Michael Robotham - Say You're sorry

Fryer pauses. There’s something else. Resuming his seat, he opens the folder.

“Elements of this case shock me, Professor. I’ve been a policeman for thirty years and not many things surprise me anymore.”

He passes me a photograph of Natasha McBain, naked on a metal bench, her chest sewn together with rough cross-stitches.

“We do some terrible things to people after they die; we cut them open, gut them, stitch them up, but that poor girl suffered more indignities in life than in death.”

He adds a second photograph. “At a stretch, I can accept why some sadistic prick might rape a teenage girl. Maybe he’s anti-social, or impotent, or just plain too ugly to get laid. And I can almost understand why he might keep her locked up as a plaything and beat her around, getting excited by her fear. But this… this is beyond me.”

He adds a final photograph-an extreme close-up of Natasha’s groin area with her vagina shown in all its anatomical detail. Then I recognize what I’m looking at… what I’m not seeing. Her prepuce and clitoris are missing.

This is what Dr. Leece saw during the post-mortem. This is what left him speechless.

“Dead people have rights too,” says Fryer. “I don’t care what you wish had happened in the past. It’s not my concern. I sometimes wish I worked less and was nicer to people and could open a homeless shelter for stray cats, but then I realize that I’m not that sort of person, which is why I don’t give a rat’s arse about you being tired or retired. It’s bogus, a bad excuse.”

The chief constable stabs his index finger at the photographs.

“You’re going to help us, Professor, because there’s a lot more at stake here than a few bruised reputations and a DCI with his nose out of joint. There were two Bingham Girls. The job is only half done.”

Drury hasn’t said a word since he emerged from the chief constable’s office. With his bloodless fists clenched and a manic gleam in his eyes, he strides towards the lift, slapping his palm against the button, trying to bruise the wall.

His arguments are stilling ringing in my ears. Delivered at decibels, they had opened doors along the corridor and raised eyebrows. He demanded a bigger task force. More detectives. Greater resources. What he didn’t want was a “bloody shrink” spouting cliches and telling him the bleeding obvious.

Charlie pretended not to listen. Turning up her iPod, she swung her legs beneath her chair and hummed to herself. Now we’re half-running down the corridor, trying to catch up to Drury who is holding open the lift doors like he’s Moses parting the Red Sea.

The police car drops us at the hotel where I rebook a room. Charlie has fallen silent, picking at a hangnail, a performance of compressed sullenness. I try to kiss her cheek. She turns her face away.

“I won’t be long.”

“What about London?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“I can go by myself.”

“Your mother wouldn’t like that.”

Drury is waiting downstairs, the engine running.

The lift doors slide closed. I stare at my reflection in the polished steel wondering how I finished up back here-involved in another investigation. Whatever skill I have, whatever ability to understand human behavior and motives, it has turned into a curse.

People teem with their own information. It leaks from their pores, spouts from their mouths, reveals itself in every mannerism, tic and twitch. Whether they are shy, materialistic, body conscious, vain, fluent in cliche, brimming with aphorisms and tabloid axioms, they reveal themselves in thousands of different ways.

And almost unconsciously I pick up these signals, reading their body language and registering the cues. I used to want to know why things happened. Why would a couple murder young women and bury them in their basement? Why does a teenage boy spray a schoolyard with bullets? Why would a schoolgirl give birth to a baby in a toilet block and dump the newborn in a rubbish bin? Not anymore. I don’t want to be able to see inside people’s heads. It’s like knowing too much. It’s like living too long or witnessing too many events; experiencing things to the point of fatigue.

People are complicated, cruel, brave, damaged and prone to outrageous acts of brutality and kindness. I know the causes. I know the effects. I have been there and back again and bought the souvenirs. It’s not that I don’t care anymore. I’ve done my bit. Someone else should shoulder the burden.

DS Casey opens the rear door for me. Drury is riding up front. We’re not going to the police station. Instead, we drive to Abingdon, the tires crunching on gritted tarmac and splashing through puddles of slush. Few cars. Fewer people.

Twenty minutes pass. We pull up outside a red brick and tile bungalow with pebble dash on the facade. Drury stares through the windscreen and finally speaks.

“Someone removed her clitoral hood and clitoris. That’s a religious thing, right? Some Muslim communities do it to young girls. Sew them up…”

“It wasn’t religious.”

“What sort of sick-”

“It was punishment. Payback.”

“Someone hated this girl?”

“Or what she represented.”

“She was eighteen-what did she represent?”

“Women, youthfulness, beauty, sex…”

“It’s a sex crime?”

“Yes.”

He blows air from his cheeks and shakes his head.

“I’m not happy about this, Professor, but I don’t have a choice. Next time you have a theory or uncover something-you tell me first, understand?”

“Yes.”

“I want a full psychological profile. I want to know where Natasha has been and why she came back. Did she run away or was she abducted? Where was she held? Why was she mutilated?”

“I’m a psychologist, not a psychic.”

“And you’re not a detective-remember that.”

The DCI steps out of the car and signals me to follow. He rings the doorbell. We wait. I can hear a TV playing. Footsteps. The door opens. A young man blinks at us. There are tattoos on his forearms and neck. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says, POKER — YOU KNOW SHE LIKES IT, and he’s holding something out of sight, behind the edge of the door.

Drury flashes his badge. “Hello, Hayden, is your mother home?”

“She’s getting ready for work.”

“This won’t take long.”

For a moment they stare at each other before Hayden turns his head and yells up the stairs.

“Mum. Coppers.”

A loud noise, something dropped. An exclamation. Then a tentative answer: “Won’t be a minute.”

Hayden slips whatever he’s holding into the waistband of his jeans and covers it with his T-shirt. A burst of canned laughter escapes from a TV. He opens the door, inviting us in.

A skinny white girl is sitting on the sofa looking drugged in the watery half-light. She’s sitting in an armchair, smoking, her arm bent and her head tilted sideways to let the smoke escape from her lips. Hayden’s girlfriend. She looks about twenty-seven but could be seventeen.

Hayden tells her to go home. She blows a fringe from her eyes and ignores him.

“I said piss off!”

This time she grabs her coat and sneers at him, slamming the door on her way out.

Hayden takes her seat in the armchair and picks up a TV magazine, turning the pages, not reading.

The sitting room is cluttered and claustrophobic, smelling of old shoes and cigarettes. There are Christmas cards on the mantelpiece next to a sad-looking Christmas tree. Fake green branches are draped in strips of tinsel and weighed down by cheap ornaments. The crowning angel is too heavy, bending the uppermost branch like a catapult.

Quiet footsteps on the stairs signal Alice McBain’s arrival. She’s wearing dark trousers, a green-hemmed blouse and a cardigan. A nametag with a supermarket logo is pinned to the pocket. Late-forties, maybe younger, she’s a small woman with short straight hair and the slightly dazed, disbelieving air of a refugee or some other figure beaten down by life without ever comprehending why.