Lying Beside You (Cyrus Haven #3)(8)

I have no idea if any of this is true, but it’s a good story. I like making up scenarios about people because the truth is either too boring, or I can’t find out what really happened. Veejay doesn’t talk about herself. I know that she has children because there are toys in her back garden. That’s where Poppy is now, sniffing at her compost heap and drinking out of her fishpond.

Whenever I ask Veejay about her family, she steers the conversation back to me. Each session begins the same way. Have I been sleeping? Any dreams? Nightmares? Panic attacks? Random thoughts? Flashbacks?

Veejay is one of the few people who knows who I am and where I came from. How my real name isn’t Evie Cormac; and that I was born in Albania and I came to Britain in the hull of a fishing boat with my mother and sister, who both died on the journey. Other people have fucked-up childhoods, but not like mine.

‘Last week you were talking about your sister,’ says Veejay, glancing at her notes. ‘Agnesa. She was how much older?’

‘Six years.’

‘What do you remember about her?’

‘She had lovely hair, a lot like yours, and she used to pay me to brush and braid it for her, or promise to buy me doughnuts.’

In that instant, I am transported back to my village, to a street-barrow beside the church, where a hanging spout is dropping balls of dough into hot oil. I can smell them cooking as they puff up and turn golden. The lady tosses them in icing sugar and puts them in a white paper bag, before squirting chocolate sauce over the top. Agnesa lets me have the top doughnuts, which have the most chocolate.

‘Do you miss her?’ asks Veejay.

‘Yes.’

‘How did she die?’

‘She drowned.’

‘Along with your mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘Were their bodies ever found?’

‘No.’

‘Tell me about your mother.’

‘She used to be a seamstress, before she grew sick. Papa called it melancholia, but I don’t know what that means. She spent most of the colder months in bed, but she cheered up when the weather grew warmer.’

These questions continue, but gradually Veejay focuses on what happened to me after the boat sank. Each time she touches on the subject, I find ways to deflect and divert her attention. It is like a game of cat and mouse, but I don’t know which of us is the cat. I have no desire to relive what happened to me. People think that traumatic events should be laid out like a deck of cards and sorted into suits or four of a kind, because it looks neat and well ordered, but I want to shuffle the deck and deal again. I don’t want ‘closure’, I want a new hand.

After fifty minutes my time is up.

‘It’s always good to talk,’ says Veejay.

‘Is it though?’ I ask.

‘Talking has the power to help.’

‘And the power to harm.’

She puts a cap on her pen. ‘Why do you keep coming?’

‘I don’t want to disappoint him.’

‘Does Cyrus mean that much to you?’

I pause, wondering how to explain my relationship.

‘I used to think I was the only conscious being in the universe. That everything existed because of me – physical objects, other people, animals, events – and that if I died everything would vanish.’

‘Solipsism,’ says Veejay. ‘The idea that nothing exists outside your own mind.’

‘Then I met Cyrus and I realised that I wasn’t alone. I didn’t just feel my pain. I felt his. His thoughts. His emotions. His experiences. I wasn’t the only conscious being in the universe – there were two of us.’





5


Cyrus


As I walk to my car in the hospital parking area, the air seems saturated with oxygen, making the colours brighter and my senses sharper. I lean back in the driver’s seat of my Fiat and feel my heart beating in my chest. Elias is being allowed out on day release. He expects to come home. The next step will be overnight stays.

The house is big enough. There are five bedrooms. Evie has one of them. I haven’t even considered how she might react to having my brother come and live with me. I’ve been in denial. I’ve assumed that Elias’s application would fail and the tribunal would kick it down the road for another two years, when he would try again.

Catching a glimpse of myself in my rear-view mirror, I see my thirteen-year-old self with freckles and curly hair and teeth encased in metal. My face is burning. I look again and he’s gone.

My phone vibrates. I glance at the screen. There are two more messages from Lenny Parvel.

Beaconsfield Street, Hyson Green. Elderly deceased male. Blunt force trauma. Daughter missing. Call me.



And twenty minutes later: Where are you?

My heart slows and sinks. This is what I do now – I investigate violent and suspicious deaths. I am a criminal profiler, an expert on human behaviour – the worst of it, not the best – the sociopaths and psychopaths, the outliers, the mavericks, the deviant and the unhinged.

Most crimes don’t require a forensic psychologist to unpack them. When two drunks get into a fight in a pub car park and one glasses the other in the throat, it doesn’t require an honours degree in criminal psychology to explain what happened. I get summoned when the crime is beyond the comprehension of those investigating. When the police want someone to explain why one human being would do such terrible things to another.