Hermit

by S. R. White

  She opened the door and nodded at the corner of the room. ‘Don’t forget to pick up your litter before you go, Mr Whittler. You can wait in reception or leave the station. Up to you. Good afternoon.’

  Chapter 32

  Earlville Mercy was a regional institution. Started way-back-when by some nuns, it had gradually morphed into a secular spine for the area. Other public bodies were mistrusted, abused or ignored; but Earlville was proud to have the area’s public hospital. Old or young, rich or poor, postcode irrelevant – Earlville Mercy took them all: one of the few levellers uniting the region.

  The original building had been a cottage hospital, but that elegant sandstone edifice was now the visitor reception and held several rooms of communications equipment. Above the main doorway the carving told of mercy for all. The words floated serenely between a unicorn and a dragon, as if to signify that such an outcome was pure fantasy. It was a facade, in every sense.

  Beyond the main wing, units and wards had been added as temporary capacity that everyone knew would become permanent. Like much of the region, any part built before the Second World War was subtle, balanced and showed local craftsmanship in stone and plaster. Anything constructed after the war was timber or clinker-brick: thrown up by the cheapest-bid supplier, to the lowest cost.

  Rainer had tracked down the incident mentioned by Dan Mathers.

  From the original report, he’d uncovered that Natalie Brewer was the woman who’d skulked around the Whittler farm just after it was sold. It was no doubt routine back then, but with the benefit of hindsight, her presence at that place and that time now seemed significant. At the very least, she apparently knew the Jeb Whittler of old and Dana was looking for potential validation of the insulin story.

  Natalie was a nurse who’d flipped mainly between pre-natal, diabetes and renal clinics around the state over the past twenty years. A call to the state’s nursing board showed Natalie’s return to Earlville two years ago, after over a decade in the city. Rainer was noticing that the town had a strange pull on its former residents, despite its lack of beauty or whimsical charm. The tug was deeper and more heartfelt than simply low property prices: they slid back to Earlville in later life as though the rest of the world were too much to bear, and they’d take familiarity over absolutely anything else.

  They found a table in a corner of the canteen area, which Rainer was surprised to find appeared to be closing down for the night. Five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. In another corner three doctors laughed raucously at their own jokes, desperately stealing glimpses at the one nurse at their table to see who was impressing.

  Natalie had recently downshifted from ER to the Stoma unit. Now she was in her forties, Emergency was too much hassle. Because of what it did, it was at the forefront of hospital politics. The peak times were chaotic, challenging and, despite the trauma, it was fun. But the quieter moments – when adrenaline junkies had too much time and too little that was urgent enough – became the setting for petty squabbles. Arguments about shifts, about perceived slights, about who was screwing who; she found the rumour and innuendo both exhausting and pathetic. So she’d switched to running Stoma – more regular hours, a smaller team; patients who were grateful and, by and large, stoically courteous. Something about a physical opening in the body that shouldn’t be there – and the equipment around it – made people humble and accepting. Hard for patients to be on their high horse, when they needed someone to show them how to empty a colostomy bag.

  ‘What do the night shift do?’ Rainer asked, nodding towards a shutter that squealed as it closed access to the refrigerated goods.

  Natalie was intelligent but somehow wearied by her own life. Rainer speculated she’d made some poor decisions and had never quite escaped the consequences. She had a sparkling awareness, ill matched to her pallid skin and enduring fatigue.

  ‘Oh, there’s dozens of machines around the place, Officer. If you work shifts, what you really need are healthy, nutritionally balanced meals to help you cope with the body clock. So what they offer you are sugar-loaded fats.’ She eye-rolled. ‘Go figure.’

  Rainer smiled. ‘Please call me Rainer. So, as I said on the phone, we’re interested in Jeb Whittler, specifically in the time around his brother’s disappearance, and again when he sold the farm. Let’s start with how you met Jeb.’

  Natalie put her chin into a cupped hand and sighed. He could tell it was not going to be a happy reminiscence.

