by Wes Markin
Again, and again, under hypnosis, Mayers relived the moment that he’d been dragged from his office by his hair and thrown to the floor in the blood and brain matter of his colleagues and patients. He’d cowered under a table, but the gunmen hadn’t taken long to find him.
The gunmen. His patients.
And that was Mayer’s problem right there, Neil realised. He was completely focused on the fact that they had been his patients, and that he should have treated them and prevented this. The dead bodies which had been littered around him were a knock-on effect of his failure.
After he’d woken up in hospital, Mayers had told the doctors, ‘They are all dead and, unjustly, I am alive.’
Even now, with Neil, after reliving the moment he’d been shot in the chest, and had woken up in hospital with a damaged, but still functioning, heart, he repeated the same thing, ‘They are all dead and, unjustly, I am alive.’
So, Neil tried for almost an hour to try and alter thoughts, which surely, Adams and others had tried to alter for years now.
He tried: ‘These men were that high on cocaine – there was no stopping them.’
And: ‘You cannot be expected to halt such ruthless behaviour on only one hour of therapy a week!’
Also: ‘You tried to help them remove the stressors from their lives – if they chose not to follow advice, how much responsibility should you really take?’
None of these reasons were helping Mayers reach acceptance in this session. So, if he couldn’t accept these specific alternative thoughts, Neil would have to try for the more philosophical. He told him that this event was part of him now, like countless other events.
‘It is important to be defined by everything,’ Neil said. ‘Not just this one moment.’
And as Neil did this, he noticed something that filled him with great concern. Mayers kept rubbing at the wrists that he’d sliced opened on three occasions since the traumatic experience.
‘They are all dead and, unjustly, I am alive.’ Mayers said, and then opened his eyes. He had broken from hypnosis. ‘I’m sorry, my mind is being rather stubborn today. It has a tendency to do that. Especially when it is so very hot.’
‘You should let me bring you out of hypnosis properly, Doctor Mayers—’
‘And risk you running into your next session?’ Mayers nodded at the clock on the wall. He was still rubbing his wrists.
‘I don’t have another session.’
‘Well, I do have somewhere to be, I’m afraid. Don’t worry, Dr Solomon, I’m a seasoned hand at this myself. Going in and out of hypnosis is like turning the television on and off. Do not take my stubborn mind personally.’
‘Dr Mayers, you repeated the statement: they are dead and unjustly, I am alive, several times. It suggests that you still believe your life is unjust. That leaves me … concerned.’
‘Well, don’t be. I’ve said this statement, under suggestion, thousands of times. I’ve challenged it repeatedly. You have unearthed nothing new here today.’
‘But you have made three attempts on your life to date, and now you’ve made this suggestion today. I’m worried that you may be a danger to yourself.’
‘Poppycock!’ Mayers stood up. ‘I like you, Dr Solomon. My first impression of you is sound. And I am close friends with Dr Adams, as well you know. He allowed you to treat me first for obvious reasons. We want you to experience stubborn resistance. A resistance that cannot be broken down, or even chipped at, in a first session. If you wish to report that I am a danger to myself, be my guest, but if you want to present yourself as a laughing stock in front of Martin on your first day, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now, young man, shake my hand, and let me make my dinner appointment.’
Yorke sent a text message to Patricia claiming that he was holding it together despite the morning’s shocking events. He really should have phoned her, but he was running a briefing in a matter of minutes, and he didn’t want to risk tears by having a heart-to-heart with his wife.
As always, Yorke was first in there. He paced the front of the incident room as the officers filed in. Many looked tired, and emotional, having put in a long shift already. HOLMES was teeming with new information. He’d already been briefed on some of the more salient facts over the last thirty minutes since concluding Chloe’s interview.
