The Suspect

10

Julianne is doing her stretching exercises in the spare bedroom. She does these yogalike poses every morning with names that sound like Indian squaws. Babbling Brook meets Running Deer.

A veteran early riser, she is combat ready by 6:30 a.m. Nothing like me. I’ve been seeing bloody and beaten faces all night in my dreams.

Julianne pads barefoot into the bedroom wearing just a pajama top. She bends to kiss me.

“You had a restless night.”

Pressing her head against my chest, she lets her fingers go tap-dancing up my spine until she feels me shiver. She is reminding me that she knows every square inch of me.

“Remember I told you about Charlie singing carols with the choir?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Apparently young Ryan Fraser kissed her on the bus on the way home.”

“Cheeky devil.”

“It wasn’t easy. Three of her friends had to help her catch him and hold him down.”

We laugh and I pull her on top of me, letting her feel my erection against her thigh.

“Stay in bed.”

She laughs and slides away. “No. I’m too busy.”

“C’mon.”

“It’s not the right time. You have to save your fellas.”

My “fellas” are my sperm. She makes them sound like paratroopers.

She’s getting dressed. White bikini pants slide along her legs and snap into place. Then she raises the shirt over her head and shrugs her shoulders into the straps of a bra. She won’t risk giving me another kiss. I might not let her go next time.

After she’s gone I stay in bed listening to her move through the house, her feet hardly touching the floor. I hear the kettle being filled and the milk being collected from the front step. I hear the freezer door open and the toaster being pushed down.

Dragging myself upright, I take six paces to the bathroom and turn on the shower. The boiler in the basement belches and the pipes clunk and gargle. I stand shivering on the cold tiles waiting for some sign of water. The showerhead is shaking. At any moment I expect the tiles to start coming loose from around the taps.

After two coughs and a hacking spit, a cloudy trickle emerges and then dies.

“The boiler is broken again,” yells Julianne from downstairs.

Great! Brilliant! Somewhere there is a plumber laughing at me. He’s no doubt telling all his plumber mates how he pretended to fix a Jurassic boiler and charged enough to pay for a fortnight in Florida.

I shave with cold water, using a fresh razor, without cutting myself. It may seem like a small victory, but worth noting.

I emerge into the kitchen and watch Julianne make plunger coffee and put posh jam on a piece of whole-wheat toast. I always feel childish eating my Rice Krispies.

I still remember the first time I saw her. She was in her first year studying languages at the University of London. I was doing my postgraduate degree. Not even my mother would call me handsome. I had curly brown hair, a pear-shaped nose and skin that freckled at the first hint of sunlight.

I had stayed on at university determined to sleep with every promiscuous, terminally uncommitted first-year on campus, but unlike other would-be lotharios I tried too hard. I even failed miserably at being fashionably unkempt and seditious. No matter how many times I slept on someone’s floor, using my jacket as a pillow, it refused to crumple or stain. And instead of appearing grungy and intellectually blasé, I looked like someone on his way to his first job interview.

“You had passion,” she told me later, after listening to me rail against the evils of apartheid at a rally in Trafalgar Square, outside the South African embassy. She introduced herself in the pub and let me pour her a double from the bottle of whiskey we were drinking.

Jock was there— getting all the girls to sign his T-shirt. I knew that he would find Julianne. She was a fresh face— a pretty one. He put his arm around her waist and said, “I could grow to be a better person just being near you.”

Without a flicker of a smile, she took his hand away and said, “Sadly, a hard-on doesn’t count as personal growth.”

Everybody laughed except Jock. Then Julianne sat down at my table and I gazed at her in wonderment. I had never seen anyone put my best friend in his place so skillfully.

I tried not to blush when she said I had passion. She laughed. She had a dark freckle on her bottom lip. I wanted to kiss it.

Five doubles later she was asleep at the bar. I carried her to a cab and took her home to my bedsit in Islington. She slept on the futon and I took the sofa. In the morning she kissed me and thanked me for being such a gentleman. Then she kissed me again. I remember the look in her eyes. It wasn’t lust. It didn’t say, “Let’s have some fun and see what happens.” Her eyes were telling me, “I’m going to be your wife and have your babies.”

We were always an odd couple. I was the quiet, practical one, who hated noisy parties, pub crawls and going home for weekends. While she was the only child of a painter father and interior designer mother, who dressed like sixties flower children and only saw the best in people, Julianne didn’t go to parties— they came to her.

We married three years later. By then I was house-trained— having learned to put my dirty washing in the basket, to leave the toilet seat down and not to drink too much at dinner parties. Julianne didn’t so much knock off my rough edges as fashion me out of clay.

That was sixteen years ago. Seems like yesterday.

