Читать книгу The Returned Dead - Rafe Kronos - Страница 4

Baxendale frowned, pushing his lips forward while he considered what to say.

“You have to understand I love my wife. That’s what makes all this so difficult.” His eyes went blank for a second and he frowned as if his thoughts were somewhere else.

What had loving his wife to do with this? And which wife? If the dead Felicity had also come back to life it wasn’t going to help.

“Your wife? Which wife? Debby? Or Felicity?”

“Debby, of course I mean Debby.” His voice became warmer, “Debby: I love her. She’s very beautiful, astonishingly so and I love her deeply. We’re very close, very, we really are.”

Was he boasting? Was he hinting that they had a wonderful sex life? He certainly seemed eager to convince me Debby was important to him. If I took his case I’d need to meet her. That might be interesting.

“So how long have you and Debby been married?”

“Almost twelve years.”

Wonderful: this just made things even more complicated. I considered it for a moment.

“So that means you were married to Debby while you were married to Felicity or perhaps the other way round, depending on who you married first. Either way, it sounds like you were a bigamist.”

“Well, yes, I mean no. Not really, no.”

We were still getting nowhere. I stared down at my desk and waited. It seemed the best thing to do.

After a few minutes he spoke, “Look, I know it all sounds complicated.”

Damn right it does, I thought.

“I’ll try to explain what happened. Tell me, have you ever woken up in the morning and, just for a moment, you had no idea where you were?”

I nodded, it had happened, especially after a night on the sauce, not that I’d had many of those recently. But in the past it had happened quite a lot; too often in fact. It was one reason I’d almost given up alcohol. Besides, I had learned that the booze didn’t take away the things that haunt me. Nowadays when I woke up I always knew where I was – though that didn’t make things much better.

“Right, Mr Dawson. You know what it’s like. You wake up and for a moment or two you have no idea where you are or how you got there. Right? That’s what happened to me. I woke up one day and I didn’t know where I was. Only in my case the feeling, the feeling of not knowing, didn’t go away. I didn’t know where I was or -- and this is what made it much worse -- who I was.” A nerve at the side of his mouth flickered like a faulty neon tube.

He took a deep breath and his next words came out in a rush, “Look, what happened was this. Nearly eight years ago I woke up in a room I didn’t recognise. Well, I knew it was a hospital room; that much I knew, but I didn’t know where it was or why I was there. After a while a nurse came in. That’s the first thing I remember after waking up: this nurse opening the door and coming over to my bed.”

He paused and he shook his head, as if he was still unable to accept what had happened to him. “She looked down at me then she asked me how I was feeling today. And she called me Roddy. The way she spoke made it sound as if we knew each other well, that this was part of our normal routine.”

His eyes widened; perhaps he was recalling his shock. “You have to believe this: I had no idea who she was or what I was doing there. No idea at all. I know it sounds weird but that’s how it was.”

“And she called you Roddy? Did you recognise your name?”

“No. I didn’t. No.” He shook his head vigorously. “No, I didn’t know Roddy was my name. I didn’t know because that was the exact moment, the terrible, terrible moment, when I realised that I didn’t know who I was. That was when I realised I didn’t even know my own name. My God, I didn’t even know my own name.”

He shook his head again as if trying to shake off the memory. “Can you understand that? I couldn’t even remember my own name -- my own name; it was terrible. I felt completely helpless, lost, vulnerable. It was a terrifying feeling, horrible, frightening.”

His face was tense and he was clenching and unclenching his hands.

“So what did you do?”

He gave a bitter little smile, a mere twitch of the lips. “What do people always do when they regain consciousness like that? What do they always say?”

I shrugged.

“I said, ‘Where am I?’ What else could I say but ‘Where am I?”

I wasn’t sure if he expected me to smile at this so I just gave a quick non-committal nod, “And this nurse, she told you where you were?”

