McAvoy says nothing. He just looks at the man in the chair. The room is warm and bright, but it contains a scent, perhaps a colour to the air, that he finds unsettling. It is as though something has died in this room. He smells decayed humanity. Something nearby is rotting. It is a place of moist corruption and slow, damp death.
For a moment, McAvoy is unsure how to proceed. He doesn’t know what he wants or what he expected. It is clear Hoyer-Wood is not faking his injuries. Before he entered the room he half-entertained the notion of tipping him from the chair and seeing if he put out his hands to break his fall. Now he sees how unnecessary that would be. Hoyer-Wood is a virtual skeleton. His body will not obey his commands. His mind is a prisoner in a bag of bedsores and rotting flesh. McAvoy feels a sudden rush of pity for the man. Tells himself that whatever his crimes, he is suffering punishments far greater than a prison sentence. He reminds himself that only one case was ever built against him and that the rapes he is alleged to have carried out are based on unsigned statements and guesswork. Perhaps the man in the chair was truly a victim. Perhaps he, too, suffered in his youth. Perhaps he acted as he did as a cry for help, and care facilities
such as these are a better place for him than a jail cell. He is glad Pharaoh is not here. She would see the softening of his face.
‘Sebastien,’ he says, quietly. ‘Is it okay to call you Sebastien? Thank you. Sebastien, I’m investigating two murders. Three, I suppose. I don’t know whether you read the newspapers or have much interest in current affairs, but over the past week, three people in the Humberside Police region have been killed. You might remember these people. They saved your life. Philippa Longman gave you CPR the night you almost died. Yvonne Dale applied pressure to your leg wound. Allan Godber was the paramedic who restarted your heart. All of these people have been killed in manners that suggest somebody is not very grateful to them for saving you. I would ask you to think very clearly and carefully. Now, do you have any thoughts that might be of benefit to our enquiries?’
McAvoy licks his lips and breathes out, slowly. Behind him, he hears Evelyn let out a little exclamation of surprise. He wonders how long it will be before she goes and makes a quick phone call to her superiors. When he had rung to arrange to speak with the patient, he had been a little economical with the facts.
Suddenly, Hoyer-Wood begins to spasm. His right arm bounces up and down and his jaw jerks forward so suddenly that McAvoy half expects his neck to crack. His left hand clutches at his own trouser leg and his face suddenly looks pained and wretched. McAvoy turns to Evelyn, unsure whether to intervene. She gives him a quiet shake of the head. This is normal.
At length, the paroxysm subsides. Evelyn crosses to his side. She takes a pad from her pocket.
‘Do you want to talk, Sebastien?’
A noise. A blink.
Evelyn confirms that he has given his assent. She starts to recite the alphabet. After he has picked four letters, McAvoy interrupts.
‘Is he saying he’s sorry?’
The noise Hoyer-Wood makes is clearly a ‘yes’.
‘Sorry they are dead?’
Evelyn looks at him, not understanding. Hoyer-Wood stays silent. Just drools onto his clothes.
McAvoy sighs. He wonders what he can possibly get from this.
‘Sebastien, I spent an hour today with Lewis Caneva. You remember him, yes? Your best friend from university. The man who did you quite a good turn? He tells me that there was a time, back when you were a patient of his, that you were getting better. He tells me you were beginning to walk unaided. You could make yourself understood. I wonder, could you tell me exactly what happened to leave you in this condition you are now in?’
Hoyer-Wood’s face stretches open. The top half of his head looks as though it could come off. McAvoy turns to Evelyn, and she begins the process again.
McAvoy does not want to interrupt. He crosses to the bookshelf. He examines the spines of some of the novels. There are some classics. A few thrillers. Poetry anthologies and biographies of poets. He tries to find anything useful. Any tome on voyeurism or domination. But there is nothing incriminating.
‘Sergeant?’
He turns back. Evelyn is standing with her pad open.
‘He says Lewis is his friend. His wife was too. He misses him. He hopes he remembers what good friends they once were.’
McAvoy waits for more.
‘And?’
Evelyn gets up and walks over to McAvoy. Her voice drops to the conspiratorial whisper in which she had shared the details of his financial circumstances.
