The Torment of Others (19 page)

Tony shook his head. That’s not how I operate, Tom. Yes, I do write up cases sometimes, but not out of ambition.’ He spread his hands, encompassing the room. ‘Does this look like the habitat of an ambitious man to you?’

Storey looked around him again, this time making his assessment more obvious. There were no degrees or diplomas on the walls, no books with his name on the cover prominently displayed, nothing that indicated Tony wanted to impress anyone with his position or achievements. ‘I suppose not,’ he said. ‘So why do you do it if it’s not to make yourself look good?’

‘I do it because what I’ve learned from someone like you could mean my colleagues giving better treatment to the people who come to them for help. That’s certainly the only reason I can be bothered reading what other doctors have to say. If I was ever going to write about you–and at this point, that’s not on my list of things to do because I don’t know what the outcome’s going to be for you–I’d be writing to try and raise the awareness of your condition so that the next Tom Storey gets the support he needs sooner than you did.’ Tony spoke with passion and sincerity, and Storey visibly relaxed as the words sank in.

‘When you say you want my help, what are you getting at?’

I’ve been watching the way you interact with the other people who live here. You’re very good with them. You seem to have the knack of connecting with people who don’t always respond very well with the staff.’

Storey shrugged. ‘I was always good with people before…’

‘Before you got ill?’

‘Before I went mad, you mean. Why don’t you just say it? Nobody ever says the word in here. Nobody calls us nutters, or loonies or even patients. You all pussyfoot around, as if we don’t know why we’re here.’

Tony smiled, trying to defuse Storey’s irritation. ‘Would you prefer it if we did?’

‘It would be more honest. You expect us to be honest all the time in therapy, but you dress our world up in euphemism.’

Tony sized up the moment. If he was going to rewrite the rule book, this was his opening. ‘OK, I’ll try to be more direct. You’re good with the nutters. They trust you. They like you. They see you as one of them, so they don’t feel threatened by you.’

‘That’s because I am one of them,’ Storey said.

‘But most of the time you’re still the person you were before your body betrayed you. And I’m gambling that that’s how you can help me.’ Tony took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. ‘I have another job. When I’m not here, I help the police. I analyse the behaviour of offenders and try to give them pointers that can help them catch criminals before they commit more crimes.’

‘You’re a profiler, you mean? Like Cracker?’

Tony winced. ‘Not much like Cracker. And even less like Jodie Foster. There’s nothing very glamorous about what I do. But yes, I am a profiler. Right now, I’m working with Bradfield police. There’s a killer they need to catch before he takes any more lives.’

Storey looked confused. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

‘A patient in here was convicted two years ago of killing four women. There was no doubt about his guilt. The forensic evidence was compelling, and he admitted what he’d done. But now another woman has died in exactly the same way. Whoever is doing it knows everything about the original crimes, including details that were never made public’

‘And you think the man in here is innocent? And you want me to help you prove it?’ Storey sounded eager, his face animated.

‘I don’t know if he’s innocent, Tom. All I know is that he has information locked away in his head that might help us stop any more women dying. And he won’t talk to me. He won’t talk to anyone. He’s scarcely said a word since he arrived here. What I want you to do is to persuade him to talk to me.’

Storey looked uncertain again. ‘Me? You think he’ll talk to me?’

‘I don’t know that either. But I’ve tried everything else I know to get him to open up, and I’ve failed. So I’m willing to try anything, however crazy it might seem.’

‘Crazy’s the word.’ Storey gave a little snort of amusement. ‘The lunatics have taken over the asylum.’

Tony shrugged. ‘Only part of it. So, what do you think? Will you give it a try?’

Carol ran her wrists under the cold tap, trying literally to cool down after her case-review meeting with Brandon. She’d always found Brandon a reasonable boss, someone who hadn’t forgotten what the job was like at the sharp end. But today she’d felt demoralized and uninspired, and she knew he’d been disappointed in her performance. She couldn’t blame him: she was disappointed herself.