“No, she just smiled at me as if I was joking.” He paused and his features tightened. “So I asked her again and she laughed, actually laughed. Then I got angry, really angry; I remember shouting at her. Then a doctor appeared, he tried to calm me but I kept asking where I was, why I was there. I was scared, I wanted to know. Then, after a minute or so, he took hold of my arm and gave me an injection. The next thing I remember was everything going black, it was like my mind was filling with darkness – and silence -- as if the world was fading away. The injection put me out, completely out.” He grimaced, “and I’ve no idea how long they kept me under after that.”

“When he injected you, you didn’t try to resist?”

“Couldn’t. I was too weak, I could hardly move my arms.”

Yet he’d had enough strength to yell at the nurse – if he was to be believed. If, if.

“And then?”

He must have sensed my doubt; but he’d have to be made of wood if he didn’t.

“Look, I know this sounds crazy but just let me finish. Next time I came round Debby was there -- though I didn’t know she was Debby then. No, there was just this gorgeous, dark haired woman there, sitting by my bed and gazing at me. When she saw I was conscious she reached out and took my hand and smiled at me. Such a beautiful smile, you’ve no idea. Then she leaned over and stroked my hair and she whispered something to me.”

“Whispered what?”

He looked uncertain. “That’s just it. I can’t remember. I mean I’ve tried often enough but I just can’t remember.”

“Have you asked Debby?”

“Of course I’ve asked her, of course I have.” The question had annoyed him; that was interesting.

“What does she say?”

“She says she can’t remember but it must have been something like ‘welcome back’ or ‘thank God you’re back,’ something like that.”

“And then?”

He shook his head again as if he was still trying to clear away something that was troubling him.

“Well, a couple of weeks later she took me home -- we live out near Neston.”

He might as well have said “we’re rich,” I thought. Part of Neston, out on the Wirral Peninsular, was as full of money as a honey comb is full of honey. He was still talking.

“What you have to understand is that at that point my mind was still pretty much a complete blank: my memory had gone. I was physically much stronger by then, I was able to walk, all that sort of thing, but I still couldn’t remember who I was, what I’d done before, where I lived. I couldn’t remember anything. By then Debby had explained she was my wife, that I was Roddy Baxendale, that I’d been terribly ill, that the illness had affected my memory. But despite what she told me about myself I still couldn’t remember anything.”

He looked at me. I hid my scepticism and signalled him to continue.

“It was bad, really bad at first. When we got home I couldn’t even find my way around our house: Debby had to guide me, tell me where everything was.” He paused and his face was grim. “It was terrible, it was as if I’d had no life before I woke up in that hospital bed. Nothing. My mind was completely empty, all my memories had been wiped out, gone.”

He was clasping and unclasping his hands again and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

I didn’t believe him but I saw no point in showing it, not yet. We’d see how things developed before I took that step. Besides, I was thinking about how good it might be to have all one’s memories wiped out, to start with a clean sheet. If only it could be done. If.

“I can see it must have been terrible,” I told him, “But surely you were able to remember some things? You say you knew the room was a hospital room and presumably you also knew how to feed yourself, shave, read, write, tie your shoe laces, turn the lights on and off, those sorts of thing? Surely you could remember those things?”

“Yes, yes, all those little things, all the little things that come automatically. You don’t have to remember anything to do them, you just do them, that’s all,” he said impatiently. “But I couldn’t remember anything important. Nothing about me as me; nothing about me as Roddy Baxendale. I felt completely lost because I was unable to remember anything about myself, to recall my life before I woke up in that hospital. I had no past, nothing. I wasn’t me, I wasn’t anyone. You’ve no idea what that’s like. Not being able to remember anything is terrible, just terrible.”

“Without my memories I wouldn’t exist.” I tried to remember who had said that: Freud? Proust? Or was it Memo the Memory Man? But were they right? Memories could destroy. Sometimes it would be better to have no memories.

“OK, that was then, that was all some years back,” I said, “but now you are Roderick Baxendale and from what you say you have a beautiful wife and you’re very rich. Have I got that right?”

“Yes. No. Yes, I’m Baxendale. That’s who Debby and other people have told me I am; they’ve taught me to be Baxendale. They’ve taught me that I was born forty-seven years ago and then, about eight years back, I suffered a severe viral illness. I had an infection of my brain that destroyed my memory and I was in a coma for nearly six months.”

