The Torment of Others

by Val McDermid

  When Tony had described Derek Tyler, Storey had known at once who he meant. He’d been aware of his silent stillness, mostly because there was so little of it around the place. Even those drugged up to their eyeballs tended towards the twitchy. But Tyler seemed to exist in a little oasis of quiet. Not that there was anything tranquil about him. He gave off an air of tension that made others wary.

  He didn’t join in, either. That was something else that marked him out. He displayed no interest in social activities, and his passive resistance to anything approaching communal treatment was impressive, all the more so because Storey reckoned he wasn’t that bright.

  All of this made him easily identifiable. But very hard to reach. This was no straightforward undertaking that Tony Hill had laid on his shoulders. Storey had spent most of the day covertly watching Tyler whenever he got the chance, trying to figure out a way to crack the carapace. Nothing suggested itself.

  In the early evening, when most of those conscious and out of their rooms were watching the TV soaps, he saw Tyler sitting alone at a table in the corner of the day room. On the spur of the moment, Storey helped himself to one of the jigsaws stacked on the bookshelves and walked across to Tyler’s table. He sat down without asking, struggled to open the box with one hand but managed it at last. He tipped out the pieces, finding a moment to wonder how many of the 550 would be present and correct.

  No reaction. Tyler seemed to withdraw further into himself. But Storey could see his eyes drawn to the muddle of die-cut cardboard in spite of himself. Storey started sorting through the pieces awkwardly, looking for edges and sky. ‘The easiest bit and then the hardest bit,’ he said. ‘After you get the sky done, the rest feels possible.’

  Tyler said nothing. The silence endured while Storey constructed the border of the picture. It was an Alpine view, a funicular railway ascending a mountain that turned from meadow to icecap. He made a couple of deliberate mistakes, but Tyler didn’t react. So he corrected himself and carried on.

  ‘I’m feeling quite cheerful tonight,’ he said, carefully not looking at anything other than the jigsaw. ‘I’ve got to have an operation, but after that, I think I’m going to be out of here.’ He glanced up at Tyler. ‘You know what I did, right?’ It was a fair bet. In spite of the best efforts of the clinical staff to prevent patients gossiping about the past transgressions of others, news travelled Bradfield Moor like rats mapping their nocturnal territory. ‘I killed my kids.’ He couldn’t help it; tears welled up in Storey’s eyes and he brushed them away impatiently. ‘I thought that was it. I’d never see the outside world again. To be honest, I wasn’t about to argue with that. I mean, how could I be trusted? How could I trust myself? If I could take the lives of the people I loved most in the whole world, how could anybody be safe?’

  Tyler showed no sign that he had heard a word. Storey persevered. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to do. ‘And the way the staff treat me, I can see that, behind all their professionalism, they think I’m beyond redemption. They’re used to dealing with sick people. But they make me feel like I’m special, like what I’ve done sets me even further apart than everybody else. That’s the one thing nobody ever forgives, killing your children. Or so I thought, until I met this new doctor they’ve got.’ He smiled. ‘Dr Hill. He’s not like the rest of them. He’s big on getting people out of here. He made me see that it’s not impossible to be made better. To start again on the outside. I tell you, you want to get out of this dump, he’s the one you need to see.’

  Tyler reached out a tentative finger and pushed a piece towards Storey. It was the next in a sequence of jagged grey that would eventually reveal itself as a glacier, hard up against the left-hand edge. Storey tried not to show his delight. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said nonchalantly. He carried on in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘I wish to Christ I’d met Dr Hill months ago,’ Storey eventually said, this time speaking from the heart with genuine resentment. ‘He knew right away what was wrong with me. If my GP hadn’t just fobbed me off with a bottle of pills, if he’d sent me to see somebody who knew what they were doing, I wouldn’t even be here now. My kids would still be alive and I wouldn’t be here.’

