Jo Soulsby approached the Regional Psychology Service, already late for her first appointment. The building was on a sink estate. Many properties were boarded up, awaiting demolition. Hers was heavily protected by electronic security alarms linked to the local nick, iron bars at the windows and closed-circuit television. In the central panel of the front door, someone had carved WANKER. Jo was so used to it being there, it hardly even registered.
She took a deep breath and let herself in.
A number of clients in the waiting area glowered at her as she passed through. First in the queue was Gary Henderson. He didn’t look best pleased. Almost as wide as he was tall, he was an ugly man with a scar down his right cheek and a nose partially disintegrated from chasing the dragon.
Feeling his eyes on her back, Jo made her way to the general office and quickly checked her appointments diary. How bad could things possibly get? The worst two clients back to back when she least felt able to cope with them. In no fit state to interview anyone, she walked back to the reception area and spread her hands in apology.
‘I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to reschedule.’
The first client in the queue, Jonathan Forster, stood up. He straightened his baseball cap, rolled up his magazine and stuffed it in the back pocket of his jeans. He moved off without saying a word, followed by everyone else, bar one. Henderson wasn’t going anywhere. He barged right past her, heading for her office. By the time she caught up with him he’d thrown himself down in a chair and was chewing the skin round his nails, projecting the pieces he’d bitten off across the room with ease. For a normal person, such objectionable behaviour would have been shocking. From Henderson and many clients like him, sadly it was the norm. Jo knew she was in for some stick.
‘I’ve told you I won’t accept that behaviour in my office.’ She held out a tissue. ‘I thought we had an agreement.’
‘We did . . .’ Henderson smirked, ignoring her outstretched hand. ‘I turned up on time. You were late.’
‘Yes, it was unavoidable.’
She lied so as not to give him an excuse to kick off. He had a tendency to do that from time to time, not for any particular reason, just because he could. Henderson cleared phlegm from the back of his throat and made a meal of swallowing it. If that was his way of winding her up, it had the desired effect. Feeling physically sick, Jo left her seat and crossed the room to get a drink. The cooler was running low; the water took forever to dribble into a plastic beaker, adding to her client’s restlessness. She hoped he’d just walk out. But when she turned around and made her way back to her desk he was making himself comfortable.
‘Just because I have to see you as part of my licence doesn’t mean you can treat me like shit,’ he grinned. ‘I want my pound of flesh, miss.’
Jo took in the clock on the wall.
Ten o’clock.
As if sensing her antipathy, Henderson pulled his chair a little closer, placed his elbows on her desk and cracked his knuckles. Close up, his physique appeared much larger and more powerful than it was in reality. He cracked his knuckles again in a show of intimidation. She could see from his dilated pupils that he was high on something. With no energy to argue, she sat down and wrote his name at the top of a fresh page in her notebook.
The interview started badly. Why didn’t that surprise her? Henderson had been difficult all his life; his impertinence and bad behaviour witnessed in every dole office, doctors’ surgery and police station within a radius of thirty miles. She’d supervised him since his release on life licence four years earlier. He’d spent the majority of his adult life inside for the rape and murder of a university student. He’d put his hands up to having had sex with her, his defence team arguing that it was consensual and that some other person had assaulted her afterwards. Jo thought it more likely that the student had spurned his advances, that he’d flown into a violent rage, killing her with unimaginable brutality. The jury obviously agreed with her. It took them less than an hour to reach a guilty verdict.
Henderson might have been an accomplished liar, but his denial of the killing didn’t wash with the parole board. It was only in the latter stages of his sentence that he realized he wouldn’t get out unless and until he admitted culpability. Now here he was, sitting in her office with about as much remorse as if he’d stolen a pint of milk from a neighbour’s doorstep.
At that very moment, Jo hated her job, hated everything connected with criminal law. But most of all, she hated manipulative clients like Henderson who managed to dupe the authorities into releasing them when they deserved to spend the rest of their depraved life behind bars. He came from a long list of offenders she didn’t like, didn’t want to supervise – most certainly didn’t empathize with. His lips were moving but she didn’t hear him. On and on he went, with plenty to say for himself. But Jo had shut down and didn’t come to until he made a sudden movement with his hand.
Jo’s eyes automatically shifted to the alarm button located on the inside of her desk drawer. If she hit it now, her colleagues would come running. But Henderson was close enough to grab her, to do her real harm. Everything she knew about him leapt to the forefront of her mind. She flinched as he repeated the action, relaxing his clenched fist as it reached his brow, combing his right hand through his hair, grinning all the while, making out she’d misinterpreted the movement and was spooked over nothing.
Was he trying to intimidate her?
Jo wasn’t sure.
Maybe she was seeing things that just weren’t there.
It was crazy seeing him in the state she was in.
Glancing surreptitiously at her watch, she was relieved to see that their half-hour session was nearly over. Somehow, she’d managed to get through it.
She looked down at the notebook on her desk.
Apart from Henderson’s name, the page was empty.