hard chairs so that I could sit beside her. ‘They want to take her home but I’ve persuaded them it’s not a good idea for now,’ she continued. ‘The blood tests showed levels of DMT in her bloodstream, which she claims she’s never heard of, never mind taken. She agreed to an intimate examination but it showed nothing. She was actually very clean which, given that she’s been missing for five days, is odd in itself.’
‘They washed her to get rid of the evidence,’ I said, in a low voice, as an elderly couple walked past.
Evi looked troubled. No sign of her disagreeing.
‘What’s the last thing she can remember?’ I asked. ‘Before she disappeared?’
‘Coming to see me is the clearest thing in her head,’ Evi replied. ‘She has a vague recollection of going to meet someone about a study group, but can’t give me any details. All a bit hopeless, I’m afraid.’
‘Anything else?’
‘She’s jumpy, nervous as anything. Especially with men, but she knew who I was. She did say something quite odd, though: she asked me if I was real. Wasn’t convinced until she could actually touch me. Then she just started talking about terrible dreams again. Terrible dreams that she couldn’t remember.’
We both thought about that for a second. Dreams? Or not dreams?
Evi took a deep breath, as though bracing herself for some exertion, then shook her head. ‘Tomorrow, if she’s up to it and she and her parents are happy, we can try a form of hypnosis to see if we can release any memories. It’s unreliable, though, and not normally the sort of thing I’d try until she’s had much more time to recover.’
‘And how are you? I had hoped you might have gone home.’
She managed to smile at me. She was a whole lot tougher than she looked. ‘I’m much better, thanks,’ she said, giving a quick look right and left to check we were alone in the corridor. ‘And I did some digging around on a borrowed laptop. Nick, Meg and Scott were all at Trinity College when they studied here, so that seemed the place to start. There were twenty medical students in Trinity that year and I managed to track down most of them.’
‘Blimey, that was good going.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t difficult. There are alumni organizations that produce directories every year, professional bodies to apply to. Anyway, four are now working abroad, two have gone into other professions and one died a couple of years ago. The rest are either GPs, working in hospitals, or teaching at other universities. They’re scattered around the UK, the nearest being in Stevenage.’
‘So we can probably rule them out,’ I said.
A party of young doctors in crisp green scrubs appeared round the corner. We waited for them to pass by.
‘The only one I couldn’t find was a chap called Iestyn Thomas. He left Cambridge before he graduated and seems to have disappeared. He’d be thirty-six now, same as Meg and Nick.’
‘Thin, geeky chap,’ I said. ‘Everyone thought he was a bit odd.’ Evi’s eyes narrowed. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure I ever met him. Why do you say that?’
‘Nick mentioned someone like that,’ I said and quickly filled Evi in with the story of the teenager who’d found his father’s dead body, and then gone on to torment a schoolmate, quite literally, to death.
‘But Thomas, if that’s who it was, was telling this story about someone he’d met,’ Evi reminded me when I’d finished. ‘Not about himself.’
‘Supposedly.’
‘Worth checking out?’
‘Absolutely it is.’
It didn’t take us long. We went to the visitors’ cafeteria, ordered coffee and sandwiches and found a quiet table to log on to the hospital wifi on Evi’s borrowed laptop.
One of the national papers had covered the story briefly, confirming what I’d already suspected, that the family was Welsh. Then it was just a question of trawling through various Welsh newspapers to pin them down. The website AberystwythOnline had archived its old footage and the story had been covered in some detail. The Thomases had been a professional family who’d lived in an old manor house not far from Aberystwyth on the West Wales coast. Both parents had worked at the university until the father was forced to retire in his late forties on health grounds.
‘What’s fibromyalgia?’ I asked Evi.
‘A degenerative muscle disease,’ she replied. ‘More common in women but men get it too. I had a patient once who was a sufferer. I was treating her for depression. It can be quite painful and debilitating.’
Early one Wednesday morning, when his wife was out of the house (the story hinted she’d been having an affair with a work colleague), Bryn Thomas had taken a loaded shotgun into his study and pulled the trigger. His three-year-old daughter, typically the earliest riser in the house, found him shortly afterwards. Two hours later, his teenage son had come downstairs.
‘Photograph doesn’t help much, does it?’ I said, looking at the grainy, taken-from-a-distance shot of the mother and two children leaving the coroner’s court. The son was carrying the three-year-old and only part of his profile could be seen.
‘I’m not sure seeing it properly would make a difference,’ said Evi. ‘There can be nearly nine hundred medical students at Cambridge at any one time. I’d probably recognize most of the ones who were in my year, but the years above …’
‘And as it was taken more than twenty years ago, the chances are he looks very different,’ I said.
‘So he could be here?’
‘Over a hundred thousand people in the city,’ I replied. ‘Plenty of places to hide. On the other hand, maybe I just don’t want it to be Nick.’
Evi slid her hand along the table until it rested lightly on mine.
‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘But even if Iestyn Thomas is here, orchestrating everything, he can’t be acting alone.’
Not the least surprising thing to happen to me that day was that I found myself twisting my hand round and closing my fingers around Evi’s. At the same time, nerve endings around my eyes and nose started to sting. I kept my eyes down, in the faint hope Evi wouldn’t notice.
‘These things never end well, Laura,’ she said. ‘Even if we win in the end, the wounds left behind take a long time to heal.’
I was dismayed to see a tear fall on to the keyboard. It landed, splat, right in the middle of the J.
Evi’s hand gave mine a squeeze. ‘Deep breaths, blink hard, then blow your nose,’ she told me in a no- nonsense voice. ‘There’s plenty of time for therapy when the bad guys are banged up.’
I did what I was told. But when I looked at her again, her eyes were shining too.
‘You’re not over it, are you?’ I asked her. ‘That business last year in Lancashire, I mean.’
A tear shone on Evi’s thick black lashes. ‘I’m not sure I ever will be,’ she admitted. ‘Experiencing something like that is like a major bereavement. You don’t get over it, you just learn to live with it.’
‘What happened to the vicar?’ I risked.
She smiled, let go of my hand and gave it a little pat. She didn’t reply immediately, but I didn’t think she minded my bringing him up.
‘There was news footage of him helping you into your car,’ I said. ‘It looked like the two of you were together.’
Sad little shake of the head. ‘We never quite made it to that stage. Harry and I were instrumental in a woman’s death. She was one of my patients.’
‘Instrumental how?’
‘Long story, and it wasn’t Harry’s fault, it was mine. I thought for a while I was going to lose my practising certificate over it. In the end I just got a reprimand for a temporary lapse of judgement, but …’
‘You can’t forgive yourself?’
She sighed. ‘Losing a patient in your care is hard enough, Laura. When it’s because of a selfish act on your part, it’s close to unbearable. I couldn’t be with Harry and deal with it. And nor could he.’
She looked at her watch and pressed a button to close down the laptop. Time was running on and both of us had other places to be.
‘A long time ago I made a big mistake,’ I said. ‘And the repercussions of it will go on for as long as I do. I know exactly what it’s like to really care for someone you can’t be with. I know about obstacles that just won’t go away, no matter how much you want them to.’
