by Andy Maslen
Susannah rolled her eyes. “Again, Henry. For the thickos amongst us?”
“My apologies. Tardive, from the Latin tardus, meaning slow, or late, onset, and dyskinesia, from the Greek, meaning faulty movement. In this case, involuntary, repetitive body movements. Usually of the face, but it can also produce a stiff or uncoordinated gait.”
Gabriel looked at Susannah.
“I knew it!” he said. “She was pulling odd, stretched faces and she looked like she’d only learned to walk that morning.”
“So the bastards drugged her up, brainwashed her, then wrapped her in explosives and ball bearings and sent her off to commit mass murder,” Susannah said, with a scowl.
“So it would seem,” Haydn said, pulling the spotted handkerchief from his top pocket and using it to polish his glasses.
“Which is all grist to the mill, Doc, but why did you summon us to your little horror show here? You could have emailed all this.”
Haydn replaced his glasses. “Look at the top of her head.”
He used a silver ballpoint pen he retrieved from his breast pocket to indicate an irregular black hole in the top of the skull, half-hidden by a hank of blood-matted hair and a mosaic of broken bone. Gabriel and Susannah peered at the cavity.
“What is it?” Susannah asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Patience, my dear DCI Chambers. Watch this.”
He crossed the floor to a stainless steel counter and came back with a thin, transparent Perspex rod, about eighteen inches from tip to tip and about the same thickness as a drinking straw. He inserted the tip of the rod into the hole, and pushed it slowly. With a faint squelch, the rod entered the skull. He maintained the pressure, and little by little, with a treacly, sucking sound, the rod disappeared until only half of it was visible.
“Look here,” he said, pointing at the ragged flesh fringing the base of the skull. Gabriel and Susannah moved round the table to get a better look. Haydn pushed the rod again and the bloodied tip slid out through a circular hole under the lower jaw. “It is my conclusion that one of the ball bearings surrounding the explosives travelled vertically upwards from this young woman’s waist, or wherever the charges were strapped on to her body, penetrated her jaw, travelled on through the brain, and exited through the top of her skull. The hole here,” he pointed at the spot where the tip of the rod had emerged, “is approximately twenty-one millimetres across, which matches the dimensions of the ball bearings recovered from the scene. Only someone whose head was directly above the bomb could have sustained this injury.”
Susannah pushed her fingers through her hair, scrunching it in her fist. “Right, so we’re belt and braces on the perpetrator. Her poor fucking parents are going to need some tranquillisers of their own when this turns up on the telly. We have to go. Thanks, Henry.”
Haydn smiled, but his eyes betrayed him. It was a rueful expression that said, another day, another dead human being.
As they walked back to CID, Gabriel touched Susannah lightly on the arm in an attempt to slow her down enough to ask her a question.
“What?”
“I have an appointment at five o’clock. Do you need me any more today?”
She checked her watch again.
“No, you’re fine. And, thanks. You’re doing well. Chelsea seems to think you have the makings of a halfway decent detective constable. Can you be back here in the morning?”
“Sure. I’ll see you then. I’ve got an idea for what I need to do next. I’ll call Don and tell you in the morning. Good luck with your press conference.”
She tossed her head back. “The camera loves me, darling! Now fuck off and let me get some lippy on.”
Gabriel found a quiet spot behind some filing cabinets. Someone had stacked box files in an untidy pyramid on a tiny steel and plastic table. It made an excellent hide. There was a chair behind it so he picked a paper at random from the topmost box, propped his feet on the edge of the desk, and pretended to read.
He let his eyes drift shut as fatigue stole over him.
Hello, Boss.
Hey, Smudge. Haven’t seen you for a while.
Yeah, well, you know, seems you’ve been kind of busy. How’s it going?
I have to get back to Eden.
Wow. That doesn’t sound weird at all.
It’s under control. Just infiltrate, tab into the centre of the enemy camp, take out the leader, exfil, and extract back to England.
Oh, well as long as that’s all…
I know. But it’s going to be fine.
You know what, Boss?
What?
It is. Going to be fine, I mean. Fariyah knows what she’s doing, and I think you do too, now.
What do you mean, ‘now’?
Got to go, Boss. Take care of yourself.
25
Session with Fariyah Crace
“WHERE DO YOU WANT ME?” Gabriel said, looking around Fariyah Crace’s office.
The psychiatrist smiled, her olive skin glowing against the shocking pink of her hijab. “Are you looking for a couch, Gabriel? I’m afraid I don’t go in for any of that Freudian bullshit. As I think I told you last time. Don’t you remember?”
He laughed, briefly. More from nervousness than genuine good humour. “I thought you’d have got one in for me, specially.”
“Oh, you’re not nearly crazy enough for a couch. You’ll just have to make do with an ordinary armchair, I’m afraid. Come on, let’s sit down.”
She motioned for him to take a low armchair upholstered in a nubbly wool fabric the colour of aubergines. It faced another across a pale, wooden, circular coffee table with a thick sheet of turquoise glass set into the top. He sat, and crossed his right ankle over the opposing knee, then immediately felt this display was overcooked and returned his right leg to the floor. He folded his hands in his lap, then crossed his arms instead.
