Chapter 2

"Cassandra's alive and well, Dan; we've found her!" Conway called out as I opened the door.

Of course that stopped me in my tracks, and I turned to look at him, wondering what kind of a sick trick he was trying to play this time.

Several times during the intervening years he'd told that me bodies had been discovered that were tentatively identified as being Cassandra. Forensics had always proven otherwise of course; but Conway and his oppos had always used the discovery of those bodies as an excuse to pull me in for yet another grilling.

I had no idea what kind of a game he was trying to play this time, and I had no intention of hanging around long enough to find out either.

"Bollocks!" I replied and then I walked out of the pub.

Of course I did wonder whether Conway was telling the truth or not, but I doubted it from the beginning. The man had told me all kinds of tales during his interrogation sessions; I figured that he was playing another of his mind games, trying to get me to say something stupid like "That's impossible because I killed her and buried her where you'll never find her!" Which of course I couldn't, because I hadn't!

Those sort of dumb confessions only happen at the end of badly written TV programmes anyway.

Over the next week or so there were a couple of times that I thought he might have been telling the truth. Actually at one time I hoped Conway had been telling the truth, but then I got to thinking about the few words he had said.

"Cassandra's alive and well."

Yeah, well, if she was alive and well, then why hadn't she come looking for me? Good question, eh? Cassandra would be a millionaire; finding the husband she walked out on four years before should be no problem for her.

Well, when you think about it, there's only one answer to that question, isn't there? Cassandra must have been stringing me along all the time, maybe to get her own hands on that trust fund of hers. Although I couldn't imagine why she didn't just divorce me. But then, who knows what was going on in her mind.

I could not make any sense in her letting me go through the hell I'd been through since that evening in Bristol. I had to come to the conclusion that if she was alive and well, then she had never felt anything for me in the first place.

For the next few weeks I checked the newspapers that I found laying around — I didn't waste my precious beer money on buying the bleeding things; after all most of them had been part of the conspiracy to get me hung, drawn and quartered. But there was never any mention of Cassandra being located. I had just about convinced myself that Conway had been lying. I'd say at least a month had gone past before anything else happened, maybe longer; time had little meaning for me by that stage. It must have been at least a month, because I got my social fortnightly and I was back drinking a proper beer in the same pub again.

I saw the guy come into the bar, a little later in the day than when Conway and his oppo turned up, so I was a little bit closer to never never land.

Anyway, he had some tart with him and they had had a whispered conversation with the barman, who I noted had gestured in my direction. He brought a couple of pints and a drink for the woman, then strolled over to my table and placed the full beer before me.

"Dan Elks, my name's Fox. Cassandra is one of my patients," he announced.

I was looking straight in his eyes as he spoke and somehow I knew that this wasn't some kind of trick of Conway's.

"I thought she was supposed to be well," I blustered. This guy had referred to Cassandra as his patient. That made him a doctor; if Cassandra was his patient then how could she be in perfect health as Conway had implied. I thought that a logical conclusion even if I was half pissed.

"Oh, she is ... physically, Mr Elks. But not quite in perfect health mentally."

And that was supposed to be news to me. Cassandra had to have been a sandwich short of a picnic to do what she'd done to me.

"You can say that again! Have you any idea what that woman has done to my life?" I found myself retorting.

"I read the papers, Mr Elks ... and I've spent some time talking to John Conway. It was he who informed me where to find you."

"You've just made yourself very unwelcome at this table, mate; I suggest you leave whilst you're still able to walk."

"Hear me out please, Mr Elks. I'm a psychologist and I'm treating Cassandra for what is commonly known as amnesia."

"So what the fuck's that got to do with me?" I said angrily. I never had had much faith in all these shrinks and the like, with all their psychobabble.

"Everything, Mr Elks, believe me. Cassie is in what we call a fugue state; have you any idea what that is?"

"Not the slightest and I don't much care."

