‘What do the night shift do?’ Rainer asked, nodding towards a shutter that squealed as it closed access to the refrigerated goods.
Natalie was intelligent but somehow wearied by her own life. Rainer speculated she’d made some poor decisions and had never quite escaped the consequences. She had a sparkling awareness, ill matched to her pallid skin and enduring fatigue.
‘Oh, there’s dozens of machines around the place, Officer. If you work shifts, what you really need are healthy, nutritionally balanced meals to help you cope with the body clock. So what they offer you are sugar-loaded fats.’ She eye-rolled. ‘Go figure.’
Rainer smiled. ‘Please call me Rainer. So, as I said on the phone, we’re interested in Jeb Whittler, specifically in the time around his brother’s disappearance, and again when he sold the farm. Let’s start with how you met Jeb.’
Natalie put her chin into a cupped hand and sighed. He could tell it was not going to be a happy reminiscence.
‘Urgh, mainly by being an idiot. This is nearly twenty years ago, mind you. I was a stupid little cow back then. Young, dumb, and full of… crap. Any sense I have now was learned the hard way. So I was a perky little nurse, thinking that since I was saving life and limb, I should be treated royally by all and sundry. If I met that version of me now, I’d end up slapping the little madam. You get the picture. I won’t bore you with how I became that kind of person, but I was.’
She stopped suddenly, as though the memory was saturated by loss. Just as abruptly, she resumed. ‘I’d met Jeb occasionally at parties. He was always very popular, but I could never work out why. I mean, he’s an odd looker and lacks charm. Have you seen him?’
Rainer grimaced. ‘Mainly on web pages or camera, not for real. Not a face that sells calendars, is it?’
Natalie smiled but kept her tinge of ingrained sadness. ‘Agreed. But at that age, you take your cues from everyone else, and they all looked so happy to see him. That mystery intrigued me, I suppose: I mistook it for enigmatic charisma. Ha. Gullible little fool.’
The two staff who’d closed the food area now drifted away, each too engrossed in their phones even to bid farewell to each other. Rainer always found hospitals brutally impersonal, despite their work being deeply intimate.
‘Anyway, we started going out, and at first it was okay. Then I began to realise that he was popular because he was the party connection, the supplier. Now it all made sense – everyone whooped when he arrived because of what he brought with him. By then, though, he assumed I was his girlfriend and therefore his property. He’s that type of person. The arm around the shoulder, but the fingers dig into the collar bone? The silent volcano? I’d spot it a mile off now, but at the time I didn’t realise until too late. He thought he owned me, and I thought he did, too.’
‘Was he ever violent towards you?’ Rainer had seen footage of Jeb being interviewed by Mike, and got the impression of a simmering anger.
Natalie paused to spit out some gum into the wrapping. She looked around for a waste bin that wasn’t there, then shrugged and simply held the wrapper in her hand.
‘Not… immediately, no. I mean, yes, but… ah crap, sorry. Look, Jeb was huge, compared to me. At that age I was this tall but only half as wide, if you can imagine. It felt like Jeb could put his hand on my head and press, and the ground would swallow me up. He could snap any bone in my body; I felt like a matchstick. So there was always this, uh, implied threat. He didn’t have to shake his fist or tell me what he might do. Didn’t need to be said. It was always there; off our shoulders, all the time. Over time the shadow became real, but it all spiralled so slowly I barely noticed. Each bit seemed inevitable from the previous bit; normal, somehow.’
She was visibly shaken. Rainer nodded.
‘Other than that implied threat, how would you characterise the relationship?’
‘How would I characterise it? Well, it was a one-way street. I’d be at his beck and call because I was scared of him, and he’d ignore me whenever it suited. I had to wait for his telephone call, whether it came or not. Woe betide me if he tested that and I failed to answer. He made plenty of money from the dealing, so he spent a fair bit bringing down, um, escorts from the city. He had a highly pornified brain, and the cash to live it out. Does that paint a picture?’
‘Very much so. We’re say, a year before Nathan disappears. That would be 2003 or so. What do you recall from then?’
Natalie squirmed in her chair. It seemed to Rainer that part of her discomfort was having to admit how much Jeb had controlled her.
‘Some time before his little brother went missing I made a mistake. Can’t recall exactly when. Uh, maybe December of that year? Don’t quote me on that. Jeb kept bugging me about acquiring stuff for him, and he wasn’t going to keep taking no for an answer. At first he wanted Valium, Temazepam, that kind of thing. He kept pushing – what drugs I could get, what they did, how they might be useful to him. He wanted something: no point dating a nurse unless he was getting some product. I told him about insulin, about how patients froze if they were given a certain dosage. I thought he’d find it funny. Jesus – he knew all about it. It was stomach-churning, how matter-of-fact he was. But he simply told me – ordered me – to get some.’
Rainer thought about interrupting to ask about protocols and security – how she actually got the insulin. But he felt the mechanics of the theft weren’t the key issue. Dana and Mike wanted to know what was done, not how.
‘I’m not proud of it, Officer. Rainer, sorry. Not proud at all. Ashamed, in fact. It was simply the lesser of two evils. By asking me for it he made me a potential problem if we split up, so there was that future threat as well as the current one. It was easier to get hold of insulin illegally than face the consequences of refusing him. I was weak, I was thinking self-preservation. Didn’t even feel like a choice.’
‘How often did you do this, Natalie?’
She looked off towards the garden that separated the canteen from the back of Intensive Care.
‘Look, Natalie. We’re not interested in prosecuting the possible theft of some insulin nearly twenty years ago. Your job isn’t at risk here. But it’s very important to us to get your impression of what happened around that insulin, and what Jeb was like at that time.’
Natalie hesitated and closed her eyes.
‘He wanted to tell me what he was doing with it – as if it was some funny anecdote from being on holiday. I’d already guessed.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘It was vile. I begged him not to speak about it. At least – here was me, being a total coward – at least he wasn’t doing it to me. But it would surely only be a matter of time. I knew enough about how his mind worked to understand it was coming.’
‘And what did he say he was doing?’
She rubbed the side of her face. ‘His parents. He was doing his parents. Freezing them, then doing all sorts of weird crap with them. Taking porno pictures, playing dress-up. Humiliating them, I suppose. Being Jeb, but to a whole new level. Like I said, it was only a matter of time before he tried someone else. Me, or his brother, or both.
‘After, I don’t know, eight or nine months of this, I made plans to escape from Jeb. By then I had bruises on my throat, bits of hair missing from my scalp; classic signs of escalation. Always my fault, of course. Something I’d made him do, naturally. People noticed – they gave me this whimpering look, as if I was some kind of run-over kitten they wouldn’t cross the road to help. I was terrified, you see: scared to leave, scared to stay. I’m sure you’ve seen other women in that kind of plight. It was the sort of thing I never thought would happen to me, until it happened to me. Until I was that victim; I was that trapped little bird in his closed fist.’