Trance

by Southward, Adam

  He pulled a wide grin, which unnerved Alex. Alex knew how to present a fake smile, but at least his were friendly. Victor’s was menacing.

  ‘Perhaps it would be better if you sat? You might be more comfortable.’

  Alex shook his head. ‘I’d rather stand, Victor. May I call you Victor?’

  Victor looked surprised for a brief moment before his smile returned. ‘You can call me what you want, Doctor. But for the sake of conversation, yes, my first name will be fine. Please sit.’

  Alex watched Victor’s body. He sat still and straight, the slouch gone, giving away nothing. His face was a mask and his eyes were obscured by the glasses.

  ‘I’ll be OK standing,’ said Alex.

  ‘Very well,’ said Victor, leaning back, lying out full length on his bunk, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. It would make it more difficult for Alex to read his body language, and Victor acted as if he knew it.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you, Victor,’ said Alex, ‘about why you’re being held on remand.’

  ‘Why?’ said Victor. ‘Ah yes. First things first. What is your particular method, Dr Carter?’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ said Alex, starting to feel out of his comfort zone. Alex had become used to timid, often frightened patients who viewed his white coat as a symbol of infallibility and the cure to their many problems. They wanted his input and were paying for it. They never questioned Alex or his methods. He was frustrated at his own naivety in thinking this man would behave the same way.

  ‘I’ve been subject to quite a few assessments over the years, Dr Carter. Is this a quick assessment for bipolar or schizophrenia? If so, I can save you the time. I have neither, nor do I have any other normal mental health disorder.’

  Alex cocked an eyebrow. ‘That’s interesting, and I believe you, but will you indulge me anyway?’

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On your real reason for being here.’

  Alex nodded. ‘My reason is to assess your mental health. I’m a psychologist. You still have rights when you’re in here. You have not been convicted—’

  ‘Liar,’ said Victor.

  Alex paused. ‘You don’t believe me?’

  Victor lifted his head off the pillow to peer again at Alex.

  ‘Carter. What’s your first name?’

  Alex paused. ‘Alex.’

  ‘Alex. You’re here for one thing, or possibly many things, depending on what you’ve been told.’

  ‘I . . .’ Alex paused again. ‘I’m interested in your—’

  Victor laughed, the noise echoing around the confined space. ‘You’re interested? Oh, I know, Alex. I’m the most interesting thing in this prison. Even more interesting than your pretty young student. What’s her name?’

  Alex opened his mouth and closed it again. He let out half a breath.

  ‘Pretty, isn’t she?’ said Victor. ‘Surely she’s a more interesting subject to assess? It’s on your mind, isn’t it?’

  Victor gave a cackle and the back of Alex’s neck tingled. He shivered. Victor was misdirecting and distracting. Alex knew this, yet he couldn’t help the anxiety rising and his past behaviour flashing into his memory. The affair and the breakdown of his marriage. He thought of the way he’d been looking at Sophie when they met. His heart thumped and his fingertips prickled.

  ‘You should calm down,’ said Victor. ‘Sure you won’t sit?’

  ‘I’ll stand,’ whispered Alex, aware that Victor already had complete control of the conversation. He was being made to look an amateur.

  ‘Do you have any children?’ said Victor, taking a different tack. ‘Of course you do. You look like a father.’

  Alex kept his face still. Answering personal questions was always a challenge in his profession. The standard approach was to decline to answer because it wasn’t relevant. In this case, in front of a murder suspect, Alex felt a flash of fear, but put it to one side. He understood now why the pseudonym was important. He knew so little about this man. He wasn’t about to give him a passport into his own life.

  Alex focused on his breathing, pulling his thoughts together, deciding his traditional assessment method was out of the window. This would be a case of forcing the interview where he wanted it to go, and ignoring Victor’s misdirection.

  ‘I’d like to talk about the University of Southampton, Victor.’

  Victor turned away. ‘Those people died terrible deaths,’ he said, his voice wavering, rising in pitch. Alex remained silent. ‘But it was a long time ago, Dr Carter.’ Victor tilted his head, raising his eyebrows.

