Lying Beside You, page 3
The judge continues.
“Long-term leave under Section 17 of the Mental Health Act must be approved by the secretary of state. Our recommendation to the minister will be that you be allowed to leave the hospital grounds on unescorted day leave.”
Elias interrupts. “When can I go home?”
“Overnight leave is the next step,” says Judge Aimes. “Weekends. Holidays. Every stage will be a test.”
“But I’m better. I’m no longer a danger.”
Dr. Baillie leans forwards, placing a hand on Elias’s forearm.
He shrugs it away. “They called me a model patient. You heard them. I’m cured.”
I hold my finger to my lips, urging him to be quiet. In the next breath, he cocks his head like a bird, watching something in the top corner of the room.
Judge Aimes finishes his statement.
“The minister will receive our recommendation by close of business today. This is usually a formality and, unless he decides otherwise, you will be eligible for day release once he signs the necessary forms.”
Chairs are pushed back. The panelists rise as one and walk in single file out the side door.
Elias doesn’t react. Two orderlies appear. Big men in short-sleeved tops and dark trousers. They approach Elias carefully, telling him it’s time to go. I expect him to react, but his entire body settles into stillness. He collects his papers, straightens the edges, and tucks them beneath his arm, before turning and bowing to an imaginary audience.
Sounding every inch a lawyer, he says, “Thank you for coming. I appreciate your patience and diligence.”
4 Evie
My therapist, Veera Jaffrey, likes to be called by her initials, VJ, which gives me the giggles because I think of vajayjay. When I told her this, she couldn’t see the joke at all.
Veejay is in her early forties with a wonderfully deep voice and thick dark hair. She still has the faintest trace of a Pakistani accent because her parents moved to England when she was seven. They were very strict and wanted her to marry a Muslim boy, but she eloped with a saxophone player called Nigel and went into hiding because her parents threatened to kill her.
I have no idea if any of this is true, but it’s a good story. I like making up scenarios about people because the truth is either too boring or I can’t find out what really happened. Veejay doesn’t talk about herself. I know that she has children because there are toys in her back garden. That’s where Poppy is now, sniffing at her compost heap and drinking out of her fishpond.
Whenever I ask Veejay about her family, she steers the conversation back to me. Each session begins the same way. Have I been sleeping? Any dreams? Nightmares? Panic attacks? Random thoughts? Flashbacks?
Veejay is one of the few people who knows who I am and where I came from. How my real name isn’t Evie Cormac, and that I was born in Albania and I came to Britain in the hull of a fishing boat with my mother and sister, who both died on the journey. Other people have fucked-up childhoods, but not like mine.
“Last week you were talking about your sister,” says Veejay, glancing at her notes. “Agnesa. She was how much older?”
“Six years.”
“What do you remember about her?”
“She had lovely hair, a lot like yours, and she used to pay me to brush and braid it for her, or promise to buy me doughnuts.”
In that instant, I am transported back to my village, to a street barrow beside the church, where a hanging spout is dropping balls of dough into hot oil. I can smell them cooking as they puff up and turn golden. The lady tosses them in icing sugar and puts them in a white paper bag, before squirting chocolate sauce over the top. Agnesa lets me have the top doughnuts, which have the most chocolate.
“Do you miss her?” asks Veejay.
“Yes.”
“How did she die?”
“She drowned.”
“Along with your mother.”
“Yes.”
“Were their bodies ever found?”
“No.”
“Tell me about your mother.”
“She used to be a seamstress, before she grew sick. Papa called it melancholia, but I don’t know what that means. She spent most of the colder months in bed, but she cheered up when the weather grew warmer.”
These questions continue, but gradually Veejay focuses on what happened to me after the boat sank. Each time she touches on the subject, I find ways to deflect and divert her attention. It is like a game of cat and mouse, but I don’t know which of us is the cat. I have no desire to relive what happened to me. People think that traumatic events should be laid out like a deck of cards and sorted into suits or four of a kind, because it looks neat and well ordered, but I want to shuffle the deck and deal again. I don’t want “closure,” I want a new hand.
