The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Read online

  ‘You like my work, Steven?’

  I must one day get myself fully inured to David’s repertoire of unnerving tricks – in this case, the eyes-in-back-of-head. At least here the illusion was broken instantly upon my catching sight of the compact mirror propped on his desk.

  ‘It’s shaping up very well, David. Could I see that sketch of yours again? The one you’re working from?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m working from in here now,’ he said, tapping his skull, homage to his own imaginative powers.

  ‘Do you have a name for her?’ I asked, half-expecting, I admit, that he would say ‘Roisin’. But he appeared to weigh this very seriously.

  ‘I believe her name’s “Dijana”. As in the goddess. I think that’s it …’ He half-shifted in his chair and shot me a squinting grin. ‘You maybe recognise her? Or just think you do? That’s not peculiar. There’s aspects of the feminine we’re hard-wired to see. Us fellas …’ This last bit tumbled out of him in a sort of mangled Irish brogue, before he turned once again to his handiwork. The nag in my head persisted. But I daresay David has a point. I shut his door, left the monster to his bride.

  9

  Dr Lochran’s Journal

  A disturbing encounter

  August 31st

  Tonight a most unpleasant duty somehow devolved onto me, and even sitting here hours later I am still a little shaken by it.

  Livy and I were stacking the dishes, polishing off a creamy Montrachet and talking in the vaguest terms about Christmas, when I had a call from Malena, a most uncharacteristic quaver in her voice, asking would I please hurry over to hers, without delay, as Killian was ‘acting very strangely’ and had put her somewhat in fear of her safety. I don’t know that Livy was entirely convinced by the entreaty, but she waved me away in the view that I’d been given no choice.

  I got there in fifteen minutes. Malena admitted me looking pale, embarrassed, even, but, yes, undeniably spooked and speaking in a hush, as if not to awaken a slumbering Cyclops. Pointing upward she told me Killian was in his studio, drunk. ‘He’s been drinking all day – a distillery smell up there.’

  Apparently, quite atypically, he’d got stuck into the Powers whiskey I brought over in the summer. (Relating this, Malena couldn’t quite suppress the accusation of her eyes.) Then from upstairs she’d heard rending, smashing noises, and she scampered up there in panic only to be roared at, warned to make herself scarce. He had moved toward her with the three-pound hammer in hand and, though I can’t imagine she really feared assault, she didn’t dally. But she had time to spot shards of shattered stone around the floor at Killian’s feet.

  I understood her alarm, yes, though not her sense of these being death-stakes between them. What I could do, I thought, was have a sober word with the man, as if I’d ‘just dropped by.’ So up I went, cursing the mad-creaking stairs at every step, until I crossed the threshold into the darkened studio.

  Some pale blue of the night’s full moon bled through the skylight, allowing me to see that wreckage was indeed strewn across the floor. Killian had overturned all those rows of small figures formerly lined up on his shelves. His cans of chisels had been thrown the length of the room, red paint was splattered like an open cut down one long wall. The bull had certainly had his way with the china shop: on all sides, things snapped and torn and crushed as if in spasms of violence.

  I heard a creak behind me, spun round and saw a ghost – or rather, Killian’s rocking chair, shrouded in an old dust sheet. Then the sheet inched away and fell, so revealing the man himself – first his glaring head, then his slumped body. That chair had looked a folksy affectation to me, but Killian made it seem sinister now as he straightened in the seat, set his hands on the rests, started to rock slowly back and forth. His eyes had a queasy gleam, the line of his mouth jagged. The three-pound hammer sat snug between his thighs. I felt a quickening in my chest, and was angry with myself: it was still only a squirt of an Irishman facing me. And yet, I admit, there was something forcefully unsettling in the very air of the room – a chill, an aura, a current of ill feeling. Finally I found my voice.

  ‘Killian, you’ve given Malena a scare today.’

  ‘Oh … I give myself a scare, Grey. She should see what I see in the mirror every morning.’

