Sharp scratch, p.20
Sharp Scratch, page 20
He opened his desk drawer and pushed a schedule in front of her. Then he tipped his chair back and meditatively lit his cigarillo from a leather desk lighter.
‘I want you to oversee the testing and make sure the results are ready by one o’clock at the latest. Get the printouts faxed over from your contact at Oxford. It looks better than handwritten. Then I’ll give the feedback to the panel.’
It felt like an insult. ‘I thought I was giving the feedback? I’m planning to brief the panel to investigate any mismatches in the interviews.’
He visibly stiffened. ‘No. Only I speak to the panel.’
He wasn’t going to be persuaded. In her annoyance she glimpsed an opportunity. ‘But we also need to follow the Psychological Society’s guidelines. I’m the only one trained in testing. So I need to, well – supervise you.’
He looked at his watch. ‘You really think so?’
‘I’ll send you a test to complete. Then I’ll run through your results with you.’
There was a sudden crack in Harvey’s smooth demeanour. His ice-coloured eyes struck hers with some force.
‘Not remotely appropriate. Given our difference in status.’ He continued in a half-humorous, half-chastising manner. ‘I can save us both precious time by telling you the results of the dozens of tests I’ve already taken. I’m a rare character in the personnel profession because I actually like people. I want them to enjoy their work. And I can read people’s motives very easily without tests. You, for instance, Lorraine, have taken your eye off the target. You need to step back in line.’
After a puff at his cigarillo he asked, ‘What else would you need to know? Whether I should have applied for the general manager job, perhaps?’
He chuckled and leant back, his eyelids half closed.
‘Well, I’d enjoy ordering those smug doctors back from their private practices to attend their NHS clinics. But no, the only ambition I have left is to enjoy my retirement and tackle the best golf courses in Britain.’
Finally, he stretched his arms and clasped the back of his head, in what she knew was a fiercely domineering piece of body language. ‘But if it makes you happy, send a test over.’ His sarcasm rang out in warning.
‘Great,’ she said, trying to sound more cheerful than she felt.
‘I’ll see you on Monday at nine o’clock sharp. It’s the biggest day of your career. Don’t let anything else go wrong.’
The mood at band rehearsal that night was one that Lorraine was getting used to since Rikki’s death: a mix of febrile excitement mixed with po-faced solemnity when anyone remembered to look sad. In honour of Rikki, Lily produced a bottle of Black Tower and some tea-stained mugs. Leaving their instruments untouched, they huddled around the electric bars of the portable heater and shared accounts of their police interviews. Lorraine told them what she knew: that Rikki had turned up at the hospital sometime before half past midnight and was later discovered dead from a lethal dose of propofol.
‘After the gig I thought you and that copper might have been following him,’ Lily said, suddenly suspicious.
‘No. Did either of you keep an eye on him?’
Dale looked to Lily for back-up. ‘We had a drink and then I realised he’d disappeared.’
Lily nodded. ‘Asked Fred to load his kit and said he had to go.’
They all stared at the silent drum kit heaped in a corner. Dale sighed noisily. ‘You know what I don’t get? Why hasn’t the band been mentioned on the news? I thought at least people might get to hear about us.’
Lorraine explained. ‘It’s a police inquiry. They keep certain facts hidden so they can weed out the time-wasters.’
Dale had put blue streaks in her hair and was momentarily checking out her reflection in the benighted window. Now she flashed a hard look at Lorraine and said, ‘So they’re holding back the facts? Like a conspiracy?’
‘Yeah, I suppose you would think that,’ she said, too weary to retaliate. The wine was even worse than the usual multi-squeezed teabags but she took a restorative gulp and then reached for her bag.
‘Have either of you seen this before?’ She pulled out the photo of young Rikki with his care team.
Lily studied it, then shook her head. ‘No. But he told me about it. How he was abandoned by his parents and, you know, really suffered.’ The unexpected crack in Lily’s voice made her own throat burn too. Poor Rikki, he’d had a pretty shitty time of it.
