Breakdown (7 page)

“Hmmm.” I didn’t add a nod.

“I bet it’s fun when you’re all together; talk must be... fascinating.”

“You’re not into logistics, right?”

“Petrol goes in one end, I pay for it another,” said Craig. “It’s about as adventurous as I get.”

“You’d be surprised how many men admit to that.” Jan came to mind and I frowned, looking away and needing something else to focus on.

“How are things at work in general?”

Giving a smile down at my soup, I put the lid back on and looked at my manager Steve. “You know I’ve been on no fucking holiday, Ste.” Things fell pretty quiet very quickly. “Get a nice call off Gray this morning, did we?”

“Jack—”

I pinned my manager up against the blinds. “How long have you been playing eye-spy for him?” I asked quietly. “What else have you told him over the past eleven years, hmmm?” The thumb tracing his jaw dug into his throat, making it hard for him to swallow.

“Jack,” said Craig, quietly. “Do you know you’re scratching at your hip?”

I glanced down. Fresh blood stained just below the waistline of my jogging bottoms, finger tips black under the nails as if I’d scratched last night. “Fuck,” I mumbled. “Bastard always knows someone in your life who can feed information to him.”

“Gray?” Craig disappeared out of the room for a moment, then came back a few minutes later with some fresh swabs and antiseptic wipes. “Here,” he handed them over.

Eventually I took them off him, easing back on the bed and pressing the swabs between pyjama and skin. I’d pulled Reis’ efforts off at some point this morning. Had to be this morning. Craig didn’t seem the type to let an open wound remain exposed to the dried blood on my jeans.

“MI5,” he said, flicking a look over. “It can’t be easy living with a counter-terrorist op from G-Branch.”

Fingertips were wiped as I glanced at them.

“Leaves you little privacy both on a professional and personal front,” he added quietly. “Refuge is important, Jack.” He looked around my room. “You need a place where you can see there’s a definite line between therapy beginning and finishing.” He glanced back. “Will you go up to Halliday’s office? Room 12 on the second floor? He’d like to discuss your—”

“Kick off—”

“—initial assessment after yesterday and propose some therapy options. I don’t want any therapy in here.”

The bathroom took my attention. I’d forgotten. You needed to play nice with these bastards. Yeah. I could roll over and purr like a good bloke.

“You also need to eat.” Craig reached over and plucked a breakfast tray off the floor. Where the fuck did he pull that from? “You had nothing, nor any fluids,” he added.

The orange juice and bowl of cornflakes sat untouched.

“When was the last time you ate?”

I took the tray off him. “Eating’s been fine,” I mumbled, more than fine. Eat, shower, work, sleep. Eat, shower, work... some sleep. But not routine. Routine was... I downed the orange juice, then took a few mouthfuls of food. “See?” He got a cornflake-filled smile.

“Nice.” He rolled his eyes. “Room 12?” said Craig, knees creaking and joints stretching as he stood. “Ten minutes, yeah?”

“I’ll have to check my diary, see if I can pencil him in.”

“No pencils allowed.”

“No threats to poke out the odd eyeball, eh?”

“You got it.”

“Any paper? Mind you, those paper cuts are vicious bastards.”

“Maybe something small to start with.” He measured a matchbox size between thumb and forefinger. “This big, considering your history with cuts.”

“Twat.”

He flashed a smile. “Room 12, then, yeah?”

“I have a choice?” Let’s not make the playing nice too obvious here.

“There’s always a choice, Jack. Sometimes people just need reminding about the options. No shame in that.”

Halliday’s office looked nothing like mine. No mahogany desk, no filing cabinets, just a smooth-looking red leather settee in a white backdrop. Finely drawn black vinyl wall art broke up the main wall, just a few flowers with petals that drifted in on a breeze. Some Latin shit was written underneath in fancy calligraphy, the lettering set to drift in swirls and curls as though caught by the breeze too. Wall lights would give a calm feeling come evening, and would no doubt have Jan grinning ear to ear over art interpretation—

Christ. I forced that back, instead going over and sitting opposite Halliday. Again he had no files, no pen, and as he sat back and eased an arm on the back of his settee, drew a leg up across his knee, he gave a very easy smile. He looked no different from when I’d last seen him in the hospital, only he’d carried a book then. Fucking hated books.

“Glad you made it, Jack.”

“Well.” I looked over at the door as Craig shut it behind me. He didn’t seem to move far away when it closed. “I was reminded of the alternative. Fuck and you.”

Halliday chuckled; I hated how natural it sounded. “Ah, Craig. He’s a... character.”

“Yeah, regular jackass.” I looked at Halliday, at least glad I was fresh from a shower, although his suit put my jeans and T-shirt to shame. “There’s a session to get through, right?”

Halliday went quiet, watching me for a minute. “After your initial assessment yesterday, my colleagues and I discussed a course of treatment—”

“Peachy.” The door over there seemed suddenly smaller. “Gonna drug me stupid and leave me to rot in here, hmmm?”

“But there’s something we need to discuss before we can contemplate beginning them.”

