Turning Nasty (Anna McColl Mystery Series Book 4)

by Penny Kline

  ‘You’re sure you can stand it, Anna?’ Heather was staring at me, her expression conveying the message that I didn’t look up to helping anyone, let alone a third-year undergraduate, who had been seeing the psychotherapist who worked part-time for the university counselling service but had asked to be referred on to somebody else.

  ‘Yes, book her in.’ When Heather had made the necessary arrangements I asked if the counsellor had provided us with any more information.

  ‘Just that there seemed to be a clash of personalities. Well, she didn’t put it like that exactly. From what I could gather the student’s one of those rich public-school types. I don’t want to sound prejudiced but… ’

  ‘She was giving them hell so they wanted her off their backs as quickly as possible.’ Heather attempted a short laugh, but she was thinking about something else. ‘Anna, I don’t suppose it’s anything important but I’ve just remembered when Dr Hazeldean phoned, well, I just had this feeling.’ ‘What kind of feeling?’

  She was looking at me with her head tilted slightly to one side. ‘You know I said she sounded like she was making a dental appointment? Well, that was right in a way, but there was something else. She sounded as if making the call had been an enormous effort. I could’ve been imagining it, but if you answer the phone as much as I do you get good at picking up the little nuances.’

  ‘Go on.’

  She hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘The thing is — and I’m sure I’m not inventing this just because of what’s happened — she sounded so afraid.’

  *

  My new client, the student, was called Imogen Nash. Already, thanks to Heather, I had a mental picture of how she looked. Tall, with long fair hair and the kind of face you see by the score in news clips of Henley Regatta or Royal Ascot. Dressed in designer jeans, white shirt, cashmere sweater.

  At four-thirty, when I put my head round the waiting-room door, I was surprised to discover my picture had been amazingly accurate.

  ‘Imogen?’

  She held out a hand in a scarlet wool glove, then laughed loudly, removing the glove and clasping my fingers in a strong, almost painful grip. ‘Lead on, the receptionist said your room’s on the floor above. Do you have a room each? How many of you are there? It’s rather chilly in here.’

  ‘Three of us,’ I said, starting up the stairs ahead of her, wondering, for no particular reason, if my skirt had got caught up at the back. ‘The passages are rather draughty but I think you’ll find my room’s quite warm.’

  ‘Jolly good.’ She was carrying a large red bag with several zip-up pockets and a collection of files and books sticking out of the main section. ‘I saw Jon Turle. Did they tell you? I wanted assertiveness training but it wasn’t what he does. He kept talking about how I was sitting on my hands, which meant apparently that I didn’t want to talk. Then he said I ought to join a therapeutic group but I said I wouldn’t like that at all. So here I am.’

  If she wanted assertiveness training why had she been referred to a psychotherapist? I knew Jon Turle, by name. He did three or four hours a week for the Student Counselling Service and the rest of the time he saw private clients in a room he rented in Kingsdown, up near the Children’s Hospital.

  Imogen was examining the paperweight on my desk. ‘Present from a grateful patient? When I say I need assertiveness training I don’t mean that silly stuff when they teach you how to go up to people and confront them with the fact that you lent them five pounds and they haven’t given it back. No, what I mean is something that gives you real confidence deep down. Do you do that kind of thing?’

  She was moving round the room, picking things up and putting them down. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I will in a minute. I sometimes think I should’ve done psychology, except you have to be good at maths, all those statistics and tables and things, and you have to train rats to run through mazes, only I think they’ve stopped all that, haven’t they?’

  She was driving me crazy already. Best to admit it — to myself.

  ‘Slow down,’ I said. ‘Let’s both get our bearings, then you can tell me a bit about yourself and I’ll tell you what I think might help.’

  She hesitated, but not for long. ‘Jon Turle sees anxiety as a symptom of a split between the individual and his environment,’ she said, talking so loudly she was almost shouting. ‘Or her environment, I suppose. Have I got the jargon right? He mistrusts words, prefers to interpret body language. That’s why he kept talking about my hands. I explained how I was all right one-to-one but if I have to speak in a seminar my chest feels all tense. Only I wasn’t allowed to say that. I had to say I felt all tense, not my chest.’ She paused for breath and I jumped in fast.

