The Torment of Others

by Val McDermid

  Don Merrick gazed at the floor. ‘Nobody here’s interested in gossip,’ he muttered. ‘Just results. And your record speaks for itself on that.’

  The shadow of a smile crossed Carol’s face. ‘Thank you, Don. Nevertheless, if we’re going to make this unit work, we need to have an open, honest atmosphere. What happened to me happened because of secrets and lies. I’m not prepared to work in an environment like that again.’ She looked around, saw she had their attention and continued.

  ‘I was selected for an undercover operation that left me in a very exposed position. Because I wasn’t thoroughly briefed by my bosses, I couldn’t cover my back properly. And as a result, I was raped.’ She heard a sharp intake of breath but couldn’t identify its source. ‘I don’t expect to be handled with kid gloves. What happened to me won’t affect the way I do my job. Except that it has made me very sensitive to issues of loyalty. This squad can only function if we all put teamwork first. I don’t want any glory hunters here. So if any of you has a problem with that, this is the time to ask for reassignment.’ She looked around at her group. Stacey and Evans looked surprised, but the others were nodding their acquiescence.

  Carol stood up straight and picked up the top file. ‘Good. Now, until we land our first job, we’re supposed to be looking at unsolved open cases. They’ve given us two murders, a rape, two armed robberies, a serial arson and a pair of child abductions. Over the next few days, I want you each to go through three separate files. Don, work out a rota so all the cases get looked at. Include me in it–since we’re one light, I’ll make up the numbers. On each file, I want you to list suggested actions for moving the case forward. Then, when you’ve all made your lists, we’ll sit down together, look at what you’ve come up with and see which cases offer the most promising prospects for further investigation. Any questions?’

  Kevin raised a hand. ‘Is this a non-smoking office?’

  Paula groaned. ‘It’s a non-smoking building, Kevin.’

  ‘Yeah, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have smoking areas, does it? I mean, what is the point of air conditioning if you don’t make it earn its keep?’

  ‘It’s bad for the computers,’ Stacey pointed out.

  ‘We could have one corner,’ Evans said. ‘Under the air-conditioning vent.’

  As the discussion rolled over her, Carol felt the first twinges of homecoming. Never mind the adrenaline of working a case, this was the kind of argument that told her she was back where she belonged. Pointless wrangling about the small issues that made life bearable, that was the hallmark of the police service. ‘Sort it out among yourselves,’ she said with an air of finality. ‘I don’t care. I’ve got a door I can close. Oh, and I’ve got a job for you, Sam…’

  He looked up, surprise on his face. ‘Guv?’ He shifted in his seat, turning slightly to one side. It was the movement of a man unconsciously reducing his target area, assessing the situation before committing himself to fight or flight.

  ‘Pop out to the shops and buy us a kettle, a cafetière and a dozen mugs.’ His eyes hardened as Carol’s words sank in. ‘Tea and some decent coffee, milk and sugar. Oh, and some biscuits. We’re not going to win any popularity contests in the canteen, digging over what other officers will see as their failures. We might as well entrench ourselves here.’

  ‘Can we get some Earl Grey tea?’ Stacey Chen’s contribution sounded more like an order than a request.

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ Carol said, turning away and heading for her office. She’d learned something already. Evans didn’t like what he saw as menial work. Either he considered it to be women’s work or he thought it was beneath his capabilities. Carol stored the information away for future reference. She had almost reached the door when Merrick’s voice reached her in a protest.

  ‘Ma’am, do you know why the files on Tim Golding and Guy Lefevre are in here?’ he demanded indignantly.

  Carol swung round. ‘Who…?’ She was aware of a sudden stillness in the room. Paula’s stare was wary, while the others’ expressions varied from surprised to incredulous.

  Merrick’s genial face had tightened. Tim Golding’s the eight-year-old who went missing nearly three months ago. Guy Lefevre vanished into thin air fifteen months before. We turned the city upside down looking for them. We even got Tony Hill to draw up a profile, for all the good it did.’

