what actually happened.’ Diane brushed tears away from her face with the back of her hand. ‘There were also times when you told me you were Jade, and I believed you, because you weren’t Emma any more. You really were Jade. And after a time,’ Diane’s voice broke and she struggled to continue speaking, ‘you became Emma again, and you didn’t remember being Jade. I didn’t tell you at the time because I liked it when Jade came back.’
Emma’s mind whirled. What her mother was saying couldn’t possibly be true. She would have remembered if she’d ever acted like Jade. They’d done it often enough when they were smaller, pretending to be each other.
‘That’s not true. It can’t be true.’ Emma couldn’t keep the anguish out of her voice.
‘I’m afraid it is.’ Diane’s shoulders shook. ‘And now you’ve done this terrible thing.’
‘I didn’t, I couldn’t. I was at the lecture.’ Her voice tailed off as the memory of the lecture returned. She’d gone to the lecture theatre and taken her seat in the middle of the row, but she’d felt funny and had pushed past the others in the row to get out. After that she couldn’t remember anything until she met her mother at the bus stop. There was a gap. She remembered now, the lecture had started at four o’clock. It had been seven when she met her mother, and her feet had been so wet they squelched in her shoes.
There had been other gaps as well. Sometimes she lost an hour or two, and occasionally a whole afternoon. Then there were the times when she returned home to find her computer on when she was sure it should have been switched off.
She shuddered. Memories flickered in and out of her brain. Strange memories. Memories that didn’t belong to her.
‘It’s not true, it’s not, it’s not.’
‘But it is true. And the police know because Bill Murphy survived and was able to remember your attack on him.’
Emma stared at her mother. The feeling of horror creeping up on her intensified.
‘They’ll be coming to arrest you soon.’
‘What can I do?’
‘Take the car keys, get as far away from here as possible.’ Diane thrust the keys into her hand. ‘Don’t tell Ryan, just go.’
The keys bit into the palm of Emma’s hand. ‘I don’t want to go.’
‘You must, it’s that or spend the rest of your life in prison.’
Emma swallowed. She struggled for breath, her pulse beat loudly in her ears, and she thought she was going to pass out. She pulled herself together with an effort, and stood up.
‘Go, go now,’ her mother said.
She left the room without a backward glance, although she thought she heard a faint, ‘I love you,’ as she rushed down the stairs and out of the building.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Kate gathered the papers in front of her and listed the evidence in bullet points on a spare piece of paper before keying it in to her computer. She needed to make her report to the PF as tight as possible, but when she looked at it she wondered if she had enough.
The crucial pieces of evidence were the alibis and Bill’s testimony. The problem was Bill wasn’t entirely sure whether it was Emma or Jade who had attacked him. His theory of Multiple Personality Disorder looked like the ramblings of someone affected by drugs, which he had been. It would need a report from the psychologist to make that stand up in court.
The alibis were also vague. No one had seen Diane at Broughty Ferry and none of the bus drivers on that route could remember her. Ryan’s alibi seemed to stand up, but a good prosecutor could easily make short work of that, and no witnesses were able to verify Emma’s attendance at a late lecture, although several people had seen her at an earlier one.
‘Damn,’ Kate muttered, but no matter how she shuffled the reports the team had done for her, or rephrased her own report, she couldn’t make it any better. ‘It’ll have to do.’ She added her recommendation and pressed print, hoping the PF would see things the way she did.
Gathering up the sheets of paper, she stuck them in an envelope, scrawled the PFs name and address on it and took it out to the team.
‘Blair,’ she said. ‘Will you deliver this to the PFs office. I need her decision as soon as possible.’
Blair grabbed his jacket. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
Kate nodded and walked to the coffee machine. The liquid sludge it delivered was awful, but she’d been fighting the urge to sleep all day and it was better than nothing.
Sue joined her. ‘Are we bringing the Carnegies in for questioning?’
‘I’d like to, but I reckon we’d better wait for the PF’s take on our case.’
‘Damned bureaucracy,’ Bill muttered behind her.
‘I agree,’ Kate said, ‘but I’ve already had my fingers rapped about not keeping her in the loop, and I don’t want them rapped again.’
‘But surely we have a good enough case.’ Sue filled a paper cup with coffee.
‘I think so, but whether the PF thinks so is another matter. She’s the one who will have to prosecute and it depends on how much of a risk taker she is.’
* * * *
Emma’s mind whirled as she ran down the stairs and jumped in the car. She threw her shoulder bag in the passenger seat, fastened her seat belt and turned the key in the ignition.
Her mother’s voice echoed in her mind. ‘You must go, or spend the rest of your life in prison.’
She pressed her foot harder on the accelerator, then eased it off again. It wouldn’t do to be stopped for speeding, and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.
She drove around for ages, unaware of where she was or where she was going. Twice she saw a police car, and on each occasion her heart pounded in her chest and her palms exuded sweat.
It was dark now, and as the hours passed the traffic thinned. The clock on the dashboard read ten past three and she hadn’t seen another car for some time.
She drove onto the Tay Bridge and stopped the car in the middle, got out and leaned over the railing.
The water below looked black and bottomless, moonlight glinted off the waves, otherwise she might not have known there was any water there.
She hoisted herself up and swung her feet over so she was sitting on the rail, looking down at the water. It had a hypnotic effect, seeming to call her, while a voice in her head taunted. ‘You’re too weak. You don’t have the guts.’
Her hold on reality weakened and, for the first time, she was aware of Jade trying to gain control. She fought it. ‘I am Emma,’ she muttered. ‘I am not Jade.’
The flash of headlights approached, and the car slowed when it reached her. She looked over her shoulder, smiled at the driver, leaned forward, and she was gone.
* * * *
It was morning before the police came to tell Diane that Emma had been seen jumping off the Tay Bridge, but as yet no body had been found. They located her shoulder bag in the car.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ the policewoman said before she left.
Diane nodded and clutched Ryan’s arm. Now she had lost both daughters and Ryan was all she had left.
‘Why would she do that?’ Ryan’s voice was troubled. ‘She seemed all right, earlier on.’
‘I should have told you.’
Diane didn’t know where to start. How to explain things to Ryan when she herself didn’t understand what was going on in Emma’s mind. Maybe if she’d paid more attention to her daughter she could have prevented what happened. If she hadn’t been so tied up in her search for Jade, she might have seen signs, and things wouldn’t have escalated the way they did.
‘Told me what?’
‘The police were going to charge her with the assault on the policeman. And maybe other things as well.’
‘Emma! I don’t believe it. She was such a mouse.’
‘They have proof.’ Diane let go of Ryan’s arm and walked to the window, staring out with unseeing eyes. ‘Bill Murphy survived, and he told me it was Emma who attacked him.’
‘The state he was in, it’s a wonder he can remember anything.’
‘Emma’s death is my fault, because I confronted her with it and told her to go before she was arrested.’
Ryan joined her at the window and wrapped his arms round her.
‘Oh, Mum! It’s not your fault. Emma made her own decisions, she always did. You can’t blame yourself.’
‘But I do, and now she’s gone, and there’s only you and me.’
Ryan’s arms tightened round her. ‘We have each other,’ he said, ‘and I’ll look after you.’
Diane nodded, but she wasn’t convinced. She would always blame herself, and she would have to live with it.