  ‘Right, let’s start with a few facts. You’re in your final year, reading English.’

  She nodded impatiently. ‘People take it in turns to give a short paper. When it was my turn I had to leave the room with a coughing fit. By the way, did you know someone from the university was burned to death last weekend?’

  ‘Yes, I heard about it.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She started rummaging through her bag. ‘I’m not supposed to talk about anything except myself. Jon said mentioning other people was just a way of escaping from your own feelings.’

  ‘Have you talked to your tutor? About your anxiety when you have to speak in a seminar?’

  ‘We don’t have a tutor in the third year.’

  ‘Someone on the staff you like, trust.’

  For the first time the bright, self-assured expression faded. ‘I can’t think of anyone, not off-hand.’

  ‘A friend, then.’

  She swallowed several times. ‘There’s Rachel. She shares a flat with me but she’s out most evenings. Anyway, people just bitch about you if you tell them anything personal. Most people are just out for what they can get. They pretend to be concerned but really they can’t wait for you to shut up and pull yourself together.’

  For the first time I felt a twinge of empathy. A negative view of self is highly correlated with a negative view of others. Worth remembering, but not much comfort when things have gone badly wrong and you’re slagging off everyone in sight. I tried a different tack. ‘Tell me about your family. Any brothers and sisters? Where do your parents live?’

  She looked away, fiddling with the strap on her bag, then she smiled, revealing two rows of perfect teeth. ‘I tell you what, you could phone Jon, ask him to give you all those kind of details. Good idea?’

  ‘You’d like me to talk to Jon Turle?’ ‘Why not? It’d be easier, wouldn’t it? He works in his consulting room on Wednesdays. I haven’t got the number but I expect it’s in the book.’

  After she left I phoned through to Martin to see if he knew Jon Turk’s number. He had two, one an address in Montpelier, the other the consulting room off St Michael’s Hill. I wrote down both.

  ‘Problem?’ Martin sounded as though he felt like a chat.

  ‘Not really. I’ll be down in a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Good. Don’t be long, I have to baby-sit while Sue goes to her class. Did I tell you I’ve been reading this book on father-child relationships? It’s rather good. No jargon or any of that crap that makes out there’s no difference between the sexes — ’

  ‘Tell me about it later. I have to make a phone call.’

  ‘To Jon Turle. Give him my regards. Funny bloke, never been able to make him out at all. If I didn’t know better I’d think he was a manic-depressive.’

  Jon Turle’s consulting-room number rang for nearly a minute. Since he rented one room he was unlikely to be somewhere else in the building unless he was in the loo. Just as I was replacing the receiver a faint voice came on the other end of the line.

  ‘Jon Turle?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sounded wary, or perhaps he had someone with him.

  ‘Anna McColl, Psychology Service.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  He must have known my name but he gave no indication of
it.

  ‘Imogen Nash,’ I said. ‘I expect you know she’s been referred to us. I don’t want to go into all the ins and outs of it but I’ve just seen her and she asked me to get in touch with you.’

  ‘What for?’ I could hear music in the background. A violin concerto.

  ‘She thought it would save time if you passed on any information you thought might be relevant to her case.’

  ‘That’s what she wanted?’

  ‘Yes.’ I was getting cross. ‘Look, just tell me enough to let her know we’re co-operating in her treatment. I expect that’s what she’s after. She’s afraid there might be some unpleasantness because she asked to be referred on.’

  ‘Why would she think that?’

  I sighed. ‘Never mind, you obviously don’t think it’s a good idea.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. When are you seeing her again? I’ll fetch my notes then I can tell you everything you need to know. How would that be?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Why the sudden change of mood? Is that what Martin had meant by manic-depressive? Surely nobody’s mood changed that fast?