  It was Carol’s turn to feel surprise. Tony had said nothing to her about profiling, never mind profiling in Bradfield. But then, he had been uncharacteristically quiet since they’d discussed whether she should take up John Brandon’s offer. He’d encouraged her to accept the job, but since she’d told him of her decision to go ahead, his emails had been curiously bland and noncommittal, as if he was deliberately making her stand on her own two feet. ‘What’s your point, Don?’ she asked.

  ‘Tim Golding was my case,’ he said angrily. ‘And I was the bagman on Guy Lefevre. There’s nothing we left undone.’

  ‘Now you understand why we’re going to be the station pariahs,’ Carol said gently. ‘There are another half-dozen SIOs out there smarting because cases they couldn’t close have been passed on to us. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tim Golding’s case had been put in deliberately to keep us on our toes. So even though I have every confidence that you did all you could, we’re still going to treat this case just like the others.’

  Merrick scowled. ‘All the same, ma’am…’

  There are people in this organization who would probably be very happy to see us fail. If you let this wind you up, Don, you’re playing into their hands.’ Carol gave him her warmest smile. ‘I trust you, otherwise you wouldn’t be in this room. But we’re all capable of missing something, no matter how much we think we’ve covered all the ground. So I don’t want the officers reviewing this case to keep their thoughts to themselves for fear of offending you. Like I said earlier: no secrets or lies.’

  Carol didn’t wait for a reaction. She walked into her office, leaving the door open. Was this the first sign that someone was out to undermine her squad and, by extension, their new Chief Constable? She knew she fell too easily into mistrust these days, but she’d rather be too cautious than blithely oblivious to someone putting the shaft in. After all, it wasn’t paranoia if they really were out to get you.

  She’d barely settled behind her desk when Don Merrick appeared in the doorway carrying a file. ‘A word, ma’am?’

  Carol gestured towards the visitor’s chair with her head. Don sat down, holding the file to his chest. Tim Golding,’ he said.

  ‘I hear you, Don. Hand it over.’

  He pulled it even closer to him. ‘It’s just that…’

  ‘I know. If anybody’s going to poke their nose into your case, you’d rather it was me than one of the new faces.’ Carol reached a hand out.

  Reluctantly, Don shifted forward in his seat and extended the file towards her. ‘We couldn’t have done more,’ he said. ‘We just kept hitting brick walls. We couldn’t even give Tony Hill enough to go on to make a profile worthwhile. He said himself it was a waste of resources. But I couldn’t think of anything else to try. That’s why it’s ended up as a cold case this early on.’

  ‘I wondered about that. It seems very soon to consign it to the back burner.’

  Don sighed. There just wasn’t anywhere else for us to go with it. We’ve still got a couple of DCs keeping an eye on it, feeding the press whenever they decide to take another crack at it. But nothing active’s happened for at least a month.’ Don’s misery was written all over him, from the hangdog eyes to the slump of his shoulders.

  It provoked a sympathetic echo in Carol. ‘Leave it with me, Don. I don’t expect I’ll see anything you’ve missed.’

  He got to his feet, a rueful look on his face. Thing is, ma’am, I remember when I was working the case that I wished you were around. Just so I could run it past you. You always had the knack of seeing things from a different angle.’

  ‘What is it they say, Don? Don’t wish too h
ard for what you want because you might get it.’

  Tony Hill leaned forward and gazed intently through the observation window. A neat, balding man sat folded in the chair bolted to the floor. He looked somewhere in the region of fifty, though his placid expression went some way towards erasing the lines etched into his face. For a fleeting, incomprehensible moment, Tony thought of a child’s lollipop, tightly wrapped in cellophane, Sellotape wrapped around the stick.

  His stillness was preternatural. Most of the patients Tony encountered had difficulty with immobility, never mind tranquillity. They twitched, they fidgeted, they chain-smoked, they fiddled with their clothes. But this man–he checked the notes–this Tom Storey had an almost Zen-like quality. Tony glanced through the notes again, refreshing his memory from the previous evening’s reading. He shook his head, fighting his anger at the stupidity of some of his medical colleagues. Then he closed the folder and headed for the interview room.