Fariyah sat in the other armchair, twisting round to turn her phone over on her desk.
“You seem a little tense, Gabriel. Everything OK?”
“I’m fine, really. I’m just having a problem knowing where to put myself.”
She smiled that warm, reassuring smile again. “Look. Can you see a clipboard or notebook?” He shook his head. “Or a prescription pad?” Another shake. “We’re going to talk. That’s all. You have your diagnosis from our first session. It is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, as I think you knew all along. So, let your arms and legs find their own place in the world and we’ll see what we can do about helping you find yours. Deal?”
He smiled. A genuine, relaxed expression this time. “Deal. Thanks, Fariyah. OK, first question please.”
“My first question is, have you been to see Richard Austin yet?”
Gabriel frowned. He’d been intending to call the therapist for a while, but work kept getting in the way.
“Not as such. He’s the eye-movement guy?”
“Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, yes. It’s been shown to have some remarkably quick, and permanent, effects in cases such as yours. Try to get around to it. I think you’ll like Richard. And I also think you’d benefit from his approach.”
“OK, I will. I promise.”
“Good. So tell me, how have you been since we last met?”
Gabriel knew that, unlike the casual enquiry of a friend or colleague, this seemingly innocent question didn’t require a generic, “fine”. So he drew in a deep breath, let it out in a hiss through his teeth, and began to tell her about the hallucinations. How his former comrade, Mickey “Smudge” Smith, dead from a Kalashnikov round to the back of the head, had become a regular fixture in his day and was now effectively offering him advice on how to do his job; bloody nightmares of lean, dagger-toothed African militiamen walking up the walls of his cottage in Salisbury; sudden urges to sit down in the street and wail with sadness; and others to race his Maserati down to Beachy Head on the Sussex coast and take one final, glorious, plunging dive off the cliff there and into oblivion.
He stopped talking. Half an hour had gone by.
Fariyah let a moment or two of silence pass. Then she spoke.
“Your hallucinations where you see Smudge and he gives you advice. In my opinion, that is your subconscious mind donning a disguise. The person giving you advice is you, but your experience in Mozambique has led you to cloak some of your own thoughts in the guise of your lost friend. But that aside, you have amazing strength of character. And a lot of mental resilience. To be carrying that load around with you, well, it’s broken plenty of men. Why do you think it hasn’t broken you?”
Gabriel scratched his face.
“I don’t know. Army training?”
“That seems unlikely. Almost everyone I see for PTSD has had the same training as you. Not the Special Forces element, and it’s possible that there are aspects of the psychological techniques for resisting torture that might be helping you, but in all other respects, my other patients have had the same preparation for combat as you. No, I wonder if there’s something else. Perhaps earlier in your life? Before the Army?”
“I had an unusual upbringing.”
“Yes. You mentioned that at our initial meeting. You didn’t settle at school?”
“Ha! You could say that. I got into a lot of fights. And I wasn’t that great at taking orders from the teachers either, which is ironic, considering my eventual career choice.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Eventual?”
He tipped his head to one side and took a deep breath. He was about to tell her something he’d never told anyone before. “I was considering a career as a gangster.”
She sat up straight and uncrossed her legs, leaning forward, eyes wide. “A gangster? Well, you get today’s gold star for throwing me. What kind of gangster?”
“In Hong Kong, when I was about seven or eight, there were a couple of gangs who were on the news from time to time. The White Koi and the Coral Snakes. They were trying to control the drugs trade, prostitution, protection, the usual gang stuff, basically. I thought they looked cool, whenever they were arrested. Leather jackets, greased-back hair. I was going to offer myself as a delivery boy for the drugs. You know? A little hoodlum on a BMX bike spinning round the streets with five-dollar baggies of pot down my trousers.”
She shook her head. “And did you?”
“No. Turns out I couldn’t take orders from them either. I hit one of their boys, got a beating, and was told never to show my face in their territory again. So that was that.”
“What changed you? Where did you discover self-discipline?”
Gabriel smiled as he thought back to his Chinese mentor, Zhao Xi, a friend of his parents and the man to whom they’d turned when the only other long-term option for their son looked like juvenile prison.
“Master Zhao, I called him. He tutored me right through from eleven to eighteen. In the beginning, I defied him like everybody else, but he was just … just different. You know that old fable about the reed and the oak?”
“I don’t think I do,” Fariyah said. “Why don’t you tell it to me?”
“Oh, OK.” Gabriel cleared his throat, and sat straighter in his chair. “An oak growing close to a river boasted to a reed about how strong he was. And the reed just smiled and said, ‘Why don’t we ask Wind to set us a test and we can see which of us is the strongest’. And the oak agreed. So they asked Wind to blow with all his strength and whoever was left standing at the end of the test would be the winner. So, Wind blew hard and the oak immediately stiffened himself and braced his trunk and branches against the power of Wind’s breath. In contrast, the reed just let Wind’s breath move him about, bending him almost to the surface of the river. Wind blew with such force that, in the end, the oak’s branches snapped off, one by one, and then, with a terrible cracking and splintering, the mighty trunk shattered and oak was felled. As Wind softened his breath until the air was still, the reed sprang back, undamaged.”
