Shaping the Ripples (28 page)

She paused, and took a deep breath before carrying on with the doctors report. “Subject two is a young female, probably aged between seven and ten years. Multiple deep knife cuts to her back, buttocks and thighs. I am fairly sure that the cause of death is exsanguination, or severe blood loss.”

A shudder of horror shook my body, at the thought of that poor little girl’s last few minutes of life. But the report wasn’t finished. Laura read on.

“That’s as much as I can say after such a preliminary examination, and I should know more after the full autopsy. I would guess, though, that the adult female was tied to the chair and then forced to watch as the child was butchered. That would explain the severe nature of the ligature marks. The torture and eventual killing of both the victims is likely to have taken some time. The perpetrator is clearly driven by a cruelty and frenzy which makes it extremely likely that he will feel the need to go on killing.”

Michael Palmer sprang out of his chair. With a shout of “You sick bastard!” he flung himself at me. I was saved by the incredible reactions of DI Smith. Somehow, she was out of her seat and in between us before he could reach me.

“Sit down, Michael,” she said firmly. “This isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

For a moment, the room was in silence. Michael’s eyes blazed past her to me, but Laura just stared defiantly at him. Eventually he moved backwards and sat down.

“Sorry,” he muttered to her, “I just lost it for a moment, that’s all.”

“I’m just as appalled by what happened to the two of them as much as you are,” she told him. “But we owe it to them to make sure that the right person is brought properly to justice.”

He nodded slowly, “You’re right of course.”

The tension slowly eased from the room. The reports of what had happened to Jill and Sophie sickened me, but there was something else. As Laura Smith had been reading out loud, a thought had formed at the very back of my mind. It was still there, but I couldn’t quite get hold of it. I was sure that it was important though.

Suddenly, I managed to grasp it in a shock of disbelief. “Oh no,” I said out loud, my head sinking into my hands.

“What is it Mr. Bailey?” Laura Smith asked.

It took a while for me to be able to form the words. “Their injuries,” I began, “the things he did to them. They’re a copy of how they were at the start.”

“I don’t quite follow you,” she said.

I collected my thoughts, and then tried to explain properly. “When Jill first came to see me with Sophie, they’d both been badly injured. Jill had been punched in the face, so that she had bruising, as well as a broken jaw and a missing tooth. The doctor found evidence of two broken fingers and cigarette burns as well. As for Sophie, Adam had thrown her into a glass cabinet, so she had cuts all over her back.”

“So you’re saying that the injuries are the same?” she said incredulously.

“I’m saying that they’re an exact copy, only even more extreme,” I said more firmly. “I’m also saying that it is all my fault.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. “How is it your fault?”

“On the web site that you don’t believe exists, the person who called himself Guignol told me that there was no achievement in my life that he couldn’t undo easily.” I said, hardly able to bear the pain of the words. “In particular, he mocked the pointlessness of the work I do. The way he killed Jill and Sophie is a message to me – a proof of his words.”

“Assuming that what you say is true,” Laura said more gently. “Who would know the exact nature of their wounds?”

I thought about this for a time. “Me,” I said finally, “Jill’s husband Adam who inflicted the wounds, the doctor who treated them. And, I suppose, anyone who had read Jill’s file at the Crisis Centre.”

“So it’s possible that whoever broke into the Centre this month got the information from the files,” she pressed, ignoring the sigh of exasperation that my answer had produced from Michael Palmer.

“It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” I told her.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a bit like you were getting at earlier,” I tried to explain. “Jill and Sophie weren’t just any old client chosen at random. If you’d asked me of all the people I’ve worked with and helped, which was the most special to me, I’d have said Jill and Sophie Sutton every time without hesitation. If the killer really is doing this to hurt me, he couldn’t have picked a better target to do it. Either he knew that, or it’s someone who had their own reasons for hurting them. Either way, I don’t believe that somebody broke into the Centre and, out of the thousands of files, just happened to pick this exact one.”

“Which brings us back to you, or to Adam Sutton,” she concluded.

