Struggles of Psycho

by Rhyam O'Bryam

  ‘Did you enjoy the ride?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not really. The boys were trying to freak me out, going too close to the castle and poles.’

  ‘Yeah, I saw that. I don’t like going up in a helicopter any more.’

  ‘Where shall we search?’

  I nodded to where the road left the courtyard to the south. ‘Let’s check those copses of trees. That’s a likely place and shielded from the sky.’

  We walked in companionable silence to where the field gave way to a dozen clumps of birch, each like an oasis. There were plenty of deep blue hyacinths among the thicker grasses here and these attracted a number of bees. Was Ivy’s body lying somewhere close?

  ‘Let’s split up.’

  ‘Sure.’ McCarthy moved away to the right and I to the left. I imagined Philips, driving out across the field with Ivy’s body in the boot of her car. She would have dragged it to one of these copses, carefully removed the top layer of grass and flowers, then dug. Probably she would have bagged the soil to scatter elsewhere. It would have been hard work and taken a couple of hours, easily. Tired, she wouldn’t have gone as deep as she initially planned, but once the hole allowed for a body to be covered without standing out, she’d have finished.

  The grass would have been carefully replaced, but still, there would be signs it had been lifted. A lighter colour, perhaps. Certainly, the lines where the spade tip had cut through should still be evident. Yet, careful as I was to cover each of my copses thoroughly, I did not find the grave.

  Nor did McCarthy.

  I checked my watch. It was after four pm and I was thirsty.

  ‘Let’s go back.’

  A glance at McCarthy showed her to be flushed and sweaty. Her shoes were filthy. I should have brought some boots for her too. She didn’t want to give up though. ‘Where next?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘The floor of the castle?’

  ‘We’d have noticed.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been packed down, solid?’

  ‘Yes, but I had a close look last time. You’d never get that consistency of colour if you had disturbed it so deeply, so recently.’

  Thoughtful, McCarthy looked around. ‘Let’s suppose she cared for Ivy at some level and wasn’t happy at killing her.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t want to live too close to the body. The spot would be a reminder.’

  ‘Good.’ This sounded plausible.

  ‘So she drives to the edge of her property.’

  I stopped. From the courtyard there was a north road, both narrow and full of pot holes. ‘North, probably. The south is too exposed. That farmhouse can see everything.’ I pointed to a long, low, white-washed building.

  ‘Right. North then.’

  When we got to the courtyard, I suggested we take the car. Not so much to save energy but because I wanted to imagine I was Philips, driving with a body. Where would I stop? Where looked safe while also being far enough away that I wouldn’t have to see the grave every day? McCarthy was grateful for the rest, but I winced to see the amount of mud she brought into the vehicle as she settled into the passenger seat. Someone would have to clean that and whoever it was wouldn’t be happy.

  A slight turn in the road as it left the courtyard brought the sun into my eyes. It was halfway down towards the horizon. Light was moving inexorably towards darkness. Then the road turned north again and I could study the ground around us more clearly.

  ‘Where would you stop,’ I asked McCarthy, ‘with a body in the boot?’

  ‘Not here.’ We were passing open fields. A donkey stood beside a water trough, watching us placidly.

  Ahead though, there was a promising avenue of beech trees, lining the farm road until it reached a gate, which opened onto the public road. A smooth, tarmacked road that contrasted with the bumpy experience we were having as we approached it.

  ‘Let’s stop here and search around those trees.’

  I didn’t mind McCarthy giving the orders; she was thinking only of the most likely spot for the grave. And in any case, I agreed with her.

  I pulled up the handbrake and got out into a cloud of midges, dancing around each other in a block of sunlight. Brushing past them, I took the left-hand avenue of trees, while McCarthy matched my slow, methodical pace up the right. We didn’t talk, just concentrated on the ground for any sign that it had been dug up recently.

