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“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery
“Not all who wander are lost, m’ boy.”
She’d sooner go to the glue factory.
long bank of windows looked out across the lough, which gleamed like burnished gold in the setting sun.
Lough = loch
He had a strong constitution, and the sight of blood alone did not unsettle him, nor did crime scene photographs—they were enough to turn any man’s stomach, but they were merely evidence of something far greater and more disturbing. The outer limits of the human mind.
a quote from Gandhi that Bill Douglas had once told him, at the end of a particularly bad day at the hospital: Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.
He was an impostor.
But it was the eyes that gave him away. They were a deep, arresting shade of green, and fathoms deep with sadness; the kind that came from delving into the hearts and souls of those wracked in torment. A little rubbed off each time, though he tried to prevent it. A shadow of their fear and self-loathing imprinted itself on his memory and made a home there, swirling around the cavern of his mind until he could no longer tell where they ended, and Alexander Gregory began.
Dixon of Dock Green,
began to wonder about the coincidence. Was there any such thing? Perhaps; but one thing he was sure about—early life trauma could impair the development of important emotions, such as compassion and empathy, both of which were crucial to prevent a person enacting violent thoughts and fantasies, including murder. Without human compassion, the victim was just a body—a means to an end—and so much easier to kill. The very definition of what it meant to be a psychopath.
Gregory had called upon some advice he’d once received from a murder detective in the North of England; a man by the name of Ryan, who dealt with the worst of humanity every day and seemed to wake up each morning still thinking the best of the world and those who inhabited it. “Follow your conscience,” Ryan had told him. “Never tell the family any lies, but don’t rob them of hope, either. Hope’s sometimes all there is.”
would never change, because she’d internalised the alternative fantasy world she’d created to justify her own actions. There were disorders he could name, syndromes he could ascribe, but it boiled down to something very simple. She believed her own lies.
“We all have bad days,” he said softly. “The key is to have a better day, tomorrow.” Niall rubbed a hand over his forehead. “What if you can’t see as far ahead as tomorrow?”
He knew there were three main clinical reasons for a person to suffer a blackout: the first was owing to a ‘syncope’, or sudden lack of blood supply to the brain caused by poor blood pressure or existing heart problems; the second was epilepsy; and the third was known as a ‘psychogenic blackout’ resulting from extreme stress or anxiety. There was also a fourth potential reason… Alcohol abuse.
Fear was a living, breathing thing inside him, and he battled to keep it at bay as he dived into the trees and made for the pathway that would take him past the tennis courts and towards the town centre. Pine cones scattered as he half-walked, half-ran through the forest, keeping to the worn pathway. The trees rose up all around him, like silent sentinels that seemed to contract and move. It’s only your mind, playing tricks again. There, beneath the forest canopy, he could have been anywhere in the world. With only Nature as his companion, it might have been ten, twenty or even a hundred years
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