“Heroic figures never retire. It’s not in our nature.”

  “You’ll have to, one day, and I’m not having you mooching around the house through these endless Canadian winters.”

  “England’s too bloody expensive. The pound is sky-high.”

  “It’s come down a lot, lately. We can afford this place, and it’s so cute.”

  On this one issue, Dorothy’s common sense had deserted her as far as Bell was concerned. Here in Canada they had a huge place, almost a mansion. But back in England even the pokiest little houses cost close to half a million quid. Dorothy seemed to have an exaggerated sense of what a psychiatrist made over here. It wasn’t as if they were living in the States. Oh well, she enjoyed looking at her cottages and gardens, and it didn’t hurt her to dream.

  Bell put his dish and cup on the counter and pinched his wife’s behind.

  Dorothy turned and gave his wrist a light smack. “Don’t you start with that now. It’s the middle of the day.”

  “Nothing could be further from my mind. I’ve got a patient in five minutes. I must prepare my gravitas.”

  “Oh, yes. Mustn’t forget the gravitas. Where would we be without that?”

  In their early days, back in London, Bell and his wife had been tearing each other’s clothes off constantly. But over the years they had settled into a more routine kind of sex life, and that was fine with Bell. They loved each other and looked after each other, and that was all he needed. Of course, Dorothy wasn’t in his class—not brilliant, not even a doctor—but she was good company. And still good-looking, even in her mid-fifties. She had the kind of thin face that ages well, and the slim figure of a much younger woman.

  Bell washed his hands in the downstairs bathroom. He rolled his shoulders, then opened the door that separated the kitchen from the front hall and his office. A young woman with blond hair badly in need of a wash was sitting on the bench in the hall. Other patients might have leafed through a New Yorker or fiddled with an iPod, but this woman was just slouched in her coat, arms folded across her chest. This was Melanie, eighteen years old and the picture of misery.

  “Hello, Melanie,” Bell said.

  “Hello.”

  Even in that single word he could detect a slowness, a thickness, that spoke of the enormous effort expended to express two syllables. Immediately, depression was a third entity in the room. Bell pictured it—him, really—as a silent figure, The Entity, caped and masked, invisible to the patient. Bell sometimes felt like the old priest in The Exorcist, fated to wrestle repeatedly an immortal nemesis. The Entity.

  Melanie followed him into the office and sat on the couch, unbuttoning her coat and letting her shoulder bag slide to the floor. She leaned back and stared at her feet. Dr. Bell sat in one of the small chairs opposite, notebook on knee, not smiling, but face composed into an expression of calm expectation. It was important for the patient, after the usual pleasantries, to be the first one to speak; those first words revealed so much. But sometimes it was hard, as now, to wait for a client to overcome whatever it was they had to overcome before they could begin. The minutes ticked by.

  Melanie looked a lot older than eighteen. She was small-boned and small-breasted, with something of a drowned-rat look, longish flat nose dividing stringy curtains of hair. The Northern University sweatshirt didn’t do a lot for her, either. When she finally did speak, she kept her eyes focused on her outstretched feet.

  “I could barely come here,” she said.

  “You found it difficult? Can you tell me why?”

  “I don’t know …” A long pause while she remained still, except for one foot ticking from side to side like a metronome. “I’m just so sick of myself. Sick of thinking about myself. Sick of talking about myself. There’s nothing worth saying. So why come here? Why run through it all again and again?”

  “You mean you feel that you’re not worth talking about? Or that nothing you say will help you get better?”

  She looked at him for the first time, green eyes two pits of despair, then quickly back at her feet.

  “Both, I guess.”

  Dr. Bell let the silence hold for a few moments, let her feel her own exaggerations, or rather the exaggerations of the hooded figure lurking in the shadows just beyond her vision. The Entity always compelled his victims to speak like this: accuse themselves of worthlessness in order to prevent them from making the slightest effort to save themselves.

