“Why haven’t you talked about it to Philly?” asked Carole, possibly in too sharp a tone.
But Mark Dennis was unfazed by her question. “I’ll come to that. I’ll explain it. Well, the main thing is, back in May I was in a pretty strange state, when all that happened. Not behaving very rationally.” He looked at Jude, almost pleadingly. “I don’t know if Philly told you anything about our circumstances…”
“A bit. I gather you had money problems.”
“And how. Yes, we’d moved out of London and down to Smalting in January. And then everything was fine. I’d got quite a lot of savings from various bonuses and what have you, then we made a bit of profit from selling our two London places and buying Seashell Cottage. Anyway, I invested all we’d got in various directions. Do you understand derivatives?”
Both women shook their heads.
“Neither, as it turned out, did I. I thought I understood them, but some freak activities in the world markets meant…well, effectively I’d lost the lot. Our little seaside idyll was looking very shaky, very much under threat.”
“So why didn’t you talk to Philly about it?” asked Carole. “Why did you just walk out on her?”
Again he didn’t react to the aggression in her questions. “I didn’t mean to just walk out on her. I meant to… sort things out. In fact, I don’t know if you know, but there were other complications in my life. I’m still technically married.”
“We know that,” said Jude.
“Yes,” Carole added. “We have actually met Nuala.”
“Have you?” Mark Dennis grimaced. “Something I must do again soon at some point. Not an encounter I look forward to.”
“We gathered from Nuala,” said Jude, “that she was pressing you for money too.”
“Mm. We had this odd arrangement. I wanted to get divorced. The marriage had been over in everything but name for quite a long time. But Nuala wasn’t keen on the idea of divorce.”
Carole nodded. “We’ve heard her views on the subject.”
“Anyway, to keep her out of the scene and to let me get on with my life with Philly, I made this arrangement to…I don’t know what you’d say…”
“Buy her off?” suggested Carole.
“Yes, that’s what it effectively was – buying her off. And she insisted that it was done properly, with a legal agreement, which may give a pointer to the kind of character she is. But at least it got her out of my hair. Anyway, that was all fine, so long as I had this big income, but when things started to go pear-shaped on the money front, oh God, I couldn’t keep Philly in our Smalting lifestyle and I couldn’t pay what I’d agreed with Nuala, and…I was very stressed.”
Mark Dennis was silent for a moment. Neither Carole nor Jude said anything, giving him time to gather his thoughts.
“Well,” he said eventually, “I still thought I could sort things out. I thought I could do it on my own. And I didn’t think it would take long. I only intended to leave Philly for a few days. Go up to London, borrow some money from various City friends to dig me out of my financial hole, then meet up with Nuala, somehow get her off my back…”
“And what happened?”
He shook his head wryly. “Should have known, really. Most of my City mates were feeling the squeeze as much as I was. Some of them actually asked to borrow money from me before I could put in my own request. Then I met up with Nuala…”
“At the Oxo Tower.”
“Yes, Carole. At the Oxo Tower. Typical of bloody Nuala, that. She knows I haven’t got two penny pieces to rub together, so she books in at one of the most expensive bloody restaurants in London.”
“How did you pay for it?”
“Oh, credit cards.” He let out a bitter little laugh. “Same way I’d been paying for everything else for the previous few months.”
“So there was quite a big debt built up there too, was there?” asked Jude.
“I’ll say. And of course I’d been a very high earner, so I had no problem getting new cards or increasing my credit limit, which meant the debts just spiralled upwards and upwards.” He sighed. “And the pressure on me was getting more and more intense…”
Carole broke the silence that followed this. “What happened?”
Mark Dennis shook his head in bewilderment. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean – you don’t know?”
He sighed. “I literally don’t know. I had…I suppose you’d have to call it some kind of breakdown. I mean, when I left Philly, I can remember that happening. And I can remember having dinner with Nuala at the Oxo Tower – that was on the eighth of May – but…” He shook his head again, unable to fill in the gaps in his recollection.
“So where have you been for the last few weeks?” asked Jude gently.
“I’ve been in a psychiatric hospital for most of it. Only came out a couple of weeks ago.”
“How did you get in there? Did you go in voluntarily?”
“No, I was sent there. Look, I can’t actually remember a lot of this stuff myself, but from what the doctors and nurses have told me, I’ve kind of pieced together what happened. As I say, the last thing I can clearly remember was having that dinner with Nuala at the Oxo Tower on the eighth of May. What I did for the next few days I have no idea, but I was found on Dover Beach on the morning of the eleventh. I had been in the sea, was drenched through and was only wearing a pair of boxer shorts. What was more, I couldn’t speak.”
“And you have no recollection of how you got there?”
“None at all. And only hazy recollections of the following weeks. Because of the location, because I had apparently come out of the sea, and because I couldn’t – or perhaps wouldn’t – speak English, the fairly reasonable assumption was made that I must be an illegal immigrant, who had been shipwrecked, or perhaps dumped in the English Channel by some unscrupulous trafficker. So I was handed over to the police, who apparently questioned me for some time.”
“Do you remember any of that?”
“Only vague sort of impressions – and not very pleasant ones at that. I think the police thought I was holding out on them, that I actually could speak but was just pretending to be traumatized to conceal my identity. So they didn’t exactly treat me with kid gloves.”
“Are you saying they beat you up?” asked Carole, whose Home Office background made her particularly sensitive about criticisms of the police.
“No, I’m not saying that. I don’t think there was any violence involved, just a lot of suspicion. And my recollections are so hazy that I don’t know which bits really happened and which I’ve invented. Anyway, after a few days the police must have decided that I was suffering from some genuine psychological condition – amnesia at the very least, and possibly some other arcanely named syndromes. So I was then sent to this secure psychiatric hospital in Lewes. Which is where I’ve been until a fortnight ago.”
“But clearly your memory’s come back. You know who you are now, don’t you?”
“Yes, Jude, I do. The process was gradual. The psychiatrists who worked with me were very good. And I had a lot of medication too.” He gestured to his flabby body. “I think that’s probably why I put on so much weight. The medication and lack of exercise.”
“Did the psychiatrists have any explanation for what had happened to you?”
“Conjectures, nothing concrete. They reckon that I’d just got to a point of stress where my system couldn’t cope, so everything kind of shut down. I couldn’t deal with the world around me and so my body reacted by excluding me from that world, shutting me off from it.”
The two women exchanged looks. Something in Jude’s expression prevented Carole from expressing the scepticism Mark Dennis’s words had engendered in her.
He shrugged. “Anyway, that was what the psychiatrists reckoned. Whether it’s true I’ve no idea, but I suppose it sounds like a kind of explanation.”
“When you went down to Dover Beach,” asked Carole, “do you think it was with the intention of drowning yourself, of escaping your problems that way?”
Mark Dennis pursed his lips. “To be honest I don’t know. I don’t think so. During the last few months I’ve
