Die of Shame Read online

  ‘Well, you will.’

  ‘Hope so.’ Caroline smiles. ‘I’m really looking forward to getting to know you.’

  Heather hums, non-committal suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Probably not a very good idea.’ Heather shakes her head, walks on with her head down. ‘If you knew me, you really wouldn’t like me.’

  … THEN

  The escort had not been the one whose picture he’d chosen, but it had happened before and this one was pretty enough, so he hadn’t been overly bothered. He had been a little annoyed that, in the usual broken English, she’d demanded more money for a few of the things he’d wanted, especially as she’d specifically promoted those services on the agency’s website. It always amused him that these things were advertised in code. Did people seriously think that CIM might stand for ‘covered in mud’ or that ‘watersports’ had anything at all to do with boats?

  Once she has gone, Robin takes a shower; his second one in an hour, since the girl had insisted on him showering before they’d got down to business. Again, all pretty standard. He changes the sheets, as there seems little point in being clean and climbing into soiled linen later on. He microwaves a lasagne, and once he’s eaten, he stretches out on the sofa in his dressing gown, listening to Duke Ellington and trying not to think about how much he would enjoy a large glass of red right about now.

  A nice shot of fentanyl or methadone.

  Tonight’s session with Tony had gone well, he thinks. The new girl seems sweet enough and, lying there, he wonders how she might react if he were to have a quiet word in private with her, talk her through some medically approved weight-loss treatments he would be able to recommend. On reflection, it’s probably not a good idea. She’s almost certainly on one diet or another anyway, and if she took offence it could make future sessions a little tricky. He likes to get on well with everyone, however difficult that is sometimes.

  He is feeling slightly anxious about having put himself forward for the shame session the following week. He was only trying to help Tony out, because he could see that nobody else was in any rush to volunteer. He tells himself to keep calm about it, that he’s got a week to think about how best to tell the story, that it will all go OK. The other reason he’d spoken up was because he’d known it would irritate Chris, which was always rather fun. Poisonous little so-and-so doesn’t like him, has a problem with the way Robin talks about his recovery. Chris is not a fan of the twelve-step approach, of the passion and the proselytising. Robin asks himself why he even gives someone like that a second thought. After all, you did whatever worked and stuff anyone else if they didn’t like it. How could Robin be any other way, considering where he’d been and where he was now? How close he’d come to losing everything.

  Not that there hadn’t been a heavy price to pay.

  He’d just about escaped with his career, but more or less everything else had gone. Almost thirty years married, his wife had known what was happening very early on of course and had made it clear that it was her or the drugs. Gave him a simple choice, unaware that it was a contest she couldn’t win. It had been ugly and rancorous, but how could he have expected anything else?

  They had already been through so much together.

  He had been furious at the time, as the scale of his losses had started to become clear, but somewhere between the lines of those legal letters and in the pauses during those frosty phone conversations there was always the suspicion that his wife could send a letter to the General Medical Council any time she felt like it, have him struck off in a heartbeat. So, in the end, he’d been left with little choice other than caving in to everything her hatchet-faced solicitor had demanded. Thankfully, he’d clung on to his job by the skin of his teeth and had salted just enough away for a one-bedroom flat in an area that wasn’t completely hideous.

  He’d made the best of it, started again.

  He looks around. The place is clean and well laid out, it has everything he needs, but Christ, it’s so pathetically small. He has nobody but himself to blame, of course, but he can’t help remembering. He would be inhuman if he didn’t miss his study, his garden, his dog.

  It’s a struggle sometimes, not to be bitter, even if that goes against everything he’s learned and come to believe about recovery. He has always tried to abide by the programme, though in at least one respect he knows that he’s cheated. Making amends to those you’ve hurt is a step that’s important and it sounds so straightforward; seems so easy when it’s just a heading on a blackboard or a flip chart. But he has still not been brave enough to check on those patients he’d infected. He’s far too scared about what he might discover.

  It had been a death that had tipped him over the edge; that still lured him back towards it every day of his life. Any more deaths would be impossible to live with.

  Robin closes his eyes, and when he opens them again an hour later, the music has finished and he’s breathing heavily, sweaty beneath his dressing gown. Climbing into bed, he can still taste the girl, can smell her perfume on the headboard, and he lies there wondering why he bothered changing the sheets.

  … THEN

  Group Session: February 16th

  New client (Caroline) started this evening. Seems confident, though may of course be front to mask predictable anxiety. Held her ground against Chris, who was oddly aggressive. Will explore this more next week.

  Others in the group supportive, as expected. Especially Robin and Heather.

  Suspect that Chris is still struggling with secondary addiction(s). Same goes for Diana and shopping compulsion. Will need to monitor this carefully.

  Robin has volunteered to begin exploration of shame/underlying cause of addiction at next session. Believe this will be very helpful. Others more reticent, but may be more willing once Robin has kicked things off. Firmly convinced this approach will yield good results. Hidden shame = guilt/anxiety/maladaptive behaviour (sexual violence, compulsion, addiction). Important to establish empathy in supportive atmosphere of group.

