by Jo Bannister
With his companions in mid air the third man did a swift reassessment of the situation and very nearly came to the right conclusion. He cast a fraught glance Alex’s way, and she saw in his eyes the knowledge that the best thing he could do now would be to run like hell. He was betrayed by a sense of loyalty to his comrades and a fear of cowardice that was greater than his fear of being hurt. He backed a couple of paces, then steeled himself and thundered in like a charging bull.
Matt met the assault with a jab from the heel of his hand to the centre of the man’s face. Blood fountained, but even through it Alex could see that the man’s nose had been not so much broken as pulped. A moment later the man realised that too and sat down with a thump in the middle of the car park.
Matt held out his hand – then, seeing the blood on it, quickly withdrew it and held out the other. “Can I have the car keys? I’ll phone the police.”
Alex stared in horror at the mayhem he had wrought and felt sick and ashamed. She didn’t know what to say to him. She reined her voice in tight and stuck rigidly to the point. “And the ambulance.”
He raised a slightly puzzled eyebrow. “Ambulance?” He was barely out of breath.
Her cheeks flushed and she panted at him in disbelief. “Look at them, Matt! Look what you’ve done. You’ve broken their bones. They were unpleasant to us and you responded with deadly force!”
“Deadly force!” he echoed scornfully; but his eyes were perplexed. Plainly he’d upset her: he wasn’t sure how. “What did you expect me to do? Wait till one of us got hurt?”
“Matt, that’s exactly what I expected you to do! If you could deal with them that easily you could afford to wait. You had no right to strike the first blow.”
The three men were moaning and bleeding on the tarmac but no one was paying them any heed. A conflict of ideologies was being played out between the strong young man who, but for malicious fate, would still be a soldier and the elegant young woman whose career and personal successes were founded on the principle that differences can be resolved by discussion and diplomacy. This was the woman who, in her time as a hospital secretary, was regularly called down to mediate angry confrontations in A&E because even tiddly football fans tended to do what she asked when she asked so nicely. She had prevented more riots than hospital security and Rosie Holland combined, and had done it without getting her front teeth knocked awry.
The events of the last few minutes had shown her that the man she was contemplating spending her life with was a quite different type of person. An activist, not an intellectual; a warrior not a diplomat. He was a nice man, a kind man, thoughtful and considerate, but if push came to shove – particularly if either of them was being pushed or shoved – he would always respond with his fists. And she was shocked.
Typically, she blamed herself. She knew Matt Gosling’s background: it had been an error on her part not to see that behind the good nature and the nice manners was a man who had chosen a violent career. He hadn’t acted out of character: she had failed to recognise that among the elements of his make-up which she liked and admired were some less attractive ones.
She felt she had made a serious mistake, and come close to making a worse one.
Nor was her mind set at rest when Chief Inspector Gordon arrived to take charge. He listened to an account from each of them – and they agreed absolutely, neither of them had any interest in lying, Matt because he believed he’d done what was necessary and Alex because she thought the truth was quite bad enough – quickly realised he’d have to wait to talk to the injured men and packed them off to Skipley General.
Then, to Alex’s dismay, he congratulated Matt on his performance. Matt didn’t preen in the glow of his admiration; but even now the heat of battle had died there was no sense of regret in him, no awareness that responding to a shove in the chest by putting three men in hospital was a case of overkill.
She said nothing more, waited for the formalities to be completed and the police to leave. Then Matt went to steer her on to the restaurant as if nothing had happened.
Alex stood her ground. “No, Matt,” she said quietly, “I don’t feel like eating now. I’d like to go home.”
He stared at her in amazement. “After what happened here? You want to be alone?”
She refrained from saying that, in her opinion, very little would have happened here if she had been alone. “That’s right. Please, Matt, take me home. Or I can walk.”
He knew he was missing something but he didn’t know what. Now his eyes were clouded with concern. “I’ll take you. I’ll stay with you.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“He decked Cunningham, he got out of the clinic and he ran,” said Harry Marsh. “Whatever’s happening in his head, he worked that out well enough: he needed to get away from here. Where would he go?”
They were sitting in his car in front of Fellowes Hall. The dashboard clock said eight twenty; by the stars it was night. A thorough search of the building and the grounds had yielded nothing. There was no point trying to search further until sunrise. It’s hard enough to conduct a proper search by daylight, impossible in the dark.
“His flat,” said Rosie, counting on her fingers. “Prufrock’s house. Maybe mine. Or maybe my office or yours.”
The detective nodded. “I’ve got his flat covered, and Prufrock’s been home for the last half-hour so he isn’t there. I’d have heard if he’d gone to Brickfields, or to Moss Street.” Her puzzled glance reminded him he hadn’t had time to tell her about recent events at the Chronicle. He told her now. “That leaves your house.”
“Let’s get round there.”
While he drove the Superintendent formulated a question. “Ms Holland, what condition are we going to find him in?”