  Tyler shifted in his seat, turning away from the table. Storey sensed he had somehow lost momentum with the silent man. ‘But the thing about Dr Hill…he’s making me see that that’s not the end of my life. That I can go back into the world and start again. And next time, I can do better. I can get it right, maybe. With help, I can get it right.’

  Storey wasn’t sure what it was that he’d said, but something had worked. Tyler moved back towards the table. He studied the pieces, then picked one up and slotted it in. His eyes met Storey’s and there was a flicker of some unidentifiable emotion. Tyler nodded slowly, then got to his feet. He walked past Storey, pausing to pat his shoulder. Then he was gone, a silent shadow slipping out of the room and into the hallway.

  Storey leaned back in his chair, a faintly perplexed smile on his face. He wasn’t sure if his tactics had worked, but he had a feeling he might have earned himself some brownie points with the man who could set him free, both from Bradfield Moor and from the prison of his thoughts.

  Carol had taken one look at the crime scene and called Tony. Now he stood by the bed, his head bowed, reverential. Carol could almost believe that he was blind to the tide of scarlet that had swept the dead woman’s life away, so focused did he appear to be on her gagged face. She didn’t have that luxury. The corpse on the bed felt like a personal affront, a calculated reminder that she and her team had failed the challenge of this killer’s last outing. Intellectually, she knew it was nothing of the sort; men who did this sort of thing were far less interested in their audience than in the contents of their own sick heads. But emotionally, it felt like a slap in the face.

  ‘There’s no doubt about it, is there?’ she said softly to Tony.

  He looked up at her, his eyes unreadable in the weak light from the sixty-watt bulb inside its dusty paper shade. ‘None whatsoever. Whoever killed Sandie killed this one too.’

  Carol turned to Jan and Paula, standing on the threshold waiting for their orders. ‘Do we know who she is?’

  Jan nodded. ‘Jackie Mayall. She’s relatively new on the scene. A smackhead, but one of the more or less functioning ones.’

  ‘Did she have a pimp?’

  ‘Not any more. When she started, she was working for Lee Myerson. But he’s doing five for dealing smack. When we lifted him, we put the word out that his team was to leave the girls alone unless they wanted a taste of the same medicine. Since we started waving the Proceeds of Crime legislation around, a lot of shitty little ponces have had to trade in their fancy motors.’

  ‘OK. So Jackie worked solo. But she must have had mates. Jan, I want you and Paula to hit the bricks. Get out there and talk to the women. Find out who else uses this flophouse. Who was here tonight. Who saw Jackie earlier on. Whether she had any regulars. You know the drill.’

  The two women were already on the move. ‘Paula, where’s Don?’ Carol called after them.

  Paula turned, her face startled. Her voice said, ‘I don’t know, chief,’ but her expression was a wary version of Why are you asking me?

  ‘He was here earlier,’ Jan said. ‘He told Kevin to interview the manager. He got me and Paula to check out the other rooms. Of course, nobody heard anything or saw anything, not even when we threatened to tell their wives. Then after the police surgeon did the preliminaries, I think Don went off with Sam to see what they could pick up on the street.’

  Carol hid her irritation. If Don Merrick wanted to be taken seriously as a DI, he had to start behaving like one. Canvassing the streets was a job for junior officers. He should have been here coordinating the rest of the team, at least until she arrived, not rushing off into the night. ‘I want him at the post mortem,’ she said. ‘Tell him to liaise with Dr Vernon’s team.’

  Tony had moved away from the bedside to allow the scenes of cri
me technicians room to practise their arcane mysteries. Carol crossed to his side, close but not quite touching. ‘It looks like she’s bled every drop of blood from her body,’ she said. ‘He’s out of control.’

  ‘It’s not a lack of control. It’s overkill, true, but it’s overkill in a very specific way. It’s about power. The abuse of power taken to the nth degree.’

  ‘And he’s going to do it again,’ she said heavily.

  ‘No doubt about it. He enjoys it far too much to stop now. And I think he’s getting more confident.’

