The Handshaker

by David Robinson

  “So what are you planning?” she asked.

  Croft’s anticipatory enthusiasm burned through his words. “A sixties concert. An entire series of bands, some of them quite well known, others I’ve never come across, and they’ll be belting out everything from Elvis to the Beatles, Cliff and the Shadows to Matthew Southern Comfort. Sadly, my wife doesn’t share my enthusiasm and I’ll be alone, unless…”

  His childlike eagerness persuaded her and in the end, she spent New Year’s Eve with him while his wife was with family and friends. Both Croft and Trish were worse for wear through drink by the early hours and it was mid-morning on the first day of the New Year when they made love for the first time. Three months later, his wife was history and Trish was with him when he secured the deal for Oaklands, and a month after that, he gave up his flat and moved in with her as a temporary arrangement until Oaklands was ready. Since then they had been all but inseparable.

  All but. Now, thanks to this maniac, not only were they temporarily parted, but unless someone did something, it would become permanent...

  Croft snapped himself out of the nostalgia. This would not help him find Trish. Taking out his mobile phone, he rang his doctor and had a brief argument with the receptionist, before she put him through.

  While he waited for Christopher Parsons to answer, Croft thought back on his privileged life. He could not remember ever having visited an NHS doctor. As a boy, the family had made private health care arrangements. Even at University, scraping by on a student income after his father had refused to supplement his meagre funds, the healthcare had nevertheless still been available to him, and as an adult, he had taken out similar insurances for himself.

  Croft had never given the matter any serious consideration. It was not something to cause him any guilt, it was not a reason to lord it over others, it just was.

  Now he had cause to be grateful for it. Had he been ringing an NHS surgery, no amount of argument would have got him through to a doctor.

  “Felix, good to hear from you.” Parsons’ voice, as cheerful as ever, snapped him from his thoughts once more. “What’s the trouble? Bust a few knuckles in your karate classes.” The doctor laughed.

  Croft did not find it funny. Aside from anything else, he’d given up karate years ago. “I’m not ringing about me, Chris, but Trish.”

  “Oh.” Parsons was suddenly more serious. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Nothing wrong,” Croft assured him, “but I need some information.”

  The doctor was suddenly more guarded. “Now, come on, Felix, you know the rules. Patient confidentiality. I can’t tell you anything about Trish.”

  “You haven’t heard me out,” Croft insisted. “After her father died, you referred her to a counsellor. I need to know who that counsellor was.”

  Parsons’ discomfort turned to stern obduracy. “I can’t do it, Felix. Anyway, the counsellor will not tell you anything.”

  Croft stood his ground. “Not good enough, Chris. Trish has been abducted, and the kidnapper has got to her through hypnosis.”

  He paused, imagining Parsons’ pliable features, twisting from the professionally cautious practitioner to the horrified confidante, taking in news of such shocking proportions that it was almost too difficult to handle.

  “Aside from me,” Croft went on, “the only other person who could have hypnotised her is the counsellor. Now I need to know who he is.”

  “But . . . kidnapped . . . but . . . the police –”

  Croft cut off the disjointed thinking. “The Scarbeck police are looking for her, and it won’t be long before they get around to you. Chris, I don’t want to waste time while they apply for a warrant. Every second could be vital. Now, for Christ’s sake, give me the name and address of the counsellor.”

  “Hold on,” the doctor ordered. There was a delay. In the background, Croft could hear the tap of computer keys as Parsons sought the name and address. “I always use the same counsellor,” he muttered as a way of letting Croft know he was still there. “She’s one of the best.”

  Croft’s heart sank. “She?” if the counsellor was a woman, then the counsellor would not be The Handshaker.

  “Yes,” said Parsons distractedly. He was still obviously searching the computer files. “Ah, here she is. Evelyn Kearns. 62 Formby Avenue, Scarbeck. Evelyn is the bees knees when it comes to bereavement counselling but whether she’ll be willing to talk to you…”

  He trailed off. Croft was not listening anyway. He was busily scribbling out the address. “62 Formby Avenue,” he repeated. “Thanks, Chris.”

