The Listeners

by Anthony J. Quinn

  He wondered why his therapist had not come. He had tried ringing him but there was no answer. Why had he heard nothing from him? Was he expected to do everything on his own? He needed the doctor to help him map out the issues at play in the room with the prisoner, to scan the emotions and problematic areas, to look inside his head, search for answers and make the right decisions.

  He rose from the chair and walked into the prisoner’s room. He saw that she was wearing her professional face, again. Staff at Deepwell were good at learning how not to look shocked or afraid. He studied the contrived indifference in her eyes as she gazed at him, trying to shift in the chair, rolling its coasters on the floor, her shoes skidding on the wooden boards.

  Her expressionless face watched him without blinking, her shoulders writhing as she worked on loosening the ropes around her hands. He could guess all the hard work going on inside her head, sizing up her choices, pondering the limited means of escape, trying to anticipate what he might do next. He admired her courage, her decision to put caution behind and go for an all-out struggle against the chair. He wondered what questions she would fire at him to distract his attention if he removed the cloth gag from her mouth. What period of your childhood are you enacting? Can you see a little boy? How old is he? What happened to him?

  She lost control of the struggle against the ropes. The chair rolled across the floor and bumped against the wall, knocking an object from her grasp. He stood up, walked several steps and snatched it from the floor. A broken pen that she had been clutching secretly as a weapon. Something swelled inside him. He felt outside time, removed from his body, in some sort of trance state, a hovering witness to the crime that was soon to be committed, foreseeing everything that would unfold. He had an instant memory of how Dunnock would die. An image from a photograph came to him, a setting his therapist had organised.

  Slowly he came back to the surface, as though rising from the depths of a dream. He decided it was time to change the cloths that gagged her. They were soaking wet.

  ‘Soon it will be time,’ he told her.

  ‘When?’ She was breathless.

  ‘In a matter of hours.’

  She gave a little sob.

  ‘First, I’m going to confess to the act of murder. Not because I’m seeking your understanding or forgiveness – it’s too late for that, now – but because I have to remember exactly how it is meant to happen. It’s possible that I may have misremembered it or misunderstood what I must do.’

  Slowly, he grew in confidence. Now that he had a witness to his telling, his memories rose up, imagery and words surfacing in his mind, the details growing in importance. The best therapy was a form of thinking aloud, the way it helped the speaker to construct a narrative out of random thoughts, remote memories and fantasies. He wanted her to see the scene that lay hidden in his memory, to see the action from the very start.

  ‘What are you planning to do?’ she asked, her voice trembling.

  He frowned. It was not meant to be an interrogation, and he did not want to be wearied by questions. In principle, she should behave as a therapist should, neither afraid nor distrustful of what he might reveal.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Don’t interrupt me. I haven’t remembered everything yet, and there is a chance I may not have to do anything to you at all.’

  He pulled his chair closer. ‘I don’t want you to ask another question unless it is absolutely necessary. If I want you to comment, I will tell you. All I want is for you to listen to me and help me remember. You must respect that.’

  She did not answer.

  ‘I’m worried about forgetting something, you see. But, somehow, the prospect of remembering frightens me more than not remembering.’

  ‘Dr Pochard thought you were cured.’

  ‘It was a bluff, I’m afraid. All those years of therapy on Ward G smartened me up, made me sly. I learned to say what was expected of me. The truth is I’m the most dangerous man ever released from that loony bin.’

  And the most lonely, too, he wanted to add. The rest of the staff at Deepwell, including Dr Pochard, had been unwilling to take on the burden of his loneliness. Everyone except his therapist had baulked at assuaging the void inside his heart, the emptiness that constantly threatened to consume him from the inside. He waited now with hope for the return of his therapist, the man who had treated him with infinite patience and listened while he talked, the man who had been strong enough to resist the pressure of his peers, but at the same time could behave mercilessly when the need arose.

  26

  Morton’s face was set in a frowning mask as he paced around Dr Pochard’s house, not uttering a single word and avoiding eye contact with Herron, who had already grown resigned to this fresh bout of silence. She had the sense that his taciturn moods were loaded up carefully in advance like gunshot in a double-barrelled rifle. Once one charge was expended, another lay sitting in wait, ready to be unleashed on the unsuspecting world.

  They entered the consulting room together and listened. Herron felt the extreme quietness of the house haunt her, as if the murderer had removed every single sound, every creak and sigh from the floorboards and walls. Her senses were tuned to almost breaking point. She glanced at Morton and saw that he was sitting on one of the leather chairs with his head hidden in his large hands, concentrating deeply. She tried to reach out mentally to him, but he got up and walked away.

  ‘Would you rather be on your own?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I just need space to think.’

