Dana stooped there, and vomited.
At first it was a dry retch. She’d been too wound up this morning – awake since midnight, in fact – to have eaten anything. Eventually, her stomach muscles produced some yellowish bile, bitter as it left her. She gasped and spat for a couple of minutes, feeling her facial muscles quiver back to normality. Then she wiped her mouth with a tissue and popped a couple of mints.
Her temples hammered with a pressure headache. Right on the psychopath zone, she thought: the area on the lobes where human empathy lay – or didn’t. She sometimes worried that her emotional freezing – the sense of standing helplessly outside normal human behaviour – was her mind telling her she was psychopathic. Maybe she was simply covering her pathology with a brittle coating of humanity, a veneer that would shatter like spring ice if she didn’t fight to protect it.
She tried to tell herself that the shakes were from the vomiting or from a lack of food. But the Day was clawing at her, reaching, taking. She thought again of the revolver, how it had felt in her mouth. That metallic coin-taste, the heaviness of the barrel on her tongue, the collision with her lip as it left. As though it were angry at her, disappointed that she lacked the courage. She felt nauseous again and leaned against the wall until the feeling subsided.
It was difficult to tell whether working this Day was making it worse. It felt worse. It had never happened before – she’d previously gone to extravagant lengths to make sure she was away from the station and uncontactable. Leaving the waterfall this morning, she’d believed the current distraction might be a good thing; maybe being around people would intrinsically make her less suicidal. But all it seemed to do was compress her anguish into little bullets of time, which sank through her guts every couple of hours. It was less drawn out, less debilitating, but sharper and more persuasive. When it bit, it bit hard.
Partly, it was a sense of failure. Or, more accurately, a sense of shame about failure. All this had first been triggered twenty-five years ago. She’d had psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and counsellors down the years who’d dug at the surface; moving soil around but never getting to the core of her. She hadn’t let them. Dana had always believed, ultimately, that only she could find the solution. Yet here she was, twenty-five years later, puking behind a wall and hiding everything from her colleagues. Still denying that anyone had a right to know what was in her heart. The bile at her feet, the shaking, the finger-and-thumb, the clutching of a nebuliser, the shimmering vision – all said she couldn’t provide the solution. She was still failing.
Trying to trammel it into one Day was not possible: she knew that, even though she clung to the strategy. Using the Day was supposed to adjust the dynamic: to delay, postpone, almost trick the heaviest shadow into waiting until it was supposed to be exposed to the light. As if there were an etiquette, understood by both her and her suicidal tendencies; social graces to be followed. Her attempts to control it and structure it were flimsy, but they were all she had. Trammelling was the only thing she could do that demonstrated she could do anything at all – the only overt sign of agency.
She thought of ringing Father Timms but decided against it. Perhaps if she was back in the office, concentrating on Nathan Whittler, it would all magically subside.
Dana stopped off at Custody, to check on the requirements for Nathan’s ongoing detention. The station had eight cells, including the suicide-watch cell, which was visible from the main desk. The other cells stretched away down a corridor of rough render walls, the concrete floor worn smooth by dragged and scuffed feet. Occasional cries, seemingly random and directed at no one in particular, split the air. They disrupted what was otherwise calm acceptance and stoicism: regulars who knew the routines as well as the officers. Martin Simpson was today’s custody officer, pottering around his small kingdom: blond wood, filing, CCTV and a radio tuned low.
Closest to the custody desk was the Lecter Theatre. Near floor-to-ceiling glass at the front, it was a cell where the edges had all been smoothed off and where the underfloor heating was turned up so that no blankets would be needed. Ligature points were minimised by flush-fitting doors and locks, and a sink recessed into the wall. Everything that could be done had been done; everyone knew it wasn’t always enough. Each custody officer held the nagging, insistent fear that this shift might be the shift.
Like most stations, Carlton had an ever-increasing problem with the mental health of prisoners: it had become the agency of first and last resort, because they couldn’t get places in hospitals. It was categorised as the police region’s biggest organisational risk: no one knew what a prisoner had taken, was suffering from or would do. Almost everything was guesswork and hope – humanity and awareness would take the custody officer only so far.
The doctor had assessed Nathan Whittler as high risk. The main problem was that no one knew – or could verify – where he’d been or what he’d done, nor could they find any evidence of medication. That, plus his clear discomfort at any human interaction, made him a concern. Dana didn’t want Nathan to be pitched into the humiliating visibility of the Lecter Theatre, but for now they really had no choice.
‘Hey, Dana.’ Simpson would be finishing his shift soon and clearly couldn’t wait.
‘Hi, Martin. How’s our new guest doing?’
She made sure she was around the corner from Nathan’s cell and couldn’t be heard. Somehow, she felt it would add to Nathan’s shame to be aware that she could observe him, see his degradation and lack of privacy.
Simpson puffed his cheeks as the printer hummed out more warm paper. CCTV screens flickered behind his shoulder.
‘So-so, at best. He’s, uh, really uncomfortable with the whole thing. I can’t, in all conscience, give him any more privacy than he has – not in that cell. Unless the doc says otherwise, he’s stuck with it. You can see him flinch, though: light, people, noise – anything. He’s a flinch machine.’
Dana nodded. ‘He’s like that in interview, too. Okay, I’ll be calling him back soon. If you can please find him anything sugary – chocolate, something like that – I’d appreciate it.’
Simpson grinned. ‘Keeping him sweet?’
‘Literally, yes.’ She smiled. ‘Lovin’ your work there, Martin.’
On her way to Bill’s office Dana poked her head round the door and spoke to Mike. ‘Anything more on that intelligence on Lou Cassavette?’
‘Yeah, actually.’ Mike lifted one file to extract another, then patted the pile twice until it was perfect again. ‘So, the hassle was because he went to school with two of the Alvarez brothers.’
Dana looked blank.
‘Ricardo Alvarez? Biggest drug dealer in the state? Jeez, you need that bit of general knowledge. Not everything is a specialism. Okay, so the Alvarez family have been up to their buckets in various aspects of organised crime. Currently drug kingpins, though the word is they’re trying to diversify.’
The whole world of sources bewildered Dana. It wasn’t how she operated, as a detective or a human being. She couldn’t imagine cultivating someone who would want to tell her something dangerous to them. She never knew what ‘the word’ currently was, or what the street thought.