Lying Beside You (Cyrus Haven #3)(6)

‘He’s lying,’ I say, stepping closer to the woman. ‘Don’t let him bully you.’

The man glares at me, but I see the flicker of doubt on his face. The lie. I cannot explain how I know these things. I wish I could point to a twitch, or a facial tic, or a vein pulsing in his forehead; or say that he double blinked, or his voice changed, or his eyes looked up to the left. I just know he’s lying. I always do.

‘Are you calling me a liar?’ he says, focusing his anger on me.

Poppy growls.

‘Yes. Maybe your phone rang, or you changed the song on the radio, or you were checking out some woman who was walking across the road. It’s your fault.’

The van driver isn’t used to being challenged. He wants to bully me, or hit me, or shove a sock down my throat. He could, I suppose, but I’d hit him back twice as hard. I’d bite and scratch and gouge. I’d fight like a girl.

I take a photograph of his van and the hatchback.

‘You should call the police,’ I say to the woman. ‘I’ll give a statement.’

In reality, I don’t want to get involved. I hate being the centre of attention. The van driver starts making excuses, saying that we don’t need to get the cops involved and we can sort this out ourselves.

‘How about we pull around the corner and swap details,’ he says.

The woman looks relieved.

‘Can you come with me?’ she asks.

‘I’ll go with him,’ I say, nodding towards the van.

I follow the driver.

‘Were you going to drive off?’

‘No.’

He’s telling the truth. He cocks his head to one side. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m an eyewitness.’





3


Cyrus


Take away the twin steel fences, the razor wire and CCTV cameras, and Rampton could be mistaken for a health and wellness retreat, or an adventure sports centre with landscaped gardens and outdoor areas, a swimming pool, a shop, recreation rooms and a gym.

In all my visits, I have seen very few patients. They are kept apart, separated by gender and the acuteness of their illnesses. When Elias first arrived, he was in The Peaks, a unit for men with severe personality disorders, and spent eleven months in solitary because of his violent behaviour. For years, when moved around the hospital, he had to be chaperoned by four people. A lot has changed since then. He is medicated. Lucid. Placid as a winter pond.

Admittedly, he is not the brother I remember, the one I idolised and whose hand-me-down clothes I willingly wore because it made me feel closer to him. I didn’t mind being mistakenly called by his name by teachers, or by relatives, who remembered him more readily than me. The firstborn child is always the most fussed over and photographed. I came second. And the twins had a genetic advantage because who isn’t fascinated by an embryo splitting to form two perfect yet different halves?

Elias was a teenager, sitting his GCSEs, when the problems began. He drifted away from me like a Poohstick thrown from a bridge. Mum blamed puberty and raging hormones, but I knew it was something more serious. He hid away, spending hours in his room, where he sat on the window sill, smoking hash, blowing each depleted lungful into the night air, while he listened to ‘headbanger’ tapes on his Walkman.

When he did emerge, it was only to eat, or to argue, or to lift home-made weights in the garden. He lost his weekend job mowing lawns, but later bought a whetstone and bench grinder, and began sharpening knives and axes and mower blades. The neighbours were queuing up for the service and Elias would revel in how sharp he could make each tool.

Try as I might, I couldn’t quite solve – or articulate – the mystery of what happened to change him. The slow disintegration. The whispered arguments through his bedroom door. ‘Leave me alone,’ he’d say to nobody but himself. ‘I’m not listening.’

Once he told me that he could control the planets and that without him the moon would hurtle into the Earth and make humankind extinct, just like the dinosaurs. I wanted to believe him. Did it seem any more ridiculous than what I was being taught at Sunday School?

The diagnosis made things easier for a while. The drugs helped, although Elias called them ‘zombie-pills’. By then, his grades were in freefall. A-levels were out of the question. Weeks passed. His silences grew longer. His isolation. Dad caught him sneaking out at night and not returning until the morning. Twice the police brought him home, his shirt torn and bloody.

We lived like that for two years – up and down – good weeks and bad, never knowing what to expect. Later, I told a counsellor it was like living with a time bomb that I could hear ticking, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, always ticking. Until one day it stopped.

Dr Baillie finds me in the garden, trying to find warmth in a sun that offers nothing but pale, yellow light filtering through the high clouds.

‘Sometimes I wish I was a smoker,’ I say. ‘It would give me something to do.’

He sits beside me. ‘They’re coming back.’

‘Any indication?’

‘No.’

We make our way to the conference room where Elias has been waiting patiently with his hands pressed together between his thighs. The three tribunal members enter in single file and shuffle between the long wall and the table, taking their allotted chairs. They are like a jury returning with a verdict.