  The beech trees had been shedding their seeds. The small, brown, spikey containers had spilled their contents everywhere. It would have been nearly impossible to have dug a grave and then covered the surface with the same proportion of beech seeds as the surrounding area. My hopes began to rise. If Ivy were buried here, Philips would want several days for the beeches to shed their seed cases everywhere and for wind and rain to even out the distribution.

  ‘Are you looking at the beech seeds?’ I called across to McCarthy.

  ‘I’m looking at everything,’ she replied, a little curtly.

  ‘There will be a patch more green than brown if there’s a grave. There hasn’t been time enough for the trees to cover the ground again.’

  ‘Right.’

  We continued our careful walk. And continued. There was an orange tinge to the sky when we reached the end of the driveway, the end of the line of trees and the end of Philip’s property. There was no grave here.

  I looked at McCarthy and she held my gaze. We had failed, but there was determination on her face. She wasn’t too discouraged and I resolved not to reveal how disheartened I actually was. Despite myself, I had really believed that the need to hide a grave explained the game Philips was playing with us. And that we would find it.

  ‘What now?’ asked McCarthy.

  ‘We get her out of her cell and put it to her that she murdered Ivy. Let’s see how she responds to a direct challenge.’

  ‘Great. Dibs on that.’

  I almost smiled at my partner’s enthusiasm.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  ‘Amy Philips, did you murder Ivy Patterson?’ McCarthy was sitting opposite Philips this time, rather than me, and her voice was severe.

  I was watching carefully, to see how Philips would react, but other than a momentary sneer, there was nothing but a supercilious smile. ‘No.’

  ‘Did you bury the body on your land?’

  ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ Philips retorted. ‘There was no body. Ivy disappeared.’

  ‘According to your previous statements, Ivy Patterson disappeared on the seventeenth of May.’

  ‘I think you’ll find my exact statement was that it was the same day we borrowed Crime and Punishment.’

  ‘Which was May seventeenth.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  I said nothing. I did not intend to intervene unless I thought I could really score a blow. McCarthy could handle our side.

  ‘Yet, according to Mrs Patterson, there had been no communication with Ivy since March. Not even on her birthday.’

  Philips took a deep breath and looked at me for a while, then returned her attention to McCarthy. ‘I can explain that.’

  ‘Go on,’ replied my partner coldly.

  ‘One problem I had was with new technology. You’ll remember life before the internet, Superintendent. But after it, well, the good news was my modest income stream from BDSM pictures. The bad news was the internet. It was a new way for Ivy to connect with people.

  ‘Before then, it was easy for me to keep an eye on the post. And I really did have to take care. Somehow – and it infuriated me – my address became known to Ivy’s friends. Perhaps they contacted Mike, or perhaps it came to them via the family. But it meant the occasional postcard and, worse, sometimes a letter. There was a time when Ivy rose early and I knew it was to try to get to the post before me. Unfortunately for her, I had an understanding with Ron, the postman. Anything addressed to Ivy was put in the birdbox near the door.

  ‘She never found out about this a
nd I was careful to present her post as if it had come on the days when I was first to the door. In this way I could screen the letters and the ones I didn’t care for, I burned. It was my hope that if Ivy failed to write back to her friends, they would give up.’

  ‘You know it is a criminal offence to intercept letters that are not addressed to you?’ McCarthy pointed out.

  ‘This was some time ago, Detective. And as I was about to say, it didn’t work. With the internet and with Facebook, suddenly friends who had lost contact with one another over the years could reunite. For a long time, I didn’t realise the danger.

  ‘Out at the farm, I knew everyone and where they stood in respect to Ivy. If there was a local man who showed an interest in her, I could keep her away from him. With Facebook and email, it was far more challenging keeping her to myself, almost impossible.

  ‘Of course I demanded her passwords and I would log in to her email every day and read it.’

  I hope I remained impassive, but McCarthy shook her head.

