by Vince Vogel
“This thing is,” Jack put back to the doc, still searching the liner surface, “I already hold on to her too much as it is. I can see it in her eyes sometimes. See how much I’m draining her. I don’t shut her out because I don’t trust her. I do it because I’m scared how much it will take from her.”
“But perhaps she feels drained because you’re shutting her out. Did you think it could be that?”
Jack turned from the moon to the shrink.
“Can we talk about something else?” he asked.
“Everything we discuss in this room is going to be hard, Jack. I can’t go easy on you. When you first asked me to help you, you said yourself that I had to be hard on you. Had to force you to admit things. Is that not still the case?”
“It is. But with Jean, I know I need to open up to her. It’s just that I’ve spent the past nine years closed around her. She’s always been that part of me—along with the boy—that doesn’t know the darkest things. It’s nice to have a little piece of innocence.”
“I agree, Jack. But innocence built on an infidelity of truth is not innocence.”
Jack rolled his eyes. He’d gotten used to being overruled in his own assessments.
“Okay,” Holby added. “We’ll talk about something else. A light interval, so to speak. Tell me about your grandson.”
Jack smiled automatically at the mere mention of the boy.
“What do you want to know about him?”
“You’ve often told me that you see some sort of hope in him. A redemption.”
“Don’t we always see these things in our children, Doc?”
“Yes. But tell me why you see it in him.”
Jack mused for a moment.
“For one,” he began in an earnest tone, “the boy always lights something up inside of me. When he talks; when I watch him play football; at night when he’s asleep with a face of utter serenity; even when I watch the greedy git stuff food in his gob; I feel the presence of something peaceful inside of me.” Jack took a toke of the cigarette and his face saddened. “But then the peace is disturbed by the past. I recall his mum and I realize just why he’s my redemption. Because in all honesty, I messed her up. I broke her home and as a result, his. He’s living without a mum and dad because of something I did years before he was born. Sure, she’s done enough herself to end up where she has, but I set the foundation for it.”
“You’re not to blame for your daughter’s illness, Jack. Carrie takes after her mother. She’s a manic depressive with bipolar disorder. She was first diagnosed when she was twenty-five. Your wife was diagnosed at thirty. Both had probably been suffering it for some years before they were finally given those diagnoses. In both cases, these things were beyond your control. They had already been set into motion.”
“You mean Marsha’s attempted suicide?”
“I do. And I also include her present state.”
“But still. I was the catalyst, wasn’t I? I tipped them both over the edge.”
“No, Jack. I refuse to agree to your self-blaming, self-chastising. It’s this Catholic guilt thing inside of you. You feel to blame for everything that goes wrong around you. You feel some sort of responsibility for the whole of your world. But you can’t control it. You need to let go. You control the truth over your lover and you control the blame for what has gone wrong with your daughter.”
“But if I could see the boy through,” Jack insisted, sitting forward in his chair. “Get him to university. Set him up for life. Make something of him. If I could just have an old age where he’s settled and happy, I would be content with everything.”
“I understand that, Jack. It’s a noble sentiment. But your guilt is eating away at you. And plus, I don’t think it’s healthy to obsess on your grandson. You could end up suffocating him.”
Jack went back to his cigarette, but it was out. When he looked up from it, Holby already had the glass ashtray held out to him. The moment he tossed the butt, Jack reached into his trouser pocket and sparked up another.
“And how is your daughter?” Holby asked, having placed the ashtray back on a small table to the side of them.
“You mean generally?”
“Yes.”
“Better, apparently. That’s what the nurses at the hospital say. She’s in speech therapy and is talking a bit now. So that means we’re communicating, at least. Nevertheless, every time I mention leaving that place, she shakes her head and tells me to be quiet. Shoves her hand over my mouth. It’s like she can’t leave. Merely lives day to day there. But it’s not living. It’s nothing but existing. Existing in a morbid way.”
“She feels safe there. It’s to be expected after what she’s been through.”
“But she should feel safe at home with her family.”
“She’s very unwell, Jack. I think she knows best where she should be. Have there been any more suicide attempts?”
“Not since the last one when they found the sharpened spoon. That was nearly two months ago. She says she’s trying not to think about hurting herself. It’s crazy that someone should have to be on their guard like that. It reminds me of so many of the psychotics I’ve dealt with over the years. Except where they can’t control the desire to kill and harm others, she can’t control the desire of wanting to end herself. Maybe I should just let her.”
“Why do you say that?”
Before he answered, Jack took a lungful of smoke and then sent it out the window at the moon.
“Carrie told me once that she wants to control how she feels,” he said. “Without drugs. Without therapy. She wants to control it through death. Like dying was some big switch that she could press to stop it all. To stop her head from eating away at her. A reset button.”
“I’ve heard it described like that before. As though it were a way to control things. Perhaps it is. But I really think it’s actually the other way around. That suicide is the ultimate example of loss of control.”
