By the Time You Read This (24 page)

35

L
EONARD
K
ESWICK LEANS FORWARD
on the couch, gripping and twisting a shredded Kleenex. He is a roughly spheroid man, and looks weak and dispirited, like a partially deflated soccer ball. His eyes are large and watery, slightly protuberant—a bloodhound’s eyes. He looks up mournfully at the unseen camera.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says. “I don’t know where to turn with this problem.”

“Well, you’ve turned here,” Dr. Bell says onscreen. “That’s a start, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but I don’t seem to be getting over this. It’s been months now, and I’m not getting any better.”

Dr. Bell, watching this a year later, nodded his agreement. “Because you don’t want to get better,” he said quietly, although not onscreen. “You just won’t admit it.”

The office phone rang and Dr. Bell froze the image. He had set the voice mail to pick up on the first ring so he could monitor the message. He knew who it would be. She had already called twice, the second message considerably more distraught than the first.

“Dr. Bell? It’s Melanie. Oh, God, you’re probably at the hospital or with another patient. Please call me as soon as you get this. I’m feeling really, really bad …”

“Of course you feel bad,” Dr. Bell said to the room. “You always feel bad.”

“I’m afraid I might really do it this time. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Bell clasped his hands behind his head and spoke to the ceiling. “Sounds like real progress to me.”

“Please call me when you get this. Please. I’m sorry. I just need—I just—please.”

“Please-I just-Please-I just-Please-I just,” Bell mimicked her. “Gimme, gimme, gimme. I, I, I.”

“Something about seeing my stepfather again really put me over the edge. Everything is just black. Absolutely black, and I can hardly breathe. Please give me a call when you get this.”

There was a timid click as she hung up.

Bell sat back and pressed Play.

“What I can’t get over,” Keswick says, “is how helpless I am over this. And it came on so suddenly. I mean, I looked at porno magazines as a kid, same as everybody else. Looked at them right through college and even a little after. But magazines are different. Magazines, it’s just normal: adult women, adult guys. It’s not as if I went searching for the stuff I’m staring at these days!”

“I believe you,” Dr. Bell says. “There are people addicted to eBay, to shopping online, gambling online— people who had no problems with these areas before the Internet came into their lives.”

“Yes, because you used to have to go way out of your way to do them. Let’s face it, it used to be difficult to be a shopaholic in Algonquin Bay. What are you going to do, buy up the entire collection of ski pants? Same with gambling. There’s no casinos here. The most damage you could do to yourself was with the lottery. But this stuff is right in my home. It’s as if they filled my drawers and closets with an endless supply of pictures.”

“Is it just pictures?” Dr. Bell says onscreen.

“What?” Keswick looks bewildered, as if the doctor has suddenly addressed him in Farsi. “Well, yeah. I would never touch a kid. I never thought about kids sexually before. I still don’t—not actual kids I see on the street. And I know the damage sexual abuse can cause. I would never do that to a kid. Never.”

“Well, let’s talk about exactly what it is you
are
doing.”

“I’m looking at pictures. That’s all. I get them from file-sharing sites.”

“Do you ever post any pictures yourself?”

“God, no.”

“Do you pay for the pictures you look at?”

“No. And I never would. That would be encouraging the whole enterprise.”

“All right. So tell me, what is it you do that’s so terrible? You haven’t molested any children. You haven’t taken pictures of any children. You haven’t paid anyone else to take them. You haven’t sent them to anyone.”

“No! I just look at them! But it’s sick! It’s sick! I shouldn’t be looking at them! Oh, God, I’m so ashamed. So ashamed.”

Keswick is weeping now, tears filming his cheeks. He takes his glasses off and tries to put them on the table but drops them. He doesn’t stoop to retrieve them, just sits there in a soggy, rumpled heap, crying.

Finally, when he is able to speak again: “I have kids of my own, that’s the real kicker. Jenny and Rob. They’re three and five—younger than the pictures I’m looking at—but still, it makes me want to throw up. I can’t imagine what I’d do if I found out someone was taking pictures of my kids. I think I would even be able to kill someone in that situation.”

“This has been going on how long? A year? Eighteen months?”

“About eighteen months. It was like instantaneous with me. The minute I stumbled onto that site, it was like a lock turned inside me. Like these tumblers clanked into place and suddenly I go from being a more or less normal human being to being a sex fiend. A pervert.”

He cries again, and Dr. Bell watches him in silence.

“I’ve tried twelve-step, like you suggested. I found a site online. It’s better than nothing, I guess, but it’s only once a week and sometimes hardly anyone logs on. There’s no sex addiction groups here that I know of. And even if there were, I could never tell them what I’ve been looking at.”

“You’ve told me. Why couldn’t you tell them?”