Debbie Lang, the parent impersonated by Chloe, had been discovered drugged up. She’d regained enough composure to explain that the empty needle lying beside her was not hers, and she had a vague memory of opening the door to an elderly man with a kindly demeanour. She’d also noted his unusually long white moustache. This man, who Yorke suspected was the Conduit, had claimed to be from Social Services, there to follow up on a concern reported by the academy. At first, Lang had been taken aback, but then he’d offered her a calming word. He’d told her that it was just a chat, that he was on her side, and nothing serious would come of all this. His ID had been very realistic. She couldn’t remember taking note of his name. In fact, she remembered very little of the next few minutes. She’d been forced to the ground and stuck with this needle. SOCOs were currently crawling over the scene for fibres and trace evidence. The usual door-to-door was in session. CCTV cameras in the local area were being scrutinised for comings and goings.
Interviewing officers at the school had already identified the leak as single mother Julia Hayder. She was PA to the headteacher and had crumbled immediately, admitting her actions before the questioning had even really started. Her ordeal had begun when a picture of her thirteen-year old boy was pushed into her letterbox late on a Sunday evening. The picture had an email address and a message scrawled on the back. The instructions had been clear: every appointment Amanda Werrell had scheduled in for the forthcoming week were to be emailed the following morning. The sender had kept the threat traditional: do as you are told or I will take your son from you. Let the police know and I will take your son from you. She’d even received a reply to her email the next day. If any appointment changes, and you fail to email, I will take your son from you. Analysts were currently trying to track the email reply to a location.
Use of manpower in Wiltshire was at an all-time high. A dead police officer, another in intensive care, a mutilated headteacher, and a missing college girl certainly warranted it.
Yorke paced back-and-forth at the board, examining the pictures from both Operation Autumn, and Operation Coldtown, which had blended themselves together into one noxious concoction. Then, he used blue-tac and added a photo of Chloe. He had another piece of A4 paper in his hand, folded. He started to unfold it, weighing up whether to pin it up on the board too. He decided against it and held it against his side.
Eventually, the officers were assembled, Dawson from HOLMES and his female counterpart had their laptops humming and ready to roll.
He noticed the smell of summer was strong in here. A floral smell had drifted in from the outside and mingled with the pungent body odour of the large crowd. Sitting right in the middle of the crowd with his arms crossed, looking squat and smug, was Parkinson.
Yorke felt his irritation surge. If the oppositional cretin started to pass comments, like he’d done in the previous two briefings, Yorke wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold it together.
He nodded over at Jake, who was running his hand back-and-forth over his crewcut, clearly not used to it. Topham stood alongside him at the front, staring at Yorke, shaking his head, indicating that Neil was still not here yet. Yorke looked to his other side where he would have asked Gardner to stand. He grimaced.
He began by dimming the lights, switching on the projector and showing them all the school CCTV footage of the violent assault on both Werrell and Gardner. No one spoke. Very few officers seemed to breathe. Everything was deathly still. Yorke felt tears prick his eyes. He decided he was past caring how he appeared. At least if it was noticed he’d be considered human. Was crying really such a weakness?
Silence continued for seconds after Yorke stopped the footage. He was allowing them time to digest
it, to press on them the importance of, in the words of Madden, closing this fucking case down.
Seconds felt like minutes. Some officers stared down at the table.
‘We’re dropping like flies,’ Parkinson said.
Yorke drew a sharp breath in through his nose. It was clearly audible. Most officers kept their eyes down. Some made notes. Some glanced at their watches.
Parkinson, with his arms still crossed, stared right at Yorke.
Topham stepped alongside Yorke and replied to Parkinson, ‘And your point, DC Parkinson?’
Parkinson shrugged. Yorke looked at Topham with gratitude because his own response to that comment would probably have caused problems. He diverted the sudden irritation, and rise of adrenaline, into bringing the incident room alive. This was the beating heart of the investigation and, now more than ever before, this heart needed to beat.
Yorke bounced around the wall, drawing the threads of the case together. He provided the background on the recruitment of Chloe, Sturridge and Severance by a man called the Conduit. He explained that many of the events disclosed by Chloe in the interview room had been corroborated by Sylvia and several other witnesses from the squat. Many of these witnesses recalled the Conduit. Many of them had experienced time alone with him after he paid for their services. He never had sex with any of them. He just asked them about their past. When he returned, he usually asked for someone different.
