Mr. Nobody(74)

Rhoda didn’t rush forward to help, but then she didn’t run away either, which is brave. She is a half-hero, if there is such a thing.

“I’m sorry,” she says, sipping her hot tea. I take her other hand in mine and give it a little squeeze.

“Not your fault. At all.”

I look back past her at Matthew down the corridor, his wound being assessed by Triage. I can’t see the extent of it clearly.

“Is he okay?” I ask Rhoda as she follows my gaze.

“It only nicked him. They’re popping a few stitches in. He’s lucky.” She looks back at me with a shaky smile. “But then, we knew that already, didn’t we?” I see the uncertainty behind her eyes.

She feels it too. That uneasy relief.

Thank God Matthew had been there. I wouldn’t be here if not for him. Perhaps neither of us would be. But how the hell did he do what he just did? I’ve never seen anything like the speed, the certainty, and the economy of his movements. He must have been trained, though for what, I don’t know. Shouldn’t someone with that kind of training be missed by someone? Yet here Matthew is in a general hospital deep in the Norfolk coast, in borrowed clothes, desperately clinging to borrowed memories.

Leaving Rhoda to give her statement, I grab some dressing packs from the triage nurse and head to the doctors’ locker room to clean myself up. I change the bandages on my hands in the sink under the mirror. I look gaunt in the reflection, drained of color. I examine my features objectively, hair ruffled, a speck of Matthew’s blood on my blouse. I could have died today, I try to let the reality of that sink in. I could have been killed by a stranger because of something someone else did fourteen years ago. My pale face blinks back at me in the glass. My haunted face. Places aren’t haunted, Emma, people are. I try to shake off the thoughts.

    I splash my face with warm water to force some color back into it. Outside the locker room Graceford is waiting; she won’t leave my side, she says. We head up to my office, and she stands guard outside. I have a moment to myself.

I receive a call from Peter.

He tells me not to leave the hospital. Someone from the MOD is on their way. I guess that training we’ve all noticed has raised some alarms along the chain of command.

I think of the final fMRI question I asked Matthew three days ago: Have you killed? I think of how he responded. His expression this morning as I groped for the discarded gun on the hospital floor. We could be onto something now.

Hands still shaky, I google “Princess Margaret Hospital.” I need to know who that gunman was. Today’s news springs up in the search results. It’s ironic that even I need to find out about my attacker from the Internet. The police knew nothing earlier, but the media have done their thing and the facts are rolling in online. The man’s name is Simon Lichfield, a fifty-three-year-old with a history of mental illness and some spurious connection to a far-right group. I don’t know him. He didn’t know me. Nor did he know any of the July 7 victims my father stole from. He just decided I deserved some justice. Maybe he thought I was lying, hiding the money, abetting a criminal, any one of the things he’d heard on TV. So he decided to do the right thing: he made his way here to the hospital armed with a sawed-off shotgun. And he waited for me.

I close my laptop lid and shudder. What is it about me that makes people think it’s okay to kill me?

People in military uniforms arrive that afternoon. Three of them are shown into my office. Two male officers and a woman in plainclothes. The woman, in her forties, clearly outranking the men. The men take the two seats offered while she remains standing. She introduces herself as Dr. Samuels, looks at my bandaged hands and we do not shake. She briefly explains that they wish to meet Matthew and assess him. She asks if it seemed to me that he displayed any specialist training earlier. I tell her my thoughts as she leans against the tall filing cabinet watchfully. After a moment the older officer speaks.

    “And your patient, Matthew, he hasn’t mentioned military training or anything like that?” he asks, his gaze gliding over my little gray office.

I slide my list of Waltham House employees deftly under some paperwork, hiding my embarrassing foray into detective work from sight. “No, he hasn’t mentioned anything at all about training,” I answer. “But I think—well, at this stage it’s entirely possible he may not even remember doing any.”

The three faces opposite me hide their own particular brands of skepticism as my eyes flit between them. The woman finally clears her throat.

“And it’s not possible, to your mind, Dr. Lewis, that your patient could be exaggerating his symptoms? Exaggerating his memory loss?”

I shake my head. “I’d be happy to show you the fMRIs if you’d like, Dr. Samuels. I’d be interested to know if you’ve ever encountered a patient who was able to exaggerate the activation of their own hippocampus.” It’s a cheap shot, and childish, I know, but she’s basically just wandered in here and told me I don’t know my job. I may very well have almost been shot this morning but I know my fucking job.

I have no real idea who these people are, and they are certainly not attempting to sugarcoat the sense that they’re in charge. Since arriving, they have made it very clear it is Matthew they want to talk to, not his doctor.

The younger officer speaks now, his voice patrician and infuriatingly reasonable. “Whilst we understand your point of view, Dr. Lewis, and obviously respect your medical opinion, we do think a conversation with Matthew himself would be in his interest.” The older officer nods in silent affirmation. “There is, of course, the possibility that we would want to move him to a more specialized facility if that were to be considered appropriate.”