The Unit was swathed in mist as though in cotton wool. Normally you could hear the distant noise of traffic, but today they might have been somewhere deep in the country. Aileen’s efforts to make her voice calm and soothing made her sound, to her own ears at least, like a radio programme called Listen With Mother. Every afternoon she and her mother had sat down in front of the wireless set and listened to a well-modulated female voice telling stories about the doings of bunnies, ducks and teddies. While she listened, Aileen had studied the lighted panel at the top of the wireless, displaying the names of foreign cities: Moscow, Rome, Warsaw, Berlin, Tokyo. The world was vast and various, fascinating but utterly safe, populated by furry little creatures who might occasionally be just a little bit naughty. No wonder people go mad, she thought.
The only point at which Steven had seemed at all disturbed by her narrative had been when she mentioned the girl. Aileen noted that this might be a sensitive area, so she decided to skip the part of Alex’s story in which he described how Tracy had got the boy to reveal the address of the house he visited. Alex said that Steven had also told the girl that the man who lived there had a trunk filled with treasure which he kept in an upstairs room, but the police seemed to feel that this unlikely detail must have been invented by Alex to justify what happened next.
‘When you got home after your newspaper round that week,’ Aileen resumed, ‘Dave and Alex took you upstairs to the room where they’d hidden Jimmy’s body and locked you in. Then they all went to the house in Grafton Avenue. The girl kept watch in the street while Dave and Alex went to the door and rang the bell in a special way you’d talked about.’
Steve suddenly twisted to one side in another convulsive shiver. Aileen waited, but he said nothing.
‘When Mr Matthews opened the door, they pushed their way in and told him to show them where he had hidden his money. He gave them about thirty pounds, which he said was all he had. But Dave didn’t believe him. He searched the house, looking for a trunk full of money which he thought was hidden there. When he couldn’t find it he got very angry. First he threatened the old man with a poker, and then when Mr Matthews still wouldn’t say where the money was, Dave started to hit him.’
‘No!’
Steve spat the word at her.
‘It wasn’t him! It was the other one, the one with eyes that glow in the dark and burn you up! I seen him just before, just around the corner! He was on his way home after doing it. He opened him up like you’re supposed to, tapping and tapping, only he was wrong, it wasn’t like a golf ball inside, it was all messy.’
Aileen frowned. She had had just about enough of the boy’s amateur mad scenes.
‘There’s no point in going on pretending, Steven,’ she said sharply. ‘I know you’re trying to protect the others, but there’s no need. Dave has already confessed. At first he denied knowing you and Alex, but the police showed your photograph to the security guards at the Tesco supermarket and one of them recognized it. He said you used to go there every week, and he remembered that one week two youths had an argument with you at the checkout. He was taken to the police station where he identified Dave and Alex. After that Dave admitted everything.’
‘But it wasn’t him!’ the boy insisted. ‘Why won’t you listen? Why won’t anyone listen? I didn’t listen either. I thought he was crazy. I thought it was all a story he’d made up. But it was all true! He killed the old man and now he’s after me too! I saw him leaving. He knows I know just like he knew what he done to him in the wood. That’s why I got to stay here, see? He won’t come near hospitals. He told me.’
Aileen held the wild eyes with her own, trying to decode this jumble of words.
‘Mr Matthews told you this man would leave you alone as long as you were in hospital?’
The boy nodded. Aileen tried to hide her satisfaction as the last piece of the puzzle dropped into place.
‘Now listen, Steven, there’s something else which you must know. When the crime was discovered, the police tried to trace Mr Matthews’s relatives. It turned out that he hadn’t got any, but in the process they found out quite a lot about him. When he was young, a long long time ago, Ernest Matthews was a soldier. There was a big war and lots of people were killed. Mr Matthews was badly wounded. It wasn’t his body that was hurt but his mind. He was suffering from what’s called battle fatigue. Shell-shock, they used to call it. You see, when things get too bad, too horrible and frightening, then after a while human beings break down and get ill. One of the things that happens is that they imagine that people are threatening them, trying to kill them. They go on thinking that even after the danger is over, when they’re perfectly safe and surrounded by people who care for them. That’s what happened to Ernest Matthews. He must have been very ill indeed, because he was sent to a special hospital and stayed there for almost twenty years.’
‘But I seen him!’ the boy cried. ‘I told you what he looked like, didn’t I? And I told him too, and he said that was him, the man that was after him!’
‘But we can’t believe everything Mr Matthews told you, Steven. You didn’t know that at the time, of course. He was older than you, so you naturally believed what he said. Perhaps he even believed it himself. Perhaps he really did still think that someone was threatening his life. Or perhaps that was just a story that was no longer real to him, which he told you so that you would keep on going to visit him. Perhaps he was afraid that you might get bored going to see an ordinary old man, so he tried to make himself more interesting. We’ll never know the answer to that. What we do know is that what happened had nothing whatever to do with any story he may have told you. Mr Matthews was killed by a violent and unpredictable youth called Dave who had already murdered his friend Jimmy and had nothing to lose by killing again, particularly since he thought that the old man had a lot of money hidden in the house which he could use to get away. That’s who killed Mr Matthews, Steven, not some character from a story. I think you know that. It’s difficult for you to admit it, even to yourself. But one day, perhaps quite soon, you’ll realize that there is no reason for you to feel guilty. Because that’s the problem, isn’t it? You feel guilty. If it hadn’t been for you, Dave and Alex would never have heard about Mr Matthews and so he would still be alive. That’s what you think, isn’t it? It’s almost as though you killed the old man yourself.’
This, she thought, is to proper psychiatric practice what an amputation with a handsaw and a tot of rum is to modern surgery. But there was no time, no money, and a queue of mutilated psyches bleeding to death at the hospital gate.
‘But of course that’s all nonsense! You never harmed the old man. On the contrary, you were his friend, you helped him. Even if you did tell the others where he lived, you couldn’t possibly have known what they were going to do, could you? It had nothing whatever to do with you.’
The boy had resumed his unnatural stillness, locking himself away somewhere deep inside where he thought he could never be traced. Aileen shifted her grip on his arm, patting his wrist lightly.
‘Let me tell you a little story, Steven. One day I was driving home from work when a cat suddenly ran out across the road in front of me. I tried to avoid it, but there was a car coming the other way. I heard a noise under the car and felt a bump. When I stopped and got out, the cat was dead.’