The Listeners

by Anthony J. Quinn

  One of the women began talking about Dr Pochard and her hopes of writing a book about her experiences as a therapist. Barker watched as the tears rolled down her face. What was the point in sitting any longer with a group gripped by the forces of negativity, these emotionally flawed therapists who had lost their father figure in Llewyn, and now had nothing to hold onto but their own mad selves? They expected him to take Llewyn’s place and lead them in the struggle to change the world of forensic psychiatry, as well as ease their own neuroses. Tomorrow, he would draft a document that would suspend the society’s activities, but first he had to conclude the meeting.

  He called the group to order, but the members ignored him, whispering in little groups, their voices indignant. None of them noticed his growing vexation. Dunnock was engaged in several conversations at once, with several members trying to get a word in edgeways. Hard to believe that, minutes ago, he had them completely in his control and had negotiated the most important role in his career. He raised his voice but no one heard him. He sat frozen in his seat. It unnerved him, the intensity in the room, the pained looks on their faces, their rising voices. Llewyn retired, Pochard murdered, and now it was as if he no longer counted. He had become a shadow plunged in darkness, part of the drama that was unfolding within the group. He heard patients’ names on their lips, Chisholm and McCrea, and others from Ward G, and the criticism of the strange therapies conducted on the ward. He flinched at hearing the phrase ‘borderline therapeutic interventions’, and then someone accused Deepwell of allowing ‘a monster to spring to life’.

  No one noticed as Barker rose and left the room with a look of fear on his face, as though he had just seen the doomed landscape of Judgement Day rolling towards him.

  15

  Before, it had never occurred to Carla that running a household might be a cure for her frustrations as a detective, the nagging sense of impotence she felt when confronting the handiwork of a murderer, and that there might be a reward, rather than stress and more frustration, in tending to sick children.

  That night, she spent the hours of darkness checking their temperatures, filling hot water bottles for the cold and shivering, and iced drinks for the feverish. Alice’s temperature settled a little under the regimen of paracetamol, but Ben and David’s did not back off at all. She gave in to his feeble requests for a hot whisky, and then went back to the camp bed in Ben’s room, guarding him as his breathing strained in his sleep. She had stripped the sheets from his bed and put on a small fan, but he remained wretched, his small cramped body sweating profusely.

  Oddly, the presence of illness made her house feel more like a home, and brought out emotions in her she had not felt since the first weeks after delivering Ben, dissolving the tensions between her and David, rounding the sharp corners, until all that remained was the stark essence of her family, the very nucleus of her existence. It no longer mattered what would happen to her tomorrow at work. Her mind ceased roaming the forest by the loch like a restless beast.

  A strange hush settled upon the house, interrupted only by the sounds of the children moving in their sleep. She kept slipping into a shallow slumber, and then snapping awake. Just before dawn, she heard the yelping of a fox in the back garden, a creature that had adapted itself to survive on the fringes of modern life. She felt it call to a similar half-animal instinct inside her, a sense of tribal solidarity, the will to protect her family at all costs, the will that played hide-and-seek with her detective’s life, but that now rose up, intense and uninhibited. The instinct felt so strong she believed it would make her soar, and remove any obstacles in her way. She must never forget this, she told herself, never lose sight of this, no matter what the dawn brought.

  In the morning, she checked that David was fit enough to look after the children. He gave her a gloomy look from his crumpled pillow, his eyes, enlarged by illness, floating up from her pyjamas to her face and then grimly floating down again with the knowledge she was heading back to work.

  She spoke gently. ‘I’ve left out drinks and a bottle of paracetamol for the children. Will you see that they get them?’

  He nodded. ‘Good to see someone’s full of beans.’

  She gave him a quick kiss on his forehead, and then she showered and dressed herself with the blinds still down. She visited the children one more time, bending down to hug them as they lay sleeping, pressing their cool faces against the white silk of her blouse. She grabbed a quick breakfast of toast and coffee, and drove to work with a trance-like feeling of elation and extreme exhaustion.

