‘What about the loch? Is there a jetty or boats? An island perhaps?’
‘Yes, an island. Definitely an island with rocks and more trees.’ He brought his hands up to cover his eyes.
‘Who are you chasing?’
‘I’m not sure.’ His breathing hoarsened. ‘A woman like you.’
‘What do you mean?’
He lowered his head. ‘There are lots of memories of women being chased that I don’t dare to believe in yet.’
She sensed the eyes of the two nurses upon her, checking her professional performance against their assumptions of how a detective should behave in the circumstances. She felt stiff as a dummy in her work clothes, exposed between the experienced nurses and this disturbed patient.
‘What happens next?’
‘In my dream?’
‘Yes.’
‘The track goes past a waterfall covered in the roots of dead trees, and then the forest changes as I go deeper. The wind picks up and the trees start thrashing through the air. Some sort of storm is raging through the branches. Then the commotion changes and I see the disturbance is her, the woman struggling in my arms. A bird cries out from the treetops and I realise it’s her screaming.’ Alistair rubbed his eyes. ‘I hold her head in my hands and then she bites my middle finger.’
‘And then what?’
‘Her head rolls away onto a pile of stones and I wake up. I find myself here in this safe place. I remember that I am a patient on Ward G of Deepwell Psychiatric Hospital. That the staff are trying to protect the world from my violent fantasies.’
McCrea’s story was more outlandish than she had expected. Yet his sense of remorse seemed genuine. She was careful not to appear too interested, remembering Barker’s advice that McCrea was an attention-seeker. She was well out of her comfort zone and Barker was the expert, after all. Still, McCrea’s emotions felt credible, even if the physical details did not, and she was intrigued. The crux of the puzzle was finding concrete evidence. She explained to him that if he could tell her the precise location of one of the bodies, then that would prove once and for all if he was telling the truth.
‘So unless you find a body you won’t believe my confession?’
‘It’s not up to me. I’m not in charge of the investigation.’
‘So there is an investigation?’ A gleam appeared in his eyes.
‘Not a formal investigation.’
An alarm bell sounded, a siren that rose and fell, and she could hear people running down the corridor. There was no way of telling what was happening, only that it was an emergency.
‘Has there ever been a police report that matches my nightmare? One where an eyewitness might have seen something strange in a forest but not known what it was?’
‘If they didn’t know what they’d seen then the report was probably never recorded.’
When she saw the look of disappointment in his face, she promised to ask her colleagues and check through all the archived logs, even though she was convinced any search would be fruitless.
‘I’ve made my confession,’ he said. ‘I’m guilty until the courts prove I’m innocent, isn’t that how it works?’
‘No court in the country will put on trial someone’s nightmares.’
‘Then there is no one who can take away my guilt.’
The longer the session went on, the more she pitied McCrea. A large part of him was lost to the real world. A man who could only make himself conspicuous by confessing to a terrible secret he had concocted from his nightmares and repressed fantasies. Her time was almost up, but before she could leave, McCrea tried to delay her with a final puzzle. ‘My middle finger still hurts where she bit me. If I made all this all up then why does it still hurt so much?’ He held up his right hand to her, but none of his fingers looked injured or painful.
Exasperated, she told him that the staff on the ward would help if he were in any discomfort.
She rose from her seat and signalled to the male nurses, one of whom led her back through a set of corridors. The lino floor gave way to carpet and a hush descended. They marched back to Barker’s office at a brisk pace, the doors banging shut behind them like traps, and then they met the woman with the scars on her arms. She was making small plodding steps down the middle of the corridor, forcing the female care assistant who was accompanying her to stop and wait. She halted right in front of Herron. The care assistant, who was sweating and wheezing slightly, made a half-hearted attempt to move her on, but the woman stuck out her elbows and stiffened her body. She stood there, as if suspended, and then she leaned closer to Herron.
‘Do you know Inspector Monteath?’ she asked in a dry whisper.
Herron said she had never heard of him.
‘But I saw him talking to you earlier. He comes here when he’s off duty and Dr Barker has gone for the day. Tell him I’ve got a clue for him.’
‘What clue?’
Her eyes grew vague. They seemed to search for an answer and then lose it. The care assistant made another attempt to move her on but she resisted with her thin arms. ‘They were re-enacting a murder on Ward G,’ she said.
‘Whose murder?’ Herron had an absurd image of the doctors and patients performing a grisly charade.
She said she did not know. The care assistant grabbed her by the elbow. ‘Come on, Mary, it’s time you had your tablets.’ She winked at Herron. ‘She’s been watching too many crime dramas on TV.’
But Mary dug in her heels. ‘You think I’m crazy,’ she said to Herron, her face turning pale and distraught.
‘No,’ said Herron softly.
Suddenly Mary smiled provocatively at her. ‘Then you must be crazy, too.’ Her face grew so tight with grinning it looked ready to burst.
‘Come on, Mary,’ said the care assistant again, dragging her along the corridor. ‘You’re wasting people’s time.’
Before she was wrenched out of sight, Mary shouted, ‘At least Inspector Monteath is not a fraud. Unlike the others.’
