56
Hazel watched Stark settle stiffly on to her consulting room chair. His call asking to see her was unprecedented, troubling enough in itself for her to give up a late Sunday afternoon to meet with him.
Patients rarely unnerved her; she’d seen all sorts. But sometimes she found it hard to look at Stark. He was like a fixed point in space; you knew you were in orbit around him and not the other way around. She didn’t understand him. It was that simple. She’d prodded and poked, provoked and tricked him. She’d worked with him, laughed with him, helped him … yes, helped him, that wasn’t pride. But, deep down, he unnerved her.
Physician, heal thyself, she thought.
His call had come out of the blue. Never before had he requested an appointment. His work colleagues were worried about him, and now Hazel was too.
He looked pale and gaunt, his head shaved to stubble around a rippled line of sutured skin with black fishing-line stitches, a split lip, bruising around one cheek and eye; split knuckles on both hands.
She’d read his A&E chart. He’d been prescribed painkillers. She didn’t know whether to hope he’d taken them or not.
Opposing forces had been stretching him thinner and thinner for two years now, perhaps longer. Duty and Guilt. Two powerful locomotives in a tug of war, not realizing they were on a circular track and that if the couplings ever let go they’d hurtle round and meet head on. She’d watched the darkness rise and be squashed down, rise and fall; listened to his justifications, obfuscations, frustrations; waiting, slipping in observations where she hoped they’d best help. Hoped. Such an inexact science, sometimes she wondered whether psychology was closer to faith. No, not faith. Philosophy, though.
It wasn’t her fault. He’d come to her damaged. Among other things, Combat PTSD was a moral injury. It impaired the capacity to trust. He’d come a long way; been coaxed kicking and screaming from denial to engagement, but he’d always held something back, something she had not understood. Now that thing was slowly pulling him under. No, that wasn’t quite right. It was holding him fixed while the waters rose about him. That was one of the key differences between military PTSD and civilian. The more the patient reintegrated, the more they reawakened to the complexities of civilian life, the stresses, the higher the tide rose about them. The patient had to rise with it. You had to help them swim. Stark was stubbornly holding his breath. Unless she could untangle the knot, this depression would engulf him and Christ knows where he’d wash up, if he ever did.
He was watching her too.
He never spoke first.
‘How are you?’ she asked genially.
‘Operational.’
He typically answered direct questions directly, so she typically avoided them. But today was different. Today he’d asked to see her. ‘How are you sleeping?’
‘Not well.’
Sleep deprivation was the killer. It dulled rationale, undermined ethical self-restraint and impulse control, gave credence to dark thoughts. ‘When did you last eat?’
He frowned impatiently. ‘I don’t know. Yesterday.’
He didn’t sound sure. ‘Are you in pain?’
‘Physical or mental?’
‘Either.’
‘Yes.’
‘Which?’
‘Both.’
‘It’s going to be that kind of session today,’ she commented, making a note because she knew it annoyed him.
‘My head hurts. My ribs hurt.’
‘Your fists?’
‘Them too.’
No. This wasn’t one of ‘those sessions’. He was on edge, on a brink. Of another breakdown perhaps; the signs were similar, yet … ‘Is there something you want to tell me, Joe?’
The hard stare. Not threatening, not deliberate, just deliberating. What whirled behind those eyes? If only she knew what thoughts were forming in his mind right now she would have the key, she could save him. The perennial shrink wish – and conceit.
‘Is there something you want to ask me?’ he countered.
‘Many things.’
‘What stops you?’
‘I’m afraid.’
‘Afraid?’ His eyes softened. One thing she did know was that he did not like causing harm, causing fear. ‘Of me?’
‘No. I have back-up.’ She chuckled, fingering the big panic button around her neck. She suspected he could kill her with the damn thing before she could press it, if he chose. She wasn’t afraid that he would. It was nothing new; a determined man could always overpower and kill her if he chose, when she worked in prisons, here in her office, out in the street, at home in her bed – that was the vulnerability of her sex. Her work was strange insulation against that. ‘I’m afraid of asking the wrong questions.’
He frowned. ‘I thought there was no such thing as a stupid question.’
‘In my line of work the wrong question can shatter trust.’
‘Ask it.’
‘Ask what? Why you requested this appointment?’
‘Ask me –’ he began, but could or would not continue.
Hazel forced herself to sit still. There was something he wanted to say, wanted desperately, but couldn’t. What was the question? ‘What hurts mentally?’ she asked.
‘No. Not that,’ he shook his head chidingly. ‘That’s the effect. The cause; you have to understand the cause.’
‘I’d like to, Joe. Perhaps you could help me?’ His fists were flexing and his jaw was tight. From him, those two small signs were akin to screaming. Anger. With her?
‘I’m not angry with you,’ he said. She was not the only observer in the room.
‘Who, then? At the men who attacked you last night?’
He chuckled, shaking his head sadly. The tension in him was beginning to give, to give up. He was giving up. She was losing him, losing the moment, asking the wrong questions. ‘With yourself, then?’ she asked desperately.
‘Obviously.’
‘Why obviously, Joe? You fought to protect yourself.’