‘He says I’m to tell you the rest from what I know of his files,’ she says. Takes a breath. Rushes on. ‘The epilepsy got steadily worse in the years after he left the home that you mentioned. The fits became so severe that even if the mental health authorities left him out, he would not be safe to live alone. Then he had what we call a “catastrophic” stroke. There was an incident involving a vehicle he was a passenger in and the stress of that event was almost certainly the trigger. He came to us shortly afterwards. It was such a shame because he had started writing. He was getting fitter. I think he entertained hopes of being allowed to go back to work some day …’
McAvoy crosses back to Sebastien Hoyer-Wood. It is impossible to read his expression. His face is too inhuman to convey his thoughts. But for an instant, McAvoy could swear that in that gory mask, between the damp eyes and the rictus set of his mouth, he sees a flash of life.
Unable to stop himself, McAvoy reaches out and touches Hoyer-Wood’s computer screen. He takes the sensor that sits on the smooth plastic tray in Hoyer-Wood’s lap, and quickly flicks back to the websites that Hoyer-Wood has been browsing before McAvoy entered the room. He looks at the screen for a moment. Swallows. Drinks in the gaudy colours. The lurid banner adverts. The image of the young girl on all fours, crying as a man in a mask holds her hair and fucks her roughly; another man tied to her bedpost with a belt and clearly begging the masked man to stop. He wonders how long it took Hoyer-Wood to blink out the word ‘cuckold’. Whether his nurses allow this indulgence or if he has found a way to keep it to himself.
McAvoy flicks the screen back to the poetry as Evelyn moves back to his side of the screen.
‘Erm, Sergeant, I’m not one hundred per cent comfortable with this. Would you mind if we took a temporary break while I contacted my superiors? I’m terribly sorry …’
McAvoy does not want to cause a scene or get her into trouble. Nor does he want to leave without understanding who the man in the chair used to be.
‘You said he was writing again?’ he asks, innocently.
‘Yes, yes, some lovely poetry. A diary of sorts, all about his plans to get well again and the battle with his physiotherapy. It was all sent to us when he moved here, though I believe he asked for much of it to be thrown away during one of his darker days. I read a little myself. Very inspirational. He spoke about the staff at the last care home. How he imagined them at home, in their peaceful, pleasant lives. He wanted that. Wanted to share it with them. Very moving. Now, please …’
McAvoy turns his head to Hoyer-Wood. Slowly, softly, he bends down and places his lips by the crippled man’s ear.
‘You’d do it all again, wouldn’t you? You’d get out of that chair and rape women and destroy lives and get off on the suffering. I know you would. Somebody else knows you would too. I think they are punishing those who saved you, Sebastien, because after you were caught, after your life was saved, you ruined somebody else’s life too. They can’t punish you, can they? What’s to punish? There’s nothing left of you. So they’re taking out their rage on the people who kept you in the world. Whose life did you destroy last, Sebastien? Whose?’
McAvoy raises his head. Watches the brown of his own eyes swim in the blue irises of the man in the chair.
Slowly, as though using every ounce of his strength, Hoyer-Wood says Evelyn’s name. She crosses to his side. Dutifully takes out her pen. Begins the alphabet afresh.
A moment later, McAvoy stomps from the room, moving as fast as he can. Were he to stay, he would not be able to stop any violence he began.
In Sebastien Hoyer-Wood’s room, Evelyn looks quizzically at the letters on her pad. Reads again what he has told her in grunts and blinks.
‘Tell me about your wife.’
*
Adam Downey is on his knees, spitting saliva and bile into the green water of the toilet bowl. He can taste blood. Can taste the three slurps of tea that he had managed for breakfast. He can smell the thick mucus that seems to have formed a wall in his sinuses behind his bruised nose.
He snarls as he wipes his mouth. Sneers at his own distorted reflection in the water of the toilet bowl. The act of retching has made his bruised ribs throb with pain and his already aching jaw now feels as though it has been opened with a car jack.
Fucking Colin Ray!
He pushes himself back from the toilet. Rinses his mouth and splashes water on his face. He looks at his reflection in the tiny mirror above the sink. He has cuts and bruises to his handsome face and a big scab on one elbow. The bandages and padding that cover the lacerations to his back form a slight bump in the outline of his T-shirt, but he doesn’t look as bad as he feels. He uses his thumb to check, one more time, that none of his teeth are wobbly, then opens the door.
