Anya Lipska - A Devil Under the Skin

The last time he’d seen her, in a Walthamstow pub, she’d been recovering from the knifing, an attack that he still felt responsible for. He remembered sensing a change in her then, a feeling that beneath her usual tough girl bravado she was as raw as a freshly skinned blister.

‘Perhaps I can turn the question around. Why do you think you’re here?’ The sunlight streaming through the window bounced off the letterbox specs of the lady shrink, making it impossible for PC Natalie Kershaw to make out the expression in her eyes.

Kershaw picked at a loose thread that had escaped the inside seam of her jacket sleeve. ‘Because I shot a paranoid schizophrenic who was about to disembowel me on Leytonstone High Street.’

The shrink didn’t respond, but as Kershaw was already learning, Pamela – or was it Paula ? – had the disconcerting ability to fill even her silences with meaning. She risked a sideways glance at the wall clock: barely twenty minutes into her first session of psych assessment and already she felt like chewing her own arm off. In the eleven months since she’d shot Kyle Furnell, every tiny detail of her actions on that day had already been picked apart, first by internal investigators, then by counsel at the inquest – and now she had to go through it all over again. She swallowed a sigh, hearing again her old Sarge and confidant, DS ‘Streaky’ Bacon, telling her to play the game and get it over with so she could get back to operational duties.

‘I totally understand it’s a big deal when somebody gets shot,’ said Kershaw, trying for a more conciliatory tone. ‘But like I told everyone from the start, when I pulled the trigger, I honestly believed there was an immediate threat to my life.’

Pamela/Paula bestowed a half-smile of what could be encouragement but still said nothing.

Christ on a bike.

‘The inquest did exonerate me,’ Kershaw went on, feeling sweat prickle on her scalp – it was stifling in here . ‘The coroner said it was wholly understandable, in the circumstances, for me to shoot him.’ She remembered his summing-up, and how he’d described Furnell as a ‘profoundly disturbed young man’. He’d gone on to remind the jury what Furnell had ingested that day, in the hours leading up to his fateful realisation that the staff at Leytonstone Maccy D’s were secret members of a cult bent on eliminating the citizens of E11 – presumably by poisoning their Chicken McNuggets. The list had included Temazepam, Ketamine, a four-pack of Special Brew and a bottle of Night Nurse, the last item prompting a few titters from the public benches. On hearing the coroner’s words, a great wave of relief had engulfed Kershaw as she sensed which way the verdict would go.

When she’d watched the TV coverage of the inquest at home that night, well on her way through the evening’s first bottle of red wine, it had stirred more complex emotions. The family’s solicitor – all sharp suit and professional outrage – did most of the talking on the court steps after the verdict, but it was the figure standing alongside him whom Kershaw’s eyes kept being drawn back to. Furnell’s mum .

Tanya Furnell was a shapeless lump of a woman in a shabby fake fur jacket with badly dyed red hair. She looked nearer fifty than her actual age of thirty-eight – and yet she held herself ramrod-straight on those steps, her expression defiant yet dignified. When the reporter asked for her response to the verdict, she said that all she’d ever wanted was some word of regret from the Met about the way her son had died. Dream on , Kershaw had thought, not unsympathetically. That just wasn’t gonna happen – not after the Met had won the case.

Almost a year on, Kershaw could barely remember the shooting itself beyond a series of blurred freeze-frame images, but for some reason, the look on Tanya Furnell’s face in the news report – that had burned itself indelibly into her memory.

She pulled at the errant thread on her sleeve again, before snapping it clean off.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable taking your jacket off?’ asked the shrink.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Kershaw bared her teeth in a facsimile of a grin. She’d never been on the wrong end of an interrogation before and she wasn’t enjoying the experience.

The therapist checked something in the file she had open on her knee. ‘The coroner did also say, didn’t he, that a more experienced officer would probably have reached for their Taser, rather than the, um …’

‘Glock 17.’

Oops . Now she was looking at Kershaw like she just said something really interesting.

‘And the other weapon you were carrying?’

‘A Heckler and Koch MP5.’

‘How would you describe that to a lay person?’

Kershaw shrugged, looked at the floor. ‘It’s a 9mm semi-automatic carbine, set to single fire.’

‘Carrying lethal weapons like that, I’d imagine it must give you a great feeling of power?’

‘Not really. It’s not like we go out planning to use them.’

The shrink’s face was arranged in a caring expression but behind the glasses, her gaze was unblinking. ‘It would be understandable though, to imagine shooting someone who was about to do you great harm.’

‘Well I never have,’ she lied.

‘Let’s go back a bit, to when you first applied to become an Authorised Firearms Officer.’ Pamela/Paula looked down at the file on her lap. ‘I’m sure it must have crossed your mind that being armed might have saved you from the very serious assault you’d suffered, just a few months earlier?’

Kershaw froze, her throat tightening. The cry of a seagull. The sight of the Thames far below, through a plate glass window. A bloody handprint on white paint. Mentally batting away the other images, she gripped the armrests of her chair, fighting the sudden swoop of vertigo.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ she said, abandoning all efforts to keep the anger out of her voice. ‘It had nothing to do with my decision to go into SCO19!’

Paula – yes, Paula, that was her name – fell silent again, but her gaze flickered down, just for a millisecond. Kershaw realised that her right hand had gone to her side, and was cradling the spot where she’d been stabbed. Feeling the warmth of her skin through her shirt, she pictured the line of stitches: they looked like the backbone of a swordfish, fading to silver now but still there to greet her every time she caught an unwitting glimpse of herself naked in the mirror. The place where her spleen had once nestled, thinking itself safe behind the bones of her ribcage; the place where sometimes she’d swear she could still feel an … absence.

She remembered what Streaky had drummed into her, years ago when she’d started in CID, his golden rule when interrogating suspects. Take control.

She cleared her throat. ‘If I could ask a question?’

Paula nodded.

‘I appreciate that it’s important to assess an AFO after there’s been … a fatal shooting,’ she said, choosing her words uber-carefully, ‘but I’d be really grateful if you could give me an idea of how long you expect … all this to take? It’s just, well, it cost a shedload of taxpayers’ money to train me up as a firearms officer and I think it’s my responsibility to get back to work as quickly as possible.’

Paula gave her a long, intent look. ‘I think your sense of responsibility is to be admired.’ Kershaw scanned her expression, but couldn’t find any sarcasm there. ‘You’re an intelligent woman, Natalie, so I’ll tell you frankly what I think. In my view, it was … unusual, to say the least, that you were accepted for firearms training so soon after suffering such a serious assault. It makes the process we have to go through now a more complex and potentially lengthy one. Because it’s my responsibility to ensure that officers are not returned to firearms duty unless I am one hundred per cent sure it is safe and prudent to do so.’