‘Did he tell you who those people were?’ Lorraine asked.
‘No. But he did tell me that the person he knew from the old days – he’d talked to them.’
‘Someone at the Memorial who knew him as a child?’
‘Suppose so.’
Dale picked up the photo and squinted at it. ‘He said he’d once had a photo of himself printed in a nursing magazine or something.’
Lorraine felt a quickening of interest. ‘So it could be this one?’
Dale shrugged, then said, ‘Hey, I’ve just remembered. Rikki put his bag in the drums before he left.’
She started poking around the drum kit, then froze and turned to Lorraine. ‘I suppose you’ll be ringing 999 if we find anything? Squealing to that cop you hang out with.’
‘Give me a break, will you? I just want to find out who did this to Rikki.’
‘Oh yeah? Rikki would still be alive if you hadn’t made him work for you.’
Lorraine folded her arms tight to stop herself from slapping the girl. ‘I think you’ve forgotten two things. One. He told lies all over his application form. Two. I would never ever have given him that job.’
Thankfully Lily distracted them both by pulling Rikki’s Army and Navy bag out from the bass drum and swinging it aloft. They unpacked the contents and spread them across the top of an amp: another copy of the same photo, some spare drumsticks, a Manchester A to Z, a scraggy scarf and fingerless knitted gloves, some Opal Fruits and a bottle of Valium. There was an EP too – a copy of Gothenburg’s first single, ‘Night to Day’.
‘Wow,’ Dale said, hugging it to her chest. ‘You could get twenty quid for that down the Underground Market.’
‘What’s that say in the corner?’ Reluctantly, she relinquished it to Lorraine who held the sleeve up to the bare light bulb. ‘FAIRHOLME?’ was written very faintly, in grey pencil. He’d used his usual childishly scruffy capitals. Lorraine found the question mark perturbing.
On the front of the EP sleeve was a grainy distance shot of Lily’s ex, Zeb, looking gawky and very young.
‘Fairholme mean anything to either of you?’ she asked.
Dale shrugged. ‘I hope you’re not going to hand that over to your plod friend. With our links to Zeb it’s like a talisman or something. Rikki would have wanted us to have it, not the pigs.’
Lorraine picked up her mug to finish the wine but at the first tannic wince, put it down again. ‘I’m going to photocopy the cover, OK? I’m serious about finding whoever killed Rikki. So how about you hold off from selling his final assets for just a day or two?’
Expedience
Question 40: There are occasions when what I want to achieve is more important than conforming to the law.
A. Often
B. Occasionally
C. Never
High score description (option A.): Disregards rules, self-indulgent, oppositional, casual, resistant to group influences, especially moral values.
Wednesday 9th March
The hospital house at 12 Radley Road was still a location of interest, but Diaz had ignored Brunt’s request to lodge the key at the station. He let himself in and prowled around, then climbed up to the bedroom where the double bed lay stripped to its striped pink mattress. To his frustration, the SOCOs’ search for a Durex, stray hairs, fingerprints or fibres had all proved negative thanks to the efforts of the hospital’s domestic department. The requisition form requesting the cleaning job could have been typed by any standard hospital typewriter and bore no signature. Again, he felt his adversary was a dozen clever steps ahead of him. Whatever had triggered Rose Cavanagh to step out of this house into Radley Road in a state of disorientation, he was sure the originating drama had been acted out here in this dreary bedroom.
At a quiet knock he went downstairs and guided Lorraine under the crime scene tape with awkward chivalry. When he had fetched her a brew from the kitchen she perched on the edge of a grubby moquette armchair.
Close up, she had made no effort with her lipstick or clothes and seemed utterly mundane. But at the same time her presence was excitingly physical and real.
‘So, any news?’ he asked. Goosebumps rose on his arms; the mildew lurking in the unheated walls was palpable. He got up and fiddled with the gas fire until solid orange whooshed across the corrugated radiants.
