The Returned Dead. Rafe Kronos
veins, they have liquid doubt. When I think of him I regret leaving academic life. Perhaps if I’d stayed I might be a seriously overworked and underpaid lecturer by now, even a professor. It mightn’t have been a bad life. But it’s all too late now, much too late.
I became aware Kate was speaking again. “You know, Charlie, this Baxendale bloke tells a fascinating story but…”
As her voice faded away I finished the sentence for her, “but the whole thing’s impossible, utterly so.”
She leaned forward and the lock of hair flopped back over her left eye. “Right, Charlie, do you think we can we believe one single word he said?”
“I wish I knew,” I replied. “Of course his story seems incredible, well, it is incredible. But I’m puzzled by Baxendale himself. I was watching him closely all the way through and he was convincing, very convincing. I’m pretty sure he believes everything he told me. Either that or he’s a damn good actor.”
“Hmm. But you must admit your judgement of people sometimes goes wildly wrong.”
I remembered the last time I’d made a catastrophic misjudgement and my flesh grew icy cold.
Kate was continuing, unaware of how her words had affected me. “You know, Charlie, now I think of it, didn’t you once tell me you thought that George Lazenby was convincing as James Bond? And as for Tony Blair…” She grinned derisively.
“Well, if you found the man convincing, even if you think he really believed what he was saying, I still think we’ve just been hired to investigate a story that’s got more holes than a string vest.”
“I agree. So why don’t you point out the holes and I’ll see if we’re thinking along the same lines.”
“OK. In brief we have been hired by a bloke who says he’s Baxendale, though how he came to be Baxendale sounds very odd -- the coma and everything. But recently he’s begun to think he’s also a dead bloke called Rankin. Right so far?”
“Right.”
“OK, for the moment let’s concentrate on the Baxendale part of the story. Let’s start with the coma. He says he was in a coma for about six months and the coma made him lose his memory, it made him forget everything he ever knew.”
She shook her head vigorously. “There’s no way I can believe that, Charlie, it just doesn’t add up, no way. I don’t believe a man can suffer a sort of brain-wipe because of a viral infection and then recover physically, become totally normal again, after six months -- apart from a total loss of memory that is. I bet that doesn’t make medical sense. I don’t think comas work like that.”
“I remember reading that a severe stroke or a viral infection can destroy a person’s memory.”
She was looking completely sceptical. It’s one of the things Kate’s paid to do: doubt everything she’s told – especially by me. I reciprocate; between us we manage to keep on the right track with most investigations.
“You’re being naïf, Charlie. Just think about it: that sort of severe illness would damage other parts of the brain as well as the memory. It would wreck things like co-ordination, speech, balance, perhaps even vision. OK? But everything about our new client seems normal, doesn’t it -- apart from the fact he thinks he’s two people at once? There’s not the slightest sign of any brain damage, any; he showed no sign of residual paralysis or slurred speech or a lack of balance or poor motor control, all the things that you’d expect if someone had suffered a severe brain infection. He has none of them. The only odd thing about him is he believes he’s two people at once – well, he might believe it but I cannot. No, Charlie, I can’t believe the coma story, let alone all the weird stuff about being Rankin who happens to have died eight years ago.”
They were all good points. “OK, tell me what else seems wrong to you,” I asked.
She filled her cheeks and blew out a long breath of exasperation. “What else is wrong, Charlie? What else? Everything, just about every single damned thing. He says he’s married to this Debby woman and they’ve been married for twelve years. Right? But if he was Jack Rankin till eight years ago that would have been impossible -- unless he was a very fast moving bigamist, whizzing between two homes and two wives. And that’s not likely, is it?”
I agreed that it wasn’t.
“And if he was Rankin then he’s dead, dead and buried, or rather dead and cremated. And if he was cremated then he’s not able to wander around and hire us and dump a heap of money on your desk. No, dead men can’t do that, Charlie. The whole thing’s impossible, totally impossible.”
“Look,” she continued, jabbing her finger at me for emphasis, “his story is full of contradictions and impossibilities. He admits someone died in his, Rankin’s, bed, so there really was a corpse there. Now also according to him the body in his bed was identified as Rankin. It was identified by three people, three, who knew him well: his cleaner, one of the employees at his car firm and his doctor. They all identified the body as a dead Rankin, a seriously dead Rankin, so dead that he could be cremated without him popping out of the coffin and objecting that it was getting damned hot in there. OK, got that: Rankin is dead, Rankin is identified, Rankin is cremated. Got it? ”
She paused briefly. “But obviously the man who’s just left here is not dead. He certainly didn’t look like a little heap of crematorium ash, did he? It’s simple: if he’s not dead then he can’t be Rankin. Let me repeat: that man cannot be Rankin. No way.”
She was working herself up into a fine flurry of annoyance at all the impossibilities in our client’s story. She hates it when things are not clear; she takes it as a personal insult. It is one of the things that make her a good investigator. I tried not to smile.
She began to speak more thoughfully. “So what on earth is he up to? Why did he tell us this stuff and practically throw all that money at us? The man in your office can’t be Rankin, he isn’t Rankin. So why is he paying us all that money to investigate his preposterous story?”
“I agree, the man’s story can’t be true but there’s a problem – he produced a piece of physical evidence that seems to support it. You haven’t seen the press cutting he brought in.”
I went to the safe, twirled the combination lock and opened it. The mass of used notes gave out their sour smell. I removed the yellowed piece of newsprint and handed it to her.
She stared at it for a minute then looked as furious as if someone had pinched her bum.
“Oh bloody hell! Damn it.” She pouted. “OK, Charlie, I agree, it looks like him, it looks very like him. Hell.” She went on scrutinising the photo, her lips pursed and a tiny frown creasing her forehead. After a while she said slowly, “If this really is Rankin’s picture then the man we had in here is Rankin. Except he can’t be, there’s no way he can. As the cutting says, Rankin is dead. Dead.” She shook her head angrily. “So what the hell is all this about? Is it some sort of con?”
“You know, Baxendale-Rankin seems to have gone out of his way to show us he has nothing to hide.” She pulled a face in mock amusement. “Well, there’s a novelty; we’ve never have a client like that before.”
She didn’t need to remind me. “Right. Everyone has something to hide,” I said quietly. Including me, I thought.
We sat in a pensive silence for a minute or two. We were getting nowhere. It was time to attack from a different direction.
"Right, Kate, we’ve done the scepticism bit, for a moment let’s just try to suspend our complete disbelief in Baxendale’s unbelievable tale. Let’s suppose that he really is Rankin." Jumping from one position to its complete opposite sometimes helps to pick things out of a case. “Just suppose he didn’t die