  Carol’s face wrinkled in distaste. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Remember Vernon said Sandie must have taken at least an hour to die? And yet he set this one up in a room that rents by the hour. He was taking the chance that he would run over time. He must have felt assured enough to deal with that if he had to.’

  Carol shook her head. ‘That would be a hell of a risk. He’d multiply his chances of being seen, surely?’

  ‘There’s that,’ Tony agreed. ‘But he doesn’t seem to be prone to risk-taking. Power Assertive, remember? Keep the dangers to a minimum. Maybe it’s got more to do with his confidence levels. Maybe he feels assertive enough now to know that he could kill his way out of the problem.’

  Carol drew her breath in sharply. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘No. But it’s something you have to consider.’

  ‘Who am I looking for, Tony? What can you give me?’

  He frowned. ‘He’s white, male, mid-twenties to mid-thirties. He’s not good with authority–he thinks he’s underestimated by the world. If he has a job, his employment record will be spotty. But I think he’s more likely to be self-employed, semi-skilled. Hires himself out casually to whoever has a job for him, but he never lasts long with the same employer because he thinks he knows best. Only he doesn’t. Socially he gets by. He doesn’t have close male friends, but he’s got a circle of acquaintances. He’s very unlikely to be in a relationship with a woman.’ Tony pulled a wry face. ‘And he’ll be impotent except when he’s doing this.’ He shrugged. ‘Not much to go on, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It’s a start,’ Carol said, knowing how often unpromising beginnings led somewhere productive with Tony. ‘And God knows, right now any kind of start is something I’m not going to sniff at.’

  He feels good tonight. He’s kept his promise to himself. This time it worked. He was strong and he was a man. Now, sitting in the bar sipping lager, acting like it was any other night and he was having a well-deserved pint, he hugs his secret to himself, knowing the activity on the street is all down to him.

  They found this one quicker, just as the Voice planned. OK, the delay in finding Sandie worked to his advantage. Time had passed and any witnesses had scattered to the four winds, leaving only the regulars who wouldn’t even notice him. But it had been nerve-racking, waiting and wondering. None of that this time, though. He knew Jimmy de Souza would be up those stairs like a rat up a drain as soon as he realized the key was back on its hook and he hadn’t been paid. Greedy little shit. Served him right, coming face to face with something that would put him right off his food for days. He remembers de Souza taking the piss once, years ago. It feels good to get payback. Two birds with one stone.

  But it was scary, being in the hotel room with her bleeding to death. It seemed to take forever, and although that really got him excited, he felt exposed there in that room in a way he wasn’t with Sandie. There were other people in the building. There was greedy Jimmy to consider. But the Voice had told him what to do if he was spotted. He hadn’t relished the thought of unsheathing his knife and plunging it into someone’s belly. It felt out of control, not part of their carefully staged cleansing. But the Voice had explained how it might one day be necessary, and he’d told himself he was ready for it, capable of it.

  He looks out of the big picture window of the bar into the street. There they are, the plod, notebooks out, taking names and addresses that’d be bullshit half the time. Asking people what they’d seen, where they’d been. Looking for alibis, looking for witnesses, looking for a killer who was under their noses. But they can’t smell him. He’s out of their reach, safe and sound in the pub with his pint. He smiles and remembers a tag from childhood. ‘Run, run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.’ That’s him, all right. The gingerbread man.

  Jan and Paula decided to start close to the hotel. There were a couple of bars in Bellwether Street close to the narrow entry that led to the Woolpack Hotel. As they walked down the street, Jan shivered in the foggy night air and pulled on her gloves. ‘It’s bitter tonight,’ she said. ‘The girls who work out of doors won’t be doing so well.’

  ‘Bloody awful life,’ Paula said with feeling, turning up her coat collar against the chill clinging hand of the mist.

  ‘So what’s it like, living with Don Merrick?’ Jan said conversationally.

  Paula flashed her a look of surprise. ‘News travels fast,’ she said.