  “Felix...”

  Croft cut the connection. Slipping the phone into his pocket, he hurried back to the lounge, opened a drawer in the lower display cabinet and took out an A-Z street map of Scarbeck.

  “Why don’t you get yourself a satnav?” he grumbled to himself. It was non-starter. Satnav would go well with his shiny executive saloon, but it was anathema to his fanaticism for the 60s.

  Moments later, he had the street fixed in his memory and was on his way out again.

  He hit the familiar jam at Pearman’s, but this time he was not driving into Scarbeck, and instead turned off to the left, behind Pearman’s Supermarket, after which the junction was named, into a forest of high density, terraced housing, cruising slowly along the streets, until he came to Formby Avenue, where he turned left again and crawled along the street, watching the numbers, 20, 30, 54, 62. He slotted the car into a nearby space, climbed out and locked up.

  It was a house no different to any of the others along the street. A three-storey, Edwardian built, mid-town house, once the residence of upper working class mill managers, now snapped up by working class men and women eager to get a first foot on the property ladder. The main difference between this and its neighbours, he noticed as he walked up the path, was a brass plate beneath the doorbell. Evelyn Kearns, Counsellor, it read in stylised script.

  He rang the bell. Moments later, he detected movement behind the frosted glass of the door. The lock snapped back and the door opened.

  “Yes?”

  Evelyn was about 50 years old, her fair hair brushed neatly into a professional sweep keeping it away from her clear skin. She was modestly dressed in dark trousers and a warm jumper.

  “My name is Felix Croft,” he introduced himself. “I’m Patricia Sinclair’s partner.”

  Evelyn was puzzled. “Whose partner?”

  Now Croft became worried. “Patricia Sinclair. Barrister. She was referred by our GP, Christopher Parsons.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr Croft, but I’ve never heard of her.”

  28

  Millie finished an adequate chicken tikka masala, pushed her plate away and they stepped out into the rear beer garden where, beneath the smoke shelter, she lit a cigarette under Croft’s disapproving eye.

  Ignoring his grim fixation on her smoke, she asked, “So what happened then?”

  He gave a weary shrug. “Evelyn insisted she had never heard of Trish. I had a hell of a job getting her to let me in.”

  That was putting it mildly. Croft had stood on the doorstep for the better part of ten minutes haggling with Evelyn, who obdurately refused to let him in. He had been about to give up when in a moment of inspiration, he mentioned his bestseller, Imagine Your Weight Away, and Evelyn wilted.

  “I have a copy of it,” she said with delight.

  After checking the photograph on the front cover and comparing it with the reality before her, she finally relented and let him in. “I only have a short time,” she insisted. “I have two clients this afternoon.”

  Settling into a comfortably furnished consulting room, he outlined the position to her, keeping the information to a minimum, telling her only what she needed to know; Trish had gone missing and there were no clues other than the medical trail to Dr. Parsons and to Evelyn.

  “I’d like to help, Mr Croft,” she said, “but I really have no idea who we’re talking about.”

  “You do know
Christopher Parsons?” he asked.

  “Of course. Dr Parsons has always referred those patients needing counselling to me, but he’s never referred your partner, or if he did, she never arrived.”

  Croft was all at sea. He controlled the feverish meanderings of his mind. “How does the referral system work?”

  “Dr Parsons rings me,” Evelyn explained. “I take the name and details and give him an appointment date and time. I make a note of them in my diary. As far as I’m aware, he then gives the patient my name, address and telephone number.”

  Croft clutched at the straw. “Could you check your diary, please. Just to satisfy me?”

  Evelyn pursed her lips, studied him for a moment, and in the light of his obvious worry, got up, crossed to her desk and took out her diary.

  “When would it have been?” she asked thumbing through the pages.

  “Let’s see.” Croft engaged his brain. “Her father died in May, so it would have been mid-June, possibly early July... I think.”