  Alex paused. What did Victor mean?

  ‘I’d like to understand what happened on the day they died, Victor,’ said Alex, focusing on the present. ‘What were you doing there?’

  Victor pulled himself up, twisting to face Alex, folding his legs. He frowned. His grin was gone and he stared right through Alex.

  ‘I told you, it was a long time ago,’ said Victor. ‘It’s a shame, because it’s not the victim’s fault. It’s never the victim’s fault. You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you? In your profession?’

  Alex was careful with his reply. Victor was intelligent, but flitted between thoughts. Symptomatic of dementia, perhaps? Alex wasn’t sure.

  ‘The people who were killed are not to blame. Are you to blame, Victor?’

  ‘Blame.’ Victor’s voice was dry and low. He sat bolt upright, sliding off the bunk to stand in front of Alex. Alex flinched. Victor’s small frame appeared threatening and alien in the confined cell.

  ‘What do you know about blame, Dr Carter?’ Victor’s stare was piercing, his foul breath wafting over Alex’s face.

  Alex paused, taking small breaths. His anxiety bubbled, his heart rate thumping in his throat as he counted slowly. Take control, he said to himself. Don’t let the conversation run on the patient’s terms.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what you think,’ Alex said, trying with difficulty to hold Victor’s stare.

  Victor’s mouth stretched almost imperceptibly into a smile.

  ‘What I think,’ he hissed, nodding. ‘Yes, interesting.’

  ‘I’m not a prosecutor,’ Alex ventured further, ‘I’m a doctor. I can help you.’

  Victor didn’t react as Alex expected. ‘Doctor,’ said Victor, spitting the word. Alex felt droplets of moisture hit his face. He instinctively reached up to wipe his cheek with his hand.

  ‘Doctor,’ said Victor, softer this time, but with malice. He turned the word over in his mouth, saying it again. ‘And you want to listen to me?’ He smiled. Alex forced himself to swallow. He was losing this one. He needed to change tack.

  Victor parted his lips, baring his teeth. He began to mutter, whispers under his breath. Alex couldn’t make out the words and found himself leaning in. Not English – Romanian, perhaps, the words rhythmic and structured.

  Alex felt muzzy, his eyes struggling to focus. He shook his head as a loud buzzer sounded. A click came from the door lock. Victor’s mouth remained open. His tongue darted out like a snake and he licked his lips.

  A muffled voice crackled over the public-address system in the corridor, asking all cells to be vacated by staff and closed for lockdown. Victor snorted, his face twisting into a grin as he backed away.

  Alex blinked a few times, his head clearing. Puzzled, he pulled the heavy door open. He glanced back at Victor, who hissed a final few words before sitting on the bunk, staring at the wall with a calm, almost vacant expression.

  ‘Sorry for the interruption, Mr Lazar.’

  Victor didn’t move. His lips remained clamped shut.

  ‘We’ll continue this later,’ Alex added, leaving the cell and pulling the door to behind him. He heard a click as the lock re-engaged.

  Robert stood in the corridor where Alex had left him. He was cupping one ear towards the public-address system, straining to make out the message. When he saw Alex he beckoned him over.

  ‘What’s go
ing on?’ said Alex, hurrying towards Robert, ignoring the shouts from the other cells. He felt a deep shiver down his back.

  Robert shrugged. ‘It happens a lot,’ he said. ‘Staff shortages. They can’t monitor every block at once. There’s probably a scuffle somewhere. You’re out until the guards return to their posts. Sorry.’

  Alex wanted to protest but saw no value in doing so. He needed to get back into the public-sector swing of things and swallow it like a professional. He followed Robert out of the block and back towards the office complex, his anxiety fading with every step, but feeling disappointed with himself. He’d failed to control his conversation with Victor from the first second and he hadn’t had time to put it right.