  READING FOR NEXT SESSION

  Shame: The Dark Core of Addiction (Hughes, Larner)

  Hidden Shame and Rehab (Psych Review 2011)

  Tony closes the file on his computer and turns round in his chair to look at the large calendar on the wall above the bookshelves. The week ahead is a busy one. He’s got two other group sessions with different clients, a number of one-to-ones and half a day at a residential centre in Sussex. It’s not untypical, but he’s already thinking ahead, to warmer weather and an altogether different few weeks.

  In three months he’ll be travelling across Europe; a ten-city tour, as ‘lifestyle consultant’ to a well-known musician he has worked with for several years. Everyone in the star’s inner circle knows exactly why Tony is there, of course, but to everyone else he’s just another member of the entourage, working alongside the dietitian, the nutritionist and the personal trainer. It means great food and five star pampering in a series of nice hotels and Tony would be being dishonest if he did not admit that it was something to look forward to after a series of sessions in grim hospitals and underfunded residential centres.

  That’s not to say working closely with such a client, making sure he stays clean and sober for as long as he’s on the road, is without its problems. Being on call twenty-four hours a day – ready to step in if there’s a problem, or if the client just wants someone to talk to – can be exhausting. It has also brought him some unwelcome attention over the years. His name has been linked with a number of celebrities online and this has led to frequent calls from journalists as well as more upfront questions from several of his own clients.

  Come on, Tony, is it really you know who? What’s he really like? I bet you get up to all sorts on those tours…

  Tony says nothing; neither confirms nor denies. He could dine out for months on some of the stories he’s able to tell, but breathing so much as a word would mean the end of a very lucrative gig.

  The money’s important
to him. The self-esteem that’s so very much tied up with it.

  He gets up, closes the door behind him and walks up one flight to Emma’s room at the top of the house. The music is loud enough to drown out the noise of his footsteps on the stairs, but he doesn’t need to go in. The stench is incredible.

  Walking back down to the ground floor, he remembers a night in Toronto a couple of years before. Sitting on the floor of a penthouse suite in the early hours, playing a borrowed guitar while a bored, insomniac, platinum-selling pop star sang one of his songs. Mangling his lyrics, but still…

  A sliver of moon that bleeds through the blind,

  Cannot light up the darkness in his mind,

  A past unnatural and people unkind,

  It’s time to leave the world behind.

  Just for a second, he thinks about going to the piano in the first floor sitting room and playing the song himself, seeing how well he can remember it. He decides that it’s probably a bit late.

  This is pretty good, mate. No, really. You should have stuck at it…

  The memory quickly dissolves as he walks into the kitchen and sees Nina sitting at the breakfast bar. She has a large glass of white wine in her hand and her stockinged feet are up on an adjacent barstool. She’s slowly turning the pages of a newspaper, keeping one eye on the TV screen that’s built into the door of the stupidly expensive fridge she insisted on buying.

  ‘You eaten?’ he asks. When she doesn’t reply, he picks up the TV remote and turns the volume down. He notices the spasm of irritation on her face just before he asks again.

  ‘I got something on the way home,’ she says.

  It’s after nine, but Tony is used to his wife getting back late. She often has to entertain clients or go for dinner with other execs at the ad agency. There are night shoots and awards ceremonies, movie premieres sometimes. Now and again she asks Tony if he wants to go with her, but he always says no. He thinks that knowing he won’t want to is the only reason she asks in the first place.

  He opens the fridge, peers in.

  ‘How was your session?’

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ he says. There are some bits of salad, lots of jars; pickles and preserves. He pulls out a pizza that is probably meant for their daughter, but which she will never eat. ‘Went well.’

  ‘Good. So, how was your girlfriend?’

  Tony turns, lets the fridge door close behind him. ‘What?’

  ‘You know exactly who I’m talking about,’ Nina says. She cranes her head and stares past him, towards the TV screen. ‘The tiny one who looks like a boy.’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous.’

  ‘You didn’t see the way she looked at me that time, when I came into the kitchen.’

  ‘I’m not even going to talk about this.’

  ‘OK.’ Nina shrugs. ‘But it’s not like you haven’t got form in this area, is it?’

  Tony sighs, begins to tear at the packaging on the pizza box.

  ‘Very unprofessional, if you ask me.’

  ‘If it’s the woman I think you’re talking about, that was a long time ago.’ He moves to stuff the plastic and cardboard into the recycling bin. ‘She developed an attachment to me, that’s all.’

  ‘Which you did nothing about.’

  ‘I was trying to help her,’ Tony says.

  ‘I think shagging her would probably have helped her enormously.’ Nina sips her wine; precise, measured. ‘You get too involved with your clients, that’s the point.’

  ‘How can I not?’

  ‘What about the new woman? The one who came tonight.’ She turns to him and smiles. ‘She your type?’

  ‘Trust me, no she really isn’t.’ Tony walks across and turns the oven on. ‘And even if she was —’ Nina’s laughter stops him short. She either finds his protestations genuinely funny or else she is simply winding him up. Tony can no longer tell the difference. He opens one cupboard after another in search of olive oil and something different to talk about. ‘Have you been upstairs yet?’

