The Torment of Others (20 page)

He turned off the main drag into a side street. It was only when he couldn’t find a parking space that he realized he had come home to the wrong house. He was in the street where he’d lived the last time he’d worked in Bradfield. His automatic pilot had taken him to quite the wrong part of town.

Jackie Mayall walked into the hotel lobby. It wasn’t much of a reception area; it wasn’t much more than a large room with an alcove cut off by a chest-high counter. It had the kind of carpet visitors knew their feet would stick to. She leaned behind the counter, stretching to reach for a key. ‘It’s Jackie,’ she shouted over the muffled hectic sound of Sky Sport coming from a room to the left of the grimy Formica counter. ‘I’ve taken twenty-four.’

‘Right. That’s ten past six,’ a voice called back. ‘I’m writing it down, so don’t you take the piss.’

‘As if,’ she muttered, heading for the threadbare narrow stairs that led up to the room on the second floor that she knew too miserably well. She let herself in and tried not to notice her surroundings. It was about as unappetizing a place for sex as it was possible to imagine. It could have served as a dictionary definition of scruffy, grimy or down-at-heel. A worn blue candlewick spread covered the sagging bed. The dressing table’s cheap veneer was chipped and peeling. One upright chair sat by a dirty sink.

Jackie looked at herself in the mottled mirror. About time she dyed her hair again. She didn’t care about the half-inch of black showing at the roots, but she understood the virtue of window dressing. Her skimpy skirt, halter-neck top, knee-length boots were all smarter than most of the girls on the street. She reckoned that was why she could afford to charge enough to bring most of her punters here, instead of shagging in shop doorways and bobbing over blow jobs in the backs of cars. Impatiently, she turned away, tossing her bag on the bed. She sat down on the edge of the bed, wondering if she should take off her boots or whether he’d want to see that for himself. He was paying her good money, after all. He deserved the best she could do for him.

A tentative knock at the door brought her to her feet again. She yanked the door hard, to overcome the way it always stuck. She eyed him up and down, sardonic amusement in her eyes. ‘Come on then, the meter’s running,’ she said, turning her back on him and heading straight for the bed. ‘I’ve got no time for men who take all night.’

As soon as Tony walked through the door, he dialled Carol’s number. ‘Who’s the voice, Derek?’ he said, absently listening to the ring tone.

‘Carol Jordan,’ she said abruptly.

‘Who’s the voice, Carol,’ he demanded without preamble. ‘It doesn’t make sense. None of the usual voices make sense.’

‘Nice to talk to you too, Tony,’ she said, weary humour in her tone.

‘The thing about voices, they’re a bit like past-life regression.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘When people do those past-life regressions, they’ve never been a stable boy or a mill hand. They’ve always been Cleopatra or Henry the Eighth or Emma Hamilton. It’s the same with people who hear voices. They don’t hear the milkman or the woman who sits behind them on the bus every morning. They hear the Virgin Mary or John Lennon or Jack the Ripper.’

‘Well, it’s hard to imagine your average milkman giving out detailed instructions about carrying out sexual homicide,’ Carol said drily.

Tony paused for a moment. He grinned. ‘So you think it’s more likely the Virgin Mary would be behind that?’ Carol giggled. Tony felt a quick flash of pride. He’d done something very human. He’d made her laugh. He’d almost forgotten how much he liked the sound of her laughter, it had been so long since he’d heard it. ‘But anyway,’ he continued, covering up his momentary lapse from the professional, ‘what I’m trying to get at is that these are grandiose voices. They live inside the head of the person hearing them and they are dynamic. What they say changes according to circumstance. You don’t have to worry about silence. You don’t need silence because the voice doesn’t mind noise. It just makes itself heard when it wants to be, whenever it’s convenient. Well, convenient for the person hearing the voice, not usually convenient for the rest of us,’ he added hastily.

‘And you’re saying Derek Tyler’s voice isn’t like that?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s as if he’s scared of losing it. Scared that it might get swallowed up in the background noise. I’ve never come across anything quite like it, not in life, not in the literature. It’s as if…’ He shook his head. ‘I need to go and do some more research. There must be something in the literature…Unless we’re breaking completely new ground.’ His voice tailed off.