I gave a raised brow. “Can I pick the topic? How about who’s worse: the nut job, or the one who sits there encouraging it?”

“That worries you?” said Halliday. “That you might be—”

“Nuts?” I shook my head. “Although you locked me in here so something’s got you worried. Gray make a call to you too? Don’t you think you keeping me here and talking about this shit feeds the bullshit he’s trying to cover up?”

I sat there in Halliday’s office, watching as he tapped lightly at his heel. Polished black shoes... they were good quality too. Everything in here echoed Gray and social status.

“You’re worried I’m feeding the insanity?” he said softly. “Gray’s? Or yours?”

Jack. What the hell have you done?

I tensed my jaw. “You know this is bullshit? Stack my case history next to Gray’s and I know full fucking well where you’re going. The only difference between my bastard side and his? I get caught.”

Halliday scratched distractingly at his eyebrow. “At the end of the first month, if you feel you need military police in on anything you disclose here, you only have to say—”

“A month?” The
first
fucking month? I was up, heading for the door. “Like fuck are you keeping me here for that long, I have a fucking life.”

“Filmed,” said Halliday. “What did you mean when you said you’d seen Gray film some of the rape and torture you went through?”

I stopped by the door and glanced back over my shoulder. “What?”

“Yesterday. You mentioned that Gray had filmed some of the rape and torture and posted it on the internet. Is that what made you wreck Gray’s gallery? Is that why you hurt some of his staff with the baseball bat?”

Okay, so the baseball bat was a damn stupid idea. Looking back, yeah, it would have made me rattle like an engine with more than just a few screws loose every time I took a swing. Even Ed... Fuck. Even that old bastard had been caught in the heat, and that was damn lousy to pick on an old man. But—“The DVD of Vince branding the hell out of me for touching Jan, it was there in his office.”

“The DVD where you wore the black rope necklace, the one with a black cross attached to the silver one?”

I frowned. “Necklace?” I hadn’t thought about it, not the necklace. Gray. I was looking at my hand. He’d given me that back a few days ago. Had that been confiscated too? “How do you know?” I looked at Halliday. “About the necklace?”

“You were wearing the rope necklace in the DVD, the night Vince branded you?”

Life stalled for a moment. Knelt there, Vince... he’d held out a long velvet box as I sat there at my kitchen table, or what I thought had been my kitchen table. “He bought a replica of the one I’d lost when I was a teenager.” I searched the image, trying to place when exactly he’d given it to me. “A day or so before Christmas, he knelt there in the kitchen holding the box then.”

“And the original necklace, what happened to that one? The one you wore when you were a teenager?”

Don’t give the bastard a name and let him own you.

Halliday sat forward slightly. “Who said that?”

I jolted slightly, not realising I’d spoken, and dug my hands deeper in my pockets. “Vince,” I said flatly, “I told him I’d lost the original when I met Gray.” Images were being too fucking stubborn, just hiding in the shadows, some stepping forward, others running off like kids hiding behind forest trees and giggling at the seeker’s ignorance. “Vince said Gray had mugged me, that I shouldn’t give the bastard a name and let him own me.”

Hands were out of my pockets, and I didn’t realise until Halliday said, “Jack, are you aware you’re scratching at your hip. Would you prefer to ‘go casual’ with your photo?”

“No,” I snarled through my teeth, hiding my hands in my back pockets.

“The rope necklace you wore as a teen,” said Halliday, his voice so fucking calm. “What happened to it?”

“Fuck’s sake. I’d just gone eighteen and beaten up a policeman in an alley.” This rushed off my tongue. “One Cutter wanted taken out of the picture. Gray was working with the copper on some illegal drug importation that Cutter was involved in, something to do with Gray’s counter-terrorism department, and he pulled me off the copper and beat the shit out of me for it. I lost the necklace in the fight. It broke in the alley.”

“Gray saved the policeman’s life?”

“Yeah.” I smirked at Halliday. “Go the fucking big hero there, eh?”

“And what happened to the rope necklace?”

I fell quiet, shrugged. The safe in Gray’s office came out of the shadows, how the necklace had sat in there over the years, how priceless art was kept on the walls, the broken necklace, in the safe. “He kept it.”

“Gray kept it?”

I looked back towards the door. “He asked if I wanted it fixing, after he’d shown me how Cutter had cut a few kids up, he asked if I wanted it fixing, but I told him to keep it.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Because sometimes things shouldn’t be fixed and given a new look just to cover the cracks. They need to stay as they are, be remembered.”

“And Gray kept the necklace all these years?”

“Yeah,” I said quietly, “he remembered.”

“Jack, are you aware you’re scratching at your hip? Would you prefer to drop your photo casually on the table?”

“
Stop with the fucking hip and photo shit
.” But I was bleeding my hip, and forced my hands back in my jean pockets, deeper, as far away as possible.

“Okay. Take a breath. Relax. Now go back to before Vince gave you the replica of your necklace, to before he kidnapped you and Jan from your home. Back to the video links that first started appearing on the internet. The ones you said Gray was responsible for.”

“What?”