  “Let me ask you something,” Bell said. “Suppose someone came to you—a friend, even a stranger, doesn’t matter—and said, ‘You shouldn’t even talk to me. I’m so worthless. I’m not worth even thinking about.’ What would you say to her?”

  “I’d say she was wrong. That nobody’s worthless.”

  “But you won’t accord yourself the same kindness you would someone else.”

  “I don’t know … All I know is, I’m in this pain all the time. I’m sick of talking about it. Talking doesn’t help. Nothing helps. I just want it to be over. I even—”

  “Even what?”

  Melanie started to cry. After a moment Bell picked up the Kleenex box from the end table and handed it to her. She yanked out a couple but didn’t use them right away. She cried hard, hiding her face behind her hand.

  “Why are you hiding?” he asked, and that only made her cry more. You could see the release in her shoulders, hear it in the jagged, breathy wails.

  “God,” she said when the tears had left her.

  “You needed that.”

  “I guess so. Phew.” She sounded spent.

  “You said, ‘I just want it to be over. I even …’”

  “Yeah.” Melanie blew her nose wetly, still gasping and sighing. “Yeah. I was in Coles bookstore the other day and they had a book on suicide. Assisted suicide, I guess. It tells you how to do it—how to kill yourself—painlessly. Basically, you just tie a plastic bag over your head.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I didn’t buy it or anything. But I stood there in the store reading it for a long time.”

  “Because you’d been thinking about killing yourself.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Straight factual question, Melanie—I need to know this: Have you ever actually tried to kill yourself?” He was sure the answer was negative.

  “No. Not really.”

  “How do you mean, ‘not really’?”

  “Well, I scratched at my wrist with a razor blade once, but it really stung. I’m completely chicken when it comes to pain. I couldn’t even cut deep enough to make it bleed.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, a long time ago. When I was maybe twelve or so.”

  “Twelve. Did you write out a note?”

  “No. I guess I wasn’t serious. I was just miserable.”

  “Worse than now?”

  “No, no. Now’s much worse. Much worse.”

  “How often are you thinking of suicide these days?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “You probably do, Melanie.”

  It was impossible to make his voice any softer. He tried to suffuse every syllable with warmth and encouragement—above all, unconditional positive regard. You’re safe here, he wanted her to know, you can face any demon you can name.

  “I think about killing myself a lot,” she said. “Every day, I guess. Mostly in the afternoons. The late afternoons. That’s when everything looks blackest to me. Another day is nearly dead and my life still amounts to nothing. I’m nothing. I hear my roommates laughing and talking on the phone and going out and having a good time, and they seem like, I don’t know, another species or something. I don’t think I was ever that happy. Four o’clock, five o’clock, another day down the drain. Another day trying to write an essay that is completely meaningless. Another day worrying about what my teachers think of me, what my friends think of me. That’s when I really dwell on it.”

  “All these thoughts of suicide. Have you ever actually written out a note?”

  “I’ve thought about it a lot, but I’ve never actually done it.”

  “If you did, what would it say?” She doesn’t want to hurt her mother; it’s not her fault. Here she is in absolute agony, and it’ll be her mother she’s most worried about.

  “I guess my note would say … I don’t know, exactly. I’d want my mother to know I don’t blame her. She did her best and all that. Bringing me up, I mean. Mostly on her own.”

  “Melanie, I know you’re finding university a little demanding these days, the written work and so on, but I’m going to give you a little bit of homework, is that all right?”

  Melanie shrugged. Tiny breasts shifted under her sweatshirt.

  “What I’d like you to do is actually write that note,” Dr. Bell continued. “Put your thoughts in writing. I think it would be very good for you. It might clarify exactly what you’re feeling these days. Do you think you could do that?”

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t labour over it too much. It doesn’t have to be long. Just write out exactly what you would say if you were actually going to kill yourself.”

