by Neil Randall
“Mr Barrowman?” He ushered me over to some chairs in a quiet corner of the reception area. “I understand you’ve got some information concerning a very serious incident that took place over the weekend.”
“That’s correct.”
“Why don’t we sit down and you can tell me all about it?”
In clear, chronological order, I told him about the photograph received at the office yesterday morning, describing the hotel room and corpses in as much detail as I could remember, emphasising the similarity between the crime scene images I’d studied on both the television and the internet.
“And you say the photograph you received is now locked in your desk drawer at work?”
“That’s right. I put it there before I left off yesterday afternoon.” And I went on to explain that my office was just down the road, walking distance, in fact.
“Okay, Mr Barrowman. If you wouldn’t mind waiting here for a few minutes, I’ll just have a quick chat with my direct superior, and then we can drive down there.”
“It’s just through here.”
I led Kendrick into the office, switched on the main light, and walked over to my desk. As I took out my keys, I noticed that the drawer had been forced open; the plastic seal around the wooden frame was all broken. When I rummaged around inside, I realised the photograph had disappeared.
“What? But I—”
Taken aback, I have little recollection of what happened next. All I remember is Kendrick’s deep monotone voice, a barrage of questions: who has access to the office? who else knew about the photograph?
“Please, try and calm down, Mr Barrowman. That’s it. Now, let’s look at this from a purely rational point of view. You say you received the letter yesterday, and that it had a London postmark. That’s correct, isn’t it? So it must’ve been posted on Friday or Saturday, right?”
I nodded – everything he’d just said sounded reasonable, factual, beyond argument.
“But the murders in the hotel room took place in the early hours of Sunday morning. You couldn’t possibly have received a photograph of that particular murder scene, because the incident hadn’t even taken place yet.”
“But – But I swear to you. The scene depicted in the photograph was identical to the one I saw on the television – the way the blood was spattered up against the wall, the bed sheets, the chandelier. And, please, I’m not some weirdo trying to waste your time. I—” the door swung open.
“Morning, Nige.” Michael walked into the room. “How’s it…” he trailed off, whether due to Kendrick’s presence alone or my visible state of distress was difficult say.
“Ah, here’s my line-manager. Michael, I’ve, erm…been talking to the police about that photograph, the one we received here yesterday morning, the one I showed you.”
“What? The prank? The grisly, photo-shopped murder scene?”
While clearly not the answer I wanted, it at least proved I wasn’t making the whole thing up, that I wasn’t the kind of fantasist I’d just so emphatically started to resemble.
“So you’re the other man who saw the photograph, then?”
“That’s right.”
“Then perhaps we’d better refresh your memory.” Kendrick turned to me. “You do have access to the internet here, don’t you?”
“Yes. I’ll switch my computer on now.”
With the three of us crowded around my computer, I accessed the BBC website and clicked onto the story about the murders, so Michael could have a look at the image I’d seen last night.
“Well?” asked Kendrick.
“Erm, yeah, it does look kind of similar, but I couldn’t say it was the exact same hotel room – not for certain. I only looked at the photograph for a moment or two. And like I said before, presumed it was a practical joke.”
Kendrick asked me a few more questions. All of which I answered with clarity, such was the relief at having the vast majority of my story verified.
“At some stage, Mr Barrowman, we might need you to come into the station and make a full statement. In all likelihood, though, this is just a horrible, horrible coincidence. In all likelihood, someone, like Mr Oliver said, has attempted to play a sick practical joke on you, a joke that has quite incredibly mirrored true life events. The phone call you received at the end of the day would suggest that’s the case. With regards to your desk drawer, the fact that someone, most probably a colleague, perhaps the individual who perpetrated the prank, has, in effect broken into the office and damaged council property is something you might want to handle internally, perhaps through your personnel department. For now, I’ll put all of the information you’ve given me into an informal report and pass it on to the team in charge of the investigation.”
“No, no, Mrs Morris, from this office we’re only responsible for… How long have I worked here? Eight years… No, I don’t consider myself to be a jobsworth. Okay, if that’s how you feel, by all means, write to the Director. My name’s Nigel Barrowman, Technical Assistant, the Risk and Assessment section. Well, I can only hope it won’t come to that, to me losing my job, I mean. But you’re well within your rights to complain if you think…”
She slammed the phone down.
Blood pounding in my temples I looked down at my desk, at the complaint form, the one I’d been aimlessly doodling on while talking on the telephone, where I’d sketched out something close (or so my memory told me) to the wounds on the dead women’s stomachs, the bloody marks that had been scraped across their skin – I was sure of it. Each intersecting line resembled the image that had become embedded in my mind. Only now it was there in front of me. On paper it looked more like an object or an animal than any character or set of characters from an unfamiliar alphabet.
The phone started to ring again.
“Risk and Assessment. How can I help?”
“Is this Mr Nigel Barrowman?”
“That’s correct.”
“Oh, good. Hope you don’t mind me contacting you at work, Mr Barrowman. This regards a, erm…personal matter. And my calling is more than a little, how can I put it? – hopeful than anything else. I’m looking to track down an old acquaintance of yours, someone who, like you, was once an outpatient at St. Peter’s hospital.”
