Struggles of Psycho

by Rhyam O'Bryam

  McCarthy had gone over to a small table in the corner. Pointing to the surface, she said, ‘We should have noticed this last time.’ I came over. It was obvious from the darker brown colouring that formed a square in the centre of the otherwise faded table top that something had rested here a long time.

  ‘The computer,’ I observed. Then shrugged. ‘Shall we look for that hidden brick in the pantry?’

  ‘I want to check the kitchen too.’

  ‘Let’s do that first then.’

  We walked across the lounge, past the breakfast bar and off the carpet, onto white tiles.

  McCarthy began to systematically open the presses and look into them. ‘When did Philips say that Ivy left?’

  ‘A month before the murder.’

  ‘What do you think, is this the kitchen of one person or two?’

  ‘Hard to say. Two, probably.’ I was looking at the variety of brands of cereals, biscuits, tea, coffee and condiments.

  ‘I think so too.’ McCarthy shook her head. ‘Can’t really tell though, can we?’ She picked up a packet of custard creams and looked at the sell-by date. ‘I mean, a month isn’t that long.’ She put it back.

  ‘Don’t touch anything else.’ I put my gloves on, thinking I should have done so earlier. ‘You’re onto something, McCarthy. Let’s bag a few items we think were bought recently and get forensics to check the prints.’

  ‘Milk, for a start.’ McCarthy went to the fridge. ‘Yeah.’ She rummaged in her pocket for her gloves and evidence bags.

  ‘Take this box of tea also, it’s only just been opened.’

  ‘Let’s suppose we get Ivy’s prints on these,’ said McCarthy, as she wrote on the bag labels, checking the time on her watch. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘In the river maybe?’

  McCarthy looked up at me sharply.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it might not have just been the computer Philips threw in.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘To remove a witness.’

  ‘You might be right. I have a bad feeling about this.’

  ‘Come on.’ I went to the pantry. Down on the right side, Philips had said. The hiding place wasn’t obvious. While I ran my fingers around the edges of bricks, McCarthy stood behind me.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon, I got a strange reaction when I told Philips we were done.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I grunted.

  ‘She was angry, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Angry? Why?’ I sat up.

  ‘I think she was looking forward to our next session. To trying to wreck our heads some more.’

  ‘She really does that all right.’ I bent down to my search again. After I’d been about ten minutes on my knees, McCarthy asked did I want her to have a go.

  ‘Be my guest.’

  While McCarthy worked her way along the bottom of the wall, I walked back out to the kitchen and lounge, wondering if I’d missed signs of a struggle.

  ‘Doyle, here it is!’ Kneeling in the pantry, rosy-cheeked from her (mild) exertion, McCarthy gave me a smile. ‘Not much of a gap between the bricks though, can you get me a knife?’

  I passed her a knife from the kitchen and she worked it back and forth with the occasional heavy exhalation, until the brick had been worked out enough that she could pull it clear.

  ‘Shall I go ahead?’ asked McCarthy.

  I checked that her gloves were on. ‘Sure.’

  It only took her a moment to draw out a purse a passport and an old, soft cardboard folder.

  McCarthy carried everything to the kitchen, where we put them on the breakfast bar.

  I started with the passport, while McCarthy opened the purse.

  ‘Empty,’ she said, then picked up the folder.

  The first thing I noticed about the passport was that it had not been clipped. I showed the back of it to McCarthy. ‘Ivy Patterson never sent this one in, since she didn’t have it. Which means she either reported it missing or never got a new one.’

  ‘Got it. I’ll check when we get back.’

  ‘She didn’t travel much.’ All the pages for visa stamps were empty. It had expired in 1990. For nearly thirty years then, Ivy Patterson had been without a passport.

  I looked at her picture. She was a young woman, nineteen and the face, while suitably neutral in expression, was a pleasure to look at. There was a touch more of the Slavic in her features than I expected. Her cheeks were high and wide, her eyes were dark and striking. These wide cheeks narrowed to a sharp chin and this, accompanied by her short haircut made her seem elf-like. Passport photos are rarely a good reflection of character, but this young woman looked determined and interesting.