  19

  IT’S NO SECRET THAT a certain type of man, or another type of man in a certain type of mood, will seek out exactly the person, place or thing that is most likely to bring him the maximum pain. A drunk will head to the bar, a compulsive gambler to a loved one’s savings account, a forlorn lover to the scene of parting. John Cardinal was in the basement the next afternoon, standing motionless in the dim light and chemical smells of Catherine’s darkroom.

  The darkroom had been hers and hers alone, and he had never set foot in here uninvited.

  Although Catherine would sometimes chat about a project beforehand, she never talked about her work in the darkroom. She was like a chef who doesn’t want anyone else in the kitchen, preferring to bring out the perfect meal as if it has been conjured out of thin air. She liked to come upstairs with a fistful of new prints and spread them out on the kitchen table. Then she would stand back while Cardinal examined them one by one.

  If Cardinal was too slow to form an opinion, she would speak her own over his shoulder. “I like the fire escape in that one, the diagonal is so dramatic.” Or “Look at the cyclist in the background, heading in the opposite direction. I love accidental things like that.” Half the time Cardinal sensed that he was admiring the wrong thing: how cute the little kid was, how pretty the snow. But Catherine didn’t seem to mind.

  There were several prints of the same photograph clipped to a line over her sinks, which Cardinal had installed for her years ago. The prints were black-and-white, and showed a brick wall in the foreground, a man approaching in the background, maybe half a block away. Man and wall were equally in focus, and Cardinal knew from his own limited experience that that was hard to do. It gave a slightly dislocated feel to the image, as if man and wall were equally inhuman. The man’s head was down, his face hidden by the kind of hat people rarely wear these days. An ominous picture… or maybe it just seemed that way in retrospect.

  “What are you doing down here?” Kelly was leaning in the doorway, looking effortlessly lovely in white shirt and blue jeans. Catherine twenty years ago.

  Cardinal pointed to the shelves that lined one wall, the tall closet for cameras and lenses, the wide shelves for storing prints. The bins for frames.

  “I built those for her,” he said.

  “I know,” Kelly said.

  “Catherine designed it, of course. I mean, it was her workspace.”

  “She was happy here,” Kelly said, and Cardinal felt a crimp in his heart.

  “I’m going to ask you to do me a favour, Kelly. Not now, but a few months from now, maybe.”

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “I don’t know anything about photography. And to tell you the truth, I liked every single picture Catherine ever took. She saw it, she thought it was worth photographing, to me it was valuable. But you’re an artist.”

  “Struggling painter, Dad. Not a photographer.”

  “You have an artist’s eye. I was hoping sometime, not now, you could go through Catherine’s photos and select the best ones. I was thinking—next year, maybe—we could put on a show of her work at the university or the library.”

  “Sure, Dad. I’d be happy to do that. But I don’t think you should be hanging around down here. Everything’s still too raw, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. It is.”

  “Come on,” she said, and actually took his hand and led him out of the darkroom. It all but undid him.

  Kelly was right, though. He found it easier to breathe upstairs, in the domain that had been half his. He went into the living room and looked over the titles on the bookshelves. Catherine bought most of the books in the house. The majority were photography books, but she had also bought books about yoga, Buddhism, the novels of John Irving, and a lot of psychology, too—books about depression and bipolar disorder. He took down Against Self-Slaughter by Frederick Bell.

  There were several other books listed on the flyleaf, all of them with academic-sounding titles, but this one appeared to be aimed at a general audience, its tone calm, reassuring and surprisingly self-revelatory. The first few pages related how Bell’s father had committed suicide when he was eight, and his mother ten years later when he was beginning university. Not surprising that such a background might lead one to labour, as Bell put it in the introduction, “in the fields of grief and despair.”