“I don’t agree. I mean, you should have seen the look on Jimmy’s face before he pulled that trigger. It was like he knew something the rest of the world didn’t. Like he was going out on his own terms and the whole of life were the game and that moment—that single moment—was the reality.”
“So suicide is a way of controlling things for you?”
“It’s a way of going out on your own terms.”
Jack looked so eagerly and intensely at the shrink then that the latter had to look away. It was his turn to gaze at the moon.
“Maybe there’s simply something wrong with me,” Jack added in a disheartened voice. “A part of me that is essentially sick.”
“You mean, your father?” Holby said, turning back to the sullen face of Jack.
“Yeah. After all, he is inside of me. Him and my mother. It’s like they’re both there. Doing battle for my soul. Him and her. The Sinner and the Saint.”
“I think there’s a duality in all of us to some extent. Nonetheless, with the unfortunate fact of your conception and the little you know about your father, it must be even worse for you. To see him as nothing but a negative force.”
Jack took a deep pull of the smoke before he answered.
“All I can tell you about my father is that he raped my mother. He was a poor man living in an attic and eating at soup kitchens. She was a nun who’d gone to help him. He attacked her for that. He was a fucking animal. I hope he’s rotting in hell as we speak. And if not, I hope he leads a miserable existence that grinds him every single day.”
The two men stared at each other across the fog of Jack’s cigarette smoke for a moment.
“There’s a lot of anger inside you over this,” Holby commented.
“Wouldn’t you feel anger if someone raped your mother?”
“But he’s still your father, Jack. How do you come to terms with such hate when it’s the man who fathered you?”
“By trying to be better.”
“But these sorts of strong emotions are insidious, Jack. They bury
themselves deep and rise up in other forms. Anger ending up pointed towards the individuals least deserving off it. Those around us. Surely in your work as a detective, you’ve come across such instances.”
“People flip, Doc. Yeah. Sometimes I feel like I could, too. But that’s why I’m here.”
Holby gazed at Jack for a few seconds. The latter looked deflated, like someone had let his air out. Slumped in the chair as if he were a coat thrown over it.
“We spoke before,” Holby went on, “but I never asked you whether you ever attempted to track your father down. Did you?”
“How could I?” Jack replied. “My mother never gave me a name. Just the address of an old tenement block. When I went there years later, it was knocked down. I checked the council register from back in 1959 and there was no record of a man being there who matched my mother’s description.”
“Do you ever wonder if he’s still alive?”
“Like I said. If he is, then I hope he’s miserable and on his own.”
3
The air was warm but Jack still shivered when he stepped out of the office block that housed Holby’s clinic. Head down, he stomped off toward Detective Constable George Lange’s car, a filthy white Ford with ‘Clean me’ written into the dust on the hood. It was parked at the far end of a small, gravel carpark that sat out back of the five-story yellow-brick building.
“Your chow mein’s stone cold now,” Lange said when Jack sat down in the passenger seat.
The detective constable nodded toward the aluminium tin that sat on the dashboard next to a plastic spoon, surrounded on both sides by litter.
“I don’t want it anyway,” Jack muttered.
Instead, he wound down the window and lit another fag. Stared out at the cars that passed by on the street beside them.
“Do you mind me saying something, Sarge?” Lange asked.
“Depends what it is,” Jack replied without taking his eyes off the road.
“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but every time you come out of that place, you look worse than when you went in.”
“Maybe that’s the point, George,” Jack said. “To admit things that you won’t even admit to yourself. It takes its toll, I guess. To say those things. To hear them.”
“You should still eat your food.”
Jack turned away from the passing scene and set his eyes on his colleague.
“And who are you,” he said dryly, “my mother?”
“It’s good to eat. Plus, mine was real good and if you don’t eat yours, I’ll have it.”
With the edge of his hand, Jack brushed the food across the dashboard toward him.
“Be my guest.”
Lange rolled his eyes as Jack gazed across the car at him.
“Are you gonna be a miserable sod all night?” the detective constable asked.
“Oi! I’m not that miserable.”
“You fuckin’ are. For the past six months, you’ve been this dark shadow hovering about. And it’s not like you weren’t pretty depressing already. But this is taking the piss. So please, Sarge, cheer up.”
Jack was about to reply when his phone went off in his pocket. He picked it out. It was Alice Newman.
“I thought you were on holiday till Monday?” he put to her upon answering.
“It got cut short,” she snapped. “Where are you?”
“With DC Lange in Stratford. We’re heading back to the Yard now. Why?”
“I’m on my way to a major incident in Boreham Wood. Close to Smithy’s Lake. Something big just happened. Meet me there.”
Never one for ceremony, Alice put the phone down the second she’d finished talking. Jack looked across the car at Lange, nonchalantly slid his phone back in his pocket, and flicked his ash out the window.
“Looks like another reason for being miserable, George,” he remarked in a casual tone.
“What is it?”
“Big one at Boreham wood, apparently.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I’m afraid our dear leader was her usual curt self, so I didn’t get any details. I guess those come when we get there.”
