Little Black Lies (16 page)

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Dr Sapphire Pirrus is not a medical doctor of any description, certainly not a psychiatrist, but she’s been on all the right courses, has the right certificates on her walls and, above all, knows how to listen.

Her house is sufficiently elevated for me to have a good view of the harbour. ‘Paperwork,’ Catrin told me, when I’d asked what she had on today. ‘The whale beaching will keep us busy for days.’ Paperwork will keep her in the office all day. It’s her boat I’m looking for, though, among the fishing vessels, yachts and ferries darting about the harbour. I think I see it moored up but it’s difficult to tell from here. Some distance away, anchored in the outer harbour, lies the cruise ship, the
Princess Royal.
It should already be heading for South Georgia, from there to Antarctica. Passengers will have paid a small fortune for their trip. They won’t want delays of any kind.

And yet everyone on the islands hopes the abductor of Archie West is on board that ship. Stopford can’t let it go.

Sapphire opens the door and steers me into her consulting room at the front of the house. As usual, there is the faintest whiff of patchouli oil about the place. Sapphire was the child of hippy parents, long before hippies became fashionable. Her family came to live on the islands forty years ago when she and her brother and sister were small. They came dreaming of a simple life, of self-sufficiency.

‘You well?’ I ask, as I take my usual seat in the wooden-framed armchair facing the window. I can still see the harbour, still watch the boats. ‘Cold clear up?’

Her lips twitch as she takes the seat opposite mine. It throws her when I ask her about herself. She’s a woman who likes to compartmentalize. The hour I pay for is my time, to be used talking about me and my problems. I don’t always go along with that, because I won’t be the needy, self-absorbed loser I imagine too much counselling could turn me into.

‘Quite a couple of days you’ve had.’ She picks up her notebook and makes sure the pencil is close to hand. She never holds the pencil, just lifts it from time to time to make notes. I suspect this is deliberate, because the one time she forgot she played with it endlessly, twisting and turning, stabbing and rolling. When Sapphire holds a pencil, she gives away how nervous this whole business makes her. Or maybe it’s just me.

‘Are you supposed to listen to gossip?’

‘Small island.’

I don’t tell her that actually, the islands are massive, pretty much the land mass of Wales, and that it is the population that is small. I’m conscious that if I piss her off too much, she might refuse to carry on seeing me.

‘You look nice,’ I say instead, which is probably worse. She does though. She’s tall and wiry, thin rather than slender, but she wears her clothes well and she favours bright colours. Today she’s wearing the sapphire of her name, a cardigan that reaches her knees. Her legs are long, slim. With a name like Sapphire you’d expect her to have blue eyes, but her eyes are a pale grey, very similar to the hair that curls to her shoulders. Her skin is pale too.

I asked her once how a little girl who didn’t have blue eyes ended up being called Sapphire. She pursed her lips for a few seconds, clearly wondering how she could get away with not telling me.

‘My older brother is called Mistral,’ she said in the end. ‘My younger sister is Blaze. I’d say I was the lucky one.’

As I say, hippy parents.

‘What would you like to talk about first?’ The tone of her voice tells me that all kidding around is done for the day. There’s only ever really one thing I want to talk about, but I feel like a girl if I start with that.

‘I had another flashback,’ I tell her instead, and describe the incident on the
Endeavour,
or what I can remember of it. She listens without interrupting, making occasional notes, a slight furrow appearing between her pale eyebrows. Her reaction when I tell her about finding Jimmy Brown’s body is muted, letting me know it isn’t exactly news to her, but when I get to the really interesting part (as far as she’s concerned, anyway) she starts tapping the pencil on the arm of her chair.

‘You hurt Catrin?’ she says when I’m done. ‘Physically harmed her?’

‘Not as much as she hurt me,’ I say, remembering how she coshed me with a crowbar. Certainly not as much as she could have hurt me, I think, remembering the gun she’d produced.

On the wreck I’d seen enough of the semi-automatic pistol to make me stop and think. Later, on the boat, after Catrin had gone into the cabin, I found it for a closer look. Several decades old, it was a Ballester-Molina, basically an Argentine copy of the famous American Colt M1911. The Colt was reproduced all over the world, sometimes becoming the weapon of choice over the original. The British Army in the Second World War used the Molina on several clandestine operations. Quite how that particular one got into Catrin’s hands I have no idea, but some of her forebears weren’t exactly peace-loving.

