Gordon Ferris - Truth Dare kill

“So you’re saying you don’t know if the “me” before this -” I pointed at my scar – “could have done it or not? But in fact, I might have? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying I don’t know if it would be out of character or not, because I don’t know what your character was. What I see today is a personality that may or may not be influenced by a severe brain injury.”

There were too many ifs and maybes in this for my liking. “For god’s sake, doc, just tell me what I should do. Where do I go from here? How do I carry this around with me without going nuts?”

“It’s such a pity that your man Caldwell is dead. But you’ve said he was pretty thick with this woman, Kate…” He looked at his pad. “…Graveney? Well I’d go back to her and do some more asking, if I were you. See if he mentioned anything else about you. And I’d also see if Mrs Caldwell would talk to you again. Maybe he said more to her than in his report.”

His words burrowed away in my head. Mrs Caldwell. Mrs Catriona Caldwell. Mrs Kate Caldwell of Chelsea. I dragged myself back to his point.

“Do you think if he’d told Liza Caldwell I was a murderer, she’d have contacted me, far less let me into her home?”

“No, you’re right.” He flicked through his notes. “But to take it a step further, she mentioned that her husband had said you had mental problems and that you might become a nuisance. Even in these lesser circumstances, it seems strange for her to have let you into her home. Unless it was to head you off by telling you her husband was dead?”

That point had worried me too. This whole thing stank. And the sooner I started acting like a proper detective and got behind all this flimflam, the better. I sat quietly for a minute or two, still facing Thompson. He let me. He could see I needed time to absorb some of the implications of what he’d said. I found I had one last big question to put to him.

“Doc, if someone were to kill in anger or in passion… is it likely… I mean is it conceivable that they’d kill again?”

He looked wary. “Strictly speaking, a crime passionnel of any sort, caused by anger, jealousy, sexual aggression or just to stop someone nagging…” he smiled at that, “…is a one-off event. It is a build-up of rage or frustration against one particular person for a particular reason or set of reasons.” Straight from the textbook.

“Strictly speaking?”

“It’s pretty rare to get a taste for it. Unless there was a deep character flaw that was revealed by the act, such as you might find in a split personality or a psychopath.”

“Do I? I mean do I show signs of being split or a psycho?” I didn’t want the answer, but I had to ask it. I wanted him to say don’t be ridiculous, of course you’re not…

“Frankly, Danny, it’s not something we’ve been looking for with you.” He tried to laugh, to make it sound silly. “You’ve got quite enough recovering to do, without adding to your woes.”

In other words I could be as crazy as a Kamikaze pilot but he couldn’t really tell because I had all these other mental health problems. There wasn’t much more I wanted to hear from Doctor Thompson. Everything he told me could be interpreted the worst possible way. And in my state of precarious sanity, I could easily convince myself I not only murdered a heroine of the resistance in a passionate rage, but I could be primed to do it again, given the right circumstances. It was probably just as well that Big Alec had stopped me seeing Sandra again. But I never would have killed her, would I?

I’d been away two days but it seemed liked a month. With or without being plugged into the mains, it’s always a pretty intense experience at the hospital.

Partly it’s seeing and hearing the real nutters around the place; blokes who’d lost it after sitting in a slit trench for ten days while Jerry bombed the shit out of them, or waiting in their tin-can tanks for a Tiger shell to smear them round the inside like jam. But usually I leave in a better mood than I arrived.

The Doc gives me hope. This time he hadn’t.

This time I was just afraid. I felt there was someone else hiding in my body. I remembered the shock of reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for the first time. It took a concoction to bring out the devil in the good doctor, but I wonder if you get the same effect with a head wound. Two people in one body. The Doc’s split personality. I needed an exorcist, not a psychologist.

The bus from Paddington was crawling along Oxford Street and I saw there was still bunting up from new year, or maybe even VE Day. But it couldn’t hide the squalor we’d made of our lives. We don’t understand how we could have won the war and ended up so destitute. How we could have booted out old Winston after he saw us through the Blitz. How we could have given so much and got so little in return. How we could match the picture now with the one we’d held in our shaky memories as we marched on Berlin.

As I hefted my little case down the stairs of the bus, wincing as the healing ribs tugged at me, I weighed the options. I could give up now and take to the bottle; it would be easy to play the victim. I’d earned that right, hadn’t I? Or I could stop bellyaching and go find out the truth no matter how awful.

There was no one waiting for me except the moggy. She – I’ve no cause to label it a she, but cats always strike me as female – was waiting, hungry and meowing outside my door. It furled itself round and round my legs until I stroked its thin ribs and let it in, then stuck close to me till I’d filled a saucer with milk. I parked my case down and sat on the bed watching her, listening to the rasp of her tongue as she gulped it down. Someone would miss me.

I took off my coat and emptied my case of its dirty shirt, underwear, pyjamas and shaving kit. I made some tea and took it through to my desk. I wanted to plan my next steps; tackle Liza Caldwell first or Kate Graveney; frontal assault or pincer movement.

I drew up my chair and sat down. I stood up and sat down again. Something felt different. I’d sat here a thousand times and my body knew the angles to within half a degree. I looked down at where the desk legs sat on the lino. The dents were a fraction out of line. My desk had been shifted. I looked round the room.

There wasn’t much to play about with in here. Desk, two chairs, phone, filing cabinet, hat stand and that was it. Had Val been dusting or mopping? Why would you move a desk that weighed a ton?

I walked through to my bedroom and looked around. If the place had been given a going over it had been done by experts. I went back through to the office and sat down. I opened my drawers. Tumbler still in the usual place, notepad, pencil, pen and ink. No bottle. I thought I had a half-full Red Label, but I guess I’d got through it. I couldn’t recall a real session in a while.

I walked over to my filing cabinet to check my client records, such as they were. About twenty of them by now. All neatly ordered alphabetically. A suspicion took me straight to the G section, but Kate Graveney’s was there all right, and my few notes were in the correct order. I began sifting through the rest. As far as I could see, they were all there too.

Then it struck me. My clippings were missing. All the newspaper reports of the murders. I checked each of the drawers but there was no doubt. Val? Had she removed it to stop me dwelling on the horrible subject?

Then I heard footsteps. Ones I knew. They were already on the second floor. I found myself gripping the arms of my chair, conscious of trying to control my heart. Wilson hove into sight and stood panting at my door. He was sucking for air but smiling. I couldn’t see any marks on his face; I couldn’t have hit him hard enough.