Rabbit Hole

by Mark Billingham

  ‘We haven’t been together very long,’ she says. ‘I met him during one of those cases you mentioned, actually.’

  ‘So he’s a serial killer?’

  She laughs and her eyes widen, and I think, whoever her boyfriend is, unless he’s also a part-time male model, he’s definitely punching above his weight. I purse my lips and suck in a noisy breath. ‘Going out with a copper is asking for trouble,’ I say.

  ‘Well, I know it can be,’ she says, ‘which is why we don’t live together.’

  I say, ‘Smart,’ and yes, I’m well aware she’s only giving me snippets of personal information to build up a rapport or whatever. I know how it works. It’s fine with me though, because I like hearing it. Bakshi’s been treating me for months and I know bugger all about her.

  As it is, the softening-up period doesn’t last long.

  ‘Would it be fair to say you didn’t like Debbie McClure very much?’

  I give it some thought, because I think I should. ‘We never really got on,’ I say. ‘Couldn’t tell you why.’

  ‘But you thought she was responsible for the death of Mr Connolly?’

  ‘I know she was and no, I certainly didn’t like her much after that. Just saying, we weren’t exactly best mates to begin with.’

  She nods. She isn’t writing anything down and I wonder if she has some kind of recorder in her bag. ‘And you thought you were being ignored by the police who were conducting that investigation, yes?’

  ‘I didn’t think I was being ignored,’ I say. ‘I was being ignored.’

  ‘So, how did that make you feel?’

  ‘Ignored.’

  ‘Were you irritated? Angry? Were you running out of patience?’

  ‘Yes, with the police. Too effing right I was. I was pissed off at the incompetence of that idiot Seddon and the rest of his team. I mean, it was on a plate. It was on a sodding plate.’

  She says, ‘Right,’ then leans her head back like she’s just enjoying the sunshine for a moment or two, but I can see the cogs turning. ‘After what happened to Detective Constable Johnston, you felt you were denied the chance to give evidence against the man who murdered him. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘I was a bit all over the place back then,’ I say.

  ‘You never got to play your part in getting justice for a murdered colleague.’

  ‘The bloke was put away. That’s what counts.’

  ‘How did that make you feel?’

  Here we go. Feelings again. ‘Look, I know this is what you do, but I’ve got to tell you that I never worked on a single murder case where how someone felt about this, that or the other thing counted for anything. You just have to catch them, right?’

  ‘You’re correct, Al,’ she says. ‘How someone is feeling at a particular time is a . . . large part of what I do. I believe it can be hugely important, and so do the senior officers who have brought me in to help with this case.’ She smiles again, but there aren’t quite so many perfect teeth on display this time. ‘So I’d be very grateful if you could tell me.’

  I sigh and stare across at the entrance to A&E again. Still nothing to get excited about. ‘I wasn’t very happy about it,’ I say.

  ‘OK, good. Thank you, Al. Now, do you think it’s poss­ible that you had similar feelings, or that those old feelings resurfaced, when you saw that the investigation into Mr Connolly’s murder had stalled? When, despite you putting it on a plate for the police, Miss McClure was getting away with it. Did you perhaps feel . . . thwarted?’

  There it was, though I’d known it was coming for several minutes. The shrink was laying it all out a bit more politely than Lauren had done last night, but she was saying much the same thing. Asking much the same question.

  It makes complete sense, after all. Sitting out here, the pair of us all pally in the sunshine, I don’t know if she’s going to be talking to Ilias or Bob or the rest of them, but right this minute I’m a suspect. Of course. How could I not be?

  When you think about it, I’m the obvious suspect.

  I understand, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

  ‘Can we go back inside now?’ She’s not actually a copper, so I’m guessing she can’t really refuse.

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ she says.

  I stand up and start walking back and, once she’s managed to catch me up, I say, ‘This boyfriend of yours. Is he the kind of copper that gives a stuff about feelings?’

