The Rules of Restraint

by David Wilson

  “Bollocks I did, look at me, can you see that happening, with my own bare shaking hands, my nerves turning me spastic as I wave the knife around in his face? I organized to get him killed by some fucking hitman? Discount for bulk if you take out his housekeeper as well? Do me a favour. Seriously Knight.”

  Knight wondered at the vehemence of Johnsson’s outburst.

  “When did Sandel and Brock grace Greenbank with their presence?”

  “About six months ago.”

  “You recruit them?”

  “It was Wooldridge’s idea, he’d heard good things about them from their training instructor, top men, said they’d inject a bit of hard core into an establishment going soft.”

  “You’d agree with that assessment?”

  “No.”

  “Are they sympathetic to the principles of a therapeutic community prison?”

  “Are they fuck.”

  Knight could see cracks and fissures appearing everywhere he looked and they were getting wider, it just depended how deep they were.

  “Why did Wooldridge bring them in then?”

  “I think, in my delusional state, and this is not for the record, that he lobbed a hand grenade over his shoulder as he left, rigged up a metaphorical booby trap. Maybe to show that he was the only one who could make a prison like Greenbank happen, maybe he had lost faith, maybe he’d made a pact with the devil, I don’t know why.”

  “What is your opinion of Officers Sandel and Brock?”

  “Sandel’s quiet, a follower, he can be easily ignored. Brock’s a psycho.”

  “Based on what evidence?”

  Johnsson stabbed a finger in his chest. “Based on what I know here, he’s a wrong ’un, I can feel it in my bones, the guy’s a fuck-up, a mental case, he’s evil.”

  Knight let the room go silent. A breeze ruffled the net curtains as the sun weakly emerged and shed a grey light over the hospital room’s floor like a stain.

  “What has he done to you to elicit your extreme opinion of him?” said Knight.

  “It’s chemistry, like acid on marble, you can feel the corrosion behind his eyes when he looks at you.”

  “So a hunch then?”

  “Call it what you like.”

  “That’s not a lot to go on.”

  “I’m convinced he planted that ring on me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know how he did it, have forensics checked it?”

  “It’s compromised, Munro’s mitts are on it, Brock could have picked it up as evidence, all a bit messy at the time as you know. I need hard facts Johnsson.”

  “One of the courses we run in the education department at Greenbank is about notorious criminals, serial killers, psychopaths, and we examine their personalities in relation to their historical context, how circumstances can shape the nature of their misdeeds. Take Charles Manson, he was surrounded by disaffection, lonely teenagers, the sexual revolution, LSD, he was on a mission and people followed.” Johnsson seemed to lose his train of thought.

  “You’re saying Brock’s on a mission? He’s behind all this?”

  “I don’t know, Knight, that’s your job, but he’s capable.”

  Knight could think of many people right now who were capable, his bosses up at HQ, captains of industry, billionaires, bankers, Russian oligarchs, but that didn’t mean they actioned the darkness that poisoned their souls. He didn’t think Johnsson was capable though. Knight’s phone rang but he ignored it.

  “You into anything kinky Johnsson, S&M, bondage, role playing, ever fancied sex with a guy?”

  “Not my bag, seriously, happily married as far as that’s possible, my son’s my priority, I don’t like to stray from the straight and narrow.”

  “We’ll want you to make a full statement, everything you’ve said just now to be included, full and frank, no evasions, you prepared to do that?”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Knight stood and shook Johnsson’s hand. He felt a heartbeat of sympathy for someone suffering so deeply, his life’s work coming apart.

  In the corridor Knight retrieved the incoming call from voicemail. It was Munro, his voice was unsteady, veering from instruction to bewilderment. Knight called him back.

  “It’s Knight, Munro, we have no evidence of the whereabouts of Lomas, your daughter’s silence does not constitute a missing person at this stage, but we will monitor the situation with extreme care. Criminal abductions of children are often splashed across the media but these cases only represent about two to five per cent of missing children in Europe.”