  ‘I’ve only just got in.’

  ‘The smell up there… Jesus.’

  ‘Yes, well.’ Another delicate sip. ‘That’s your area of expertise, Tony, not mine.’

  ‘She not your daughter, then?’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re being so dramatic. They all do it.’

  ‘It’s getting out of hand.’

  ‘It’s just an appropriate rebellion, that’s all. Even I can work that much out. What do they say about a cobbler’s children going barefoot?’

  Tony closes the cupboard. He stands and studies his wife.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll sort it out with her.’ Nina reaches for the remote and raises the volume of the TV. ‘When you’ve got time. I think that’s the attachment you should be concentrating on, don’t you?’

  HERE AND NOW

  Nicola Tanner read through the email twice, then clicked on the attachment. She thought about the tens of thousands of other Londoners starting work in bland, open-plan offices much like this one, right about now. Many would be exchanging meaningless platitudes with workmates; chatting about what had been on TV the night before or complaining about the day ahead, just as several of her own colleagues were doing at desks nearby. Loosening ties and needlessly rearranging paperwork. Finishing overpriced coffees bought from chains on the way in, because they could not face the slop that squirted in fits and starts from the machine in the corner.

  She clicked on the first picture, sucked in a fast breath.

  Many of them would be working at computers, as she was, and might spend the first ten minutes weeding out spam or checking Twitter. Some might even ease themselves into the drudgery of the working day by checking out a few of the hilarious videos someone else thought they might enjoy.

  She doubted that too many would be staring at pictures of dried blood and marbled flesh.

  The next photograph was a close-up of the victim’s face, its features ravaged. The lips gone, a yellowish trail of leakage from the nose…

  ‘All right, Nic?’ DCI Martin Ditchburn dropped a meaty hand on Tanner’s shoulder on the way to his office. Tiny, but, most important, with a door that could shut out the open-plan hubbub and provide a few precious moments of peace and normality. It was the perk of the chief inspector’s rank that everyone coveted the most. Ditchburn called back as he walked away. ‘You up to speed with that Victoria job?’

  ‘Just looking through it now, sir,’ Tanner said.

  Catching a glimpse of the smile as Ditchburn carried on towards his office, Tanner knew exactly what her boss found so amusing. Among a certain sort of detective at least, such everyday deference to seniority was seen as a little ‘old school’. Tanner knew that some found the simple use of the word ‘sir’ when addressing a senior officer unnecessary at best and ridiculous at worst, but she didn’t much care. It felt… correct. Perhaps foolishly, she expected the same from those of lesser rank than herself, but it rarely happened and only if she was in a particularly bad mood would she pull an officer up on it. Those few occasions had, she knew, been the cause of some resentment, bouts of mockery poorly disguised as banter, but Tanner had been in the Job too long to give a toss.

  Straight out of university and twenty years in.

  A little under ten more left and she was already starting to plan, because that was what she did. Thinking about what to do afterwards. There was a village in Wiltshire she and her other half had been visiting on and off for a while and she liked to imagine the two of them getting out of London and settling down in a place like that. Something part time maybe, to bring a few quid in and stop her brain turning to mush. Long walks and a decent garden to work on and no snaps of corpses waiting for her first thing in the morning.

  She dragged her eyes back to the screen, thinking that she would happily have traded places with anyone responding to an email from a suspiciously generous Nigerian prince or an advert for penis enlargement. She might even have stooped to sitting through a montage of whimsical
cat videos.

  She managed half a smile. No, that would probably be going too far.

  Tanner read through the email one more time, then dialled the number of the officer who had sent it. Marion Fuller had been one of the on-call inspectors for the Homicide Assessment team the previous night, and had been dispatched to an address in Victoria as soon as the body had been discovered. She had quickly ruled it a suspicious death and now the case was being passed across to a team at Homicide Command in Belgravia, specifically the one whose DI had the lightest caseload.

  ‘Have fun with this one,’ Fuller said, once she’d answered the call.

  It was a routine handover, a process she’d been through many dozens of times, but Nicola Tanner was already starting to think that this was not her lucky day.

  ‘Who found the body?’ she asked.

  ‘Local uniform put the door in just after midnight,’ Fuller said. ‘A neighbour rang in to complain about the smell. Had done so several days running, apparently.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Yeah, so someone’s on the naughty step.’

  ‘How long are we talking?’

  ‘A couple of weeks at least. One for the bug squad, definitely.’

  The first piece of bad news. However brilliant a forensic entomologist was, they would be unlikely to establish a time of death any more precise than a two- or three-day window. This meant that identifying a suspect based on their lack of an alibi was almost impossible.

  Tanner put her glasses on again and went back to the text. ‘In the email you say “signs of a struggle”.’

  ‘Yeah… broken glass on the kitchen floor, plant pots and whatever knocked over. It was a right mess. You only had to see the blood, though, to know it was wrong.’ The sound muffled suddenly; Fuller placing a hand over the mouthpiece to talk to someone else for a few seconds. ‘Sorry… yeah, the skull looked intact, so stabbing’s my best guess. Hard to be sure, what little there is left.’