‘Tony?’

‘I’ll call you. I need to think about this. Thanks for listening to me.’ Whatever she said in reply was lost as he hung up the phone. He’d never encountered anything like Derek Tyler’s voice. If it broke all the rules, maybe it was time for him to do the same thing. Instead of working with probabilities, maybe he should start considering improbabilities. He headed upstairs to his study, muttering, ‘Six impossible things before breakfast.’

DS Kevin Matthews stood behind the Woolpack Hotel reception desk, notebook in hand. There wasn’t much room behind the counter, which meant he was uncomfortably close to the seedy individual who had introduced himself as Jimmy de Souza, night manager. In spite of the stench of sweat, cigarettes and stale pizza that ballooned around de Souza, Kevin preferred this view to what was upstairs in room 24. One quick look had been enough to tell him that interviewing the man who had found the body was definitely not the short straw. Much better to be down here where there was nothing more disturbing to see than a cheesy night manager and a stream of SOCOs and cops going in and out.

De Souza was stocky, with a round belly that strained his grubby white T-shirt and the waistband of his shell-suit trousers. His black hair was greased back from a sharp widow’s peak, and a rosebud mouth over a plump, rounded chin gave him a look of petulance. ‘Look, I told you,’ he said, a faint trace of distant parts underpinning his Bradfield accent, ‘I only come out if somebody rings the bell. People like their privacy. That’s what they’re paying for.’

‘By the hour,’ Kevin said, his voice acidic.

‘So? It’s not against the law, is it, renting rooms by the hour? People have needs.’ De Souza started to pick his nose then thought better of it as he noticed Kevin’s lip curl in distaste.

‘So you rented out room twenty-four when exactly?’

De Souza pointed to a thick desk diary lying open on the ledge beneath the counter. ‘There. Ten past six.’

Kevin glanced at it. The time and a name scrawled next to it in a clumsy hand. ‘And who did you rent it out to? I’m assuming–correct me if I’m wrong–it wasn’t Margaret Thatcher.’

‘Slag calls herself Jackie. Skinny bit of stuff with bleach-blonde hair. She used to come in most nights a few times.’

‘You don’t know her surname?’

De Souza leered. ‘You kidding? Who’s interested?’

‘Who was she with?’

‘I dunno. I was in the back, watching the football. She shouted through that she was taking the key and I just wrote down the time. She’d settle up on her way out. I like to give the regulars a bit of leeway.’

‘So you didn’t see who was with her?’ Kevin asked again.

‘I don’t even know if he was with her. Often the blokes hang back a few minutes, so nobody sees them. The girls just tell them what room to come to.’

‘Very handy,’ Kevin said bitterly. ‘So what made you go up there?’

‘Her time was well up, wasn’t it? Normally, she’s out of there in half an hour or so. Like I said, she’d settle up and I’d go and change the sheets. When the match finished at the back of eight, the key was sitting there on the hook. I was pissed off, I thought she’d done a runner on me. So I went up to see if she’d left the money in there. I went to twenty-four and let myself in…’ For the first time, de Souza looked uncomfortable. ‘Christ, I’m not going to be able to let that room out again in a hurry.’

Kevin looked at de Souza as if he’d like to hit him. ‘My heart bleeds for you.’ He reached over with his pen and snagged the key of room 24 off its hook. He slipped it into a paper evidence bag and tucked it away in his pocket. ‘We’ll need to hang on to that for the time being,’ he said. ‘But, like you said, you’re not going to be needing it any time soon.’

His words roused de Souza’s self-interest. ‘How long are you lot going to be keeping us out of business?’

Kevin smiled sweetly. ‘As long as it takes. This is a crime scene now, pal.’

As he spoke, the street door opened again and Carol Jordan strode in. ‘Where am I going, Kevin?’ she said.

‘Second floor, guv. Room twenty-four. Don’s up there with Jan and Paula. And the SOCOs.’

‘I’m on my way.’

