`To make sure of what?'
'That everyone in there's dead!' he snapped back at the psychiatrist Okay, Bob, okay. Just keep telling us about it.' The entranced body on the bed began to move once more, jerkily. 'What are you doing now?'
I'm climbing, up towards the windows. There are torn bits in the outer casing. I'm using them as hand grips and footholds. It's not too difficult: I'm nearly there now. Bugger! That was sharp: I've cut myself.' His right hand jerked suddenly, but his legs continued to move.
`Right, I've made it. I'm going to look in the window.'
Skinner fell silent. O'Malley, sitting beside the bed, and Sarah, in her corner seat, watched his face intently. And as they did it changed. Where it had been that of someone in a deep, if troubled sleep, it took on the appearance, even with eyes closed, of a man confronting something dreadful, something too awful to be contemplated.
The sound, when it came, was one of grief. Pure, deep, inconsolable grief.
'No!' he keened, he wailed. 'No! No! No! Please, you bastard, don't let this be.'
As they listened, the wife and the counsellor realised that, apart from its misery, there was something else that was different about his voice. It sounded rougher, and more mature, as if the last innocence of youth had been rubbed away.
`Bob,' said O'Malley, very quietly. 'How old are you?' `Twenty-eight.' He was sobbing, tearlessly.
`Where are you?' luffness Corner. Between Aberlady and Gullane.'
And what are you doing?'
'I'm looking through the window.'
`Which window?'
Of the Mini. The window of the Mini.'
`What do you see inside? You must describe everything.' On the bed he shuddered, and shook his head.
`Yes, Bob, you must. I'll keep you locked in there until you do. Tell me, and release yourself.'
In his trance sleep, he began to whimper. Sarah was appalled by the sound, and terrified.
`The car's against a tree,' he moaned, at last. 'The front end's smashed in. I see the engine, inside the body compartment. That's the thing about Minis. That's what happens to them if they hit something hard enough. I see wires and cables all over the place. There's one of them almost under my eyes. It's the brake-fluid pipe. It's got a nick in it. Not a tear. A cut.
D'you see it?'
`Yes, yes, I see it,' O'Malley responded urgently.
`Do you understand me? It's been cut, by a blade. About a third of the way through. The fucking thing's been sabotaged.'
I see it. I understand. Now, what else do you see?'
He shook his head again. 'No, please. I can't look any further `We must finish it, Bob. You must finish it. Look through the window!'
They waited, but not for long. His mouth opened in another long, howling cry.
`Myra! I see Myra. The steering column is through her chest. There's glass in her hair.
There's blood on her hands, and on her face. I can smell the blood, and the oil, but above it all, I can smell her perfume. It's Chanel No. 5. She always wears it. The bottle's in her handbag, on the passenger seat, and it's smashed.
And she's dead. Oh, God help us, my wife is dead!'
Down to his right, in the corner, O'Malley was aware of Sarah, her face buried in her hands and her shoulders shaking,
`Bob,' he said. `You will leave the dream now.' As he watched, Skinner's face relaxed.
'But I'm not going to bring you up yet. I want you to sleep calmly, for fifteen minutes, to recover.'
He stood up, lifted the weeping Sarah from her chair, and led her from the room. Outside in the corridor, it took some time for her to compose herself, but eventually, her sobbing subsided. A passing Sister saw her and looked at the door of Skinner's room in alarm, but O'Malley waved her away.
`Has he ever mentioned that to you before?'
`No,' she whispered. 'He told me that Myra had been killed when her Mini went off the road and hit a tree, but he never said that he'd been there, that he'd seen her. Why couldn't he share that with me?'
`Sarah, my dear, if he couldn't acknowledge it to himself, how could he tell you? Come on, let's go back in. I'll give him a few minutes more rest, then I'll bring him back up. But I warn you, I wasn't expecting anything like this. I've no idea how he's going to react to the memory.'
EIGHTY-SEVEN
‘Five. Four. Three. Two. One.’
Skinner's eyelids flashed open, wide. His eyes seemed to stand out slightly as he stared at the ceiling, but they did not seem to be focused on anything in the present.
`Think your happy thought, Bob,' said O'Malley. `Concentrate on your present happiness, and let it drive everything else to one side. Concentrate, and talk me through it as you do.
What are you thinking about right now?'
`Sarah and Jazz,' he said at last. 'In Spain, by the side of the pool. The sun's going down, and I've got a beer in my hand… Alex, on the day when she came back from Europe and took us all by surprise. Sarah again, and me, on the day we got married.'
`Good. That's your reality, remember. That's your life today. The memories that we've unlocked over the last three days might be terrible, but they are things in the past, and they can't hurt you any more than they have already.'
Bob pulled himself up to a sitting position on the bed, drew Sarah to him, and hugged her, hard enough for him to wince from the pain of the healing wound in his ribs. 'I know that,' he said, looking over her shoulder at O'Malley. 'But it amazes me that I was able to keep them so deeply suppressed, and for so long. Imagine, for all those years, I didn't have the balls to face the truth of my own experiences.'
`No,' said the psychiatrist. 'In my experience your reaction is a sign of exceptional strength of character, and of very strong mental control. You should never have been put in that position at that air crash all those years ago. You were still a very young man, you had been on the same plane a week before; then to find the body of your friend's child… To expose you to that was inexcusable behaviour by your commanders.'
Skinner smiled at him. 'Give them a break, Kevin. They really weren't to know, and I didn't say anything. Mind you, it explains one thing. Eddie McGuinness went on to become Deputy Chief Constable, and latterly I worked quite closely with him. Yet I had this in-built dislike of the man that I could never explain to myself. I can now. The fact is that any half-fit man could have climbed up to look in that cockpit window. Eddie ordered me to do it because Pender was throwing up, and because he didn't have the bottle himself to face what might have been in there.'
`What was in there, Bob?'
`Nothing. The crew had run to the back of the plane before the impact. It was the Captain's body that was trapped under the fuselage.'
`Yet when you looked through the window, in the dream’. O'Malley stared at Skinner.
'That was quite remarkable,' the psychiatrist said. 'In fact, I've never encountered anything like it. First, as a very young adult you had an experience which would have left most people mentally scarred for life. You coped with it by taking all the detail of it, walling it up, entombing it in the depths of your mind.
`But then, a few years later, you had an experience that was even worse. Infinitely worse, in fact. You dealt with that by taking it and hiding it, for extra security, actually inside your first terrible memory, behind the wall, in that tomb in your subconscious!
Remarkable, quite remarkable. Bob, if you'll allow me, I'd like to publish a report of your case, on a Mr X basis, of course.' I'll need to think about that!'
'Naturally, but I hope you'll agree. You know,' he went on, 'it's pretty obvious how those locked memories were disturbed.'
`Sure, through me being called to a second air crash.'
O'Malley shook his head. 'No. Not just that. I'm aware that you rehearse situations like these — but that hasn't been enough to trigger any memories. The crash itself might have knocked a couple of bricks out of the wall, but it would have repaired itself pretty quickly.