  She doesn’t answer, so I’m guessing we’re about done.

  FORTY-THREE

  Detectives French and Saunders and their tame trick-cyclist have left and suddenly there’s a weird atmosphere on the ward. Weirder than normal, I mean. Usually, at any time of the day or night, there’s one or two people plodding around in a bit of a daze, but now it’s like everyone is . . . subdued. Nobody seems very keen to discuss what’s been happening, to talk about anything come to that, and I start to wonder if the staff have got together and decided to up the dosage on everyone’s sleepy-pills.

  If it’s something they do whenever it’s necessary.

  When things get a bit stressful or if they’re understaffed.

  So make that . . . all the time.

  I remember reading somewhere that prison officers are quite happy that their prisons are in the grip of a Spice epidemic, because zombified inmates are that much easier to handle. The prisoners are happy being off their tits because it helps them forget they’re, you know, in prison, and it gives the screws a bit more time to put their feet up and do sudokus. It’s a win-win. It’s hardly a big leap to imagine Marcus and his team doing whatever it takes to make their working lives a bit more peaceful, is it?

  I might ask Marcus when I get the chance, but I doubt he’ll admit it.

  For now, it’s just me, Big Gay Bob and Tiny Tears chilling out in the dining room. I’m actually quite glad that there hasn’t been a lot of chat about this latest round of interviews, because if it was to start now, I can guess the kind of thing Bob would have to say about the hot psychiatrist.

  [Puts hand on cock] I told her to analyse this!

  Instead he says, ‘I miss Debbie.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ I ask.

  I’m still thinking he’s cueing himself up for a crack about his history of rumpy-pumpy with Scottish women, but he just looks sad. ‘Because she was nice.’

  ‘Was she, though?’

  ‘Well, not to everyone, I suppose. Her and Femi didn’t like each other very much and she had that big row with George.’

  ‘What big row?’ I ask.

  ‘A couple of days before she was killed, in one of the exam rooms. I don’t know what they’d fallen out about, but I could hear them shouting.’

  I know Debbie and Femi had clashed a few times, but this is the first I’ve heard about her and George. I should try and ask George about it when I get the chance.

  ‘She was nice to me, though,’ Bob says.

  ‘Why wouldn’t she be? You’re nice.’

  ‘Thanks, Al,’ he says. Then he shakes his head. ‘Not nice enough to stop Sandra leaving.’

  The wife who walked out on him. Because Bob was constantly shagging other women. Or because he was constantly talking about shagging other women. Or because it wasn’t actually women he wanted to shag.

  I’m not even sure Bob knows.

  The best I can manage right now is, ‘Shit happens sometimes, mate.’

  ‘Why would someone kill her?’ Clare asks, from nowhere.

  Bob looks horrified. ‘Someone killed Sandra?’

  I put my hand on his arm and tell him that nobody’s killed his ex-wife and that everything’s OK. Then I turn and give Clare a good, hard look. She’s been sitting watching me for twenty minutes, keeping shtum even though she looks like she’s got plenty to say. Like she’s trying to psych me out, you kno
w what I mean?

  I can hear Perera’s voice: How does that make you feel?

  Properly uncomfortable, if I’m honest.

  What is her fucking game?

  ‘You tell me,’ I say.

  ‘I haven’t got the foggiest,’ she says. ‘How could I?’

  Why would someone kill her?

  All whispery and wide-eyed, she is. Above it all. As if what’s happened is just incomprehensible and she’s asking the most difficult question in the world. Like it’s something she can’t possibly know anything about, while she’s conveniently ignoring the fact that if I’m the obvious suspect – because I thought Debbie killed Kevin and I found the body – then the fact that Debbie was murdered five minutes after she arrived on the ward makes Tiny Tears a pretty close second.

  ‘Oh, come on, don’t be shy,’ I say. ‘If you’ve got a theory then let’s hear it. Obviously you’ll have shared it with the police by now, but don’t keep the rest of us in suspense.’