  ‘Get on with you. Wait ’til you’re my age, then you’ll see a sorry sight. You’re a fine-looking young man.’

  He grunted. ‘You wanna suck my rod or something?’

  ‘No, son. No, I’m here because Malena’s worried about you.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘It is. You’ve got her in quite a fret down there. Do you not think you should— try to make things better?’

  ‘Do you not think you should stay out of it? Promise you, captain, you should not interfere.’

  ‘Probably not, but— I’m here now, and Malena is my friend, and I’m finding I don’t quite like your tone.’

  ‘Oh no?’ he sneered, and rose, came toward me, the hammer hanging from his hand, his brow tilted in the manner of a bull contemplating a charge. ‘My tone, y’say? Well, see, I have had intolerable provocation …’

  I held my ground. ‘I’d warn you, Killian, don’t let the Powers talk you into trying something daft. You may think you’ve got youth on your side, but I’ve fifty pounds of heft on you. That’ll count if it comes to a ruck, you can bet on it.’

  He stood there, swaying a little, seeming to weigh my argument. Then he looked hard at me, that brow still tilted. The foreshortening distorted his handsome face most unpleasantly – dark pools under his eyes, the eyes themselves narrowed to slots under his arched brows. His mouth could have been grin or grimace.

  ‘Tell me something, Grey. I want you to tell me honestly. Do you suppose your friend Malena was a happier soul when she was with her – what shall we say? – her ex-lover? The eminent doctor?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say, Killian.’

  ‘But you’d know, in fact you’d have a preference yourself …?’

  ‘Robert is my oldest, dearest friend,’ I shot back, without flinching. ‘But Malena wouldn’t be with you now if she didn’t think her relations with Robert had broken down – irreparably. And if she didn’t believe you loved her. So I’d say your speculation’s a waste of time. As long as you do love her. And show her as much.’

  But he’d ceased to listen, had hung his pickled head. ‘Huh. “Irreparably”. Poor Doctor Forrest. Poor, dead Doctor Forrest …’

  I wouldn’t accept that, not even as drunken maundering. ‘Robert’s not dead, Killian, so you shouldn’t say it.’

  He looked up at me flatly, churlish again – a hiss in the breath coming out of him, mingled with the peat-smoke odour of the whiskey. ‘Grey, when the vital functions cease, and the heart stops, and the breath leaves the body – we call that death, do we not?’

  ‘It’s a working definition of sorts, but it doesn’t apply to Robert, does it, Killian? Robert’s missing.’

  ‘Gone missing, gone astray … Wherever will we find him? And if we do then would we know so? Where would the essence of Robert be found …?’ He prodded a floorboard with the scuffed toecap of his boot.

  ‘Killian, if you’re trying to tell me— you know something, about what’s happened to Robert? Then pull yourself together, talk to me in plain words.’

  He had turned half of his back to me, and when he spoke again it was a near-whisper. ‘I’m as much in the dark as yourself. What could he have done to himself? Or anyone? What would be the worst you could imagine?’

  He had laid down the hammer on one of his sandbagged benches, and seemed now to be surveying his own wrecking handiwork round the room. I risked drawing a little nearer, truly wondering what in hell had possessed the man. ‘God sakes, Killian. How could you trash your own stuff like this? After all what you told me?’

  He spoke without turning. ‘What did I tell you? Tell me again.’

  ‘I mean all that about … respecting the bloody stone.’ />
  ‘Aw, the materials were good, Grey, but I made something evil of them. And she deserved it, most eminently. I took it all out on her. But much the better, yeah? Would you have me dissect a living subject …?’

  His look at me was almost taunting while I wracked my faulty memory for what he’d stirred up. Then it hit me. ‘How did you come by that turn of phrase? It was a little joke of Robert’s and mine.’

  ‘I know. Now it’s one of Killian’s.’

  For the first time I wondered how well acquainted Killian and Robert might have got, before Robert realised the younger man had plans to usurp him. I glanced aside to the worktop where the bottle of Powers sat drained down to all but an amber heel. Killian followed my gaze, lifted the bottle and knocked the dregs back with barely a grimace.