Julianne pushes a newspaper toward me. There’s a photograph of Catherine and the headline reads: TORTURED GIRL IS MP’S NIECE.

Junior Home Office minister Samuel McBride has been devastated by the brutal murder of his 27-year-old niece.

The Labour MP for Brighton-le-Sands was clearly upset yesterday when the Speaker of the House expressed the chamber’s sincerest condolences at his loss.

Catherine McBride’s naked body was found six days ago beside the Grand Union Canal in Kensal Green, West London. She had been stabbed repeatedly.

“At this moment we are concentrating on retracing Catherine’s final movements and finding anyone who may have seen her in the days prior to her death,” said Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz, who is leading the investigation.

“We know she took a train from Liverpool to London on Wednesday, 13 November. We believe she was coming to London for a job interview.”

Catherine, whose parents are divorced, worked as a community nurse in Liverpool and had been estranged from her family for a number of years.

“She had a difficult childhood and seemed to lose her way,” explained a family friend. “Recently attempts had been made for a family reconciliation.”

Julianne pours half a cup of coffee.

“It’s quite strange, don’t you think, that Catherine should turn up after all these years?”

“How do you mean strange?”

“I don’t know.” She shivers slightly. “I mean, she caused us all those problems. You nearly lost your job. I remember how angry you were.”

“She was hurting.”

“She was spiteful.”

She glances at the photograph of Catherine. It’s a shot of her graduation day as a nurse. She’s smiling fit to bust and clutching a diploma in her hand. “And now she’s back again. The police ask you to help identify her and then you get that strange letter from her…”

“A coincidence is just a couple of things happening simultaneously.”

She rolls her eyes. “Spoken like a true psychologist.”

It has been three days since I handed Ruiz the letter and I saw the look on his face that was a mixture of self-satisfaction and suspicion. He had picked up the single page and envelope by the corners and slipped each into a plastic ziplock bag.

I haven’t said anything to Julianne but I think the police are watching me. An unmarked police car was parked outside the office yesterday. I saw two detectives talking to the receptionist at the front desk. At lunchtime I went Christmas shopping in Tottenham Court Road and they were there again.

A part of me felt like walking up to them and introducing myself. I wanted them to know I had found them out. Then I contemplated whether that wasn’t their whole idea. They wanted me to see them.

I can’t be bothered with cat-and-mouse games. It is inconceivable that I could be a suspect. Why are they wasting their time and resources on me? Yet as skeptical as I am, I feel the same imperative to explore Catherine’s death. I want to empty drawers, peer under sofas and turn things upside down until I find the answers.

Bobby Moran intercepts me as I cross the lobby. He looks even more disheveled than normal, with mud on his overcoat and papers bulging from his pockets. I wonder if he’s been waiting for sleep or something bad to happen.

Blinking rapidly behind his glasses, he mumbles an apology.

“I have to see you.”

I glance over his head at the clock on the wall. “I have another patient…”

“Please?”

I should say no. I can’t have people just turning up. Meena will be furious. She could run a perfectly good office if it weren’t for patients turning up unannounced or not keeping appointments. “That’s not the way to pack a suitcase,” she’d say and I’d agree with her, even if I don’t completely understand what she means.

Upstairs, I tell Bobby to sit down and set about rearranging my morning. He looks embarrassed to have caused such a fuss. He is different today— less grounded, living in the here and now.

He is dressed in his work clothes— a gray shirt and trousers. The word Nevaspring is sewn onto the breast pocket. I write a new page for notes, struggling to loop each letter, and then look up to see if he’s ready. That’s when I realize he’ll never be entirely ready. Jock is right— there is something fragile and erratic about Bobby. His mind is full of half-finished ideas, strange facts and snatches of conversation.

“Why did you want to see me?”

Bobby stares at a spot on the floor between his feet. “You asked me about what I dream.”

“Yes.”

“I think there’s something wrong with me. I keep having these thoughts.”

“What thoughts?”

“I hurt people in my dreams.”

“How do you hurt them?”

He looks up at me plaintively. “I try to stay awake… I don’t want to fall asleep. Arky keeps telling me to come to bed. She can’t understand why I’m watching TV at four in the morning, wrapped in a duvet on the sofa. It’s because of the dreams.”

“What about them?”

“Bad things happen in them— that doesn’t make me a bad person.”

He is perched on the edge of the chair, with his eyes flicking from side to side.

“There’s a girl in a red dress. She keeps turning up when I don’t expect to see her.”

“In your dream?”

“Yes. She just looks at me— right through me as though I don’t exist. She’s laughing.”

His eyes snap wide as though spring-loaded and his tone suddenly changes. Spinning around in his chair, he presses his lips together and crosses his legs. I hear a harsh feminine voice.