  It probably came out a little more spiteful than I intended and her eyes start to brim with tears as per bloody usual. I don’t feel bad, though. I’m perfectly happy to sit here and watch her weeping herself to soggy pieces.

  ‘I was just making conversation,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’m interested, that’s all.’ Her head drops but, by sheer force of will she heroically holds the tears at bay. When she looks up again, there’s a hint of mischief, which I do not like one bit. ‘You know who killed her though, don’t you?’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  Even if she intends to tell me, she can’t get the words out through the volley of racking sobs that she simply can’t fight off a moment longer. She splutters and gulps. She presses her hands to her face to staunch the tsunami of convenient waterworks.

  Doesn’t much matter. I’m guessing gobby Lauren said something.

  George appears in the doorway to see what the matter is.

  Jesus H Christ . . .

  I’m certainly not going to tell Clare why Debbie was murdered. I was very happy to pass on what I knew to the police and alert them to the fact that Debbie had a drug-smuggling accomplice with a very good reason to want her silenced, but I don’t see any reason to tell any of these numpties.

  ‘I think it’s because she was ginger,’ I say. ‘Homicidal ginger-phobia.’

  Clare’s still sobbing, but I know she can hear me and she’s got one eye on George approaching with tissues.

  ‘I bloody love ginger girls,’ Bob says. ‘Minges like copper wire.’

  It’s great to have him back.

  There’s half an hour before lunch, so with nothing more exciting on offer, I nip back to my room for a spot of casual Googling. I’ve just typed in memory blackout when my mobile rings. There’s no caller ID showing and whoever’s calling hangs up after I answer, same as last time. A wrong number probably or scammers of some sort, but still, I’d like to know if someone’s pissing me about. Time was, I might have been able to call in a favour from the Forensic Telephone Unit, but those days are long gone. I think about maybe getting Banksy to do it for me, but that would mean asking him a favour and I reckon I’ve used up all my credit.

  Back to Google . . .

  The first page is full of articles that refer to excessive alcohol consumption and a couple mention Valium and Rohypnol. I don’t think anyone’s been slipping either of those into my dinner, so I try again and add not drug or alcohol related into the search. Predictably, this gives me a bunch of pages about memory loss that are specifically about those things but, after scrolling for a while, I find Other Causes of Memory Blackouts.

  I wish I hadn’t bothered.

  Low blood pressure seems to be the most common one and there was nothing wrong with my BP when it was checked yesterday, same as it is every bloody day. So . . .

  Epilepsy, lack of oxygen, psychogenic seizures. WTF?

  I’m fairly sure I’d know if I’d had a psychogenic seizure and, once I’ve looked it up, I’m positive I haven’t. Got to say, though, it sounds exactly like what Shaun had that night in the TV room, and now I’m even more convinced – not that I need to be – that poor dead Debbie would have known just which buttons to press to bring it on.

  She’d managed to shut him up, but imagine how perfect it would have been for her if she’d managed to wipe out Shaun’s memory as well.

  I’m still thinking about the ‘thank you’ note he passed me last night.

  It seems like he thinks I killed Debbie, too.

  It only takes a few more minutes’ rooting through the search results before I come across pages full of articles about memory loss as a symptom of PTSD. I was expecting as much. I skim-read a few, but I’m not convinced that’s what’s going on. They’re all about memory loss as the brain’s coping mechanism, which would mean that, in my case, I would be blanking out the ‘traumatic incident’ because it’s simply too painful to remember. I’m not saying it’s a ridiculous idea, but it’s been a year and a half since Johnno was killed, so could it really be delayed that much? More important, it’s not like that’s what being blanked out, is it? I’ve got no memory at all of flicking bits of fish finger at L-Plate, while I can remember every hideous moment of what happened in that crack-head’s flat.

  The pattern on that carpet. Blue and green and blood-red.

  It doesn’t make any sense at all.

