went back to the search engine page and clicked on a few other results. There was very little information available.
‘The internet isn’t going to be much help to us,’ he sighed. ‘Which is a shame. I get so used to finding everything I want on Google.’
Kate drummed her fingers on the table. Next to her, Jack was happily drawing a picture of Billy standing on an alien planet, firing a laser beam at a many-tentacled alien. She could sense Paul’s growing frustration and wished so badly that she could help him.
‘Who else would know what Stephen might have been talking about? Is there anyone else that you might have talked to about it? Friends? Family?’
‘Apart from my sister Miranda, Aunt Lil’s my only family, and she wouldn’t be able to help even if I’d told her everything. She’s got dementia. She barely recognises me now.’
She thought back to her frustrating visit to the nursing home two days before. It had been one of the most depressing experiences of her life. The lively, caring woman who’d looked after her and Miranda all those years after her parents died, was completely gone, replaced by a paper-skinned complaining creature with a body and mind that didn’t work properly any more.
‘Oh, that’s terrible, I’m so sorry. It happened to my gran. It’s so awful to lose someone like that, when they’re still alive. It’s like you can’t even grieve for them.’
Tears filled Kate’s eyes again. ‘Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. And she didn’t even know who Jack was – she kept calling him Ernest, who was her little brother.’
Paul was looking at her with such sympathy that she had to look away. ‘So, no, we wouldn’t get anywhere with Lil, and I know that I didn’t talk to Miranda about any of it. We aren’t that close, and anyway she was away at Uni in Edinburgh at the time.’
‘You’ve told me about when you first went to the Unit. Tell me what happened on your second visit, after the fire? What do you remember?’
She glanced at Jack. He was still engrossed in his drawing.
‘I remember the night of the fire itself.’ She told Paul about the rush from the building, passing out and waking up outside. And then seeing Stephen’s body being carried out. After that, she said, she must have passed out, although she had this strange, vague recollection of a doctor, a guy in a white coat – or that might have been mixed up with her next memory: waking up in hospital.
‘I asked them how long I’d been in hospital, and they told me three weeks. I couldn’t believe it. Three weeks – lost. Apparently, I had woken up a few times, but I couldn’t remember it at all. That was one of the first things they asked me: what do you remember?
‘At first, I couldn’t remember anything. I had no idea what had happened to me. They told me amnesia was common among people who’ve suffered a trauma, without telling me what the trauma actually was. I heard the doctors and nurses whispering about me. They told me I needed to rest and get strong before I could leave. So I let them look after me.’
She stared through the window at the London street. A couple walked by, hand-in-hand. A homeless man begged for change across the road. Red buses and black cabs. After sixteen years in Boston it all seemed so strange.
‘It took me a couple of days to remember the fire and Stephen. I think I started screaming when I remembered. All the nurses came running and, well, I guess I was sedated. When I woke up again there was this man who came and sat by my bed and talked to me about how I felt. I assumed he was a therapist. He told me I had missed the funeral. He kept asking me what else I could remember. I told him that I could remember going into the Unit, and then the fire. That was it. You know, thinking about it now, I got the impression he seemed relieved when I told him that.’
Paul was shaking his head. Now he was the one who looked as if he was going to cry.
‘Are you OK?’ Kate asked.
‘Sorry. You just reminded me of the funeral – it was so horrible, knowing that Stephen was in that coffin, so badly burned that my folks couldn’t even identify him. It had to be done by his dental records . . .’
Kate bit her lip. When would she stop feeling so over-emotional?
‘Go on,’ said Paul. ‘I’m fine now.’
They smiled watery smiles at each other.
‘I stayed in the hospital for another three weeks after that. It seems like a dream now. White walls, white sheets, people in white coats like angels coming to see me and talk to me in quiet voices. They brought me books and puzzles to do. No TV or radio. Great food. But I don’t remember what, if anything, was physically wrong with me. I wasn’t in plaster, or in pain. I can’t imagine why I needed to stay there for so long.’
‘So it wasn’t a normal NHS hospital?’
‘No. They said it was a private clinic. Actually, no one told me very much at all. Whenever I asked questions I’d be told that I needn’t worry, that I was in safe hands. And the thing was, I was so tired that I didn’t have the energy to ask too many questions. There were other patients there. I would see them sometimes if I got up to go for a walk around, although I was always escorted and never got the chance to talk to anybody else. I heard a woman crying in the night a few times. Perhaps the other patients heard me crying in the night. Though most of the time I felt alright.’
‘Did they have you on drugs?’
‘I was given a ton of pills every day. I was told they would help me get better quicker, and help my memory come back.’
‘And what about your aunt? Did she visit you?’
‘I asked to see her and they said it was difficult. Apparently, according to them, she’d been to visit me when I was first brought in, which I obviously had no recollection of. Eventually, after I kept asking, they let her visit me. She seemed uneasy. She told me she’d asked for me to be transferred to the local hospital, but that the doctors had told her I was better off here, in the private clinic. Aunt Lil was of the generation that trusted doctors one hundred per cent, so she didn’t argue. And she said that Leonard himself had phoned her and reassured her I was in good hands.’
Another memory came to her. ‘Leonard came to see me towards the end of my stay in the hospital.’
‘What was his surname?’
‘Bainbridge.’
Paul tapped the name into the search engine and found a page about Leonard Bainbridge. ‘An obituary. He died two years ago. Cancer. There’s a paragraph here about the CRU but it’s just the usual brief history stuff. It says he left behind a wife, Jean, but had no children. So what happened when this Bainbridge guy came to see you?’
Kate felt sad for the loss of the avuncular, warm-hearted man she’d only met a handful of times, but who had made a deep impression on her. She stared at the computer screen until the words blurred together, recalling the scene when Leonard had come to visit.
Leonard perched on a hard chair beside her bed, his smile adding warmth to the room. He was a distinguished-looking man
