Touched

Chapter Eleven

Tuesday Night

Dan sat on the settee for a full ten minutes before moving. He found that he was shaking.

Then he decided that, tonight of all nights, that a whisky would be justified.

Once he had poured it he sat down again, sipping it slowly, trying to sort out his thoughts. Was this it then, was this insanity? Was this how it felt?

Should he call someone? Probably. Was he going to? No, the prospect of admitting to going crazy was not a welcome one. Mental illness. Not something that looked great on a CV. What would they do, would they commit him?

He wasn't exactly sure what she was but that was one thing he was absolutely sure about; Dan didn’t want to be committed. Sure, he obviously needed help but that was far too drastic a step. Wasn't it? He had had an uncle who was sectioned, then committed. It took him years to get free of it, to convince the authorities that he safe. His uncle had never really got over it. He had previously held down a directorship at an engineering works but afterwards no one would give him a job, even a chance of a job. He ended his days as a gardener, literally scraping a living.

Dan didn't want to risk that; the stigma of mental illness was too strong. After all, he was functioning wasn’t he?

He laughed.

Yeah he was functioning. He was functioning so well he was seeing dead girls.

No not seeing. Not just seeing; talking to dead girls. More than that in fact, having a two way conversations with them.

Well not them. Just one.

Just one. Well that made it all right then, didn’t it?

She was in his head. She had to be, didn’t she? Well what was the alternative? A ghost? Dan didn’t believe in ghosts or anything like that.

But he did believe in Tess. She seemed so real. Tess was more real than almost anyone in his life at the moment.

He laughed out loud at that thought but then, abruptly stopped. Laughing out loud at thoughts would definitely get him committed.

But she was so real.

He stared at the spot where she had been sitting. He thought about what she had said, about the blanks, about being ignored, about being scared.

Feeling only slightly self-conscious he said; ‘Tess, I can’t see or hear you but…if you’re there I’m here for you.’

Yes, he thought, that was better. Now he was talking to imaginary girls who weren’t there too.

So what to do? He decided that maybe he could go and talk to someone if this kept happening. Nothing could be done now. The best thing was to carry on as normal and just accept whatever his mind served up for him. He needed to occupy himself, not brood. The best thing was to get on with things, like his application.

He gave it his best shot over the next ten minutes but he knew it was no good. He just couldn’t concentrate on it.

He found himself back on Google, running the same search as he had run the previous night but this time delving deeper, reading around, reading the other articles published at the time of the murder and the follow-up ones published over the next few weeks and months.

He learned a lot.

He learned that the murder was particularly shocking. Tess was a respected professional, a young solicitor with a very bright future. She also seemed to be genuinely nice; OK when someone died, even if they were the world’s biggest bastard people found something nice to say about them because that was the done thing but the outpouring of grief and shock seemed totally genuine; Tess didn’t seem to have an enemy in the world. Her friends, work colleagues and family were in shock both straight after the murder and long afterwards. The story was long lasting, there were a number of follow-up articles in the local papers, at least one of which had been taken up by the nationals. Dan now had a vague memory of it; it was about the time when he was still in London doing agency work and hating every moment of it. He was surprised anything had stuck; he wasn’t really interested in anything at the time.

It was also shocking how little progress had been made in finding the killer. Tess had been killed in her own flat only minutes after coming off a long call with her sister. There was no sign of a forced entry, no fingerprints, no murder weapon, no DNA left at the scene. There was speculation that Tess had known her killer and had let him (or her) in but Tess’s family had been adamant that she wouldn’t have done that once she was settled down for the evening.

The police seemed to think that this was a stranger killer preying on young women and issued a warning to those living on their own to keep a chain on the door and not to let anyone in they were not absolutely sure about. There was even some lurid press speculation about the existence of a ‘Salford Ripper’ that linked some violent and unsolved attacks in with Tess’s murder that had occurred in and around the Quays over recent years.

To Dan’s admittedly unprofessional eyes the links looked very tenuous and the other attacks very dissimilar to the attack on Tess – indeed they all looked to be different from each other, the only common thread was that women were always the victims.