‘They obviously weren’t damaged enough for him,’ Yorke said. ‘So, he kept on returning until he found the three he wanted.’
‘At this point I am going to hand you over to DI Topham to explain HASD to you. I’d suggest taking notes. There is a lot to get your head around here.’
Topham talked them through the practise of HASD in a similar fashion to how he’d done with Yorke earlier in the office. At the same time, Yorke wrote the list on the board in permanent marker, capitalising the initial letter of each word to spell out the acronym.
Healing.
Acceptance.
Sharing.
Displacement.
Willows asked a question. ‘So, would it not be reasonable to assume that this Martin Adams, founder of HASD, is the Conduit?’
Yorke said, ‘It’s a very good question, Detective Willows. We will come back to that in a moment.’
He circled the word Acceptance. ‘Let’s consider this phase one of the process. I’ve no idea if they actually refer to it in this manner, but until we have our expert in,’ he paused to glance at Topham, who gave him a shrug, ‘we will consider this phase one. I think he managed, phase one, acceptance, in a straight-forward manner at the squat. He returned again and again for sessions with them, while their pimp, Alex Drake, just assumed they were having sexual relations. Not that Alex would have cared either way as the Conduit was still paying for their time. So, at the squats, using visualisation, hypnosis and CBT techniques, he helped them to come to terms with their past traumas. Consequently, they started to trust him, so he could convince them to come away with him. To his house.’
Yorke explained how the Conduit kept this part of the journey secret by taking them in the boot of his car.
He then circled the word sharing. ‘This is where things get creepier. Phase 2. Now, I want you to consider what DI Topham has just told you about sharing. It sounds very traditional – yes? People sharing past traumas in groups, using each other for support, sympathy and empathy. After intensively interviewing Chloe, and I emphasise intensely, we have discovered that she is rather childlike in her understanding of the world. Her ability to communicate, as you can imagine, is limited. But her confession indicates that Phase 2 is where the Conduit started to adapt the normal approach to HASD.’
He paused for a sip of water and a deep breath.
He pointed at all three pictures. ‘They all shared their afflictions. Literally. Not just through visualisations, but physically, too.’
There was a moment of nervous chatter. Yorke let it pass, and then elaborated. ‘Christian Severance’s trauma was the loss of his tongue. Chloe and Sturridge have shared this. Chloe’s was the loss of fertility. Again, this is shared by Severance, and Sturridge - I’m guessing through vasectomies. Finally, Sturridge was raped,’ he paused, every eye in the room was on him, ‘and so Severance and Chloe were both raped by the Conduit.’
‘Sick,’ said Willows.
‘So,’ Yorke said, ‘we can surmise that the Conduit is adapting Adam’s HASD technique outside of a scientific setting. Which brings us to Phase 3.’ He circled displacement.
He held a hand up and gestured at the board, and all the victims displayed on it.
‘This is the displacement. Gone is the controlled environment in which the psychiatrist uses visualisations to actually displace their pain onto others to offer temporary relief. Those visualisations just became very real.’
‘So,’ he said, pointing at the photographs of Simmonds, Long, and then Werrell, ‘we know why their tongues were removed.’
‘To offer relief to Christian Severance?’ Jake said.
‘Yes. And we can assume Alex, the pimp who raped Sturridge, has also experienced this displacement. In what form that is, we can only hypothesise, but we have been informed by Sturridge that he is dead. Chloe, when I questioned her, wasn’t aware of the specifics of his fate.’
‘And Chloe’s aggressor? The one who caused the miscarriage?’
‘Checked already,’ Yorke said. ‘Fate beat them to it. He was involved in a fatal road collision five months ago.’
‘Lucky for him,’ Parkinson said. ‘He probably avoided a grislier death.’
