One For Sorrow

by Sarah A. Denzil

  “Okay. It’s still good that you told me,” he said in a kind but slightly disappointed voice. “I’ll have a team come out to dust for fingerprints and check for footprints. If it was Isabel, this could be very useful.”

  “And you’ll continue look into James’s disappearance?” I ask. “Will you let me know if you find him? I’d like to know that he’s safe.”

  “Of course I will. It’s good that you called, Leah.”

  I can’t help but note the slight note of condescension in his voice, but I don’t think it’s malicious, or that he notices he’s doing it. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before. Every doctor and every nurse talks to me like I’m a child. Maybe I am a child now that my mind is broken. Are our bodies the real indicator of adulthood? Isn’t it our brains that distinguish the child from the adult? I was a nurse long enough to know that a child can exist in an adult’s body, and the difficulties that come along with that. When I put down the phone I start to cry.

  But crying isn’t going to get me anywhere, so I dry my eyes quickly, wash my face, clear away the breakfast dishes, and open my laptop. For the first time in a while I have the urge to watch the video of smug David Fielding condemning me for the release of his daughter, and calling for NHS reform because she escaped, but I don’t watch it. Instead, I check his Twitter account to see where he is today. According to the account, he was drinking coffee in a Costa in Harrogate, which means he is out of London and further north. What does that mean? If Isabel is moving in the same direction as her father it might mean they were both coming north. Then again, if the birds were real, she was already here.

  I close the laptop. None of this is working. I can’t track David or Isabel from his Twitter account because there is no way of verifying the information he posts. I need James. He’s the one who can travel to the suspected area and report back to me.

  The sound of a van pulls me from my thoughts. The postie walks with a whistle towards the front gate and then pauses, staring at the bushes where Pye waits for him.

  “Get t’fuck, kitty,” he shouts, opening the gate quickly and shuffling up the path, leaping once into the air as Pye rushes out of the bushes with his hackles up. Tom and I used to watch this scene every Saturday, giggling into our mugs as the poor man protected his legs from the oncoming claw attack.

  The letterbox rattles, and the postie hurries back down the path, stomping his feet to scare the cat away. I haven’t had post for a while, so I decide to get up and investigate. The only post we receive here are bills and pamphlets about local events in Hutton village: line dancing in the village hall, cider tasting at the Queen’s Head. I skip through the scant pile of envelopes until I find one embossed with the North Yorkshire NHS Trust, and my heart drops to my knees. I don’t need to open it to find out what’s inside. They’ve set a date for my misconduct tribunal, which will be the date I officially lose my job as a nurse. Right now I’m suspended, but once the tribunal goes ahead, I’ll be surprised if I manage to keep my job. A dangerous criminal escaped on my watch. That doesn’t go unpunished.

  But what I can’t stand is the idea of Chi going through the same thing. He didn’t do anything wrong, but his judgment has already been called into question. The police don’t name names, but they’ve already dragged Chi over hot coals for his decision to hire a nurse whose father resides in Broadmoor, and his decision to put Isabel on a ward with slightly fewer restrictions than the intensive care ward. But what do they expect a hospital to do with a patient who has shown no signs of violence for years? Are they supposed to keep her isolated forevermore? What if there’s another patient who needs to be in the intensive care ward more than Isabel? Are they expected to turn that patient away because they’re short of beds? None of them understand what it’s like or the pressures facing the staff, but they love to throw their opinions around all the same. Everyone becomes an expert on how to care for a patient once there’s a crisis like this.

  I put the letter to one side and try not to think about it.

  *

  I spend the morning in the farm shop before leaving early to meet the police team to check on the garden and the windowsill where I saw the birds. After they’ve taken a statement, I decide to leave them in the garden as I go for a walk to clear my head, but the wind unnerves me, tricking me into thinking there’s someone behind me when the breeze whistles through blades of grass.