  He felt the spring in his step, even in that short journey. Bradfield Moor Secure Hospital wasn’t generally associated in people’s minds with the notion of contentment, but that was precisely what it had given Tony for the first time in months. He was back in the field, back in the world of messy heads, back where he belonged. In spite of his constant efforts to assume a series of masks that would help him blend in, Tony knew he was an outsider in the world beyond the grim institutional walls of Bradfield Moor. It was a feeling he did not care to examine too closely; it said things about him that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. But it was impossible to deny that the exercise of empathy was what gave meaning to his days. There was nothing quite like that moment when the tumblers of someone else’s brain clicked into place for him and allowed him to penetrate the knotted logic of another mind. Really, truly, nothing.

  He pushed open the door to the interview room and sat down opposite his latest challenge. Tom Storey remained immobile, only his eyes shifting to connect with Tony. In his right hand, he cradled a heavily bandaged stump where his left hand had been until a few days previously. Tony leaned forward and arranged his face into an expression of sympathy. I’m Tony Hill. I’m sorry for your loss.’

  Storey’s eyes widened in surprise. Then he gave a small snort. ‘My hand or my kids?’ he said sourly.

  ‘Your son and your daughter,’ Tony said. ‘I imagine the hand feels like a blessing.’

  Storey said nothing.

  ‘Alien Hand Syndrome,’ Tony said. ‘First recorded in 1908. A gift for horror-film scriptwriters: 1924, The Hands of Orlac- Conrad Veidt played a classical pianist who had the hands of a killer grafted on after his were destroyed in a train accident; 1946, The Beast with Five Fingers, another pianist; 1987, Evil Dead II– the hero takes a chainsaw to his possessed hand to stop it attacking him. Cheap thrills all round. But it’s not so thrilling when you’re the one with the hand, is it? Because when you try to explain what it feels like, nobody really takes you seriously. Nobody took you seriously, did they, Tom?’

  Storey shifted in his seat but remained silent and apparently composed.

  ‘The GP gave you some tranquillizers. Stress, that’s what he said, right?’

  Storey inclined his head slightly.

  Tony smiled, encouraging. They didn’t work, did they? Just made you feel sleepy and out of it. And with a hand like yours, you couldn’t afford to relax your vigilance, could you? Because there was no telling what might happen then. How was it for you, Tom? Did you wake up in the night struggling for breath because the hand was round your throat? Did it smash plates over your head? Stop you from putting food in your mouth?’ Tony’s questioning was gentle, his voice sympathetic.

  Storey cleared his throat. ‘It threw things. We’d all be sitting eating breakfast, and I’d pick up the teapot and throw it at my wife. Or we’d be out in the garden and the next thing I’d know, I’d be picking up stones from the rockery and throwing them at the kids.’ He leaned back in his chair, apparently exhausted from the effort of speech.

  ‘I can imagine how frightening that must have been. How did your wife react?’

  Storey closed his eyes. ‘She was going to leave me. Take the kids with her and never come back.’

  ‘And you love your kids. That’s a hell of a dilemma for you. You’ve nothing to fight back with. Life without your kids, it’s not worth living. But life with your kids places them in constant danger because you can’t stop the hand doing what it wants. There’s no easy answer.’ Tony paused and Storey opened his eyes again. ‘You must have been in complete turmoil.’

  ‘Why are you making excuses for me? I’m a monster. I killed my children, that’s the worst thing anybody can do. They should have let me bleed to death, not saved me. I deserve to be dead.’ Storey’s words tumbled over each other.

  ‘You’re not a monster,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t think your kids are the only victims here. We’re going to run some physical tests. Tom, I think you may be suffering from a brain tumour. You see, your brain comes in two halves. Messages from one part reach the other across a sort of bridge called the corpus callosum. When that’s damaged, your right hand literally doesn’t know what your left hand is doing. And that’s a terrible thing to live with. I can’t blame you for being driven to the point where you thought killing your children was the only way to keep them safe from whatever you might do to them.’

  ‘You should blame me,’ Storey insisted. ‘I was their father. It was my job to protect them. Not kill them.’

