Page 78 of Watching You
Connie laughed and made her way to the door. ‘It was nice working with you again, detective superintendent. Good luck with the press. I’m sure your natural charm and warmth will win the day.’
Chapter 49
14 July
‘There’s someone to see you, Beth,’ Lively said. ‘Are you feeling up to a visit?’
‘I’d rather not’ she said.
Her head was bandaged from the neurosurgery that had repaired the lesion in her brain causing Fregoli syndrome, and tests to establish success were still ongoing, but the surgical and psychiatric teams were hopeful. The more concerning issues were depression and anxiety. Lively was encouraging her to work with a therapist, but it was too soon. Going through her mobile and emails to assess the case, though, Salter had found something she thought might be far more useful than counselling.
‘Mum?’ a voice called from the corridor, then the uniformed police officer stationed outside the door moved out of the way and a young woman ran in.
‘Oh my God,’ Beth sobbed. ‘Molly!’
Mol ran in, throwing her bag down and rushing to her mother’s side, crying before she even reached her.
‘Mum, it’s okay now. I’m here. I’m back.’
They wrapped one another in a desperate embrace.
‘I didn’t want you to see me like this. I didn’t want you to know what I’ve done. Such terrible things, Molly. I killed people!’
‘No, Mum,’ Molly said softly, rubbing her mother’s back, and rocking her gently. ‘That wasn’t you. It was brain damage. It was broken cells that had become wrongly wired. You had no idea what you were doing.’
Beth looked at Lively over her daughter’s shoulder.
‘How did you find her? We were so careful. I’m sorry I had to lie to you about her death.’
‘Molly explained everything,’ Lively said. ‘Her going back to Australia to find her father, you both not knowing if Smith had accessed your emails. No social media, no visits, Molly changing her name. It must have felt as if she really did die.’
‘I did, briefly,’ Molly said. ‘They revived me in the ambulance, and I knew I had to leave and never come back. It was me who persuaded Mum to tell everyone I was dead. Thank you for looking after her, Sergeant Lively, and for protecting her from Smith. I’d never have set foot back in Scotland while he was alive. He did kill me, in lots of ways. If I hadn’t had an Australian passport through Dad, I don’t know what I’d have done.’
‘Call me Sam, please,’ Lively said. ‘Stalking is one of the least understood, hardest to prosecute crimes, but it’s devastating. I was able to go through the complaints you filed, and I’m sorry nothing could be done to help you. Karl Smith was a severely mentally unstable but very intelligent young man. For what it’s worth, I think leaving the country may have saved your life. There’s no way of knowing what he’d have done if you hadn’t.’
‘I held a memorial service for you,’ Beth said. ‘And I have an urn with your name on, full of newspaper ash in my bedroomin case he broke in. Some days, it was like living in a parallel universe.’
‘He had to believe I was dead,’ Molly told Lively. ‘Not just so he wouldn’t follow me, but so that I could restart my life. Mum would only talk to me from the bathroom with the shower running once a week in case he was bugging the house.’
She let her mother go and sat back on the bed.
‘How are you feeling after the surgery? Does it feel different?’
‘It’s so hard to explain,’ Beth said, leaning back on the pillow. ‘I can’t remember the things I’m told I did. It’s like my brain wiped them out of my memory, yet when I was doing them, I used all my knowledge and skill. All those years as a surgeon, and still I underestimated the power of the human brain.’
‘I don’t even like to ask, but what’s the police position on the deaths of those other people?’ Mol asked, voice shaking, gripping her mother’s hand.
‘I’m not allowed to be involved, for obvious reasons, but I’ve heard on the grapevine that Superintendent Overbeck has been consulting with the families of the deceased, explaining the situation and giving them full background. The position is very much that Smith was really the one responsible. It just needs a lot of careful handling. If it were me making the decisions, I’d just want to be sure the surgery had worked, then I think the Procurator Fiscal could be convinced not to prosecute at all, but only if there were no risk whatsoever of the problem coming back. You can expect several more months of being asked to voluntarily comply with psych evaluations, interviews, handing over of evidence, then there are questions about getting your car repaired after the Divya Singh incident.’
‘Her killing.’ Beth nodded and folded her arms. ‘Let’s call it what it was.’
‘Don’t do that, Mum,’ Molly said.
‘What if they can’t fix me?’ she frowned. ‘What if some psychiatrist somewhere concludes that I’m still a risk? And even if everyone puts all those deaths down to my skull injury and bloody Fregoli syndrome, how do I even start to learn to live with myself? How can I ever look in a mirror again and not hate myself?’
Lively went to sit the other side of the bed from Molly and took hold of Beth’s hand.
‘One day at a time. No mirrors if that’s what you need. With people who love you there to hold you and tell you that it wasn’t your fault, and that although you survived, you were a victim too,’ he said.