  ‘I meant that Powers as a present, Killian, not that you should try killing yourself with it.’

  ‘You’re right. We should take care, yes? When we unleash the Powers on ourselves.’ He seemed to slump, the heel of his palm on his forehead. ‘Grey, I’ve had such a lesson. No end of a lesson …’

  If at first I’d found him menacing, now he looked merely forlorn. ‘Killian, you need to get a grip on yourself, man.’

  ‘Yeah, I need to— master these extremities, it’s true. It would be simpler, but that I have bad dreams …’

  ‘Aye well, I know that feeling. What do you dream about?’

  ‘Things you’re not to know, Horatio. There’s more to heaven and hell than you ever … whatever.’ Red-eyed, he waved a hand. ‘I’m drunk, Grey, okay? So pay us no mind. I’m drunk, and tomorrow I’ll be sober. None of this will matter. We’ll forget.’

  He managed a grin, as if I should join him in the jape. In the next instant he’d slung an arm around me, and was singing into my face:

  One night I came in the bedroom door,

  Just as drunk as a fella could be,

  To see a young lad lain there in the bed

  Where my old bones should be.

  I grabbed me wife and yelled for dear life,

  ‘Can you ever explain to me?

  Who owns them bones by you in the bed

  Where my old bones should be …?’

  Then he staggered against me. I gave him the full benefit of my shoulder. ‘Right,’ I murmured, ‘let me help you clear up, you eejit.’

  ‘Leave it be. My mistake. My bloody mess …’

  And yet he allowed me to support him back to the rocking chair. Then I stooped and collected up one can of chisels, set a couple of figures back upright on a shelf. Whereupon I properly noticed the two pieces of lunar-white alabaster, clearly broken halves, their jagged edges speaking to one another. I suspected the three-pound hammer had done this damage. And so I picked them up and pressed them together, and what formed in my hands was a sort of death mask, a Greek severity about it, with empty sightless eye-sockets and fine-boned female features. Then – I swear – something twisted hard in my chest.

  Killian lurched from his chair, snatched what was in my hands, hurled the broken stone across the room where it struck bare brick.

  ‘Get out, Grey. Out of my world …’

  I had seen enough of it, that was for sure. I hit the door, made my way down the stairs. By the second flight I could hear him coming down behind me, a stumbling sort of tread, and I braced myself to renew hostilities. But then I heard him stagger off aside, into the small guest bedroom that lay off the third floor landing. Boards creaked above my head, as they do when a body crashes down insensate on a mattress. Then all was horrid silence.

  Malena was at the foot of the stairs, still worryingly grim. I couldn’t tell her what I had seen, since I wasn’t sure myself. And I couldn’t face climbing those stairs again. So I told her what I believed to be true – that he would be a different man again once he’d slept off the whiskey. But this terrible bitterness he’s brought to their relations – in all honesty I’d be less certain that will pass.

  September 1st

  Some sort of movement in Robert’s case this morning – or so I dearly hope. I got a call from DS Goddard on behalf of DI Hagen, who asks that we meet for an hour or so on Friday at Robert’s apartment in Artemis Park. I agreed, of course: on paper there’s nothing I can’t shift that day, work-wise. But since the appointment was made by proxy the mystery is in no way lessened. Perhaps there’s been progress. Or perhaps I am to be among the privileged first to be told some bad news.

  There are, at least, new things I can tell Hagen – about Killian MacCabe, for one thing. I don’t know if they interviewed him during the preliminaries, but they should bloody well speak to him now – because there is something about his new fixation on Robert that I find disturbing, if not downright suspicious.

  And then I must try to face up to – just get clear in my own beclouded head – this business of Dijana Vukovara, the ‘dark lady’, Robert’s mystery woman. The trouble is, she has been such an elusive, strangely half-formed figure in my memory – for one thing I had entirely forgotten her face, what she looked like.

