About the Author
Rhyam O’Bryam is a chartered public accountant, IT auditor and counsellor who has to deal with a lot of people. Over the years, his interest in the behaviour of people has increased more and more. His fascination is what is happening in the brains of people. What drives people and why people do the things they do. When he heard an incredible story as counsellor he decided to write a book about it. In Struggles of Psycho he describes how a psychopath is driven to despair and nothing and no one could stop her.
Struggles of Psycho
Rhyam O’Bryam
Struggles of Psycho
Olympia Publishers
London
www.olympiapublishers.com
OLYMPIA EBOOK EDITION
Copyright © Rhyam O’Bryam 2019
The right of Rhyam O’Bryam to be identified as author of
this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All Rights Reserved
No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,
copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions
of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be liable to criminal
prosecution and civil claims for damage.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is
available from the British Library.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places and incidents originate from the writer’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
First Published in 2019
Olympia Publishers
60 Cannon Street
London
EC4N 6NP
Prologue
Transcript of an emergency call, 7.32pm, Tuesday 19 March.
‘Nine, nine, nine, which service do you require?’
‘Police please. And an ambulance, I suppose, for the body.’
‘Connecting you to the police.’
‘Hello, police emergency. What is the address of the incident?’
‘Castle Sinet, Ballyseedy, County Wexford.’
‘What is the nature of the emergency?’
‘I’ve been attacked. Only the man is dead. I defended myself with a knitting needle and it’s gone in his chest.’
‘You’ve been attacked. You’ve wounded a man and he’s dead?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Philips, Amy Philips.’
‘Amy Philips?’
‘Correct.’
‘And the victim?’
‘Mike Patterson.’
‘Mike Patterson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you checked his pulse? Is he breathing?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Just now. Just a few minutes ago. He was raging, I thought he was going to kill me. What should I do?’
‘We have a car on the way and an ambulance. They will be with you shortly. Please stay on the line.’
Chapter One
You have to go a long way off the main road to find Castle Sinet. I was cursing as my BMW bounced along what was little more than a track, scraping over the raised central grass. Beside me, it seemed to me that Detective Sergeant McCarthy smirked every time we hit a bump.
‘You should have brought the squad car,’ she said, wise after the fact, as always.
‘Do you know why I’m superintendent and you’re still sergeant?’ I dared not glance at her, all my attention was on this godforsaken road.
‘Because you’ve got a cock?’ she offered. Orla McCarthy was both crude and feminist.
‘Because to lead is to foresee. And I foresee a lot. Like the fact that you are in the wrong job.’
‘I like it.’
‘Oh, yeah? What do you like about it?’
‘You get to see a lot, behind the scenes of daily life.’
‘You do that. But it’s rarely interesting and it’s often grim, like this place.’
‘All the same. A desk job wouldn’t suit me.’
This time I did spare her a look. She caught it. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What?’
‘You could be fitter. If you are going out in the field. It’s dangerous sometimes and you never know when you might have to take off.’
‘Fuck’s sake. I go to the gym.’
I said nothing.
‘Fuck off, Doyle and find this castle.’
We were passing two farmers, elderly men in their tattered work clothes. I wound down the window.
‘Castle Sinet?’
They exchanged a look. It wasn’t a warm one. The nearest man gestured with a slight movement of his head. ‘Stay on for a mile. The drive is on the right.’
‘Thank you.’
I continued on carefully until the gateposts came into view. The granite, square-edged slabs were topped with lions. Turning in, I could hear the crunch of gravel under my wheels. At last, a proper road, even if it was just the short distance up to the house.
‘Jesus, who has a castle growing out of their yard?’ McCarthy was shifted out of her discontent with my comments upon her fitness by the sight of a big grey tower rising between whitewashed buildings.
‘The old aristocracy.’
‘Is there any left? I thought we burned them out in the revolution.’
‘Some survived. Kept their heads down. Rented out their lands to locals.’
‘Like Amy Philips?’
‘Well, her grandmother, Mary Sinet.’
With the engine still, the courtyard was quiet. This was a grim place all right. Over at one of the doors, the black and yellow tape marking off the crime scene was still in place.
‘There’s a torch in the glove compartment,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure if the electricity is working everywhere.’
McCarthy got out of the car with the torch and we took a moment to survey the property.
‘I hate the countryside,’ she said.
‘Oh yeah?’ I was born on a farm and, apart from the huge and intimidating tower, this was familiar enough. A low-roofed building to my right contained the tack for the horses, along with some old trestles, pots of dried paint with their lids missing, a worn-out tractor tyre, a stack of half a dozen tiles and a stall in which stood a rusty hoe.
Ahead of us was the house proper and behind us, that castle tower.
‘Where first?’ McCarthy asked.