  ‘Urgh, mainly by being an idiot. This is nearly twenty years ago, mind you. I was a stupid little cow back then. Young, dumb, and full of . . . crap. Any sense I have now was learned the hard way. So I was a perky little nurse, thinking that since I was saving life and limb, I should be treated royally by all and sundry. If I met that version of me now, I’d end up slapping the little madam. You get the picture. I won’t bore you with how I became that kind of person, but I was.’

  She stopped suddenly, as though the memory was saturated by loss. Just as abruptly, she resumed. ‘I’d met Jeb occasionally at parties. He was always very popular, but I could never work out why. I mean, he’s an odd looker and lacks charm. Have you seen him?’

  Rainer grimaced. ‘Mainly on web pages or camera, not for real. Not a face that sells calendars, is it?’

  Natalie smiled but kept her tinge of ingrained sadness. ‘Agreed. But at that age, you take your cues from everyone else, and they all looked so happy to see him. That mystery intrigued me, I suppose: I mistook it for enigmatic charisma. Ha. Gullible little fool.’

  The two staff who’d closed the food area now drifted away, each too engrossed in their phones even to bid farewell to each other. Rainer always found hospitals brutally impersonal, despite their work being deeply intimate.

  ‘Anyway, we started going out, and at first it was okay. Then I began to realise that he was popular because he was the party connection, the supplier. Now it all made sense – everyone whooped when he arrived because of what he brought with him. By then, though, he assumed I was his girlfriend and therefore his property. He’s that type of person. The arm around the shoulder, but the fingers dig into the collar bone? The silent volcano? I’d spot it a mile off now, but at the time I didn’t realise until too late. He thought he owned me, and I thought he did, too.’

  ‘Was he ever violent towards you?’ Rainer had seen footage of Jeb being interviewed by Mike, and got the impression of a simmering anger.

  Natalie paused to spit out some gum into the wrapping. She looked around for a waste bin that wasn’t there, then shrugged and simply held the wrapper in her hand.

  ‘Not . . . immediately, no. I mean, yes, but . . . ah crap, sorry. Look, Jeb was huge, compared to me. At that age I was this tall but only half as wide, if you can imagine. It felt like Jeb could put his hand on my head and press, and the ground would swallow me up. He could snap any bone in my body; I felt like a matchstick. So there was always this, uh, implied threat. He didn’t have to shake his fist or tell me what he might do. Didn’t need to be said. It was always there; off our shoulders, all the time. Over time the shadow became real, but it all spiralled so slowly I barely noticed. Each bit seemed inevitable from the previous bit; normal, somehow.’

  She was visibly shaken. Rainer nodded.

  ‘Other than that implied threat, how would you characterise the relationship?’

  ‘How would I characterise it? Well, it was a one-way street. I’d be at his beck and call because I was scared of him, and he’d ignore me whenever it suited. I had to wait for his telephone call, whether it came or not. Woe betide me if he tested that and I failed to answer. He made plenty of money from the dealing, so he spent a fair bit bringing down, um, escorts from the city. He had a highly pornified brain, and the cash to live it out. Does that paint a picture?’

  ‘Very much so. We’re say, a year before Nathan disappears. That would be 2003 or so. What do you recall from then?’

  Natalie squirmed in her chair. It seemed to Rainer that part of her discomfort
was having to admit how much Jeb had controlled her.

  ‘Some time before his little brother went missing I made a mistake. Can’t recall exactly when. Uh, maybe December of that year? Don’t quote me on that. Jeb kept bugging me about acquiring stuff for him, and he wasn’t going to keep taking no for an answer. At first he wanted Valium, Temazepam, that kind of thing. He kept pushing – what drugs I could get, what they did, how they might be useful to him. He wanted something: no point dating a nurse unless he was getting some product. I told him about insulin, about how patients froze if they were given a certain dosage. I thought he’d find it funny. Jesus – he knew all about it. It was stomach-churning, how matter-of-fact he was. But he simply told me – ordered me – to get some.’

  Rainer thought about interrupting to ask about protocols and security – how she actually got the insulin. But he felt the mechanics of the theft weren’t the key issue. Dana and Mike wanted to know what was done, not how.

