The Torment of Others. Val McDermid

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      She’d barely settled behind her desk when Don Merrick appeared in the doorway carrying a file. ‘A word, ma’am?’

      Carol gestured towards the visitor’s chair with her head. Don sat down, holding the file to his chest. Tim Golding,’ he said.

      ‘I hear you, Don. Hand it over.’

      He pulled it even closer to him. ‘It’s just that…’

      ‘I know. If anybody’s going to poke their nose into your case, you’d rather it was me than one of the new faces.’ Carol reached a hand out.

      Reluctantly, Don shifted forward in his seat and extended the file towards her. ‘We couldn’t have done more,’ he said. ‘We just kept hitting brick walls. We couldn’t even give Tony Hill enough to go on to make a profile worthwhile. He said himself it was a waste of resources. But I couldn’t think of anything else to try. That’s why it’s ended up as a cold case this early on.’

      ‘I wondered about that. It seems very soon to consign it to the back burner.’

      Don sighed. There just wasn’t anywhere else for us to go with it. We’ve still got a couple of DCs keeping an eye on it, feeding the press whenever they decide to take another crack at it. But nothing active’s happened for at least a month.’ Don’s misery was written all over him, from the hangdog eyes to the slump of his shoulders.

      It provoked a sympathetic echo in Carol. ‘Leave it with me, Don. I don’t expect I’ll see anything you’ve missed.’

      He got to his feet, a rueful look on his face. Thing is, ma’am, I remember when I was working the case that I wished you were around. Just so I could run it past you. You always had the knack of seeing things from a different angle.’

      ‘What is it they say, Don? Don’t wish too hard for what you want because you might get it.’

      Tony Hill leaned forward and gazed intently through the observation window. A neat, balding man sat folded in the chair bolted to the floor. He looked somewhere in the region of fifty, though his placid expression went some way towards erasing the lines etched into his face. For a fleeting, incomprehensible moment, Tony thought of a child’s lollipop, tightly wrapped in cellophane, Sellotape wrapped around the stick.

      His stillness was preternatural. Most of the patients Tony encountered had difficulty with immobility, never mind tranquillity. They twitched, they fidgeted, they chain-smoked, they fiddled with their clothes. But this man–he checked the notes–this Tom Storey had an almost Zen-like quality. Tony glanced through the notes again, refreshing his memory from the previous evening’s reading. He shook his head, fighting his anger at the stupidity of some of his medical colleagues. Then he closed the folder and headed for the interview room.

      He felt the spring in his step, even in that short journey. Bradfield Moor Secure Hospital wasn’t generally associated in people’s minds with the notion of contentment, but that was precisely what it had given Tony for the first time in months. He was back in the field, back in the world of messy heads, back where he belonged. In spite of his constant efforts to assume a series of masks that would help him blend in, Tony knew he was an outsider in the world beyond the grim institutional walls of Bradfield Moor. It was a feeling he did not care to examine too closely; it said things about him that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. But it was impossible to deny that the exercise of empathy was what gave meaning to his days. There was nothing quite like that moment when the tumblers of someone else’s brain clicked into place for him and allowed him to penetrate the knotted logic of another mind. Really, truly, nothing.

      He pushed open the door to the interview room and sat down opposite his latest challenge. Tom Storey remained immobile, only his eyes shifting to connect with Tony. In his right hand, he cradled a heavily bandaged stump where his left hand had been until a few days previously. Tony leaned forward and arranged his face into an expression of sympathy. I’m Tony Hill. I’m sorry for your loss.’

      Storey’s eyes widened in surprise. Then he gave a small snort. ‘My hand or my kids?’ he said sourly.

      ‘Your son and your daughter,’ Tony said. ‘I imagine the hand feels like a blessing.’

      Storey said nothing.

      ‘Alien Hand Syndrome,’ Tony said. ‘First recorded in 1908. A gift for horror-film scriptwriters: 1924, The Hands of Orlac- Conrad Veidt played a classical pianist who had the hands of a killer grafted on after his were destroyed in a train accident; 1946, The Beast with Five Fingers, another pianist; 1987, Evil Dead II– the hero takes a chainsaw to his possessed hand to stop it attacking him. Cheap thrills all round. But it’s not so thrilling when you’re the one with the hand, is it? Because when you try to explain what it feels like, nobody really takes you seriously. Nobody took you seriously, did they, Tom?’

      Storey shifted in his seat but remained silent and apparently composed.

      ‘The GP gave you some tranquillizers. Stress, that’s what he said, right?’

      Storey inclined his head slightly.

      Tony smiled, encouraging. They didn’t work, did they? Just made you feel sleepy and out of it. And with a hand like yours, you couldn’t afford to relax your vigilance, could you? Because there was no telling what might happen then. How was it for you, Tom? Did you wake up in the night struggling for breath because the hand was round your throat? Did it smash plates over your head? Stop you from putting food in your mouth?’ Tony’s questioning was gentle, his voice sympathetic.

      Storey cleared his throat. ‘It threw things. We’d all be sitting eating breakfast, and I’d pick up the teapot and throw it at my wife. Or we’d be out in the garden and the next thing I’d know, I’d be picking up stones from the rockery and throwing them at the kids.’ He leaned back in his chair, apparently exhausted from the effort of speech.

      ‘I can imagine how frightening that must have been. How did your wife react?’

      Storey closed his eyes. ‘She was going to leave me. Take the kids with her and never come back.’

      ‘And you love your kids. That’s a hell of a dilemma for you. You’ve nothing to fight back with. Life without your kids, it’s not worth living. But life with your kids places them in constant danger because you can’t stop the hand doing what it wants. There’s no easy answer.’ Tony paused and Storey opened his eyes again. ‘You must have been in complete turmoil.’

      ‘Why are you making excuses for me? I’m a monster. I killed my children, that’s the worst thing anybody can do. They should have let me bleed to death, not saved me. I deserve to be dead.’ Storey’s words tumbled over each other.

      ‘You’re not a monster,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t think your kids are the only victims here. We’re going to run some physical tests. Tom, I think you may be suffering from a brain tumour. You see, your brain comes in two halves. Messages from one part reach the other across a sort of bridge called the corpus callosum. When that’s damaged, your right hand literally doesn’t know what your left hand is doing. And that’s a terrible thing to live with. I can’t blame you for being driven to the point where you thought killing your children was the only way to keep them safe from whatever you might do to them.’

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