by Alex Walters
She stared back at him, understanding the significance of what he was asking. 'I can't say that anything's impossible,' she said, finally. 'Do you believe that might have happened?'
'I don't know. I feel as if I don’t know anything any more.'
'The thing is,' she said, 'something similar’s happened to me. I’ve found something in my house that shouldn’t be there.' She briefly recounted finding the photograph in her bedroom. 'Perhaps we’re both going mad.' She regretted the flippancy of the words as soon as she'd spoken.
'That would be your considered professional opinion, would it?' He smiled, but there’d been no humour in his tone.
'I'm like you,' she said. 'I feel as if I don't know anything any more.' She paused, wanting to move the conversation on. 'You wanted to tell me about your dream. You felt you were getting nearer the truth.'
'That’s exactly what I felt—feel. It seems so weird that it’s happening at the same time as all this.'
'Jungian synchronicity?' she said, and this time she offered the smile.
'Who knows? But the dreams have been there for weeks, months. Probably longer than I realise. I told you about the clearing, the first sight of sunlight? And then, just last night—'
'Go on.'
'It went further. I knew, for the first time, that it wasn’t me that had my hands on the child’s throat. There was someone else. An adult. In the dream, I mean.'
'What do you think that means?'
'It could mean anything. I suppose it could mean that the adult me is finally taking responsibility for what I did as a child.'
'But you don’t believe that?'
'No. I can’t justify what I’m feeling. I can’t give you any proof or evidence. But I think I’m finally remembering what really happened.'
'You might just be deluding yourself.'
'Of course I might. But then I’d be deluded, so I wouldn’t know, would I?' He laughed. 'And people say psychology’s a waste of time.'
'But you seem confident.'
'I still can’t recall what happened that morning. But my feeling is that the dream is true. That I didn't kill Ben Wallasey. But that somehow, by accident or design, I ended up in the frame.'
'Whatever the truth, it sounds as if psychologically you’re moving in the right direction.'
'And that sounds as if you’re saying, very politely, that you don’t believe me.'
'I believe what you're saying,' Kate said. 'But I don't know how much it means. You still don’t remember anything more of what actually happened?'
'Not yet. But I feel as if it’s slowly returning. Like someone gradually turning up a dimmer switch.'
Kate sat back and swallowed the last of her coffee. The sun had almost set behind the row of houses, casting deeper shadows across the valley. The twilight was thickening. 'I haven’t a clue how any of this knits together,' she said, finally. 'But I’ve got a few stories of my own to tell you. And, somehow, you seem to be at the heart of them.'
'Me?' Wickham blinked in surprise. 'Tell me.'
Slowly, with no real sense of where the narrative was going, Kate began to recount all the events that had happened since her last sessions with Wickham. The relationship with Graeme, and her growing distrust of him and his motives. Her own apparent breakdown after she'd thought Graeme had taken her son. The change in jobs and the move down here. Greg Perry. Tim Hulse. That last fateful conversation with Hulse, and what had happened afterwards. Her growing paranoia. Finally, as she realised how absurd the whole thing sounded, she told him about her apparent glimpse of Graeme on the television—somewhere here, now, in this village.
'You think I’ve not recovered from the breakdown,' she said. 'That I’m still out of my head. It sounds like that to me, now I’ve said it all out loud.'
'No.' He paused as if considering the question seriously. 'Look, you're more of an expert than I am, but you strike me as a very stable person. Even that supposed breakdown doesn’t sound like much more than acute stress. You were already doing a very stressful job. You had the pressures of dealing with my case. You were afraid of this guy, Graeme. Afraid for your son. And no-one seemed ready to believe you. Enough to drive anyone over the edge.'
'You’re being very kind,' she said. 'But you still think I’m off my trolley.'
'I’m trying to look at it all objectively. No-one knows better than I do about the vagaries of memory. I don’t know how or whether any of that stuff really does link together, or whether you’re being paranoid.' He smiled. 'Just like you don’t know whether I’m right about my memory coming back. But a lot of what you’ve told me is substantive enough.'
