The Torment of Others (6 page)

Reluctantly, Don shifted forward in his seat and extended the file towards her. ‘We couldn’t have done more,’ he said. ‘We just kept hitting brick walls. We couldn’t even give Tony Hill enough to go on to make a profile worthwhile. He said himself it was a waste of resources. But I couldn’t think of anything else to try. That’s why it’s ended up as a cold case this early on.’

‘I wondered about that. It seems very soon to consign it to the back burner.’

Don sighed. There just wasn’t anywhere else for us to go with it. We’ve still got a couple of DCs keeping an eye on it, feeding the press whenever they decide to take another crack at it. But nothing active’s happened for at least a month.’ Don’s misery was written all over him, from the hangdog eyes to the slump of his shoulders.

It provoked a sympathetic echo in Carol. ‘Leave it with me, Don. I don’t expect I’ll see anything you’ve missed.’

He got to his feet, a rueful look on his face. Thing is, ma’am, I remember when I was working the case that I wished you were around. Just so I could run it past you. You always had the knack of seeing things from a different angle.’

‘What is it they say, Don? Don’t wish too hard for what you want because you might get it.’

Tony Hill leaned forward and gazed intently through the observation window. A neat, balding man sat folded in the chair bolted to the floor. He looked somewhere in the region of fifty, though his placid expression went some way towards erasing the lines etched into his face. For a fleeting, incomprehensible moment, Tony thought of a child’s lollipop, tightly wrapped in cellophane, Sellotape wrapped around the stick.

His stillness was preternatural. Most of the patients Tony encountered had difficulty with immobility, never mind tranquillity. They twitched, they fidgeted, they chain-smoked, they fiddled with their clothes. But this man–he checked the notes–this Tom Storey had an almost Zen-like quality. Tony glanced through the notes again, refreshing his memory from the previous evening’s reading. He shook his head, fighting his anger at the stupidity of some of his medical colleagues. Then he closed the folder and headed for the interview room.

He felt the spring in his step, even in that short journey. Bradfield Moor Secure Hospital wasn’t generally associated in people’s minds with the notion of contentment, but that was precisely what it had given Tony for the first time in months. He was back in the field, back in the world of messy heads, back where he belonged. In spite of his constant efforts to assume a series of masks that would help him blend in, Tony knew he was an outsider in the world beyond the grim institutional walls of Bradfield Moor. It was a feeling he did not care to examine too closely; it said things about him that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. But it was impossible to deny that the exercise of empathy was what gave meaning to his days. There was nothing quite like that moment when the tumblers of someone else’s brain clicked into place for him and allowed him to penetrate the knotted logic of another mind. Really, truly, nothing.

He pushed open the door to the interview room and sat down opposite his latest challenge. Tom Storey remained immobile, only his eyes shifting to connect with Tony. In his right hand, he cradled a heavily bandaged stump where his left hand had been until a few days previously. Tony leaned forward and arranged his face into an expression of sympathy. I’m Tony Hill. I’m sorry for your loss.’

Storey’s eyes widened in surprise. Then he gave a small snort. ‘My hand or my kids?’ he said sourly.

‘Your son and your daughter,’ Tony said. ‘I imagine the hand feels like a blessing.’

Storey said nothing.

‘Alien Hand Syndrome,’ Tony said. ‘First recorded in 1908. A gift for horror-film scriptwriters: 1924,
The Hands of Orlac-
Conrad Veidt played a classical pianist who had the hands of a killer grafted on after his were destroyed in a train accident; 1946,
The Beast with Five Fingers
, another pianist; 1987,
Evil Dead II–
the hero takes a chainsaw to his possessed hand to stop it attacking him. Cheap thrills all round. But it’s not so thrilling when you’re the one with the hand, is it? Because when you try to explain what it feels like, nobody really takes you seriously. Nobody took you seriously, did they, Tom?’

Storey shifted in his seat but remained silent and apparently composed.

‘The GP gave you some tranquillizers. Stress, that’s what he said, right?’

