Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

women were only beaten this badly, this systematically, by their partners. This was domestic violence gone rogue.
    And she was caught at the heart of it.
    Tears seeped from her swollen eyes. She’d tried to hold on to the promise of seeing her son again. But Bev was no fool. She knew she couldn’t withstand another night like that. She’d seen his face. She could identify his home.
    She wasn’t going to make it out of here alive.

24

    T ony had always liked the room where he visited Dr Jacob Gold. Nothing in it reminded him of anywhere he’d spent any significant amount of time; it was emotionally neutral. The walls were lemon yellow, broken up by four large paintings of beaches, seascapes and tidal estuaries. Two armchairs at an angle to each other sat on either side of a gas fire, separated by a striped rug in muted colours. In the shallow bay window sat a chaise longue with another armchair close to its head. A low table sat in the centre of the floor displaying an exotic collection of polished sea-shells.
    It was the kind of calm space that was perfectly suited to the supervision sessions most psychologists saw as a key part of their professional lives. The relationship was all about helping them to develop skills and become better practitioners, which was something Tony took seriously. The problem he had with supervision was that he didn’t have a whole lot of respect for most of the supervisors he’d encountered. He was well aware that his was an unconventional mind. It wasn’t arrogance to acknowledge he was also smarter than most of the people doing his job. Then he’d heard Dr Gold speak about damaged lives at a symposium. This, he thought, was the man for him. He’d approached him afterwards, but Dr Gold had refused. ‘I don’t do supervisions,’ he’d said in a tone that left no space for discussion.
    That had never stopped Tony. ‘I know why,’ he said. ‘Compared with your patients, practitioners are boring. Well, I’m not. I’m the one passing for human.’
    Dr Gold frowned, turning his attention properly to the little guy in the ill-assorted clothes and the bad haircut. That had been back in the days before Carol had made some subtle changes that Tony had barely noticed happening. ‘Who are you?’
    ‘You remember that serial killer in Bradfield last year? Young male victims?’
    Something shifted in Dr Gold’s expression. ‘You’re the profiler.’ Tony nodded. There was nothing more to be said. Either Jacob Gold would bite or he wouldn’t. They stood, eyeing each other up, heedless of the conference bustle around them. ‘Come and talk to me next week. I’m based in Leeds. You can contact me via the university.’
    And so it had begun. After that first session, Tony knew he’d found someone who could help him live with himself and his work, his achievements and his mistakes. Luckily for him, Jacob Gold had also discovered someone worth breaking his own rules for.
    Tony had always conceived of the role of supervisor as analogous to that of the priest in confessional. As he understood it, the theory of Catholic confession was that you went when you had sins to confess; that the priest helped you to see the error of your ways; that you underwent a penance to remind you of the way, the truth and the light; that you departed, ostensibly to sin no more; and that whatever you brought into the box stayed between you and the priest. And presumably, God. Though He never seemed to intrude much on the practical proceedings of the Church.
    Tony made an appointment with Dr Gold once or twice a year, when some aspect of his clinical practice was troubling him, when he felt he wasn’t dealing well with some element of his professional life, or, more rarely, when his personal life was throwing him conundrums he couldn’t readily solve. A fifty-minute hour under Jacob’s gentle probing usually suggested a solution to whatever he’d brought to the session. At the very least, it brought Tony a degree of clarity. The equivalent of Catholic penance was the process of digging away at the roots of the issue during their session. And of course, he would leave with the firm intention of making the changes that would resolve his difficulty.
    And often he would fail.
    But that was part of the process too.
    Tony knew he should have talked sooner to Jacob after the debacle with Jacko Vance. He was conscious that he’d been avoiding it. Jacob, who wore his supervision lightly, had clearly been well