"Twelve," the man said. "It was twelve years in August. The seventeenth."
"Really? Time flies. If you don't want me to start taking an interest again, I suggest you get on with leaving." Toreth cocked his head towards Helen. "Or shall I take her off your hands? Take her in to I&I? With your history and the order I've got forty-eight hours before I even need to talk to a Justice rep and after that I can hand her straight over to them without you ever seeing her."
"You — " The man nodded sharply. "Come on, Helen. Time to go home. Helen — it's me. Helen? Can you hear me? We have to go home now."
Finally the woman turned towards him. "Michael?" She frowned, then shook her head. "I have to stay with Val," she said, sounding surprised that there was any doubt.
"He doesn't want to see you."
"Yes he
does
." Helen spun back to Toreth. "Tell him, Val. Don't be angry with me."
Toreth pushed his chair back, catching the table with his thigh as he stood. Cups rattled, coffee spilling onto the table. "Shut up and fuck off. How can I make it any clearer?"
He turned and Helen wailed, recognizing the planned departure before Warrick did. Before Toreth could walk away, she seized his arm. He spun back and struck her hand away, the blow audible over the noise of the park.
"Don't fucking touch me!"
She whimpered, pressing her hand to her mouth. At precisely the same moment, Warrick stood and Michael stepped forwards, both stopping when Toreth held his hand up.
"The banning order entitles me to use reasonable physical force to protect myself," he said to Michael. "You do know that, don't you?"
Michael's lips tightened.
"If she tries that again, I'll break her arm. Sound reasonable to you?"
"If you dare,
I'll
break — "
"No!" Helen stepped between them, facing her husband. "Don't hurt him!"
"Don't — ?" Michael groaned with frustration. "Helen,
please
. Come away. Leave him."
"No!"
She lunged for Toreth again, evading her husband's desperate hands, and Toreth hit her in the face. A single blow with a calculated placment and force that left a sour taste in Warrick's mouth.
Helen went down screaming, her hands to her face, blood already seeping between her fingers. Cafe patrons rose, then hesitated as Toreth pulled his I&I ID from his jacket and held it up. Michael, swearing loudly, seemed momentarily torn between going to his wife's aid and attacking her assailant.
Toreth looked around at the chaos, shook his head, and simply walked away.
By the time he'd reached the edge of the cafe, Michael was already on his knees beside his wife. "Shh. It's going to be all right."
"It's your fault," she sobbed. "You made him angry with me. You made him go."
"Yes. It's my fault. I know. Shh, now."
Warrick stayed where he was, frozen by the contrast between the man's soft, patient voice and the pain and despair on his face.
Slowly Helen calmed, letting Michael gather her against him, then finally help her to her feet and into a chair — not the one Toreth had sat in, although it was the closest. He picked up a handful of paper napkins and held them to her face. The blood from her nose had already stained her chest, clotting in the fabric of her cardigan.
Michael looked up, apparently only then seeing Warrick again.
"Still here?" he asked Warrick.
He wanted to go, but ingrained politeness forced him to ask, "Is there anything I can do?"
For a moment he thought the man might lash out, then he mastered himself. "I need something to clean her up with, and a glass of water."
The cafe management provided both, and thankfully listened to Warrick's assurances that everything was under control and there was no need to call Justice.
Back at the table, he set the bowl and glass down. While he was away, Helen's sleeves had been rolled down again, hiding the scars. She sat in the chair, arms wrapped round her, staring down at the floor, rocking. Warrick caught a low murmur of words, but couldn't make them out. He didn't try very hard.
Without even a glance at Warrick, Michael picked up the glass and offered it to his wife along with two white capsules. "Take them, sweetheart. Please?"
She accepted the tablets, although her hands shook and he had to help her with the water. Some of it spilled anyway, adding to the mess.
Then Michael picked the cloth out of the bowl, wrung it out, and handed it to her. "Do you think you can manage, or do you want me to do it?"
"I'll do it." She took the cloth, holding her head up. "I'm not a child, Michael."