  There was still no sign of Sophie, but as Alex grabbed his bag and phone from the desk, he reassured himself that today hadn’t been a total loss. Victor Lazar had proved to be as intriguing in the flesh as on paper. True, Victor deserved better than Alex had given, but Alex could put that right. Before he spoke to Victor again he’d get properly prepared – a better workup of Victor’s history, his background and influences. Victor was being treated as an enigma by Robert and the prison, which was great for academic papers but useless for diagnosis and treatment. Alex needed basic childhood and parental information. He needed education and employment details, a traditional background sweep, before moving on to the more peculiar aspects of Mr Lazar’s behaviour. Alex didn’t relish the thought of reviewing the prison CCTV footage again, but he owed it to Victor.

  He was starting from scratch with a new patient and a high-profile criminal case. Against the background hum of his ever-present anxiety, Alex felt a small thrill as he left the office. He recognised it as professional excitement, and realised, with a small smile, how long it had been missing in his work.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Alex heaved the next textbook on to his lap. Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View was a thick tome and, like the previous three, which lay on the coffee table bookmarked for later reference, told him nothing he didn’t already know. He eyed the stack of back-issue copies of the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis he’d picked out of storage. He doubted they’d offer any answers either.

  Alex topped up his glass, watching the red liquid cling to the crystal as he swirled it around. He corked the bottle – a 2005 Rioja – and placed it carefully on the table to avoid marking the waxed rosewood finish. He was back in his city office, feeling comfortably recovered from his prison experience and reflecting on how wonderful benzodiazepines were – even better when mixed with alcohol. His particular prescription – 1 mg Xanax – had the beneficial property of being almost impossible to overdose on. The more you took, the higher you got, but a dangerous dose was difficult to achieve. That’s why so many people abused them.

  His habit had started early. As a child, Alex would help his mum collect her prescription, wondering at the transformative effect the medication had on her. Her OCD and panic disorder disappeared into the background for hours, sometimes days. She credited her little magic pills, and Alex believed her. With his own anxieties developing fast and without the maturity or the support to explore them, he tried the magic himself. One evening he waited until his mum was asleep – his dad was working, always – and popped a couple of pills into his mouth. His nervous symptoms stopped within the hour. Stomach ache, dizziness and sore throat all melted away. His constant worry, that gnawing feeling that tugged at his gut and throat night and day, reduced. He faded into a warm fuzzy reality, relaxed and ready to tackle the world.

  He tried it again the next day, and the day after that. His mum never questioned the rate at which her pills disappeared and her GP didn’t seem to either. He kept taking them and his life was easier. He coped. That was all that mattered.

  It was only a temporary thing, he told himself, but by the time he became aware of the benzodiazepine’s addictive properties it was too late. School, college and university took their toll as he battled exams by day and cared for his mum by night. Alex finished his PhD with a regular benzo habit and a plan to stop it when the time was right.

  That was fifteen years ago. The time was never right. Career, marriage, child, divorce. At what point did life get easy enough to kick such a habit? Perhaps when he retired.

  Certainly not now.

  Alex gazed up at a framed piece above the fireplace. It was a bright blue abstract canvas by one of Jane’s friends. Alex hadn’t been sure about it at first. Now, on reflection, he hated it. He would take it down the second he split up with Jane. Thinking about it dulled his mood, and he brought his gaze back down to the wine glass.

  Alex hadn’t remained long at Whitemoor after his short interview with Victor. Robert had offered very little in terms of a case history and Alex decided to leave with a promise to be back. He needed thinking time, away from the bustle of the prison. Somewhere familiar and comfortable. A safe place from where he could examine the events of the last twenty-four hours.

  His phone vibrated. A text from Jane:

  I forgive your moods if you forgive my persistence? Make it up to me with dinner tomorrow night?

  He dropped the phone on the table, feeling even worse about how he’d been treating her.

  Alex didn’t tell Jane anything about his work – it was confidential and he told himself that he couldn’t risk her letting anything slip to her friends. But Jane hadn’t given him any reason to distrust her, and he knew that the problem was him, not her. He’d convinced himself that their relationship was temporary, that there was no need to involve her. No need to open himself up, to form a meaningful connection.