  I showed the picture to McCarthy.

  ‘Nice pixie.’

  ‘She does look like a pixie, I suppose.’

  ‘No, it’s a hairstyle, the pixie. That’s an expensive one. It would be fashionable today.’

  ‘Funny how they go around.’ I put the passport into an evidence bag. ‘What’s in the folder?’

  ‘These.’ McCarthy had spread Polaroid pictures on the table, dozens of them. They were very faded, with the red all gone from them, so that they were a monochrome with a blue-green tinge. They were mostly of Ivy, in various sexual poses.

  McCarthy looked at me and I could not tell what she was thinking. It was like she was appraising me. Did she think that I might be looking at the pictures lustfully? Rather than as a detective in a murder case?

  ‘There are different sets,’ I said, moving them about. ‘She looks younger here.’

  ‘Philips said she took nineteen pictures of Ivy at school, remember?’

  ‘I do. And I think these are they.’ I sorted out the older pictures. There were eighteen and they told a story, with Ivy going from being clothed to naked and tied out on the bed, tears in her eyes.

  ‘One missing then.’ McCarthy seemed satisfied with my behaviour, as that earlier judgmental look was gone and now she was focused on what we could learn from the pictures.

  The other pictures were varied. A lot were simply of Ivy in various lewd poses and they did not seem to be in sets. Invariably, Ivy looked miserable and sometimes her head was blurred, as if she had ducked away beneath her fringe as the picture was taken.

  McCarthy made a division of the pictures into three piles and I caught her eye questioningly.

  ‘These are all taken in the bedroom upstairs,’ she tapped on the largest pile with her gloved finger.

  ‘And these?’

  ‘The castle, I think, look at the walls.’

  In many of the pictures, an X-frame made of wood was used to display Ivy, her arms and legs trapped wide. She must have been on that frame a lot because there were pictures where she was in just bra and panties, others with her in stockings of a variety of colours and two with her naked. Again, she always looked disconsolate. In the background, the bare stones were large.

  ‘We should go look again and find the place.’ My heart sank, even as I spoke. I disliked that castle.

  ‘What do you think of these?’ McCarthy tapped the third pile, then spread them out.

  Five Polaroids were taken much more recently than all the others. Still old and a little faded, they retained their full colour. In them was Mike. One was him naked and kneeling, looking up pleadingly. Another was naked, strapped out in an X on the bed, face up, semi-erect. The other three were him on the wooden frame, naked, scrawny and flaccid.

  ‘I think the jury should see them.’ These pictures had the dates on them in red digital numerals. They were all taken in 1994.

  ‘What does it prove?’ She wasn’t disagreeing, just clarifying, I could tell from her tone of voice.

  ‘It’s evidence of their having a sexual relationship in 1994.’ I paused. ‘That doesn’t contribute to the question of motive, of course, but it will show the jury there was something unusual and dark about their relationship.’

  ‘Something fucked up, you mean.’

  ‘McCarthy, learn from me, will you. You
’re going to be on the stand and you can’t tell the judge that Philips and Patterson were fucked up. Try again.’ I smiled to show I was half-joking.

  ‘But fucked up is exactly what it is. I can’t think of a better way of saying it.’

  ‘Try dysfunctional.’

  McCarthy snorted with derision and I gave a shrug to admit it was a poor suggestion.

  ‘Well,’ I hurried on. ‘You can look it up. But the main point is you’re right. There’s something in these that speaks of a man who is desperate and a woman who is cruel.’

  ‘There you go!’ McCarthy looked at me admiringly. ‘There’s a poet in you, Doyle.’

  ‘Or an art critic.’

  She laughed and we gathered everything into the bags. These we put in the boot of my car and while there, I took out two large torches, the ten-watt kind with the handle. This time I was better prepared.