  Cardinal flipped through. The book was organized around several case studies, each chapter beginning with a description of a suicide attempt that brought the patient into Bell’s practice. There was also a section dealing with partners of suicides, with particular emphasis on people who had married more than one person who had committed suicide. “Some people with deep, repressed suicidal fantasies of their own,” Bell wrote, “need to be near people who are able to kill themselves. Unable to hurl themselves over that mortal precipice, they need someone to commit suicide for them.”

  Cardinal decided it probably wasn’t the best thing for him to be reading just then.

  He went into the kitchen, where Kelly had settled herself over a sketchbook. He picked up the mail from the counter where she had stacked it. Most of it was for Catherine: a photography magazine, notices from the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum of upcoming shows, a bill for her MasterCard, as well as various mass mailings from Northern University. There were a couple of square envelopes addressed to him, more cards.

  He was looking for his letter opener when the phone rang.

  It was Brian Overholt, a Toronto homicide cop Cardinal had known forever. They had worked vice together more than twenty years ago, and after that narcotics. Together they had made an effective team, and Overholt was one of the few Toronto colleagues he missed. Cardinal had called him about Connor Plaskett.

  “John, I got an answer for you. Plaskett is indeed an experson. Got run over by an Escalade in the club district here a couple of weeks ago. Hung in on the critical list for a while, but he died a week ago last Saturday.”

  “Was he into anything down there I should know about?”

  “Not that we know of. His associates scattered into the woodwork when he got run over, so draw your own conclusions. They clearly didn’t want to pass the time of day with law enforcement.”

  “You catch the driver?”

  “No, but it’s just a matter of time. Anything else I can do for you? Hello? You still there?”

  Cardinal had opened one of the envelopes addressed to him and now he was staring at the card it had contained.

  “Uh, yeah, Brian. Listen, thanks a lot. Any time I can return the favour.”

  “Sure. Next time I’m looking for an Eskimo, I’ll hold you to it. Hey, how’s Catherine?”

  “Gotta run, Brian. Something just came up.”

  This card was postmarked Mattawa, just as the first one had been, again a semi-glossy Hallmark of the sort available at any large drugstore, not to mention every stationery store in the nation. So the sender had bought at least three. Maybe he had bought them all at the same time in the same store. A clerk might notice someone who bought three sympathy cards at once.

  Cardinal tried to keep his mind fixed in investigative mode and not react to the words inside the card.

  What a terrific husband you must have been, it said. Same set-up as before, original message of the card covered up with a typed message. She preferred death to living with you. Think about it. She literally preferred to die. That should give you some idea of what you’re worth.

  Cardinal went to the window and tilted the card this way and that in the light. Yes, he could just make out a thin line across the capital letters. Almost certainly the same printer, and even if not, almost certainly the same sender. Whoever it was, it could not be Connor Plaskett, who had died before Catherine. Connor Plaskett, as Brian Overholt had so eloquently put it, was an ex-person.

  She preferred death to living with you.

  “Oh, fuck you!” Cardinal slammed his fist on the fridge, sending magnets, notes and snapshots to the floor.

  “Dad, are you all right?”

  Kelly had leapt up from her chair and was regarding him with dark, alarmed eyes.

  “I’m fine.”

  She put a hand to her heart. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear like that.”

  “You may have to get used to it,” he said, shrugging on his jacket.

  “You’re going out?”

  Cardinal grabbed his car keys.

  “Don’t hold supper for me,” he said.

  20

  “CAN YOU GIVE ME an address on Neil Codwallader?” Cardinal was heading into town on 63. The heat of his anger surprised him. He could feel it pulsing in his wrists, throbbing in his temples.

  “Neil Codwallader is single now, John. He doesn’t have anyone to beat up at the moment.”

  It was Wes Beattie on the other end of the line, a parole officer. Beattie had an imperturbable and comforting purr of a voice; it was hard to believe he had ever been a cop, but he had put in fifteen years with the OPP before being reborn into the gentler avatar of parole officer. Whenever he spoke to Beattie on the phone, Cardinal pictured a fat tabby.