  After the breakdown of his marriage to Grace, the pain of being distanced from his daughter’s life, the guilt and shame of knowing it was all his own fault, he had shut down. He’d always been emotionally distant, but now he was a closed book. His issues and their roots were easy to identify – a straightforward case for an experienced psychologist such as himself. So why couldn’t he change? Why couldn’t he be better?

  He might have permanently damaged Katie’s childhood by messing up his marriage, but making sure she felt loved and supported by both parents, despite their separate living arrangements, was of the utmost importance. Katie knew that her dad loved her – but did she feel that she could rely on him? Alex sighed and rubbed his temples. She was growing up so fast – he felt the time slipping through his fingers. He wanted to be a better father to her than his own had been to him. He’d lost count at an early age of the number of times his father had let him down, emotionally and practically, never being there when it mattered.

  He was thirty-nine and divorced. The woman who’d divorced him thought he was a loser, but he still loved her. The woman he was with attracted him in all the wrong ways, but he was too much of a wimp to tell her. To blank both of those women out, he thought about his new assistant, Sophie, a woman he barely knew but who was already playing on his mind, a strange desire he could do without. He was drinking more than he wanted to. He wasn’t in a mood, he was just preoccupied. He frowned as the wine glass clunked on to the coaster, annoyed at the constant distraction of his failures. He needed to focus on Victor.

  He stared at the books, trying to concentrate. Whatever his learned colleague Robert thought Victor could do, it was undocumented in the world of psychology. It wasn’t possible, according to the literature, for Victor to compel people to do the things they did. Even in clinical study conditions, manipulation and suggestive techniques took time and trust from both sides. Victor had only been with the deceased for a matter of seconds in a busy prison environment. The CCTV footage was baffling, but it didn’t constitute evidence. There could be many other explanations for what had occurred at the prison. None, admittedly, sprang to mind, but it would be a ludicrous and incompetent leap of faith to suggest mind control.

  Victor’s manner was more than a little unsettling, but Alex also knew that he was rusty, out of practice. It had been a long t
ime since his last case and he needed to factor that in. He wondered how many more excuses he could make for his lack of insight. To help, he poured himself another large glass of wine and swore at the ceiling.

  Tossing the books aside, Alex grabbed the paper copy of Victor’s file. He frowned as he flicked through the brief case notes and timeline, annoyed it was so thin, so lacking in information.

  Alex drained his glass, picturing the vivid images he’d seen on video and comparing them with the crime-scene photographs from Victor’s file. The similarities were striking. Death by violent means, using a sharp object or blunt trauma, or both. Victor hadn’t been in the room when any of them were killed, but appeared to have influenced the outcome from afar.

  Sighing, he tried to pour more wine, found the bottle to be empty and thumped it back on the table, wincing as the glass hit the wood. Instead, he flicked through a few pages of his notepad, looking at the numbers. He’d made a few calls in the car on the way over but had got voicemail on every one. He picked the first name again and dialled. The call was answered on the third ring. On his request he was directed to a detective chief inspector in Hampshire Homicide. A man called Laird.

  ‘Yes?’ The voice was polite but impatient. Probably used to eighty per cent of his phone calls being a waste of time.

  Alex introduced himself and jumped straight into the reason for his call. He presented his argument in a professional manner, but was soon interrupted by the detective.

  ‘Forgive me, Dr Madison, if I sound a little sceptical,’ said the DCI. Alex could hear a keyboard tapping in the background. ‘I’m looking you up. It says here you provide private therapy services?’

  Alex bit his lip. ‘I’m a clinical psychologist. On this matter I am operating as a forensic consultant to the CPS, out of HMP Whitemoor.’

  ‘I see,’ said the detective, sounding unconvinced. ‘And you want me to re-interview everyone who’s had contact with this . . .’ The detective paused. ‘Victor Laz—’