Mention of St. Peter’s completely threw me. However minor or long ago, I didn’t like being reminded of my psychiatric treatment by a stranger over the telephone.
“Erm, yes, I was, many years ago now. How can I help? What’s this all about?”
“Well, my organisation is trying to track down a member of the same counselling group. And please, rest assured – there’s nothing sinister or criminal involved here. We’re just concerned about their welfare.”
“Who’s welfare? Which patient are we talking about?”
“Jeffrey Fuller,” he replied, saying a name I hadn’t heard, or wanted to hear in many years. “As you probably remember, Jeffrey was a very troubled individual, someone with a lot of, erm…issues, someone not altogether equipped to look after himself. He’s been missing for several days now, and it’s not like him to just drop out of sight, to not contact his loved ones. So I don’t suppose you’ve heard from him recently, have you, Mr Barrowman? From what we gather, the treatment you undertook was rather unconventional, and it’s our understanding that the group as a whole developed quite a strong bond back then.”
“No. I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I haven’t spoken to Jeffrey in over ten years.”
Chapter Four
When I got home from work, I hunted out an old photograph album. Inside were pictures of the counselling group the anonymous caller (and in the days that followed, I cursed myself for not having asked for his name) mentioned earlier. As always, it felt strange looking back over this particular chapter of my life, seeing shots of twelve awkward young people dressed all in black and with questionable eighties’ haircuts, mainly because I still wasn’t sure how I felt about the process as a whole.
To understand why I sought out treat
ment, I have to go back to my school years, in particular, the months after my final exams. An only child, brought up in a very stuffy, intellectual atmosphere, I spent my formative years surrounded by books. To gain my parents’ approval I became an extremely academically minded boy, a voracious reader, a devourer of the written word (to this day, I still read over one hundred books a year). At high school, I dazzled teachers with the breadth and range of my knowledge. There was talk of me going on to Oxford or Cambridge. But when it came to my final examinations, examinations I’d revised incredibly hard for, I cracked under the pressure. I couldn’t handle the idea of failure. No sooner had I read the first question on the exam paper than my mind went completely blank. On one extreme occasion I ran out of the hall in tears.
My final results were a disaster. I re-sat and performed even worse the second time around. All of which led to years of depression, anti-social behaviour, a serious eating disorder.
Back then there weren’t many specialised support groups or treatment structures in place. After many fruitless, frustrating visits to therapists, I got involved with a group of outpatients at Saint Peter’s, taking part in an alternative form of treatment. This was a purely voluntary support group, set up by a young psychotherapist called Dr Rabie, or Ray as he insisted we call him. At the time, he could only have been in his late thirties. An intense, highly intelligent man, he had nevertheless cultivated a laid-back counselling style, where he was particularly adept at getting young people, either hostile to his methods, the whole idea of counselling, or too shy and withdrawn to feel comfortable talking in front of others, into speaking about ourselves and our problems.
The group consisted of myself, Michelle Rouse, Gloria Daniels, Jane Lines, Helen King, Clare Ferguson, Riordan Leach, Cara Clarke, Emma Macpherson, Wendy Lomas, Patricia Gregory and Jeffrey Fuller – all in our late teens, early twenties, all mental patients who hadn’t responded to traditional treatments, young people who’d sunk into depression, who’d attempted suicide, self-harmed or turned to drink and drugs, young people with problems whose cause and effect had never really been satisfactorily reconciled.
The counselling sessions themselves lasted for around two hours (although Ray always kept things fluid: if we hit an early impasse, he’d call time on the meeting, if we still had things to contribute, he was happy to let the discussion run to its natural conclusion). In a musty-smelling room in an old public building, we sat and talked about our problems, discussing ways in which we could best function in everyday life. In one session, Helen might talk about her self-harming, how dark moods would often overwhelm her, how she’d sometimes hear voices telling her to take out her frustrations on herself, how relieved she felt when she dug a knife or pair of scissors into her skin. In another session Riordan might talk about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, how her father and uncle had systematically molested her since the age of ten or eleven, how it had turned her into a nervous, bitter, untrusting wreck, and how she couldn’t face up to the world, let alone the idea of a relationship, of being touched or kissed, or even in close proximity to another human being, without drinking copious amounts of strong alcohol.
Or I might try and explain why I’d stopped eating, how food had become the only thing I felt I could control, how pushing a plate of food aside, was, to a very small degree, me reasserting some kind of mastery over my own fate.
Undoubtedly the most volatile and unpredictable member of the group was Jeffrey Fuller. While we were never particularly close, there was, as the only two males in the group, an unspoken solidarity between us, a bond. Even if, in the early sessions, his constant sniping at people as they tried to talk about their problems, his juvenile disruptions, the way he would burp or sigh exasperatedly or blow raspberries, appalled me.