  ‘No secrets in a nick,’ Jan said.

  ‘Then you’ll know I’m not living with him in the biblical sense,’ Paula said sharply. ‘He’s sleeping in my spare room. Just till he gets himself sorted out.’

  Jan laughed. ‘He’ll be there for a while, then. It’s all right, Paula, I know you’re not shacked up with Don.’

  There was something in her tone that made Paula uneasy. ‘Good. So you won’t mind keeping everybody else straight on that one.’

  ‘Is that what you want? You really want me to tell everybody how I can be so sure you’re not sharing your bed as well as your microwave with Don?’ There was a playful, teasing edge in her voice now.

  Paula stopped in mid-stride. ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked, a hollow feeling in her stomach.

  Jan wheeled round to face her, a smile turning her cherub’s face into a picture of innocence. ‘Rainbow Flesh, Leeds. On the dance floor. I think it was the dance mix of Beth Orton’s “Central Reservation”. Your partner was very cute. Mixed race. Tat of a snake on her shoulder.’

  Paula tried not to show the shock that seemed physically to ripple through her muscles. ‘Not me,’ she said automatically, not even pausing to figure out that even by asking this, Jan was making her own confession. She started walking again. ‘You obviously have more time off than I do if you’re out clubbing,’ she added, trying to make light of this moment when her worst fear had assumed the shape of reality. She felt sick.

  ‘It’s all right, Paula, I’m not going to tell,’ Jan said, falling into step beside her. Think about it. I’ve got as much to lose as you do. We both know that, no matter what the brass say, the street cops aren’t going to be our friends if we’re out.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ Paula said sharply. She wanted time to think about this, not fall into false comradeship with someone she didn’t know well enough to trust. She headed across the street, not bothering to see if Jan was following her. There’s a woman over there, looks like she’s working. Let’s go and check her out.’

  Jan followed, the cherub smile still on her face.

  Next morning, the fog had thickened to a dismal shroud, a pale grey tinged with sulphurous yellow. Traffic crawled through the city streets and the morning DJ on Bradfield Sound was beginning to betray his exasperation at the length of the traffic reports. Normally, it wouldn’t have impinged on Tony, who would have used the time to escape inside his head. But this morning he was impatient to get to work.

  He’d come home from the ugliness in room 24 of the Woolpack to a message on his answering machine from Aidan Hart. When he’d returned the call, his boss had sounded both bemused and faintly annoyed. ‘Derek Tyler wants to see you,’ he’d said.

  ‘He asked?’ Tony wondered what on earth Tom Storey had done to break the logjam of Tyler’s silence.

  ‘He didn’t use his voice, if that’s what you mean. He wrote a note, gave it to one of the nurses. “I want to see Dr Hill.” That’s all it
said. But the nurse thought it was enough of a breakthrough to call me on my mobile,’ he added petulantly.

  I’m sorry your evening’s been disturbed,’ Tony said, not bothering to thread regret into his voice. That’s great news. Thanks for letting me know.’

  I’ve booked you an appointment with him at nine tomorrow morning,’ Hart continued.

  Sorry, Carol, he thought. That’s fine. I’ll be there.’

  ‘In the interview room with the observation window,’ Hart added. ‘I want to see this for myself.’

  Tony cursed the weather and the traffic and wished he knew the back streets of Bradfield well enough to get off the main drag and cut through the back doubles to his destination. At this rate, he was going to be late, and he had a feeling that would bring altogether too much pleasure to Aidan Hart.

  Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the cars in front of him started to move at something approximating the speed limit. Tony surged forward, saying a prayer of thanks to whatever god governed Bradfield’s erratic traffic flow. Must be a malicious bastard, he thought irreverently.

  He arrived at the hospital with seven minutes to spare. Tony didn’t bother going to his office; he made straight for the observation booth behind the interview room. As he turned into the corridor, he bumped into one of the orderlies. ‘Sorry,’ he said, stumbling slightly.