Tom Storey hadn’t been lying when he’d said he had people skills. His work as a housing benefits officer had been fraught with the underlying threat of violence, both verbal and physical. Until his recent erratic behaviour had seen him sent home on sick leave, he’d always been known as the one the bosses could rely on to prevent an awkward client losing it in the worst way. That was why the task Tony Hill had given him seemed less a burden than a genuine challenge he thought he might be able to rise to.

Incarcerated in Bradfield Moor, burdened both with crushing guilt and the fear of the unknown invader eating away his brain, he’d tried to distract himself by watching his fellow inmates. It helped him stay in control of his mind if he had something outside himself to focus on. Of course, the ones who were allowed a certain freedom of movement were the ones who were regarded as safe in the sense that they weren’t about to run amok with a sharpened fork: the obsessive compulsives who were mostly a danger to themselves; the schizophrenics meekly medicated; the manic depressives kept on a level by lithium. In a way, they were more interesting to him than the violent. Tom found it easier to understand how they’d slipped the cogs of normalcy. He didn’t like to think of the personality-disordered ones; he’d seen enough sociopaths in the course of his previous professional life to last him the rest of his days.

When Tony had described Derek Tyler, Storey had known at once who he meant. He’d been aware of his silent stillness, mostly because there was so little of it around the place. Even those drugged up to their eyeballs tended towards the twitchy. But Tyler seemed to exist in a little oasis of quiet. Not that there was anything tranquil about him. He gave off an air of tension that made others wary.

He didn’t join in, either. That was something else that marked him out. He displayed no interest in social activities, and his passive resistance to anything approaching communal treatment was impressive, all the more so because Storey reckoned he wasn’t that bright.

All of this made him easily identifiable. But very hard to reach. This was no straightforward undertaking that Tony Hill had laid on his shoulders. Storey had spent most of the day covertly watching Tyler whenever he got the chance, trying to figure out a way to crack the carapace. Nothing suggested itself.

In the early evening, when most of those conscious and out of their rooms were watching the TV soaps, he saw Tyler sitting alone at a table in the corner of the day room. On the spur of the moment, Storey helped himself to one of the jigsaws stacked on the bookshelves and walked across to Tyler’s table. He sat down without asking, struggled to open the box with one hand but managed it at last. He tipped out the pieces, finding a moment to wonder how many of the 550 would be present and correct.

No reaction. Tyler seemed to withdraw further into himself. But Storey could see his eyes drawn to the muddle of die-cut cardboard in spite of himself. Storey started sorting through the pieces awkwardly, looking for edges and sky. ‘The easiest bit and then the hardest bit,’ he said. ‘After you get the sky done, the rest feels possible.’

Tyler said nothing. The silence endured while Storey constructed the border of the picture. It was an Alpine view, a funicular railway ascending a mountain that turned from meadow to icecap. He made a couple of deliberate mistakes, but Tyler didn’t react. So he corrected himself and carried on.

‘I’m feeling quite cheerful tonight,’ he said, carefully not looking at anything other than the jigsaw. ‘I’ve got to have an operation, but after that, I think I’m going to be out of here.’ He glanced up at Tyler. ‘You know what I did, right?’ It was a fair bet. In spite of the best efforts of the clinical staff to prevent patients gossiping about the past transgressions of others, news travelled Bradfield Moor like rats mapping their nocturnal territory. ‘I killed my kids.’ He couldn’t help it; tears welled up in Storey’s eyes and he brushed them away impatiently. ‘I thought that was it. I’d never see the outside world again. To be honest, I wasn’t about to argue with that. I mean, how could I be trusted? How could I trust myself? If I could take the lives of the people I loved most in the whole world, how could anybody be safe?’

Tyler showed no sign that he had heard a word. Storey persevered. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to do. ‘And the way the staff treat me, I can see that, behind all their professionalism, they think I’m beyond redemption. They’re used to dealing with sick people. But they make me feel like I’m special, like what I’ve done sets me even further apart than everybody else. That’s the one thing nobody ever forgives, killing your children. Or so I thought, until I met this new doctor they’ve got.’ He smiled. ‘Dr Hill. He’s not like the rest of them. He’s big on getting people out of here. He made me see that it’s not impossible to be made better. To start again on the outside. I tell you, you want to get out of this dump, he’s the one you need to see.’