“We’re all going to die soon, so what’s the point in trying to understand anything?” was his favourite saying, no more than a defence mechanism, a way for him to deal with his own insecurities, the problems he was struggling to handle. It took several weeks before he finally spoke frankly about his personal situation, and why he himself attended the sessions. With a certain sadistic relish, he told us about the morning he attacked his mother with a knife, forcing himself on her, how she pleaded with him to stop, and how cold and indifferent he had felt during and after the incident.
As if ashamed of his disclosure, he went on the offensive again, spitting out a series of caustic, rhetorical questions in his thin, whiny voice:
“Why would a son do something like that to his own mother? Because he’s evil? Because he’s got the devil inside? Because those pesky voices in his head told him to? Or because he just wanted to get laid?”
After that session, for shock value alone, he often asked me if I’d ever considered raping a woman at knife point, or if I’d ever considered sleeping with my own mother (“if it’s good enough for Oedipus, it’s good enough for me”.). One time, when I’d accepted a lift home in his car, he insisted on cruising the streets, pulling over to the side of the road and propositioning girls, telling them that we were after some action. But he only seemed interested in continuing the conversation if they showed not the slightest bit of interest, and by that I mean, if a girl or group of girls (or young women, I should probably say) responded positively to his advances, he simply drove away. If they got angry and told him to leave them alone, he persisted, became abusive, threatening almost, telling them he wanted to show them what sleeping with a real man was like, how he wanted to screw them until they couldn’t walk straight anymore.
I turned a few pages of the photograph album, coming across a picture of Jeffrey and Michelle, in the woods adjoining the hospital grounds, near some picnic tables, a place we often used to congregate, especially in the summer months when the weather was nice. Both had startled, almost angry looks on their faces, and were standing quite a distance apart, unnaturally so, as if this photograph, or perhaps each other’s company, was the last place in the world they wanted to be. This concerned me for two reasons: One: because I couldn’t remember ever seeing this picture before. Two: because it stirred up a lot of old memories about Michelle, my only ever real, proper, serious girlfriend. Having met during the sessions, we went out for five years, we moved in together. In many ways, we provided each other with a necessary crutch, to help deal with the kinds of everyday issues ordinary people wouldn’t find even remotely problematic. But we were far too young and inexperienced to understand the essential truth, the codependent dynamic of our relationship, how our particular conditions could be worsened, our symptoms exacerbated, purely by spending so much time together. After a serious relapse, Michelle’s new therapist suggested that we take a break, that perhaps our relationship was holding us both back. That was five years ago. Only without a big argument, a nasty scene, the usual kind of things couples go through when splitting up, I never quite accepted that our time as a couple had ended.
Chapter Five
On evenings like this, when I felt distant and preoccupied and not in any kind of mood to cook, I often went to the fish and chip shop on Goodmayer’s Road. It was run by a doddery old Chinese couple, whose constant bickering had been a source of entertainment to customers for years, even if they couldn’t understand a word of what husband and wife were saying to each other.
Tonight, when I pushed open the door to all the familiar sensations: the frying fat smell, the television noise from out back, the harsh overhead lighting, I was so distracted, caught up in my own thoughts, I didn’t notice that someone was sitting on one of the chairs by the plate-glass window, waiting for their food order. Not until I heard a voice that I recognised from somewhere did I turn my head.
“Fancy seeing you here.” Liz Green stood up and walked over. “Must be fate, hey?”
“Erm, yeah, I–I only came here on a whim. Didn’t really fancy cooking at this time of night.”
“I know what you mean. Not the healthiest of choices, but if you can’t be arsed, you can’t be arsed.” She smiled.
“And say, if you ain’t ordered yet, do you fancy maybe nipping to the pub down the road? You can buy me that drink, if you want.”
“Yeah, okay. But what about your food? Won’t it –?”
“Oh, it’ll be all right.” She waved my words away. “I’ll get Mr Wang to shove it in the cabinet, keep it warm for a bit.”
In a quiet corner of the almost deserted pub, Liz told me all about her life, how she shared a flat with a friend not too far from mine, how she’d been single for a while now and didn’t go out all that much, and how she was going to night school, training to become a counsellor, doing voluntary work for The Samaritans, and helping out at a shelter for the homeless.
“So you live just across the way, then?” she asked. “Springfield Road? Yeah, a few years back, I had a mate who lived down the bottom end, near the butchers. And you work at the council offices?”
“That’s right.” And I told her about my job in Risk and Assessment, the stupid things I had to deal with each day, all the painful, comi-tragic nonsense, how much stick I got from the general public, how petty people could be sometimes, always trying it on.
“Bloody hell! That’s sounds like a bit of a nightmare. Don’t know if I’d like all the abuse. Having to get up and go to work is bad enough in itself.”
“Yeah, it is.”
The first drink, the conversation had passed far too quickly. I was really enjoying myself, and really wanted to ask Liz out on a proper date.
“Could I, erm…have your phone number? Maybe we could go out sometime.”
“Course you can. I think I’ve got a pen in my handbag somewhere. If you’ve got a scrap of paper floating ‘round, we could be in business.”
I rummaged through my pockets, pulling out a piece of paper, the complaint form I’d been doodling on at work earlier.
“Hold up.” Liz pointed to the pattern I’d sketched. “What’s that all about?”