There had been a time when Rosie Holland knew as much about the physical structure of brains as anyone, and even that hadn’t been much. You looked at the convoluted lump of grey tissue in your hand, you put it on the scales and weighed it, you noted any obvious lesions, you took sections for microscopic analysis – and then you looked at everything that had originated in that brain, everything it had caused to happen, everything it had known and governed and thought, and you felt dwarfed by the majesty of it.
How did it do it? You could talk about neurons and ganglia and synaptic gaps, and chemical activity and electrical activity, and all you were doing was defining what it was you didn’t understand. The working of the human brain could be described, its physical structure mapped, its operations observed. But as to how a brain works, let alone how a mind works, even experts don’t claim to know much. A Unified Field Theory reconciling quantum physics with general relativity and thus explaining everything about the physical universe would be codified long before the last question about the human brain was answered.
And even answering the last question about the normal human brain would leave queries relating to the mind and brain of Shad Lucas.
Rosie heaved a substantial sigh. “Superintendent, your guess is as good as mine. Cunningham stretched that machine further than it was designed to go – volts, amperage, duration – to do a job it was never designed for. To inflict brain damage. He meant Shad never to wake up, or to wake up profoundly disabled.
“But if it had worked we’d have found Shad either unconscious on the couch or dribbling down his shirt in the corner. He had no business coming to with enough mental and physical command to flatten Cunningham and make his escape.
“So what kind of a state is he in? – better than he should be, but that isn’t saying much. His memory could be gone. His entire personality could be gone. That may be little more than a zombie out there, a body powered by animal instinct and not much else. If that’s what we find, Cunningham will have destroyed Shad as utterly as he destroyed Jackie Pickering.”
Marsh didn’t look at her. “This is my fault. I sent him there.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Rosie tiredly. “You did wha
t you thought was best. You were lucky enough to know an expert in memory-related psychiatric illness – it would have been negligent not to seek his opinion. Don’t flay yourself, Superintendent, you had no reason to suspect Cunningham while there was time to stop him. You thought Shad was in good hands. So did I.”
And now they knew better. While uniformed constables were beating the shrubbery around Fellowes Hall, Harry Marsh was on the phone – first to the Burgesses, then to their daughter. Debbie was still mourning her friend, inconsolably tearful; and that was while she still thought Jackie the random victim of a stranger. When she began to realise, from the direction of Marsh’s careful questions, that she herself was the catalyst for the tragedy, grief turned to hysterics and she screamed and wept down the phone at him.
Only when she grew quiet was he able to get some measure of what she knew. Yes, Jackie had set her sights on Cunningham almost as soon as the extent of the damage he’d done became clear. For two years the girls had talked of making him pay: at first as a kind of fantasy, therapeutic in a way, like painting his face on a football and kicking it around. Later Jackie began to talk of it as a real possibility. She found a job in the town where he’d surfaced. She worked for the advancement that would empower her to make programmes. She tracked down other patients with similar tales to tell, lined up other psychiatrists to speak on the pitfalls of regression therapy and recovered memory.
The last time they’d talked Jackie had been elated, almost as if she were high on something. Debbie was anxious about her. Jackie shrugged off her concern, told her to be patient only a little while longer. The waiting was almost over, she promised. She wouldn’t say more than that.
Debbie wasn’t entirely sure if it was Cunningham she was talking about, even if she was in earnest or still fantasising. When Jackie was found dead three days later, and some kind of half-crazed vagrant was said to be helping police with their inquiries, it seemed suddenly irrelevant. Debbie never suspected a connection to the cause her friend had been pursuing since university, not until Marsh himself suggested it.
“Jackie was after him for two years,” growled Marsh. “I wonder how long Cunningham was after her.” He’d seen a lot of crime and a lot of criminals, had developed a certain understanding of some of them. Some crimes were just hanging around waiting for an incautious passer-by to commit them. Almost anyone could find himself on the wrong side of the law by carelessness or stupidity. But he didn’t like people who planned crimes in cold blood, preferred a spur-of-the-moment axe murderer any day.
Rosie shrugged. “I suppose, since one of the psychiatrists Jackie approached warned him what she was doing. Her programme was almost ready, all she needed was his contribution. He may have known for months. Certainly he had time to plan his response.”
“It wasn’t panic, then – he really did intend to murder her?”
“She meant to break him,” said Rosie. “He destroyed her friend’s family, and he did it in a way in which there was legitimate public interest. The personal desire for retribution found common cause with her professional need to make a name for herself and they blinded her to the dangers of what she was doing – driving a man with so much to lose into a corner.
“Everything he’d worked for was heading down the tubes. Jackie had manoeuvred herself into a position where she could subject his professional conduct to a degree of scrutiny he couldn’t survive. Don’t underestimate the motive that gave him, Superintendent. Nothing in the world is so unemployable as a struck-off doctor. Defrocked vicars and disbarred lawyers can use their talents in other ways, but a doctor forbidden to see patients is finished.”
Marsh pictured the big house up on The Brink, imagined the mortgage that went with it and found his eyes watering. “I assumed he came here because Fellowes Hall made it worth his while. But that wasn’t it. After the Burgess case he had to start again somewhere, and in some field, where he wasn’t known.”