‘Didn’t I just.’
Hazel frowned. ‘You’re saying … you enjoyed it? Is that it?’
He said nothing, just closed his eyes.
So that was it? After all this time? The moment hummed like a taut wire but now, at last, she could guess. ‘How did it make you feel? Is that the question?’
Stark breathed out a barely audible sigh. ‘Bingo. The clumsy, ham-fisted, clichéd prodding of the snake-oil head-shrink,’ he said softly. ‘Tell me; how did that make you feel?’ His eyes opened, shining with life. ‘It made me feel wild, free, unleashed, righteous. I despised them for their cowardice, their callous stupidity, but I loved them for it too, for letting me hate them, for the outlet. And I thanked them in kind. How did it make me feel? It made me feel alive.’
Hazel thought quickly. He was not the first man to feel this, nor the first to confess it to her. This was not the problem. Finally it began to fall into place. How long since she’d thought they’d passed this point? More than a year. ‘Guilt, Joe? Again?’
‘The difference between you and I,’ he said softly, ‘is that you believe guilt can be faced, packaged and put away whether justified or not, while I believe that justified guilt is rational, honest and that subsuming it is a crime.’
‘But we talked about this, so many times. You never felt remorse for the lives you took. You explained eloquently. And you’ve always understood survivor-guilt, faced that there was little more you should or could have done, I thought we’d made progress on that?’
‘Progress …’
‘So what is it? What is it that’s hurting you, Joe?’
‘You’ve always come at this from the wrong direction,’ he said kindly, but wearily. ‘You’ve always assumed you are treating someone haunted by war.’
‘You’re not haunted by war?’
‘Of course I am.’ He smiled, a parent coaxing a child towards the conclusion. ‘But …’
‘You also miss it. But that’s nothing unusual, Joe, many
veterans –’
‘I don’t miss the institution,’ he interrupted firmly. ‘I don’t pray for the order of military routine to save me from the chaos of civilian irrationality. I don’t miss the safety, the camaraderie, the bond of friends laying their lives on the line for each other daily. I don’t miss the uniform, or knowing my place in the ranks of life. I miss the violence. I miss the cold, hard fury. Knowing that I must kill or be killed, kill or risk the lives of comrades, kill in the name of right, principle, justice, democracy, family, country. And the guilt I feel for actions past is nothing to the fear I feel that people will see me for what I really am, red in tooth and claw, knowing that I must never reach across the gap between me and people I love, or might love.’
Another person delivering such a conclusion might weep. Stark merely stared, as if daring her to contradict him.
Hazel sat back and placed her pen on her pad. ‘Well,’ she sighed. ‘We’ve come a long way, you and I. And yet you can still surprise me.’
‘I’m glad I still cause amusement.’
Hazel tilted her head. ‘I’m not surprised at what you’ve told me, Joe. I’m surprised that it’s taken this long to come out. You’re far from the first person to feel this way.’
‘Sharing a psychosis doesn’t lessen it.’
‘Joe …’
‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m not here for sympathy.’
‘Perish the thought.’ Hazel pondered for a moment. ‘You once told me off sharply for asking about an ex of yours – Julie, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘You insisted it wasn’t relevant that you pushed her away after you were injured. You were probably wrong, of course.’
‘Probably.’
‘And Kelly … You explained what happened, calmly, rationally. Are you going to bite my head off if I ask about it again?’
‘That depends on whether you ask the wrong question,’ he said, watching her carefully.
‘Kelly is effect, not cause,’ agreed Hazel. ‘Then, tell me, Joe, how does that make you feel?’
57
Stark emerged from Hazel’s torture chamber, drained. He’d said his piece, she hers. She might note it down as a milestone. He just saw another hurdle crashed into.
With another due any moment. He’d told her about the reporter, Gwen. She’d hinted before that he should consider telling his side, drawing a line under the story under his own terms. Her suggestion implied a faith in the press that Stark didn’t share. It was out of his hands now anyway. Bullets flew where they would.
Standing up to leave had been like lifting twice his weight, like wounded man exercise, but instead of running with a man over his shoulder he was barely carrying his own weight. His ribs stabbed. His legs were like lead and everything hurt. He needed to take on fuel, but was struggling to find anything appetizing in the cafeteria downstairs when his phone rang.
For some reason he thought it might be Selena, but it wasn’t.
‘Major? I thought you were off me,’ he said.
‘You’re an idiot,’ said Pierson.
Stark sighed silently. ‘I’ve spent the last hour being told just that. Perhaps you could narrow it down?’
‘First you waste my time on a spurious question and then don’t follow up with the pertinent one.’
‘Which is?’
‘You’re supposed to be the detective, think …’
Then it hit him; he’d asked her about Mark White. ‘Was there ever a Simon Kirsch in the FFL?’
‘No.’
‘Meaning yes?’
‘Meaning no.’
‘So he used a different name? His mother’s maiden name is Larson.’
‘No and no. He had his passport. Simon Kirsch.’
‘Hang on, you said …’ Stark paused. ‘He was rejected?’
‘Failed the medical,’ confirmed Pierson. ‘Heart murmur.’
