The Whisperers

‘The cops found my card in his cabin, and it seems that his physician is on vacation in the Bahamas.’

‘It’s a long way to drive for a man that you didn’t know well.’

‘He was a soldier, and another suicide. This is my work. The cops thought I might be able to shed some light on the circumstances of his death.’

‘And could you?’

‘Only what I could tell from my sole visit to his home before tonight. He lived alone, drank too much, smoked some pot, judging by the smell in his cabin, and he had little or no support structure.’

‘So he was a prime candidate for suicide?’

‘He was vulnerable, that’s all.’

‘Why now, though? He’d been out of the military for fifteen years or more. You told me that post-traumatic stress could take as long as a decade to undo, but fifteen years seems like a long time for it to begin in the first place.’

‘That I can’t explain.’

‘How did you come to find him?’

‘As I interviewed former soldiers, I asked them to suggest others who might be willing to participate, or those whom they felt were vulnerable and could use an informal approach. Someone suggested Harold.’

‘Do you remember who it was?’

‘No. I’d have to check my notes. It might have been Damien Patchett, but I couldn’t say for sure.’

‘It wouldn’t have been Joel Tobias, would it?’

She scowled. ‘Joel Tobias doesn’t hold with psychiatrists.’

‘So you tried?’

‘He conducted the last of his physical therapy at Togus, but there was a psychological component as well. He was assigned to me, but our progress was limited.’ She examined me steadily over the lip of her glass. ‘You don’t like him, do you?’

‘I’ve barely met him, but I don’t like what I’ve found out about him so far. Joel Tobias drives a big rig with a bigger trailer. There’s a lot of space to hide something in a box that size.’

Her eyes didn’t even flicker.

‘You seem very convinced that there is something to hide.’

‘The day after I began looking into Joel Tobias, I was worked over very professionally: no bones broken, no visible marks.’

‘It might not have been co

‘Listen, I appreciate that there may be people out there who don’t like me, but most of them aren’t very smart, and if they arranged a beating for me they’d be sure to claim a little credit. They’re not the anonymous donor type. These guys used water, and a sack. It was made clear that I should stay out of Joel Tobias’s business and, by extension, theirs.’

‘From what I hear, most of the people who might have had real difficulties with you are no longer in a position to arrange beatings, not unless they can contract out from the grave.’

I looked away. ‘You’d be surprised,’ I said, but she didn’t seem to hear. She was lost in her own thoughts.

‘The reason why I declined to help you when we first met was because I didn’t believe that you wanted what I wanted. My role is to help these men and women where I can. Some of them, like Harold Proctor and Joel Tobias, don’t want my help. They may need it, but they consider it a sign of weakness to confess their fears to a shrink, even an ex-army shrink who spent time in the same dustbowl that they did. There’s been a lot written in the newspapers about suicide rates among military perso

‘And now?’

‘I still think you’re a jackass, and that detective out at the Proctor place clearly concurs, but maybe our ultimate aims aren’t so different. We both want to find out why these men are dying at their own hands.’

She took another sip of wine. It stained her teeth, tipping them with red, like an animal that had fed recently on raw meat. ‘Look, I take this seriously. That’s why I’m engaged in this research. My study is part of a joint initiative with the National Institute of Mental Health to try to come up with some answers, and some solutions. We’re looking at the role that combat, and multiple deployments, play in suicide. We know that two thirds of suicides take place during or after a deployment: that’s fifteen months in a war zone, with barely enough time to decompress afterward before exhausted men and women are sent back into the field again.

‘It’s clear that our soldiers need help, but they’re afraid to ask for it in case it’s recorded and the jacket follows them. But the military also needs to change its attitude toward its troops: mental health screening is poor, and commanders are reluctant to allow military perso

She sat back. Some of the hardness fell away from her, and she just looked tired. Tired, and somehow younger than she was, as though her distress at the deaths was both professional yet also almost childlike in its purity.

‘Do you understand now why I was wary when a private investigator, and one, with respect, whose reputation for violence precedes him, began asking about the deaths of veterans by their own hands?’

It was a rhetorical question or, if it wasn’t, then I chose to consider it as such. I signaled for another round. We didn’t speak again until it arrived, and she had poured the remainder of her first glass into her second.

‘And you?’ I asked. ‘How does it affect you?’

‘I don’t understand the question,’ she said.

‘I mean that it must be hard, listening to all of those stories of pain and injury and death, seeing those damaged men and women week after week. It must take its toll.’

She pushed her glass around the table, watching the patterns that it formed: circles upon circles, like Ve

‘That’s why I left the military and became a civilian consultant,’ she said. ‘I still experience guilt about it, but over there I sometimes felt like King Canute, trying to hold back the tide alone. In Iraq, I could still be overruled by a commander who needed soldiers in the field. The needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, and for the most part all I could do was offer tips on how to cope, as if that could help soldiers who had already gone far beyond the possibility of coping. In Togus, I feel like I’m part of a strategy, an attempt to see the bigger picture, even if the bigger picture is thirty-five thousand soldiers already diagnosed with PTSD, and more to come.’

‘That isn’t answering the question,’ I said.

‘No, it isn’t, is it? The name for what you’re implying is secondary trauma, or “contact distress”: the more deeply therapists involve themselves with victims, the more likely they are to experience some of their trauma. At the moment, mental health evaluations of therapists are practically non-existent. It’s self-evaluation, and nothing more. You know you’re broken only when you break.’

She drank half of her wine.

‘Now, tell me about Harold Proctor, and what you saw out there,’ she said.

I told her most of it, leaving out only a little of what Edward Geagan had revealed, and the money that was discovered in Proctor’s cabin. When I was finished, she didn’t speak, but maintained eye contact. If it was some kind of psychiatric trick designed to wear me down and blurt out everything that I’d kept hidden since childhood, it wasn’t working. I’d already given away more than I wanted about myself to her, and I wasn’t about to do it again. I had a vision of myself closing a stable door while a horse disappeared over the horizon.