  When he came back on the line he sounded neither manic or depressive, just business-like, a little cool but quite helpful. Perhaps I had judged him too harshly. No one likes it when one of their clients asks to see someone else. However much you tell yourself certain people are bound to find the way you work wrong for them, it still feels like a kick in the teeth.

  *

  The dusk provided a degree of cover. On the other hand if someone was watching me the inadequate street lighting worked in his favour, not mine. I had seen the guy taking his dog into the park opposite my office so it seemed likely he lived in the area. A smallish expanse of rough grass, with four or five undistinguished trees, was hardly the kind of place someone would drive half across Bristol to reach.

  I walked briskly, the limp long since abandoned, not looking at the houses, just the cars driving past and the rows of battered-looking vehicles, interspersed with fairly expensive ones, that were parked in every street. Aware that the chances of seeing the brown Allegro were virtually nil I was still determined to make at least a token attempt to find out where Max lived. Something about the way the dog had released its grip the moment it heard a familiar whistle made me think Heather could be right. The attack had been deliberate. But if Max had seen Howard Fry talking to me in the car park, and suspected the conversation had something to do with him, his best bet would have been to have kept a low profile, not set his dog on me. Still, if he had any connection with the fire in Bishopston he was probably the type that craved excitement, liked to live dangerously. The type. I was doing it again. It was pure prejudice to imagine that anyone dressed in the uniform of the far right was automatically a member of a neo-fascist group. In any case, the connection between Maggie Hazeldean and any such group seemed tenuous in the extreme. Teaching painting once a week to a bunch of Asian kids hardly warranted an arson attack on your home, although it was possible her involvement had been far greater than anyone realized. Perhaps she had marched, carried banners, even taken part in scuffles when people with opposing ideologies clashed in the city centre.

  The front door of one of the terraced houses suddenly burst open and a girl of about fourteen came down the short path, swinging a sports bag in one hand and a badminton racquet in the other. She was a beautiful-looking girl, with long black hair tied back in a ponytail. She glanced at me, then back at the house as a woman called out to her.

  ‘Nine-thirty sharp. If it’s a minute after you know what’ll happen.’

  The girl snorted, tossing her head, and at that precise moment a car roared towards us, swerving from side to side, with a boy hanging out of the passenger window shouting remarks that were barely audible but almost certainly obscene. As it mounted the pavement I felt a sharp tug that sent me crashing against a low wall and knocked most of the breath out of my body.

  ‘You OK?’ The girl pulled me to my feet and started brushing my coat with her hands. Her sports bag and racquet lay in the gutter. I moved to rescue them but she shook her head. ‘It’s all right, no harm done.’

  The woman in the doorway had joined us. ‘Did you see how fast they were going? Bloody morons.’ She broke off, looking at my face for the first time. ‘Oh, I thought you were Mila. What happened? Have you lost your way?’

  It was a strange thing to say. In a road that length she was unlikely to know the inhabitants of each and every house.

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I was looking for a parked car. A guy with a shaved head and a brown dog.’

  She stared at me. So did the girl. Then they both spoke at once.

  ‘What kind of dog?’

  ‘I don’t know. A crossbred. Bull terrier. Look, it doesn’t matter.’

  The girl smiled, then started to cross the road.

  ‘Nine-thirty,’ shouted her mother, ‘and don’t hang about outside the sports centre or your dad’ll see you when he drives past.’ She turned to me. ‘You’d better come in. Some trouble, is it, something about a car? I might be able to help.’

  The house was flat-fronted, with a grey pebbledash finish. It was part of a terrace that in another area of Bristol would have been described by the estate agents as much sought after. In this particular street, squeezed between the main road and the cemetery, prices were probably comparatively low.

  Inside the house someone was playing a flute. ‘My son,’ explained the woman.

  ‘That was Sibi you met outside. Rupal’s the musician.’

  ‘Lovely names.’