‘Unlike who?’
‘Dr Barker and the rest. They’re all frauds, passing themselves off as something they’re not, persecuting me every day.’
The male nurse raised his eyebrows and gave Herron a look that warned her not to say anything else. They walked through another set of double doors.
‘Mary’s a lonely woman desperately trying to get attention,’ he explained. ‘A stranger’s face is like fresh meat to her.’ Then, dropping his voice to a whisper, he added, ‘To survive in this place you have to be at least a little bit crazy.’
‘She said I was crazy, too,’ said Herron.
‘Don’t worry, you’re not crazy. Not even a little bit.’ He gave her a wink. ‘You’d never survive on a ward like this.’
His comment prompted a smile from Herron, and then, as if taking her into his confidence, he said, ‘You know, Alistair was waiting all morning for you, asking had the police arrived, were they really on their way.’
‘Why is he so keen to have the police involved?’
‘He wants to make sure he stays on Ward G rather than go back to the community. The doctors were planning to release him at the end of the month.’
‘But what if he’s arrested and taken into custody?’ she said. ‘At the very least, he runs the risk of wasting police time.’
‘Alistair’s plan B is to keep spinning you a story so absurd and vague that no court would ever believe it.’ The nurse opened the final set of security doors and pointed her in the direction of the reception. ‘He wants you officers of the law to give up eventually and leave him to his own devices without ruining his comfortable relationship with Ward G and its pharmaceutical cabinet.’
6
It was raining when the detectives left the hospital. They hurried down to the car park without looking back. Herron seated herself in the passenger seat and Morton drove off. Behind them, the hospital disappeared in the downpour. Morton was aloof, colder than before, and the trees seemed to hem in the road more tightly
on the way back to Peebles. The rain drummed on the roof and against the windscreen.
She expected him to ask her how the interview had gone, but he did not show the slightest degree of curiosity. They were meant to be working together with him overseeing the interview, and she thought some form of communication or candour was needed between them. Besides, Morton had twenty years’ more experience than she had, and had visited the hospital before. He was bound to have something useful to say. Her thoughts groped for a way to initiate conversation, troubled by Morton’s reticence. She sensed no outlet in the vista of ramifying trees and constant rain, but she was unwilling to say nothing.
‘Do you think McCrea is making it all up?’ she asked.
‘You’re the one who interviewed him, not me. And it’s you who has to write up the report for Bates.’
‘You don’t want to contribute to it in any way? After all, you were meant to help me with the interview.’
‘No.’
‘At least you could tell me your impressions.’
There was no answer from Morton. He seemed to be concentrating all his energy on driving. Several minutes passed. The downpour darkened.
‘What awful weather,’ said Herron, giving up any attempt to extract Morton’s opinion. It seemed too much to ask. She peered sideways at his lank hair, his beard and his glowering eyes. Much too much.
After a few miles, he shuddered slightly. ‘To tell you the truth, all I could think of was how lonely McCrea must feel in a place like that, surrounded by mad people and cold-faced bastards like Barker.’
He didn’t say anything else after that. Herron wanted to tell him about the odd impression she’d had that McCrea was telling the truth, or at least a version of the truth, but she was afraid the wrong words might slip out, stupidities she might regret uttering to a senior colleague not known for his patience with new recruits. She had excelled on the training course, but still she felt unsure of herself, and of the larger world of policing and crime. Her weaknesses and strengths felt inseparable. She was the fast-tracked female detective, whose bright talent might easily be shattered by a careless word or action, and who had to be treated with extreme caution by her older male colleagues. Was that the reason for Morton’s reticence?
It was only when they were pulling into the police station’s car park that Morton spoke again. ‘Words can sometimes be the devil,’ he said. ‘They get people into all sorts of trouble. If I don’t have anything useful to say, I’d rather say nothing.’
She nodded, grateful at getting such a succinct reply, wondering to herself how on earth she was going to work with a partner so reluctant to use the powers of speech. There was an unnerving solidity about Morton and his few announcements, which she noticed to an extent in the other officers at the station, a sense that their judgement was always accurate and beyond doubt. Morton’s behaviour demonstrated his great confidence in his place in the world as a middle-aged detective in a small Scottish town, but it also showed his flaw, his inability to test his opinions with others and invite opposing points of view or ideas. What if one day a detective like her were to prove him wrong? What would happen then? Some sort of violent inner explosion, she suspected.
*
In front of Herron, framed against the forest stretching up to a bleak hillside at Dawyck, stood Dr Pochard’s wooden lodge. It looked pretty with its large windows and overhanging balcony, floating amid the surrounding pine trees like a little island, a final refuge of civilisation before the harsh Borders landscape set in. There was even something enchanting about the darkness in the forest, she thought. It was the kind of place she would like to retire to or go on weekend retreats. She wondered what was so comforting about a secluded timber house enclosed by trees. Was it the return to the wild and the simpler charms of nature that it seemed to offer her troubled mind?