  This morning Morton reminded her of a tomcat that had spent the night being mauled by other cats. His hair was more unkempt than usual, and his raincoat badly creased. Did he ever stop working, and what on earth was his personal life like? He was always at the station first thing in the morning, and usually the last to leave. Rarely did he take part in officer banter. He had developed the trick of slipping beneath the surface of conversations and sinking out of sight. In fact, he was a complete stranger to her in almost every regard, a tall detective with lank hair and a long raincoat, whose curt answers and reticence somehow gave her greater confidence in her instincts and sharpened her mind, but on another level frustrated and irritated her beyond belief. They had grown to know each other in the shadows of the crime scene, but nowhere else. Their lives were a complete mystery to each other. She wondered if there was a future to their strange working relationship, and if, when the investigation concluded, they would go their separate ways and any connection between them disappear completely.

  ‘What was Professor Reichmann looking for?’ asked Morton.

  ‘Something he thought would be here but wasn’t.’

  They walked around the house again and stared at the rooms for several minutes.

  She tried to start a conversation with him about Reichmann, but he refused to be drawn and instead mumbled, ‘Time to draw upon the most important skills of a detective.’

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘Patience and watchfulness.’

  It was a disconcerting experience working a crime scene with Morton. She felt comfortable in his presence yet incapable of saying anything meaningful. She followed him around, staring at what he was staring at, trying to work out the real reason for Reichmann’s visit.

  ‘Something is amiss,’ said Morton eventually.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just a vague notion. Do you feel it? Something has been changed or moved.’

  They stood still, breathing softly. The silence felt unique. It seemed to start at a single point, Dr Pochard’s large leather chairs the epicentre, and from there it emanated outwards, fanning into all the rooms.

  Morton marched towards the French doors. He loosened his tie and stared out at the pine forest. The police officer guarding the house was moving at the edge of the trees. He appeared to be searching for something amid the brambles and nettles. Morton stood for several minutes letting the vista take effect on him. She could tell he was thinking about something crucial to the investi
gation, but she had no idea what it was.

  Eventually, she could bear it no longer.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘Two things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘One of them has nothing to do with you or this investigation.’

  ‘And the other.’

  ‘It strikes me that this case is about people who are unable to draw the line between their own fantasies, wishful thinking and reality.’

  She assumed he meant Chisholm and McCrea, but he began talking about the staff at Deepwell.

  ‘I’ve looked into Barker’s background. He appears obsessed with awards and commendations. For himself and Deepwell. There doesn’t seem to be an honour for which he is not willing to grovel. He even gets himself invited on radio programmes and news stations as a psychological expert into the criminal mind. His office is plastered with certificates and photographs of him mingling with the great and powerful. I can just imagine him strutting around the place when he thinks he’s alone.’

  From Morton’s reflection in the window, Herron could see he was grinning to himself, a wolfish grimace framed by his long hair.

  ‘I find his personality lacking in something,’ said Morton. ‘Like a lot of other bosses I’ve met in my time.’

  It was true, she thought. Responsibility and power attracted a certain type of person.

  Morton kept speaking with his back to her as though he was talking to himself. ‘Quite often, they are vain, self-promoting egotists trying to hide the fact that they are frauds. But with Barker the vanity seems more extreme, more restless. I think he is as deranged as some of his patients. Without a single speck of self-doubt in him.’

  ‘Sounds like one of those personality disorders,’ she said. While they were on the subject, she told him about her interview with Sinden. She had found him an unusual psychotherapist. For one thing, he seemed a lot more vulnerable and lonely than the ones she had met before. He also appeared to have an irrational belief in his own powers to reform criminal behaviour.

  ‘He really thought he was curing the patients on Ward G?’ said Morton. He turned and looked at her. For the first time that morning, he appeared interested in what she had to say.

  ‘I think he’s a committed therapist. But there’s also an element of self-delusion about him. He believed in his theories even when the evidence was mounting against him.’

  ‘Another fantasist, then. How does he feel about Pochard’s murder and the disappearance of Dunnock?’

  ‘He seemed anxious, but I got the impression it wasn’t his biggest concern.’

  ‘Did you notice anything else about him?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘What we’ve been talking about before. Vanity, self-promotion, wishful thinking about one’s own talents.’

  ‘You mean is he like Barker?’

  Morton nodded.

  ‘No. I think he is just one of those people who are vulnerable to cults. I don’t think he’s able to withdraw himself emotionally from the foundation.’

  Morton stepped away from the window and lowered his head. He walked around the room without looking at her. ‘It’s been more than a week since Pochard was murdered. And we’re no closer to finding Chisholm or Laura Dunnock.’

  She didn’t reply. In the circumstances, what could she say?

  ‘The pressure is rising,’ he said, his voice almost cracking. ‘We’re getting closer and closer to having another dead body on our hands. Do you feel it?’ He squatted by the chairs and examined them. Then he walked slowly in a circle. He spoke in a low voice that welled up from deep within his chest. ‘Let us presume that sometime on Friday evening the murderer appears here at Pochard’s house. She is about to see her last patient of the day, or perhaps has already seen him or her. Either she invites her killer in or he somehow slips in without disturbing anything.’

  ‘You say “he”. I presume you’re talking about Chisholm?’

