‘You remember who I am?’ she asked.
He paused before saying yes, and then added, ‘I’m afraid.’
‘Afraid of what?’
‘My memories.’
‘What memories?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. That’s what frightens me.’
‘But you must remember.’
Wordlessly, his face told her that a part of him had been locked away in darkness. At first, she was unable to fathom his sense of confusion. Then she realised. He was drugged, heavily drugged. His mind had been eased into a chemical straitjacket.
‘Dr Pochard’s remains were found in a forest clearing last night. The pathologist has estimated that she died sometime on Friday night. Are you surprised?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
He looked up at her briefly, his eyes half-closed, and his long white eyelashes like a blindfold. ‘I only ever saw her head in the pile of stones.’
‘What about the rest of Dr Pochard’s body?’
‘They won’t let me have it. They’ve taken it away.’
‘Who?’
‘The other people in the forest. They won’t let me see their faces and I don’t know who they are.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘Walking around the cairn, spying on me, checking behind the trees and under the stones.’
It filled her with a strangeness she could not absorb. His thoughts were confused and uncertain, but she knew that McCrea had a crucial link to Dr Pochard’s murder. An investigation that had not really been an investigation and a confession where the truth had been mixed up with the volatile dreams of a psychiatric patient were now linked to a real murder inquiry. Of all the possible outcomes, this was the least expected. McCrea confessing to a murder he could not have committed. What other secret clues might lie in his confession? Herron was not willing to assume the worst conclusion, that somehow McCrea had committed the murder from his secure room on Ward G, either directly or indirectly. She had the impression that McCrea was too ill to convince anyone else to murder Dr Pochard. But the sheer implausibility of him recounting the murder scene in such detail worried her. She knew that he had repeated the same gruesome images in his earlier confessions.
‘Have you any idea what happened to the rest of her body?’
‘Haven’t I told you enough?’
‘Is it hidden somewhere? Can you think of the terrain?’
McCrea began to rock back and forth.
‘The police need your help. You must help us find her body.’
When McCrea didn’t reply it occurred to Herron that the patient sitting opposite her belonged to a puzzle he couldn’t solve himself, perhaps because he was only a tiny part of it.
‘I need your help, Alistair,’ she said. ‘It was clever and very good of you to warn us that Dr Pochard had been killed. Right now, you’re the only person who can give us the help we need.’ She felt the urge to kneel at his side, to penetrate the veil of his long lashes.
‘I don’t want to remember.’
McCrea lowered his head further. Herron knew it was important to keep his attention and not let him slip further into a drug-induced haze.
‘Remember what?’
‘The rest of the story. For months, it didn’t make sense to me, but now it feels horribly true. I don’t think I can bear the strain. What about the other patients? Can’t they help you with the details?’
‘What other patients?’
‘I’m not the only one who remembers killing women in forests. Stories like mine have been going round Ward G for months. Why don’t you read the other ones?’ He raised his head and she saw his face full on, the long eyelashes hiding the strange look in his eyes. ‘Billy Chisholm was the first of us to talk. He made a full confession to the staff. If you read through his notes you might find a clue.’
‘Is Billy here on Ward G?’
‘Not any more.’ He watched her carefully. ‘He managed to bluff the staff, even Dr Barker, and got himself released. No one madder than Billy ever got out of here before.’
‘Isn’t it odd that Billy confessed to the same type of crime?’
‘No.’
‘But the two of you must have talked about it.’
‘We were ordered not to.’
‘By who?’
‘Dr Barker. After Billy and me, other patients started giving the same confession. But they were only trying to get staff attention. At least, that’s what Dr Barker accused them of. He went to great trouble to keep everything under control. First, he stopped the therapies that Dr Sinden had set up. And then he got rid of Sinden.’
‘Who’s Dr Sinden?’
‘A memory expert. He used all sorts of ways to help us bring up our repressed memories. He thought that with enough therapy all the missing bits would come back.’
‘What sort of therapies?’
‘Drug therapies, hypnosis, regression, role plays, even re-enactments. For weeks, we had sessions with him every day.’
‘What do you mean re-enactments?’
‘He used smells, sounds, photographs to trigger our memories. He even took Billy and me on trips into the forests.’
‘Did Billy ever talk about his plans when he left hospital?’
‘One of your colleagues asked me that already,’ said McCrea.
‘A colleague?’
‘Yes, a detective. He was here for most of the morning. Didn’t introduce himself or say goodbye. He left just before you came.’
‘What was he like?’
McCrea shrugged. ‘A middle-aged man in a black coat with its collars turned up and a hat. I couldn’t see his face. To be honest, I was afraid to look in case there was no face there.’
Again, she wanted to get up and kneel by his side so that she could see his eyes more clearly.
‘He had pictures of the crime scene. He wanted to charge me with aiding a murderer. He said I was a monster hiding behind my mental illness.’
‘Did he ask any other questions?’