“But you came out of the coma, right? That was when you woke up in this hospital?”

“This private hospital, yes,” he said. Now why did he say that? Was it just another way of telling me how rich he was, that he didn’t need the NHS?

“Eventually I came out of the coma. And once I was out of hospital Debby and others helped me rebuild, reconstruct my past. They filled my mind with all the things I’d done, things I would have been able to remember if the coma hadn’t wiped them out. I suppose you could say they’ve taught me my own history; they’ve helped me to recreate my lost past. They’ve rebuilt my memory for me. And I’ve lived my life, Baxendale’s life, since I came out of that hospital; I’ve lived it for over seven years.”

He gave a tight little smile that somehow made him look both nervous and pleased at the same time. “What you have to understand is it’s a good life, a very good one. I mean I really like being me; you have to understand that I have a great life. I like being Roddy Baxendale. I have a gorgeous wife, three houses, good cars, I fly business class, all that stuff. I have everything I could want. Except, now….”

After a few moments silence he sighed and seemed to shrink in on himself.

“But now,” he tried to speak, stopped and then gasped in air, “Look, Mr Dawson, since the hospital everything has been fine except that, well, very recently I’ve begun to realise I’m Jack Rankin: the dead Jack Rankin. But I’m not dead and I am Jack Rankin and I’m Roddy Baxendale at the same time. Can you imagine how that feels? How can it be? Christ, it’s a hell of a situation. It’s driving me mad. I’m desperate. That’s why I’ve come to you, I need your help. I need you to find out what’s been happening to me. I’ve got to know.”

I thought about all this for a minute or two and said, “Look, why don’t I get us some coffee while we talk. How do you take it?”

“White, one sugar.” He suddenly grimaced, angry. “No! No! I mean black, no sugar.”

“Is that Roddy and Jack?” I asked.

“Yes. At moments like this I suddenly remember how I used to take my coffee: black. White with one sugar’s how I – Roddy -- take it now.”

“Confusing for you,” I said, struggling to keep any trace of doubt from my voice.

“Confusing? Of course it’s confusing, of course it is; you have no idea how bloody confusing it is. It’s like there are two of me, both of them inside my body, both inside my mind, both at the same time.” He grimaced, “I can’t go on like this, I just can’t.”

I went over to my coffee machine and set it going. I wasn’t using it just for refreshment: the machine was a useful investigative tool. These days many of my clients respond positively to the smell of fresh coffee in the room. It unconsciously reminds them of being in Costa or Starbucks and it helps them to relax. Pavlov would be proud of me.

When the machine had delivered its brew I poured him his coffee and held up the mug, “Which is it to be?”

“Black,” he said very definitely. He was showing me he was Jack Rankin.

As I handed him the coffee I asked, “And what does Debby say about all this?” It was a test, I wanted to see what his face would show when part of his mind was focussed on taking the mug.

His expression went blank for a moment then the muscles seemed to writhe beneath the skin.

“I’ve…I’ve not told her. She doesn’t know. This all started after she left.”

“Left?”

Had his wife walked out on him? Was this some sort of bizarre stunt to get her back? Was he hoping I could arrange a reconciliation with his runaway wife? His next words killed that idea.

“She’s at our house in Italy, been there for over a month. We’ve got the builders in: someone needs to be there, it’s her turn. I did it last summer.”

We sipped our coffee in silence. I gazed at him and wondered about his preposterous tale. Perhaps after all he was mad, though he seemed sane enough – even if his tale wasn’t.

I decided I wouldn’t get anywhere until I learned more.

“So, are you saying that you began to remember you were – that you are -- Jack Rankin after she went away to Italy?”

“Yes, it was about a fortnight after. But it only happened – began to happen -- when something triggered it, when someone near me spoke my name.” He took a deep breath and seemed to be bracing himself. “I was in a shop trying to decide which shirt to buy and a woman behind me said, ‘For God’s sake get a move on, Jack, we haven’t got all day.’ I just swung round: I thought she was talking to me. It was instinctive, automatic: I was reacting to my name.”