All in all, the Molina is a pretty respectable weapon. I hadn’t taken seriously Catrin’s ability to use it. The woman I’d thought I knew couldn’t point a gun at a living creature and pull the trigger. Just shows what I know.

‘I’m not trying to make light of it,’ I say. ‘God knows, Catrin’s the last person I’d knowingly hurt.’

‘Tell me everything you can remember. From climbing on to the boat to when you came back to yourself again.’

I try, but flashbacks are like dreams. If I don’t capture them in the seconds after I come out of them, they quickly fade. ‘Something to do with the bombing of the
Galahad,
I think.’

‘Your regiment watched that happen, didn’t it? You were camping out at Fitzroy at the time?’ Sapphire, like all islanders over a certain age, is well versed in the history of the conflict. On 2 June 1982, the Chinook put us down on the stark, snow-swept hillside above Port Pleasant. We were due to rest up as the powers that be prepared for the final onslaught into Stanley. Battle weary from taking Goose Green, we dug ourselves in and watched two ships, the
Sir Galahad
and the
Sir Tristram,
slip into the harbour below us, bringing troops and ammunition. To our amazement, the troops remained on board, effectively making both ships sitting ducks in the event of an Argentine bombing.

A few days in, it happened. We heard the approaching Skyhawks, the answering roar of machine guns, and watched men leap from a burning ship into a burning sea. The gunfire, the Hawk engines, the exploding ammunition should have been deafening. Maybe it was. Maybe the screaming of tortured and dying men was only in our heads. All I know is that it sounded very real at the time, and it still sounds real when I get the flashbacks.

We ran down to the beach and discovered we couldn’t touch the survivors because their blackened skin came away in ribbons. The stench of gunpowder and phosphorus filled the air, threatening to burn the inside of our lungs and even that was preferable to the smell of burning flesh. To this day, even the whiff of a barbecue makes me want to throw up.

‘And Catrin’s two boys, Ned and Kit. They were part of it. But there’s nothing logical about these flashbacks when they happen. Imagine a drugged-up, drunken nightmare. The scariest images you can think of racing into your head one after another.’

‘It makes a lot of sense.’ Sapphire is leaning towards me. I can smell the heavy, musky perfume she’s wearing. ‘In a state of some stress, compounded by being with Catrin, you went to the place where you had one of the worst experiences of your life. And then, not only did you find the body of a young child, albeit not the one you went looking for, you also found a toy that belonged to yet another dead child. One that meant a great deal to you.’

‘It may not have been Kit’s rabbit.’

She gives a brief, dismissive shake of the head. ‘Doesn’t matter. In that moment, you thought it was. I’m not surprised all that triggered an episode. What does surprise me is why you put yourself in that situation in the first place.’

I shrug. ‘We all wanted to find the bairn.’

‘There are two thousand servicemen on the islands who could have gone. Are you sure you didn’t want an excuse to be alone with Catrin?’

Sapphire takes no prisoners. Five minutes into our session and she has me bang to rights.

‘Have you thought any more about what we talked about last time?’

I stand up and walk to the window. A fishing vessel coming into harbour is leaving a trail of white water on the sea and a flock of scavenging birds hangs in the air.

‘Callum, within a year of coming to live here, most of your PTSD symptoms had gone. You were well on your way to becoming healthy.’

I know what’s coming. I’ve heard it before.

‘Then, almost immediately after the Grimwood car accident, the violent flashbacks began again.’ I can hear from Sapphire’s raised tone that she’s spun round in her seat to face me. ‘It doesn’t take a genius to work out that they’re directly related to what happened that day, to the fresh trauma you were personally involved in.’

‘How’s your da?’ I ask her. ‘Ready for his big night?’ Sapphire’s father is in charge of the firework display on November the fifth.

She ignores that. I don’t blame her. As distractions go, it was pretty lame.

‘Three years on, there’s no sign of them improving. In fact, judging by what you’ve just told me, they’re getting worse. Unless you’ve been hiding something, you’ve never exhibited physical violence before.’