The smell of the hospital ward offends his nostrils, so his
actions are quick. He crosses to the bed where he has been a patient these last couple of days. He picks up his copy of his release paperwork, feeling a half-smile crease his face. He knew he’d get bail somehow. He just didn’t expect to have to get his head kicked in to achieve it. Still, he trusts that his new employers had no alternative. He’s just grateful they kept their promises. He always intended to keep his.
Downey takes another quick look at the room. He’s pleased to be leaving. He doesn’t like being cooped up, and the succession of uniformed constables who kept him company were not great conversationalists. Anyway, he hasn’t really wanted to talk. His mind has been elsewhere. On getting out. On getting paid. On getting
her
.
The last uniformed constable has gone. Downey is a free man, for now. He can walk out the door and do what the fuck he likes. And he knows exactly what he’d like to do.
Gingerly, painfully, but refusing to yield to his injuries, he gets himself ready. The bin liner that contained the possessions he had brought with him from the custody suite is lying on the bed. The T-shirt he was wearing when they brought him in to A&E was too ragged and bloody to be kept, but he slips into the same jeans he had on when Colin Ray beat the shit out of him. The T-shirt he is wearing was torn fresh from a cellophane packet. It had been inside the bin-liner. He doesn’t know if it is a present from somebody. Perhaps it is some kind of apology from the police for what happened to him. If it is, they can fuck off. He doesn’t wear plain T-shirts. He likes a label.
Downey stands in the doorway to his hospital room. He takes a breath.
Young, fit and energetic, Downey would normally be able to walk the mile and a half to his Victoria Dock home, but he’s
feeling a bit banged up and doesn’t fancy walking through the city centre wearing this T-shirt. He pulls out his phone to call a taxi. There’s probably a rank of them somewhere around here, or a pay phone with a free link to a local firm, but Downey reckons there’s no point running a taxi firm if you can’t get yourself a lift. Besides, it will be nice to give the drivers a real job for a change. He might request Hakan. The lad will have been shitting himself these past few days and it will be better all round if his punishment comes quickly.
He opens his phone. He’s surprised to find that it’s already ringing. The number has been withheld.
Downey feels a tongue of nausea licking the inside of his throat. He knows himself to be able to hold his own in a fight, but his confidence has taken a little knock and he’s weak as a kitten. If the call is from the man he thinks it’s from, he knows he needs all his faculties, and right now, he’s not himself. He’s had his arse kicked twice in the past few days – once by an old bloke and once by a girl. It’s the girl who’s hurt him most. She took his money. Got him caught. Acted like he was a nobody. Oh, he has such plans …
‘Hello,’ he says, focusing on the call.
‘Mr Downey,’ comes a familiar voice. ‘I hope you are well.’
Downey closes his eyes. He leans against a circular column that supports the front of the hospital, pleased to be outside. He looks around him. There are people in wheelchairs, people holding drips. On the grass, beyond the little shop, is an area where patients and visitors alike sit and smoke; some holding cigarettes in hands that are wrapped in bandages or skewered by a cannula. A husband and wife pass a cigarette between them. She’s in a pink dressing gown, both eyes black. He’s in jeans and
a Man United shirt and his right hand is in plaster. To his left, Downey sees the maternity hospital. New life. New hopes. New customers, some day.
The vista of real life suddenly makes his head reel. He doesn’t want to be a part of it. Of
them
. He’s above it all. He suddenly reminds himself who he is. What he had to do to prove himself to these men. The voice at the other end of the line scares him. But he has earned their respect and they owe him a favour. He tells himself to get it together.
‘I’ve been better,’ he says, trying to sound casual. ‘But fresh air feels nice.’
‘Excellent. I can assure you that we had several stratagems for securing your release. The one that was successful came at a high price to your well-being. I trust that when the physical wounds heal, no festering resentment will remain?’
Downey finds himself smiling. He likes how this man talks. He wishes he could picture him.
‘I’m out, that’s what matters.’
‘A pragmatic and sensible approach, Mr Downey. You repay our faith in you.’
There is a pause. Downey expects more, but nothing comes. Nervous again, he fills the silence himself.