When he finished reading, he remained bent over the desk, staring at the last word. Then he pushed back and leant into his chair, making a hollow sound in his throat. That sound seemed to fall right through her, like a penny in a well, echoing as it hit the edges and landed with a dull thud in the pit of her stomach.
Failure. All that work, ploughing up memories and emotions until they were seeds on top of the soil for the crows to peck at, and still – failure.
Or was it? She watched him minutely, alert for the slightest change in his countenance. His green eyes had not moved, they were trained on the paper. A good three minutes passed. The space between them thickened, heavy with expectation.
She pictured his mind like a great machine, the pistons pumping, assembling her past into . . . what? Did she even want to know?
‘Well,’ he sighed. ‘Well. It must have been Mr Underwood you heard, calling your name. He found you.’
Only a crumb of information but she leant forward, eager to take it.
‘Although,’ he went on, shifting in his chair, ‘it was considerably later than you have written here. Full night. He saw the glow from your house on the horizon and raised the alarm.’
No one had told her that. No one had told her anything.
Flashes of aching memory came: not just sepia photographs of people but their voices, their scents, the feelings they inspired. Mr Underwood, Sarah, Jasper. What had happened to them?
She’d regarded the story as her secret. Now she saw it before her on the desk, pages and pages covered in her large, square writing, and realised it was incomplete. The end was not in her power. Dr Shepherd held the last act, locked inside him.
Hesitantly, she picked up his pencil and wrote a word at the bottom of the last page.
Sarah?
‘That is the question. What befell Sarah Bainbridge?’
She tilted her head, trying to see the look in his eyes, but the light was wrong. The lenses of his spectacles were opaque, screening him from view.
‘What you have written . . . I think, perhaps, that I can use it. But possibly not in the way you had hoped. It does not prove your innocence, or indeed anything except a great facility for invention. And if imagination were a malady, Mr Dickens would be a permanent resident here.’
Imagination! At least madness had power. It did not make her sound puerile, a girl dreaming of fairies and unicorns.
Sarah? She underlined the word, scratching through the paper.
‘Yes. She is the only person able to collaborate your story. If what you write is true, she can confirm your whereabouts at the time of Jolyon Livingstone’s death.’
A tear wet her cheek at the mention of Jolyon’s name.
‘Here we reach our difficulty, Mrs Bainbridge. Since you began to write, I have been scouring records in search of Sarah Bainbridge. Will you hazard a guess as to what I found?’ He held out his hands, showing them empty. ‘Nothing. I cannot trace a census entry, a death – not a thing. I even took out an advertisement appealing for information. Sarah Bainbridge has vanished.’
Another tear, falling to join and speed on the first. Poor Sarah never reached the police. They had not found her body. It could be lying in some ditch, corrupting, flies crawling in and out between her lips. Oh, Sarah. She deserved so much more than that.
Dr Shepherd coughed – not a real cough, but a modest clearing of the throat. A harbinger. It was coming now: his theory.
‘One thing is clear to me from your writing, Mrs Bainbridge. You have a tendency to repress unpleasant emotions. It is your defence, your strategy to cope. The – incidents – with your father, for instance. Then episodes missing from the story. Elsie – that is to say, the Elsie on these pages – passes out on several occasions. I cannot help but feel each one represents a chunk of the past you refuse to remember.’
Down the corridor, a bell rang.
‘Let us consider, for a moment, that you are actively submerging your harmful memories. Your anger at your parents, the guilt you feel for their deaths – whether qualified or not, I cannot say at this stage. All those dark emotions must go somewhere. I have read of them turning upon the patient’s body and making them unwell. But there are also cases where they splinter off, so to speak, into what we can only call a double consciousness.
‘Would you consider a possibility for me, Mrs Bainbridge? No doubt it will prove alarming, but I want you to open yourself up to the possibility that Sarah Bainbridge did not exist at all. That she was, in fact, an aspect of yourself.’
She grabbed the pencil, tried to keep her hand steady. People saw her. They spoke to her.
‘So you believe.’ His voice was soft, but not kind. Insinuating, tickling inside her ears. ‘But we cannot verify it. The cast of your story are gone. The only people who could attest to the existence of Sarah Bainbridge now lie dead and buried.’
Mr Underwood.
‘Ah.’ He crossed his legs. ‘I am sorry to say Mr Underwood also perished.’
Her fingers moved but all she felt were the vibrations of the pencil. How?
‘By fire. It seems that when the rescue party arrived from Fayford, Mr Underwood sent some villagers to Torbury St Jude for help. But he did not wait for their return. Witnesses say he spoke of other people, trapped inside the building. That does tally with your story – he would not know about the deaths of Mr Livingstone or Mrs Holt, he would imagine them still inside. He ran into The Bridge to try and rescue them, but alas . . . Poor man.’
Jasper?
A relieved smile broke on his face. ‘At least there, I have some good news. The little fellow did not leave you with your injuries. He fairly guarded you. By daybreak, our people had arrived in response to Mr Livingstone’s telegram. Given your condition, the police were willing to let us take you to our infirmary, and the little cat tried to follow you. One of the orderlies took pity on him, brought him back here. He has been living with our chief superintendent ever since. I’ve seen him. Very fat, he looks, and very happy too.’
Nine, she wrote.
‘I’m sorry?’
Nine lives.
‘Ah! Yes, quite.’ Dr Shepherd uncrossed his legs and leant forward to rest his hands on the desk. He had short, even nails. Blond hairs grew on his knuckles. Beside him, her own burnt hand looked like a monster’s paw. ‘Fortunately, we do not have nine lives to account for. Only two. Mr Livingstone and Mrs Holt.’