“Now Bobby don’t tell lies.”

— “I’m not a blabbermouth.”

“Did he touch you or not?”

— “No.”

“That’s not what Mr. Erskine wants to hear.”

— “Don’t make me say it.”

“We don’t want to waste Mr. Erskine’s time. He’s come all this way…”

— “I know why he’s come.”

“Don’t use that tone of voice with me, sweetie. It’s not very nice.”

Bobby puts his big hands in his pockets and kicks at the floor with his shoes. He speaks in a timid whisper, with his chin pressed to his chest.

— “Don’t make me say it.”

“Just tell him and then we can have dinner.”

— “Please don’t make me say…”

He shakes his head, his whole body moves. Raising his eyes to me, I see a flicker of recognition.

“Do you know that a blue whale’s testicles are as large as a Volkswagen Beetle?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“I like whales. They’re very easy to draw and to carve.”

“Who is Mr. Erskine?”

“Should I know him?”

“You mentioned his name.”

He shakes his head and looks at me suspiciously.

“Is he someone you once met?”

“I was born in one world. Now I’m waist-deep in another.”

“What does that mean?”

“I had to hold things together, hold things together.”

He’s not listening to me. His mind is moving so quickly that it can’t grasp any subject for more than a few seconds.

“You were telling me about your dream… a girl in a red dress. Who is she?”

“Just a girl.”

“Do you know her?”

“Her arms are bare. She lifts them up and brushes her fingers through her hair. I see the scars.”

“What do these scars look like?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does!”

Tipping his head to one side, Bobby runs his finger down the inside of his shirtsleeve from his elbow to his wrist. Then he looks back at me. Nothing registers in his eyes. Is he talking about Catherine McBride?

“How did she get these scars?”

“She cut herself.”

“How do you know that?”

“A lot of people do.”

Bobby unbuttons his shirt cuffs and slowly rolls the sleeve along his left forearm. Turning his palm up, he holds it out toward me. The thin white scars are faint but unmistakable.

“They’re like a badge of honor,” he whispers.

“Bobby, listen to me.” I lean forward. “What happens to the girl in your dream?”

Panic fills his eyes like a growing fever.

“I don’t remember.”

“Do you know this girl?”

He shakes his head.

“What color hair does she have?”

“Brown.”

“What color eyes?”

He shrugs.

“You said you hurt people in your dreams. Did this girl get hurt?”

The question is too direct and confrontational. He looks at me suspiciously.

“Why are you staring at me like that? Are you taping this? Are you stealing my words?” He peers from side to side.

“No.”

“Well, why are you staring at me?”

Then I realize that he’s talking about the Parkinson’s mask. Jock had warned me of the possibility. My face can become totally unresponsive and expressionless like an Easter Island statue.

I look away and try to start again, but Bobby’s mind has already moved on.

“Did you know the year 1961 can be written upside down and right-way up and appear the same?” he says.

“No I didn’t.”

“That’s not going to happen again until 6009.”

“I need to know about the dream, Bobby.”

“No comprenderás todavía lo que comprenderás en el futuro.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s Spanish. You don’t understand yet what you will understand in the end.” His forehead suddenly creases as though he’s forgotten something. Then his expression changes to one of complete bafflement. He hasn’t just lost his train of thought— he’s forgotten what he’s doing here. He looks at his watch.

“Why are you here, Bobby?”

“I keep having these thoughts.”

“What thoughts?”

“I hurt people in my dreams. That’s not a crime. It’s only a dream…”

We have been here before, thirty minutes ago. He has forgotten everything in between.

There is an interrogation method, sometimes used by the CIA, which is called the Alice in Wonderland technique. It relies upon turning the world upside down and distorting everything that is familiar and logical. The interrogators begin with what sound like very ordinary questions, but in fact are totally nonsensical. If the suspect tries to answer, the second interrogator interrupts with something unrelated and equally illogical.

They change their demeanor and patterns of speech in midsentence or from one moment to the next. They get angry when making pleasant comments and become charming when making threats. They laugh at the wrong places and speak in riddles.

If the suspect tries to cooperate he’s ignored and if he doesn’t cooperate he’s rewarded— never knowing why. At the same time, the interrogators manipulate the environment, turning clocks backward and forward, lights on and off, serving meals ten hours or only ten minutes apart.

Imagine this continuing day after day. Cut off from the world and everything he knows to be normal, the suspect tries to cling to what he remembers. He may keep track of time or try to picture a face or a place. Each of these threads to his sanity is gradually torn down or worn down until he no longer knows what is real and unreal.