After fifty minutes my time is up.
“It’s always good to talk,” says Veejay.
“Is it, though?” I ask.
“Talking has the power to help.”
“And the power to harm.”
She puts a cap on her pen. “Why do you keep coming?”
“I don’t want to disappoint him.”
“Does Cyrus mean that much to you?”
I pause, wondering how to explain my relationship.
“I used to think I was the only conscious being in the universe. That everything existed because of me—physical objects, other people, animals, events—and that if I died everything would vanish.”
“Solipsism,” says Veejay. “The idea that nothing exists outside your own mind.”
“Then I met Cyrus and I realized that I wasn’t alone. I didn’t just feel my pain. I felt his. His thoughts. His emotions. His experiences. I wasn’t the only conscious being in the universe—there were two of us.”
5 Cyrus
As I walk to my car in the hospital parking area, the air seems saturated with oxygen, making the colors brighter and my senses sharper. I lean back in the driver’s seat of my Fiat and feel my heart beating in my chest. Elias is being allowed out on day release. He expects to come home. The next step will be overnight stays.
The house is big enough. There are five bedrooms. Evie has one of them. I haven’t even considered how she might react to having my brother come and live with me. I’ve been in denial or been operating on the assumption that the application would fail and the tribunal would tell Elias to make another application two years from now.
Catching a glimpse of myself in my rearview mirror, I see my thirteen-year-old self with freckles and curly hair and teeth encased in metal. My face is burning. I look again and he’s gone.
My phone vibrates. I glance at the screen. There are two more messages from Lenny Parvel.
Beaconsfield Street, Hyson Green.
Elderly deceased male. Blunt force trauma. Daughter missing. Call me.
And twenty minutes later: Where are you?
My heart slows and sinks. This is what I do now—I investigate violent and suspicious deaths. I am a criminal profiler, an expert on human behavior—the worst of it, not the best: the sociopaths and psychopaths, the outliers, the mavericks, the deviant, and the unhinged.
Most crimes don’t require a forensic psychologist to unpack them. When two drunks get into a fight in a pub car park and one shoves a broken bottle into the other’s face, it doesn’t require an honors degree in criminal psychology to explain what happened. I get summoned when the crime is beyond the comprehension of those investigating. When the police want someone to explain why one human being would do such terrible things to another.
I type a text message: On my way.
Lenny responds: About time.
My aging Fiat doesn’t have a satnav, so I use my mobile phone, which is suctioned to the dashboard and has a female voice that sounds uncannily like a patient of mine, Ursula, an occupational therapist suffering from apotemnophobia—a fear of missing limbs.
Forty minutes later, I reach the outskirts of Nottingham, having skirted the eastern edge of Sherwood Forest, an ancient woodland that doesn’t seem big enough to hold its own history; the folklore, not the facts.
Police cars are parked at the ends of Beaconsfield Street, using the cross streets to divert traffic. Two uniformed constables are manning the western barricade, which is threaded with police tape that twirls in the cold wind.
“DSU Parvel is expecting me,” I say.
The female PC makes a note of my name and points me to a parking spot. She’s new—fresh out of training—and her face is full of excitement and gravitas. One day, crimes like this will sadden and horrify her; when she’s seen too many bodies pulled from wrecked cars, or carried from bloodstained bedrooms, or collected from the base of cliffs, or cut down from rafters.
I study the houses. Most are detached or semidetached. Redbrick. Two-story. Built during the fifties and sixties. This is a working-class area, but clearly some owners are aiming higher, having renovated and added loft conversions.
“You took your time,” says Alan Edgar, a sergeant in Lenny’s squad. His nickname is Poe, for obvious reasons.
“How bad is it?”
“Messy.”