  ‘Let’s go look at the castle again.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Once more, I felt intimidated by a sense of history and the weight of the grey tower that loomed over us. This was not a happy place. When all power rested in the medieval lord, without accountability to law, what restraint was there on wickedness? What terrible events had occurred here?

  The heavy key was in the same hiding place, just as I’d left it. I had to strain to turn the lock, but then could swing open the thick, iron-bound door. For the ground floor, we had no need for the torches. I switched on the one, uncovered bulb.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ McCarthy went in ahead of me.

  ‘Anything. But I’d like to identify the place where those pictures were taken.’

  ‘It wasn’t here. The interior walls here are brick, not stone.’

  ‘Right.’

  I picked up the corner of one of the sacks in my gloved hand. Nothing. To be sure, though, that they were not covering a trapdoor, I moved all the sacks into a pile by the wall. Satisfied, I gave a nod to McCarthy, who went on up the tight, bare stone stairway in the corner. Her ample hips brushed the walls and she climbed up with visible exertion.

  It was a relief to exit the cramped stairwell, into the next level.

  ‘I think it was somewhere around here,’ said McCarthy with a grunt.

  It seemed to me that she was right. These were the original large, grey stones and they had the right size and texture. We walked across bare planks, our footsteps ringing out, to the table in the centre of the room and the four camping chairs around it. Our torches played this way and that, bright blocks of light that made the darkness around us even more intense.

  ‘What do you think of this?’ McCarthy had found three deep indentations in the wood of the floor. Her beam picked them out, one after the other.

  I squatted down, trying to picture the Polariods again.

  ‘Switch that off for a second, would you.’

  It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the very dim light allowed by the arrow-slits in each wall, but it was enough. This was the place. ‘Yes, that frame was here, don’t you think?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Tell me, McCarthy,’ I flicked my torch back on and started systematically examining the floor and then the walls, unsure what I was looking for but if Ivy had been murdered, perhaps there were bloodstains. ‘What do you think of the master and slave angle? Sinister, or just adults playing games, since they have a castle to play in?’

  ‘In this case, sinister.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s like that architect.’

  ‘Graham Dwyer?’

  ‘That’s him.’

  I nodded, then realising that McCarthy couldn’t see me, spoke aloud. ‘I think so too. She’s already confessed to the fact of having starved Patterson to a point where it was dangerous and that she wasn’t that interested in him sexually. These games were about something darker.’

  In the Dwyer case, despite decisive evidence that a murder had taken place, the jury had heard a lot about the man’s BDSM activities. A body – that of a childcare worker, Elaine O’Hara – had been found in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. Then, the next month when the reservoir had dropped to a record low depth, handcuffs, restraints and other items had been found, having been thrown into the lake. Placing these discoveries together with the fact that he had gone to great lengths to cover up his relationship with the victim, the jury had declared Dwyer guilty.

  It was some comfort to me that a jury had needed no other motive to convict on the count of murder than a sadistic man wanting to hurt a vulnerable woman. My feeling was that Philips was that kind of person. A sadist. And someone who didn’t care about the value of another person’s life. Yet, Dwyer had said (in a text) he wanted to stick a knife in flesh while sexually aroused and that he would like to stab a girl to death. Philips didn’t seem to have the same kind of dark sexual drives. More a need to control.

  Also, was it different, a woman killing a man? Would the jury look at it differently? Even if I got a statement out of Philips as incriminating as those obtained from Dwyer’s phone, would it be enough? Plus, I had a body and a weapon. Philips wasn’t covering that up. Quite the opposite.

  ‘Shall we go up?’ McCarthy was standing at the stairs.

  ‘Just a moment, there’s something—’ It began as a feeling that there had been a change to the room since our previous visit. Since nothing had visibly moved, what could it be? A change in the smell of the place. The various odours of farming were all around us, yet there was a new scent. ‘Urine. Can you smell it?’

