the duvet from the bedroom and tucked me in on the sofa, then checked the time and swore softly under her breath.
‘I have to go and make up for that shift.’ She bent to kiss me goodbye. ‘Just stay put. Don’t let anyone in.’
‘All right, Mum.’
She tapped her fingers on the edge of the mug, running something through her mind. ‘They’ll go to his boat next, I should think,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘Maybe they’ll find something there.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing.’ She found a brief smile, shrugged her shoulders.
When she finally left, I got straight up from under the duvet and went into her room, pulling a corner of the curtain aside to watch her through the window. She paused at the car, glanced up at me, and touched her fingertips to her lips. Then got in and drove away.
Maybe they’ll find something.
She meant a note.
Was there a note?
I wasted no time. I pulled some shoes on, and looked for my raincoat before remembering I’d been unable to find it earlier. I dug around in a drawer until I found the fleece-lined zip-up hoody I’d borrowed from Matt and refused to return. I left the flat with Siggy still tiny and shuddering in my chest.
Mae bit into his bagel. Pinned to the fabric-covered room divider behind his workstation was a page from a set of ACPO guidelines, thoughtfully printed out and displayed by whoever had last occupied Mae’s desk. IF IN DOUBT, THINK MURDER, it read. It had been there so long that the drawing pins had gone rusty, and snagged on the cloth when Mae pulled them out. He balled it up to lob, with flukily perfect aim, into the recycling, just as Kit walked in.
‘Like things spic and span, don’t you?’ she said, looking around, holding a pen drive and standing in a strict at-ease. ‘Speaks of a need to instil order.’
Mae held out his hand for the drive. ‘Spare me the amateur mind reading. What have you got?’
‘Apart from a first-class honours degree in psychology?’
He laughed, then stopped. ‘Really?’
She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I can see into the very blackness of your soul,’ she said, before breaking into a grin. ‘No but seriously, tidy people do tend to crave reliability and control, and you tend to crave the things you didn’t get as a kid. Just saying.’
He opened his mouth, shut it again, totally at a loss for what to say. What to even think. ‘You do remember that I’m your boss here, right?’
She shrugged. ‘Fluid thing, though, hierarchy, isn’t it? Anyway,’ she said, leaning over him to slide the drive into a port and commandeer his keyboard. ‘Headlines. I couldn’t get hold of the person who dealt with Corsham’s contract but the HR person I spoke to said it looked like he was on short contracts and just hadn’t been offered a new one. I’ll keep trying for his direct line manager though, see if there’s any more to it.’
Mae nodded, scanning the document she’d opened. ‘Any more workmates?’
‘The guy he shared an office with said he was talking about buying some vintage lomo gear.’
‘Lomo?’
‘Kind of cult photography thing. Analogue, retro stuff. Apparently Corsham had been reading up on the ones where you take the picture and they spit the thingy out, and you …’ she mimed waving a wet photograph, ‘you remember?’
He scrolled through the rest of the notes, ticking off the lines of investigation. Matthew Corsham was an only child, estranged from his father since infancy; mother dead from cancer a few years previously.
‘DVLA have a 1989 soft top Golf Cabriolet registered to him,’ she told him, pointing it out lower on the page. ‘I’m going to run a search on that in a sec. He’d been for a few after-work drinks but no particular mates – sounds pretty shy – and he hadn’t been in the job that long.’ She lifted her hands, dropped them, underwhelmed. ‘Not much to go on though. He’d signed up for a few socials with a local photography group. I’ve emailed the guy who organized it to see if he made any friends there.’
As Mae read, the picture emerged of a quiet, unremarkable man. He’d moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh a couple of years before, then down to London only a few months ago. From what Kit had managed to trawl in a couple of hours, they were looking at an average twenty-something bloke, without a particularly vibrant social life, with good, normal, healthy pursuits. Vintage cameras. The gym. Batshit crazy girlfriends.
In the pause, Kit moved her feet a bit before telling the floor, ‘So I found that book online, A Splintered Soul. That chapter on Ellie.’
Mae looked up from the documents. ‘OK. And?’
She gave him a look. ‘You could have told me, you know.’
‘Told you what?’
‘Her phobia. Why you wanted me to change into plain clothes.’
‘OK. Well,’ he said, holding his hands up, ‘not everyone’s as well-versed in mental health as you are.’ Back in 2006, if he’d suggested DS Heath wear plain clothes because a uniform was a known trigger for a vulnerable witness, he’d never have heard the end of it.
But Kit was still looking distracted. ‘Maddening though, isn’t it? I mean, I know it’s none of my business what happened when she was little but, even in the book, there’s no mention of the trauma.’
‘Trauma?’
‘Yeah. The cause of the disorder she’s got.’
‘I think he just couldn’t work it out?’
She shrugged, but the nonchalance was forced, hiding something. ‘Just – frustrating. I mean, this is an extreme thing, DID. It gets diagnosed like, practically never, and when it does … well, they say the mind can do literally anything, but there’s going to be a bloody good reason for it to do that.’
Mae squinted. ‘You really have got that degree, haven’t you?’
But she waved it away. ‘What I’m saying is, the trauma you’d have to experience for something that extreme to happen would have to be chronic, for one thing, and fuck-off massive, for another. But he never even offers a guess. Do we even know if she knew her father, for example?’
‘Christine had been single for a long time. That’s all I know.’
‘See, that’s waaaay suspicious, isn’t it? Surely there has to be some context about her dad? Early years with him, or something. And I get that Cox had to anonymize it,’ she said, holding up her hand to pre-empt the next thing that Mae was going to say, ‘but it just seems like a massive missing piece. I mean, there’s the mention of these scars of hers but it says that was because of an accident, right? I mean, I’m no expert but I don’t think a one-off accident is going to be enough to cause something as serious as a dissociative disorder.’
Mae had noticed it too, way back when. The other cases in the book were fleshed out, the abuse or trauma that triggered the disorder in the first place forming part of the story. As per the title, they were stories of successful treatment. The book had been funded by a charity, so the message was fairly consistent: funding + excellent care = positive outcomes. The exception was the part dealing with Ellie, which was just a snapshot of the middle of her story, the few months she’d spent under Cox’s care. There was no background, and no happy ending.
‘Guess maybe he wanted to talk about the treatment part