“And?”

“Of course she wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to a young kid who was dawdling along behind her, staring around, miles away.” His eyes became unfocussed as he imagined himself back in the shop.

“So what happened then?”

He wetted his lips and for a few seconds he seemed to have trouble speaking. “Well, at that moment it felt, well, it felt weird, totally unnerving. There were suddenly two of us; I suppose it felt as if someone else was inside my head with me.” He gave a gasp as if again suddenly feeling the shock of the moment. “It was completely disconcerting. It was if my mind was wrestling with itself. I didn’t know what was happening to me.” He bit his lower lip. “Anyway, after I had recovered a bit I went and found a pub. I bought myself a drink, sat down and tried to work out why I’d reacted that way to being addressed – or thinking I was being addressed -- as Jack.”

“And that’s when you started to remember you were Jack Rankin?”

He shook his head, “No, no, that came later, much later. No, all I knew at that point was that something big had just occurred to me, something very important -- though I couldn’t understand what it was.” He leaned forward, “You know, I once read that when people are stabbed with a very sharp blade, something so sharp it just slides into them, they sense that something has happened to them but they don’t realise they’ve got a stab wound. I suppose I felt a bit like that.”

Stabbed people soon find out, I thought. They soon start vomiting blood or they collapse in a bloody mess of their own making. Still, the violent imagery he’d used was interesting.

He was speaking again, “So I went home, still feeling, well, sort of baffled and sick, sick in my guts and later, just as I was thinking of going to bed, I sort of began to half see things.”

I said nothing. Perhaps he was mad. I’ve known people who started to see things and they usually ended up in the psychiatric ward.

He took a tentative sip of coffee and seemed to be putting his thoughts in order. “It’s hard to explain what that was like but I’ll try. Imagine you’re inside a house at dusk. You’re looking out through a window and there’s a light on in the room where you’re standing. Outside it’s a bit darker because it’s dusk, right?”

I nodded.

“So, you can still see everything outside fairly well, there’s still enough light for that, but at the same time there’s also a reflection on the window between you and the outside world, a reflection of things in the room. That’s a bit like what I was getting. I started to get these faint pictures in my head as if they were appearing between me and the world around me.”

He paused to check if I was following so I nodded again.

“The first picture, image, whatever you want to call it, I got was of a house. I mean another house, not one of my own houses, not a Baxendale house. Then there was this image of a tree, then a woman. She was wearing a blue dress and she was standing with her back to me. Somehow she seemed totally familiar but I didn’t know who she was. I felt I ought to know her name and who she was, but it evaded me.”

He stopped and took a quick gulp of coffee.

“These flashbacks, mental images, they came and went very quickly. Anyway, those were the first three things I saw.”

“And one of them was a tree? Really? A Tree? A house or a woman I could understand. But a tree?” I made no attempt to keep the scepticism from my voice.

He laughed briefly, a sharp, rattling sound like hailstones hitting a window.

“A sycamore tree. It turns out it’s in my old garden, Jack Rankin’s garden, in front of the house. That was the house I’d half recalled, the first image that came back to me. I saw the tree the other day, it’s still there.” He leant forward confidentially, “You know, I still can’t think why that bloody tree was one of the first things I remembered; I never liked the damn thing. It was always dropping seeds, you know, those spinning things, and they sprouted all over the lawn and in the flower beds.”

He might be lying but, if so, he was good. Putting an irrelevant thing like a tree into his narrative made it seem less likely to be fiction. But, I told myself, that’s just what a really good liar would do. It was one of the techniques I’d had hammered into me in the past. My mind swerved away from thinking about those days. I made myself concentrate on asking questions.

“And the woman in blue, who was she? Was she your wife, your Rankin wife?”

“Yes, Fizzy, Fidelity, that’s right. It was her favourite dress. I remembered that later.” His mouth tightened.

“OK, so you were starting to remember you’d had another life, your Rankin life.”

