PEEL-BEHIND THEIR EYES. Book 1 (Complete)

Chapter 6. Therapy cont.

Question: It says here that you lived up north, then moved to London for a while, before coming to Grimsby. It must have been hard for you as a child, moving around, was that for your father career?

Robert: Yeah, we lived in London for a while, we moved down there when I was about five years old. My mother said it was for my father's career, as well as for a change of scenery. Years later I found out that she threatened to leave him if he didn't stop his affairs with other women, and that was the scenery she wished to change. Well, the scenery didn't so much as change as evolve.

I heard them arguing one night, I was in bed asleep. The front door slammed suddenly and I woke with a start. Downstairs my father had stumbled drunkenly down the hallway and into the front room where my mother always waited for him on nights like those. Now that I come to think about it, I think she waited for him so she could calm him down, or to take the brunt if the more than often violence erupted. I listened to their voices which were quiet, to begin with, but then there was a loud scream from mother and a loud crash. My father screamed something I couldn't make out clearly, but I'm sure it wasn't pleasant from the way he had said it, forceful and to the point. My mother screamed back at him. By then I had crept out of my dark bedroom and down a couple of stairs. Through the balustrade I caught a single word 'Prostitute' I didn't understand what it meant, but I knew it wasn't good. I found out soon enough. The next day my black and blue mother walked me to school.

I said his affairs had evolved, but I think mother if she could, would have said devolved. I don't know what happened immediately after that event in our family's ongoing drama, but things, as I remember, seemed to settle down for a while. Soon after we made yet another move, this time here, to Great Grimsby, I was eight by then. Father had moved another rung up the ladder and was starting to make a name for himself now he was a Detective Inspector in C.I.D. the Criminal Investigation Department. I never knew what crimes he had a hand investigating, but as most C.I.D departments, he would have been involved in serious crime; you know the sort, fraud, assault, rape, and murder. Was it these cases that sent his mind onto unsafe ground Doc? Well, either way, we had a couple of half decent years, hardly any violence at home, mother almost had a smile on her face and father seemed settled.

Question: Yes, those kinds of difficult cases can cause many emotional symptoms in the people investigating them. Just as traumatic fires can emotionally compromise firemen, or paramedics, doctors, and nurses, the police are not exempt. But I wasn't asking about your parents, Robert, I was asking about you, you as a child, how did you cope?

Robert: Me? Oh, I was fine, I found the moves a bit difficult, but what kid doesn't when starting a new school. As to be expected I had the odd run in with the tougher kids, but father had already beaten into me a toughness of my own, so I was having none of it. I quickly found myself in the headmaster's office, my hand out, and a cane thwacking my palm. I remember one headmaster's confusion as he swung the cane time after time and receiving no response to my pain in return. After ten strikes I gave in and let him have my crocodile tears just so he wouldn't find me to strange. By that age Doc, I began to understand that the best way to fit in was to give people what they wanted, to a degree, if they were happy, they tended to leave you alone. With me, they didn't realize what I kept hidden from them. That was how I survived, how I survive now. In a way, I guess my father taught me one of the more useful lessons in life, survival, but even he eventually lost that edge.

Question: Do you think your father was running away when he committed suicide, from his problems with you and your mother, from his work, you have already spoken of his final case. Do you feel as if he left you with to many unresolved questions, Robert?

Robert: His suicide, I don't want to talk about that Doc. Why! Why do you think? No, not because I loved him, Jesus no! I hated him for what he did to us. No, I don't want to talk about it because that hard, no-nonsense wife beating bastard eventually became a coward and took the easy way out. He refused me the chance to return the years of misery he gave us, and believe me, even at the tender age of 10, I was already looking forward to the day I could stand over him and beat him into a puddle of his own blood.

Everytime I say I don't want to talk about something, you always say the same bloody thing. Will it really make me feel better to talk about it Doc, will it really? OK have it your way.

Yeah, I guess he couldn't cope with the guilt, all those months, almost a year, chasing shadows and the only thing to keep him going was the thought of the safe return of those young girls. I'd like to think that at the last he realized how bad a man he had become himself, how he couldn't go on punishing the ones he loved to satisfy his own demons, how he failed us. But as they say, reality bites, he jumped because of those fucking girls, not me, not mother, but those poor, poor fucking girls.

You really think that he jumped because he failed all of us, Doc, I don't, and next you'll be telling me that deep down he was a good to honest guy. I've heard that kind of shit from nearly every mother of a suspect I've every interviewed, it didn't wash then, it doesn't wash now. And before you ask, yes I've started to read his case file again, just as you suggested before. I got as far as the Beaumont's, they were the first family, the second came two days later, and the third, two more days after that, each the same M.O, dead parents, gouged eyes, and missing girls. It was a rapid escalation on the murderer's part, but I guessed he had everything planned from the start, quick, easy, with no eyewitnesses. It drove my father to drink, and then he escalated his own crimes against us, poor, poor us, hey Doc! Yeah, and then the victims were discovered, witnesses dried up and leads, dead. Months passed, and nothing and my father's heartfelt promises broken. Like I said before, when that girl killed herself, so did he, coward!

(If you enjoyed this chapter please feel free to vote)