At least she’d managed to persuade Brandon not to pull her budget from under her feet and reduce the level of the Sandie Foster inquiry to her own small team. She could still call on other officers as and when she had something for them to do. But it was galling to feel his frustration mirroring her own and to be unable to suggest a course of action that would remedy it. She knew one of the reasons for her success as a detective was her ability to think laterally, to come up with the tangent that nobody else had considered. But on these two cases, she felt trapped in deep ruts of conventional thinking, unable to see over the rims.

And part of that reason was that another of her gifts had turned into a curse. Carol had perfect recall of speech. It made her masterly in the interview room, enabling her to trap her victims in the toils of their own words. But these days, the tape that kept looping through her brain more often than not had nothing to do with what she was working on. She was working so hard not to hear the fragments of dialogue that crept under her guard that she had no space in her mind for those promptings of her subconscious that might just take her further forward.

Carol leaned her forehead against the cool mirror and closed her eyes. What she wouldn’t give for a glass of wine right now.

The door to the ladies’ toilets banged open and Paula rushed in. Carol jerked erect, taking in the startled reflection of her junior in the mirror. ‘Hi, Paula,’ she said wearily. Paula had been even more distant than usual at that morning’s briefing. Carol tried not to take it personally, working on convincing herself that Paula had been scratchy with everyone. But she hadn’t managed it.

‘Chief,’ Paula said, hesitating on her way to the cubicle. ‘How did the review go?’

Carol pulled herself together, assuming the appearance of calm authority she knew she needed with a detective she feared was already on the road to writing her off. ‘As you’d expect. Nobody’s very happy with such conspicuous lack of progress in two very expensive inquiries. But at least they’re not scaling us back just yet.’ Carol made to pass Paula and head for the door. But Paula wasn’t finished with her.

I’ve been looking at the Tim Golding file again,’ she said, her body language already on the defensive.

‘Something strike you?’ Carol tried to keep her voice as neutral as possible.

That photo, chief. I don’t know much about rocks and stuff, but the background looks pretty distinctive to me. I was wondering if there was any mileage in blacking out the image of the boy and asking climbing and rambling magazines to print it, see if anybody recognizes where it was taken?’

Carol nodded. Once that would have occurred to her. Now her thought processes were blurred with too many bad memories.
And too much wine
, a small voice in the back of her head muttered. ‘Good idea, Paula. Ask Stacey to work something up and we’ll get the press office to send it out asap.’ Carol had taken a couple of steps towards the door when something in Paula’s words triggered a faint memory. She half-turned just as Paula pushed open the cubicle door. ‘Paula? What do you know about forensic geology?’

Paula looked puzzled. ‘Forensic geology? Never heard of it, chief.’

‘I heard something on the radio a few months ago. I wasn’t really paying attention, but they were definitely talking about forensic geology. I wonder if someone like that might be able to help us narrow the location down?’ Carol was thinking out loud rather than talking to Paula, but she was suddenly taken aback to see the DCs face light up in appreciation. It was as if this was the moment she’d been anticipating for weeks. It should have pleased Carol that she seemed finally to be dispelling the doubt she’d felt emanating from Paula. Instead, it saddened her to think that she’d been so far removed from her former self.

‘That’s a brilliant idea, chief,’ Paula said, giving the thumbs-up sign.

‘Maybe,’ Carol said. ‘For all I know, these guys just do the Sherlock Holmes thing of looking at the mud on your trousers and revealing which field you got splashed in. But it’s worth a try.’

She walked back to the squadroom, telling the small condemnatory voice inside her that the white wine hadn’t completely done for her brain cells. ‘Sam,’ she called as she crossed the floor. ‘Get on to the BBC website and see what you can find under forensic geology.’

Sam looked up from his desk, startled by the unfamiliar vigour in Carol’s voice. ‘Sorry?’