Rosie sniffed. “I thought it was a funny job for a memory specialist. He made it sound plausible enough, but I should have queried it then. The only reason he’s working in an addiction clinic is that his old speciality was too hot for him. When did he come here?”
“About eighteen months ago.”
“And three months later Jackie Pickering followed and began demolishing what he’d saved from the wreckage. She was obsessed, she was never going to give up. It was him or her: Skipley wasn’t big enough for them both.”
“She was planning his humiliation and he was planning her death.”
“It was the only way he could shut her up. She was fired with a sense of righteous indignation, and she just kept coming. When they arranged to meet at the station, Cunningham was determined to come away safe. He’d survived one scandal just barely, he couldn’t take another. It was dark, he could take her somewhere no one would see them, and he had the knife strapped to his ribs.”
Marsh blinked. “Shad said he …”
Rosie cut him off impatiently. “Shad said what he was coached to say. Everything Shad said he got from Cunningham, either in their sessions together or straight from his head at the scene of the crime. The knife, and the knowledge to use it, were Cunningham’s. He was a physician before he was a psychiatrist – he knows his way round the human body.”
“And Shad had the bad luck to be passing.”
Rosie shook her head. “Luck had nothing to do with it. He knew someone was in trouble. Fear made Jackie radiate like an emotional pulsar. He may have felt it before he left the flat – maybe that’s why he was out late without much money. Or maybe he needed a pint of milk but her terror grabbed him before he got to the shop. I don’t expect, now, we’ll ever know.”
“Don’t be in too much of a hurry to write him off,” Marsh advised softly.
Rosie appreciated his kindness though he didn’t know what he was talking about. “However it happened, he knew she was in trouble and he tried to help.”
“Cunningham must have wondered where the hell he came from,” said Marsh. “There’s no gate at that end of the station. Shad must have climbed over eight feet of wire netting.”
“He would,” murmured Rosie. “No wonder people are scared of him – he doesn’t behave normally at all. Most of us would tell ourselves we’d imagined the cry for help. Only a freak would go to so much trouble to make sure.”
Marsh frowned. “Who says he’s a freak?”
“Just about everybody, sooner or later.” Rosie sighed. “What he does, what he can do, is so far outside normal experience that people feel threatened by him. He’s the alien in their midst: they don’t understand so they’re afraid. If I’d been found with the body, some people would have thought me innocent and some would have thought me guilty but none would have cared enough to picket the Chronicle. If you’d found Jackie they wouldn’t have marched on the police station. But Shad’s different. People treat him differently. Now a man he hardly knows has tried to burn his brain out. He must be a freak: people don’t treat other people that way.”
Marsh returned to the script they were hammering out. “So there was a witness after all. Cunningham had done everything he could to avoid being seen and heard, but he couldn’t anticipate a witness who knew what was going on from streets away.”
Rosie nodded. “I expect he took Shad for a wino or a junkie – if you’ve seen him in his work clothes you’ll understand why. He knocked him out and left him with the body. If he woke up next to a corpse he’d run off and never say a word, but his fingerprints would be on the knife and the police would ignore any suspect whose prints didn’t fit. And if he was found at the scene, no one would ever believe he didn’t kill the girl.
“But Shad isn’t a junkie, and he has friends who do believe him. Mostly, anyway. Only, when he woke up his memory of the critical period was lost. Thus far Cunningham was still safe, if nervous.
“But his luck held. When you sought his help he was suddenly able to protect himself. He knew how false memories can be planted in vulner
able people – that’s how he got into this mess. Once Shad was a patient he could manipulate his recollection. If he could make Shad feel guilty about what happened he was safe. He’d confess; and when a little later Cunningham had to report that the murderer’s wits had finally given way, he thought somebody’d make a note on the file, drop it in a drawer and that would be that.
“But he wasn’t quite that lucky. When he realised the police weren’t about to grab a confession, any confession, and rubber stamp it, the risk of discovery loomed again. And when I left word at the clinic that we were going to get Shad off the hook, Cunningham assumed I knew the truth and decided he had to finish the job. Dispose of the only witness.”
Marsh was nodding slowly. His voice was gruff. “You can’t fault his logic.”
Rosie blinked. “What?”
“I have no doubt,” he said carefully, “that he did what we think he did, pretty much how we think he did it. It makes sense: it explains everything that happened. But it’s purely circumstantial. We don’t have any evidence that Andrew Cunningham has committed a crime. If he treated Debbie Burgess inappropriately, that’s a matter for his professional body. Debbie can say that Jackie planned his downfall, but only Lucas can put him at the station, bundling her on to a train and stabbing her.”
“But – what he’s done to Shad! If he didn’t kill Jackie, why on earth …?”
“There’s also no evidence that he did anything to Shad beyond trying to treat him. The dials? You can only say what they read when we went in there. There was a scuffle – either of them could have knocked into the machine and altered the settings. They were alone, the only one who can say different is Lucas. We need his testimony. We need him in his right mind.”