  But Killian was right: we can recognise a woman by just a pair of smudged lines. If she wore a mask we’d guess by the frame of hair, if she wore a greatcoat we’d know her by the turn of her ankle. I had sight of Dijana just the once, but – no mistake now, no seeming shroud of fog around her, no curtain drawn across my mind – I’m nearly certain I saw her face again, the contours of it, eyeless but unmistakable, when I rejoined those two broken shards of alabaster.

  10

  Dr Hartford’s Journal

  Through the trees

  September 2nd

  More grief last night – my prize for coming home. I was barely through the door when I heard the tok of Tessa’s heels across the kitchen tiles. Her theme: that the house is no longer big enough for four, needs extension – a cellar dug, perhaps, or an add-on out the back? What has she got in mind, really? A den for the boys? Or a room of her own, somewhere to be free from the sullen men-folk in her life? Frankly I don’t see the need, nor do I feel like paying for it, or having to manage an invasion of bricklayers. None of that will solve our actual problems.

  At least I have Grey … Calder must think the same, as would the rest of the big ebullient brood that Grey and Livy ought by rights to have had, so easily and with such authority does Grey play paterfamilias. But just as Grey was raised not to dwell on misfortune, so he will never have thought twice – whereas I agonise – over whether he’s a fit paternal role model. He just knows it and gets on with it.

  To this day I’m as obedient and biddable in Grey’s company as little boys are with their fathers. Robert, I know, has felt similar, much as it would kill him to admit it. But I’ve got to be on guard for any outward show of mawkishness. I suppose the simplest remedy is to imagine Grey’s face – his mirthful, annihilating riposte – if by some awful Freudian mishap I addressed him as ‘Dad’.

  Gruff as he is, Grey is a rock in this shifting world, his opinion of a thing the same today as it was yesterday. When we met as lads at Kilmuir – he prefect and Head of House, de rigueur – I thought him too bumptious for his boots, imagined he drew his assurance entirely from being so physically bullish and well made. But time and friendship showed me his was an inner strength. (Otherwise Robert and I, both lean and speedy backs rather than hulking prop forwards, would have left him to the fascists of the First XV, drinking beer from a boot to the delight of the ladies.) Being proportionally larger than the rest of us has only ever made Grey more conscious of the need for delicacy toward others. ‘From each according to their ability’, indeed. He takes his clout as a duty, not as an excuse to throw his weight about, smack down lesser specimens.

  This morning our run was on, so I laced up and jogged away from my doorstep just after 5.30 a.m. Having worked up a head of steam I found him pacing in wait for me on Wildwood Road and, wordlessly, we set off abreast. He didn’t look lively, though – wincing at times – and when he pulled up and bent double near the entrance to the He
ath I made solicitous, but he only waved me off.

  So I headed in and uphill, over the un-mown grass, between the sparse cypresses, the Heath seeming deserted. For me a run is always the same punishment: ten minutes of what feels like virtuous purging, then a further half-hour of being stabbed in the chest and beaten round the knees. I was sat nursing my calves on Parliament Hill, oblivious to the city vista under wan sun, by the time Grey finally crested the rise at a trudge.

  ‘Dear me. Shall I fetch your stick?’

  ‘Piss away off. You weren’t so far ahead of me.’

  ‘I’d already run a mile before I met you, old timer.’

  From his shorts Grey retrieved a book of matches and a crushed pack of red Marlboros. I trust he didn’t spot the hungering look in my eye. ‘I’m no’ a medical man, Steve,’ he growled in his cod-Jock manner once he was sparked up, ‘but ah reckon somethin’ in mah chest just broke. A rib, mebbe? What’d be your diagnosis?’

  ‘Nothing so severe. Though I suspect if we did have a doctor to hand he’d advise you to cut back on the sugar, and the cholesterol. And maybe the tobacco.’

  Grey stretched that bass-drum chest of his, exhaling in my direction. ‘Pish on that. The Lochrans have never had heart disease.’