Sorrow Bound (27 page)

Hoyer-Wood had not wanted to talk at first. Even with his best friend, his oldest confidant, he wanted to keep his secrets inside. His difficulties in making himself understood only served to frustrate him, and Caneva’s records of their early sessions are filled with little more than polite enquiries about health, the weather and how he is settling in. In those sessions, it is Caneva who does most of the talking. The notes are a seemingly endless soliloquy on the tiresome business of driving up from London; problems with the practice; getting the right staff. In terms of insights, the first months drew a complete blank. It was only as Hoyer-Wood began to physically improve, and became more able to communicate, that he opened up. And in the sessions that followed, he told Caneva all about how it felt to live inside a head that worked as his did.

As he meanders through the deserted streets, McAvoy tries to marry up what he already knew of Hoyer-Wood with what he has just discovered. He thinks of the broken man in the chair. Then he pictures Hoyer-Wood as a child. More than anything, he pictures Hoyer-Wood as the criminal who broke into homes, doused his victims with petrol and threatened to set them alight unless they opened their legs to him in front of those they loved.

McAvoy stops, suddenly too tired to carry on walking. He leans against the front wall of a small, semi-detached house. Next to it is a boarded-up, burned-out building. McAvoy thinks he may have
been here before. He seems to recall attending a murder here. He feels compelled to laugh at his own uncertainty. Wonders if, twenty years from now, he will be unable to drive through the city without pointing out places where he has smelled blood and decay. He found a young girl here, her corpse having suffered horrendous indignities. McAvoy had been new to CID then. New to Doug Roper’s super-squad. He had been eager to make his mark and impress a boss who seemed too good to be true. And then he had discovered just what kind of man Doug Roper was, and everything had changed.

He shakes his head. Pulls the papers from his bag again. Opens the envelope and hurriedly leafs through the pages. There are letters in here too, marked with the name of Caneva’s private residence in the hospital grounds. Tilia Cottage. Such a pretty name for a property now broken and overgrown …

McAvoy finds the session he can’t get out of his mind. He sits down on the brick wall. Lets his eyes pore over the confessions of a psychopath.

Hoyer-Wood:
It’s strange. Talking to you, Lewis. About this.

Caneva:
We’re past that, Seb. You’re doing so well. You’ve made such progress. But we can’t move on until we address what made you enter that house. What made you need to look into that lady’s eyes. What made—

Hoyer-Wood:
It wasn’t her eyes. It was his.

Caneva:
His? Whose?

Hoyer-Wood:
His. Any ‘his’. The man. Or the children. Those who cared. Who loved.

Caneva:
Seb, I’m not sure—

Hoyer-Wood:
My father was a weak man. Oh he was an
army man, of course. A proper old-school officer. He drank sherry in the officers’ club and knew how to fasten a cummerbund. He’d seen service and got his scars, but it was all giving orders rather than fighting. He was a Rupert. That’s what they call them, did you know? Posh officers. Expensive education and a stately home. That’s what he was. I didn’t know that, growing up, of course. He was a hero to me. He was still serving when I was born. Stationed in India, though I don’t remember it. He had an accident of some kind and was invalided out. Mother, him and little baby me. Came back to the family home. I don’t know how much of this I remember and how much I’ve made up, but he walked with a stick and always seemed to be in pain. Mother was from good middle-class stock as well. She’d married him when he was home on leave. Followed him to India thinking it would be a grand adventure. Coming back to England was not part of her plan. Nor was looking after a listless, injured man. I remember Mother as being sad. Angry. Never content. She did her duties, of course. Raised me, clothed me, sent me to the right school in the right uniform. Dad managed some of the lands that belonged to the family estate. I went to boarding school at seven. It was all very formulaic and dull. It was when I came home in the holidays that I discovered Mother had found a way to make her life more interesting.

Caneva:
She had an affair?

Hoyer-Wood:
She had lots of affairs. Again, I was young, so I don’t know how much I imagined and what I saw, but I saw enough. Dad must have known. He must have. But
he turned a blind eye. We never talked about any of this. Not after.

Caneva:
After what, Seb?

Hoyer-Wood:
Mother met somebody different. Before him, it was farmhands and blokes from the village. It was knee-tremblers behind the pigsty. Then there was this man. He entered our lives and nothing was ever the same again.

