Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

I was lying on the doctor’s examination couch.

My shirt had been unbuttoned, exposing my — if I say so myself — finely toned torso. I expected the lady doctor to be more impressed with my physique than she seemed to be, judging by the expression on her face as she probed my musculature with cool, slender fingers, her perfectly trimmed nails immaculately painted in postbox red.

‘What the hell happened to you?’ she asked. ‘You look like someone took a baseball bat to your stomach!’

She had a point. I looked down at the bruising which was already beginning to turn a very unpleasant colour. ‘Something very similar.’

I winced as her skilled hands probed and examined the area. ‘Can you go a bit more gently with that?’ I said.

‘Go gently!’ she said. ‘You’re lucky I don’t kick your sorry Irish backside. What the hell happened?’

‘There was a conflict of interest in a financial situation. Seemed that words were not sufficient to bring the other party to a negotiated settlement.’

I winced even more violently as she probed deliberately harder this time. ‘OK! I was doing a favour for a friend.’

‘What friend?’

‘Amy, the solicitor. You’ve met her.’

‘I hope she’s paying you well is all I can say.’

‘She puts a lot of work my way.’

‘Maybe she does. But this isn’t the sort of work that you, or I, or your family need,’ she said pointedly.

‘A couple of cowboy builders conned a sweet old lady out of some serious money and I asked them to return it.’

‘And they objected?’ she asked, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

‘I am afraid they did, Kate darling.’ I looked up at her beautiful face, framed with silken dark tresses, saw the passion sparking in her big luminous eyes and felt myself drowning in them all over again.

‘Don’t “darling” me! We came up to Norfolk to get away from the violence, or don’t you remember that?’

‘I had to do something.’

‘It’s not a doctor you should be seeing, Jack. It’s a psychotherapist to help you with that white-knight syndrome of yours.’

I smiled and shrugged and the smile fell right off my face as my stomach muscles protested at the movement. That guy seriously had a punch like a mule’s kick. Lucky for me he didn’t know how to box. Often the way with big strong men who get their bulk from weightlifting or heavy manual labour. They’re not used to people standing up to them. And when they do it’s a strength contest, a war of attrition. They get knocked down, then they get up again. Only difference with me was that I knew how to punch and where. And I usually had the element of surprise on my side. I never wait to be asked to dance. If it’s going down then you get yours in first. First and hard. My dad had taught me that much.

‘She really is a dear old lady, quite a character. You’d like her,’ I said as Kate continued with her probing, a little more gently this time.

‘This “dear old lady” have a name?’

‘Helen Middleton, no relation.’

Kate stood up and nodded. ‘I know her. She’s a patient here. You better make sure she is taken care of!’ she said in her no-nonsense schoolteacher tone that I had become accustomed to.

I blinked at the volte-face. ‘That’s what I said!’

‘I mean it. She’s a lovely woman.’

Sometimes you have to just roll with the punches.

‘Yes, dear.’

‘Okay. You can take the shirt off now, Jack. Doesn’t seem to be anything broken. Just bruising and tissue damage. It will hurt for a while. Try not to laugh too much or cough.’

‘And how do I do that?’ I asked as I took off my shirt.

‘Force of will power.’

‘And what are you going to do?’

‘Bandage you up and give you some painkillers.’

‘You could always prescribe a bottle of Jameson’s — that’s quite effective in the painkilling area.’

She pursed her lips. ‘Co-codamol will be just fine.’

A few years back and I had what is technically called a drinking problem. Whiskey was my main poison of choice. I’d drink it till my brain and sensibilities had been anaesthetised, and the past and the future disappeared with every tumbler of the amber oblivion that I drank. Until, finally, all that was left was the cosy, hazy cotton-wool present. Laughter and noise and faces that I would never remember. Women I wouldn’t recall. One-night stands or prostitutes I would take up against a brick wall or a garden fence, or down some darkened alleyway. Fighting and fornicating my way round Soho and Shepherd’s Bush. A psychoanalyst would probably tell me it was guilt. A downwardly spiralling vicious circle of self-loathing and disgust. The whiskey didn’t just take away the pain of simply living, it took me away from myself. For a few hours I could forget who I was, and become something worse.

My pregnant wife had died when I had intervened in an armed robbery at a petrol station. Goodness knows what I was thinking of at the time. She took the shotgun blast which was aimed at me and she died a short while later in hospital, and my baby that she was carrying died with her. I had another child, a daughter. Siobhan. But rather than keeping it together and looking after her I carried on working and drinking and pretty much destroyed myself.

Another woman’s death was the catalyst for change, as they say. Not a woman I loved in the traditional sense of the word. A woman I had made love to, though, and more than once. An Irish woman, like me an exile from the land of her birth. Jackie Moiyne — she had dark curling locks as a gift from her marooned Spanish forebears who’d been washed up on the south shore of Ireland when their invading Armada fell foul of the English weather that saved Drake’s bacon. And she had flashing blue eyes that bespoke of the gypsy nature of her soul.

Jackie Moiyne was a prostitute and while I might not have loved her I liked her. I liked her a lot. When she was murdered it should have been enough to sober me up and sort out my life: she had deserved my full attention as lead detective on the case and I figured I had owed her that much. But I let her down — or I would have done if Kate Walker hadn’t also got involved. She was the forensic pathologist assigned to the case and we were thrown into a working relationship which, as sometimes happens, strayed into the personal. I had never thought I would love again, but I was wrong.

I discovered that Kate had skeletons in her closet, too. An uncle who was a senior member of the Metropolitan Police, and who had abused her in childhood, turned out to be linked to the murder. A group of men were taking runaway children off the street. Using them in a large house in Henley-on-Thames. Using, abusing, photographing them and filming it all. Jackie’s brother had also been involved and when her son went missing it was that that prompted her murder. Her brother was murdered too when he tried to blackmail Kate’s uncle.

When my own child had been taken, Kate’s help had been crucial in getting her back safely and putting her uncle and his associates behind bars for a very long time. I had rescued my daughter but in the process Dr Kate Walker had rescued me, too. I owed her my life. Everything.

It was Kate who saved me.

She spoke, snapping me out of my reverie, and I felt a chill pass over my heart as I registered her words.

‘We need to talk, Jack.’

We need to talk.

Probably the most unpleasant arrangement of four simple words in the world.

‘Go on?’ I said, swinging my legs over the examination couch to the floor and buttoning my shirt back up over the bandage that Kate had applied.