A murder… of what? Erin’s neck tingled. ‘Why don’t you take a seat, Tim.’
The sour smell of defeat hung in the air. She checked her watch, anxious to get this over with and back on the road before the weather blocked her in.
He turned away from the window and focused on a point just beyond her left shoulder. His eyes, the colour of pond water, were blank. ‘My name is Timothy.’
‘Timothy?’ She scribbled a note. ‘I heard Dr Harrison call you Tim.’
‘I told him to call me Timothy. He forgets.’
‘Is there a reason you don’t want to be called Tim any more?’
He pivoted back towards the window and pressed his hands against the glass. ‘My father’s called Tim. I used to be Timmy. But I’m too old for that now.’
In the still air, the only sound was the scratch of her pencil on paper. ‘Is there anything special you’d like to talk about?’
He edged close to the chair and dropped into it like a sack of flour. ‘You’re not a visitor,’ he said, looking at his shoes. ‘You’re part of that… review, something. Board. Panel. People. I know about it.’ He rubbed his hands across his chest. ‘I can’t leave until another doctor says it’s okay. Someone who doesn’t know me.’ His eyes shifted to the general direction of her face, then skittered away. ‘You don’t know me.’
Erin was startled but tried not to show it. Maintaining a neutral face was part of the trade. How did he know this? Listening at doors? Or was Harrison’s ploy of introducing her as a ‘visitor from downstate’ so transparent that even to a patient doped up on meds, it was an obvious charade?
‘That’s right.’ She studied his face. ‘I’m sorry Dr Harrison told you that. It’s always better to be honest. It’s true I’m here to get to know you better. But it’s not a test you need to pass, like in school. If it turns out that I’m the right doctor to help with your case – and that hasn’t been decided yet – then we’ll meet with each other a few more times.’ She fiddled with the cap on her pen. ‘But it could be that we only meet today, just this once. Is that okay?
He rubbed a stain on his jeans with his thumb.
‘You mentioned your father just now,’ Erin said. ‘Would you like to talk about him?’
Tim’s hand twitched. ‘Why?’
‘You told me about the name change to Timothy, so I thought you might want to say more about what he’s like, your father.’ She was treading on fragile ground. Harrison had warned her about Tim’s refusal to talk about his family, or anything to do with his hometown and the past. But it was her job to test the boundaries. Wasn’t that why she was here?
He tugged the book of Sudoku from the waistband of his jeans. As he riffled the pages, a scrap of paper fluttered to the floor. Erin caught a brief look of the pencilled scrawl.
Hey Timmy, Timbo. I’m talking to you. Cat got yer tongue? Mister Golden Hair surprise. Too cool for school. The Viking. Rat-a-tat-tat. Movie night. History girl mystery girl. Three across one down.
Before she could make sense of the jumble of words, he snatched the paper off the floor and stuck it between the pages of his book. What was this? Delusional nonsense? Or possibly snatches of memory. Who was history girl? The Viking?
A chill passed through her. No. It was impossible. Across a desert of time, a memory bloomed like a noxious weed. Could there have been more than one? She knew of only one person who called himself ‘the Viking’.
Afraid of breaking the spell, she kept utterly still, hardly daring to breathe. ‘Is that a poem you wrote?’
‘No.’
Hailstones clattered against the window, and she jumped as if struck. When a blast of wind rattled the glass, the desk lamp flickered. She stared at it, expecting the electricity to cut out, plunging the ward in darkness. As it flickered again, she tensed, praying for the gods to be kind. In that moment, hands clasped in her lap, desperately hoping the lights stayed on, the role she was meant to play in Tim’s life clicked into place.
She couldn’t walk away. Not after stumbling upon a doorway, however narrow, into Tim’s damaged psyche. Any other doctor would have dismissed that jumble of words as the product of a delusional mind. But to Erin it was a coded missive from Tim’s past, of his life before he killed his family. Impossible to turn her back on him now.
Her mind fizzed with a million questions, but if she pushed too far, it might scare him off. Take a breath, tread carefully.
Tim picked at the loose skin on his thumb. When a bright spot of blood appeared, he rubbed it away on his sleeve. ‘You talk like Dr Harrison.’
So, he’d noticed. That meant he was paying attention, alert to body language and intonation.
‘I’m from England, like Dr Harrison,’ Erin said. ‘But I only moved here a few months ago. I didn’t know Dr Harrison before. We met for the first time today.’ Best to spell it out now, before his paranoia ballooned into panic.
He heaved himself from the chair and approached the window. The icy sleet had turned into snow, big wet flakes that spun out of the sky and stuck to the glass. Before long, the roads would be a mess.
‘I want to leave the hospital,’ Tim said. ‘They tell me it’s time to go now.’
‘Who tells you?’ Was he hearing voices? She jotted the letter V in the margin of her notes.
He mumbled. ‘No one. Just people.’
‘Have you been hearing voices today?’
‘No.’
She made another note, no voices (today).
‘Dr Harrison mentioned that you didn’t want to leave the hospital before when you had the chance. Can you tell me why?’
‘Miss