Caneva:
Explain, Seb. You’re doing so well …

Hoyer-Wood:
He wasn’t a big man. Nothing special to look at. He did a bit of work at the garage in the village, as far as I can recall. I spotted him at the house often enough for it to become remarkable. I could sense something different between Mother and Dad. I think she was considering leaving him. For this man, this exciting, virile, alpha male with his dirty hands and oil on his overalls. He wanted her to leave me, to leave Dad, to abandon the big house and go rut in poverty for the rest of her life with him.

Caneva:
The atmosphere must have been unbearable. I’m so sorry, Seb. How old were you?

Hoyer-Wood:
I was eight. Maybe seven. I don’t remember the conversations. Just the shouting. The way the air felt. I just rattled around in the big house, wondering what the hell was going on.

Caneva:
Did she leave him?

Hoyer-Wood:
This is so hard, Lewis.

Caneva:
It needs to come out. You know better than anybody, secrets just eat away …

Hoyer-Wood:
If she’d left him, it wouldn’t have happened.

Caneva:
What?

Hoyer-Wood:
She told him no. Said she couldn’t leave me, though in all honesty I think it was the house and the money that twisted her arm. He didn’t take it well. The man. Came to the house.

Caneva:
To confront her? To confront your father?

Hoyer-Wood:
I don’t know what his intentions were. But it was late at night and I was reading in bed and suddenly there was this commotion in the hallway. I went downstairs and there he was: this angry ball of venom in a donkey jacket and flat cap. Mother was crying. Father was standing there in his dressing gown and pyjamas, leaning on the banister like he was going to fall down. Mother was in her nightdress. They were all screaming at one another, but somehow they heard me. Mother told me to go to bed, but the man didn’t want that. He looked at me, then at Father, and told me to stay where I was. He wanted Mother to see the kind of man she had chosen. Then he hit Dad. He just punched him in the stomach and Dad doubled over. I couldn’t move. Just stayed there on the stairs. And then he grabbed Mother by the hair. Forced her down and kicked her legs apart.

Caneva:
Oh Seb, I’m so—

Hoyer-Wood:
He raped her right there. Kept his eyes on me the whole fucking time. Dad wasn’t tied up. Wasn’t even that hurt. He just didn’t do anything. He froze. Stayed there a few feet away from where this animal was raping his wife. And he just sat there with this look on his face.

Caneva:
And you?

Hoyer-Wood:
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t take my eyes off what was happening either.

Caneva:
You can’t blame yourself. You were a child, and that kind of trauma—

Hoyer-Wood:
I don’t blame myself. I blame her.

Caneva:
How so? I don’t—

Hoyer-Wood:
Even as it was happening, this thought kept hammering away in my head. The thought that even though she was crying and telling him to stop, it was the same cock she’d loved before.

Caneva:
No, Seb, you can’t—

Hoyer-Wood:
I remember when he finished, he walked over and took the hem of Dad’s dressing gown and wiped himself on it. Then he spat on him and walked out the door.

Caneva:
Did they phone the police?

Hoyer-Wood:
No. They went back to bed. By breakfast, we were all wearing our masks again. Nothing had happened. We went back to living. Mother started having a few extra shots in her morning Bloody Mary. Started having longer naps during the day. By the time I was in my teens she was drunk most of the time. She died when I was twenty.

Caneva:
But I knew you when we were twenty. We were friends. You never—

Hoyer-Wood:
Never said anything? No. It didn’t matter, did it? I had a new life. I’d escaped. I had friends and people liked me.

Caneva:
But you must have had so much you wanted to say. So much inside.

Hoyer-Wood:
I’m English, Lewis. English going back
hundreds of years. We don’t say anything. We keep it all in.