  *

  Police officers weren’t allowed to park in front of the building that had previously served as Peebles’ quadrangular poorhouse but had been refurbished to house the council offices and, as an afterthought, the town’s police station. That privilege was reserved for the elected representatives, who strutted about like a breed apart, most of whom Herron could now recognise due to their frequent comings and goings. Usually, she didn’t mind the imposition. She quite enjoyed parking at the side and walking under the mature cherry trees that lined the circuitous route to the building’s cream stone front. Like so many of the old buildings in Peebles, it seemed to emit its own light. Perhaps it was the colour of the stone, which contrasted so sharply with the nearby granite terraces, especially on rainy, dark days.

  She had been stationed here for six months, and no longer felt like a complete outsider. She had stopped staring with her detached stranger’s gaze at the orderly drift of shoppers and hiking-clad tourists, who all seemed much older than her, the gently moving traffic, and the solid stone houses, irreproachable and dull. She was only an hour’s drive from Edinburgh, where a neighbour could be killed without you ever knowing about it, but she might as well have been in another part of the world.

  However, everything had changed this morning as she hastened under the trees. With a murder investigation under way, the police station now had the air of a backwater venue preparing to host the big star of the criminal world, a gruesome murderer at large. It was the police officers and detectives who dashed in and out of the building, too caught up in their own drama to notice the curious looks of the council staff, who must have been wondering how long it would take to have the town restored to its conventional routines and legality. In fact, the council leaders were already putting pressure on the team to have the killer caught before the walking season took off. They expected even the most psychopathic murderer to comply with the same strict standards that governed the rest of life in Peebles. They were used to the high points of the month being the council meetings and the latest charity drives by the chamber of commerce. The forests and river walks of the Tweed valley were meant to be safe and comforting escapes, a world away from the bewildering territory of murder scenes. This was, after all, the town that marketed itself everywhere as ‘Peebles for Pleasure’, and the last thing it wanted was for an unsuspecting visitor to be nauseated by a bloody trail on a hiking trail.

  Herron stepped into the incident room and saw Morton already working at one of the desks. He regarded her with a look of concerned watchfulness. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Apart from spending the night getting friendly with a flu virus I couldn’t be better.’

  He reported that the murder investigation was advancing on two fronts. Officers were still searching Pochard’s home for clues. In the meantime, the two of them would progress the search for the man with the missing finger, whom they now suspected to be Billy Chisholm.

  She straightened her skirt and stepped out of her role as mother to a sick household. The morning light looked foggy and unclear, and she felt a heavy tingling travel down her head into her neck and shoulders, as though a pain-killing medication was wearing off. The sense of elation mixed with tiredness now resembled a hangover, one of those that lingered all day, like a hatchet planted in the back of the skull.

  A meeting of the investigative team had been scheduled for ten o’clock that morning, but just as she was gather
ing her notes to join the rest of the officers, a call came through from the front desk. According to the receptionist, a woman had walked in through the front doors saying she wanted to report a missing person.

  ‘Can no one else handle it?’ asked Herron.

  ‘She wants to speak to a female detective. Says it’s urgent.’

  Herron stared at her male colleagues trooping in through the doors of the main meeting room, and decided that whatever was spoken at the start of the meeting would not be as urgent as a missing person. ‘I’ll be down in a second,’ she said.

  The woman was waiting in one of the interview suites. She stood in an agitated manner, looking uncomfortable in the surroundings.

  ‘I’m worried about my neighbour,’ she explained. ‘She lives alone, but two nights ago, she had a row with someone, her boyfriend I think, and I haven’t seen her since.’

  Herron beckoned her to take a seat. ‘Who’s your neighbour?’

  ‘Laura Dunnock.’

  Herron thought for a moment. The name was familiar.

  ‘Does she work at Deepwell Hospital?’

  ‘Yes. I called the hospital this morning, but no one has seen her.’

  Herron remembered that Dunnock was the therapist who had first reported McCrea’s confession. She started making notes, and in the silence, the woman began to talk freely.

