AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I’ve seen the messages.’
She holds up her phone. I step closer and look at the screen.
A boat has stopped us. They are telling us to turn back. We have claimed asylum, but they will not listen.
The message is dated and time coded. Fourteen minutes later, a second one arrived.
The engine has stopped. We are drifting but we can see the shore. The boat is following us.
There is a much longer gap of forty minutes before the last message.
Help. They are killing us. People are in the water. Help.
‘You need to show these to the police,’ I say.
The woman looks towards her motorbike, unsure of what to do.
‘What’s your name?’ I ask.
‘Florence Gatsi. I’m a lawyer. I could get into trouble for having these texts.’
‘You’ll have to explain that to me,’ I say. ‘How about I buy you a coffee?’
She glances at the hospital and the police officers waiting outside. ‘I don’t think I’m allowed in there.’
‘We can drink it here.’
I point to a picnic table with bench seats, bathed in the glow from a streetlight. ‘My name is Cyrus Haven. I’m a forensic psychologist.’
‘You work with the police.’
‘Sometimes.’
This doesn’t reassure her. If anything, she looks more nervous. She’s in her late twenties, with a slight accent, South African, maybe, or Kenyan, but softened by years of boarding schools and college debating contests. With her high cheekbones and slightly turned-down mouth, she could grace a glossy magazine cover. Many women are pretty in their teens or twenties or thirties or forties. Some grow more beautiful with age or find a particular sweet spot when they’re at their most beautiful, but Florence is clearly parked there for a lifetime.
‘You won’t run away, will you?’ I ask.
She tentatively shakes her head. Her dreadlocks are threaded with coloured beads that make click-clacking sounds as they swing.
I go inside and negotiate two hot drinks from a dispensing machine that spits out sump oil claiming to be coffee. When I return, Florence is at the picnic table, studying her phone.
‘I didn’t ask if you wanted sugar.’
‘No,’ she says distractedly. ‘You live in Nottingham.’
‘You googled me.’
‘You don’t make it easy. No Instagram page or Twitter account.’
‘I avoid social media.’
‘Why?’
‘Privacy. Anonymity.’
She is still reading. I know what’s coming.
‘Ah,’ she says, not looking up from her phone. She has discovered a news story about the event that shaped my life. At age thirteen, I came home from football practice and discovered the bodies of my parents and twin sisters. The killer was my older brother, Elias, a paranoid schizophrenic, who heard voices in his head.