‘BBC website, forensic geology. Print out what you can find then get me somebody local to talk to,’ Carol said over her shoulder. There’s probably someone at the university earth sciences department who can point you in the right direction.’ She closed her door behind her, shutting out the main room behind the recently installed blinds. She dropped into her chair and put her head in her hands, feeling a slither of sweat under her fingers. Christ, but it had been a long time coming, this small and blessed inspiration. It wasn’t enough to solve anything. But at least it was a start. And she had some breathing space to explore it.

He looks at the tools of what has become his trade laid out before him. The handcuffs, the ankle restraints. The leather gag. The pliable rubber dildo. The razor blades. The latex gloves. The cameras. The laptop. The mobile. All he has to do now is slip the blades into the dildo then swaddle it in kitchen roll so it doesn’t take his fingers off
.

He presses on his minidisk player and the Voice floods over him, taking him through it one more time. He doesn’t need this reminder of what has to be done; he knows it by heart. But he likes to listen. Nobody ever made him feel this good, and what he does in return seems like a very small price to pay for something so right
.

The Voice tells him who to pick, makes it easy for him. There’s nothing left to chance. Tonight he’ll find her round the corner from the shitty hotel just off Bellwether Street where they rent rooms by the hour to women like her. She’ll be leaning against the big cast-iron litter bin, like as not. She’ll be amused when he tells her what he wants from her, like as not. The women don’t expect anything from him except always having good gear. He’s just there. Part of the landscape. Not worth paying attention to
.

But she’ll pay attention tonight. It’ll be the last bit of attention she pays to anybody. But it will be paid to him, and that means something
.

The streetlights hung like luminous boiled sweets in the thin fog of the early evening. Bradfield’s rush hour had spread like a middle-aged stomach even in the few years Tony had been away. But that evening, he was oblivious to his surroundings, working his way across town from Bradfield Moor to his new home on automatic pilot. Music spilled out of the tape player; he’d no idea what it was. Something soothing, minimalist and repetitive. One of his students back at St Andrews had given him the tape. He couldn’t remember why now–something about brainwave function. He liked it because it covered up the background interference, shutting out road noise, other people’s engines, the low subdued roar of the city’s life.

He wondered about the task he’d set Tom Storey. Was he asking too much of a profoundly damaged man? Would Storey feel so pressurized that he’d blow up again? Tony didn’t think so, but he couldn’t know for sure. He’d gone way outside the limits this time, and he knew how bad he’d feel if it had any adverse effect on Storey.

It dawned on him that feeling bad might be the least of his worries. Aidan Hart would go ballistic if he found out what Tony had done. It flew in the face of every therapeutic regime in the book, but in Tony’s view, the book had been written by people with at least as many problems as those they professed to treat. He knew this because he was one of them. His own difficulties with personal relationships of any kind, the impotence that had dogged him for most of his adult life, his failure to turn his feelings for Carol into any functional shape; these were all measures of his closeness to the ruined personalities he tended in his clinical role.

At least he knew he could do that with some semblance of competence. His empathy with their dysfunctionality made it possible for him to tease out useful treatment programmes. If it sometimes left him feeling uncomfortably complicit, that was a bearable trade-off.

What he couldn’t reconcile himself to was the guilt he felt towards Carol. Right now, the best way to help her heal seemed to be helping her to do her job. And the key to that was Derek Tyler. Which went some way to providing him with self-justification for the process he’d set in motion.

‘Oh, Derek, Derek, Derek. You crave the silence because that way you can still hear the voice,’ he said out loud, continuing a conversation he’d been having with himself since he’d left the hospital. ‘The voice does what?’ He paused, thinking and feeling, before he answered himself. ‘It reassures you. It tells you that what you did was good. If you couldn’t hear the voice, you might have to consider that what you did was bad. So you need to hear the voice. So you don’t talk, because that way nobody talks to you. So who’s the voice?’