“How about forty-five degrees?”
“Under certain circumstances, we are capable of surprising acts. Bravery, for example. Men giving up their lives for others in the heat of battle…”
“Murder?” I’d told him everything.
“Perhaps. But Danny, please remember that we are dealing here with hearsay. The only evidence…” I could hear the quotation marks in his voice. “… for this so-called murder is Major Caldwell’s report. We don’t know – a, if there was one; b, whether it was an accident; c, if you had anything to do with it, and d, if a woman was killed and you did it, whether you had been provoked in some way.”
I turned to him. He was sitting forward in the hard chair, his big eagle nose jutting out over his notepad that he clutched in both hands. His fair hair hung over his forehead at the best of times but one slice of it was falling into his right eye. He sat up straight and pushed it back.
“What about the memories I have? Holding the bloody bayonet? How do you explain that away? “An image in your mind doesn’t have to be a memory. It could be a composite of several memories. You’re a soldier. You used a bayonet? In earnest?”
“Once. Near Tobruk. We had to go into the trenches after the Italians. I blew it, thank god. The man dodged me and I only hit his arm. It was enough.”
“That would do. You could be feeling guilty about not killing him. It was your duty, after all.”
That made me think. It made me think these quacks always had an answer for everything. How did you ever get to the truth? “Doc, you said there might have been a provocation. Is there any provocation that would justify murder?”
“That wasn’t what I meant. Nothing justifies murder. But aren’t there different shades? Premeditated, an act of revenge, say? Crime of passion, as the French have? Cold-blooded, sadistic…” he began to tick them off on his fingers.
“What about these murders of prostitutes in London?”
He sat forward again. His face took on an eagerness, as though filled with professional fascination for the slaughters. “Ah. We are clearly dealing with a psychopath, someone who has no human compassion, does not empathise with the rest of us. Doesn’t have the same moral code. Freud would see a sexual motivation here too. Perhaps someone getting revenge on a woman: a cruel mother or a woman who rejected his advances.”
“He?”
“It’s usually a he. Men are by nature more violent.”
My silence stopped his flow. I gathered myself to ask the big question, the one that was making me sick. “Doctor, do you think – from what you know of me – that I am capable of murdering this woman in France?”
His face took on a guarded look, and he rubbed his pointed chin with his knuckle before answering. “The trouble is, Danny, I’ve been treating you for the effects of the bash on your head. I’ve been trying to help you make sense of the trauma and piece together the fragments of your memory. If this dreadful act took place, and if you were involved in some way, it happened before your skull fracture.”
That wasn’t the resounding vote of confidence I wanted to hear from my quack.
“So you’re saying you don’t know if the “me” before this -” I pointed at my scar – “could have done it or not? But in fact, I might have? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying I don’t know if it would be out of character or not, because I don’t know what your character was. What I see today is a personality that may or may not be influenced by a severe brain injury.”
There were too many ifs and maybes in this for my liking. “For god’s sake, doc, just tell me what I should do. Where do I go from here? How do I carry this around with me without going nuts?”
“It’s such a pity that your man Caldwell is dead. But you’ve said he was pretty thick with this woman, Kate…” He looked at his pad. “…Graveney? Well I’d go back to her and do some more asking, if I were you. See if he mentioned anything else about you. And I’d also see if Mrs Caldwell would talk to you again. Maybe he said more to her than in his report.”
His words burrowed away in my head. Mrs Caldwell. Mrs Catriona Caldwell. Mrs Kate Caldwell of Chelsea. I dragged myself back to his point.
“Do you think if he’d told Liza Caldwell I was a murderer, she’d have contacted me, far less let me into her home?”
“No, you’re right.” He flicked through his notes. “But to take it a step further, she mentioned that her husband had said you had mental problems and that you might become a nuisance. Even in these lesser circumstances, it seems strange for her to have let you into her home. Unless it was to head you off by telling you her husband was dead?”
That point had worried me too. This whole thing stank. And the sooner I started acting like a proper detective and got behind all this flimflam, the better. I sat quietly for a minute or two, still facing Thompson. He let me. He could see I needed time to absorb some of the implications of what he’d said. I found I had one last big question to put to him.
“Doc, if someone were to kill in anger or in passion… is it likely… I mean is it conceivable that they’d kill again?”
He looked wary. “Strictly speaking, a crime passionnel of any sort, caused by anger, jealousy, sexual aggression or just to stop someone nagging…” he smiled at that, “…is a one-off event. It is a build-up of rage or frustration against one particular person for a particular reason or set of reasons.” Straight from the textbook.
“Strictly speaking?”
“It’s pretty rare to get a taste for it. Unless there was a deep character flaw that was revealed by the act, such as you might find in a split personality or a psychopath.”
“Do I? I mean do I show signs of being split or a psycho?” I didn’t want the answer, but I had to ask it. I wanted him to say don’t be ridiculous, of course you’re not…
“Frankly, Danny, it’s not something we’ve been looking for with you.” He tried to laugh, to make it sound silly. “You’ve got quite enough recovering to do, without adding to your woes.”