  “I know,” said Munro. “I know. This is irregular but I’m going up to Oxford to find her myself, make sure she’s safe, I need to be near her, indulge me. This is temporary I assure you, call it a timeout. Just between you and me, can I request that of you?”

  “Sure, nothing bad is going to happen to Morag, I promise,” said Knight, and wondered since when he’d become a Samaritans counsellor or how he could say what he had just said with any degree of confidence or authority.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Munro took a left off the Abingdon Road and parked down one of the side streets. It was residents parking only and he knew he’d pick up a penalty notice but he didn’t give it a second thought. He took a good look around to remember where he’d parked then slammed the car door hard and set off towards Oxford city centre. He passed The White House pub and thought about a sandwich but he wasn’t hungry. He reached Folly Bridge and looked down at the brackish green river. The waters swirled and churned as a pleasure boat cruised by, its wake staining the concrete walls enclosing the river, sending the moored canoes into a deranged dance.

  Had he done well enough in the game of life, he thought? He’d played it hardball and straight, but he was losing faith in the system, it was unravelling. Blood was everywhere, it was sticky on his hands, red mist was clouding his vision, poison seeping into the bedrock of his convictions.

  He downloaded a photograph of Bobby Lomas on his phone from Google images, but it looked out of date; there was scant resemblance from his own encounters with the prisoner. He studied the features, the soft eyes, the angular nose and cheekbones. He was clean-shaven and his hair was a short, spiked crop but he could have let it grow, and a beard, it would be grey, as anonymous as any hard-bitten drifter, out of luck, living on the streets.

  Munro noticed how many homeless people there were in Oxford, attracted by the tourists perhaps. They were shuffling along with a dog on a piece of string, or sitting Buddha-like on a slab of cardboard, mumbling endless imprecations, a plastic cup on the pavement in front of them. There were Big Issue sellers on several street corners as he made his way along St Aldate’s to Cornmarket Street. He watched the students, on their bicycles or walking briskly, bright with intent, and he yearned for recognition, cried out for it, like someone clutching at air before a fall. Her presence must be here, he thought, if only he could read the signs, feel the faint electricity. He passed a door that said “Oxford Clairvoyant Society” and stopped to consider ringing the bell but was convinced it was mumbo-jumbo for the desperate and spiritually empty. He reached the Ashmolean Museum and sat on the steps, willing the passers-by to give up their secrets, toss him a morsel to relieve his destitution.

  Inside the museum he wandered through the William Blake prints, reading the writer’s ecstatic exhortations: I am in you and you in me, mutual in divine love.; Do what you will, this world’s a fiction.; Active evil is better than passive good. After a while, Munro couldn’t help but put his hands over his ears, a crazy old man seeking solace in the dead halls of antiquity, deafened by the roar of the divine. A young girl, an exhibition guide with a lanyard around her neck and a walkie-talkie, approached him and asked if he was all right, a student earning pin money between lectures, and he said gently, “Yes, yes, I am all right.”

  He visited Morag’s college and studied the ins and outs as students circulated busy and thriving, but he could not see her
or feel any closer to her. He wondered if he waited until it was dark that she would come home to her room, she must with time, he craved the answers. He entered the college’s quad and spoke to the porter who said he’d not seen her for days, but students you know what they’re like, liberated nowadays, easy with their own lives, probably staying with a boyfriend in town, but Munro said no that was not possible. He left his mobile number with him and as darkness fell he found a pub down a side street off Magdalen Street East. It was empty, the barman was a young man with blonde hair wearing a black T-shirt with what looked like a cardio pulse pattern in white running across it. Munro recognized the image, it was famous, but he couldn’t place it. He ordered a pint of Directors.

  “Students come here?” said Munro.

  “Occasionally,” said the barman. “Not really for them though, too much of a dive.” He laughed. “Mostly regulars, older guys who want to sit and think about their lives as they slide into oblivion.” He laughed again.

