“He’s difficult to catch in the normal way.”
“He’s come to the house. Under your noses.”
“Give us a break,” Stadler said with an embarrassed smile.
“But that’s crucial,” Dr. Schilling interrupted. “He could just attack women if he wanted. But for him the point is to demonstrate his power and control.”
“I don’t care about his psychology,” I said irritably.
“I do,” said Dr. Schilling. “His psychology is one of our main ways of catching him. We can use it. And one of the main ways of doing that is to see you the way he does. That’s not nice for you, I’m afraid.”
“We’re depending on you,” Stadler said. “It puts even more pressure on you, but we’d like you to think about your own life and to let us know if there is anything out of the ordinary.”
“This isn’t just an ordinary Peeping Tom,” said Dr. Schilling. “It could be somebody you bump into in the High Street more often than you expect. It could be a friend who’s suddenly a bit more attentive to you, or a bit less attentive. He wants to show his power, so the main thing is to be aware of your surroundings, for anything new or out of place. He wants to show he can get things to you.”
I gave a snort.
“It’s not so much a matter of new things arriving,” I said. “It’s more the old things disappearing.”
Stadler looked up sharply.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing that will be of any help to you. Have you never moved house? It took two moving vans to shift us and I’m convinced that there is a small van somewhere going round the M25 with all the objects that didn’t make it. Shoes, bits of food mixers, my favorite blouse-you name it.”
“This was all during the move?” asked Stadler.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “This man couldn’t have stolen all of that unless he’d pulled up with a van and four helpers. Even you would have noticed that.”
“Still…” said Stadler, looking lost in thought. He leaned over to Dr. Schilling and whispered to her, as if anything they were saying could be interesting enough to be secret. Then he looked up. “Jenny, could you do us a favor?”
It looked like a rummage sale organized by a blind madman. After phoning ahead, the two of them had taken me to the police station and to a special room where, Stadler told me, there would be objects on display. In the car, Dr. Schilling put her hand on mine in a gesture that gave me the creeps and said that I should just look at the objects and say whatever came into my mind. The only thing that came into my mind was what a wretched lot of hocus-pocus it all sounded.
The stuff itself almost made me laugh. A comb, some rather tacky pink knickers, a fluffy teddy, a stone, a whistle, some definitely pornographic playing cards.
“Honestly,” I said. “I can’t see what you expect-”
And at that very moment I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach and given an electric shock all at the same time. There it was. The funny little locket. I remembered different things at the same time. A day and a night in Brighton on our first anniversary. We’d gone to better places in later years, but that had been the best. We walked in all those little dinky shopping streets just away from the front and we’d laughed at the awful souvenir shops, and then at the same moment we’d spotted that in a jeweler’s and Clive had walked in and bought it just like that. And another stupid thought had come into my mind: That night in the hotel Clive took all my clothes off but left the pendant on. It had hung down between my breasts. He had kissed it and then kissed my breasts. It’s mad, the things that stick in your mind. I felt myself blushing and almost had to stop myself from crying. I picked it up, felt the familiar weight in my palm.
“Nice, isn’t it?” said Stadler.
“It’s mine,” I said.
The most idiotic expression came over his face. It was almost comic.
“What?” he said, almost in a gasp.
“Clive gave it to me,” I said, as if in a dream. “It was lost.”
“But…” said Stadler. “Are you sure?”
“Of course,” I said. “There’s a fiddly clip at the back that opens it up. There’s a lock of my hair inside. Look, there.”
He stared.
“Yes,” he said. Dr. Schilling was gawking as well. They were looking at each other, open-mouthed. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.”
And he ran, ran, out of the room.
ELEVEN
I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand at all. Not anything. I felt as if I were looking at one of Josh’s wretched computer games that get posted through our front door and that make his grumpy face light up, but I didn’t even know the language, the alphabet it was written in. It was just dots and dashes and signs and codes to me. I looked over at Dr. Schilling, as if she could tell me what was going on, but she just offered me her meaningless reassuring smile, the one that gave me the shivers. Then I looked at the locket again, sitting among the curious pile of objects. I reached over and touched it with one finger, lightly, as if it could blow up in my face.
“I want to go home,” I said, not really meaning it but needing to say something to break the silence in the drab little room.
“Soon,” said Dr. Schilling.
“I want to have something to eat. I’m hungry.”
She nodded, but in an absentminded way. She had a little frown on her face.
“When did I last eat? It must have been ages ago.” I tried to remember back through the last few days, but it was like peering into inky darkness. “Is anybody going to tell me how my locket got here?”
“I’m sure they’ll-”
But then she was interrupted by Stadler coming back into the room with Links. They both looked intensely agitated as they sat down opposite me. Links picked up the locket by its chain.
“You are quite sure this belongs to you, Mrs. Hintlesham?”
“Of course I’m sure. Clive’s even got a photo of it somewhere for our insurance.”
“When did you lose it?”
Now I had to think.
“It’s hard to say. I remember wearing it to a concert. That was on the ninth of June, the day before my mother’s birthday. A couple of weeks later I wanted to wear it to Clive’s work’s bash, but I couldn’t find it.”
“What date was that?”
“You’ve got my date book, for goodness’ sake. But it was in June sometime, the end of June.”
Stadler looked down at a notebook in his lap and nodded as if he was satisfied.
“What’s important about it? Where did you find it?”
Stadler looked into my eyes and I made myself not look away. For a second I thought he was going to tell me something, but the moment passed, and he looked down at his notebook once more with that secret satisfaction on his face.
There was a brief, strange hush in the room, then I raised my voice:
“Won’t someone please tell me what is going on, for goodness’ sake?” But my heart wasn’t in it. My anger seemed to have all seeped away. “I don’t understand.”
“Mrs. Hintlesham,” said Links, “can we just establish-”
“Not now,” said Dr. Schilling suddenly. She stood up. “I’m taking Jenny home. She’s been under great strain; she has been unwell. Later.”
“Establish what?”
“Come on, Jenny.”
“I don’t like secrets. I don’t like people knowing things about me that I don’t know. Have you caught him? Is that it?”
Dr. Schilling put a hand under my elbow and I stood up. Why on earth was I wearing these cotton trousers? I hadn’t worn them for years; they didn’t suit me at all.
Everybody was behaving oddly. The house was full of a new kind of energy, as if the curtains had been pulled back, the windows thrown open. Nobody told me anything, of course, but Dr. Schilling came back with me and a bored-looking woman officer. Links and Stadler pitched up soon afterward. They were all beckoning to each other and muttering things to each other and looking at me, then looking away when I caught their eye. Dr. Schilling didn’t seem as happy as the others.