“That’s different. You’re a doctor. Our conversations are privileged. There might be people I knew at the meetings. I would die if this ever got out. Literally. I would have to kill myself.”

“Well, perhaps we should work on reducing some of this shame you’re suffering from.”

“But it
is
shameful. What I do
is
shameful.”

“Let me finish. With all addictions there’s a cycle of shame that seems to operate. Take heroin, for example. An addict has resolved to quit using, but he’s feeling a little nervous, a little jumpy. Eventually he goes out and buys some dope and shoots up. Magic. All that anxiety is gone. It’s a powerful thing. But it wears off, of course, and then the addict is left with his shame at having used the drug again. Then he needs something to counteract the shame—and what’s the first thing that comes to mind?”

“More dope.”

“More dope. Exactly. And that’s one of the reasons twelve-step programs enjoy some success. Being in a room full of people who accept you and your weakness, who even share it, is a powerful way to reduce shame. It’s certainly a pity, as you say, that there’s no such group here in town. Suppose we were to have a couple of sessions with your wife—”

“Never. Don’t even think that. She doesn’t even know I’m seeing you.”

“But you’ve said many times you have a loving relationship with your wife. Wouldn’t that love survive the possible disappointment of finding out you have an unfortunate weakness?”

“She would hate me. She would dump me. She would take the kids away from me and I’d never get to see any of them again.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve heard her talk about it. You know, when there’s a story in the paper or on TV, about a teacher or a priest or whatever. She’s always completely disgusted. She says stuff like, ‘Oh, they should boil that guy in oil.’ ‘They ought to castrate that man.’”

Dr. Bell is the calm voice of reason. “But priests, teachers—those are people who are responsible for lots of children. They’re in positions of trust.”

“Look, I work for ComSoc. Social assistance. I’m surrounded by social workers. You think they’re going to tolerate having a child porno addict in their midst? I’d be out of there in five seconds.”

“We were talking about your wife, not your colleagues. This would only be sharing the information with your wife. Is there not any possibility she was exaggerating her response to the stories you mentioned? One often says things like, ‘They ought to hang that man.’ But one doesn’t necessarily mean them.”

“She may have been exaggerating. Meg isn’t one to hold back her feelings. She may have been exaggerating about the punishments, castration and so on, but she wasn’t exaggerating her disgust. I could hear contempt in every word. If she ever felt that kind of contempt toward me, I couldn’t live with it. I’d sooner die, I swear. I’d sooner die.”

Bell froze the image, savouring his patient’s horrified gaze, his absolute helplessness, then hit the Off button. Keswick had been a lamb to the slaughter. A little too easy, really, to be completely satisfying. Still, there was a neatness about it, an almost Greek inevitability, that one could appreciate.

The phone rang again.

“Hello, Melanie,” Bell said without picking up. “Little distressed, are we? Lurching toward an actual decision?”

“Dr. Bell, it’s Melanie again. I know you said you’d be unavailable this week, but I thought you’d be checking messages. This is pretty critical …”

He could hear a sniffle, loud and wet. He got up and took the DVD out of the player, slipping it into a numbered sleeve.

“Please call me back, Dr. Bell. My thinking gets so distorted. I think maybe I should go to the hospital. If you could just get me into the hospital. I actually have the pills. I have them in my room, and it just seems like the best thing to do, but I don’t know.”

Dr. Bell took out a CD of Haydn’s
Seven Last Words of Christ. Eli, Eli, why hast thou forsaken me?
An agony of ropes and nails and abandonment.

“Oh, God. I can’t stand this anymore. I don’t know why I’m alive, I truly don’t.” There was a messy disconnection as she had trouble hanging up.

Bell pushed Play and lay back on the sofa.

36

C
ARDINAL WOKE UP THE
next day, and Catherine’s absence sucked his breath away, as if his bedroom were adrift in space and someone had thrown open the airlock.

As he stumbled through his morning routine—toast and coffee and the
Globe and Mail
—he forced his thoughts toward work, toward Delorme’s case of the child pornographer, Arsenault’s series of break-ins.

At one point he looked up from his newspaper and stared into the emptiness across the table.

“I don’t want to think about you,” he said. “I don’t want to think about you.”

He went back to the
Globe
, but could not concentrate; his eyes were scratchy from a night of fitful sleep. The sooner he got into work, the better. He put his plate in the dishwasher and tossed the rest of his coffee down the kitchen sink. He rushed through his shower, threw on his clothes and headed out.

The mornings were getting crisper now. There was a scent of winter, a hint of ice, even though there was not yet any ice on the lake, nor would be for another month or so. He shivered in his sports jacket. It would soon be time for a heavy coat. The sky was dazzling blue and he thought of how Catherine would have loved it. Her PT Cruiser sat empty in the driveway.