  “Like me?”

  “You’re an out-of-towner, mate, easy to tell, the way you looked around, trying to find coordinates, somewhere to park and rest. What you doing in these parts?”

  “I’m trying to find a girl, a student.”

  “Aren’t we all mate.” He winked.

  “No mate, she’s my daughter. Seen a girl on her own in here in the last few days?”

  “I see a lot of people my friend. Let me think.” He stroked his chin with a little too much exaggeration, like a Mastermind contestant. “You know, I did in fact, not long ago, left with an older man, about your age, grey hair, looking to settle some deal by all appearances.”

  Munro felt the edge falling away, there was nothing to prevent the massive plummeting fall. He couldn’t find air to breathe.

  “You all right mate?” said the barman coming around to hold him steady. “Take a seat.”

  “How long ago?” said Munro.

  “A few days, they seemed to be getting on, if you know what I mean.”

  “This man?” Munro showed him the photo on his phone.

  “Could be, but guys all look the same after a certain age, hair too short I think, but grey, yes.”

  “What happened after?”

  “Went out the door, that’s the last I saw of them. All pretty harmless I think mate.”

  “Thanks.” Munro sipped his pint. He considered various likelihoods but there were too many. Time is always of the essence. He nodded to the barman and left.

  *

  Munro followed his instincts, like a bloodhound with too many scents, each one mingling with another. He stumbled into the early evening darkness like a drunk, conversing with himself, and like a drunk found neural pathways short-circuiting, that sent him down unusual ways, so he followed the unfamiliar, trusting his senses. He crossed over the Folly Bridge and climbed down to the river walkway to examine floating objects, cartons, coke cans, plastic bottles, discarded toys, searching for larger objects. He entered Marlborough Road, passing along the Victorian terraces with their wheelie bins and bicycles in the small front gardens. There were privet hedges, pot plants, ornamentation, tidy and tended, residential pride displayed but there was one front garden overgrown, with a traffic cone in the centre. The curtains of the house were closed, but there were slivers of light from the ground floor, students pretending to exist in perpetual darkness perhaps, emerging only in the dead of night. Munro had no reason to linger, but he did so, listening to silence, the echoes of his imagination. There was no number to the house but there was a horseshoe over the front door. Munro moved on, keeping a steady step, feeling his way forward.

  You’re not alone.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I’m lost.

  It was dark and damp and cold. She’d never felt so terrified and the panic welled up threatening to burst. She breathed deeply and quickly, searching in her heart for a handhold, to stop herself from being swept away into the long slow drowning as little by little she let each piece slip from her grasp. She thought of her mother, long lazy days by the river, the sky a deep rich blue, a kingfisher a dart of colour, her hand holding her father’s on magical walks.

  She was lying on a thin mattress when she woke, emerging from the soft clouds of a drugged dream into the blackest of night. She was suddenly plunged into infinity, an endless chasm, an absence so absolute it made her ears ring. Eventually a thin blade of light cut through a place above her head and she could make out a door and steps. Next to her on the mattress was a candle and a fold of matches. She studied the matches, they were damp but on the fourth or fifth strike she achieved a feeble flame which kept its fire long enough to light the candle. The walls around her were large irregular stone and flint with blackened infilling. The floor was dirty red brick with a raised ornate red tile hearth at one end. Down the centre of the floor the bricks had parted to reveal a silt of mud and water which seeped through the crack like a small slow moving stream.

  She remembered waking and being desperate for water, that’s all she could think of, and a man giving her a glass of liquid which made her head loopy and all went blank again, a different kind of sleep this time, like dancing with a feather. There were two slices of bread and a bottle of water at the bottom of the stairs which she grabbed. When the light from the door eventually disappeared she would blow out the candle and try to sleep and when the light returned she cut a notch in the candle with her thumbnail. This way she measured the days and night and scratched a mark on the wall to indicate time, there were now three days and three nights, and it was obvious that he wasn’t ready to kill her yet.