‘And in all of this,’ Yorke continued, ‘Susie Long is still missing.’
Topham said, ‘And now it really doesn’t look good.’
‘No,’ Yorke said. ‘If we assume Severance knows that his play to get Long to remove his tongue was successful, he would have no further need for her.’
‘He could release her?’ Willows said.
Everyone stared at her. No one graced her with a response.
An officer called Prior said, ‘But sir, why would all these individuals go to so much trouble to heal themselves in such a barbaric, complex fashion only to spend the rest of their lives in jail?’
‘It’s a good question,’ Yorke said, ‘and one that I can’t get out of my own head. They gave themselves up too easily. Why? Chloe and Sturridge both remained at the crime scenes. I agree, it makes little sense.’
‘Maybe they think that true healing cannot be achieved?’ Jake said. ‘Maybe they are just giving up?’
‘They could believe,’ Topham said, ‘in their own twisted way that if the process works, that they are the evidence that it works. Maybe the Conduit is revelling in the success of his adapted HASD programme and wants to show that it is successful?’
‘I think this is the more likely explanation,’ Yorke said. ‘We must assume he is a doctor. Research is everything, and then the evidence is his bread and butter. Also, let us not forget that Severance is still out there, which means that he is not finished yet.’
‘What if there are more recruits?’ said an officer from near the back.
‘The interviews at the squats, which are still ongoing, suggest otherwise. These are the three recruits. Unless he has recruited elsewhere, but we have no evidence of that yet.’
He paused for another mouthful of water. He noticed Parkinson whispering something in a colleague’s ear, and smirking to himself. Enough is enough, Yorke thought. I’m addressing him after this briefing. Yorke realised he was clenching a fist. Embarrassed, in case anyone noticed, he thrust it into his pocket.
‘Assignments are organised, but I can tell you what the priority is right now.’ He held up the A4 piece of paper. ‘Chloe is quite the artist. This is the Conduit.’
On the paper was a large burly man, leaning forward over a desk, smiling. Jake looked closely. ‘No one will miss that moustache.’
Yorke said, ‘I will put this on the board a
fter it has been copied, familiarise yourself with the image. Earlier DC Willows asked me if we should be interviewing Martin Adams. And yes, we will be. But after seeing an image of Adams earlier, I do not believe he is the Conduit. He has no likeness to the man in this image. However, we need to see Adams immediately because the Conduit may be connected to the HASD team in some way.’
It was at that point that Yorke noticed that Parkinson had his mobile phone out. Yorke’s surge of irritation could be contained no longer. ‘Detective Parkinson. Get to your feet now!’
The room fell silent. Parkinson looked up. Yorke started to move towards him. ‘I SAID NOW!’
Parkinson stood. He expressed confusion with a creased brow, but his flushed cheeks showed he was embarrassed.
Yorke stood a metre in front of him, towering over the smaller man. He widened his eyes, lowered his voice to a hiss. ‘Give me your phone.’
‘No, I will not…’
‘Are you disobeying a direct order?’
‘No, but it is an inappropriate—’
‘Now.’
Parkinson handed it over with a trembling hand.
Yorke marched over to the window, opened it, and glanced down to check that there was no one two floors below. Then, he dropped the phone out of the window, and watched it smash on the concrete below.
He closed the window, turned to the crowd and pointed at Parkinson. ‘If you ever contaminate my incident room again, I will end your career.’
He left the silent room.
14
ON HIS WAY to see Dr Martin Adams at Southampton University, Yorke took the scenic route, so he could pull over in a quiet country lane. He reached under a seat and pulled out a disposable phone. Over ten minutes ago, he’d texted Harry the following message: phone this number from a payphone at least fifteen minutes from your house.
He quickly phoned Jake on his main phone to tell him that he was running a little late in meeting him at the university to see Adams. He lied, saying he’d had to stop and queue for fuel. He’d no need to contact Topham, because he’d left him back at the station to wait for Neil’s arrival and coordinate the rest of the team in their assignments.