"Mr Elks, Cassandra's condition is not only extremely rare, it's almost unheard of for it to have lasted as long as it has. Usually, the patient recovers within a matter of days or weeks. We believe Cassandra's been in this condition since the night she disappeared. And we believe that you might hold the answer to bringing her out of it."

Damn it, when he first spoke to me I'd intended to see the tosser off, the same way I'd seen Conway and arse wipe off a few weeks previous. But the bugger had got me intrigued; which I suppose, was what he'd intended to do. Crafty arsehole.

"Oh, yeah, how can I hold the answer to anything? I don't know what the bitch was playing at or why she ran off that way. Where's she been anyway?" I asked, surprising myself somewhat that I even cared.

Shit! With that damned question, the bugger had me, and what's more he knew it. Maybe there is something in all that psychology crap after all.

Fox slipped into the seat opposite me, and his female colleague came over to join us. I was to find out later that she was into people who drink too much. Not alkies, but the likes of me who try to hide in a bottle.

What's that? You didn't know there was a difference? Yeah, well, there is! Alcoholics drink because they are addicted to the stuff. When they've got it bad enough they will drink just about anything that contains alcohol. Some of us don't get addicted; we can take or leave alcohol as we please. We are choosy about what we drink and only consume the stuff to turn our minds into mush. We choose to drink ourselves into oblivion as much as we can.

"I'd better explain a little about Cassie's problem to you first, Mr Elks; and I'll try to keep it in layman's terms as much as I can. Cassie appears to be in a fugue state. As I told you it's a rare condition, but extremely well documented. The sufferer loses all knowledge of who they are, and inexplicably are known to travel away from home, or places they are familiar with, as if running away from something."

"Usually they are assumed to have taken on or invented a new persona for themselves whilst in this condition. And most commonly they recover after a few days or even weeks. The odd thing is, they usually have no recollection of the time they are in the fugue state. So knowledge of what they actually do whilst in a fugue is extremely limited."

"As far as it's understood, usually they will just wake up one morning in a strange place, with no idea how they got there or what they've done during the fugue. Sometimes giving the impression that they've only just lost their memory. Other times the memory has returned. But rarely with any knowledge or memory of what happened when they were in the fugue."

"So, Cassandra should know why she left then."

"No, Mr Elks; Cassie is the exception, it's been nearly four years and she's still in the fugue condition. She has no recollection of her childhood, or of you. She believes at the present time that she's an American by the name of Sarah Lee."

"Why should she think that?"

"Because that's who she's been for the last four years. Look Mr Elks, let me explain how she was found. You know the Americans are getting a little paranoid about the terrorist threat. Well, apparently Sarah Lee applied for a position in a government agency over there. As a matter of routine she was finger printed and her prints didn't match up to the prints of Sarah Lee that the FBI had on file."

"Add to that, she speaks English with a very pronounced English accent and she is also fluent in Serbo-Croat..."

"Do what?"

"Yes, she apparently speaks it like a native, didn't you know? Well, it's not surprising really, her parents were Croatian. Ah, you never knew that either!"

"They were both dead long before I met Cassandra."

"Don't suppose there was any point in Cassie mentioning the fact then. I know she had ample reason to want to forget the country. Anyway the American authorities kind-of had themselves a communal heart attack, and assumed that Cassandra, or Sarah Lee, was some kind of terrorist sleeper. Apparently it's routine for them to check terrorist fingerprints with the British police and their system threw up Cassandra's name as a missing person pretty quickly."

"It took a few months before an American psychologist realised that Cassandra wasn't a threat, but a patient in need of help. They eventually got in touch with Cassandra's Aunt and she had Cassie flown back to the UK, where she was placed into my hands. I'm charged with the problem of getting Cassie's memory back."

"Well, if you're convinced she lost her memory, surely all you got to do is find out what caused her to lose it. But if you're expecting me to come up with a reason, then you're barking up the wrong tree mate. I have no idea what came over Cassandra that night, or why!"