  She monitored the movements above her. There was only one set of footsteps, and very rarely did they step over the floorboards. He must be sitting, sedentary and silent, contemplating, thinking most of the time. She tried to build a story about the man, linking the parts of him he inadvertently revealed, filling in the spaces with her imagination. Only once did she hear him walk up and down above her head, backwards and forwards, careful, even steps and she could hear murmuring and suppressed groans, then a dull regular thud and the walls shook like he was trying to break them down.

  Her memories of the pub were hazy. She’d pushed it too far and got burnt. She knew it would happen sooner rather than later. Take a walk on the wild side; they were fancy words until you got hurt. People are strange. What was he going to do with her? She suddenly started crying and hated herself even more, a long howling outpouring of despair from the deepest part of her soul. She saw herself as a speck of pain in a world of indifference, the important pieces of herself broken, never to come together again. She cried and cried, and couldn’t see herself stopping.

  You’re not alone.

  The door at the top of the stairs banged like it was being forced off its hinges and then it creaked open and slammed against the stone wall. The single bare light bulb attached to the centre of the cellar’s wooden roof beam flicked on.

  “Dude,” said the man. “Dude, no more, you’re making me want to cry.” He came halfway down the stairs and sat down. His grey hair was matted and the stubble on his chin was growing into an untidy beard. He had a large knife in his hand. He wacked it on the edge of the stair below him taking out a chunk of wood. He looked at the blade and ran his finger over it. Then he stabbed the knife into the stair he was sitting on, right between his legs, and left it impaled there.

  The light from the bare bulb scorched Morag’s eyes.

  “Bad stuff happens,” he said. “You build yourself up and shit takes you down. It’s such a fine balance, do you understand? It’s too easy to lose and no one wants to lose. Please don’t cry girl.”

  Morag found she’d lost the power of speech and when she tried to put words together she stuttered, tripping over her tongue so nothing made sense. The man looked at her curiously. He put his hand to his mouth as if to stop himself from screaming and then he rubbed his eyes.

  “Oh man, it’s fucking miserable,” he said. “There was a time, a time of shin
e and honour, when you did what you did and it was right. Victor Frankenstein built a monster, but he never gave it a name, don’t you think that is the most vicious cruelty? ‘Fiend’, ‘wretch’, ‘vile insect’ the monster is called but he was a fallen angel, and the loneliest person that was ever given life.”

  His hands went to his head and he scratched at his temples as if to erase the thoughts that were silently rioting.

  “Morag,” he said. “Come up here.” He waved over to her. “Give me company.”

  She was sitting cross-legged on the mattress and she had no intention of moving.

  “Come,” he said. “This is a time of gentleness, it may not happen again, Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.”

  He sounded like a preacher in a cavernous place of worship but the words echoed around the empty space like the shrieks of a rodent afraid of the light. Morag pulled herself to her feet and shuffled over to the stairs, tentatively placing one foot after another on the steps.

  He held out his left hand. On the tender flesh of the wrist were crudely etched the initials “FN”, the letters twisted and distorted with time. Morag put one hand on the bannister and her right hand in his palm. She felt the rough skin dried with age, the gnarls and callouses, the heat and heft of his masculinity. She carefully turned his palm over, exposing the back of his hand with its dark hairs, complicated blue veins and several livid pale white scars that were raised and knotty. She gently took hold of his index finger and with all her strength suddenly wrenched it back as far as she could until there was a sharp crack like a twig breaking. Lomas let out an animal yelp that turned into a roar of searing pain and he leapt up off the stair, holding his hand, whimpering with tears in his eyes. He screamed with shock and betrayal and stooped down to grab the knife. He pulled it violently out of the step and held it up as Morag backed away gripping the bannister. She reached the bottom of the staircase, holding herself steady, holding her position.