The Returned Dead. Rafe Kronos

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