  ‘Oh,’ said Philips dismissively, ‘don’t judge me for that. You must remember it goes all the way back to that little girl in the car with her dying mother. “Trust no one”. I certainly could not trust Ivy. She was a caged bird who would fly away if ever the door were left open.

  ‘Mostly, her emails were from her mother. There was one from her father, George, but I replied to it. Told him never to email Ivy again. And, as far as I know – because she might have had an account she kept secret from me – he never did.

  ‘Sometimes, a girl from school might get in touch with her. Do you remember me telling you about Karla Fletcher, the spotty chess player?’ Philips looked at me (pointedly, not at McCarthy) until I gave her a slight nod. ‘Well, Ivy got a pathetic email from her. Karla had her first real job and was very proud of it. It came with a desk and a computer, with email. But she didn’t really know who to email. So, she hoped Ivy didn’t mind but it would be nice to talk. And perhaps play chess. You could hear the excitement in her next lines, about how they could start two games, so they were one black and one white. And just to get things started, as white Karla would play d4.

  ‘Well, there was no way I wanted this correspondence to continue. Karla had never forgotten her rise in status in the school, following her chess game with Ivy and was absolutely devoted to her. A renewal of their friendship would almost certainly be at my expense. So my response was barely polite.’

  ‘Your response,’ interrupted McCarthy, with the emphasis on the word, “your”.

  ‘Yes, Detective. I already told you I had her passwords. And this was just the kind of situation where respecting propriety would have been a disaster. Don’t you see? They would have played their games. Chatted. Figured out how to use ICQ. Maybe even used Skype or video Messenger when that came along. And what would they talk about? Sooner or later, Ivy would confide to Karla that she was living with me and that she hated it and wanted to leave. Karla would be curious. Why didn’t Ivy leave? It was too shameful and too dangerous, Ivy would confess. And Karla would urge her to grasp the nettle. To stand up to me, whatever the consequences.

  ‘I could see all this as clearly as I can see you, Superintendent. And with just as much insight into how matters would play out.’ Her somewhat mocking smile made me squirm, but I didn’t interrupt her. ‘And so I emailed Karla back, along these lines. Dear Karla, first of all, I really don’t think you should be spending your work time emailing people from your old school or anywhere else that’s not related to your job. Please don’t put me in the difficult position of having to report you. As for chess, that game no longer interests me. I find it very dull. I’m sorry to say, also, that the idea of a sustained communication between us sounds equally dull. I realise this will come across as rude, but I want to make it unambiguously clear that your email was not welcome.’

  Philips looked very satisfied with herself, leaned back and folded her arms. ‘And that did the trick. No more emails from Karla. But of course, that was just the start. Who would have known that Ivy was so popular at school? Because as soon as Facebook became popular, she had hundreds of friends requests. And it took me a while to realise what was happening.

  ‘Usually on Mondays we went to the library. Because she liked literature, while I liked to read the papers and perhaps pick up a biography, we tended to part ways. Of course, I was always aware of Ivy and I was especially attentive if she started to talk to someone. She was a lovely, intelligent-looking woman, just right for the kind of man who used a library. And no doubt she was looking for a knight in shining armour to come rescue her.

  ‘So I was very attentive when there were men of our generation present. Often, I would catch them studying Ivy, staring at her even. Fortunately, such men were too timid to actually speak to her but the very occasional time that happened, I immediately went over and closed down the conversation. What I underestimated, however, were the computers.

  ‘Still a little behind the times, I thought the computers were just for the catalogue. I rarely underestimated Ivy, but here I did. She would take a seat in plain view of me, her facing me (and sometimes looking up to acknowledge me) and the computer screen facing away and, unknown to me, she created a Facebook account. She was clever about using it. Every so often, she would get up, as though having looked up the book she wanted, and she would spent a little time at the shelves before returning to the computer.

