Giles Blunt - The Fields of Grief

‘There’s a common saying in psychotherapy: It has to get worse before it gets better.’

‘Yeah. Catherine told me that, too.’

‘Not that one ever intends to make a patient feel worse,’ Dr Bell said. His hands toyed with a brass object on his desk. It looked like a miniature steam engine. ‘But we all build up defences against certain truths about ourselves or our situations – against reality, essentially – and therapy provides a place where it’s safe to dismantle those defences. The patient does the dismantling, not the therapist, but the process is bound to be painful nevertheless.’

‘Luckily, I’m not here as a patient. I just wanted to ask you about those cards. I realize you’re not a profiler …’

‘No forensic experience at all, I’m afraid.’

‘That’s all right – this isn’t an official investigation. But I was hoping you would help by giving me your opinion on what kind of person would write these cards. They were mailed from two different locations, but they were printed by the same machine.’

‘What exactly is it that is under investigation – officially or otherwise?’

‘Catherine’s d—’ Cardinal’s breath caught on the word. He still could not say that word about Catherine, even though it was more than a week now. ‘Catherine.’

‘You mean you don’t believe she killed herself?’

‘The coroner has made a finding of suicide, and my colleagues down at the station agree. Personally, I find it a little harder to accept, though you’ll probably tell me that’s just my defence.’

‘Oh, no, I would never say it was just a defence. I have great respect for defences, Detective. They’re what get us through the day, not to mention the night. Nor would I second-guess your expertise on matters of homicide. My own experience of Catherine makes me think it indeed highly likely she killed herself, but if evidence were to show otherwise, I would not try to argue black is white. Certainly a finding of accidental death would be much easier for me to accept. But you’re not thinking it was an accident, are you?’

‘No.’

‘You’re thinking she was killed. And that whoever wrote these nasty cards was behind the killing.’

‘Let’s just say I’m pursuing several lines of inquiry at the moment. I’d be willing to pay you – I should have said that right away.’

‘Oh, no, no. I couldn’t possibly accept payment. This is not my field. I’m happy to give you my opinion, off the record, but to accept payment would imply a commercial service offered with confidence. It most assuredly is not.’ Dr Bell smiled, eyes disappearing for a moment in fur. ‘That’s a considerable caveat. Do you still wish me to proceed?’

‘If you would.’

Dr Bell rolled his shoulders and shook his head. If you were going to have tics, Cardinal supposed, they weren’t the worst ones to have. The doctor picked up the first card and adjusted his glasses. He swivelled slightly in his chair, bringing the card into the light. Then he went still, a figure in a painting.

‘All right,’ he said, after some time. ‘First of all, what is the nature of someone who writes a note like this? Essentially, you’ve got someone who is sneering at you.’

‘A friend of mine used the same word.’

‘And the author is not even sneering at you in person, he’s doing it behind your back. Or she. Rather in the way of a child who calls someone names from a safe distance. He knows you can’t retaliate. It’s a cowardly, fearful sort of attack.

‘Whereas killing someone – killing someone is very personal and face to face. Usually. To link these cards with Catherine’s possible murder, you must assume the motive in both cases is the same: the goal is to hurt you , and Catherine was just a means to that end. Somehow, in order to hurt you , the killer first got hold of her suicide note – unless you’re thinking it’s not in fact her handwriting. Are you in doubt about the handwriting?’

‘For now, we’ll assume it’s genuine.’

‘Which would mean someone got hold of her suicide note. How could that be?’

‘I don’t know – at least, not yet. Please go on.’

‘He intends to hurt you by hurting her, perhaps follows her for a time. Possibly a good long time. Possibly snoops through her things and finds a suicide note she wrote on a particularly bad day. Possibly even finds it after she discarded it, who knows? In any case, he follows her on this night when she’s quite alone and pushes her off the roof, leaving the note behind to throw everyone off the scent. If that is in fact what happened, it seems to me the person capable of going through with all that – the stalking, the waiting, and then the final violence itself – is not the sort of shrinking violet who’s going to bother writing anonymous squibs. Am I making sense so far?’

‘I wish OPP Behavioural Science was this fast,’ Cardinal said. ‘Keep going.’

‘I would say in the case of the card writer you’re looking for someone who knows you. And I emphasize you as opposed to Catherine. He’s gone to the trouble of hiding his handwriting. And you say he’s mailed the cards from two different locations.’ Dr Bell sank back into his chair, rocking it with one foot propped on the coffee table, and resumed, ‘I’d say this is going to be someone nervous and withdrawn. Someone who feels himself – or herself – a failure. Almost certainly unemployed. Self-esteem deep in the negative zone. Also – to judge by the first card – someone who has suffered a great loss for which you are to blame. I imagine you’ve already considered the possibility, Detective, that this is someone you nicked?’

‘Mm,’ Cardinal said. ‘And there are a lot of those.’

‘Yes, but that “How does it feel?” That rings with a very specific intent, don’t you find? Someone steps on your foot, so you stomp on his. How does it feel? How do you like it? My point being, it’s not just someone you’ve imprisoned, but perhaps someone who lost his wife as a result of that imprisonment.’

‘We don’t keep statistics, but there’s probably a lot of those too. Marriages don’t tend to thrive on imprisonment.’

‘Nor on hospitalization, though I note your own admirable exception to this.’

Cardinal wanted to say, ‘I did my best, obviously it wasn’t enough,’ but grief closed its bony hand around his throat. He opened his briefcase and pulled out Catherine’s suicide note, the original encased in plastic.

Once again Dr Bell turned toward the window light. A few pensive scratchings among his sandy and grey curls, and then he went still again.

After a few moments he said, ‘That must have been painful to read.’

‘How does it read to you, Doctor? Does it sound genuine?’

‘Ah. So you do have doubts about the handwriting?’

‘Just tell me how it sounds to you, if you would.’

‘It reads exactly like Catherine. A deeply sad woman, often hopeless, but also capable of great love. I think it was that love that kept her going through depressions that by all rights should have proved lethal years earlier. Her main concern, and I heard this from her over and over again, was how it would affect you – apparently even at the end.’

‘If it was the end,’ Cardinal said.

Larry Burke was new in CID. He’d only been out of uniform a few months, in fact, and he very much wanted to make a good impression on his colleagues. He even worried that stopping into the Country Style at the top of Algonquin for a quiet lunch might be viewed as a complete cliché, the cop in the donut shop. But the truth was he didn’t give a damn about donuts, he just liked Country Style coffee. And they were making a decent sandwich these days, when you got down to it, so why shouldn’t he eat where he liked?