“No, not immediately. No, at that point I was just aware that something strange was happening to me. I tell you, it was frightening. I was scared: those images, whenever they popped into my head, they scared me.”

He stopped and then said very quietly, “I began to wonder if I was going mad. It was only later that I began to accept that they were actual memories, memories that had been buried deep inside me for years, memories that were finally coming to the surface from somewhere deep, deep down in my mind.”

I stared at him, very obviously not saying anything.

He said defiantly, “It does happen you know, Mr Dawson. I mean people do forget important things, they bury them deep in their minds and then years later they start to come back to them.”

I knew a lot about memories and how they can return when you least expect them. I kept my face blank and waited for him to say more.

“It does happen, it does,” he insisted. “People do remember things from far back in their past, things that are buried deep down in their minds. You read accounts in the papers about people who suddenly remember how they were sexually abused when they were kids, decades before. They suppress memories of all the terrible things that happened to them; they push them down so deep that it takes years for them to re-surface. But they do eventually surface, they do.”

I gave a little shake of my head. “Yes, sure, I agree it happens. But not everything those people claim they remember turns out to be true. A fair number of those supposed memories never happened. They’re imaginary, they prove to be fantasies. The shrinks have a fancy term for it: false recovered memory syndrome, something like it.”

“Don’t even think that’s what happened in my case, just don’t. I’m not imagining my past, this is real. For God’s sake, you’ve seen that photo,” he pointed to the press cutting, “that’s me, Jack Rankin. That photo proves it. For God’s sake, I’m here because I want you to find out why I’m dead. I need to know why I’m both Baxendale and Rankin. I can remember being Rankin, then there was a gap when I was – am – Baxendale and now I’m back, back as Rankin and as Baxendale.”

“So according to you it sounds as if Rankin was off stage for a while but recently he popped back for a curtain call,” I said, still trying to nettle him as I struggled to make sense of what he was telling me.

He gave me a look I could not interpret: surprise? Anger? His face flushed. “Look, just try to understand this, I desperately need to know what’s happened to me. Why else would I be here? Why?”

He certainly sounded sincere but that didn’t mean I could believe him. But since he was a potential client – a potential rich client -- I said, “I do understand how difficult this is for you. Please go on.”

He gave a quick glance towards his briefcase before looking back at me.

Now why should he do that? My immediate thought was that he was recording what we were saying. If so, then it would mean both of us were. But if he was recording our conversation, why? And for whom? Was this something from my past catching up with me? A chill surged down my spine and all my muscles tensed.

“Well, after those first incidents, those first memories, things started to slip back into my consciousness. Gradually I got a growing feeling that there was a sort of closed off place inside me, deep inside my Baxendale mind. I could sense something big, important, in there but however hard I tried I just couldn’t get at it. That feeling was terrible, frightening.”

He gave a quick grimace like a man feeling a sudden stab of pain. “I know I’m not explaining this very well but it’s hard to put into words. After all I’m not a writer, I run, ran, car dealerships.” He gave a bark of unamused laughter and gulped a large swallow of coffee as if to dilute his anguish.

“You’re doing fine,” I told him. “Just take it easy and tell it as best as you can. Please go on.”

“Well, at first I wondered if the things that kept popping into my head were bits of my Baxendale memory, things that had happened before I’d fallen into the coma, things too small or unimportant for Debby to have known about or told me about.”

I noticed how his voice softened when he mentioned his wife.

“OK, I knew the bloody coma had destroyed my memories of everything that mattered: my childhood, my marriage to her, buying the estate in Scotland, starting to rebuild the house in Umbria, everything.” He paused. “But I still couldn’t see how it could explain why I’d reacted instinctively to the name Jack or why I was getting these images in my head. I began to wonder if maybe I’d been nicknamed Jack when I was a kid, when I was a kid as Baxendale I mean, and that was why I’d instinctively reacted to the name – but somehow it just didn’t fit, it didn’t feel right.”

It wasn’t the only thing that didn’t feel right, nothing about his story felt right. Still, it might earn me the money I needed to make the next payment. I wrenched my attention back to him.