In other words I could be as crazy as a Kamikaze pilot but he couldn’t really tell because I had all these other mental health problems. There wasn’t much more I wanted to hear from Doctor Thompson. Everything he told me could be interpreted the worst possible way. And in my state of precarious sanity, I could easily convince myself I not only murdered a heroine of the resistance in a passionate rage, but I could be primed to do it again, given the right circumstances. It was probably just as well that Big Alec had stopped me seeing Sandra again. But I never would have killed her, would I?
FIFTEEN
I’d been away two days but it seemed liked a month. With or without being plugged into the mains, it’s always a pretty intense experience at the hospital.
Partly it’s seeing and hearing the real nutters around the place; blokes who’d lost it after sitting in a slit trench for ten days while Jerry bombed the shit out of them, or waiting in their tin-can tanks for a Tiger shell to smear them round the inside like jam. But usually I leave in a better mood than I arrived.
The Doc gives me hope. This time he hadn’t.
This time I was just afraid. I felt there was someone else hiding in my body. I remembered the shock of reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for the first time. It took a concoction to bring out the devil in the good doctor, but I wonder if you get the same effect with a head wound. Two people in one body. The Doc’s split personality. I needed an exorcist, not a psychologist.
The bus from Paddington was crawling along Oxford Street and I saw there was still bunting up from new year, or maybe even VE Day. But it couldn’t hide the squalor we’d made of our lives. We don’t understand how we could have won the war and ended up so destitute. How we could have booted out old Winston after he saw us through the Blitz. How we could have given so much and got so little in return. How we could match the picture now with the one we’d held in our shaky memories as we marched on Berlin.
As I hefted my litt
le case down the stairs of the bus, wincing as the healing ribs tugged at me, I weighed the options. I could give up now and take to the bottle; it would be easy to play the victim. I’d earned that right, hadn’t I? Or I could stop bellyaching and go find out the truth no matter how awful.
There was no one waiting for me except the moggy. She – I’ve no cause to label it a she, but cats always strike me as female – was waiting, hungry and meowing outside my door. It furled itself round and round my legs until I stroked its thin ribs and let it in, then stuck close to me till I’d filled a saucer with milk. I parked my case down and sat on the bed watching her, listening to the rasp of her tongue as she gulped it down. Someone would miss me.
I took off my coat and emptied my case of its dirty shirt, underwear, pyjamas and shaving kit. I made some tea and took it through to my desk. I wanted to plan my next steps; tackle Liza Caldwell first or Kate Graveney; frontal assault or pincer movement.
I drew up my chair and sat down. I stood up and sat down again. Something felt different. I’d sat here a thousand times and my body knew the angles to within half a degree. I looked down at where the desk legs sat on the lino. The dents were a fraction out of line. My desk had been shifted. I looked round the room.
There wasn’t much to play about with in here. Desk, two chairs, phone, filing cabinet, hat stand and that was it. Had Val been dusting or mopping? Why would you move a desk that weighed a ton?
I walked through to my bedroom and looked around. If the place had been given a going over it had been done by experts. I went back through to the office and sat down. I opened my drawers. Tumbler still in the usual place, notepad, pencil, pen and ink. No bottle. I thought I had a half-full Red Label, but I guess I’d got through it. I couldn’t recall a real session in a while.
I walked over to my filing cabinet to check my client records, such as they were. About twenty of them by now. All neatly ordered alphabetically. A suspicion took me straight to the G section, but Kate Graveney’s was there all right, and my few notes were in the correct order. I began sifting through the rest. As far as I could see, they were all there too.
Then it struck me. My clippings were missing. All the newspaper reports of the murders. I checked each of the drawers but there was no doubt. Val? Had she removed it to stop me dwelling on the horrible subject?
Then I heard footsteps. Ones I knew. They were already on the second floor. I found myself gripping the arms of my chair, conscious of trying to control my heart. Wilson hove into sight and stood panting at my door. He was sucking for air but smiling. I couldn’t see any marks on his face; I couldn’t have hit him hard enough.
“Get out, Wilson. Or rather, don’t come in.”
He ignored me and slouched in. “Looking for this?” He drew out a folder from under his arm and waved it at me as he approached. He tossed it on my desk and slumped, chest pumping, into my visitor chair. It groaned under him. I wished his heart would pop.
I looked at my clippings file and then at him. There was still some contusion about the left eye, and his mouth looked swollen. Better. I was through playing games. I picked up my smart pen and unscrewed the top. This time I was on my own ground. If he attacked me I’d see how long he could fight with a pen in his fat throat. My voice was cold. “Did you have a warrant?”
He smirked. “By the book.”
“Yours, or the police manual?”
“All proper. Of course.”
“I’d like to see the section that allows you to steal a man’s whisky.”
His smile widened. “Thirsty work.” Then his face closed. “Why are you so interested in these murders, Mr McRae?”
Mister now. What was going on? “I told you before, Wilson, I was curious. That’s all. Professional curiosity.”
He reached out, took the folder and flicked through the clippings. He was obviously intimate with it. He found what he was looking for and laid it out flat on my desk, facing me. It was the one reporting the arrest of the “Ripper”.
My handwritten Ha bloody ha! leapt out from the page.