Storey inclined his head slightly.

Tony smiled, encouraging. They didn’t work, did they? Just made you feel sleepy and out of it. And with a hand like yours, you couldn’t afford to relax your vigilance, could you? Because there was no telling what might happen then. How was it for you, Tom? Did you wake up in the night struggling for breath because the hand was round your throat? Did it smash plates over your head? Stop you from putting food in your mouth?’ Tony’s questioning was gentle, his voice sympathetic.

Storey cleared his throat. ‘It threw things. We’d all be sitting eating breakfast, and I’d pick up the teapot and throw it at my wife. Or we’d be out in the garden and the next thing I’d know, I’d be picking up stones from the rockery and throwing them at the kids.’ He leaned back in his chair, apparently exhausted from the effort of speech.

‘I can imagine how frightening that must have been. How did your wife react?’

Storey closed his eyes. ‘She was going to leave me. Take the kids with her and never come back.’

‘And you love your kids. That’s a hell of a dilemma for you. You’ve nothing to fight back with. Life without your kids, it’s not worth living. But life with your kids places them in constant danger because you can’t stop the hand doing what it wants. There’s no easy answer.’ Tony paused and Storey opened his eyes again. ‘You must have been in complete turmoil.’

‘Why are you making excuses for me? I’m a monster. I killed my children, that’s the worst thing anybody can do. They should have let me bleed to death, not saved me. I deserve to be dead.’ Storey’s words tumbled over each other.

‘You’re not a monster,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t think your kids are the only victims here. We’re going to run some physical tests. Tom, I think you may be suffering from a brain tumour. You see, your brain comes in two halves. Messages from one part reach the other across a sort of bridge called the corpus callosum. When that’s damaged, your right hand literally doesn’t know what your left hand is doing. And that’s a terrible thing to live with. I can’t blame you for being driven to the point where you thought killing your children was the only way to keep them safe from whatever you might do to them.’

‘You
should
blame me,’ Storey insisted. ‘I was their father. It was my job to protect them. Not kill them.’

‘But you couldn’t trust yourself. So you chose to end their lives in the most humane way you could. Smothering them while they slept.’

Storey’s eyes filled with tears and he bowed his head. ‘It was wrong,’ he said, his voice choking. ‘But nobody would listen to me. Nobody would help me.’

Tony reached across the table and laid his hand on the bandaged stump. ‘We’ll help you now, Tom. I promise you. We’ll help you.’

Carol arched her back and rotated her shoulders, swivelling round in her chair to stare out of the window. Across the street stood a white Portland stone building with a fine neoclassical portico. When she’d last been in Bradfield, it had been a bingo hall. Now it was a nightclub, its cold neon tubes spelling out ‘Afrodite’ in fake Greek script. Buses rumbled past, advertising the latest movies and console games. A traffic warden stalked the metered parking, his computerized ticket machine held like a truncheon. A world going about its business, insulated from the unpleasantness that was her stock in trade. She’d read the material on Guy Lefevre and now she was close to the end of Tim Golding’s file. The words were starting to blur. Apart from a half-hour break for lunch, she’d been reading solidly all day. She knew she wasn’t the only one. Every time she’d raised her head, the rest of the squad had been equally engrossed. Interesting how their body language seemed to reveal so much more of their personalities than the slightly awkward and guarded conversation over the lunchtime sandwiches Stacey had fetched from the canteen.

Don sat hunched over his desk, one arm round the file like a kid who doesn’t want anybody copying his work. He wasn’t the quickest wit Carol had ever worked with, but he made up for it with his stolid persistence and total commitment to the team. And if there was one person whose loyalty she could depend on without question, it was Don. He’d proved himself in the past, but she hadn’t realized until this morning how important that knowledge was to her.