“I think so,” I told her, and the room returned to silence. Eventually, she spoke again, but not to me. “Can I speak to you outside, Michael?” she asked, and the two of them left me on my own.

For a time, I could hear the murmur of voices from the other side of the door, too soft for me to distinguish what was being said. Then they died away. It was nearly another half hour before the door opened, and Laura Smith walked in on her own.

I’ve got a slightly strange proposition to put to you,” she said as she sat down.

“Go on,” I answered.

It obviously took a few moments for her to sort out what she was going to say to me. “You may have gathered that there’s a difference of opinion about you. The idea that the killer is picking his victims to damage you is a fairly bizarre one, but my instinct is that you’re probably telling the truth as far as you know it. Some of my colleagues aren’t convinced, however, and believe that you’re trying to play some sort of twisted game with us. I’d like us to try and get a neutral third opinion.”

“What would that involve?” I asked cautiously.

“I’d like you to speak to a psychiatrist,” was her stunning answer. “We have someone who we use regularly to assess the mental state of people we’ve charged. He’d be willing to talk to you now.”

“And what do you think it would achieve?”

“Just what I said, an independent third opinion. He’s very good at judging when someone is playing around and when they’re for real.”

“That sounds the sort of thing a lawyer would advise me to steer well clear of,” I thought out loud.

“Oh, it is,” she agreed. “I want you to be very clear about this, I’m asking you to do this because I think it will help me in arguing that we need to widen the murder investigation. But don’t be under any illusions. If you’ve got something to hide, it would be very foolish of you to agree. There aren’t any deals here. If you do it, and something comes out which makes it more likely that you are the killer, I’ll use it against you without hesitation. The session will be recorded, and could be used in evidence against you.”

“And if I refuse?” I asked.

“Then you’re perfectly free to go. We’ve asked all the questions we need to at this stage. There’s no pressure on you at all to do it, and if you were to decide to then you would have every right to have a solicitor present with you, advising you which questions to answer, and which ones not to.”

I thought about the idea for a while, before making my mind up. “Alright, I’ll do it,” I said.

“And would you like to call a solicitor to be present?” she offered again.

No, I’ll do it on my own,” I decided. “I would like to make a phone call beforehand if I could, though. I need to let someone know that I’m not going to be able to meet them this evening.”

“That’s no problem,” she said with a smile. “I’ll have a phone brought in for you.”

A few minutes later, the constable who had brought in the doctor’s report on Jill and Sophie came in holding a phone, which he plugged into a socket in the wall. He then handed the phone to me without a word, and left the room.

I hesitated for a moment over which number to dial. Obviously I needed to let Katie know that our plans for the evening weren’t going to be possible, but I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to stop myself crying if I told her the news. Finally, I rang George.

“Hello,” came his reassuring voice.

“George, it’s Jack,” I announced. “If you’re not sitting down, you might want to before I tell you why I’m ringing.”

His voice immediately became concerned, “What is it Jack? Has something happened to you?”

“Not to me, no,” I answered, and began to tell him what had happened. His reaction as I outlined the terrible events of the day was somewhere between disbelief and horror. When I’d finished, I explained to him where I was, and the interview I was about to have.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” he asked.

“Why, do you think I’ve got something to hide?” I quizzed, only half joking.

“No, of course not,” he answered. “It’s just that I’m not convinced it’s a good idea to be so open with them. This psychiatrist is going to want to know everything about you – your past and so on. Who’s to say that they won’t just twist whatever he finds out to use against you? You need to be very careful exactly how much you open up to him.”

“I know,” I told him. “I had thought of that, but I don’t really see that I’ve got much choice. If I refuse to do it, they’re going to decide that it means I really have got something to hide, and be even more convinced that I’m a deranged killer. You never know, the doctor might manage to convince them that I haven’t got anything to do with it.”

“Maybe,” he said, sounding unpersuaded. “Do you want me to come down and sit in with you? It wouldn’t be any trouble.”