Fariyah smiled and mimed applause. “Beautifully told, Gabriel. So you were Wind, your teachers were the oak, but Master Zhao was the reed?”
“Something like that. Except, my teachers didn’t break. But their way was a trial of strength. Master Zhao let me blow myself out. When I was finished, he began to teach me. We did the usual school stuff, which kept my parents happy. And we did some really interesting other stuff that kept me motivated.”
“Such as?”
“Martial arts. Hypnosis. Meditation. And this discipline developed by the Shaolin monks called Yinshen fangshi. It means ‘the way of stealth’. It’s hard to explain, but you let yourself soften and pull in all your sharpness—that’s how Master Zhao explained it to me—until you disappear from people’s perceptions.”
Fariyah leaned back and folded her hands in her lap, her forehead wrinkled in a frown of curiosity. “Do you know, I have been a practising psychiatrist for thirty years and a professor for five, and I like to think I have read the literature on altered states thoroughly, but I have never heard of Yinshen fangshi. Would you give me a demonstration one day?”
Gabriel returned her smile and began speaking.
“Of course I … could, we’d just need to … find a time when both you … and I … were in the frame … of mind … to make it …happen … if you’d like to …”
As he spoke he began altering his breathing and the cadences of his speech, directing his gaze at Fariyah’s left and right eyes in a precise coordinated sequence. As her eye movements and breathing began to mirror his, he waited for the telltale sign that it was time to move.
Her eyelids fluttered and her focus slipped.
At that instant, he slid from his chair, retrieved her phone from the desk beside her and tucked it into his pocket. “Check your diary … we could book a time for … me to show you.”
Then he stopped speaking and waited, counting in his head.
At five, he leaned forward and tapped her twice on the left knee. With a brief shudder, her eyes refocused on his face.
“Yes,” she said. “That would be wonderful. Let me check my calendar.” She turned to retrieve her phone from the desk, and frowned.
“Something wrong?” he said, unable to keep the grin from his face.
She looked back at him. “It’s my phone. I’m sure I put it here.”
Gabriel pulled the phone from his pocket and held it in his outstretched hand.”
“Here you are.”
Her mouth fell open as she retrieved her phone. Then she laughed.
“You devil! Did you just use the way of stealth on me?”
“You said you wanted a demonstration.”
“And I certainly got what I asked for didn’t I? That is a very powerful mental technique.” She paused and placed the tip of her finger against her lips briefly, then spoke. “Coupled with meditation and the inner strength and discipline you would have gained through your martial arts training, I’m not surprised you’ve been able to cope with your PTSD for so long. But I’m concerned you may be turning from a reed into an oak yourself. You can only resist trauma for so long without therapy before it fells you just as surely as Wind felled the oak in your tale.”
“Which is why I’m here. I need to sort this out. I can’t keep carrying this guilt around with me for ever.”
“And that brings me to another question. You see, the circumstances in which you lost Smudge, well, they were certainly traumatic, but they lack some of the characteristics that would trigger full-blown PTSD. You were in control, for one thing. You were in battle, albeit under covert operating procedures. The loss of life was not caused by poor leadership or soldiering on you
r part. That you were unable to recover his body was a great sadness, but in itself not sufficient to account for the severity of your reaction. I don’t mean to diminish any aspect of your experience, Gabriel, not the pain, not the grief, not the shock, not the shame, which I know you feel. But in my experience, none of those emotions, or the particular events you’ve described, are in themselves likely to have caused your health problems. I wonder whether there was an earlier event that laid the charge, as it were, that your experience in Mozambique detonated.”
Hello, Gable. The nice lady is talking about me.
The voice in his head caused Gabriel to jerk back violently in his chair. His heart began racing and he broke into a sweat.
Fariyah leaned forward, an expression of concern on her face. “Gabriel, what is it? What’s the matter?”
He swiped his palm over his face and shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing’s the matter. Just a flashback. Talking about Smudge must have triggered it. I’m fine.”
Fariyah pulled her chin down to her neck. “Really? Because you reacted only after we’d stopped talking about Smudge.”
“Honestly, it’s nothing.”
I’m not nothing, Gable. I’m me.
“Well,” Fariyah said, looking at her watch. “Our time’s up for today. But I want you to make another appointment as soon as you can. Will you do that?”
“Of course,” he said, fighting down an urge to scream. “Yes, I want to. I may have to be away for a while. But yes. Definitely. And thank you.”
“It’s what I’m here for. And thank you for demonstrating Yinshen fangshi to me. I think I could deliver a whole conference paper on that one episode.”
Outside Ravenswood, the swanky hospital in the heart of Mayfair where Fariyah ran her private practice, Gabriel leaned against a parked car. He was shaking uncontrollably.
26
One Hand Washes the Other
THE OUTLINE FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS AGREED upon, Toron and Jardin were able to relax in each other’s company. Another bottle of wine procured and opened, they began discussing operational issues.