'What do you remember about the Youth Offenders' place? Somehow, we keep coming back to that.'
Wickham involuntarily rubbed his hands across his face as if the memories were physically painful. 'Jesus, that place. It was my worst time inside. The only really bad time I had, to be honest.'
'In what way?'
'In every way. The staff. The other prisoners. Things kicking off every ten minutes because some spotty little tosser has too much testosterone gushing through him. You name it. I’d been in a special unit up to that point, I guess because of the notoriety of the case. I hadn’t realised how much I’d been sheltered.'
'Why did they take you out of the special unit? I’d have thought in a case like yours it wouldn’t be unusual to spend most of your sentence there. At least up to twenty-one.'
'Who knows? Someone thought it was the right decision. I suppose, looking back, that's an interesting question in itself. They supposedly gave me anonymity—at least, they'd given me a false name to use, though no other real preparation—but someone must have known or guessed. I argued against the decision for a while, but I was too young and nobody on the outside, not even my dad, was very keen on fighting my corner.' She could see he was tracking back through his memories. 'But the place was awful. You’ll have looked back at my file. There was a period, just one, when I stopped being a model prisoner. It was while I was there, and it was because I had no choice.'
'Why?'
'Because some bastard, or maybe more than one bastard, had it in for me. Really had it in for me. It wasn’t something I’d been used to. But I was attacked three, four times in the first few weeks. I wasn’t even sure who was behind it. But it wasn’t just the stupid scrotes who were putting the boot in. It felt organised. Suddenly, for whatever reason, there'd be no staff around. It was like someone was trying to take me out.'
'How did you get through it?'
Wickham shrugged, mock modestly. 'I learned to look after myself. I don’t just mean that I fought back, though I did that too. Bullying in prison’s like bullying anywhere else. They pick on the weak and the vulnerable. If you show you’re neither of those things, they eventually move on. I was smart enough to make the right friends, too. Prison is about cliques and alliances. I learned fast. You get the right people on your side, and the rest don’t take you on.'
'What about the staff? What were they like?'
'I remember your husband,' he said, finally. 'Mr McCarthy.' He smiled. 'I'd never made the connection, obviously. But he was one of the good guys. I’m not just saying that. There weren’t many of them in there, so you tended to remember them. He tried his best to look after me. Not just me. Everyone. Not in a soft way, but, you know, professionally. Tried to do his job like it ought to be done. He actually used to talk to me. Proper conversations. There weren’t many did that. The others—well, they were a mixed bunch, of course, but most of them tend to blur into one mass of unpleasant brutality, to be honest. A lot of them had become institutionalised themselves. Some of them just enjoyed exploiting the youngsters' vulnerability.'
'You mean—?'
'I mean in every way. Bullying, mostly. But in some cases sexually as well. There were various scandals that never saw the light of day.'
'Do you have any recollection of Greg Perry or Graeme Ellis? From your days in the YOI, I mean.'
'When I s
aw Perry at the Open, I knew I'd come across him before but couldn't remember where. He was relatively senior so I'd only encountered him once or twice. I don't have any real memory of Ellis. But, as I say, a lot of the officers just tended to blur into one. You just knew there were a lot of unpleasant bastards around. There were a few of them only too happy to turn a blind eye when someone was having a go at me.' He frowned. 'But I do remember Ellis's name. That's because, later on, there was some gossip about him. That he’d got the boot for some reason. Sexual assault was the word on the landings, but then it would be. That was usually the claim whenever any officer moved on.'
'That was what Tim reckoned, too.'
'It would tie in with your fears about him,' Wickham said. 'Maybe that time there was fire as well as smoke.'
'It’s not getting us very far, this, is it?' she said, after a pause. 'I’d somehow expected some kind of alchemy, I suppose. That we’d share what we each know, and somehow all the pieces would fit together and it would all make sense. But we’re in the same place as before.'
'What about this last thing?' Wickham said. 'You reckoned you spotted this guy Ellis on TV?'