“I don’t want to think about you,” he said again, and got into his Camry.

He was backing out of the drive when a car pulled up and blocked his exit. Paul Arsenault rolled down the window and waved a gloved hand.

“Morning!”

Cardinal knew he must have something good. No way Arsenault would stop by before work unless he had something pretty tasty to share. Cardinal got out of his car and went over to Arsenault’s window.

“Thought I’d stop by so we don’t use up any of that precious Police Services time.”

“You get something interesting?”

“Well, yes and no. I don’t know how you’re going to take it.”

“Just give it to me, Paul.”

“In the end, I got it from the Immigration database—and no, I’m not going to tell you how. We got a British national, moved here a couple years ago.” He handed a printout through the window.

It showed two thumbprints. The photograph above them was kinder than the general run of such documents. In the curly hair, the salt-and-pepper beard, it captured the canine amiability of the man. Frederick David Bell, MD. When Cardinal got to work, he called Bell and arranged to meet him on his lunch hour up at the psychiatric hospital.

He drove out along Highway 11 and turned in at the all too familiar driveway of the Ontario Hospital. Cardinal had been here countless times—professionally, because it often housed criminals, and personally, because of Catherine. Usually when she was booked in here, it was the dead grey month of February.

The red brick building was nearly lost amid the glory of the leaves. A crisp wind blew over the hilltop, and the poplars and birches dipped their heads like dancers. All of Cardinal’s history with the place blurred into one long ache, all the times Catherine had been taken here because she was manic and spouting some loony idea as if it made perfect sense, or because she was so depressed she was an inch away from sliding a razor across her wrist.

He took the elevator to the third floor. Dr. Bell’s door was open. He was in his chair, looking out over the parking lot and the hills beyond. He sat very still, and Cardinal was put in mind of a dog at the window, waiting for its owner to return.

He knocked—loudly, with the intent to startle—and was gratified to see the effect. Bell’s shoulders shot up and he turned around. He stood up when he saw Cardinal.

“Detective. Please come in. Have a seat.”

Cardinal set his briefcase on the floor and sat down.

“You were right about the cards,” he said. “They weren’t from a murderer.”

“No, I thought not.”

“They were from a guy I put in jail for fraud a few years back.”

“Well, that makes perfect sense. Fraud is such a sneaking, knavish thing. Fits in with the style of the poisoned pen. And did he lose his wife as a result of your efforts?”

“Yes. You were right about that too.”

“Probably not by suicide, though.”

“No. But how would you know that?”

“Because—at least on the face of things—the shame in such a case would be all with the criminal and not the criminal’s family. Different story if, say, the crimes were a long-standing series of sexual assaults, or racist violence, something a spouse might be expected to know about, or at least suspect. Do you have something else for me? Is that why this sudden trip up here? I was thinking, just before you arrived, that it would be painful for you to come up here. All the memories of Catherine.”

“It doesn’t make any difference where I am.”

Cardinal opened his briefcase and pulled out Catherine’s suicide note. This time he handed the doctor the version that had been through the
ESDA
machine. It was encased in plastic, the writing a ghostly white script on a background of graphite, Catherine’s small prints dotting one edge and a fat splotch of thumbprint at the bottom.

Dr. Bell put on small reading glasses and peered at the note. “Mm. You showed me this before. I see it’s now been processed in some way.”

“Right again, Doctor. And that’s your thumbprint at the bottom.”

Cardinal was watching Bell’s face for any reaction, but there was none. Of course, he was a psychiatrist, trained to keep his own emotions hidden while others wept and wailed.

Bell handed the note back. “Yes. Catherine did show me such a note a few months ago.”

“Funny, you didn’t mention that when I brought it to you last week.”

Dr. Bell winced and removed his glasses, massaging the bridge of his nose. Without the thick lenses he looked oddly vulnerable, a lemur in daylight.

“I’ve gone and put my foot in it, haven’t I. Detective, I’m so sorry. I admit I wasn’t keen for you to know I’d seen this. I was afraid you’d think I’d been negligent in some way, that Catherine had written a suicide note in a pitch of agony and I had blithely ignored it.”

“Now, why would I think a thing like that?” Cardinal said. “After all, it’s only a suicide note. She only has a history of serious depression.”

“Well, of course, now you’re angry—”

“She even shows you the note, hoping against hope that somehow you will help her with these terrible urges. You have a little chat, and at the end of the hour you hand it back.”

“It’s easy to make it sound bad in retrospect.”