  ‘Yes.’ She guided me into the kitchen. ‘I’m Paddy, can’t get more boring than that and you’re… ’

  ‘Anna. Anna McColl. Look, the reason I was walking past, I was bitten by a dog last Monday.’ Automatically I held out my injured leg. ‘Maybe it was an accident, maybe not, but the dog’s owner drives a brown Allegro and I think it’s possible he lives round here.’

  She pulled out two chairs, one at either end of a table that was covered in pieces of a construction kit that looked as if it might end up as an aircraft carrier. The kitchen was warm and pleasantly stuffy. A small ginger cat, perched on a cardboard box, was cleaning the fur on its white chest front with neat, efficient licks. The box it was sitting on had once contained an electronic piano. Perhaps it still did. On the wall between two fitted cupboards someone had stuck three flying china pigs. Paddy turned her head to see where I was looking.

  ‘Pigs might fly,’ she said, trying to keep a straight face. ‘Little things please little minds, just like the T-shirts eh?’ She looked me up and down. ‘You’re not from Easton are you?’

  ‘No, but my office is quite close by.’ She nodded, waiting for me to tell her more, sitting with her elbows on the table and her face cupped in her hands.

  ‘I’m a psychologist,’ I said, ‘but this dog business has nothing to do with my work.’

  She nodded again. ‘Working with kids or adults?’

  ‘Mostly adults.’

  ‘How about teenagers?’

  ‘Yes, I see some of those too.’

  She stood up and filled the electric kettle. Her hair was very short at the back, apart from a few strands that had been plaited with a red braid. She turned her head, then laughed, putting her hand up to her plait. ‘Sibi did that. She cuts all our hair. She’s got a friend who works in Bits and Bobs. She taught her how.’ ‘That’s useful.’

  ‘Yes, it is. My husband’s from Pakistan. I mean his parents were. He was born in Coventry, not that it makes any difference to that lot.’ She studied my face to make sure I had understood who she meant. ‘Sometimes I could weep. But I never do. Not at the time. I expect you must come across plenty like me. People who bottle everything up till they make themselves ill.’

  She didn’t seem like someone who bottled everything up. It was less than five minutes since we had met and already she was talking about her problems.

  ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ she said.
‘You look a bit shaken. We’re used to that kind of thing. Stolen cars, often driven by kids barely in their teens. The police do nothing, but I suppose they’re understaffed, haven’t the manpower.’ She grinned. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not as bitter as I sound. It’s just that I’ve never met a psychologist before. I suppose you saying what you did acted like a green light. Take no notice. Milk and sugar or do you like it black?’

  Suddenly I felt desperately tired. The brown Allegro, the man with the shaven head — if I really wanted to follow it up I would have to get in touch with Howard Fry. And what about the car swerving on to the pavement? Was that the common occurrence Paddy seemed to think it was or had someone intended to give me a fright? Was the man with the dog really connected with Maggie Hazeldean’s death, or had there been someone in her life who wanted to get rid of her while making the fire look like a racist vendetta? It was up to the CID to work that one out. Maggie’s name seemed to be cropping up wherever I looked. Even on the questionnaire that Janice and Trev Baker had been asked to fill in. Still, was that really so surprising?

  She had worked at the university, taken an interest in the Student Counselling Service, and involved herself with the Asian community. Sooner or later, if she had lived, our paths were bound to have crossed.

  Paddy was talking about pressure groups. ‘Not that I like the lefties any better,’ she said, rinsing two mugs under the tap. ‘Not much different really. Ranting and raving, looking for a fight. Have you noticed how sometimes there’s nice people with nasty ideas, and silly sods with nice ones? I work for this company that sells T-shirts, mail order. Jokes and emblems printed on the front — and the back if that’s what the customer wants. There’s this bloke, works in packing. Big boots, rolled-up denims, the lot, but he’s really friendly — and to Azim just the same.’ She broke off, drew a deep breath, and started again. ‘Azim believes in arranged marriages for girls. Well, introductions, nothing forced. The trouble is Sibi’s not interested. Why should she be? Ever come across that problem have you, in your work I mean?’