A ghostlike figure walks from the house. Lenny Parvel is dressed in white forensic coveralls, latex gloves, and a plastic face shield. She pushes back the hood and appraises me with hazel-colored eyes. Warm. Intelligent. Judgmental.
“Where have you been?”
“Rampton.”
“Are they letting him go?”
“Yes.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Nervous.”
“That’s understandable.”
My relationship with Lenny is difficult to label. She was the young police constable who found me hiding in our garden shed, wearing muddy football socks and armed with a mattock, convinced that Elias was hunting for me. It was Lenny who coaxed me out and wrapped me in her coat and sat with me on the swings until backup arrived.
Later, she chaperoned me during the police interviews and watched over me when I fell asleep on a foldout bed at the station. Over the next few months, she escorted me to the funerals and the coronial inquests and when Elias appeared in court. And later still, during my wilderness years, it was Lenny who came to find me when I was cutting, drinking, injecting, and vandalizing my body with homemade tattoos.
Although only in her mid-forties, she has been like a mother to me, and maybe I’m like a son. Lenny didn’t have children of her own, having married an older man and helped raise his two boys, who are not much younger than me. One is a doctor, the other a dentist. A credit to them both.
Lenny hands me a set of white polythene coveralls and I shimmy inside them, pulling elasticized plastic booties over my shoes.
“What do we know about the victim?”
“Rohan Kirk. Aged sixty-seven. Disability pensioner. His wife died in a car accident ten years ago. Rohan was at the wheel and suffered brain injuries. They have two daughters. Twins. Thirty-two. Maya lives with her dad and runs a mobile dog-grooming business. Melody is married with a kid. Lives two streets away. Maya hasn’t been seen since yesterday.”
A police siren approaches at speed. The car pulls up and a detective gets out. Dressed in a well-cut grey suit, he’s about five nine with a wiry muscularity that will defy middle age if he stays off the booze.
He spies Lenny and something passes between them. Not so much a smile as a smirk.
“I thought this was my case,” he says, patting his pockets as though he’d misplaced the note informing him of the change.
“I thought it might be something for SSOU,” says Lenny. She means the Serious Sexual Offences Unit, a new task force that Lenny has been running in Nottinghamshire.
“A man has been murdered,” says the newcomer.
“And his daughter is missing,” replies Lenny.
“That doesn’t make it a sex crime.”
“Not yet.”
The standoff lasts a few seconds and Lenny backs down. The detective turns his attention to me.
“I don’t think we’ve met.”
“DCI Gary Hoyle, this is Dr. Cyrus Haven,” says Lenny. “He’s our forensic psychologist.”
“Yes, of course, I’ve heard of you,” he says, pumping my hand. “You shot that guy in Scotland.”
“In self-defense,” I say.
“Of course it was. His gun was empty, but you weren’t to know that.”
I can’t tell if he’s criticizing me or making a genuine attempt to sympathize. I wish Evie were here.
“Glad to have you on board,” says Hoyle. There is something very American about his smile, broad and quick and full of optimism. In the next breath, he says, “I would prefer to limit contamination of the crime scene.”
“I’m suited up.”
We match each other’s gaze for several seconds too long. Finally, he nods. “I shall value your input.” Then he smacks his hands together, rubbing them as though ready to start work.
Forensic examiners are carrying equipment into the house. Cameras. Lights. Biohazard bags. Backup batteries. Swabs. Print kits. Evidence markers. Barrier tape. Duckboards. Hoyle signals to one of them that he wants a word and strides across the road.
“He seems very friendly,” I say.
“Yes, he does,” replies Lenny. “He’s the sort of friend I’m happy to follow.”
“Because you don’t want him behind you.”
“Exactly.”
“Is he new?”
“Hoyle? No. He’s been working with the National Crime Agency. Before that he was with SOCU. A star performer. Fast-tracked. Destined to rule us all.”
She’s talking about the Serious Organised Crime Unit.