She paused before responding, asking herself if she really could be sure it had been Graeme she’d seen in that instant on the television screen. But she had no doubt that it was him. 'I’m sure of it,' she said, finally. 'It was him.'
'What would he be doing round here?'
'Christ knows. That was always one of the problems with Graeme. You never really knew what he was up to. One of those ducking and diving types. Always cagey about his work. Cagey even about where he lived. He had some flat up north when I knew him. He took me back there a few times, but it gave me no sense of who he was. It felt like an anonymous rental. He was something in import-export, he said, so he was always travelling. Supposedly.' It had all sounded reasonable at the time, even after she’d started to become suspicious of Graeme. Now she wondered how she could ever had believed any of it.
'Do you have any pictures of him? It’s a long shot, but if he’s living round here now, I might recognise him.'
'Funnily enough, I do,' she said. She wasn’t a great one for taking photographs, and Graeme had seemed almost psychotically camera-shy. But she had a couple of pictures of Jack that had Graeme caught in the background. She hadn't deleted them, even she'd tried to remove all other traces of Graeme from her life, because she'd wanted to keep the images of Jack. She pulled the phone from her handbag and flicked through to the images.
'That’s him.' She slid the phone across the table to Wickham.
Wickham peered at the screen. He said nothing for a long moment, then he looked up at Kate. 'That’s not Graeme Ellis,' he said. 'Or not only Graeme Ellis. I know exactly who that is.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Mrs Morrison had shooed Charlie upstairs to play on his computer, and now sat on the sofa, her body contorted as if in pain, opposite Bert Wallace.
'I don't know why you want to talk to us,' she said. 'Charlie's told you everything he could.'
Wallace tapped gently on her notebook with her pencil. 'It's not Charlie I want to talk you, Mrs Morrison. It's you.'
'Me? There's nothing I can tell you.'
Wallace had known that her presence was unwelcome from the moment Mrs Morrison had opened the front door. There had been no offer of coffee this time, and Wallace had had the impression that Mrs Morrison simply wanted her out of the house as quickly as possible.
Wallace glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. 'What time does you husband usually get back from work, Mrs Morrison.'
'I don't—' She stopped, unsure of her ground. 'About five thirty. But I don't—'
'Then we've got a bit of time. I'll try to be gone before your husband gets home.'
'I don't understand.' But the obvious relief in Mrs Morrison's eyes told Wallace everything she needed to know. She felt confident in pushing this harder now.
'I think you do understand, Mrs Morrison. I think there's been something you've not told us.'
'I don't—'
'Let's not play games. We're conducting a murder enquiry. We're currently searching for a second missing child. If you're withholding information that's pertinent to our investigations—' Wallace left the consequence unstated, but she could see that the point had struck home.
'But it's not relevant—' Mrs Morrison stopped, conscious that she'd already said too much.
'What is it you've not been telling us, Mrs Morrison?'
There was no immediate response, but Wallace was content to let the silence build. She tapped gently and rhythmically on her notebook. Finally, Mrs Morrison said: 'My husband doesn't need to know, does he?'
'Until I know what the information is, I can't offer you any guarantees, Mrs Morrison. But we won't make anything public unless we need to.'
'It's nothing,' Mrs Morrison said. 'It's really nothing. But, well, it's embarrassing—'
'Go on.' Wallace could see now that Mrs Morrison wanted to talk, wanted to get something off her chest. She would need little more than encouragement.
'I should have known better. I don't know what I was thinking—'
'Start from the beginning, Mrs Morrison. That may be easiest.'
'I had—' She stopped. 'Well, it was hardly even an affair. Not even a fling. It was just stupid. This man was pestering me for ages. Very persuasive type. Wouldn't take no for an answer. And, well, he was flattering and he played to my ego.' There were tears in her eyes now and for a moment Wallace thought she would begin crying. 'Talked to me in a way that my husband had forgotten.' She shrugged and smiled. 'You know?'
'I can imagine,' Wallace said.
'I fended him off for ages, but then eventually—'
'This is recent?'
