Page 59 of The Man Made of Smoke

I thought about my next question carefully. There was something obvious I wanted to ask, given the nature of what I’d just been told, but it seemed better to approach it from a respectful angle.

“Did you believe her story?” I said.

He nodded to himself. Not to say that he did, but acknowledging what I was actually asking.

“I told you that Rose was eccentric,” he said. “The truth is that she was ill a number of times over the years. She was sectioned by the authorities on four different occasions that I know of, each time because she suffered a break with reality. When Rose was ill, she said a lot of things that weren’t true. So when she told me this… I thought it might be the same thing. That she was getting sick again and needed help.”

“That’s understandable.”

“No, it isn’t. Because the thing is, she was never lying to me. All those times over the years, it was always realto her. And if you imagine that you’re scared or in pain, then… you really are, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s true.”

“So even if I didn’t believe her,” he said, “I had to believeinher. I had to try to support her and do what was best.”

“And she wanted to go to the police?”

“Yes. Because that was the right thing to do.”

Despite the threat, she had been adamant that she had to report what happened to her. Rose—Gill told me—had been a woman who felt things deeply. That the murdered man deserved justice. That the killer had to be caught and punished. That the system would protect her.

And that if the police didn’t believe her, she wouldmakethem.

“I drove her to the police station,” Gill said. “I waited in the car. Not long after, an officer came out and tapped on the window. He wanted me to go inside to help them calm her down. Which I tried to. She was raging. Desperate. Panicked. It was touch and go whether they were going to call a doctor there and then.”

Having dealt with patients with similar histories in the past, I had a degree of sympathy for the authorities for their response. You could only work with the facts available to you. The story Rose had given them was extraordinary, she had a documented history of mental illness, and her behavior in that moment would have led them to a conclusion that was perfectly reasonable. Especially given that the alternative explanation—that her story was true—seemed so wild and unlikely.

“They didn’t believe her,” I said. “And then she disappeared again?”

“A couple of weeks afterward. She went out for a walk and didn’t come back. I went to the police again, of course, but they didn’t take her story any more seriously than they had before. They assumed she would come back, like she had other times. And then, when she didn’t, they made certain assumptions.”

“Yes.”

“There was an appeal. Did you see it?”

I shook my head.

“No,” Gill said. “Of course you didn’t. There hasn’t been much coverage, and most of it was down south. She lived there for a while, you see. The police think she’s left me and is staying somewhere with friends.”

“Maybe that’s true.”

“No, they’re just sweeping her under the carpet. They’re not interested. Because of the type of woman she was. No steady employment; no real social network; just living here on this boat with me for years, as off the grid as we could manage. Someone like my Rose was never going to be front-page news. Never anyone’s priority.”

He grimaced and took a sip of whatever was in his mug.

Then he closed his eyes.

“Nobody cares,” he said.

The light in the barge seemed to darken at that. It was only my imagination, but it was as though someone had stepped into the galley behind me, and I felt a tickle at the back of my neck. I glanced over my shoulder. There was nobody there, of course.

Concentrate, I told myself.

Think.

However right Gill might have been about certain people slipping through the cracks, he was wrong about at least one thing.

“But my father came here,” I said quietly.

---