  Evelyn slowed down as she trawled the pages from mid-June to early July. “You see. Nothing… oh wait. Here she is. Tuesday, July 19th. Yes, Dr Parsons did refer her, but she never kept the appointment. She can’t have done. I would have remembered.”

  Croft’s suspicions began to rise. He cast an eye on her desktop computer. “What kind of records do you keep?”

  Evelyn followed his eyes. “Computerised, mainly. I maintain a record card for every client, but it has only the bare bones: name, address, contact details, and the particular problem for which they need counselling.”

  Croft looked worriedly to the computer, then back at her. He was practically pleading. “Would you check them, please?”

  Evelyn’s face screwed up in disapproval.

  “Please,” he begged. “Trish may be in danger, and we have no other lead on her.”

  With a sigh, Evelyn acquiesced and moved behind the desk to boot up the computer. While waiting for it, she turned to a filing cabinet, and began to sift through the card index in the upper drawer.

  “It really is a waste of time, Mr Croft. I remember all my clients and if Ms Sinclair had come to me…” She trailed off once more. Her brow knitted in a deep frown. “Odd.”

  “What is it?” Croft’s hopes rose briefly.

  Evelyn did not answer. Instead she turned back to the computer, and shuffled the mouse around its mat, clicking the buttons. Presently she sat back in her chair, staring at the screen, still puzzled but deep in thought.

  “This is most strange.”

  “What?” heart constantly rising in hope before sinking into fresh despair, Croft moved to the rear of the desk and leaned over her shoulder. “What’s strange?”

  Evelyn pointed at the screen. “Referred directly to G.B.”

  Croft had already read it and taken in Trish’s name and notes on her bereavement problems. “Who is G.B?” he asked.

  Evelyn shrugged. “I don’t know. Obviously, Mr Croft, she came to me, and I have her referred straight to this person, but I don’t know who G.B. is. I really don’t understand it. I never refer clients other than back to the GP, and only then when I feel my progress has been inadequate. According to this,” she indicated the record card, “Ms Sinclair visited me just the once and I referred her straight away.” She pondered the problem for a moment. “The only conclusion I can reach is that she asked me to refer her. You have no idea who G.B. might be?”

  “None,” he admitted, “and Trish would be unlikely to ask you to refer her. If she wanted to see a specific counsellor, she would have asked Parsons.”

  ***

  Croft eventually came away from Evelyn’s at 4:30 and rang Millie, only to find her deep into the investigation of Victoria Reid’s disappearance. She was unable to get away but agreed to meet him for an early evening meal in The Bath Inn on Union Street, not far from the police station.

  It was not one of Croft’s favourite haunts. Too close to the town centre, too full of young revellers on a weekend, too close to the job centre, too full of unemployed young men and women through the week, the place pandered to a modern generation with no interest in the 60s. But the food was acceptable, the bar was as quiet as could be expected for a wet Wednesday evening, and the room large enough for them to disappear into a discreet corner with little danger of being disturbed.

  “The cops don’t come in here,” Millie had explained. “They prefer The Star or The Hog’s Head.”

  Over the meal, Croft detailed his findings on Trish’s visit to Millie, and now that she had her cigarette, she asked for his conclusion.

  “You won’t like it,” he told her.

  “I hear lots of things from lots of people every day, and I don’t expect to like everything.” She puffed on her cigarette and tapped ash into the ashtray. “Just tell me.”

  “I think Evelyn Kearns has been hypnotised into forgetting everything about Trish.”

  He had thought about it for over two hours after leaving Evelyn. It had not been an easy conclusion to reach, but when he considered the problem it was the only explanation that fitted.

  Millie did not think so. When he said it, she almost choked on her cigarette. “What? Where the hell do you get that from?”

