'Where do you work?'
'For the last couple of years I've been working like a lunatic for a company that furnishes offices.'
'What do you mean?'
'If some company is setting up a new office, we can do as little or as much as people want. Sometimes it's just designing the wallpaper, sometimes it's everything from the pens to the computer system.'
'Do you enjoy it?'
'Kind of. I can't believe I'll still be doing it in ten years' time or even in one year's time, when I come to think of it. I just kind of wandered into it and discovered I was quite good at it. Sometimes we're sitting around, but when the pressure's on we work all night. That's what people pay us for.'
'And you have a boyfriend?'
'Yes. I met Terry through work. That's the way most people meet, isn't it? I don't know where else I'd meet anyone. He works with company computer systems and I moved in with him about a year ago.'
She just sat and waited for me to say more, so of course I did, because I've always talked too much, especially when there's a silence and because I wanted to talk, I suppose, about things I'd never put into words before. So now I took the plunge in a gabble.
'Actually, the last few months haven't been exactly brilliant. Well, they've been awful in many ways. I was working too hard and he was working too hard and when he works hard, he drinks hard. I don't think he's an alcoholic or anything, he just drinks when he wants to unwind. But the trouble is, he doesn't unwind, or not for long. He gets weepy or he gets angry.'
'Angry about what?'
'I don't know, really. Everything. Life. Me. He gets angry with me, because I'm there, I think. And he, well, he-' I stopped abruptly. This was very hard to say.
'Is he violent?' Irene Beddoes asked.
I felt I was slipping down a slope towards things I had never properly told anyone.
'Sometimes,' I muttered.
'Does he hit you?'
'He's lashed out a couple of times. Yes. I always thought I was the kind of woman who would never let myself be hit more than once. If you'd asked me a few months ago, I'd have said that I would just walk if a man hit me. But I didn't. I don't know why. He was always so very sorry, and I guess I felt sorry for him. Does that sound stupid? I felt he was doing something that hurt him much more than it hurt me. When I talk about it well, I've never really talked about it before now, actually, but now, I feel that this isn't me I'm describing. I'm not like the woman who stays with a man who treats her badly. I'm more well, more the kind of woman who escaped from a cellar and now just wants to get on with life.'
'And you did terrifically,' she said warmly.
'I don't think of it like that. Really. I just did the best I could.'
'By the sound of it that was very good indeed. I've made something of a study of these sort of psychopaths .. .'
'You didn't tell me that,' I said. 'You said you were a psychiatrist and that you weren't interested in all that side of it.'
'The way you handled yourself was first amazingly resilient, just to survive at all. Then there was your remarkable escape. That is almost unprecedented.'
'You've only heard my version. Maybe I exaggerated it to make myself seem more heroic'
'I don't see how that's possible,' she said. 'After all, you're here. You're alive.'
'That's true,' I said. 'Anyway, now you know all about me.'
'I wouldn't say that. Maybe over the next day or two we can meet again.'
'I'd like that,' I said.
'I'm going to get us lunch in a minute. You must be starving. First I'd like to ask a favour.'
'What?'
She didn't answer. Instead she started rummaging in her shoulder-bag. While she did this I thought about her. I had to make an effort to prevent myself feeling that she was the sort of mother I would have invented for myself: warm where my mother was detached, assured where my mother was nervous, intelligent where my mother was, well, not exactly Einstein, and just sort of deep and complicated and interesting.
She pulled a file out of the bag. She put it on the table and removed a piece of paper, a printed form, which she put in front of me.
'What's this?' I asked. 'Are you trying to sell me insurance?'
She didn't smile. 'I want to help you,' she said, 'and I want to make a proper assessment and in order to do that I want to build up as complete a picture as I possibly can. I'd like to have access to your medical records, and for that I need your permission. I need you to sign this.'
'Are you serious?' I said. 'It's just bundles of stuff about injections for going on holiday and antibiotics when I had a chest infection.'
'It would be useful,' she said, offering a pen.
I shrugged and signed. 'I don't envy you,' I said. 'So, what do we do now?'
'I'd like to talk,' she said. 'Or, rather, I'd like you to talk. Just talk and see where it takes you.'
And I did. I gave myself up to it. Irene Beddoes went into the building and returned with sandwiches and salad and fizzy water and tea and biscuits, and the sun moved across the sky and I talked, and sometimes, as I thought of the sheer tiredness that my life had been over the last year, I cried, but mainly I talked and talked and talked until I was exhausted and the courtyard had become dark and cold and she led me through echoey corridors back to my room.
There was a large bunch of daffodils on my bed, and a note scribbled across the back of a used envelope. 'Sorry you weren't here. I waited as long as I could. I'll come back as soon as I can. Loads of love and I'm thinking of you, Sadie.'
I sat on the bed, weak with disappointment.
'How's the investigation going?'
'We're short of anything to investigate.'
'There's the women.'
'There's five female names.'
'Six. Including me.'
'If you .. .' Cross paused and looked awkward.
'If I remember anything,' I said, 'you'll be the first to know.'
'This is your brain.'
'My brain.' I looked at the scan spread out on the light board in front of us and then touched my temples. 'How odd to look at your own brain. Well, is it all right?'
Charlie Mulligan smiled at me. 'It seems pretty good to me.'
'It's a bit shadowy.'
'It's the way it's meant to look.'
'But I still can't remember. There's a hole in my life.'
'Maybe there always will be.'
'A disaster-shaped hole.'
'Or perhaps memory will gradually return and fill it in.'
'Can I do anything about it?'
'Don't fret away at it. Relax.'
'You don't know who you're talking to.'
'There are worse things than forgetting,' he said mildly. 'Anyway, I ought to be getting on.'
'Back to your mice.'
He held out his hand and I grasped it. It was warm and firm. 'Back to my mice. Get in touch if you need anything.'
If I need something you can do anything about, I thought. But I just nodded and tried to smile.
'I read somewhere that you only really fall in love twice, maybe three times, in your life.'
'Do you think that's true?'
