Bleed For Me

8

It’s six thirty-five. Still dark outside. Sometimes I wake like this, aware of a sound where no sound belongs. The terrace is old and full of inexplicable creaks and groans, as if complaining of being neglected. Footsteps in the attic. Branches scratching against glass.

I used to sleep like a bear, but not any more. Now I lie awake taking an inventory of my tics and twitches, mapping my body to see what territory I have surrendered to Mr Parkinson since yesterday.

My left leg and arm are twitching. Using my right hand, I pick up a small white pill and take a sip of water, raising my head from the pillow to swallow. The blue pill comes next.

After twenty minutes I take another inventory. The twitches have gone and Mr Parkinson has been kept at bay for another few hours. Never vanquished. Till death us do part.

At seven o’clock I turn on the radio. The news in scolding tones:

Scuffles broke out yesterday outside the trial of three men accused of firebombing a boarding house and killing a family of five asylum seekers. Riot police were called to quell the fighting between anti-racism protesters and supporters of the accused, who have links to the British National Party.

Police have promised extra security when the trial resumes this morning at Bristol Crown Court.

The second bulletin:

A decorated former detective has been brutally murdered in his home in a village outside of Bath. DCI Ray Hegarty, who spent twenty years with Bristol CID, bled to death in his daughter’s bedroom.

Forensic experts spent yesterday at the eighteenth-century farmhouse, where they took bedding and carpets, while detectives interviewed neighbours and family members. Investigators are waiting to talk to the victim’s teenage daughter who is under police guard in hospital.

The weather forecast: patchy cloud with a chance of showers. Maximum: 12 °C.

Gunsmoke can hear me coming down the stairs. He sleeps outside in the laundry, an arrangement he resents because the cat sits on the windowsill almost goading him.

‘A short walk today,’ I tell him.

I have work to do - a lecture at the university. Today my psychology students will learn why people follow orders and act contrary to their consciences. Think of the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, black prisons and Guantanamo Bay . . .

I make mental notes as I walk across Haydon Field. I shall tell them about Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, who in 1963 conducted one of the most famous experiments of them all. He organised a group of volunteers to play the roles of teachers and students and then set up an ‘electric shock’ machine. The students had to memorise a pair of words and were ‘punished’ for any wrong answer with a shock from the machine.

There were thirty levers, each corresponding to fifteen volts. With each mistake, the next lever was pulled, delivering even more pain. If a teacher hesitated they were told, ‘The experiment requires that you go on.’

The machine was a fake, of course, but the teacher volunteers didn’t know that. Each time they pulled a new lever a soundtrack broadcast painful groans, turning to screams at higher voltages. Finally there was silence.

Sixty-five per cent of participants pulled levers corresponding to the maximum 450 volts, clearly marked ‘DANGER: LETHAL’.

Milgram interviewed the volunteers afterwards, asking them why, and was told they were just following orders. Does that sound familiar? It’s the same excuse offered down the ages. The man in the white coat or the military uniform is seen as a legitimate authority figure. Someone to be believed. Someone to be obeyed.

Gunsmoke is lying in a shallow watercourse at the edge of the river where silt has formed a beach. He drinks, pants and drinks some more. Crossing the bridge, I walk up Mill Hill. The Labrador catches up, dripping water from his chin. His pink tongue swings from side to side.

As I near the terrace, I see a young woman sitting in a wheelchair. Dressed in jeans and a sweater, her dark hair is pulled back from her face into a tight ponytail.

‘Mr O’Loughlin?’

‘Yes.’

She raises her hand to shield her eyes from the glare, but the morning sun isn’t that strong.

‘I’m Zoe Hegarty.’

She looks older than nineteen, with her mother’s eyes and build.

‘Do you want to come inside?’

Zoe glances up and down the street. Shakes her head. ‘I get a bit funny about being alone with men. No offence.’

‘None taken.’

She rolls her chair to face away from the sun, resting the wheels against the low brick wall. Fumbling for a cigarette, she lights it apologetically. ‘Can’t smoke around Mum. She doesn’t like it.’ Turning her head, she exhales slowly.

‘I heard about Liam’s hearing. They’re not going to release him.’

‘Not this time.’

‘But he can try again?’

‘In a year.’

Zoe nods. I wait for something more. Her hand shakes. She raises the filter to her lips.

‘Sienna didn’t kill Daddy.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘You can tell the police.’

‘Why don’t you tell them?’

‘I have. I don’t think they’re listening.’

A car passes. She looks at it through a veil of tiredness.

‘Tell me about your father.’

She takes a deep breath. ‘It was tough being his daughter.’

‘In what way?’

‘It was like living in some Arab country with curfews and dress regulations - home before ten, nothing above the knee.’ She holds up her fingers. ‘I wasn’t allowed to wear nail polish, or go to parties. And how’s this? I couldn’t wear anything red. He said only sluts wore red.’

‘What did your mother say?’

Her shoulders rise an inch and then fall.

‘Mum made excuses for him. She said he was old-fashioned.’

‘You think he was wrong?’

‘Don’t you?’ She doesn’t wait for me to answer. ‘He eavesdropped on my phone calls, opened my letters, read my diaries. I wasn’t allowed to talk to boys or have a boyfriend. He thought I’d get pregnant or take drugs or ruin my reputation.’