I went around to the boot and took out a dozen evidence bags. ‘Let’s go through her documents, letters, computers. You know.’
‘So the house then.’
‘Right.’
Did McCarthy feel it too? The presence of the tower. And like me, did she want to avoid it?
Inside, with the lights on, the house felt fine. Normal and lived-in. We worked patiently and systematically through the kitchen, downstairs bathroom and utility room, taking the best part of an hour. Naturally, we left the lounge alone. I would only have access when forensics had finished with it.
McCarthy, leaned against the crime scene tapes and peered in as far as she could.
‘It all looks tidy. No sign of a fight. No blood.’
I came over. She was right. Two armchairs and a couch were grouped around a well-used, low coffee table, on which there was Saturday’s Irish Times. Although the sheets of the newspaper were somewhat untidy, it looked more like they had
been put down after being read than scattered. Certainly, there was no blood.
‘I suppose if she hit his heart and stopped it, there wouldn’t be much blood,’ I offered and made a note to ask the pathologist when she gave us her report.
Upstairs was a little more challenging because the corridor was a crooked leg, rather than a straight one. At some point an extension, clumsily built, had been run over the roof of the barn. Here, Amy Philips had a spare bedroom (seemingly unused) and a music room, with a piano and a guitar, both very worn.
It was a low-tech kind of household. There were no televisions at all; nor any computers and the only phone I could see was the old-fashioned kind that was connected to a line in the entrance hall.
‘How many people lived here?’ I asked McCarthy.
She shrugged. ‘Looks like just the one. Just her. Not much in the fridge. One pair of wellies at the door. One toothbrush. Spare beds not made up.’
‘Right. But look at this.’
I was at the wardrobe in the master bedroom. It had been partitioned into two parts. The larger section had Amy Philips’s clothes, or so it seemed to me: sombre colours, expensive tweeds and size twelve dresses and blouses. The smaller part, however, contained brighter coloured clothes and – to be frank – more sexy items. Tops that were lacy and low cut. They were size tens.
‘Ivy Patterson’s?’ McCarthy took one out.
‘Probably.’ I took out my phone to read the file. ‘Yeah, size ten.’
‘She left a lot of good gear behind.’ McCarthy was looking through the rack. ‘And nice shoes.’
I took a couple of pictures.
According to Amy Philips, Ivy Patterson had walked out of their relationship a month ago and had disappeared. Then, yesterday, Ivy’s brother, Michael Patterson had turned up and created a row. He became threatening and after being punched in the cheek (she certainly had a big bruise there), Amy had stabbed Michael with a knitting needle. The poor bloke got it in the heart.
If the story was true, Amy would get off lightly, maybe entirely if the jury agreed her actions were reasonable self-defence. But I didn’t like the missing person, unreported until now, and I certainly didn’t like the castle.
I checked my watch. ‘Shall we look at the castle, then?’
‘All right.’
Shame, but it was better to get it done than have to come back again tomorrow.
So back we went across the courtyard, with a glance to confirm the car was untouched, and over to a thick, iron-bound door. The key was where Amy had described it would be, under a rusting wheelbarrow. It was an old, heavy key with a rather ornate pair of wings made out intertwined black metal curves. I felt the ghost of the Norman lords, the castle’s builders, holding this very key.
Inside, there was at least electric light for the first floor. A bare bulb illuminated what might have been a store room, except that it was empty of everything but some half dozen bags made of sacking. The sort that could contain large amounts of potatoes. Come to think of it, the place did smell of potatoes.
This ground floor had modern brickwork all around the interior, like cladding inside the old castle walls. To support the thick wooden planks that made up the roof, perhaps? Maybe insulation too, although it didn’t look like the room had been used much for anything other than storage.
To go up, we had to squeeze into a narrow stone stairwell. Very worn and very dark. Here we had to use the torch and I went first. I can be gallant. Not that there should be any danger here. Yet I for some reason I was anxious and made sure that nothing could come at me out of the darkness, by aiming the beam as far up the stairs as I could.
The next level was built solely out of the older, medieval, stone. The floor of this next level was the roof of the store room below. On the planks were a few items of furniture: a long, rectangular table and four folding chairs, the kind you often see outside in a garden. There was some light, from four narrow stone windows on whose sills were candles. I walked over to them, my footsteps loud on the bare wood.
All the candles had been lit and burned down past halfway, the pale grey wax pooling and hardening on the stone of the windowsill. Black soot came off onto my fingers.
‘Used within the week, I’d say.’
‘What for though? What would you do in here?’ McCarthy had stayed at the doorway and called over to me, her voice carrying easily.
‘I’ve no idea. Let’s ask her later.’
‘Shall we keep going? I bet the view from the top is amazing.’ McCarthy sounded more cheerful than I felt.