“Why did you write that?”
“Because I knew you had the wrong man.”
“And how did you know that? You cleverer than all of us down at the Yard? That it?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it? The man you arrested didn’t fit with the picture that was coming through from the newspapers.”
“Oh, really. Got that from the papers, did you? Wasn’t because you knew who the real murderer was?”
“I don’t have to answer any more of these daft questions.”
He sighed. “Not here. Not now. But you could, if I was to arrest you.”
“What the hell for Wilson? You’re flying a kite.”
“For the murder of three women in London. Not to mention the little incident in France.”
“That’s bullshit! Total shite!” I was furious and terrified at the same time.
“Is it? After our little set-to the other night, I got a warrant, McRae. Saw your personal file at the SOE. Documents missing, weren’t there? But there was a note on top. Said you weren’t to get any information about events or people in the SOE if you came looking. Made me wonder. Didn’t find the missing papers on you when you were arrested for breaking and entering. Had a little hunch. I’m good at hunches. Asked for your old boss’s file, Major Caldwell. What did I find?”
I knew what he found. My stomach was knotted with the terror of what he would do with that information.
“Seems you’re a handy man with a knife.”
“There’s no proof!”
“Maybe. But it made me wonder about our little run-in in Soho. Made me wonder what you were doing there. So I got another warrant and found this.” He stabbed the clippings with his finger. His nails were shredded and split like a miner’s.
But they’d seen no such honest work.
“So what? It’s no crime to read the newspapers or keep bits of them.” Which was true, but I knew how it looked.
“No, but it’s adding up. It’s all adding up, McRae. Circumstantial to be sure, but it’s beginning to come together.” He leaned over the desk at me. “You ever pay little visits to Soho, McRae? You know, for fun? Like New Year’s Day? If we start showing your photo about the place, would they recognise you?”
This was too close. I panicked. “No more than they’d recognise you, Wilson, if I started asking around.”
His face purpled and his mouth worked under his puffy cheeks.
“I think some day soon you’ll make the one mistake, McRae, leave the one clue, that ties you to one of these.” He pointed at the paper. “And when you do, we’ll have you back down the nick and this time you’ll stay there. Until of course…
“He mimicked a noose going round my neck and pulling tight.
He tossed the clippings folder on my desk and clumped out the room. I sipped at my cup to stop the shakes. The tea was stone cold, but I drank it anyway. Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, it had. Trouble was, I could see Wilson’s point of view. Leaving aside his tendency to punch first and ask questions after, my own police training would have sent me down the same road. I would have made myself a suspect if I’d been in his shoes. And he didn’t know about my blackouts, those little gaps in my life that were unaccounted for except for the cryptic – insane? – scribbled residue.
Hell, in the grey world of circumstantial evidence I could make a case for Wilson himself being investigated. God knows what he got up to in Soho with those poor girls Mary said he misused. Did it get out of hand? He certainly had the violent tendencies. Doc Thompson would have him in a straitjacket in a flash.
I’ve found that when there’s so much shit coming your way that you’re going to drown in it, the best thing to do is start swimming. It still stinks, but you can take your mind off it by concentrating on staying afloat. That’s how I survived when my unit of the Seaforths was under fire from tanks, machine guns, artillery and Stuka bombers in the desert.
My le
g was broken and bleeding from being blown against one of our Shermans by a near miss. I stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet made from the belt of a man who no longer needed to hold his trousers up. I made a splint from the ribs of the wrecked canopy of a truck. I collected three water bottles and started my hobble towards my own lines. Or at least where my own lines had been yesterday; we moved a lot. It was a long three days; I had to keep stopping to release the tourniquet before my leg dropped off. I holed up in a hollow I scraped in the tough desert sand during the day and hobbled slowly in the night. The war was going on around me, but all I concentrated on was walking.
It worked. I’m here. It was time to tie on my tourniquet again, set my compass and make a start.
I took my pad out and wrote two names at the top. On the left, the dowdy Mrs Caldwell, on the right, the elegant Kate. Then I started to write what I knew under both of them. Then I wrote down the simple questions I wanted to put to them both.
Kate Are you also known as Mrs Catriona Caldwell?
What’s your real relationship with Tony Caldwell?
What was really wrong with you in the hospital the night of the bomb?
Why hire me to find out if he was dead? You could have done it yourself.
Liza Are you or are you not married to Tony C?
Why don’t you care enough that your husband is dead?
Did he mention the murder to you? What else did he say about me?
Why are you lying to me?
Finally I stared at both columns trying to plan what action to take. I needed to move fast; Wilson was bearing down on me. But I also needed to move with circumspection; I didn’t think I’d get anywhere by phoning up Kate or Liza and asking if I could pop round for tea and questions. I thought about where they lived, and then the decisions became very easy. Liza’s house bordered the heath.
It would give me terrain to operate from.
SIXTEEN
The next day, good and early, I got out my sole remaining screwdriver and my hammer. The screwdriver was fine and thin and it didn’t take much bashing on the edge of the iron stove to knock up a snake-ended pick. It wasn’t the quality of my bike-spoke versions but it would have to do.
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