The last article he read solved another mystery and saddened Dan more than any other: It was a follow-up article on Tess’s family that was dated in February, some two months ago. It reported the death of Jill Johnson from cancer. She had been in remission after chemotherapy that had been carried out some five years before but then the disease had returned suddenly and more virulently and had killed her in just a few brief, painful weeks. Her daughter said that she had no fight left in her when the cancer came back.

Her only surviving daughter, Annie. Tess’s sister, for Jill Johnson was her mother, divorced and remarried, hence the change in name. The newspaper article was sympathetic and considerate but ended with a simple statement that Dan felt must be true; ‘Sadly, it seems that the Quay’s killer has claimed a second victim’.

Jill Johnson, The estate of the late J Johnson, the name on the probate forms.

It was as he sat back from this article that he glanced at the time. He had spent over an hour on the search and he hadn’t even touched his whisky.

He needed a sip now though.

He mulled over what he had found out. Had he got any further? Well he did no more, things that he hadn’t known before. That had to suggest that he wasn’t going mad.

But did it? Did he not perhaps know all of this before? He thought he had remembered some of the articles, couldn’t he have known more? He had come back to Manchester at Christmas, long after most of these articles had been published. Most but not all though, that was the point. He did not normally buy the M.E.N. but he had a few times when he was looking for a flat and a job. He’d seen copies of the paper around the office too; Steve got it for both the football and the commercial property section. It was just possible that he’d read all of it. The brain was a complex, delicate thing. It could be deceived, and deceive itself. It was how hypnotism and tricks of illusion worked after all. So had his brain, stressed as it was from all that had happened to him – marriage, work, relocation…drinking too much and sleeping too little, yes he had to admit that to himself– oh, and why not admit everything - loneliness and solitude too, had it constructed Tess from half-remembered facts?

Possibly.

That was inescapable, it was possible. But then surely the fact that he was going through all this research, wasn’t that proof that he was functioning fine and that he was sane and hadn’t made Tess up. Wasn’t that enough to establish his sanity?

Dan shook his head. Just thinking about this was enough to make it spin, maybe enough in its own right to tip him over the edge. He took another sip of the whisky. He had put the rough Co-op blend to the back of the cupboard for emergency/last resort use only. He had forgotten his overdraft and treated himself to a single malt. He held the glass up to the light, watching the oily swirls as the straw coloured liquid mixed with the water he had let it down with.

He stopped.

There was a face reflected in the glass, the face of someone stood silently behind him. His enigma, his muse, his construct? Well whether she was real in his mind or real in reality, did it really matter? She was real to him and, within the walls of his flat or within the bones of his head, surely that was all that was important.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hello,’ she replied.

He turned and she was there. She was different though, looking just the same yet changed. She was calmer, much more in control of herself than she had been before. And that was all the more remarkable considering that she was staring at the laptop’s screen, apparently almost in a trance like state.

‘How long have you been there?’ he asked.

‘A while,’ she said without moving her gaze.

‘How much did you read?’ he said, knowing that it was too late now to minimize it.

‘Enough,’

‘OK,’ nodded Dan, ‘You didn’t know?’

Tess seemed to shake herself out of her trance, walking away from the dining table and going to sit on the settee. Dan followed her, sitting on ‘his’ two-seater, giving her space.

‘No,’ she said, ‘Well not really. Not at first anyway. I was more…confused, puzzled I guess. I knew something had happened but there was no one to tell me, to explain to me, what it was.’

Dan gave a wry smile. ‘It’s very hard to know what’s real and what’s made up in your head, isn’t it?’

She looked up and made eye contact for the first time. She nodded, ‘Exactly. That’s it exactly. You’re taking this…quite well?’

Dan shrugged, ‘So are you.’

‘Yes but…well I think I’d be running around screaming if this happened to me. And, as for me, well I have no choice do I? I am what I am – apparently.’