I felt rushed, but at the same time wanted to leave. And there really didn’t seem to be anything else to look at.
On we went, again I took the torch and led the way up the narrow, curving stairwell. It would have been hell to have tried to fight your way up. Did they ever have a battle in this castle? A raid, maybe, the Irish finally avenging themselves on the Norman landlord? I should look it up.
The next level had another large room, also with bare wooden floors, this time with no furniture at all. But there were side rooms off short corridors. One of them contained a stone seat, the hole revealing a dizzying drop down to a muddy field.
‘Careful, Superintendent.’
‘The medieval toilet.’
‘Jaysus. I wouldn’t fancy that.’
‘The original would have been covered in wood.’
‘Even so.’
I couldn’t guess at the function of the other small room on this level. A store, maybe? It wasn’t much wider than my outstretched arms. Deep holes in the stone at the entrance to it indicated where a door would have once been hung.
Nothing unusual, however, apart from the fact that the whole castle itself was unusual. So we went up the final set of stairs to the roof.
‘Wow, you can see the sea.’ McCarthy, blonde hair pulled out by the wind, looked happy.
It was true. On the horizon, so faint that it could have been a line of grey cloud, was the sea. Between the castle and that distant vista was a chequered pattern of dull green and pale yellow fields, marked out with hedgerows and the occasional copse of trees.
I walked slowly around an interior wall, that was in a state of disrepair and in some places only came up to my waist. Again, the drop made me uncomfortable. In my youth, I hadn’t cared at all about heights, but at some time in my forties, I started to feel vertigo any time I was above a lethal fall. Was that normal? It probably happened to everyone with age.
Completing the circuit, I stood at the door again. McCarthy was still enjoying the views, only now her attention was inland.
‘Coming?’
‘Sure.’ She turned and walked back to me. ‘Not bad. I wouldn’t mind owning a place with a castle.’
‘What does she use it for, though?’ I found myself echoing McCarthy’s own question from earlier.
‘Let’s go ask her.’
Chapter Two
We hadn’t actually charged Amy Philips with anything yet, nor detained her on any formal grounds. So the clock wasn’t running. All the same, I had no intention of letting her go and at some point she would ask, was she free to leave? Before we reached that point, I wanted to know enough to make a recommendation to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
It was mid-afternoon. So with just a quick coffee, a scone and a wash, I arranged for our second interview with our suspect. McCarthy, looking animated, was in the room with me.
Amy Philips was fifty-one and her once-dark hair, tied back in a bun, was mostly silver. Her face was very fleshy, you might even say (if you wanted to be unkind) that she had jowls. It was the right cheek that was bruised and she had made no effort to put makeup over the purple blotch. Her body, too, was stocky. She was wearing a tweed jacket and skirt, thick brown tights, a blouse and sensible shoes. It was an outfit that did not shout wealth, though it did suggest a rural life. You didn’t see much tweed in town.
As she sat down, she smiled and held my gaze too long with a stare from her deep
brown eyes. I preferred to look away than to become locked in some kind of standoff. I’d noticed this intense gaze from her during the first interview too.
We did the preliminaries and started the recording.
‘Would you tell us again about your relationship with Michael Patterson?’ I asked.
‘Certainly. Where shall I start?’
‘At the beginning?’ offered McCarthy and I glanced disapprovingly at her. My colleague was being smart and you could hear it in her tone. I figured that Amy Philips had picked up the hint of mockery too, because our suspect transferred both her smile and her unwavering stare to McCarthy. Then she seemed to settle back and relax in the chair.
‘You know, it’s a pleasure to have some intelligent company. Out at the farm, I’m on my own too much. I miss it.
‘Well then, the beginning. I never knew my father. He died of lung cancer when I was only two. There are pictures, of course. He was more of a scholar and recluse than a farmer and there’s a picture of him in his study, looking uncomfortable as he holds me. Of course, I don’t remember him at all.
‘And I don’t remember my mother much either.’
At this McCarthy shifted impatiently in her chair, but I gave a slight shake of my head and she stayed silent. I’d learned over the years to let people speak without interruption if they were in good flow. Again, I felt that Ms Philips was well aware of the unspoken interaction between myself and McCarthy, but she continued without a pause.
‘My mother was driving me home from Carlow, where we’d spent the day with her brother. My brother and sister had stayed at home. I think there had been a piano exam that day for them. Something musical, anyway, and they were much older than me. I would have been five, so that would have made Lucy sixteen and Oliver fourteen.
‘There was something wrong. It’s hard for me to remember but I don’t think Mother was listening to me. She might even have been crying. Anyway, the journey back in the dark was not much fun for me. And I still feel guilty about what happened, although the counsellors always tell me it wasn’t my fault.
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