“Thanks, but no,” I said. “I do need you to get in touch with Katie for me though. She’s supposed to be coming round to the flat tonight. Could you give her a ring and explain what’s happened? Tell her that I’ll give her a call as soon as I get back, and let her know what’s happening then.”

“Of course I will. Take care of yourself, Jack” George said as he rang off.

I’ll do my best, I thought as I disconnected the phone and went outside to tell DI Smith that I was ready.

Chapter Thirty

Laura Smith drove me to the psychiatrist’s office. She offered to come back and give me a lift home, but I figured that the office was only about ten minutes walk from my flat, so I said no.

Dr. Peter Mitchell lived and worked in an impressive house just outside the city centre. He was a small, slightly weasely-looking man, but his smile was broad, and his handshake firm as he greeted me.

“Mr. Bailey,” he began, as he showed me into his consulting room. “It’s very good of you to agree to talk to me.”

The room itself was sparsely furnished with a long couch, and a couple of chairs divided by a desk. The walls were decorated with a number of detailed posters depicting the human brain, and some paintings of landscapes. The couch faced a large photograph that I’d seen on a poster before, of a group of dolphins springing together out of the sea.

“What happens now?” I asked him. “Am I supposed to lie down on the couch and tell you my life story?”

“You can if you want,” he replied in a jocular tone, his blue eyes sparkling. “But I thought we’d probably be better off in the chairs. There are a couple of things I need to get first.”

He walked over to a large unit at the side of the room. There were several thick and imposing books on top of it, but he ignored them and began to root in the drawers.

“They’re in here somewhere,” he muttered as he searched. “Ah, here they are!”

He returned to the desk, clutching objects in both hands. He placed a cassette recorder in the middle of the desk, but it was the contents of the other hand that intrigued me.

“I’m afraid the police insist on me recording all the sessions I do for them,” he said apologetically. “This other gadget is my own idea.”

He placed it on the desk. A couple of small pads were attached by electric wires to what looked like a very small laptop computer.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“It’s a monitor,” he explained. “We attach the pads to your fingertips, and they keep a check on things like your body temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat and so on. It’s a very new development for me.”

“Is it a sort of lie detector?” I said, not sure how I felt about being hooked up to it.

He frowned slightly. “Not exactly,” he said. “It is a similar sort of technology, but it’s more keeping a check on your emotional and stress level. I suppose it might give a clue if you were lying, but it’s more to show me when we get onto a subject that you feel strongly about. I use it to help me focus in on areas which are important. Of course, it’s entirely up to you whether we use it or not.”

Again, I paused for thought. “If I let you use it,” I said, “I’d want you to be as open with me as I’m planning to be with you. I want you to tell me what conclusions you come to first, before you tell the police.”

“Fair enough,” he said easily. “I’d like to see what you make of my conclusions in any case. Shall we begin?”

I let him fasten the pads to me. They tingled slightly. He turned the tape on and began the session.

“I’m going to ask you later about the murders which have happened recently,” he started. “But first of all, I want to get to know you a little bit. How old are you?”

For the next few minutes, we went through some basic personal details; how long I’d lived in York, my job, and so on. The questions became a little more pointed once we discussed my marital status.

“How did you feel at the break up of your marriage?”

“Obviously, I was very sad,” I answered, “I loved her a lot, but it was clear that I was making her unhappy so it was better to let her go. It’s all worked out really well for her.”

“And for you?”

I admitted that I’d settled for a fairly solitary existence since, but then talked about Katie and our developing relationship.

“Do you think marriage is a prospect?”

“It’s early days yet,” I told him. “I do care about her a great deal, but I’m not sure that I’m exactly good husband material.”

We moved on to talk about friendships, and about how much I enjoyed my job. So far, it was all fairly unthreatening.

“Let’s move on to more recent events,” he suggested. “The first murder victim was a local counsellor, a Jennifer Carter. I understand that you were a client of hers?”

“Yes,” I confirmed.

“Would you be willing to tell me why you were seeing her?”