‘Is it true that Felicity Jardine and Harvey Wright were together on Saturday night?’
He shook his head. ‘You know I can’t talk about that.’
‘I’m only repeating what everyone’s saying. I’m disappointed in Harvey. What about his wife?’
He shrugged, unsure if her offended expression was intentional. Had she somehow found out about Shirley? No, she couldn’t have. Still, he felt it as a dig at his own treachery.
The gas fire hissed; he shifted on the ancient settee and wished Lorraine would come over and join him. He’d got over the first rage of lust. Just to put his arms around her would have been really great.
‘Well, have you got my test? Are you going to commit me to the loony bin or what?’
‘Got all the evidence right here,’ she replied, deadpan. She got out some papers and made her way over to the settee and said, ‘Shove up, then.’
He made room and she set down a paper headed ‘PX60 Profile’ between them on the coffee table. There was a wiggly line down the centre plotted on a graph.
‘I’ll give you the basic spiel. When we test people, we compare them to norms. I’ve compared you to other professionals, lawyers, teachers and so on rather than the general population.’
He nodded, dismayed at the prospect of being judged against what he imagined were snobby grammar school types.
‘So, let’s start with this cluster.’ She pointed her pen at the graph. ‘Your scores for Dominance and Tough-mindedness are much higher than average. That’s in line with your police work.’
He perked up, feeling better already.
‘But your scores for Warmth and Extraversion are unusually low. To be frank, you are far more critical and detached than most other people. You appear to prefer ideas to people. You say what you want and don’t care how harsh it sounds. My advice is to watch your behaviour and how it affects other people. You always need to be right,’ she said.
‘I can live with that.’
‘You just gave an example,’ she said dryly. ‘It’s about being right all the time. But what about your colleagues who have to listen to you all the time?’
‘They’ll learn,’ he quipped.
She looked disappointed. ‘It’s you who’ll learn when you get nowhere.’
He made an effort to grasp her point. He wondered if she was telling him he’d been too cold and harsh towards her.
‘OK. Let’s lighten up,’ she was saying. ‘Amazingly, your score is above average in Intelligence.’
He laughed out loud at that.
‘OK, hardly the next Einstein.’ With a pencil she pointed towards two big zigzags on the chart.
‘Another surprise.’ Her pencil pointed to a jagged height. ‘A very high score for Imagination. Another unconventional side to your personality that you keep under wraps.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘A powerful inner life. Absorbed by ideas in your head as much as the realities outside it.’ She looked down at her paperwork. ‘An active fantasy life.’
Suddenly, it was as if a searchlight was sweeping inside him, illuminating his private thoughts. No one – and he barely acknowledged it even to himself – knew that behind the hard-man image he was an intense daydreamer. At the kids’ home he’d spent every second longing to be somewhere else. Was it any surprise he’d escaped into a secret dreamworld?
‘This interest you have in profiling,’ she continued. ‘It’s abstract, it’s deep. It’s radical compared to the police work going on around you. It’s firing up your brain.’
He nodded, still reeling from the phrase ‘active fantasy life’.
‘You don’t have to answer this, but do you feel you have to watch yourself all the time?’
‘Christ. How did you pick that up from all those daft questions?’ When she didn’t answer he mumbled, ‘Sorry. Go on.’
‘And you have to keep people at a distance to function well?’
He gave a little nod of his head in surprise.
‘The bad news is how far you disregard rules. That really threw me for a so-called law-keeper. Not quite Charles Manson, but at best an outlaw, a Robin Hood type. I think you get a kick out of pushing against the status quo.’
‘I can usually see a better way of doing things.’
‘So can I. But it’s dangerous, isn’t it? You’re risking your career. Other people aren’t as stupid as you think they are.’
He was about to say that he had evidence to the contrary but held his tongue. Maybe he could learn from all this stuff after all.
‘Your scores indicate that, to use an old-fashioned word, you struggle with morality. You told me you were very much alone as a child.’