‘Only did I know where Chisholm was. I told him Billy had left the hospital but he wanted to know where he’d gone and did I know his address. I said I had no idea. He said not to worry and it wasn’t important. He told me he’d be in touch and then he left just before you arrived.’
Herron made a mental note to check the story with staff. She suspected the detective had been an hallucination. By now, the strands of hair on McCrea’s brow were tangled in sweat. She had an unpleasant flashback of Pochard’s red hair, sticky and darkened with threads of blood.
‘If you read Billy’s confession you might find clues about the other bodies.’
‘You mean there are others?’
‘Yes. Did I not tell you? Billy had lots of plans when he left.’
‘What sort of plans?’
‘I don’t know exactly, but ask Dr Barker who else has gone missing from Deepwell.’ McCrea’s face suddenly turned ghoulish. ‘Maybe now you’ll listen to my story. If someone had believed me earlier, Dr Pochard wouldn’t be dead.’
McCrea’s descriptions of the forest clearing had matched the murder scene, but there had been something veiled in his recollections, his words evasive. Herron now suspected that the entire fantasy was second-hand, borrowed from a darker, more dangerous mind entirely.
‘You’ve got it wrong, Alistair. Dr Pochard’s death is not part of your story. This is someone else’s story, not yours, someone who is no longer locked up here, someone like Chisholm.’
‘Then how has my memory slipped into his story? My mind keeps circling around the scene in the forest. I can see it as if from a distance, as if I’m looking into the past.’
Herron was too tired to provide any explanations for McCrea’s confusion, and her time with him was ending. He had given her the openings she needed to quiz Barker about. Two new names – Billy Chisholm and Dr Sinden – which she felt would bring her closer to the truth.
*
A nurse opened
the door and led her back through the security doors. Herron asked him about the detective who had visited McCrea earlier.
‘He must be talking about Monteath,’ replied the nurse. ‘What did Alistair say about him?’
‘Only that he sat in the corner for most of the morning and asked some questions.’
‘That fits. Monteath usually sits in the corner and listens in on his thoughts. It’s not a good sign that Alistair is talking about him again.’
It was the same name that the female patient had mentioned to Herron during her first visit to the hospital. ‘What do you mean, not a good sign?’ A detective who did not say much, it reminded her of a close colleague.
‘Monteath exists only in the borderland between Alistair’s fantasies and the real world. He’s a delusion. All this stress caused by Dr Pochard’s death, there’s a real danger he’ll have another breakdown.’
Herron wanted to ask him more about Monteath, but the nurse would not be detained any further.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’ve the medication round to do now. You have no idea how agitated the patients get if there’s a delay with their tablets.’
She could imagine well enough. She turned and walked back down the corridor, wondering if there was anything McCrea had said that would stand up in a court of law. It was clear that he was shut inside a world that was emptied of all rational meaning. Not for the first time, she thought of Ward G as a separate mental state, one where the sterile surroundings and boring daily routine had been replaced by sinister plots and fictions fabricated by the patients who roamed freely in their imaginations, while the hushed, orderly team of doctors and nurses were the true inmates, locked up inside their beliefs about mental illness and their therapeutic practices.
13
Barker came marching down the corridor to meet Herron and escort her back to his office. She would have liked more time to digest what McCrea had told her and unravel what had been going on in Ward G, but Barker gave her the impression he wanted her off the hospital grounds as soon as possible.
‘I take it you’ll want to see McCrea’s notes again,’ he said.
‘His notes aren’t the only ones I want. I have more questions for you.’
‘Yes?’
‘McCrea says there were other patients on Ward G who made similar confessions.’
Barker frowned. ‘Is this really relevant? These are confidential matters.’
Once again, Herron felt a flicker of annoyance at the way Barker kept erecting professional barriers, in spite of his promise to help in any way he could. ‘I shall decide if it’s confidential or not,’ she said. ‘You’re in charge of this hospital and you have a legal right to protect the privacy of your patients, to lock away their case histories and treatment plans, and prevent whoever you like from probing too deeply. With one exception. The police. Especially in the middle of a murder investigation.’
‘I haven’t locked away any treatment plans,’ he said, without batting an eyelid.
‘What about helping the inquiry by explaining what exactly has been happening on Ward G?’
They were back in his office now. Barker sat down heavily in his seat and hesitated. He looked as though he were pulling together thoughts from corners of his mind he wanted to keep hidden. ‘The delusion obsessing McCrea that he is a secret murderer is a not a creation of his own illness,’ he said eventually. ‘It is much more perplexing than that. The delusion operated on a group level on Ward G. It could only be described as a form of collective madness, one that I did my best to cure.’
‘So several of your patients made bogus claims that they were murderers. How did you interpret this behaviour?’
‘In order to survive on Ward G, patients like McCrea and Chisholm needed to keep a fantasy playing in their minds. These delusions are always in the background, like an orchestra repeating the same comforting melodies, drowning out the harsher sounds of reality.’