  ‘But you couldn’t trust yourself. So you chose to end their lives in the most humane way you could. Smothering them while they slept.’

  Storey’s eyes filled with tears and he bowed his head. ‘It was wrong,’ he said, his voice choking. ‘But nobody would listen to me. Nobody would help me.’

  Tony reached across the table and laid his hand on the bandaged stump. ‘We’ll help you now, Tom. I promise you. We’ll help you.’

  Carol arched her back and rotated her shoulders, swivelling round in her chair to stare out of the window. Across the street stood a white Portland stone building with a fine neoclassical portico. When she’d last been in Bradfield, it had been a bingo hall. Now it was a nightclub, its cold neon tubes spelling out ‘Afrodite’ in fake Greek script. Buses rumbled past, advertising the latest movies and console games. A traffic warden stalked the metered parking, his computerized ticket machine held like a truncheon. A world going about its business, insulated from the unpleasantness that was her stock in trade. She’d read the material on Guy Lefevre and now she was close to the end of Tim Golding’s file. The words were starting to blur. Apart from a half-hour break for lunch, she’d been reading solidly all day. She knew she wasn’t the only one. Every time she’d raised her head, the rest of the squad had been equally engrossed. Interesting how their body language seemed to reveal so much more of their personalities than the slightly awkward and guarded conversation over the lunchtime sandwiches Stacey had fetched from the canteen.

  Don sat hunched over his desk, one arm round the file like a kid who doesn’t want anybody copying his work. He wasn’t the quickest wit Carol had ever worked with, but he made up for it with his stolid persistence and total commitment to the team. And if there was one person whose loyalty she could depend on without question, it was Don. He’d proved himself in the past, but she hadn’t realized until this morning how important that knowledge was to her.

  Kevin’s wiry body sat erect in his chair, papers neatly aligned. Every now and again he would pause and stare into the middle distance for as long as it took to smoke a cigarette. Then he would scribble something on the pad next to him and return to his reading. Carol remembered how he’d always seemed so buttoned up. It had made it all the harder to believe when he’d gone off the rails. But like most repressed individuals, when he had finally broken the rules he’d been more reckless than the wildest risk taker. And it had led him into betrayal. Carol told herself that he’d never make that mistake again, but she was still reluctant to trust. She
hoped he couldn’t see that in her eyes.

  Sam Evans was hunched in the chair opposite Kevin, his jacket carefully arranged on a hanger hooked over a filing-cabinet drawer handle. His shirt was crisp and white, the careful creases of the iron still clean cut on his sleeves. He and Kevin had staked out smokers’ corner on the opposite side of the room to Stacey and her computers. Evans’ reading style seemed almost nonchalant, as if he were drifting through the Sunday papers. His expression gave nothing away. But occasionally his hand would snake into his trouser pocket and emerge with a minidisk recorder. He’d mumble a few words into it then slip it back out of sight. Carol didn’t think much was getting past him.

  Paula, conversely, was a spreader. Within half an hour of starting, the whole of her desktop was covered in stacks of papers as she sorted through the file in front of her. But in spite of the appearance of untidiness, it was clear she knew where everything was. Her hand moved, apparently independent of her eyes, confidently picking up the next piece of paper she needed. It was as if she had a mental map of her arrangement, a neat grid stamped firmly on her brain. Carol wondered if that was how she worked interviews; slotting every piece of information into its own socket till the connections linked together and lit up like a completed circuit.

  Stacey couldn’t have been more different. Even her dress style was at odds with Paula’s casual T-shirt and jeans. Stacey’s suit fitted as if it had been made to measure, and the fine polo-neck sweater beneath it looked like cashmere to Carol’s eye. A surprisingly expensive outfit for a detective constable, she thought. When it came to work, it was almost as if Stacey resented the presence of paper. She’d balanced the file she was studying on a pulled-out desk drawer to leave her work surface clear for interaction with the machine. The twin screens of her computer system held most of her attention. She would swiftly scrutinize the file material, then her fingers would fly over the keys before she cocked her head to one side, ran her left hand through her glossy black hair and clicked a mouse button. Manipulable virtuality was seemingly what she craved over reality.