“So, well, after that more and more bits of my life, my Rankin life, began to come back to me. I’ll tell you what it was like, Mr Dawson. You know when you see newsreel footage of an aircraft that’s crashed into the sea and little bits start to float up to the surface? Bits of the wing, tail plane, seats, luggage, all that sort of thing?”

And bodies, mutilated bodies, I thought, don’t forget the bodies. There’d been one body already: his wife Felicity, killed by a hit and run driver. Were more bodies going to come to the surface?

“It was like that; things were sort of floating up from deep down in my memory, but they were just scraps. Do you understand, just scraps?”

“I think so, yes,” I assured him.

“Right. I kept getting these pictures inside my head. I suppose they were like single frames that had been cut from a long strip of film. They kept popping into my mind at odd moments. For example, one picture, image, whatever you want to call them, was a car, a blue MG B, a soft top, and behind it a hedge, a hawthorn hedge, covered with white blossom. The following day I saw – call it remembered if you like -- a set of coffee cups on a table. Then I remembered being in a hotel dining room, looking at the menu. Another time I saw a tie, black with light blue dots, hanging over the back of a chair, and next day I recalled the inside of a café, one of those olde worlde tea-shoppe places. I still couldn’t understand what these things meant but I began to feel they must be things I’d actually experienced; they weren’t hallucinations they were actual memories – though I have to admit the possibility that they could be hallucinations worried the hell out of me.”

He looked at me to see if I sympathised with his situation so I nodded gravely and said, “Please go on.”

I was being careful not to call him Mr Baxendale or even Mr Rankin; at this point it seemed best not to make a commitment one way or another.

“Right, the basic problem was that they were just scraps, scraps unconnected with anything else; there was no thread joining them, nothing that linked them together. It was like I was being given single words or sentences torn out of a book but without being given the rest of the book there was no way I could understand how they all fitted together. It was as though I lacked the story that tied everything together. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

“Sure.” I thought he was expressing himself pretty well for someone who wasn’t a writer; that interested me.

I wondered about the recurrence of blue: Felicity’s dress, the MG, the dots on the tie. Was it significant? I could detect nothing blue about him now. Blue: another thing to ask about later if I got the chance.

“So how did you get from those images to remembering you were – are -- Jack Rankin?” I asked.

“One day my name -- Jack Rankin -- just came back to me. I was in the middle of eating breakfast. One second I didn’t know it, the next second I knew I was called Jack Rankin. In an instant I was quite certain about it; once the name was there, once it had popped into my mind, it just seemed completely obvious, incontestable. And after that, bit by bit, I began to remember lots of other things about my life as Jack Rankin. Not everything -- well, I don’t suppose any human can remember every single thing they ever did, can they? You only remember key things, the good and the bad, things that affect you most, don’t you?”

Oh yes, I thought, yes, that’s exactly what you do and often the memory of the bad things is far stronger than the memory of the good ones. Bad memories can overpower the good; they can cripple a person for ever.

“So after a bit I could recall my mother and father and growing up, school, working for my father in the holidays, being trained by Jimmy the foreman, marrying Fizzy,” he paused, “and her death, her death.” For a moment he looked deeply distressed.

I thought it would be interesting to find out more about her death but it would have to wait. I decided to track sideways. I indicated the press cutting lying on my desk, “So how did you get this?”

His face showed embarrassment, then defiance.

“I got it from the local library. By about eight days ago I’d managed to remember a lot about where I use to live, my old house, the address, the road, our business, all that.”

He paused and when he spoke again his voice was sombre. “Last week I decided to go back to my car dealership, our main premises, the place where my father started the business. Somebody else owns it now; our name’s gone from the front. It’s no longer Rankin Ford, it’s Beasley’s. I don’t know who the hell Beasley is.”

“Seeing that name really annoyed me. My father and I built up the business, now someone else is running it, benefiting from all our efforts. A lot of money and a lot of damned hard work went into growing our business: now someone else is getting the profits from it.” He sounded bitter.

“So you went in?”