  ‘Perhaps I should have noticed that Ivy was a little more cheerful, a little more talkative. But I put that down to her become adjusted to our life here, which really wasn’t that bad. With the revenues I’d obtained from renting my land to the local farmers, I could afford to eat out once a week, buy us new clothes now and again, go to the theatre or a concert. It wasn’t a bad life. And it was healthy. Walks on the beach whenever we had good weather.

  ‘So no cause for alarm.

  ‘I should have been alarmed though. Ivy was growing a friends list hundreds strong and worse, she was exchanging messages with all sorts of people. Friends of friends she’d never even met. When I finally discovered this account –and this is the point I’m coming to, it was last March – I was horrified to see it also had twenty or so pictures of her. Most had been taken at the farm, with the digital camera I used for our BDSM website.

  ‘Looking at them, I felt cold. What a violation of trust. She must have taken the image, saved it onto a memory stick, then deleted it from the camera. To post it, she must have secretly brought the memory stick to the library. All that planning and care. All that sneaking around. Ivy wasn’t reconciled to living with me, she was conspiring to leave me.

  ‘This all came out after Google introduced image results for searches. I would regularly check Ivy’s name in a search, but there are a lot of Ivy Pattersons and I never saw my Ivy in the first few pages of results. Long after she had created her Facebook account, I failed to spot it, because I didn’t scroll through enough results to find it and even if I had seen an Ivy Patterson Facebook result, I would have ignored it as being that of a different woman. Then we got images and I was amazed. I could see Ivy looking out at me.

  ‘Clicking on the image brought me to a Facebook page full of life. It was a whole hidden world. One where Ivy was sending emojis, commenting on the discussions in her posts and those of others; where she was “liking” no end of posts and pictures, including those of men she’d never met. It was horrifying. Like I’d been living with a doppelganger or a werewolf. And I’d caught it just in time. Some of Ivy’s message streams were with a Brendan Crokery from Waterford. They were pages long and while often only dealing with the latest book she was reading or film she had seen, sometimes they went deeper.

  ‘At first I couldn’t read them, of course. I could only see her public posts. But after sitting before her open profile for over an hour with my head in my hands, I pulled myself together and went to the study, where she was reading.

  ‘“Ivy,’ I said, “would you mind coming with me to the lounge
, I want to show you something?”

  ‘“You do?” Ivy put a bookmark in her book (we got it from Wexford Jail) and stood up. “What is it?”

  ‘But I just walked briskly back to my computer and when she saw what I was looking at, she just folded her arms and pursed her lips. I could tell there was going to be a big fight over this.

  ‘“So you’ve been sneaking around on Facebook, have you?” I started the battle.

  ‘“There’s nothing sneaky about it. I have a Facebook page, that’s all, the same as millions of people.”

  ‘“If there’s nothing sneaky about it, why didn’t you tell me? Why don’t you use it here?”

  ‘Ivy just sighed. “We both know perfectly well why not. You keep me here pretty much as a prisoner. You are paranoid when I talk to strangers, especially men. You steal my post. You stand listening when I phone home.”

  ‘“Log in for me. Let me see.”

  ‘“I will not. This is private. This is mine. It’s the only thing I have that’s mine.”

  ‘“You will though.” I thought carefully about my next words, feeling that there was a real danger here that if I pushed her too far, she’d just leave and risk the release of her pictures and the danger to her brother. A danger, which I hasten to add, was in her mind but not in fact a real one.’

  A jury might have a different opinion on that, I thought to myself. Especially when they listened to the chilling narration of the death of the dog.

  ‘“There will be consequences.” I simply left it at this.

  ‘“Damn your consequences!” Ivy was wide-eyed and tense all over, clearly determined to make a stand. No doubt she wanted to make this moment one that changed our relationship in her favour. She thought she had all the cards.

  ‘“For a start, there will be no more library trips and no more phone calls.”

  ‘“I’ll go to town myself.”

  ‘“How? You have no money for a taxi and you’re not going to walk a dozen miles.”

  ‘“I’ll hitchhike. I’ll get a lift, there will be no difficulty there.”