  When I return to the cottage I’m on edge, climbing the walls and feeling the oppressive weight of them. Despite the cold, the air feels stale, but I daren’t open a window. For the first time in a long while, I crave alcohol. A soothing glass of wine would take the edge off and put me at ease. But the house has been stripped of all alcohol, so instead, I settle for a mug of hot chocolate and a blanket wrapped around me on the sofa. Seb calls to check on me in the evening. He’s stuck at the farmhouse with a birthing horse. Part of me considers going to watch the event, but the other Braithwaites frighten me. The other brothers, with their weathered-faced farmwives, regard me with suspicious eyes whenever I work in the shop. I’m convinced they see me as an insane scrounger who has seduced the youngest son into my bed.

  Time ticks slowly by until I feel the pull of sleep. I was worried it wouldn’t come for me tonight, but the boredom of the day has taken its toll. Before I make my way upstairs, the doors and windows need to be checked. I go through it quickly, rattling the handles and yanking the curtains shut. After getting into bed, I get up and check my bedroom window again to be sure, and then I settle into the bedcovers.

  My dreams are filled with birds, as usual. A gulp of magpies cluster around my body, perching on me from neck to toe. I try to wiggle myself to scare them away, but I can’t move. When I try to count them, I get lost and have to start all over again, beginning with the first line of the rhyme—one for sorrow—but forgetting the rest. They peck at me and claw my skin, flapping their wings until a cloud of loose feathers forms around me. There must be dozens of them with their beady little eyes.

  When I come to, I can’t move and my breath comes out in a ragged pant. It’s perhaps a second or two until my muscles release, but the moment is stretched out with panic. I’m drenched in sweat and breathless by the time I can sit up in bed. I bend over, pressing my forehead against my knees as I slowly recover from the dream.

  That’s when I notice it.

  My head snaps up. Something is different.

  I throw the covers back and place my feet on the bedroom floor. It’s cold. The heating is off and winter is creeping into the house, cooling the old floorboards. But I don’t bother looking for a dressing gown. I shiver as I walk through the bedroom and into the hallway, flicking on the light switch.

  Something is different.

  But what is it? I inhale slowly, trying to gauge whether there’s a slight difference in the scent of the house. The air is always somewhat musty, but is there more of an earthy smell than usual? Or is it rot? I’m not sure. I move slowly through the hallway and down the stairs, my feet a bare whisper on the floorboards.

  When I reach the bottom of the stairs I notice the tickle of fresh air on my ankles and neck. Is there a window open? That can’t be possible—I checked every window and every door in the house, and I shut all the curtains. If there is a window open, it means someone has either forced it open or broken the glass. My heart begins to pound.

  I’m on high alert as I quietly open the door into the kitchen. By now I’m certain that the fresh air is definitely coming from the kitchen. It’s dark in the room. There are no streetlights outside my house, not like when I lived in Hackney; it’s only moonlight that ever comes in through the windows, but the curtains are shut as I thought they were. I listen carefully for the sound of an intruder, but the house is silent. Until a soft bang, like the sound of a door gently closing. Has someone slipped out of the house as I’ve been coming down the stairs? I grope for the knife block, knowing it’s on the kitchen side somewhere near here. My fingers wrap around the handle of one of t
he knives.

  The house is silent apart from my breathing and the blood rushing through my ears. I approach the wall where I know the light switch is, terrified of switching it on, but equally terrified of remaining in the dark. Without the light I can’t defend myself, but I don’t want to know what’s going on. I want to be in my bed relaxed in slumber, not here, frightened for my life.

  My fingers reach the switch, and I flick it on with a little gasp.

  The room is empty, but the kitchen door is slightly ajar. That’s why there was a breeze coming through the house. When I move closer, I see that the door has been forced open. There’s a gouge in the wood where a crowbar or some other implement has broken the lock and opened the door. I need to be careful not to destroy any evidence, but I need to check that there’s no one out there. Taking a deep breath, I hurry forwards and open the door with my fingertip.