“A funny handshaker?” I ask.
“Not still a thing.” Lenny adjusts her face shield. “He’s one of those detectives who seems to enjoy this job too much. It’s like he feeds off the suffering of others.”
“A soldier who thinks that war is glorious.”
“That sort of thing.”
I study the house, making mental notes. It fronts a quiet road, within line of sight of at least six other properties. No burglar alarm or security lights.
“What about the neighbors?”
“They heard nothing, for a change.”
“Meaning?”
“The daughter and father were known for their arguments. Rohan Kirk had a habit of calling the local cops and complaining that he was being mistreated. Said his daughters were stealing his pension payments.”
A blue van is parked in the driveway. The sign on the side says Short Bark and Sides. We have reached the entrance, which has an inner and outer door with a small porch in between designed to create a heat envelope in the winter. The outer door is double-glazed.
I step onto duckboards that are spaced along the hallway. Overcoats hang on pegs and boots are lined up beneath. The kitchen is directly ahead. The sitting room to my right.
I see his feet first, pale ankles sticking from flannelette pajama bottoms. Dry hard patches of skin on the heels. Veins etched purple on his shins. He is curled on his side, with one arm twisted under his body. One side of his head has been smashed to a bloody pulp. He crawled no more than a few feet before dying in front of the gas fireplace. His right hand seems to be reaching out for a cushion, which has fallen from the sofa, as though he wanted something soft beneath his head.
A white duvet, speckled with blood, is lying on the floor beside him, along with a plastic Tupperware bowl.
A scene-of-crime officer is crouched beside the body.
“Craig Dyson,” says Lenny. “He’s managing the scene.”
“We’ve met.”
Dyson turns and nods. He’s holding a moistened swab, which has been run over the victim’s fingers and nails and around the cuticles. He slips the swab into a plastic test tube that is sealed in a tamperproof evidence bag. Labeled. Documented. Stored.
“Any sign of the weapon?” I ask.
Dyson motions to a decorative fireside tool set, which includes a hard-bristled broom and a shovel. “The poker is missing.” He points to the blood spray on the wall. “Looks like he was struck from the front as he came into the room. He kept coming and was hit again. He fell here and tried to cover his head with his arms, but the blows kept coming.”
“Fingerprints?”
Dyson points to a bloody smear on the nearest light switch. “That was left post-crime; there are no loops or whorls, which suggests our perp was wearing gloves.”
More traces of blood were found on the kitchen floor and in the sink. Evidence markers indicate the locations. A single cupboard door is open next to the front-loading washer-dryer. Detergent and fabric softener are visible on a shelf.
I follow Lenny through the rest of the house, looking for signs of a disturbance, argument, robbery, or fight. A female technician is working on the stairs. We’re dressed identically, but her hair is bunched under a hood and the suit looks better on her.
“Hello, I’m Cassie Wright,” she says, as though keen to introduce herself.
“I’m Cyrus Haven.”
“I know. We’ve met.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
She laughs, her eyes dancing. “You will.”
Stepping back, she gives me room to squeeze past. Our suits brush and faintly crackle with static electricity.
There are three bedrooms upstairs. Rohan Kirk slept in the largest one, nearest the road. The bedclothes are disturbed. His duvet thrown back. The pillow has a depression. He has a glass of water next to his bed. A bottle of sleeping pills.
A well-worn armchair is facing a large TV. Two empty beer cans are crushed on the side table, next to the TV remote and an ashtray full of wrapped sweets. Opening his wardrobe, I see a handful of sweaters, two pairs of jeans, and checked shirts, all with the same brand labels and similar colors. Clothes that are functional, but not statements.
Across the landing must be Maya’s room, which is brighter and neater. Her double bed dominates the space, along with a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. Her duvet is missing. It must be the one downstairs. A dozen stuffed animals, including a Paddington Bear, are side by side on a shelf beside the window, arranged from biggest to smallest.