Talking to Bobby is like this. The random connections, twisted rhymes and strange riddles make just enough sense for me to listen. At the same time I’m being drawn deeper into the intrigue and the lines between fact and fantasy have begun to blur.

He won’t talk about his dream again. Whenever I ask about the girl in the red dress, he ignores me. The silence has no effect. He is totally contained and unreachable.

Bobby is slipping away from me. When I first met him I saw a highly intelligent, articulate, compassionate young man, concerned about his life. Now I see a borderline schizophrenic, with violent dreams and a possible history of mental illness.

I thought I had a handle on him, but now he’s attacked a woman in broad daylight and confessed to “hurting” people in his dreams. What about the girl with the scars? Could he possibly have known Catherine? Is she the girl in the red dress?

Take a deep breath. Review the facts. The fact that Catherine and Bobby are both self-mutilators isn’t enough to link them. One in fifteen people harm themselves at some point in their lives: that’s two children in every classroom, four people on a crowded bus, twenty on a commuter train and two thousand at a Manchester United home game.

In my career as a psychologist I have learned unequivocally not to believe in conspiracies or listen for the same voices my patients are hearing. A doctor is no good to anyone if he dies of the disease.

I’m back in Jock’s office, listening to him rattle off my results, which I don’t understand. He wants to start me on medication as soon as possible.

Clicking a stopwatch, Jock makes me walk along a line of masking tape on the floor, turn and walk back again. Then I have to stand on one foot with my eyes closed.

When he brings out the colored blocks I groan. It feels so childish— stacking blocks one on top of the other. First I use my right hand and then my left. My left hand is trembling before I start, but once I pick up a block it’s OK.

Putting dots in a grid is more difficult. I aim for the center of the square, but the pen has a mind of its own. It’s a stupid test anyway.

Afterward Jock explains that patients like me who present initially with tremors have a significantly better prognosis. There are lots of new drugs becoming available to lessen the symptoms.

“You can expect to lead a full life,” he says, as though reading from a script. When he sees the look of disbelief on my face he attempts to qualify the statement. “Well, maybe you’ll lose a few years.”

He doesn’t say anything about my quality of life.

“Stem-cell research is going to provide a breakthrough,” he adds, sounding upbeat. “Within five or ten years they’ll have a cure.”

“What do I do until then?”

“Take the drugs. Make love to that gorgeous wife of yours. Watch Charlie grow up.”

He gives me a prescription for selegiline. “Eventually, you’ll need to take levodopa,” he explains, “but hopefully we can delay that for maybe a year or more.”

“Are there any side effects?”

“You might get a little nauseous and have trouble sleeping.”

“Great!”

Jock ignores me. “These drugs don’t stop the progression of the disease. All they do is mask the symptoms.”

“So I can keep it secret for longer.”

He smiles ruefully. “You’ll face up to this sooner or later.”

“If I keep coming here maybe I’ll die of passive smoke.”

“What a way to go.” He lights up a cigar and pulls the scotch from his bottom drawer.

“It’s only three o’clock.”

“I’m working on British summer time.”

He doesn’t ask, he simply pours me one.

“I had a visit from Julianne last week.”

I feel myself blinking rapidly. “What did she want?”

“She wanted to know about your condition. I couldn’t tell her. Doctor-patient privilege and all that bollocks.” After a pause, he says, “She also wanted to know if I thought you were having an affair.”

“Why would she ask that?”

“She said you lied to her.”

I take a sip of scotch and feel it burn my esophagus. Jock watches through a stream of smoke, waiting for an answer. Instead of feeling angry or at fault, I have a bizarre sense of disappointment. How could Julianne have asked Jock a question like that? Why didn’t she ask me directly?

Jock is still waiting for an answer. He sees my discomfort and begins to laugh, shaking his head like a wet dog.

I want to say, Don’t you look at me like that— you’ve been divorced twice and are still chasing after women half your age.

“It’s none of my business, of course,” he says, gloating. “But if she walks out on you I’ll be there to comfort her.”

He’s not joking. He’d be sniffing around Julianne in a flash.

I quickly change the subject. “Bobby Moran— how much do you know about him?”

Jock rocks his tumbler back and forth. “No more than you do.”

“There’s no mention in the medical notes about any previous psychiatric treatment.”

“What makes you think there has been any?”

“He quoted a question to me from a Mental Status Examination. I think he’s been evaluated before.”

“Did you ask him?”

“He wouldn’t talk about it.”

Jock’s face is a study of quiet contemplation, which looks as though it’s been practiced in the mirror. Just when I think he might add something constructive, he shrugs. “He’s an odd fucker, that’s for sure.”

“Is that a professional opinion?”

He grunts. “Most of my patients are unconscious when I spend time with them. I prefer it that way.”