  ‘I’m not proud of it, Officer. Rainer, sorry. Not proud at all. Ashamed, in fact. It was simply the lesser of two evils. By asking me for it he made me a potential problem if we split up, so there was that future threat as well as the current one. It was easier to get hold of insulin illegally than face the consequences of refusing him. I was weak, I was thinking self-preservation. Didn’t even feel like a choice.’

  ‘How often did you do this, Natalie?’

  She looked off towards the garden that separated the canteen from the back of Intensive Care.

  ‘Look, Natalie. We’re not interested in prosecuting the possible theft of some insulin nearly twenty years ago. Your job isn’t at risk here. But it’s very important to us to get your impression of what happened around that insulin, and what Jeb was like at that time.’

  Natalie hesitated and closed her eyes.

  ‘He wanted to tell me what he was doing with it – as if it was some funny anecdote from being on holiday. I’d already guessed.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘It was vile. I begged him not to speak about it. At least – here was me, being a total coward – at least he wasn’t doing it to me. But it would surely only be a matter of time. I knew enough about how his mind worked to understand it was coming.’

  ‘And what did he say he was doing?’

  She rubbed the side of her face. ‘His parents. He was doing his parents. Freezing them, then doing all sorts of weird crap with them. Taking porno pictures, playing dress-up. Humiliating them, I suppose. Being Jeb, but to a whole new level. Like I said, it was only a matter of time before he tried someone else. Me, or his brother, or both.

  ‘After, I don’t know, eight or nine months of this, I made plans to escape from Jeb. By then I had bruises on my throat, bits of hair missing from my scalp; classic signs of escalation. Always my fault, of course. Something I’d made him do, naturally. People noticed – they gave me this whimpering look, as if I was some kind of run-over kitten they wouldn’t cross the road to help. I was terrified, you see: scared to leave, scared to stay. I’m sure you’ve seen other women in that kind of plight. It was the sort of thing I never thought would happen to me, until it happened to me. Until I was that victim; I was that trapped little bird in his closed fist.’

  Rainer passed her the water bottle and she took a deep swig. Her hand still shook.

  ‘I’m sorry, Natalie, I don’t mean this to be difficult, but we need to bottom out some things. Were you there when Nathan left?’

  She shook her head. ‘I assumed he was still there when I ran. I moved interstate, all in one night when I thought Jeb was away. A friend of my sister had an apartment across the border. She was going travelling, wanted a house-sitter for six months. I dropped a letter at the farm gate and scrammed. Hoped to God that Jeb didn’t follow me, track me down. He could have, easily: I wasn’t hidden that well. I got lucky. Turns out that was the night after Nate ran, too. So I guess everyone was bailing on Jeb at the same time.’

  Rainer frowned. ‘How do you know it was the night after Nathan left?’

  ‘I had some friends I’d asked to keep an eye on Jeb after I went: you know, see if he was sniffing around the old apartment, asking after me, and so on. I gave myself way too much credit. I was only a scaredy-cat to play with when Jeb couldn’t buy company. He couldn’t have cared less that I was gone. But anyway, one of those friends said later that Jeb had been riding around that day looking for his brother, putting out the word.’

  ‘So Jeb wasn’t worried about you telling tales out of school?’

  ‘Apparently not. He knew I was terrified of him. I imagine his ego thought that would always stick; that I’d never tell, and he was always safe. I imagine that’s how his mind still works.’

  Rainer thought about it. Everything tallied with Nathan’s interview – everything. There was no way Natalie and Nathan could have co-ordinated; the pictures fitted because they were the same pictures.

  ‘So you’d escaped. Why go back months later, a few days after Jeb had sold the farm?’

  Natalie scratched at the table’s surface.

  ‘That friend who was keeping an eye out for me? Worked in real estate. Told me Jeb was selling. I was sure Jeb still had some of the last insulin I stole. He wasn’t using as much in those last months before I went, so he probably still had some on the farm. Or maybe, old packaging lying around. I couldn’t risk it, Rainer. That stuff comes in packets with reference numbers on the side – it’s traceable. I could still have lost my job, my career. I heard Jeb had shot through and moved out in a hurry. Thought he might have left behind something incriminating – well, deadly for me, anyway. My friend said there were a few days before the new owners arrived. I went back when I knew Jeb wasn’t there, had a check around.’

  ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Two packets, and some used syringes in the rubbish. I threw some of the other rubbish around, made it look like animals got into the bags. Burned everything incriminating. You said you didn’t need to know . . .’

  ‘We don’t, no.’ Rainer glanced at his notes, trying to think what Dana would ask. He turned to face Natalie again.

  ‘Final question, Natalie. Are you okay? Is there something we can do to make you feel safer?’

  The question buckled her: part surprise, part overwhelmed by the humanity of it.

  ‘Oh. Oh, Jesus. Um, no. Thanks. No. Well, you could shoot Jeb, that would be real handy. But no, not really. I’ve been back two years and I’ve never even seen him across the street. I’m uh, older and wiser now. Haven’t been drawn into that sort of garbage in a very long time.’ She collected herself. ‘But thank you, anyway. I mean it – thank you.’

  Chapter 33

  Mike was waiting outside the door; the uniform was standing sentry, ready to escort Jeb Whittler back to reception. Dana raised an eyebrow at Mike and they started walking towards her office. Her pulse was vivid; she felt a rush of heat and relief.

  ‘There you go; isn’t he quite something?’ asked Mike. ‘Now that’s a man who could stab someone in the darkness. And he’s been to the store. And we know that he knew Lou.’

  ‘Yes, all that, Mikey. Plus, after talking to him I’m finding it easy to accept what was said about him: the bullying, the control, the insulin. All of it. He gave off that . . . danger. In waves.’

  People like Jeb Whittler generally didn’t faze Dana. They were a known quantity: a threat whose main pathways were easy to spot. Costlier were the insidious, the undermining, the covertly political; the ones who presented two very different faces when it suited them. In the confines of an interview room she could pick them out. In the real world, she found it tough.

  ‘He didn’t mention knowing Lou was dead,’ said Mike. ‘He must know, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Dana. ‘Unless he’s avoided the news. The radio reports said it was Jensen’s Store; one man dead. Jeb has to make that calculation. He would avoid talking about it if he was involved, of course.’

  A corridor light was flickering; it felt like a stab behind her
eyes.

  ‘To be fair,’ said Mike, ‘there’s a number of reasons he might avoid mentioning that. You think he was there? You think his brother is covering for him? Or is Jeb doing the covering?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘But Jeb’s curious enough to stick around. I have nothing to hold him on right now, but he won’t go far. He’ll be lurking around trying to find out more, which buys us a little time. Although you said you thought he has a source here?’

  ‘Yup. Peripheral, though. Not well placed. A good source would know we haven’t charged Nathan Whittler with anything.’

  They passed Lucy on the way to the office. Dana could see she had been viewing a silent feed from Interview Three. It was common practice within the unit: a standard safety measure, no matter who was involved, or how harmless they were assumed to be. Lucy looked troubled.

  In the office, Dana sat and massaged her kneecap. ‘For all that, I don’t know that we’re any further on. Jeb flinched at the allegations, and he didn’t have a ready or persuasive response. But all we’ve got is hearsay. So we’ve proved nothing.’

  Mike leaned against the wall. ‘Indeedy. But your gut instinct?’

  ‘My instinct won’t stand up to prosecutors, Mikey, let alone a trial. Jeb genuinely didn’t know what happened to his little brother when he ran.’

  She thought for a moment about the process. A sibling goes missing – what would be the first steps?

  ‘Jeb knew he’d gone off somewhere, but the effort to track him down was a cover. If he’d really wanted to find his brother, he would have called us on day one. Hiring a PI is a fig-leaf; it’s a sop in case anyone asks. Like offering a reward: it looks like something major but it really isn’t helping. If I didn’t know Whittler was alive and kicking, I’d be asking Jeb and thinking murder.’

  ‘He really had no idea that his brother didn’t know about the parents. You shook him when you said that.’