Kevin’s wiry body sat erect in his chair, papers neatly aligned. Every now and again he would pause and stare into the middle distance for as long as it took to smoke a cigarette. Then he would scribble something on the pad next to him and return to his reading. Carol remembered how he’d always seemed so buttoned up. It had made it all the harder to believe when he’d gone off the rails. But like most repressed individuals, when he had finally broken the rules he’d been more reckless than the wildest risk taker. And it had led him into betrayal. Carol told herself that he’d never make that mistake again, but she was still reluctant to trust. She hoped he couldn’t see that in her eyes.

Sam Evans was hunched in the chair opposite Kevin, his jacket carefully arranged on a hanger hooked over a filing-cabinet drawer handle. His shirt was crisp and white, the careful creases of the iron still clean cut on his sleeves. He and Kevin had staked out smokers’ corner on the opposite side of the room to Stacey and her computers. Evans’ reading style seemed almost nonchalant, as if he were drifting through the Sunday papers. His expression gave nothing away. But occasionally his hand would snake into his trouser pocket and emerge with a minidisk recorder. He’d mumble a few words into it then slip it back out of sight. Carol didn’t think much was getting past him.

Paula, conversely, was a spreader. Within half an hour of starting, the whole of her desktop was covered in stacks of papers as she sorted through the file in front of her. But in spite of the appearance of untidiness, it was clear she knew where everything was. Her hand moved, apparently independent of her eyes, confidently picking up the next piece of paper she needed. It was as if she had a mental map of her arrangement, a neat grid stamped firmly on her brain. Carol wondered if that was how she worked interviews; slotting every piece of information into its own socket till the connections linked together and lit up like a completed circuit.

Stacey couldn’t have been more different. Even her dress style was at odds with Paula’s casual T-shirt and jeans. Stacey’s suit fitted as if it had been made to measure, and the fine polo-neck sweater beneath it looked like cashmere to Carol’s eye. A surprisingly expensive outfit for a detective constable, she thought. When it came to work, it was almost as if Stacey resented the presence of paper. She’d balanced the file she was studying on a pulled-out desk drawer to leave her work surface clear for interaction with the machine. The twin screens of her computer system held most of her attention. She would swiftly scrutinize the file material, then her fingers would fly over the keys before she cocked her head to one side, ran her left hand through her glossy black hair and clicked a mouse button. Manipulable virtuality was seemingly what she craved over reality.

It was, Carol thought, a group with enough variety in their skills and attributes to cover most of the bases. The key question was whether she could get them to bond into a unit. Until they felt part of a team, they would be less than the sum of their parts. She sighed. Somewhere in her near future, she could see a night out with her officers. On balance, she’d rather have spent a day in the dentist’s chair without benefit of anaesthetic. She hadn’t been out on the town since she’d come back from Germany. Even going to familiar restaurants with friends had been beyond her. The idea of raucous, crowded pubs and clubs curdled her stomach. ‘Get over it,’ she muttered angrily to herself as she turned back to the Tim Golding file.

She reread the statement given by the organic vegetable deliveryman. My, how Harriestown had changed in the few years she’d been gone. The previous occupants of the area would have been interested in organic vegetables only as potential missiles. So engrossed was she that the sharp rap of knuckles on her door jamb made her start. The pages she was holding fluttered to the desk unheeded as Carol pushed back in her chair, heart thudding, eyes wide. This was new, she thought. The old Carol Jordan was a lot harder to startle.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to creep up on you.’ The woman in the doorway looked more amused than apologetic.

It was Carol’s habit to form descriptions of new encounters as if she were registering their details for the National Criminal Intelligence database. Medium height; wiry as Carol herself. Straight shoulders, full breasts, narrow hips. Wavy brown hair cut in a tousle that had been fashionable a few years before, but which she’d probably hung on to because it suited her incongruously cherubic face. The cast of her features made her look as if she was perpetually on the verge of a smile. Only the eyes gave her away; she had the long flat stare of the cop who’d grown weary of the variety of human viciousness and misery. She wore black jeans, a black silk T-shirt and a leather jacket the colour of crème caramel. Whoever she was, Carol was certain she’d never met her before. ‘I was miles away,’ she said, getting to her feet.