‘I hide nothing from you,’ I tell her. I’m lying, of course.

‘It seems to me that Catrin and her grief are having a direct and damaging impact upon your mental health. She’s refusing to get over her loss and, while she’s in your life, you’re not getting over what happened either.’

I turn quickly. ‘She lost two children. Three children.’ I hear my voice break and know I’ve made a mistake that Sapphire will spot. ‘How soon was she supposed to get over it? Six months? A year?’

‘You need to talk to her. You know you do.’

‘She’s not strong enough.’

One pale, perfect eyebrow lifts. ‘She slaughtered nearly two hundred whales yesterday. I’d say she’s tougher than she looks.’

Stalemate. I’m annoyed. From the look in her eyes, Sapphire’s pretty narked too. But she’s the professional. She gets it together first.

‘You think you can’t talk to Catrin about something so painful because you’re worried what it will do to her?’

‘Maybe I’m worried what it will do to me.’

I get a very firm headshake in response. ‘I don’t agree. This has always been about what’s best for her. My point remains that it shouldn’t be. There are two of you involved in this.’

‘She lost everything.’

‘Well, arguably, so did you.’

I take a deep breath.

‘There are other women in the world,’ she tells me, not for the first time, but her voice is gentler than usual. ‘There are other women on the islands.’

I smile, which isn’t difficult. For all that she gives me a hard time, I like Sapphire. ‘There’s you,’ I say. ‘Although you might think it unethical.’ As I wait for her to respond I realize I’m only half joking. Sapphire is definitely shaggable, even if she is a decade older than me. Even if she is married. Suddenly, shagging Sapphire feels like the best idea I’ve had in ages. Right here, right now. On the thin beige carpet, or across the desk, watching the boats heading out to sea. Her eyes have fallen to her notepad. I wait for her to look up. The answer will be in her eyes and I’m going to act on it.

‘It would be completely unethical,’ she says, in a flat voice, keeping her eyes on her notepad. I feel like a dick.

The atmosphere in the room has turned awkward. I wonder if I should leave, even though there are twenty minutes of the appointment to run.

‘How was Catrin last night? When the two of you were bringing home the child. That must have been very difficult for her.’

Sapphire is usually reluctant to spend too much of our time talking about Catrin. That she should bring her up again probably means I’m forgiven. Or that she’s picked the best way she knows of getting my attention off her. I cross the room again and sit, resolving to behave for the rest of the session.

‘Quiet. As though she couldn’t really take it in. But then I was much the same, after Speedwell. I think we were both on autopilot.’

She nods, her signal that she wants me to go on talking.

‘She was unusually silent. Even by her standards. There was none of the “How did he get there? What were the chances of us driving past at that moment?” – none of the reaction you’d expect. She almost, I don’t know, took it in her stride. As I said, on autopilot.’

‘Do you think it might offset public opinion? The fact that she was instrumental in finding the boy?’

‘What public opinion needs offsetting, exactly?’

‘She killed two hundred whales.’

‘She euthanized two hundred dying animals.’

‘Not everyone will see it that way.’ Sapphire’s voice has a definite edge to it now. She knows what she’s doing, goading me about Catrin.

‘Islanders will be fine with it.’

‘Some of them. Maybe most of them. But there’ll always be a few who will question it. Did she act too quickly? Had she really tried everything? And there’s been a lot of talk among the visitors, I understand.’

‘They’ll be gone in a couple of days. I wouldn’t be surprised if that cruise ship leaves today.’

She nods again, although I know she doesn’t agree with me. And she’s touched on something that, I admit, does worry me. Catrin should be able to rely on the support of the people around her. After yesterday, I’m not sure she’ll get it.

‘Do you still love her?’

The question takes me by surprise. She has never asked me outright before.

‘You’re very protective,’ she says. ‘Not just with me. That race over to Speedwell yesterday was all about watching her back, wasn’t it?’

I nod, because trying to pretend otherwise would be a waste of my time and hers. ‘She’s not the woman I knew. I keep hoping she’ll come back, even a glimpse, but she’s a shell. A – what do you call it – a cardboard cut-out.’

‘I agree with you, but that’s not what I asked.’