Don’t Trust Me: The best psychological thriller debut you will read in 2018. Joss Stirling

certainly has the face for popularising psychology; the camera will love him with his square jaw, astute gaze and wavy auburn hair – no geeky egghead here, no sir. He may not be the most academically successful psychologist ever, but he certainly is in contention for the most handsome. It’s like Hollywood has already cast him in his own biopic. I tease him that he wants to be a celebrity and he gets flustered, so I know I’m on the right track there. I can read people; I suppose that’s one of my talents.

      Being this sick gives me plenty of time to think about my own career – one of the drawbacks, really. Have I done the right thing with my life? If I do get out of this and recover enough to return to work, would I go back to the same job? No, I think I’m done there. I can’t imagine walking into the classroom to preach what I didn’t practise. I can’t tell the students that I got away with skirting the rules just barely and some of the things I did seem crazy in retrospect. God, I was so driven – I saw myself as a crusader, saving young lives from radicalisation, ends justifying the means and so on. I can’t claim that I wasn’t warned. You get sucked in, thinking it’s your responsibility to save the day. It’s not a job where you can shelve your concerns as you approach home and put some distance between yourself and what weighs on you. Even doctors have that luxury. No, like a soldier in a combat zone, you have to live it twenty-four seven.

      And what does weigh on me? I don’t think I’ve been fair to some people I met. They might’ve had better intentions than I gave them credit for and still I reported them. But I have a priority now that goes above and beyond any person I brushed up against in the job. Biff says I made the right choice leaving. Michael is a great guy, a safe pair of hands. He’ll make up for any shortcomings that I introduced into the situation. On my own I’m pretty crappy; with him I make half of a good team.

      That’s got to count for something. I hope Katy will think so when I explain.

       Chapter 12

       Jessica

      Drew tells me he has to go out to deal with a DB from Florida so I decide I’d better go to work too. I minimise the photo of the page in Emma’s diary that I’ve been reading on the laptop and resolve to spend the day reconstructing my cases. I hadn’t realised she’d moved into teaching. Had she been tasked to keep a watchful eye out for student extremists? That’s what I took from the last paragraph. I don’t think I could do that. It must’ve been so awkward. I’m enjoying reading her words, though, puzzling through the hints of people around her, the regrets. I can get back to her later. I have to focus on the now if I’m going to get out of this fix Jacob left me in.

      I’d reached some conclusions about the missing girls individually but seeing them like this, I begin to make some new connections. They’ve all vanished in a two-year period with indications that they were headed to London, or at least away from their home town where things had become unbearable. Lillian and Clare had both come out of the care system so had the smallest support network but Ramona and Latifah have families who are presumably still anxious to know what has happened to their daughters. I remember I had suspected that Latifah’s exit had partly been motivated by the desire to avoid an arranged marriage – there had been talk of a cousin coming to meet her last summer. She was an all-A-stars A-Level candidate but missed out on taking her place at Royal Holloway. I’d felt particularly close to her when I saw that she had been down to do Criminology and Psychology. The irony is that Latifah would’ve been one of Michael’s students now if she had taken her place last autumn. I make a mental note to check she hasn’t reapplied this year. I don’t suspect foul play with her; I think she’s just biding her time. I suppose I have to consider that there’s a vague possibility, a notion prompted by Emma’s diary, that she might’ve been radicalised and gone to Syria, but there is no sign of that on her social media or in anything her friends say about her. It would be lazy to leap to such a conclusion just because the press sees every story about a Muslim runaway in terms of terrorism. No, I think Latifah has her head screwed on. She’s OK.

      I am more worried right now about the other three. They seem more vulnerable. From some of the things Ramona let slip, her father looks like he might’ve been abusive. I can well imagine her running away, but with little or no qualifications and no money, she is unlikely to have landed on her feet. Same goes for Lillian and Clare. They all seem to have vanished into the crowds of the city.

       A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

       I had not thought death had undone so many.

      T. S. Eliot is haunting me at the moment. Little fragments pop up in my mind every time I hear an echo of one of his words. I can’t make a hot drink without his Prufrock telling me that he’s measured out his life in coffee spoons. I wonder how many other people suffer from this same cultural commentary as they go about their ordinary business? I suppose there could be worse poets to carry around with you.

      Where was I? I tap the pen on the notes I made on Ramona. Margate, February 2014 was the last sighting. I remember visiting the seaside town around then with Michael. It’s an odd place: great beach, tatty seafront, boarded-up shops in a failed high street and then this world-class art gallery on the quayside.

       On Margate sands,

       I can connect

       Nothing with nothing.

      Thanks, T. S. How true. We were attending an event at the Tate Contemporary and I’d enjoyed the landscapes by Turner that Michael had abhorred. He’s got this thing about anything impressionistic. He accuses late Turner, Monet, Manet and their followers of chocolate-box painting, softening reality, avoiding sharp edges. He is not interested in the theories of light that they were exploring or their message about art being in the fleeting perception of the artist. His own taste runs more to the blocks and shouting colours of the De Stijl movement and Pop Art. Our house – his house – is decorated with reproductions and the occasional canvas by a contemporary artist who meets his exacting standards. Perhaps my rebellion when I furnish my next home will be to make it a homage to Monet’s water lilies, what Michael calls the apogee of Impressionist wallowing.

      Apogee? Who even uses that word in everyday life?

      ‘I like Impressionism.’ I say it out loud to the humming silence of Drew’s flat. Take that, Michael. You have a partner – soon to be ex-partner – with conventional tastes.

      I look back at my notes on Ramona. Something else has shaken loose in my mind. I hadn’t noticed or put much store by it before but the one area at school in which she excelled was art. I had found articles online in the local press about her winning a competition when she was fifteen. One of the few photos I have of her is from that time. Dark-haired and daunted, she stands beside a big canvas of the sea and beach at Margate. She had given the holiday scene a disturbingly stormy sky and the faces of the people were pained and haunted, a view of Margate as the Expressionist Emil Nolde might have depicted it. Where would a girl running away from her family, but drawn to art, go in London? If she has avoided the downward spiral of the desperate into prostitution and drugs, what would be her goals, her aspirations? Art college maybe? Or finding jobs as a model? I know from my time as a student that you could earn some useful money as a life model. I’ve never been overly self-conscious – it goes with my impulsiveness – so stripping off to be sketched by a bunch of art students had not been a problem. I found watching them draw me as interesting as I hope they found me as a subject.

      I close the notebook on Ramona and get up to make a sandwich for lunch. I’ve never told Michael I did that for money. Somehow I don’t think he’d understand as he is uptight about nudity, always donning a robe to walk from bathroom to bedroom whereas I’m happy to flit around naked. Odd, really, as he’s the one with the great body.

      I make a round of sandwiches for Drew and head downstairs to find him. Mrs Payne is on reception. A curvaceous woman with dyed red hair and a fondness for floaty scarves, she reminds me of a fairground fortune-teller. Not that she has the least interest