4
Detective Inspector Alice Newman of Scotland Yard had spent the past two weeks of her holiday locked away in her apartment, exercising and listening to emergency broadcasts on her police scanner. She wasn’t a drinker, a smoker, and she didn’t take drugs that hadn’t been prescribed by a doctor or shrink. There were no live-in—or live-out—lovers. No real hobbies or interests outside of her professional life. She had no friends, no family, and her romantic involvements were physical and transient. They served a carnal purpose and then faded.
What she did was police work. Lived and breathed it.
For those past two weeks, she’d shut herself away, listening to the constant buzz of the police scanner in the background while reading several books on police work and an autobiography on an ex-FBI detective she admired. It was only when she slept that things weren’t so regimental. When her world slipped into a chaos she couldn’t control. When she would be faced with the evil presences that had invaded her life thus far. Two people were especially prominent in her nightly visitations. Her father—angry-faced and obnoxious—and the one person she ever felt love for.
Both had hurt her. Both had left their marks deep inside.
It had been upon waking from one such nightmare—one that had taunted her during a nap—that she heard the talk of a mass shooting at Boreham Wood tittering out of the scanner. Listened to the frantic radio calls of the first officers to arrive on the scene.
Now, as she drove down an avenue of tall trees under the glare of a full moon, the residue of the dream clung to her mind like a tick. She couldn’t get the sight of the young woman out of her head. The young woman who had poisoned her dreams for the past six months. The girl she felt she never knew, but loved all the same. Spent less than a week with and yet felt love. It had been like meeting a part of herself.
Now, Alice felt her everywhere. Heard her voice inside. Heard it continually whisper as though she weren’t dead but pressed right up against her.
The dream had been awful. She’d been in the room again. Not tied down but free this time. Walking about the ruins of the dead. The dangling lightbulb was covered in blood and cast the room in deep red. The nameless girl smashed in on the floor. Suki with her throat slit, lying on the bed. Alison with her eyes gouged open. Charlotte screaming somewhere outside.
The trees that leaned down either side of the road began to feel like the heavy thoughts that filled Alice’s head. So much so that she suspected they would crash in on top of her at any minute. Both the trees and the thoughts.
A police blockade had been set up on the road. Officers sent cars back. Alice showed her identification and was sent through. It wasn’t long before she arrived at a dirt carpark that stood between the edge of the road and the edge of the woods.
The first thing she did when she parked was flip the lid off her alprazolam and pop a couple of the pills into her mouth. With closed eyes, she chewed them up, her shaking fingers tightly gripping the steering wheel.
Upon opening her eyes, she groaned loudly in the car. There in the windscreen was the image of the girl—of Suki—gazing back, sitting where her own reflection should be. Alice did her best to clear her mind and the black-haired girl slowly faded to reveal the blonde detective.
A knock at the window caught her by surprise and she turned sharply. It was Jack Sheridan. With gruff movements, she opened the door and stepped out.
A large, white tent had been erected in a far corner with police tape separating it from the rest of the carpark. In an opposite corner was an ambulance. Someone was being seen to in the back of it. Up the road, another police blockade turned the traffic back, the place completely shut down. Several news vans were already parked at its edge. Cameras snapped away.
The three detectives strolled up to and then entered the large tent. The inside was illuminated with halog
en lamps, giving everything a shimmering vividness. A car was parked at one end, the body of a young male slumped in front of the driver’s door. His face was almost completely shot away, only the right eye and cheekbone left, the jaw completely removed. Numbered markers on the gravel floor indicated the pieces of skull and flesh that had scattered from the blast. Two large wounds stuck out of his chest and abdomen, the T-shirt blown apart and the bullet wounds about the size of a fist.
“So this is what you meant by big,” Jack remarked.
“What’ve we got?” Alice asked.
A forensic operative in coveralls, who was kneeling by the body, measuring and photographing the wounds, lowered her mask.
“High caliber weapon,” the woman informed them. “Pistol. Shot him once in the chest, then the stomach, and finally the face. Very high caliber and probably some sort of bullet that spreads out. These wounds aren’t normal bullet wounds.”
“Where’s the rest?”
“Up the dirt track.”
The operative put her mask back on and continued to go over the body. Alice and Lange left the tent while Jack continued to stare down at the broken flesh cavity, the single eye still open, frozen in that final moment. The detective wondered if an imprint of the killer had been left on his pupils. Stained into him.
He was athletic, Jack noted. Dressed in a colorful T-shirt and shorts. He was dressed for fun. He looked to be the fun type. The car was a Volkswagen Golf GTI in good shape. His parents probably bought him it when he passed his test. It was probably the happiest day of his short life.
Jack left the tent and rejoined the others by another cordon that cut off a dirt track snaking through the dense trees. They shone their identifications to the uniformed officers before being admitted.
“Which detective is in charge?” Alice asked a constable standing by.
“Local detective, ma’am,” the women informed her. “You’re the first from Scotland Yard. Though a load are on their way.”