"Of course you aren't." He pulled the bowl to the edge of the table nearest her. "I'm sorry."
Nevertheless, he waited until she began the task before he came over to where Warrick watched.
"Thanks," Michael said. Then, after a pause he added, "I wouldn't have asked except that if I'd left her alone she'd only have gone after the bastard and got herself arrested or lost."
"Don't mention it."
"I'm only surprised he didn't call Justice right away. Or — " Michael looked at him. "Was that your idea?"
Caught out, Warrick nodded before he could stop himself.
"Figures." He looked Warrick up and down and asked, "You don't work for I&I, then?"
"No. I'm a friend." The word sounded odd, and as unsuitable as most other descriptions of their relationship.
"A friend?" Michael laughed, brief and bitter. "I'd never have imagined he'd have one."
At the table, Helen was busily cleaning the blood from her face, using a vanity mirror from her handbag.
"It's plastic," Michael said. "The mirror. Unbreakable. We can't let her have anything sharp. Her arms aren't the worst of it. That's what I was worried about when she disappeared — that she'd find something she could hurt herself with. I didn't think for a moment it would be him."
Warrick looked round, but Toreth was long out of sight. "I really have to go."
"Helen thinks he raped her," Michael said with no change in his tone.
Had he heard right? "Thinks?"
He nodded. "And the irony is, he didn't. All he did —
all
he did — was order the guards to do it. And stand and watch. And make sure that I saw it all. I remember what he said when it started. 'It's up to you. This goes on for as long as you allow it'. When they stopped . . . they didn't stop until I'd convinced him I'd told him everything I knew."
Michael looked round the cafe, a quick glance over the nearby tables. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. "She couldn't tell them herself, because she didn't know anything. I always made sure she never heard anything, never saw anything dangerous. I thought that would be enough to keep her safe."
Apparently oblivious to the conversation, Helen rinsed out the cloth and started sponging her blood-soaked cardigan.
"I let a few friends use a room, that's all," Michael continued, words spilling out like they'd been trapped for too long. "I only went to one or two of the meetings. I didn't even know all their names, but I gave him every one I did know. I sold them out, and now they're dead, or they were sent for re-education and God only knows what happened to them. I did it to save
her
, and I didn't even manage to do that." His voice roughened. "Most of the time she's all right. No. She's never all right, but most of the time she copes. Then she sees someone — someone who looks like him. Or she hears a voice in the street, or on the screen, or sometimes in her fucking
head
, and she loses it all over again."
What could he say? Michael looked away, across the cafe, and Warrick saw the hastily averted faces.
"Not that I'm saying there's anything
wrong
with what they did to her." Warrick couldn't help staring himself at the words, and Michael nodded, his face set grimly. "I&I did what was necessary for the protection of the Administration from criminals and resisters. Exactly like they say in citizenship classes. I'm a good citizen now. Reformed character. You can tell your friend that if he asks. Not that he will — he doesn't care." His voice cracked. "How could he do that to her when he didn't even
care
?"
Without waiting for a response, Michael went to crouch beside his wife.
An incipient hole in the sole of his right shoe caught Warrick's eye, drawing his attention back to the general shabbiness of the couple's clothes. Nothing surprising there, now. A conviction for political crimes would automatically disqualify an applicant from finding work with even semi-respectable corporations. SimTech wouldn't even send a rejection note. It was the only sensible thing to do — any kind of association with a convicted resister was an invitation to trouble.
Michael took the cloth from Helen and dropped it into the bloody water. The worst of the blood was gone, but the whole cafe was watching and they would attract plenty more stares on the way out of the park. Perhaps Helen wouldn't even notice, but Warrick could barely imagine how Michael must feel. He dismissed a brief impulse to offer to pay for a taxi home for them — no doubt Michael would only feel insulted.
And any kind of association . . .
"Come on, love," Michael said. "Time to go home."
"Can't I wait?" she asked wistfully. "Please?"
"He won't come back. Tell her," he added without looking round.
"He's right. Toreth won't come back." That was certainly true.
