Free Like This, for Ever by Sharon Bolton

Dana. ‘They look like restraint marks to me.’
    ‘They look exactly like restraint marks, but they’re older than the wounds. I’d say these marks were made on the day the boys were taken, not the day they died,’ said Troy. ‘It’s also my view, and Dr Kaytes doesn’t disagree, that these marks are on the exact site of the carotid baroreceptor.’
    ‘Troy studies martial arts,’ said Kaytes. ‘I’d have written them off as restraint marks; he thinks they could be more significant.’
    ‘Nothing on the others?’ Dana asked, speaking directly to Troy now. ‘The earlier victims?’
    ‘Not in this exact spot, but to be honest, these are very faint bruises. I’d expect them to disappear after a day or two,’ Troy told her.
    ‘So Ryan and Noah could have had them, but there was chance for them to fade?’ said Anderson.
    ‘Exactly,’ said Troy.
    ‘Could explain a lot,’ said Anderson. At his side, Stenning was nodding in agreement.

14
    ‘COULD YOU TELL
me
what they did to you?’ asked the counsellor.
    ‘I assumed you’d read the files,’ replied Lacey. ‘That you’d already know.’
    ‘I’ve read all the files on the Cambridge operation. But this isn’t about what I know or don’t know, it’s about whether you’re strong enough to talk about it yet.’
    The small room in Guy’s Hospital was windowless and Lacey could never quite remember whether she’d pressed the lift to go up to one of over thirty floors, or down into the basement. She could be underground, she could be fifteen storeys up. Once in the room, there was no way of knowing.
    And the corridor outside was always so silent; as though no one but she ever walked it, no one but she ever came to this small, square, dimly lit room, in which sharp edges probably existed but faded to ambiguous shadings in the gloom. There was a couch, two semi-comfortable chairs and a desk. A reading lamp was the only source of light. Lacey sometimes wondered if the woman she came to see twice a week was nocturnal, unable to face sunlight, even bright artificial light. Perhaps she was doomed to lead a sub-terranean existence, dependent upon the needy and the disturbed for her interaction with the outside world.
    Lacey watched the second hand glide round the face of the wallclock. Two pounds a minute, this woman’s time was worth. Every thirty seconds, ching, another pound gone. It was worse than being in a black cab stuck in traffic. Thank God she wasn’t paying the bill herself.
    And once again, she was expected to talk about the time, not much more than a month ago, when she’d come up against a new kind of evil. A depravity in which victims were stalked relentlessly, tortured with their own worst fears, before being thrown headlong into a downward spiral that ended only in self-destruction. She’d come so close to being one of those victims and now this woman, who knew nothing about real evil, was interpreting her reluctance to share details as weakness.
    ‘I’ll have to say it all in court,’ Lacey said at last. ‘I’ll have to spell out every last detail in front of a hundred strangers. I think that will probably do me.’
    She could never bring herself to lie on the couch. Having to talk about herself made her feel vulnerable enough; doing it prone would be a step too far. So she sat, in the chair directly facing the counsellor. Sometimes she and the counsellor held eye contact for long seconds without speaking.
    ‘Well, that won’t be easy,’ the counsellor said, after the better part of a minute. ‘It might help to go through it with me first.’
    ‘I had to make statements from my hospital bed,’ said Lacey. ‘Then, when I got out, I had to go through it all again, just in case there was any question of statements made in hospital somehow being inadmissible. I’ve done it twice already, I think a third time should pay for all, don’t you?’
    The woman glanced down at her notes, as though to check which of her pre-prepared