For an instant he looked shifty. “No, somehow I couldn’t face it.” He looked away and then said, “If you must know, I was too scared to go in.”

I stared at him and in the silence he glanced back at me and then looked down, shamefaced.

After a long moment he spoke. “I was afraid, terrified actually. What if I was wrong? What if I went in, met some of the old staff and nobody recognised me? What if that proved I was going mad?”

He bit his lip. The front of his hair was dark with sweat, stuck down to his skull. “You must try and see it from my point of view. Please try to understand why I was so scared. I’d been very ill, I’d been in a coma for months and something had happened to my brain while I was unconscious. But I’d re-learned, been re-taught, my pre-coma life. I was Roddy Baxendale, I had everything I wanted. Right?”

I nodded.

“OK, that was the situation: me, Baxendale, happily married, beautiful wife, so rich I never need to work. OK? And then I start to think I am someone else. But how could I be two people at the same time? Perhaps my mind was giving way. Perhaps I was going mad. Perhaps I had a brain tumour and it was making me have these fantastic ideas. Perhaps the virus had messed up my brain far more than we knew. So when it came to the point, I was just too scared to get out of the car, walk into that place and try to get confirmation that I was Jack Rankin – or not. It was the possibility of the not that terrified me.”

It was plausible -- just. “So what did you do?”

He gave me an embarrassed look, “I took the easy way out. Instead of going in, having to meet people, facing them, finding out if they recognised me, I went back to check if our old house was the place I’d been seeing in my mind.”

“And?”

“And it was, it really was. Thank God, it was. It was just as I’d seen it when the image of it had floated into my mind. Even that bloody sycamore tree was there, bang in the middle of the front lawn. The place was exactly as I’d remembered it. That was when I knew that the ideas, images, memories, I was experiencing weren’t fantasies.” He relaxed once he had said this, slipping back in his chair.

I sipped the last of my coffee and waited for him to continue.

After a few seconds he seemed to gather up his strength and started speaking again. “Of course, some of the old house has changed but it’s still the place I was remembering, it’s still my old house, the Rankin house. The new owner has re-painted the outside woodwork and put a different light over the porch but it’s definitely the same place. Well, seeing the house gave me a bit more confidence that I wasn’t going mad.” He sighed, “But somehow the possibility was still there. I didn’t know what to do. Then I realised that if my business had been sold to this Beasley outfit, it must have been because I’d gone away or retired -- or died.” His voice stumbled over the last word. “And I eventually realised that if any of those things had happened then there would be a record of it somewhere.”

At least he’d reasoned logically – or he was pretending he had.

“So I decided to see what I could find. The public library was the obvious place to start digging. I went there and asked if I could look at their old newspaper files. I began working back from just before the date when I woke up and found Debby sitting by my hospital bed. It took a while but eventually I found a half-page advert put in by Beasley and Co. announcing they’d taken over my old business. That proved the business used to be called Rankin Motors – so I had remembered that correctly. That was another reassurance. Then I found this,” he pointed to the clipping on my desk. “It came from a few months before the announcement of the take-over by Beasleys. I was flicking through the pages and I found it. I found my own bloody death notice. How would you like to find that, eh, Mr Dawson? How would you feel if that happened to you?”

I ignored the question. “So how did you get it?” It wasn’t hard to guess but I wanted to hear it from him.

“Nobody was watching so I tore out that part of the page. I needed it; you must understand that. That’s me in the photo; you can see it is, there I am with my name and everything. I had to have it because it proved I wasn’t imagining all this. OK, I admit I stole it – but I desperately needed something to prove I wasn’t going mad. I needed something that showed I was Rankin. Do you understand?”

I wasn’t going to report him for damaging library property so I dipped my head in agreement.

We each sat in silence, thinking our own thoughts. Eventually he sighed and said, “OK, so that’s where I am now. That’s the basic story, however strange it seems -- and I admit it must sound strange. I’m here because I need your help. I want to hire you to find out what’s been happening to me. I want you to investigate for me. I suppose that what I really mean is that I want you to investigate me, the Jack Rankin me, and find out what has happened to me. I just want to know what’s been happening; I must know. So, will you do it? Please say you will. I’ll pay well, I really will, money’s not a problem.”

