Mr. Nobody(103)
The police I didn’t recognize carefully helped me out from under Matthew’s body. With gloved hands they’d bagged my clothes and given me new warm ones, erecting an incident tent around Matthew’s lifeless body. A medic in a dark uniform carefully dressed my wounds.
Peter took me back into the house for a “delicate” conversation, warm tea held in my confused and shaky hands. Options were given to me and I made my choice.
Damage limitation was agreed upon.
We decided on a story. Or rather Peter gave me his.
Matthew took his own life. He stole a car belonging to one of the nurses at Princess Margaret’s, Rhoda Madiza, he drove that car to the childhood home of his doctor, whom he’d become obsessed with and overly dependent on, and he’d taken his own life. Just a confused man, a desperate man with mental health problems. They could even arrange a typed suicide note. The irony smarts. I ended up doing to him exactly what he planned for me. He jumped from the roof of the house and didn’t even try to break his fall.
And my part in all of that story? After realizing Matthew was missing from the hospital, I’d headed to the wrong place to find him. The beach. The place I assumed he’d return to. By the time I’d worked out my mistake and made it to the house, a place I’d mentioned to him only the day before, Matthew was already dead. What could anyone have done? We didn’t realize until too late how unhappy he was, but sometimes it’s impossible to tell. Tragically, the story goes, Matthew died before we could find out who he was.
I lied. On the record, in my statements to the police, to everyone. Peter led me back outside and I said what Peter told me to say to the officers, in the driveway of my old family home, shivering in the sharp January evening. Damage limitation, Peter called it. I think of the press, of the mistakes I made, and the errors made by Peter, Groves, Rhoda, Nick Dunning, and Dr. Samuels, the military psychiatrist. Matthew slipped through all of our fingers. It’s understandable that some people wouldn’t want the truth to come out. Who would the truth benefit, anyway? I lied—for Peter, yes, but mainly for myself.
Mr. Nobody’s case was investigated, though. Two days after the incident, once I was safely back in London, Peter arrived with plainclothes officers at my flat. They asked questions and Peter told me to tell them everything I had told him. I would not be implicated and any information relating to open cases would be unconnected with the official Matthew story. They wanted to know about Mr. Nobody. So I told them everything Mr. Nobody had told me, about the murders he had committed, about his past, the missing soldier, how I got to the top of Richard Groves’s list in the first place. That afternoon the real Stephen Merriman’s body was found in his tiny bedsit off Russell Square. He had been dead for over two months, his remains shoved into a suitcase in a closet. The murder was reported in the news but not in connection to Matthew.
Matthew killed the real Stephen before taking his identity and moving to Norfolk. The officers said he may have found Lillian first before choosing to take Stephen’s identity. Matthew needed someone that no one would miss but that had a strong connection to Norfolk. Everyone knew Lillian had a son, but he was in London and they’d never really met him. With Lillian in the late stages of dementia, it was easy for Matthew to take Stephen’s place in her affections. Matthew had chosen the perfect identity for what he needed. He moved into Lillian’s empty house as her son, and while she was away in her care home he started to gather information on me, on all of us; he planned each step out meticulously. Knowing he wouldn’t recall hardly anything from before his self-inflicted reset, he laid a careful trail for himself before he set it all in motion. He left addresses for Lillian’s house and my old house on a phone that he buried on an evening visit to the hospital just before Lillian passed on the elderly care ward. Later the officers investigating his case would tell me Matthew’s phone showed he had been to Cuckoo Lodge, the night Chris was there, the night the news broke about my real identity. Thankfully, I was protected; it was the one night I wasn’t there alone. It was only luck that Zara broke her story that evening and I suddenly had police protection; she made me safe without even realizing it. Matthew remembered just enough and needed to get me on my own. He must have collected whatever he needed from Lillian’s and headed out to find me. But he couldn’t get to me that night, so he had to head back to the hospital. If I didn’t know what I know about Matthew, I might wonder at how he got in and out so easily, but if you spend your whole life disappearing you’re bound to get good at it. He knew what he needed to do. He lined up the dominoes, stepped back, and tapped them. And all to find me, to get me to fix him somehow.
No one believed Nigel Wilton’s suggestion that Matthew was Stephen. A story flared briefly in the Brancaster Times and had a sideline in some of the more salacious tabloids but quickly disappeared. It was easy for people to disregard Nigel’s version of events as the well-meaning but befuddled ramblings of a sweet old man. And when Stephen’s decomposing body was discovered in his London bedsit, Nigel’s story was roundly dropped.
Stories have surfaced since about other murders. I am still in contact with Peter and receive the odd fact-checking phone call from the officers I spoke to with him. They found the remains of missing Royal Anglian Regiment soldier Phillip Andrews about three weeks after our chat. He was found in woodland at Thetford Forest Park, twenty miles from the military base he signed out of on leave over a year previously. Another one of Matthew’s identities. When I saw his face on the news I couldn’t help see the similarities. Of course, that’s why he chose him. No wife, no kids, one-bed flat, kept himself to himself. Neither the base nor Andrews’s extended family had seen him since he signed out. The situation was bound to raise a few eyebrows at the MOD, an officer returning from Afghanistan and disappearing off the face of the earth, a court-martial-able offense and certainly worth investigating. Whether the MOD thought Andrews had deserted or defected the day they arrived at the hospital I do not know, but when they didn’t find Andrews in that consultation room but instead just a man who looked vaguely like him, their work there was done.