  I close my laptop and decide that Google is brilliant if you want to know which film you’ve seen some actor in, or how old someone is, but that using it to try and work out what might be wrong with you never goes well.

  I leave my room and prowl around a bit, not sure what to do with myself.

  Like a fart in a colander, my mum always says.

  They’ll have started dishing up lunch by now, but I don’t much fancy sitting there chit-chatting with the rest of them. I’m not really up to it. I can usually sweet-talk Eileen into giving me a sandwich or something once the service has finished and they’ve all buggered off, so I decide to leave it a while.

  I walk past George and Femi without saying anything.

  I ignore Tony, who’s drumming on his suitcase by the airlock.

  One of the Informals – who might be called Trevor – is sitting on his own in the music room doing a jigsaw, so I wander in. He’s fifty-ish and wears a suit – without a tie, obviously – like he’s just arrived from an office somewhere. He’s a bit red-faced, like he might be a drinker, but beyond that I’ve no idea what his story is. I’ve seen him around the last few days, but we’ve never really spoken, which is my bad, probably. Normally I prefer to stick with my own crowd, because there are fewer surprises, but right now I’m uneasy about it.

  I want to talk to someone I don’t know at all.

  I sit down and say, ‘All right?’

  His jigsaw’s nearly finished, but he immediately starts breaking it up, not angry or anything, just nice and calm like that’s what he has to do because he’s been interrupted. He needs to start all over again, simple as that. As soon as he’s finished and all the pieces are laid out in front of him again, he looks up and smiles at me.

  ‘All right?’

  FORTY-FOUR

  ‘Sorry about your jigsaw,’ I say.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he says.

  ‘Do you always start again? If you’re interrupted?’

  ‘Those are the rules.’

  ‘It must happen a lot.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve never finished it.’

  ‘Why don’t you just take it to your room and do it in there?’

  He looks at me like that’s just about the stupidest idea he’s ever heard, so I decide not to labour the point.

  ‘You got nowhere to live then?’ I can only presume, because the police had not allowed him to leave after what happened to Debbie, that his abode is . .
. unfixed.

  He shakes his head. ‘Only for a couple of nights at a time.’ He looks around. ‘This isn’t too bad, though.’

  I can’t imagine how bad the place where he was staying before must have been. A freezing, rat-infested hovel. Or a Travelodge.

  ‘Don’t you think things are a bit strange in here right now?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure I’ve been here long enough to tell.’

  ‘I’ve been here quite a while,’ I say. ‘And it feels to me like something bad is coming.’

  He laughs. A high-pitched, girlish giggle.

  ‘Why is that funny?’

  ‘I think something bad has already come, don’t you?’ He laughs again and mimes a frenzied stabbing, like the killer in Psycho.

  ‘Something else,’ I say. ‘Something bad for me.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ he says. ‘Like what?’

  I fight the urge to say, well if I knew what it was I might be able to do something about it. Instead I just shrug and say, ‘Some people in here think I killed Debbie.’ I realise that he might not even have been here long enough to know her name. ‘The nurse.’ Now I’m the one miming the stabbing. ‘In the toilets.’

  He nods. ‘Did you?’

  I stare at him and . . . bingo! All this time I’ve been banging on to Banksy about killers coming in here and pretending to be patients and it suddenly strikes me that an undercover police officer would make a damn sight more sense. I’m annoyed I didn’t think of it before. He comes in a few days after Kevin is killed, because Seddon and his useless team are running out of ideas, then after the second murder there’s all the more reason for him to stay where he is. Get to know the suspects a bit better.

  Fuck, why not?

  It’s definitely what I would have done, back in the day.

  He’s holding a hand up now and shaking his head. ‘No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’

  If I’m right, he’s certainly convincing, but the best UCs are seriously good at this. Problem is, some of them can immerse themselves in their roles a bit too much. I knew an officer one time who was undercover for Serious and Organised and, a month after he’d helped bring down one of the biggest gangs in West London, he was done for armed robbery himself.