  What I see on the doorstep leaves me bloodless and limp. When a high-pitched scream breaks the silence, it takes me a moment to realise that it’s coming from me.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  James Gorden stares at me with his eyes and mouth wide open. He’s as shocked to be there as I am to see him. I drop to my knees and the knife hits the ground, clattering slightly on the tiles.

  “This isn’t real,” I whisper. For the briefest of moments I reach towards James with a trembling hand to touch him. Then I retract it and move away from the door. “No. You’re not real. This is in my mind.”

  James simply stares at me as I talk to myself, his face as bloodless as mine feels. He’s the same milky pallor of a full moon, with his features in the shade of the dark. Only the orange glow from the kitchen light casts any colour, except for the feathers.

  The feathers are the same iridescent blue of the feathers in my dreams, except they aren’t moving anymore. They are still and lifeless. As dead as the birds I saw on the windowsill.

  I close my eyes and open them again, trying to process what I’m seeing. There, on my doorstep, is the severed head of blogger James Gorden, and in his mouth is a dead magpie.

  That’s exactly what I see, and this is why I’m crazy.

  “It’s not real.”

  The smell seems real. It smells like a hospital room with a dying patient, except that the bleach of the hospital has been replaced with the earthy scent of decay. James must have been dead for a while because he doesn’t look anything like the corpses I’ve seen as a nurse.

  “Stop it. Stop it.” I clamp my hands around my ears and try to stop myself from justifying this, from analysing it like it’s real.

  Moving back from the door, I press myself into the corner of the kitchen and draw my knees up to my chest. None of this is real; it’s a hallucination. It has to be. What’s the alternative? That Isabel has delivered James Gorden’s severed head to my house in the middle of the night? Isn’t that insane? Of course it’s insane because I am insane.

  When I close my eyes and open them, James is making a sound, like a groaning sound. The bird is wiggling, as if trying to break free from between his teeth. The sound of wings flapping against my window turns my skin to ice. It’s all too much. I close my eyes and I don’t open them again.

  *

  This is what she’s done to me. She’s worn me down until my mind is broken. Perhaps I’ll never know what she did to me in that room, or whether I’m as much to blame as she is, but the outcome will always be the same: I’ll always be the woman cowering in the corner of the kitchen, curled up into a ball, staring into the dead eyes of my ally. I’ll be the one with the crippling hallucinations stripping me away step by step until I’m so far removed from reality I’m not even here anymore.

  There are footsteps coming up the path. I lift my head in an instinctive reaction to the sound, even though my mind is elsewhere. Am I talking? I’m not sure. Someone says, It’s not real, but I couldn’t say whether it’s coming from my lips, or whether I hear it in my mind.

  How long have I been here? The darkness of night has turned into the pastel blue of morning. My eyes are glazed from lack of sleep.

  “Leah!”

  Smash.

  Footsteps again. Quicker. Quicker, quicker.

  “Leah!”

  Then comes a gurgling sound followed by a splash. I can see the back of someone doubled over. Those thick canvas trousers that belong to Seb. He always wears them because they’re durable. He straightens up and turns to me, still outside the house, still only visible through the open door. He’s staring down at James on the doorstep, and for a moment I actually believe that James is real, but then I remind myself that this is all in my head, and I let out a snort.

  “It’s not real.”

  “Leah,” Seb says again. This time he looks up at me with sad eyes, and I can’t bear the pity. “It is real. I’m going to phone the police.”

  “You’re not real either.”

  The Seb standing by the door ignores me and collects a mobile phone from his pocket. He takes a step back and puts the phone to his ear. It’s so convincing that I have to remind myself how elaborate my hallucinations can be. None of this is real—not James’s head presented to me like a suckling pig, and certainly not this version of Seb who looks at me with sad eyes and says my name in a desperate, longing kind of way. It’s like Alfie all over again, nothing more than my broken mind playing tricks on me.