‘I had to look after myself, dead right.’
‘That must have been very painful.’
When he mentioned his childhood he sensed she shifted closer. That she was supportive. But maybe that was the old Imagination playing up.
‘I don’t trust rules for their own sake. They work for other people, not for me. Brunt and his sort can go hang.’ Suddenly he checked himself. ‘Blimey. Are you enjoying getting inside my skull and having a good poke round?’
She was watching him narrowly. ‘I know. It feels awkward to share the way we really experience ourselves. My tutor told me we all have a shadow inside us. Our fears, our capacity for inflicting pain and violence, all the bad stuff we repress. But it helps to talk about our authentic selves. The questionnaire helps. Otherwise it might take years to trust another person.’
‘And even then, not always,’ he found himself saying treacherously. He and Shirley hadn’t had an honest heart-to-heart in ages. She complained that talking to him was worse than talking to the wall. ‘So, are there any traits here that we – you know, me and you, both share?’
She took a while till she found the right paper. ‘Imagination, for one. Like you, I live in my head a lot of the time. And we’re both very private and independent. And prefer to work alone more than most.’
He felt grateful and nodded emphatically.
She put her head on one side. ‘And we’re both fishes out of water. We have to follow our self-image, to watch ourselves for good behaviour, because we’re not really part of the club, are we?’
‘Dead right.’ Like bitter medicine, he grasped that this was good advice. After years of reining himself in, he was losing his cool around Brunt. He must never have another rant at the boss like the one he’d had over Rikki’s corpse.
‘But I’m nothing like you about the law,’ she said, meeting his eye. ‘That trick you played with the speed the other night. That puts you way beyond the pale of most other people. In a minority of four point four per cent of the population, to be exact. You might want to think about why you needed to do that. What were you really trying to do?’
She was waiting for an answer. Why had he done that? He’d told himself he wanted to get hold of the test results, but now he was less certain. He’d been fed up and frustrated but it had been more than that: the idea of taking the speed with her had possessed him like a devil directing his thoughts and limbs. He had lied to his colleagues, forged the evidence sheet, and risked destroying years of study and diligent behaviour.
He mumbled, ‘I don’t know. Couldn’t stop myself.’
‘I am worried for you. That’s my sensitivity showing. For the record, I’m about fifty per cent more sensitive than you.’
‘You can keep that,’ he said.
‘Actually, this horrible sensitivity I have – my tutor tells me it’s the trait that helps me read people.’
‘And what do you read in me?’
‘On some traits you’re almost my opposite. A bold, cold tough guy. But under the steel armour there’s lots going on: fizzing ideas, dreams, plans. Lots of energy fuelled by anxiety, lots of libido.’
He laughed nervously, wondering if he’d heard that last word properly. Sex. Was she trying to remind him that that was what they both really wanted?
‘OK. So what are you doing tonight?’
She stood and gathered up her papers. ‘Not seeing you for a start.’
Cheekily, he reached for her hand but she pulled away. ‘Come on, Lorraine. Please.’
She looked down on him severely. ‘Don’t underestimate me. I know your boss thinks I’m some dizzy blonde but he’s a dinosaur heading for extinction. I’ve got to work tonight or I might fail my psychometrics exam this weekend. And I need to be in my tutor’s good books when I ask her what a murderer’s test results look like. So not a good time.’
‘Don’t go yet.’ He tried to put his arms around her this time and there it was – a flash of how the killer must have felt, a surge of dominating power over a weaker victim.
She squirmed and stepped back. ‘Seriously, Diaz. Behave yourself.’
‘Sorry.’ And for that instant he actually was. ‘I just – I just want what we had before,’ he added mournfully.
‘Think first. Brunt will find out.’ She shook her head at him. ‘And I’m not sure.’
She’d reached the door when she said, ‘One last thing. You’re even more stressed than me. But you know how to bind it, to use it to create lots of energy. You’re compulsive. I’d back you over Brunt to solve this any day. You won’t give up.’