Money might not be a problem but there was an obvious problem: the whole thing was unbelievable. Despite that I was willing to take the job so I sat there and said nothing, waiting for him to persuade me to work for him. Like every client, I needed him to be fully committed to my investigations.

I needed his full commitment because I knew that once I started digging I might unearth things he might not want brought to light – it often turns out like that. That’s when the client decides that employing you is a bad idea. The next thing you find out is he won’t pay your bill. I didn’t want that, especially not now.

“Well, will you do it for me? Will you investigate?” he repeated.

“Well, if I take your case – if -- you must understand I’ll need your full backing. That means you must be ready to accept whatever I do as I investigate and accept whatever I find. There’s no saying what I might uncover; it might turn out to be very painful for you. Think about it. Are you willing to accept that? I need to be quite sure before we go any further.”

He leaned forward, eager to convince me. “I understand all that and I assure you I’ve already thought about it. I still want you to go ahead. That’s why I am here. I thought I’d just made that clear.”

“And I have to warn you I’m expensive. My fees are high.”

He gave a little shrug, “Money? No problem, I can afford it. But I have to get this settled, it’s tearing me apart. I really must know what’s happened to me; I’m willing to pay almost anything for that.”

“Are you absolutely sure? Absolutely sure you want me to go poking around in your life? I’ll need to ask you a mass of questions and you may find some of them embarrassing, even offensive. Just think: my inquiries could blow up in your face. You tell me you’re married, you’re rich and, of course, there’s seems to be good evidence that you’re dead, or one of you is. Are you really sure you want me to dig into everything? The whole thing’s…” I was tempted to say totally unbelievable but I settled for “very complicated. Are you absolutely sure you want me to find out more? Why not leave it alone? Why not just stick with your Baxendale life? It sounds like a pretty good life to me. After all, that’s where you are now and, as you say, Rankin’s dead, officially dead and gone. Why not leave it alone? Why not leave Rankin dead and concentrate on your Baxendale life?”

I found I was holding my breath as I waited for his answer.

“No, I can’t, that’s impossible, quite impossible. Now that I’ve remembered I’m Rankin I must have certainty. I must, I just want it settled. I really do.”

“You’re absolutely sure? Once I start there can be no going back. You’re ready to accept that? You really are?”

“Yes, I am. Yes, definitely.”

It was exactly what I wanted to hear.

“Right, Mr Baxendale, then let me tell you my terms. My fees are £1,500 a day and in addition you meet all relevant expenses incurred by me and my staff. I’ll work seven days a week on your case and you’ll get an itemised bill every week. I’ll send it to your home or wherever you want or you can collect it from here if you prefer. I’ll also submit a written report every seven days in the same way or, if you have a secure system, I can send it to you by email. If I discover anything significant I’ll let you know immediately by phone. I’ll give you my mobile phone number and you can reach me at any time, day or night. Is all that acceptable?”

“Yes, yes, thank you.” He seemed genuinely grateful.

“Right, I have copies of my standard contract here and if you are quite certain you agree with what I’ve just said, you can sign a copy for each of us before you go. I will need half a day to tidy up a few things I’m currently handling and then I’ll begin working for you full time on an exclusive basis. I’ll also be supported by other members of my team. Are you quite sure you are happy with that arrangement?”

He sat very still for several seconds and then he reached down beside his chair and picked up his briefcase. For a moment I thought he was going to walk out but instead he opened it. He took out a bulky brown envelope. He stood up, stepped forward and held the envelope upside down over my desk. I watched as the contents cascaded out with a gentle swishing sound.

Now I knew why his bag had been so heavy.

“There’s fifteen thousand in fifties and hundreds,” he said. “That should get you started. Let me know when you need more.”

I glimpsed a grin twitch across his face.

“I thought you might somehow prefer it in notes. After all I am -- I was -- in the motor trade. Now bring me the bloody contract and I’ll sign it.”