It’s All in the Game

CHAPTER 1 Annalee Theakston; there‘s something strangely comforting in using my own name again after so long, it’s like regaining my true self, battered and bruised but definitely still me. Those months in St Joseph’s Psychiatric Hospital under the care of Dr Metcalfe had given me time to think; to acknowledge my mistakes and plan anew. I’d had counselling before, long before the accident that had brought me to St Joseph’s. Then it had been just a bit of fun; my adversary, for that was how I saw Barnaby, was a rank amateur but our sessions did allow me the opportunity to practise deception, to infer one truth whilst hiding another and to sharpen my memory; it’s far too easy to slip up at your next meeting when your adversary is the only one taking notes. Dr Metcalfe, on the other hand, was a different prospect and a far greater challenge. An eminent psychiatrist with, I discovered, a renowned academic career, he’d concentrated most of his professional life in studying and treating psychopaths, trying to determine if their ‘affliction’ was more nature or nurture. As if anyone really cares! Sitting in the window seat of my new apartment I turn toward my beautifully crafted marionette. She has the most compelling eyes, wide blemish-free white ovals, the irises green as ivy leaves with pupils the deep liquid black of its berries. Her lashes, dark brown, are as soft as the ears of a King Charles spaniel and long, so that when she closes her lids they lay against her high cheek bones with the delicacy of an artist’s sable brush. I’ve named her Liliad after the two young women who have so featured in my life; Lily and Addie. Brushing the marionette’s hair back from her forehead I note again the scar and feel the familiar stab of guilt. If only I’d left her at home that fateful evening. I let the hair fall back, covering the blemish and she is once again beautiful, the work of an exceptional craftsman. As I stare into Liliad’s face I know there’s no going back, that life can only be lived in a forward gear. The day to day banalities will continue but beneath the reassuring pattern of their normality hides the insidious murmur of compelling desire. ‘You know, Liliad nowadays there’s a huge profession built up around finding reasons behind people’s heinous crimes, as though the human race simply can’t accept its inherent evil. Strange, don’t you think when the evidence to the contrary is so compelling?’ Liliad’s head turns slightly to look out of the window at the crenelated roof top of St Joseph’s, one street away and rising like a harbinger of doom over the houses opposite. ‘You don’t have to worry,’ I say, ‘we won’t go back there, I promise.’