‘I…I don’t exactly know what you are,’ admitted Dan.

‘Oh, well I think I must be a…well, you know.’

Dan didn’t want to go there, not just yet. He said the first thing that came into his head. ‘What do you remember? About what happened? And since?’

‘What do I remember?’ she frowned, ‘Well I sort of remember the attack. Sort of, but, well I think I’d rather not go there. It hurt.’

‘That’s OK. Other than I suppose you don’t remember who did it?’

She shook her head.

‘My life before…it’s a bit foggy.’

‘OK. What about since?’

‘Since, there are gaps. I couldn’t work out why I had so many gaps. I’d sit around my flat at first, wondering where everyone was, why no one was calling or looking after me, yet I wasn’t able to call them. No. No, that’s not right, somehow I didn’t want to call anyone. I was just…there.

‘People came to the flat though, sometimes. Usually I just sat there quietly, watching them. They just ignored me. That was puzzling. I never felt the need to speak to them. They just came, did what they had to and left.

‘Except for one person. Annie. It was different with her. She only came once,’ Tess looked up, ‘Annie’s my big sister, two years older? Well, was I suppose.’ For the first time since she had reappeared a veil of sadness passed briefly across her face.

‘Yes I know about Annie,’ said Dan quietly, ‘I read about her.’

Tess nodded. ‘She looked so upset. It must have been so hard on her. She was getting married you know? That summer. It was meant to be her big, happy year. Poor Annie. And now mum’s gone too.

‘She was the one person I spoke to, or tried to at least. I tried to hold her, hug her. But she just shivered and cried even more. She ran out of the flat and I haven’t seen her since.

‘There was a long gap after that. A very long one. And then, when I came back, the flat was suddenly empty; all the furniture had gone, all my things. I was so lonely.’

She had been staring at a point in the floor as she spoke, clearly reflecting. But then she looked up straight into Dan’s eyes.

‘Then you came. Clipboard, serious face. Lovely eyes though, gentle and, somehow, sad too. I don’t know why but somehow I really wanted to speak to you. I did – and you spoke back! I was so amazed, so shocked when you did that I didn’t know what to say at first.’

‘I wonder why me and not anyone else,’ mused Dan.

‘I just struck lucky I guess.’ She forced a smile, ‘Are you psychic?’

‘Nope, not in the slightest. I don’t believe in anything like that.' He hesitated, looked straight at Tess and said, firmly: 'And I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘Er…hi,’ she said, giving him a little wave.

Dan couldn’t help but smile.

‘I still don’t,’ he said, ‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise. I’m with you on that actually. But then, what else do you think I can be?’

Dan just shrugged.

‘Ah,’ said Tess, slowly nodding, ‘You think I’m all in your mind, that you’re going crazy?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t blame you. I’d probably think the same actually. You really are very calm about it.’

‘Well, if I must either go insane or be haunted, well…I could have done a lot worse.’

This time Tess laughed.

‘That has to be the single most unusual compliment I’ve ever had!’ she said, ‘Thanks – I think!’

‘So why are you here then?’ he said, ‘here at my flat, I mean, not here generally.’

‘Though you’d like to know that too.’

‘Yes, as I guess you would?’

She nodded.

‘To both, I don’t know,’ she gave a little shrug of her shoulders, ‘I guess the best I can come up with is that I’m here because you asked me to come with you. On that first day, in my flat, you asked me to come for a drink. I just didn’t know I could leave, oddly it had never occurred to me to try to leave. Then I was downstairs and…you just went. I didn’t know where you had gone. I just stayed there, waiting, hoping that you would come back.’

‘Which I did.’

‘Which you did.’ She got up and walked to the window to look out again. ‘Why did you?’

That was a very good question, just why had he gone back?

‘I don’t actually know. You seemed nice and, OK, we had only chatted for a few minutes but you seemed to be somebody I’d like to get to know better. You’d also intrigued me by vanishing when my back was turned!’

‘I did? I thought it was you that had gone.’

‘No, you did.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Well I think you have a reasonable excuse.’