Helen checked her reflection again before she slowly slid the mirror into her bag. She stood and turned towards Warrick, blinking vaguely, then smiled at him. "It was very nice to meet you. Will you see him again? Soon?"
Warrick glanced at Michael, who merely shrugged. Perhaps there was no right thing to say. "I don't know."
She nodded gravely. "If you do, give him my love."
Warrick had visited six bars on the route between the cafe and Toreth's flat before he realised he was approaching the problem from the wrong angle. Toreth was avoiding him, and he'd probably also guess that Warrick knew that. Therefore he'd take care to be in the least likely place.
Warrick rang the comm at the entrance to Toreth's block of flats for two minutes, getting no response, then let himself into the building. Upstairs, he knocked on the door of the flat half a dozen times with the same result. Well, Toreth had given him the code, so there was no reason not to use it.
Inside he found Toreth sitting on the sofa with a glass in his hand and an open bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him.
"Oh, hello," Toreth said, just as if Warrick hadn't touched the comm or door. He downed the contents of his glass and poured another. "Didn't think I'd be seeing you around for a while. If ever. Nice chat with Michael?"
The bottle was more than two-thirds empty, and Warrick wondered if it had been full when Toreth started. "Toreth — "
"If you've come to tell me how much you hate I&I, or interrogations, or me, you can save your breath and fuck off right now because I don't give a shit what you think about any of those or anything else."
"Will you — "
"She was on a level eight waiver, so was he. The resister group was breaking up, they were the only link in we could lay our hands on." The defensiveness in his voice surprised Warrick. "I just picked the quickest thing to get the information out of them. If the psych profiles had fit, I'd have had them do him. Before they started on her, I explained what a section N interrogation clearance meant. I could probably find the recording somewhere if you'd like to see it."
He drank again, only a mouthful this time. "What else would you like me to say? I have nightmares about it? I'm sorry I did it? Well, I don't and I'm not. That's just the way it is. All inside the waiver, per the P&P. My first big case as a junior para — I got a commendation for the result."
This time Warrick stood and waited.
"I haven't run a lot of section Ns. It's not a very reliable technique. I'll tell you what's different with Helen, though. I fucked her." He looked up and grinned. "The funny thing is, her idiot husband thinks she's making it up, but she isn't. I really fucked her. Not in the interrogation — afterwards. After the trial. Christ, I was stupid. Anyone who's been through any kind of high-level waiver, never mind a section N, and wants to fuck their interrogator afterwards is guaranteed cracked."
Finally Warrick managed to get out a whole sentence. "May I sit down?"
"Do whatever the fuck you like." Toreth glanced over as he sat, then shook his head. "I fucked her once, dumped her, and spent months trying to get the deranged bitch to leave me the fuck alone. Everyone knew what I'd done, so it was a case of 'serves you right'. She couldn't get onto Int-Sec grounds, so she waited outside my flat every bloody day. I had to get taxis everywhere. I moved flats twice, and she found me again; I'm sure one of the bastards at work gave her my address."
He drained his glass and topped it up again although, to Warrick's relief, to only a third full. "Worst part was, I couldn't do a thing about it. Michael was away learning how to be a good boy. Level one re-education — reduced sentence because he co-operated in the end. Spineless tosser. Anyway, there was no one to keep her on a leash. If I'd laid a finger on her, Justice would've had me nailed. Para, ex-Justice interrogator. They'd have loved it. Jesus, it was a nightmare. So fucking embarrassing."
"What happened?"
"When her husband got out he had her locked up, thank God. She came back once or twice. The last time was . . . " He frowned. "Fuck.
That
must be eight, nine years ago. Not long after Sara started working for me, anyway. I know 'cause she eventually dragged a banning order out of Justice — pestered them until it was easier for them to do it than put up with her calling every day. I sent the order to 'em and moved flats again. And there you have it." He raised his glass. "The story of Psycho Helen. Fuck her, and her fucking idealist traitor husband, because I don't give a fuck about either of them."