She looks at her legs. ‘On the night Liam attacked me I wasn’t supposed to be at the cinema. I lied to Daddy and said I was studying at a friend’s house. After the attack, whenever he looked at me, it was like he wanted say, “I told you so.”’

Her cigarette is almost finished. She stares at the glowing end, watching it burn through the last of the paper.

‘Did you know that Sienna had a boyfriend?’

Zoe shrugs.

‘Did she ever mention him?’

‘No, but I guessed it.’

‘How?’

‘She seemed happier. She couldn’t tell me directly, because Daddy was always listening in to her phone calls and reading her emails.’

‘Was Sienna sexually active?’

She hesitates, holding something back. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Why did you come here today?’

‘To tell you that Sienna didn’t do it.’

‘Did she tell you that?’

‘I just know.’

‘Was your father ever violent?’

‘He had a temper.’

‘Did he ever touch you or Sienna?’

Squeezing her eyes shut, Zoe pops them open again. ‘Would it help her?’

Before I can respond, she adds, ‘The only reason I ask is that, in my experience, the truth doesn’t always help people.’

‘Your experience?’

‘Yes.’

When did she become so cynical? I look again at the wheelchair and get my answer.

Zoe takes a deep breath as if poised to push herself off a cliff.

‘It first happened when I was seven. Daddy was driving me home after I played netball. I was wearing my pleated skirt. He bought me an ice cream. He said it was dripping on my thighs and began wiping it off, pushing his hand between my legs. I kept trying to hold my skirt down. He asked me if I loved him. He said girls who loved their daddies did what they were told . . .’

She can’t finish the statement, but the memory shudders through her shoulders.

‘Did you tell anyone?’

‘Mummy didn’t believe me. She said I was making it up, but later I heard them arguing. She was screaming at him and throwing things. She broke the frame of their wedding photograph. It’s still on her dresser. You can see where she’s patched it up with tape.

‘Later that night, Daddy came to my room, put his hand over my mouth and nose so I couldn’t breathe. He held it there, looking into my eyes. “That’s how easy it is,” he said. “Remember that.”

‘From then on I knew I wouldn’t be believed, so I stopped saying anything and started trying to find ways of avoiding him. I got pretty good at it - making sure I was never alone in the house with him, or in the car. I stopped playing netball. I never asked to be picked up from a friend’s house or the cinema.’

‘Did you ever tell anyone else - a teacher, a school counsellor?’

‘I told my Auntie Meaghan. She and Mum had the biggest fight. Mum told her that I made up stories to get attention. Later she made me call Auntie Meaghan on the phone and apologise to her for telling lies.’

I feel my breath catching. I don’t want to hear any more.

‘When I was thirteen, I said no to him. I had a knife in my hand. He stopped touching me after that.’

‘Where is your Auntie Meaghan now?’

‘She died of cancer last July.’

Zoe lights another cigarette. She smokes quickly. Nervously.

‘Did your father ever touch Sienna?’

She closes the lighter and looks at her hands.

‘When I came out of hospital after the attack, Daddy wouldn’t look at me. He pushed my wheelchair up to the car door and lifted me out, but turned his face away. They set up a room for me downstairs. They had to widen the doors and build ramps. They pushed me into the room and expected me to be all excited, but I just looked at Daddy.

‘Before, when I was upstairs, I shared a room with Sienna. We had bunk-beds. I was on the bottom and she was on top. We were safe there because there were always two of us. Sienna thought it was so exciting, having her own room, but I had to teach her to look after herself, how to stay out of his way.’

‘Did he ever touch you again?’

‘No. I was a wheelchair girl. A cripple. Not even he was that sick.’

‘What about Sienna?’

‘I think she was old enough by then. He might have tried, but I think she would have fought back.’

The cigarette glows as she inhales. ‘I sometimes wonder why people like him have children. I think my mother wanted someone else to love - other than my father. He was always a bully, bossing her around, making her fetch and carry for him. A beer from the fridge. A sandwich. A newspaper. Whenever he shouted her name she dropped everything and ran to him like a dog wanting to please her master. And all she got in return was ridicule and scraps of affection, yet she kept coming back. Surely you must get sick of being treated like a dog?’

The air has grown colder around us.

Zoe crushes her cigarette against the brickwork. Raising her elbows, she rests her hands on the wheels of her chair, rocking back and forth.

‘I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.’

‘You have to make a statement - tell the police about your father.’

Zoe shakes her head. ‘That’d just kill Mum.’

‘What about Sienna?’

‘She loved Daddy and she hated him, but she didn’t kill him.’

My phone is ringing. It’s Ronnie Cray.

‘Busy?’

‘I’m lecturing today.’

‘This is more important.’

‘That’s as may be, but it doesn’t pay my rent.’

The DCI sounds annoyed, but she doesn’t raise her voice. Her tone barely alters as she suggests that my Volvo might find itself clamped in the university car park should I turn up at the campus.

‘I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.’

‘You could explain that to the clamping crew,’ she replies. ‘Those guys love a good story. They’re born listeners.’

Why are detectives so droll?

I consider my options.

‘Since we’re calling in favours here, I have a small issue you might be able to help me with.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Charlie had an altercation with a cab driver yesterday. Didn’t have the full fare. Got into a fight.’

‘Princess Charlie?’

‘That’s the one. She was interviewed at Bath Police Station. The driver wants to press charges.’

Cray doesn’t need the rest spelled out. She’ll make a call.