Caneva:
But the effects of what you saw …

Hoyer-Wood:
Oh it took its toll, Lewis. That was my introduction to sex. That was when I saw real control. I saw a nobody, a man in a flat cap, scare my rich, army-officer dad into sitting mute while he fucked his wife. That went in, Lewis. It took root. When I had my first sexual encounters in my teens it was nothing but a disappointment. A disaster, even. I didn’t get hard over the same things as other kids. When I got a chance with a girl, I wanted her friends to be watching. Her mum. Her bloody dad. I knew what I wanted to do. I just didn’t do it. Honestly, Lewis, it was just that one time, when the demons in my head took over and I found myself in that room in Bridlington, staring down at this woman, and the next thing her husband was throwing me through a window and I was waking up barely able to move. I was in this chair. Lewis, I know you must have had your doubts about the stories you heard. I know they said I did more. But I’ll never forget what you did for me. To be here. To be getting better, with your family, in your care, able to talk about it. I’ll always be grateful …

McAvoy stops reading. The transcript of the counselling session ends shortly afterwards. The next page in the envelope is a photocopy of a report sent to the Home Office by Caneva, using Hoyer-Wood as an example of the good work the new facility was continuing to do. There are no more transcripts of their sessions. McAvoy leafs through the other pages, in case they have been
sent out of order. He checks the dates. This was the last session, a week before the breakout and the fire. He checks the time on the document. Cross-references with previous sessions. They all took place on Tuesdays, 4 p.m. He flicks through his notes. Checks the date of the fire and discovers that it happened on a Tuesday. The escape was noticed late afternoon. He bites his lip. Caneva had told the truth. Hoyer-Wood would have been involved in another counselling session, over at Caneva’s private residence, at the moment the other patient disappeared.

McAvoy frowns. Wonders if it changes what he already knows. He knew Hoyer-Wood was over there. Why else would he have been there but for counselling? Does it matter? Does it help him catch a killer of three innocents …

He holds the documents, loose, in his hands. Sees himself leave damp fingerprints on their pages and smudge the ink. They have only been printed recently. He raises one of the pages and examines the tiny row of black digits in the bottom right-hand corner. They were printed yesterday evening. Could they have made the last post? He looks at the envelope. Examines the postmark. He swallows, unsure what to think. The letter was posted to him in Bradford; an hour or more from Caneva’s home in Chester. Why Bradford? He wonders at the significance of it. Grows frustrated. He curses the fact he is clever enough to know he is no genius.

McAvoy pushes himself off from the wall. The sweat on his back has cooled on his skin and his shirt feels cold and damp on his flesh. He feels uncomfortable and strangely angry. He can see fragments of something but cannot even conceive of how the finished picture will look. He starts to walk back towards the station, Hoyer-Wood’s words tumbling in his mind like dice in a cup.

McAvoy thinks of himself at seven years old. His mother had been gone four years, disappearing with a man who offered more wealth, more excitement. He, his brother, his father and grandfather were living a simple life in their croft, halfway up a heather-clad hillside in Aultbea. They had a few cattle. Some sheep, on a nearby pasture. They ate well and laughed a lot. They told stories and watched old movies on a black and white TV with a poor picture. Those experiences formed him. His was a childhood of unspoken love and safety. At eight years old, Sebastien Hoyer-Wood saw a father he barely knew sit mute as a stranger raped a mother who didn’t give a damn about him. McAvoy finds himself beginning to pity the child. But then he thinks of him as a man. Thinks of what he did. Thinks of the creature who, even yesterday, managed to assert power over a bigger, more able man, by simply mentioning his wife. He cannot pity the rapist Hoyer-Wood became. And he does not believe a word of his denials. Even through the dry black-and-white of the typed sessions, he can smell the lie of Hoyer-Wood’s words. Can see when his tone changes, from the raw honesty of his childhood confession to the subtle manipulation of his friend in the closing paragraph. McAvoy doubts much about himself, but he knows he is good at reading people.

A dull headache is starting to form behind McAvoy’s eyes. He feels wretched suddenly. Wonders what would make him feel well. He imagines lying on a rug in the back garden of his new home. Imagines Lilah asleep on his belly, Fin kicking a football at the bottom of the garden, Roisin sitting on the new designer swing she has ordered, reading a magazine. He finds himself drifting into maudlin thoughts. Finds himself beginning to over-analyse. Thinks of his days spent with the
dead, and his nights trying to be the silly, capable, strong protector that his wife and children adore. Whether Lewis Caneva still thinks he did right by his friend in writing a report that declared Sebastien Hoyer-Wood mentally unfit to stand trial. Whether he would do the same. Whether he has a best friend. Any friends at all …