So Simon Kirsch had fled his past in the UK for the romantic dream of serving in the Foreign Legion, only to be knocked back. ‘Do they have any idea what he did after? Did he stay in France?’
‘Getting them to cough up that much was like asking them to drink red wine with fish. And on a Sunday … You would’ve thought I was asking them for the crown-bloody-jewels.’
Stark decided now was not the best time to point out that the French had toppled their crown, beheaded their royalty and presumably flogged the jewels to fund their bloody republic. Pierson was chalking up the IOU and enjoying it. The French had not volunteered this information. For all her declared irritation, Pierson had called them of her own volition and doggedly worn them down. ‘Thank you.’
‘Talking of which, pay your respects?’
‘Yes.’
She was silent on the line. Stark wondered if she had further bad news to impart. ‘Good man,’ she said, ringing off. Stark shrugged in bemusement. He stared at the rations on offer but couldn’t face them. He just wanted to go home to bed but now he had one more stop to make.
Fran gripped the TV remote in her hand, trying not to hurl it at the screen in disgust.
Harper, bullishly proclaiming that further evidence had come to light linking the death of Carlton Savage to that of Thomas and Mary Chase, that the police now believed Mark White and Simon Kirsch were indeed one and the same and that it was only a matter of time before he was found.
He’d wasted no time getting back in front of the cameras, taking credit. Compensation for biological insufficiency, thought Fran uncharitably. She was getting heartily sick of seeing him on TV. Somehow it was worse than seeing him in person. It had never, not even once, occurred to her that he would make inspector before her. She wasn’t jealous; not really. She was a sergeant and a bloody good one; better than Harper ever was. She’d be a better inspector too, when the time came, but she’d hoped that would be years away. Too many distractions from real police-work, too much politics and media. But finding herself working under Harper hadn’t featured in her plans.
He was a prime example of how it wasn’t only cream that floated. The police force, like any large organization, failed to achieve meritocracy. As a woman of colour, she was acutely aware of that. And in her experience, those with a burning desire to move on up were as often motivated by a fear of being exposed for incompetence at their current level as they were by overconfidence, and too often, like Harper, a twisted combination of both.
Temporary; she just had to remember it was temporary.
Ballistics had test-fired the Webley revolver and ammunition. The resulting bullet markings were a match for those recovered from Thomas and Mary Chase. The NABIS database still offered no matches from other crime scenes. They had no bullet from Savage’s body. It was probably in the Quaggy, but the divers had just laughed at the hope of finding it unless the river miraculously dried up overnight. Using X-ray first, and then acid to expose the metal fatigue shadow of the stamping, they’d recovered a nearly complete serial number from the revolver, but without the whole number they had little or no chance of tracing it.
More significant: Marcus had come up trumps with the lab geeks. Professional courtesy, which had been notably absent all the times she’d begged them to get a bloody move on. They’d verbally confirmed a preliminary match between the DNA in the glove to the sample submitted by Kirsch when he was still pretending to be Mark White.
Harper didn’t go into detail, of course, confirming only that police had searched a property and an area of the Quaggy River, and a weapon had been recovered. He looked straight into camera, grave and commanding. ‘If you’re listening, Simon, the net is closing in. You will be brought to justice, one way or another. Turn yourself in before it’s too late.’
‘Before my big head crushes me,’ added Fran in a mock-Harper voice.
‘Did I miss anything?’ said someone behind her.
Fran jumped so hard that her feet, hitherto resting up on her desk, slipped off and kicked the contents of her bin all over the floor. ‘Jeeezus!’ she hissed, angri
ly scooping up the detritus to cover her shock.
‘Sorry,’ said Stark.
‘What the hell are you doing here? You look like crap.’
‘Always good to hear,’ he replied, limping to his desk and sitting, hooking his cane on the lip of the photocopier. ‘So what’s been happening?’
Fran gave him a summary. ‘And you?’
‘Sightseeing,’ he lied.
‘Not resting, then.’
‘It’s a zen thing.’
‘So what brings you here this sunny evening?’ she asked, indicating the chilly darkness outside.
He explained Pierson’s findings. ‘I thought maybe Interpol might have something.’
Fran doubted that. They’d already tried the aliases they knew. ‘Any chance you could call in another favour with Major Pierson?’
‘I’m in debt.’
‘A little more won’t hurt then.’
‘Tell that to the economists.’
She explained about the gun, and he nodded with little enthusiasm. ‘Worth asking, I suppose,’ he said, dialling.
‘You’d better be calling to reiterate your eternal gratitude, and not to ask another favour,’ said Pierson.
‘Put this one on Fran’s tab. She’s here on speakerphone.’
Neither woman said hello. ‘DS Millhaven’s credit has limits too,’ said Pierson.
‘More or less than mine?’
‘Out with it.’
‘Clive Tilly believed one of Thomas Chase’s grandfathers had a World War Two revolver, but we only have a partial serial number …’
‘And you want me to trawl through the archives to see if it was his?’ She sounded far from keen. If the records had been kept in any semblance of order at all it would be a miracle, and God knows what damp or dusty basement they languished in.
Between the Crosses (Joseph Stark) Page 26