“I suppose so,” I answered, and began to explain about my childhood. He listened intently, occasionally glancing down at the computer screen.

“How do you feel towards you abuser?” he asked once I had finished the story.

“I don’t really feel anything towards him,” I answered. “There’s not much point feeling anything is there, he died when I was seven years old.”

Again, there was a glance down at whatever the monitor was telling him. “And how did you feel about Jennifer Carter? Was she helping you to come to terms with your past?”

“For the first question, I liked her a lot,” I said. “She was a person who showed you how much she cared. For the second, I’m not sure. She certainly helped me to understand things, but we’d not really made much progress in changing them.”

Over the next minutes, he got me to talk about finding her body and the weeks afterwards, leading up to the murder of Christopher.

“When you found out about Rev. Upton’s pornography addiction, did you feel angry towards him? Let down that this person you respected and trusted had lived with such a secret?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I just felt very sad for him. Sorry that he’d never been able to share his problem with anyone, and that it had made him so unhappy. Guilty, I suppose, that I hadn’t been able to help him.”

He carried on, exploring what had happened with Jill and Sophie and my feelings towards them. Eventually, we seemed to have covered everything and I felt utterly drained.

“We’re nearly done,” he said sympathetically. “I’ve just got a few more questions for you and then we’ll stop.” He looked directly into my eyes, and it felt as if he was boring into my soul.

“Do you believe that you are responsible for these deaths?”

“Yes, in some ways,” I admitted.

“Did you kill any of them?”

“No, I did not.”

“Do you find that you have problems with your memory – difficulty remembering what you did on the previous day for example?”

This last question took me by surprise. “Not really, no,” I answered him.

“Do you ever experience blank periods? By that, I mean times when you notice that a lot of time seems to have passed but you don’t really know how you’ve spent them?”

“I suppose that sometimes time passes without me noticing it, but not really in the way you mean,” I told him.

His face relaxed, and he sat back in his chair. “That’s us done, then,” he said and unfastened the pads from my fingers.

“Go on then,” I said when he’d finished. “Tell me what you’ve made of all that.”

“Are you sure you want to know?” he asked without a hint of humour.

“Is it that bad?” I said with a slightly nervous laugh.

“No, it’s not bad at all,” he reassured me. “It’s just you might find it slightly uncomfortable.”

“I’ll risk it,” I told him firmly. “Has your machine told you that I’m emotionally unstable?”

“Quite the opposite, in fact,” he answered. “I’ve never interviewed a client with such steady readings. Given the nature of what you’ve been talking about, I find that rather surprising.”

I nodded for him to continue. “What the machine leads me to believe is that you’re someone who keeps a very tight reign on his emotions. No doubt that’s a result of the childhood abuse, in that to survive you had to blot out the pain of those early years. What it’s meant is that you never allow yourself to fully feel any emotion. It’s not that you don’t feel things at all, it’s just that you only feel them very superficially.”

As he’d predicted, I was feeling very uncomfortable. “Can you explain that a bit more?” I asked.

“Alright,” he said. “You talked about the break up of your marriage, something which was obviously very hard and for which you blame yourself, but the readings didn’t change a fraction. The same is true when you talked about the death of your counsellor, who you say you regarded as a friend, and when you talk about Christopher Upton and the distressing circumstances of his death.”

He continued. “As I said, you do feel emotions, but you never allow those feelings to be very deep. The readings changed slightly when you spoke about your current girlfriend, and slightly more when you described the manner in which the latest two victims were killed. I suspect the fact that you couldn’t completely control your response in those cases means that your feelings there are, for you, very strong indeed.”

“You seem to be describing a robot,” I said in despair. “Is that your conclusion?”

“No, not at all,” he said quickly. “I’m describing someone who has been hurt a great deal, and who has tried to protect themselves from being hurt that badly again. That’s lead you to keep a tight hold of your emotions. As a small child, I’m sure it was necessary for you to survive, but as an adult, I would suspect that it’s doing you more harm than good.”

“So does that mean you can’t tell whether I’m telling the truth or not?” I demanded.