  “I’m going to stand out here,” Seb says, after hanging up the phone. “I don’t want to disturb any evidence, so I can’t come inside, but everything is going to be all right. The police are on their way.” He stops talking and waits, but I’m not sure what he’s waiting for. Maybe he expected me to acknowledge him, but I’m not going to. “It’s going to be all right.” Another pause. “I… I’m not one for words at the best of times, and I’ve never known what to say in bad situations like this. I’m a doer, you know that. When the animals are in trouble, I know what to do or who to call to help. I don’t like standing by and watching others sort out a problem, I like to get stuck in.” There’s comfort in his voice. The low depths of it soothe me deep inside, but I can’t allow myself to be taken in by my fraudulent imagination; by these falsities that are nothing more than a conjurer’s trick performed by the synapses in my brain. “You’ve no idea how much I want to come into the house right now and… and… well, do anything rather than be stuck out here. But I won’t. If there’s a chance to catch her, I won’t risk it.”

  “It’s not real!”

  “Leah. Leah, it is real. It’s very real, I’m sorry to say.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” I hear scuffling as he paces back and forth. “I can’t bear this.”

  “You’re not real,” I whisper to myself.

  Dr Ibbotson told me to learn my triggers. Isabel, Father, Mother. Those are my triggers, but I don’t see how that helps right now. What triggered this? I don’t understand.

  When the police car pulls up, the siren seems out of place in the quiet countryside. Sirens were commonplace back in Hackney—I heard them every day, and sometimes at night. But this is a peaceful place, not to be sullied with the violence of the city. I’m shocked to hear them, not just because of the sound, but because two police officers climb out of the car. If this is still all a hallucination, it has become infinitely more complicated. Why? Why would I make up police officers, too?

  “We’re going to need SOCOs down here,” I hear one of them say with a note of panic in her voice. “I’ll call it in.”

  “Is… is that a head?” says another.

  “I was sick. I hope it doesn’t mess up the crime scene.” Seb this time. “And I dropped a bottle of milk.”

  “If you could take a few steps back, sir. There might be evidence in the vicinity of the… remains.”

  “Okay, no problem. There’s a… a woman inside. Leah. She found the head, but I don’t know when. She’s frightened and upset. Please, help her as soon as you can.”

  “Is there another entrance into the property?”
/>   “No. The back room is used as a living space. The sofa blocks the door.”

  “All right, well, I’ll go and see if I can talk to her. Leah? Is it Leah? My name is PC Abbott, and I’m here with PC Fisher. How are you doing in there?”

  “I keep telling you all it’s not real, but no one will believe me.”

  “It’s real, Leah. Don’t you remember me? I spoke to you at Hutton Comprehensive School about the bullies targeting your brother. Sit tight for now, okay? We’ll be in to take a statement. Stay warm and keep yourself comfortable.”

  The police officer turns away as she speaks into the walkie-talkie attached to her jacket. I can’t say how long it is before the next car arrives but soon there are several, with people walking around, measuring, whispering, barking orders, and taking photos. I sit there watching it all unfold, shivering so hard my teeth chatter together.

  When the head is taken away, Seb is the first one through the door. He throws his jacket over my shoulders and kneels down next to me.

  “It’s real, Leah. I’m real.” He touches my face, my hair, and pulls me into his shoulder, proving that he is in fact a real person, warm, with a heart beating hard and fast beneath his ribcage.

  “James,” I say, my teeth still chattering. “She killed him.”

  “Hello, Leah.” DCI Murphy stands over me with his hands in his trouser pockets. “Were you the one to find James Gorden?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. And about what time was that?”

  “Hold on a minute, mate. She’s freezing cold and in shock.” Seb gets to his feet and stands between me and the detective.

  “The paramedics will be in shortly, and PC Abbott is making a cup of tea. Unfortunately, I need to ask these questions as quickly as possible. This is a very serious crime and we need to move quickly.”