  ‘I’m not nosy. I certainly don’t consider myself that way. It’s just she had an argument with an odd-looking man and I’m worried about her.’

  ‘Odd, how?’

  ‘He was much older for a start.’ She paused as if weighing up how much more she could say without sounding judgemental. ‘I heard him shouting at her.’

  ‘Had you seen him before?’

  ‘Only his back when he climbed the stairs to her flat. Ms Dunnock is always very discreet about her private life, and I’d never intrude by asking questions about her callers.’

  Most of us do not believe that our private lives are the business of our neighbours, thought Herron. She imagined that Dunnock was the type of woman who opted for discretion even when there was no need to be secretive.

  ‘The way he left her flat wasn’t reassuring at all,’ continued the woman. ‘So the next morning, I went to see was she all right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He looked capable of doing something… violent. Which was why I checked her door. It was unlocked. I thought something must have happened to her so I went inside. But there was no sign of her. This morning I went up again and found the door still unlocked. That was when I decided to call her work.’

  ‘Can you describe her caller?’

  ‘He looked so angry and he came down the stairs with such force that I shivered and avoided his gaze.’

  ‘But what did he look like?’

  ‘All I can remember was his dark look of anger.’

  ‘Was he short, tall, fat, thin?’

  She glanced at Herron apologetically, and made a further effort. ‘He had greying hair. A medium build. He was the only man I ever saw go up to her flat and they seemed an unlikely pair.’

  ‘How do you know they were a pair?’

  She appeared to weigh up how much to tell Herron without compromising herself. ‘Well, sometimes I was able to hear their voices through the ceiling. Their tone suggested they had known each other a long time, and not superficially.’

  ‘We’ll definitely check it out,’ said Herron. ‘There’s probably a simple explanation for her absence. There normally is.’ Deep down, however, she felt a sense of dread. She thanked the woman and said she would be in touch. She logged Dunnock as a missing person and filled out a report. Then she hurried upstairs and walked into the middle of the meeting.

  Afterwards, she could not remember if she had excused herself or explained what she had been doing. The case meetings were conducted according to such a fixed agenda that everyone turned to look at her in surprise when she interrupted Chief Inspector Bates. In a breathless voice, Herron told the room that the investigation would now have to include the disappearance of the Deepwell therapist, Laura Dunnock.

  16

  Nobody said anything for a while. Herron’s announcement seemed to have sucked the air out of the room. She felt her face grow hot, reminded suddenly of her junior status in front of officers like Morton and the chief inspector. She thought they were ignoring her announcement, their blank faces showing an utter lack of urgency or tension. She could hear her heart beating. Then she realised that the pressure in the room was so intense it prevented everyone from thinking clearly and articulating an appropriate response. A murmur broke out among the team, and then Morton spoke in a sharp, clear voice.

  ‘Deepwell is where the lines of investigation meet,’ he said. ‘Two strands and now perhaps a third.’ He took his time to formulate his thoughts, trying to be as thorough as possible. ‘Patient Alistair McCrea confesses to murdering Dr Pochard in a forest, even though he was on a secure ward at the time of her death. Then there is the man with the missing finger who we believe to be Billy Chisholm, a recently released patient, who also happened to confess to murdering a woman in a forest. Now the therapist, Laura Dunnock, has been reported missing. Memories, especially traumatic ones, figure in the professional practice of both Pochard and Dunnock, yet we don’t know how important they are to the murderer. But this is the most significant similarity from an investigative point of view, as both McCrea and Chisholm seem troubled by memories that may or may not be figments of their imagination.’

  The team took a while to digest the detective’s comments. Something was missing, thought Herron. They still did not have a clear motive.

  ‘We have two sets of confessions,’ she said, ‘but we still don’t know exactly why Pochard was killed, or why Dunnock should go missing. I don’t think the usual motives for murder apply here.’

  ‘Pochard wasn’t killed,’ said Morton. ‘That is too simple a term. She was butchered. We still don’t know exactly how she died or where the rest of her body is.’