“And during the next three months, as these suicidal thoughts are apparently building up and building up, and Catherine is coming to see you two or three times a month, you never see fit to admit her to hospital. You don’t even see fit to call me in for a consultation. After all, I’m only her husband, I’ve only lived with her for decades, why should you bother to let me know? So, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Catherine is doing fine. You, on the other hand, happen to know she’s planning to kill herself, and you choose to do nothing about it.”

“Detective, you’re making exactly the sorts of assumptions I was afraid you’d make. I labour in the fields of grief and despair—with people who are unbearably depressed. Sadly, they often want to end their lives and sometimes they succeed. It’s no one’s fault. Families get upset and they can rush to judgment. I’m sure it happens in your line of work too. I read in the paper that the Dorn family is extremely upset with the way the police handled that young man’s suicide.”

“The difference is, the officer did everything he could to stop that guy.”

“And I did everything I could to help your wife.”

“Allowing her to carry around a suicide note for three months. So that one night, when she’s in the middle of an interesting photographic project, on impulse, she pulls it out and jumps.”

“Detective, I’ve been dealing with depression for over thirty years now, and believe me, at this point there’s nothing that would surprise me. The only certainty with this disease is that it
will
surprise you.”

“Really? Personally, I’ve always found it hideously predictable.”

“Forgive me, Detective, but clearly not. You didn’t see it coming any more than I did. As to her using a note she’d written earlier, it’s most likely an example of Catherine’s thoughtfulness. She wanted to use words she’d written when she was not too overwrought, a note that would express her feelings less harshly than something scribbled in the heat of the moment. Most suicide notes, as you probably know, are not full of concern for those left behind.”

“Did you even think about calling me after she wrote that note?”

“No. Catherine was not upset when she brought it in. We discussed it as we would a dream or a fantasy. She was emphatic that she had no imminent plans to harm herself.”

“I believe her. I would have seen it coming.”

“You’re still suggesting there’s some other explanation for her death? The original reason you suspected she might have been murdered was that you were receiving those nasty cards in the mail. You thought that only someone who had killed your wife would do such a thing. And so you tracked down the person who wrote them, and it turns out he hasn’t killed anyone. Isn’t that right? Or am I missing something?”

I’m off my game, Cardinal thought. The shrink has me nailed: I have no hard evidence. Nothing.

“She wasn’t upset the day she died,” was all he could manage. “She gave no sign that she was thinking of suicide.”

“Over the years, she gave every sign. I’ve read her medical records, Detective. Catherine has stayed in this hospital more than half a dozen times—once for an episode of mania, but all the other admissions were for unmanageable depression. All those times she was feeling that she wanted to die, that suicide was the only way out for her. It seems clear to me that she decided to actually do the deed when she was in a relatively lucid state, when she could carry it out with some degree of control, some forethought.”

“I would have seen it coming,” Cardinal said again, knowing how lame it sounded.
Catherine, what have you done? What have you done to me?

“Surely, in your line of work, Detective, you’ve had occasions where people miss the obvious about people they live with?”

Cardinal thought of the mayor and his trollop of a wife. Am I that blind? Does everyone know the truth but me?

“Is it not possible, Detective, that you, in your grief, are missing what is obvious to everyone else? Why not allow yourself the possibility of being wrong? You’ve lost your wife, your thinking is bound to be clouded at best, and who wouldn’t be subject to the palliative effects of denial? The nasty cards were sent by a resentful ex-con; there’s no reason to believe anyone killed your wife. I knew Catherine for going on two years, and I can’t imagine her having any serious enemies. You’ve known her for decades—have you come up with anyone who might have a motive?”

“No,” Cardinal said. “But motives aren’t always personal.”

“Psychopaths, you mean. But there’s no reason to suppose this was the work of a serial killer. Especially not one who had handy access to her suicide note and could leave it behind at the scene of the crime.

“If you believe Catherine was murdered, then knowing that she wrote a suicide note three months earlier would not have prevented it. If you believe she committed suicide, then you have nothing to investigate, unless you intend to sue me for malpractice. As I say—and as you say—she gave no indication she was intending such an act. None. And so I treated the note at face value. It was the answer to a question I posed to her.”

“What question was that?”

“We were talking about the reasons why she
hadn’t
killed herself, despite years of emotional suffering. Her biggest reason was what it would do to you—to you and your daughter. My question was, What would you say to your husband if you
did
commit suicide? What would you say in a note? I wanted her to articulate the feelings right then and there, but Catherine didn’t answer me. She said she would have to think about it. And then, to my surprise, she brought a note in, next session. As you see, it clearly expresses her love for you.”

Cardinal’s throat felt swollen shut. And then, to his horror, he found that he was weeping.

“You might think about taking some more time off,” Dr. Bell said gently. “Clearly, you haven’t yet had time to grieve properly. Maybe you should consider allowing yourself that kindness.”