‘Look, honestly, I’ll be fine,’ I say, a bit too full of beans to convince anyone. ‘It’s the little girl I feel sorry for.’ I slow my breathing, steady my voice. ‘Tell me, will she remember everything that happened or could she forget, given time?’
I call her ‘the little girl’ so Dr Allen doesn’t start bleating about ‘over-empathy’ but her name is Alana-Jane and her favourite song is ‘Five Little Ducks’. I know this because she told me she sang it to her mummy to try to wake her up, and I know that she ate dog biscuits for two days because it was all she could reach, even when she stood on the pink bucket. I also know she wore a ‘Daddy’s Little Girl’ vest under her blood-spattered hoody and I absolutely know that her daddy killed her mummy, even if the CPS ruled that we’d face an impossible task proving it.
‘My only professional interest is in what you remember, Cat. What you might forget, given time.’ She closes her pad, signalling the end of our tête à tête. ‘You mentioned in our first meeting that you weren’t sleeping very well? Any improvements?’
‘Nah. But then I’ve never been one of life’s great sleepers.’
She shifts position, briefly energised by this admission. ‘Any ideas why?’
I shrug. ‘I lived above a pub until I was eight – it doesn’t exactly cement regular sleeping patterns. Or maybe I eat too late? And then there’s the cheap, crappy pillows .?.?.’
Dr Allen stands up and walks slowly towards the door. She doesn’t exactly look annoyed by my flippant response – I’m not sure ‘annoyed’ is licensed for use on the ‘Counsellor’s List of Appropriate Faces’ – but there’s definitely a flash of something human. A silent scream of ‘why do I do this fucking job?’ that we’re all probably entitled to by the twelfth month of a hard year.
‘So, er, the little girl?’ Determined to get an answer, I stall for time, making a huge, almost slapstick performance of buttoning up my coat. ‘Do you think she’ll definitely be affected by it, long-term?’
‘At three years old, it’s very difficult to predict,’ she says eventually. ‘She’s unlikely to remember the details. She might even forget or block out the “event”. But it’s likely she’ll remember the feelings. And she’ll carry those feelings through life, into her relationships, her work and so on. Strong, innate feelings of fear, anxiety and insecurity, that she may never fully understand.’
Spikes of deep discomfort when you least expect them.
The constant low-level dread that taints everything you do.
‘And of course at three years old, she’s not really old enough to understand the finality of her mother’s death. The irreversible nature of it. That concept will add a whole new complexity in a few years’ time.’
I picture my nephew, Finn – six years old and struggling with the concepts of broccoli, backstroke and three-digit sums.
‘I’ve bought her a Christmas present,’ I say quickly, just to stop the flow of her gloomy predictions. ‘One of those Frozen dolls. It’s Anna, I think. They’d sold out of Elsa.’
Dr Allen says nothing. In our fairly limited time together, I’ve come to realise that ‘nothing’ generally means ‘bad’ and that I’ll be held to account for the ‘over-empathetic’ Christmas present at a later date. Probably when I least expect it. But then maybe I’ve got her all wrong? Maybe she just has to get on. Maybe she has another soul to save, or Christmas shopping to do. Maybe she actually doesn’t care once the sixty minutes are up. I have no idea what drives her to do her job. She probably feels the same about me.
‘Merry Christmas, Cat.’ She flicks the catch on the door and a whoosh of relief shoots through me. ‘Look after yourself. You’ll be with your family, yes?’
‘Of course,’ I lie. ‘Twelve hours of rich food and poor conversation, same as everyone. Merry Christmas to you too, Dr Allen.’
The assumption that ‘family’ equals ‘nurture’ seems a little utopian coming from someone who deals in the science of dysfunction, especially after my ‘family mediation’ remark, but then a frosty Christmas week in a twinkly, bustling London can do that to a person and I’d feel mean-spirited not playing along, even though I’m not sure I’ve got the stomach for Christmas with my family.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve got an invite.
2
Fevered and ghoulish, like Satan’s little imps, we sit and wait in darkened rooms, aching for death to bring us to life.
Welcome to a slow nightshift with Murder Investigation Team 4. Where the only crime under investigation is ‘Who ate the last of DS Parnell’s mince pies?’, and the only questions come courtesy of Chris Tarrant on three a.m. reruns of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
You see, when you work for the dead, you work for a notoriously unreliable employer. Sometimes they’re all over you, screaming their need for justice at every cursed turn. Conscripted by tortured ghosts, your need to serve them never goes away, not even when you sleep. It ferments in your stomach like a late-night curry, waking you at godless hours and leaving you queasy and exhausted for days.
But other times there’s nothing. Nothing new, anyway. Just an avalanche of paperwork and quiz show repeats.
They can never prepare you for the down-time, for the sedentary stage that follows the kill. When you’re holed up at Hendon – the Met’s training centre for new recruits – and you’re being dazzled by mock courtrooms and flashing blue lights, you can never quite believe that admin will soon become your god. Data, your religion. I certainly couldn’t anyway, although in fairness I might have been warned. There’s every chance I just didn’t hear it over the sound of my pounding heart every time a murder detective, especially the fabled DCI Kate Steele, took to the hallowed stage.
The slack-jawed child swooning over the prima ballerina.
‘OK, for thirty-two thousand pounds, who is the patron saint of chefs?’
DS Luigi Parnell – nightshift’s lead imp, and incidentally about as Italian as a bacon sandwich – jabs his Arsenal mug in my direction and winks at me like we’re old allies from the trenches, even though it’s less than six months since he alighted the Good Ship Gang Crime and took up with Murder. ‘Come on then,’ he says, ‘You and Seth are supposed to be the brains around here. Enlighten me and Renée?’
DC Seth Wakeman looks up from a textbook, surreptitiously brushing pie crumbs off his jumper. ‘No idea, Sarge.’
‘Nor me,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll Google it.’
Parnell looks pseudo-disgusted and swivels back to the TV, muttering something about private-school educations and Google being the death of independent thinking. DC Renée Akwa laughs and offers me a crisp. I mindlessly grab a fistful even though I’m not keen on the flavour and it’s only been an hour since we stank out the squad room with a garlicky pizza.
Awesome Renée Akwa. Twenty-five years a DC and as constant as the sun. I’d have sneered at that once, back when I had notions of progression but it’s amazing what a flip-out in a prostitute’s bedsit can do to pour concrete on your glass ceiling.
I squint at my screen, too lethargic to reach for my glasses. ‘So St Lawrence is the patron saint of chefs. St Michael’s the patron saint of coppers, if you’re interested. He’s the patron saint of the sick and the suffering too.’
Parnell doesn’t rise to it, choosing to nag Seth instead. ‘Here, Einstein, are you ready for another test? Fat lot of use Google will be when you’re trying to remember “Revisions to PACE Code G” for your boards next month.’
Seth groans, pretends to hang himself with a strip of tinsel, and the laugh that breaks out goes some way to dissolving the twisted ball of angst I’ve been ferrying around since I left Dr Allen’s introspection chamber earlier this evening. Later, as Parnell argues with Chris Tarrant that the Nile is definitely longer than the Amazon, and Seth gives us his rugby-club’s slightly un-PC rendition of the ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’, the urge to do a Miss Havisham, to bolt the doors and stop the clocks and cocoon the four of us in our cosy-as-fleece squad room forever, overwhelms me.