  ‘It’s clear we’re dealing with a madman,’ said Bates. ‘A madman who managed to convince the psychiatrists at Deepwell that he was sane enough to leave.’

  It seemed almost too terrible to imagine, Pochard signing her own death warrant the day she agreed to Chisholm’s release from Deepwell. A man who had pulled the wool over her eyes and those of her colleagues. Herron recalled her fleeting conversation with Chisholm in the forest. A madman? Perhaps, but not a methodical and calculating madman. He had seemed distressed and confused. She could not help worrying that the delusion he shared with McCrea had been brought into being on Ward G to prepare the ground for Pochard’s murder, and that somewhere in the forest, a killer with hooded eyes watched over the scene, like a puppet-master pulling the strings.

  Somewhere on Ward G lay the answers, she thought, which put the murder squad at a terrible disadvantage, since the hospital was in the delicate position of controlling the flow of information in order to protect its reputation. She thought of the mysterious Dr Sinden and the subtle figure of Dr Barker, who refused to give anything away, and of Ward G itself, its silent corridors, the neutral colours of its walls and the watchful expressions of the staff.

  ‘The question is where to start looking for Chisholm?’ said Shaw.

  ‘Until we get a positive lead from the public we are relying on the cooperation of Deepwell,’ replied Morton. ‘An institution that might be facing its biggest ever crisis. Chisholm is our main suspect, but we have to keep an open mind.’

  The team discussed lines of inquiry in the hope that they might lead to better ideas. The pauses between suggestions lengthened. The forensic team gave a verbal tour of the forest clearing. They had been up to their knees in mud and rain, and the search for clues had been painstaking but fruitless. They had found no signs of a struggle or spatters of blood, which suggested the murder had happened elsewhere. Similarly, Pochard’s house had shown no signs of forced entry or struggle. Nor were there an
y traces of blood. The only thing they had found that might be of interest was a piece of a woman’s painted fingernail lodged in the side of one of the leather chairs in Pochard’s consulting room. Tests showed the nail belonged to Pochard.

  Shaw and Rodgers had interviewed all the patients that Pochard had seen that day, but none of them had reported anything strange or unusual. The only one they could not trace was the eight o’clock appointment that had been marked with an ‘S’. Pochard had made extensive notes on the previous patients but few for ‘S’, who in all probability was the last person to have seen the psychotherapist alive – but who was ‘S’?

  Herron mentioned that Pochard’s secretary claimed the psychotherapist never saw patients after six, yet ‘S’ had always been given an appointment in the late evenings.

  ‘A special patient, then,’ said Morton. ‘One she sees only outside of normal working hours.’

  ‘Perhaps they had a busy job and wanted the meetings kept confidential,’ said Bates.

  Herron pointed out how the previous notes on ‘S’ were always kept to a minimum. Just a line or two on how well or badly the session went. Morton asked Shaw and Rodgers to double their efforts to find out the identity of this mysterious patient. He also ordered a search of Dunnock’s flat, and contact to be made with her relatives, if she had any, in case she had gone to stay with them. Meanwhile, he would speak to Dr Barker about her disappearance. Herron said she would interview Dr Sinden to see if he could throw any light on what had been happening on Ward G.

  Finally, Bates concluded the meeting and organised a time for the next one.

  *

  While her colleagues were getting coffee and lunch, Carla slipped home to check on David and the children. The inside of the house was bathed in the same low glow and silence she had left it in that morning, the same smells of sleep and sickness, the same frowning looks on her children’s faces, her little nest safe and intact in spite of her abrupt departure at dawn. Again, she felt the tug at the core of her being, the pleasant sense of weight and rootedness, as she crept from bed to bed, listening to her children’s breathing. She was a happy trespasser, her domestic world suddenly precious to her. Alice briefly opened her eyes and seemed glad to see her. Her blue eyes were clear and she looked at Carla without blinking, as though not entirely sure if it was a dream.