Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

‘She sent Harry out. Said she wanted to tackle Billy alone. Harry walked the streets, had a beer or two, stayed away like his mother asked him for two hours or more before he returned to their little house out the back of town.’

Frank Harvey paused and took an even longer drag of his beer. He might start off slowly, but he was a grand story-teller. If he was deliberately trying to build up dramatic effect then he succeeded admirably, and the finale to his tale was no anticlimax. ‘Everything was quiet. Harry assumed his father had taken off on a bar crawl, or had simply drugged himself to oblivion. The kitchen door was unlocked and he stepped inside. There were no lights on. He slid on something slippery. He fumbled for the light switch and turned it on.

‘His mother was lying on the floor at his feet in a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut and her head very nearly severed from her body.

‘Behind her in the open doorway Harry could see a pair of feet and legs dangling. Later, much later, he said he knew what he was going to see before he got there. His father had hanged himself from the banisters.’

I don’t know what I had expected. Nothing like this. I gripped the edge of the bar so tightly that my fingertips turned white.

I heard Mariette say, ‘Oh, my God!’

Frank Harvey was watching me closely. ‘Do you want me to go on?’ he asked evenly.

I nodded. It was all I could manage.

He began to speak again. ‘At the time, Harry didn’t have anything to say. I was the police doctor then, as well as being the family doctor. It was some crime scene, I can tell you. And young Harry just couldn’t find any words.

‘In fact, the boy went into severe shock. He didn’t speak for three months. He blamed himself, you see, always blamed himself for not making his mother run off with him.’ Frank Harvey sighed deeply. ‘Way I see it, young Harry’s been running from something or other ever since.’

Carl had never told me any of it. I found that hard to take. In a peculiar way I felt a certain sense of guilt, too. I had always been so wrapped up in my own problems, my own past. Maybe it was because of this that Carl had never felt he could confide in me.

It was a truly horrific story and explained so much about Carl. I dreaded to think what he must have gone through when he found Robert lying in a pool of blood – exactly the way he had found his own mother. Then there was his daughter’s horrific death, in an accident for which he was responsible.

I bought Frank Harvey another beer and he carried on with the story.

It seemed that Doctor Harvey was actually a qualified clinical psychiatrist but he just hadn’t been cut out for a big-time specialisation. ‘Too much Key West in my blood,’ he said with a chuckle rasping hoarse from the effects of years of cigarette smoking, I reckoned. He accepted a bourbon chaser, lit up another Marlboro, passed one to Mariette, coughed some more and carried on talking, telling us how something unfightable had drawn him back to practise general medicine in his home town.

‘Guess I’m just another Keys bar bum. Only difference between me and all the others is that I used to keep the old doctor’s bag behind the bar.’

I reckoned he was probably not doing himself justice. Through the haze of cigarette smoke his eyes blazed clever and clear, perhaps surprisingly so in view of his obvious love of beer and whiskey.

The case of Harry Mendleson, my Carl, had fascinated him, he explained. ‘Guess I sometimes used to hanker after what might have been. Trying to sort young Harry out did me as much good as it did him, I reckon, maybe more. I became his therapist, unofficially, but that’s what it was. Mind you, if Harry had heard it called that he’d probably have refused to have anything to do with me.

‘He abandoned his art college, simply didn’t go back, wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t talk at all. He was sick, no doubt about that. I took him under my wing, I suppose, even put him up for a bit. The house his parents lived in was rented, of course, and he couldn’t afford the rent. About a fortnight after the tragedy I went round there and the landlord had had him out already. Took me two days to find the boy. He was sleeping rough under the pier. Didn’t look like he’d eaten or drunk a thing in days. I took him home with me, fed him chicken and fries, and he bolted it down like he was starving. Still didn’t speak, though. I installed him in the spare room, got my books out and went to work. Every spare minute I had I talked to him, but it was three months before I coaxed a word out of him.’

I was moved by the image of Carl being shocked into silence. After all, the same thing had happened to me as a child, although I had been so young that I did not remember it, only what Gran had later told me.

‘Now three months doesn’t sound much, but it’s some long time for a man not to speak, believe me,’ Frank Harvey continued. ‘Then, when he did start to talk, well, it was like unstopping a blocked pipe in your sink. The words gushed out. Guilt and blame, that was the sum of it, really. The kid had nothing to be guilty about, nothing to blame himself for. He tried to do his best, took on more than any kid his age I ever knew, but he didn’t see it that way. If he’d done something different, if he’d taken his mother away straight off, or if he’d told his father instead of leaving that to her, it would never have happened. He could have prevented it. That’s what he kept saying.

‘Took almost a year before he was halfways functioning properly again. He never did go back to college but I had this old pal who ran an ad agency up in Largo – tourist stuff for the hotels and all. He owed me. I sent him Harry. In spite of everything the boy did good and he worked there till all his other troubles started.’

Frank Harvey sighed deeply and drank deeply. I bought him another bourbon and waited.

‘More than his share of troubles, no doubt about that. And him always just wanting to look after people, to protect them.’

I spoke then. ‘That was it from the beginning, with me. I needed protecting and there he was, just longing to protect me.’

‘It is a sickness, you know,’ went on Frank Harvey. ‘Carl became anankastic. I’ve always been quite sure of that. It’s an extreme personality disorder, associated with excessive controlling behaviour. His overwhelming desire to protect those he loves is all part of it. You’ve probably heard of Othello syndrome, that’s excessive jealousy. Then there’s Oedipus, obsession with your mother, generally sexual. Those are the more high-profile conditions. If you’re anankastic you probably have a bit of both of those in you too.’

I felt a shiver down my spine. I had loved Carl so and there was no doubt that he had loved me. If only I had realised how flawed he had been, maybe I would have been able to help him.

Frank Harvey continued to talk. ‘An anankastic is obsessive in his personal habits as well, meticulously tidy, scrupulously clean and insisting on those standards all around him. He’s a very ordered person, likes routine, always has to be the one to check the house is locked up at night, would never leave a single dish in the sink when he goes to bed. That kind of thing. And of course, he’d want to know where the person he loved was and exactly what she was doing every minute of the day and night. Does that sound like the man you knew?’

I nodded bleakly. It all flashed through my mind, from how he liked to wash himself and me after sex, to how scrupulously he kept his paintbox and catalogued his work, and above all how he had always taken over my entire life.

‘In lay terms an anankastic is an extreme control freak,’ Frank Harvey continued. ‘His motives are nearly always good. Harry’s almost certainly are. He just wants to take care of those he loves, that’s how he sees it.’