What exactly are you doing, Dan, he asked himself. He was flirting with an enigma, a wraith, something that he was imagining, someone who only existed in his own mind. But he was enjoying it, he told himself, and not to knock it until you’ve tried it.

‘But you did come back and then you took me out of the building, outside, down to the water. It was good to be out, good to be with someone, good to be talking with you. But it was then I began to realise just how wrong things were. I couldn’t feel things; the cool of the air, the cobbles under my feet, nothing. And then we started to talk about the attack and that raised lots of questions for me, the gaps, everything. It all got too much. I just had to get away.’

They were silent for a while. Tess came back and sat down again. At last Dan asked; ‘How did you find me again?’

‘I don’t know. Accidentally I guess. There were more gaps but I then remember walking, not sure where I wanted to go just knowing I didn’t want to go back to my flat. I found myself in town. I went and found my old office. I watched some of my old colleagues going in and out. Then I realised it was Friday evening and that they would be heading out for a drink. I followed them.’

‘Did anyone see you?’

‘No. It was the same as before. I spoke to them but they ignored me. Or I thought they did.’ She caught Dan’s gaze again. ‘I think it’s just you that can see me.’

Dan wondered whether he should feel blessed or cursed.

‘Anyway most of them headed to Bar 37. I didn’t go in, just watched them through the window. And, to my surprise, you were there too.’

Dan nodded. There had been a lot of legal people in the bar. He knew a few of them from work, a few more from attending CPD events on planning and development.

‘Was the blonde girl you were with the one that just called?’ Tess asked, taking Dan by surprise.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that was Jenny.’

‘Hmm, OK.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Nothing. I’m sure she’s very nice.’

If Dan didn’t know better he was sure that she was going onto say something about her being a lot younger than he was, or that she didn’t thing she was right for him, but Tess didn’t say anything like that. So – if Tess was in his head – was his subconscious telling him to wake up and smell the coffee and get real about Jenny? That she was too young and too lively for him?

He decided it would be better to move the conversation on.

‘So you followed me and waited for me?’

‘Yes.’

Dan nodded.

‘That’s a bit like stalking isn’t it?’ said Tess, ‘Sorry.’

Dan shrugged.

‘And since I brought you here you’ve been here ever since?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve moved things.’

She nodded.

‘Yes. Sometimes I can. It’s almost if I forget, then I can. It’s not all the time though and I get really tired when I do.’

‘Tired?’

‘Yes. I know it seems odd given what I am…what I must be…anyway it’s true. I get tired.’

‘Tess, given all of the oddness that’s only a minor thing.’

‘Good point.’ She got to her feet, ‘Well, I guess this is it now? I think you’ll have to show me out.’

Dan was shocked. What had happened now? Had he upset two girls in one night?’

‘Show you out?’ he said.

‘Yes. Well I don’t think I’ll be able to leave otherwise.’

‘Do you want to leave?’

‘Well, no. But I didn’t think you’d want me here.’

It had actually never crossed his mind that she would leave. Now she had suggested it though he had to consider it; Was this his mind trying to heal itself; would his insanity follow her out of the door? If so then, yes, she should go.

But.

‘Tess,’ he said at last.

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t want you to go.’

Tess’s eyes widened in surprise.

‘Really? Are you sure?’

He gave a little laugh and shrugged.

‘Tess, I’m not sure about anything anymore. I’m not sure if you’re real or imaginary. I’m not sure if I’m sane or insane. I’m not sure what the consequences will be of asking you to stay but, yeah, I really want you to stay. I can’t explain it, I can’t explain anything. I just know I want you to stay with me.’

She smiled.

‘You’re quite a unique guy, Mr Jackson.’

‘Unique equals crazy I suppose?’

‘No unique and amazing.’

Dan stood up and walked over to Tess, being careful not to touch her.

‘I think you’re pretty amazing too, Tess,’ he said. ‘There’s something special about you.’

‘A haunting quality, perhaps?’ she said with a mischievous smile.



*



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