  ‘For the sake of argument, yes. Let’s say he attacks her and transports her body without leaving anything incriminating behind except a broken fingernail in one of the leather seats. After taking such great care, I can’t get my head round what he does next.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Placing the head in the stone cairn. Usually you move a body part to hide it, but in this instance, the intention was the opposite. There must be some logical reason why Chisholm took such great care to cover his tracks but then went to the considerable effort of removing her head, depositing it in the middle of a forest, and then hanging round so that a passer-by might find him.’

  ‘Not to mention losing his finger in the process.’

  ‘Exactly. I can’t understand how his frame of mind shifted.’

  ‘A psychotherapist might say that in his derangement, Chisholm was compelled to act out his fantasies.’

  ‘And yet he remembered all the details of the pseudo-confession in the middle of this attack of madness.’

  Herron thought about the forest clearing but could no longer see it clearly. Her trips through the forests around Peebles, Pochard’s photographs of rocks and trees and overgrown tracks, the confessions of the patients on Ward G had trapped her mind in an endless loop, turning the murder scene into a recurring dream, all muddled up in time and overexposed, full of the blinding light of repeated revelations, more light than she could bear, but what was it she still could not see?

  ‘To me, the scene in the forest is too concise,’ said Morton. ‘It matches too many details from the confessions. Yet there are no signs of struggle or violence in this house, nor clues that might lead us to the murderer, except the figure of Chisholm himself, standing in the darkness like some sort of sinister signpost.’

  Or someone trying to remember a dream, thought Herron. ‘What struck me when I saw him was his uncertainty,’ she said. ‘I got the sense that he couldn’t see clearly, that he was peering at a scene that might have been real or invented.’

  ‘Did he say anything that sounded odd?’

  ‘He kept mumbling to himself about taking a trip down memory lane. He said he was just watching.’

  ‘Just watching. But he did not know what he had watched. That’s for the detective to work out. To see what the person who left the head in the cairn wants us to see. Solve this and the case will be closed.’

  ‘The person? Not Chisholm but someone else?’

  ‘Yes. The person who went to the effort of leaving the head there.’

  Neither of them spoke for a while. They were trying to uncover a secret presence in the crime scene, another person, a guiding intelligence. Herron wanted to tell him her suspicions about Llewyn but she held back. ‘What conclusions can we draw, if it’s possible to make any sensible conclusions?’ she asked.

  ‘The head was left in the cairn to communicate something to us. That Deepwell had failed to cure Chisholm and that Sinden was correct in his assessment and Pochard disastrously wrong.’

  ‘But Sinden could not have been directly involved in the murder. He was at a mental health conference in Edinburgh. Dozens of people saw him there along with Dr Barker.’

  ‘Who else could have done it, then?’ said Morton. ‘Someone else connected to Ward G and familiar with the patients’ confessions.’

  Herron took a deep breath, knowing that their conversation had reached a crucial point. ‘I managed to find out something else from Sinden,’ she said. ‘Dr Llewyn was his therapist and supervisor. In fact, all the therapists at Deepwell were being treated by Llewyn.’

  Morton turned and stared at her with a look of intense concentration. ‘This is an interesting development. It means that the idea of a conspiracy is starting to hang together.’

  ‘You think it’s Llewyn?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. All we know for certain is that Sinden and Barker have rock solid alibis that will stand up in court. If they were behind Pochard’s murder, then they must have had some sort of accomplice.’ Morton turned and stared at the leather ch
airs. ‘This may be a fatal mistake, but let’s forget about Chisholm for the time being. We don’t know the entire terrain but we can see that Pochard, Dunnock, Sinden and Barker are all connected to Llewyn. I think it’s time I tracked him down and checked his alibi.’ He glided across the room like a leopard in search of prey. Before disappearing through the door, he turned round and said to her, almost as an afterthought, ‘Well done, Carla, we’re on to something. Keep focusing on the foundation. This society of psychotherapists might well be hiding a bloody psychopath. Holistic therapy, I’ll be damned.’

  27

  Driving back to the station at speed, Herron devoted her mind to pondering what was missing from Pochard’s house. An important piece of evidence should have been there, but was not. Some sort of clue was being withheld from her and Morton, and possibly Reichmann, too. The thought nagged at her so much that she almost crashed into a red post van at the bottom of the valley. She had to steer onto the grass verge to avoid the vehicle, the car rocking over mounds of grass and pitching her roughly in her seat. She caught a glimpse of the driver, waving a reprimanding finger at her, and then he sped on.

  She watched the van disappear in her rear-view mirror, and broke into a cold sweat at the thought of how close she had come to a collision. Then her brow furrowed at the thought of the van visiting the lonely farmhouses along the valley. It struck her that the daily post was something she had not thought about in relation to Dr Pochard’s house. The mat at her front door had been completely empty. Not even a trace of junk mail. Yet on the day they had broken in, there had been an assortment of letters jamming the bottom of the front door. What had happened to Pochard’s post in the meantime? There had been no mention of it in the forensic reports so why had it been removed? Perhaps it had never arrived in the first place and had been redirected elsewhere? She realised she could not solve the mystery without first checking at the local sorting office.