Mr. Nobody(69)

Either way, I wouldn’t read mine for another two years.

I stand and stare at what he’s done, dizzy, my head pounding and the sound of Mum’s gasping breath behind me. The shotgun now propped between two lifeless thighs. His dark blood creeping slow and steady across the oak floorboards toward us.

The room spins around us and I can no longer stop the nausea from rising. I vomit hot sharp bile forward onto the floor.

And suddenly there are police everywhere, swarming into the house, through the front and back. Later I will see the squad cars filling our drive, the riot van, next to Mum’s 4x4. They’re shouting but we don’t hear their words as they pour in, fully armed.

    We’d find out later they’d come to seize Dad’s hard drive, his papers, before he’d destroyed them; they’d come to take him in, but he’d beaten them to it. He’d destroyed everything and he was already gone.

We’d find out later that he’d embezzled hundreds of thousands of pounds from charitable funds, that he misappropriated funds meant for survivors of the London bombings. Other people’s money. Victims’ money. And we’d never find that money.

We’d find out in the emergency room that the headaches and the vomiting we were all experiencing were due to gas poisoning. Dad had disabled the pilot light on the oven, he’d put out the flame and the house had slowly been filling with gas for hours while we slept. The bitter smell of it permeating every room of the house.

They said at the inquest he meant to take us all with him. A last-minute idea, they speculated—otherwise why would he have bothered to write us all notes? Why indeed? After two years of waiting, I found that mine had said only:

    Marni-marn,

I love you. I hope one day you’ll be able to understand.

Your Dad



He thought we’d be better off dead than without him, that was what he had decided for us. That we were his property to dispose of in any way he liked. We weren’t meant to read those letters; he wrote them to our dead bodies. We were all meant to go in our sleep but he ran out of time and shot himself first.

Except I don’t think he did. I don’t think the man with no face in the study was my father. Which I would later tell the police and social workers. I saw him put on his coat, I’d tell them. I saw him leave the house. He told me to go back to bed. Whoever that person was in the study, they weren’t my father, that body wasn’t wearing a coat. You never found his coat.

    They’d tell me it was a hallucination from the gas poisoning, they’d tell me they’d done a DNA test on the remains, they’d tell me to stop, but someone believed me. The press believed me. And at first, I was glad at least someone did. But they wanted to know, if he wasn’t dead, where had he gone? They demanded to know where he’d gone with all that money. They wanted to track him down and make him pay. And they just wouldn’t stop asking. Even after I told the police I believed them, that I must have imagined seeing him. Even after I told everyone I’d made a mistake. They just kept asking and then they got angry and it became dangerous. That’s when we had to leave.

I know logically I didn’t see him. That logically I couldn’t have seen him leave…but…I did, didn’t I?

Shards of memories from that night. Recalled over and over and over. Blood everywhere; I stare at it transfixed. Mum crouched on the floor, her mouth open in a silent scream, spit stringing straight down onto our floorboards. Her eyes searching the approaching faces of police for some kind of answer as to why.

They pull her roughly backward, and like a rag doll she lets herself be carried off, no resistance, something soft and helpless in a sea of uniforms. The world slows right down as they pour into the study around me, finally blocking my view.

As I’ve said, nobody becomes a psychiatrist by accident.





35


DR. EMMA LEWIS


DAY 12—REPERCUSSIONS

Officer Graceford arrives at 7 A.M., bringing the stack of newspapers I’d requested through Chris.

Not yet ready to face the TV coverage, I pore over the papers with my bandaged palms as Chris finishes cooking us breakfast. He wouldn’t take no for an answer after calling a company to replace the glass in the basement window.

Graceford eyes the apron he’s wearing over his uniform and turns back to me briskly. “I’ll be covering you at the hospital if you want to go in today,” she explains. “If you don’t feel up to it, you can stay here in the lodge with Chris until things calm down. It’s totally up to you.” She smiles understandingly and I want to hug her for her lack of judgment either way.

“I’ll have a think about it.”

She nods and throws a look back to Chris; his hair is still rumpled from sleep. “I’ll be keeping an eye on things at the hospital, Chris. Radio me if anything changes here.”

“Will do,” he says, trying to remain dignified while holding a spatula.

After Graceford leaves I take a deep breath and flick on the TV. Footage of my face, me walking out of the hospital, furtive, guilty, though of what I do not know. I guess I have a guilty face. The news anchors talk about me, about Dad.

    “The daughter of the late Charles Beaufort, who is estimated to have misappropriated approximately ￡875,000 from the July seventh victims’ charity, as well as other sums from various sources, reemerged yesterday after fourteen years in hiding. Marni Beaufort, now Dr. Emma Lewis, has been working within the NHS under an assumed name.”