After leaving Morton at the station, she had travelled the winding A72 road to Lyne Station on her own. She had crossed the river Tweed, and taken a small side road away from the valley floor, feeling calm settle upon her thoughts, the professional and domestic worries slipping behind her as the track rose into the leaf-purified air.
The lower floor of the house was completely dark, the sunlight only reaching the windows on the first floor. She tried the doors and lower windows. They were all locked. She rang the doorbell and called Dr Pochard’s name through the letter box. From inside, she could hear the sound of an extractor fan, which struck her as odd, if Pochard had indeed left on holiday. She walked round the building and saw a car in a little side garage, which also struck her as unusual.
She was drawn to the burnt-out remains of a fire at the bottom of the garden. A thin sour stink emanated from the ashes, which she surmised were a few days old. She poked through them and studied the blackened scraps of paper. The pine trees swayed slightly in the wind as she read what appeared to be the remnants of Dr Pochard’s notes on her patients. She picked over a notebook that had escaped the worst of the blaze, but was now sodden and disintegrating. She could see that Pochard had been a careful listener, recording all the little details of her patients’ lives, the nuances of their emotions, precise descriptions of their dreams, more like little biographies than patient notes. However, the fire and rain had made it impossible to draw the fragments into a coherent story. She flicked through the pages, recognising the names of some of her patients from the media, actors and writers and even the odd politician. In one of the last pages, Pochard had written in shaky, strained handwriting, ‘This is a total setback for Deepwell. I can’t let everyone down. The therapy with the patients should continue. No doubt about it.’
At the edge of the fire, she found the imprint of a boot, size nine or ten, she guessed, smudging a collection of half-burnt notes and photographs, the imprint like an angry verdict on Pochard’s life’s work. She saw the photos were of forest clearings, some of them with figures huddled together for the camera. Immediately, she recognised the figure of Alistair McCrea in one of them, framed against a row of trees. He was half looking back at the camera, his long white eyelashes clearly visible in the low sunlight, seemingly exhausted, grimacing in the light, while the other figures stood around him as if waiting for something. One of them was the male nurse from Ward G.
She poured all her attention into the photographs. They seemed to document some sort of excursion from Deepwell Hospital, but what was the exact purpose of the trip? The only thing she could construe was that staff had taken a deeply troubled McCrea on a walk through a forest. What did the path through the pine trees represent? Not a venture into freedom, but something much darker.
Most of the photos were empty of people. Snapshots of different waterfalls and piles of stones, upended roots, contorted branches, all trying to tell her something as though the photographer were attempting to bleed secrets from wood and rocks, and always the presence of water in the background, silent and solitary.
A psychotherapist who had burned her notes before going off on holiday. A set of photographs taken by a photographer who seemed as obsessed with forest clearings, piles of stones and waterfalls as McCrea. She wondered what Morton would do in the circumstances. She listened to the stillness of the house again and decided she needed to speak to him. She could not tell if there were sufficient grounds to be suspicious about Pochard’s safety, but she was sure that she needed to speak to someone. She rang headquarters, but Morton had already left. She called him on his mobile. In the background, she could hear the muffled sound of his car radio. She told him what she had discovered.
‘There’s no sign of Dr Pochard, as we expected,’ she said. ‘But I found some half-burnt photographs and notes in her garden. I think you need to take a look at them.’ She described the scenes, their similarities with the landscapes of McCrea’s confession. ‘I find it disturbing that the photos match descriptions from his delusions.’
‘Why?’ There was a hint of harshness in his tone.
She wanted to voice the troubling thought that was run
ning through her mind, that somehow Pochard had fallen into the trap of McCrea’s nightmares, a trap that had snapped shut upon her.
‘It seems like some sort of warning,’ she said. ‘Whoever took the photographs was searching for something.’ She struggled to put her fears into words. ‘It’s as though they were trying to summon up McCrea’s nightmare from the forest.’
‘You make it sound so sinister and mysterious. It doesn’t have to be that way. There might be a perfectly ordinary explanation for the pictures.’
The pine trees began to whisper in a strengthening gust of wind. All around, she felt the shadowy weight of their branches.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘In this case, it is that way. I’m sure something bad has happened to Pochard.’ She stared at the doctor’s house, the empty gaze of its windows and the glass reflections of the pine trees swaying like restless curtains. She knew there was something to be grasped in the convulsions of the trees, something fleeting in the quietness of the house and the mystery of the discarded photographs, but she wasn’t skilled enough to listen and understand.
‘There’s something you learn with experience,’ said Morton. ‘The most reasonable explanation is usually the one that turns out to be true, even when there are sinister possibilities lurking in the background. In this case, you are worrying too much about a patient who was locked up in a secure ward and had no possible means to do any harm to this doctor, who, I suspect, will turn up perfectly well in a day or two. You must learn to distinguish between the possible and the impossible in our line of work.’
‘I still think we should put a call-out for Dr Pochard. Ask her to make contact with the police and clear up any concerns about her safety.’
After a pause, Morton asked, ‘Do you remember what the boss told you about this case?’
‘It’s not a formal investigation.’
‘Correct, and what else?’
‘He wanted a report on his desk by Thursday morning.’
The Listeners Page 5