‘But why concoct a fantasy about murder in the first place?’
‘Why not? The patients are cut off from everything else. The only links they have with the outside world are through the internet and television, and both are awash with images and stories of murder and attacks on women. They are among the most shocking tales we tell ourselves. My therapeutic approach was to interrupt their fantasies rather than treat them as a clue to suppressed memories.’ Herron could detect a note of hostility enter his voice. ‘Their shared delusion was completely out of control, in my opinion. My approach was to close off the affected areas and stamp it out, like a forest fire.’
Herron was interested in his interpretation. It was perplexing, and, more than that, fascinating. However, Barker’s interpretation still did not explain the most confusing fact of all: how had this delusion turned into reality?
‘McCrea told me about a patient called Billy Chisholm. Where is he?’
‘No longer under our care. About a month ago we released him to a halfway house under the supervision of one of our doctors and the mental health team. We don’t leave patients to their own devices. The problem is Chisholm absconded last week, and no one has seen him since.’
Barker chewed on his beard. What was he not telling her? she wondered.
‘The doctor who was looking after him, I take it it was…’
Barker finished the sentence for her. ‘Dr Pochard.’
‘Did it not concern you that Chisholm might want to continue the delusion that he was a murderer? That once he had got into it so deeply, he might want to keep going with it now that he was free?’
‘Dr Pochard oversaw his treatment in his final few weeks here. She was convinced he was ready to return to the community. Chisholm is well educated and showed very few signs of mental illness. His grip on reality was a lot firmer than McCrea’s.’
Only someone with a very firm grip of reality could have murdered Pochard so ruthlessly, thought Herron. She asked Barker for a photograph of Chisholm and all the notes relating to his release. He rang the details through to his secretary.
‘McCrea also mentioned a therapist called Dr Sinden. How can I contact him?’
Barker’s voice grew tense and low. Herron sensed the importance of what the director was revealing, its crucial role in explaining what had happened on Ward G. ‘Before I give you his details I have to tell you what kind of therapist Jeremy Sinden was. He was trained in the old school of psychotherapy. He had certain listening talents but he was also naive, quite unaware of the dangers his patients posed to the outside world.’
‘How?’
‘He believed that with enough memory recovery therapy he could completely cure his patients and they would never go back to being criminals, even if they wanted to. His theory was that all the patients on Ward G were repressing traumatic events in their past, and if he could only unlock these memories then the patient would no longer rely on mental illness as a coping method.’
‘And did his therapy work?’
‘Jeremy inspired hope, and his approach was humane. However, it almost always led to failure. I came to the conclusion that he had completely lost his professional bearings on the ward.’ Barker was interrupted by the secretary bringing in the file on Chisholm. He hunched forward and grabbed it protectively, but Herron had already noticed the photograph of the patient on the cover and his dark haunted eyes. It was the face of the strange man she had met in the forest clearing. She flinched, feeling an underlying excitement take hold. However, Barker seemed oblivious to her reaction.
‘Initially, Sinden was convinced the patients were accessing repressed memories of actual murders,’ Barker went on to say. ‘When it became clear that these memories must be false, he became very upset and began to worry that his theories on repressed memories might be wrong. That was when he began to work harder on recovering Chisholm and McCrea’s hidden memories. Sinden had impressive powers of persuasion, and he wanted to come up with a new insight into the psychology of the criminally insane, one that would demonstrate his impressi
ve talents. I understand that he even drove some of the patients to nearby forests to help trigger their memories. He took photos of sites that were further away and gave them to his patients. I told you earlier that the delusion of a murderer in a forest was a form of collective madness. Well, that madness grew to include Dr Sinden, which is why I had to suspend him from his work here.’
‘Is it possible that McCrea internalised the psychopathic plans of Chisholm?’
‘Quite possible.’
‘And that in his imagination, he is following Chisholm down the same path?’
‘You speak as though Chisholm is suddenly your prime suspect.’
Herron took a deep breath. ‘If I’m not mistaken, Chisholm was there at the crime scene. Or at least someone who strongly resembles the photograph on the cover of his file. He told me he was troubled by his memories, and he pointed to the murder scene. He knew about the pile of stones.’
‘Chisholm? But why was he in the forest?’
‘When we understand that, maybe we’ll know why Dr Pochard was killed in the first place.’
‘Have you any ideas?’
‘I have plenty of ideas, but the best thing you can do now is stop hampering this investigation and hand over everything you have on Chisholm. His history, the addresses of his relatives and any other contacts he might have with the outside world.’
‘Let me assure you, Sergeant Herron, Deepwell has no interest in hampering this investigation or hiding what happened on Ward G. We want Dr Pochard’s murderer brought to justice, and I promise we will do everything to assist you.’
‘One other thing I will need from you and your colleagues is the details of what you were doing last Friday evening.’
Barker appeared unruffled. ‘I was at a weekend-long mental health conference in Edinburgh. Dozens of people saw me there along with Dr Sinden.’
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