  McCarthy came back towards me, face in darkness. ‘Wait. You’re right. Like someone’s taken a piss here. Or downstairs maybe.’

  ‘Anyone could use this place, if they knew about the key,’ I observed.

  ‘You’d have to be pretty desperate to kip here.’

  ‘Get the lads to call up here in the early hours, will you? If someone is using the place, I’d like to talk to them.’

  ‘They won’t thank you for that job.’

  ‘It’s a murder case. And we need a break.’ It was a long shot, but if someone was using the tower (God, but I wouldn’t want to spend a night here), maybe they had heard or seen something.

  ‘I’m going up, coming?’

  ‘Sure.’

  We spent another hour there, half of which was on the top of the tower looking out over the sodden fields. It was impossible to see the sea today, with a low, grey sky overhead. I was disappointed in that, but like last time, the height made me uncomfortable. I was glad to return to the ground, lock the castle door and put the key back. For a moment, I wondered if I should keep the key. It was a possible crime scene after all. But if there was someone using the tower, I didn’t want to lose any chance of bringing them in to the station.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  That afternoon, Philips had her lawyer with him, Brian Healy. A stocky man, the fleshiness of his face was emphasised by a receding hairline. Like me, he was in his fifties, and I knew him well. In work, he was thorough, competent, and a good negotiator. Outside work, he was less attractive. There was a club in Wexford that opened late on week nights and which attracted an older crowd: the single, the divorced, the married-but-looking and a small lesbian and gay crowd too. Most nights, you could find Healy there and I didn’t think it reflected well on him. There was no wife or kids in the background, there was nothing obviously wrong about his going to the club. But to me it seemed to be a weakness on his part; it was a sign of desperation and lust.

  Healy was from an old Protestant family and was the lawyer of choice for most of the big landowners around here. It made complete sense that he would be representing Philips from the point of view of the social background of his clientele. It also made sense from a psychological point of view: he had secrets and weaknesses, which probably made him ideal as far as Philips was concerned.

  ‘Superintendent, welcome. Where were you?’ Philips half rose as I entered and took my seat, as if intending to embrace me or shake my hand. She gest
ured to the stocky, greying, well-dressed man on her right. ‘I believe you know Mister Healy.’

  We exchanged nods.

  There was silence. Neither McCarthy and I offered a question and on their side of the table, Philips was smiling in her usual knowing way and Healy was reading through a file, glancing up at me from time to time. Eventually, it was he who spoke.

  ‘I have to say, Doyle, this seems like a pretty clear case of manslaughter, which my client is willing to plead guilty to. There’s nothing in the evidence to suggest murder. What have you got to argue otherwise? Am I missing something?’

  ‘Her.’ I nodded toward Philips, who for once was caught off guard and her eyes flashed angrily.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Healy asked.

  ‘How well do you know your client?’

  ‘Pretty well. Amy became my client about forty years ago.’

  ‘Then you know exactly what I’m talking about.’ I glanced at McCarthy, who gave a wry smile. Interestingly, Healy didn’t try to contest my suggestion that there was something wrong with the character of his client, he just shook his head.

  ‘Come on, Doyle, do you have anything for pushing a murder charge? It’s not too late to back out of a murder trial.’

  I hope my face did not betray me as I looked across the table and into his tired-looking eyes. Because the truth was, I really didn’t have anywhere near enough of a case. ‘She murdered Mike Patterson and we’ll find the evidence.’

  ‘Well, against my advice, my client wants to waive her right to remain silent. So, go ahead, ask your questions.’

  ‘It’s not a question of them asking questions, really, is it, Superintendent?’ Amy Philips looked sharply at me. ‘I’m answering your questions fully, of course. But I’m also putting on record a history that completely justifies my claim that I had every reason to feel that my life was in danger.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘I’ve a question,’ McCarthy looked directly at Philips. ‘Did Ivy Patterson ever renew her passport?’