Michael Robotham - Shatter

‘It’s nice to be wanted.’

‘Why are they so keen to get you?’

‘Can’t tell you that, Joe, or I might have to kill you. I put the word secret into secret service. I’m one of those soldiers that isn’t supposed to exist.’

‘You’re an interrogator.’

‘I know how to ask the right questions.’

He’s getting bored with the conversation. He expects more of me. I’m supposed to provide him with a challenge.

‘Why did your wife leave you?’

I can hear the slow, relentless sound of his breathing.

‘You frightened her away,’ I continue. ‘You tried to lock her up like a princess in a tower. Why were you so convinced she was having an affair?’

‘What is this- a fucking therapy session.’

‘She left you. You couldn’t keep her happy. How did that make you feel? Till death do us part, isn’t that what you both promised.’

‘That bitch walked out. She stole my daughter.’

‘The way I hear it, she didn’t walk- she ran. She punched that accelerator and got the hell out of there- left you running down the driveway, trying to put on your pants.’

‘Who told you that? Did she tell you that? Do you know where she is?’ He’s yelling at me now. ‘You really want to know what happened? I gave her a child. I built her a house. I gave her everything she wanted. And do you know how she showed her gratitude? She left me and she stole my Chloe. May she piss red-hot pokers, may she rot in hell…’

‘You hit her.’

‘No.’

‘You threatened her.’

‘She’s a liar.’

‘You terrified her.’

‘SHE‘S A WHORE!’

‘Take a deep breath, Gideon. Calm down.’

‘Don’t tell me what to do. You miss your daughter, Joe, well I haven’t seen mine in five months. I once had a heart, a soul, but a woman tore it out. She shattered me into a thousand pieces and left nothing but a glowing filament, but it’s still burning, Joe. I’m nursing that light. I keep it burning against the whores.’

‘Maybe we should talk about that light.’

‘And how much do you charge for a session, Joe?’

‘For you it’s free. Where do you want to meet?’

‘How does someone become a Professor of psychology?’

‘It’s just a title.’

‘But you use it. Is that because it makes you sound clever?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think you’re cleverer than I am, Joe?’

‘No.’

‘Yes you do. You think you know all about me. You think I’m a coward- that’s what you told the police. You drew up a profile on me.’

‘That was before I knew who you were.’

‘Was it wrong?’

‘I know you better now.’

His laugh is spiteful. ‘That’s the bullshit thing about psychologists. Guys like you never come down off the fence and give an opinion. Everything is couched in parenthesis and inverted commas. Either that or you turn everything into a question. It’s like your own opinion isn’t good enough. You want to hear what everyone else has to say. I can picture you banging your wife, hammering away between her legs, and saying, “Obviously, it’s good for you, dear, but how is it for me?”’

‘You seem to know a lot about psychology.’

‘I’m an expert.’

‘Did you study it?’

‘In the field.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means, Joe, that fuckers like you who call yourself professionals don’t know how to ask the right questions.’

‘What sort of question should I be asking?’

‘Torture is a complicated subject, Joe, a hell of a subject. Back in the fifties, the CIA ran a research project and spent over a billion dollars to crack the code of human consciousness. They had the most brilliant minds in the country working on it- people at Harvard, Princeton and Yale. They tried LSD, mescaline, electroshock, sodium pentothal. None of it worked.

‘The breakthrough came at McGill. They discovered that a person deprived of his or her senses will begin to hallucinate within forty-eight hours and ultimately break down. Stress positions accelerate the process, but there’s something even more effective.‘

Gideon pauses, wanting me to ask, but I won’t give him the satisfaction.

‘Imagine if you were blind, Joe, what would you prize most?’

‘My hearing.’

‘Exactly. Your weakest point.’

‘It’s sick.’

‘It’s creative.’ He laughs. ‘That’s what I do. I find the weakest point. I know yours, Joe. I know what keeps you awake at night.’

‘I’m not going to play games with you.’

‘Yes you will.’

‘No.’

‘Choose.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I want you to choose between your whoring wife and your daughter. Which one would you save? Imagine they’re in a burning building, trapped inside. You dash in, through the flames, kick open the door. They’re both lying unconscious. You can’t carry two of them. Which one do you save?’

‘I’m not playing.’

‘It’s the perfect question, Joe. That’s why I know more about psychology than you’ll ever know. I can break open a mind. I can take it apart. I can play with the bits. You know I once convinced a guy that he was rigged up to a power socket when all he had was a couple of wires in his ears. He was a would-be suicide bomber but his vest bomb didn’t blow up. Thought he was going be a martyr and go straight to heaven. Thought he’d get blowjobs from the vestal virgins for the rest of eternity. By the time I was finished with him, I convinced him there was no Heaven. That’s when he started praying. Crazy, isn’t it. Convince a guy there’s no Heaven and the first thing he does is start praying to Allah. He should have been praying to me. He didn’t even hate me in the end. All he wanted to do was to die and to take something into death that wasn’t my voice or my face.

‘You see, Joe, there is a moment when all hope disappears, all pride is gone, all expectation, all faith, all desire. I own that moment. It’s mine. And that’s when I hear the sound.’

‘What sound?’

‘The sound of a mind breaking. It’s not a loud crack like when bones shatter or a spine fractures or a skull collapses. And it’s not something soft and wet like a broken heart. It’s a sound that makes you wonder how much hurt can be visited upon one person; a sound that shatters the strongest of wills and makes the past leak into the present; a sound so high only the hounds of hell can hear it. Can you hear it?’

‘No.’

‘Someone is curled up in a tiny ball crying softly into an endless night. Isn’t that fucking poetic? I’m a poet and I don’t know it. Are you still there, Joe? Are you with me? That’s what I’m going to do to Julianne. And when her mind breaks, so will yours. I’ll get two for the price of one. Maybe I’ll give her a call now.’

‘No! Please. Talk to me.’

‘I’m sick of talking to you.’

He’s going to hang up. I have to say something to stop him.

‘I’ve found Helen and Chloe,’ I blurt.

Silence. He waits. I can wait, too.

He speaks first. ‘You’ve talked to them?’

‘I know they’re alive.’

Another pause.

‘You get to see your daughter, when I get to see mine.’

‘It’s not that easy.’

‘It never is.’

He’s gone. I can hear the hollow echo of my own breath in the emptiness of the bedroom and see my reflection in a mirror. My body is shaking. I don’t know if it’s the Parkinson’s or the cold or something more elemental and deep-seated. Rocking back and forth on her bed, clutching Charlie’s pyjamas in my fists, I howl without making a sound.

The service lift rises from the lower basement through the floors. A light floats through the numbers on the panel.