“As I told you at the start, it isn’t a device to determine between truth and lies, just to measure levels of emotion and stress, which can sometimes be linked to deceit,” he answered calmly. “For what it’s worth, I believe that your answer that you did not kill the four people was an entirely truthful one.”

Despite the sting of what he had already said, I felt a great wave of relief. “Thank goodness for that,” I said with a heavy breath. “Maybe that will help to convince the police.”

His expression was non-committal. “What is it?” I asked. He didn’t respond at first, and was clearly struggling to decide how frank to be with me. At length, he spoke.

“There is, however, one other possibility that I will have to mention in the report. It’s not uncommon in cases such as yours where severe childhood trauma has resulted in the repression of emotions, for the person to need to find some way of releasing the feelings of hurt and anger – a safety valve if you like.”

“Which means what?” I asked.

“In a few cases, this results in the phenomena sometimes called split or multiple personality disorder. On the face of it, the person is mild and placid, never losing their temper. However on occasion they switch to an alternative persona who is frequently very angry and violent. In some very rare cases, the “Nice” person remains totally unaware of the existence of the other person, who acts to right perceived wrongs done to the individual.”

“How is that possible?” I asked, genuinely interested at this stage.

“The normal persona just switches off for a period, and has no memory of the actions of the other.”

“Which is why you were asking me about losses of memory and blank periods,” I realised.

“Precisely. I have to say that the fact you haven’t had those experiences makes it even more unlikely that this is what’s happening in your case.”

“But you still think that it’s possible?” I challenged him.

He fixed me firmly with his gaze. “If we’re talking in abstract terms, then yes I do think that it’s possible that a person with that condition could kill. Indeed, there are several documented cases where we believe that it had happened. Could that anger come out towards a counsellor who had failed to solve the person’s problem; a trusted vicar who was discovered to have a double life; a family the person had helped who he perceived as insufficiently grateful, or who provoked feelings the violent persona found threatening? Again, in abstract terms, it’s perfectly possible. Could that person even go so far as to send notes of hate to their rival personality? Yes, they could.”

He stopped for a moment to allow me to absorb the impact of his words, before going on.

“If you’re asking me do I think that you are such a person, and that you have unknowingly murdered them, then my instincts tell me “no”. But it would be unprofessional of me not to raise the possibility in my report to the police, no matter how remote I think the chance, of that being the true explanation, is.”

“Great,” I said with heavy sarcasm. “So now they’re not just going to be convinced that I’m a killer, you’re going to tell them that I’m totally deranged.”

His voice remained impressively calm. “That is not what I’m going to be telling them,” he stated again. “As I’ve said, I would be failing in my duty if I didn’t mention the possibility of multiple personality disorder to the police. However, I will be making it clear in my report how very remote I believe that possibility to be in your particular case.”

That seemed to be the best I was going to get out of him. I stood up, thanked him for his time, and left. Once he had closed the front door behind me, I stood there for several minutes, thinking. One of the consequences of having low self esteem, is that you’re always very quick to believe anything bad that someone has to say about you. So I stood there, tormenting myself with the question – could I be the killer?

Was it possible that I had some sort of dark alter-ego, that was trying to destroy me and everyone that I was close to? For a split-second I was almost convinced that it was true. Fortunately, logic kicked in before I plunged too far down that road. While I supposed a split personality could send notes to their alternate selves, I knew for a fact that I had had a dialogue with “Guignol” on the web site. Even if the police hadn’t found any trace of the site subsequently, I knew it was a concrete fact that we had talked. There was no way I could have been having that conversation with myself. Therefore, there was no way that I could be the killer.

Feeling stupidly relieved, I started down the path to the road. To my surprise, Laura Smith was parked directly opposite the house. She wound down the passenger window, and called “Get in.” I crossed to the car and leaned in.

“It’s alright,” I told her. “I can easily walk home from here.”

“I just want to talk to you for a moment,” she said. “Get in and I’ll give you a lift home while I do.”