  He played with a glass of lager. “The logic is intricate but when you think about it, inescapable. You have to think about everything that’s happened over the last two days. The Handshaker wrote to me suggesting he was committing a crime similar to Heidelberg, involving the abuse of hypnosis. At the same time he wrote to you warning that he was after my girlfriend, and he took her. I don’t think there can be any doubt about that. He took her using hypnosis, but that, in turn, means he had to have access to her in order to hypnotise her. Who had access, who would she trust sufficiently to let him or her hypnotise her? Her counsellor. How did he become her counsellor? She was referred by a woman who never refers clients. How could he be sure that Evelyn Kearns would refer Trish? Because he arranged it. He had to have hypnotised Evelyn in order to get her compliance. The only other conclusion is that Evelyn Kearns is The Handshaker, but you insist he’s a man.”

  “Are you sure this Evelyn isn’t a man?” Millie asked. “It’s an omni-gender name, isn’t it?”

  Croft gave a little grunt that could have been a laugh, but he felt no humour. “I didn’t ask her to whip her knickers off and prove it, but yes, she’s a woman. My GP refers patients to her, and he must have known her a long time to do that.”

  Millie spoke candidly. “Over the last day and a half I’ve learned more about hypnotism than I was ever interested in, and the more I hear, the more I want to keep away from it.”

  Taking a final drag on her cigarette, she crushed it out in the stubber and they ambled back inside

  “Ernie is convinced you’re a whacko and you’re probably making all this up to reinvent yourself,” she said, “and our scientific support people are so busy with the rising body count that we haven’t had the analysis back of the typeface, fingerprints and DNA matches we got off the last note, so we’re not yet certain that it is The Handshaker… correction, I’m certain, Ernie isn’t. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, but now you’re talking about him hypnotising others in order to get where he’s going. That’s a trance too far.”

  “But there’s no other explanation,” Croft insisted.

  Millie urged him to be calm. “All right, all right. Keep your tights on. Explain to me how he would get at Evelyn? She’s a counsellor, you say most of them are trained hypnotists, she would have realised what he was doing. How did he get to her?”

  “It’s easier than you may think,” he admitted. “Do you know one of the first things they do when you’re training to be a hypnotist?” He did not wait for her to answer his rhetorical question. “They hypnotise you. Most hypnotists are easily hypnotised, but because they know what’s happening they can resist it when they wish. Conversely, if this mysterious G.B. came to Evelyn, asking for testimonials because he was freshly qualified
or new in town, he may have offered to hypnotise her just to prove how good he is. She could have agreed in all innocence, and if he’s as good as he claims, as good as Franz Walter, the damage would have been done.”

  Millie thought this over for a moment. “You’re the expert not me. Did you run this by Evelyn?”

  He shook his head. “I wasn’t sure of her reaction. I thought it might be better coming from you.”

  She agreed immediately. “You’re probably right. Okay, here’s what we’ll do. First thing tomorrow we’ll go see her, and I’ll put it to her.”

  “Tomorrow?” Croft was crestfallen.

  Millie checked the time above the bar. “It’s too late right now, and I’ve put in enough unpaid overtime for one day. First thing in the morning. Right? Right. In the meantime, I need to ask one last question. Why Ms Sinclair?”

  Croft shrugged. “Why Sandra Lumb? Why Susan Edwards? Why any of the women?”

  “No, no, you misunderstand me.” She gave him an apologetic smile. “My fault. You are the first person he’s written to outside the police. What I meant is, why tell you in advance that he would be taking your girlfriend? The husbands, partners, boyfriends of every other victim did not receive notes, so why did you?”

  Resting his weight on his forearm, Croft ran his index finger across the condensation on the outside of his glass. “Hypnosis again. I keep telling you I’m an authority on the subject and he’s throwing down the gauntlet, challenging me by stealing my girlfriend and threatening to murder her the way he’s murdered all the others, using hypnosis on her of which I was unaware. He’s taunting me.” He sighed, picked the glass up, and drank it down. “And it’s worked. I’m running round in circles with nowhere to go.”

  “Then you have to find a direction,” Millie told him. “Like I said, you’re the expert hypnotist. You’ve done okay so far. It’s a little wacky, but it’s better than nothing, and if you’re even half right you may get us closer to The Handshaker than we’ve ever been. Keep at it. You’ll get there.”