'The last couple of months. He's been coming here in the daytime when my husband's at work. Not often. Just three or fours times. But often enough.' She dropped her head into her hands, as if thinking about what she'd just said. Then she looked back up at Wallace. 'How did you know?'
It was Wallace's turn to shrug. 'We didn't. My colleagues just sensed that there was something you weren't telling them.' There was no point in stirring up any bad blood with the nosy neighbour. The interesting question, she thought, was why Mrs Morrison had been so anxious about her secret when Murrain and Milton had spoken to her. 'The day this incident happened with your son—'
Mrs Morrison nodded. 'He'd been here earlier. We'd been, well, you know. He'd stayed a bit longer than we intended.' She offered a weak smile. 'Lost track of the time. He'd not been gone long when Charlie arrived home.'
'So when my colleagues spoke to you—?'
'I just thought it was all bound to come out. I couldn't bear it. I've been so stupid.'
'And when Charlie said he thought the man looked like someone he'd seen leaving the house—?'
Mrs Morrison was staring at her with dead eyes. 'Yes, it's possible. The first time he came to see me at home he was leaving just before Charlie arrived home. He was just visiting that day. Just came to see how I was, he reckoned. Nothing had happened, you understand?' She spoke as if it were vital that Wallace accepted this point.
'I'm not sure I do see exactly, Mrs Morrison. Who is this man?'
Mrs Morrison took a breath. 'This doesn't need to come out, does it? I mean, my husband doesn't—'
'I can't make any promises. It depends on how pertinent this is to our investigations. But we'll do our best to handle this discreetly.'
Mrs Morrison nodded. 'It started with my mother, you see. She died last year. She'd been in a care home for the last couple of years. Alzheimer's. After dad died, it just got to the point where we couldn't take care of her properly any more—'
'And this man?' Wallace prompted.
'I met him at the care home. He was very solicitous—'
I bet he was, Wallace thought. 'This was after your mother died?'
'Well, I met him before that, you understand. He's the manager or owner, I'm not s
ure which. He was very thoughtful and supportive when mum was ill.' She allowed herself a thin smile. 'More than my husband was. That was partly the point. Then after she died—well, he was helpful in sorting out all the arrangements. I thought he just wanted to help, you know?'
Wallace didn't know, but she could easily imagine. Just as she could imagine the kind of man who might prey on a woman when she was at her most vulnerable. 'I understand. And one thing led to another?'
'I suppose. He turned up here, a few weeks later. Just wanted to see how I was bearing up, he said. And he wanted to know how Charlie was coping—'
'Charlie?'
'Yes, you know. Losing his gran and all that. Truth was, I think, Charlie was really a bit young to take it in. But, you know, I just felt that there was someone who was genuinely interested in us. In me.'
Yes, Wallace thought, that's generally how these things are worked. She leaned forward. 'I'm afraid we will have to talk to this man, Mrs Morrison. Especially after what Charlie told my colleagues.'
'Yes. Yes, I understand.'
'We'll need his contact details.'
Mrs Morrison nodded. 'Yes, of course. His name's Brody,' she said. 'Finlan Brody.'
***
'Finlan Brody,' Wickham said. 'Finlan fucking Brody.' He flicked backwards and forwards between the two images. The same face from two slightly different angles.
'Who’s Finlan Brody?'
'Local noise. Runs the retirement home, up the hill. Jesus.' It was clear that some other thought had just struck him.
'Go on.'
'He was the one introduced me to Sue Myers in the first place. He runs some local business group. Meet in the pub on Friday nights. I was encouraged to go along. Ended up sitting next to Sue—'
'Sounds not a million miles from how I met Graeme. Funny that.' She took the phone from him, staring at the screen herself. 'You’re sure it’s him?'
'Pretty certain,' Wickham said. 'It’s one of those images that make you do a double-take because it looks like it should be a different person. The clothes, the whole style looks different. But the face is the same. It took me a moment, because I was thinking: 'Where the hell do I know that face?' I couldn’t connect it with Brody at first.'