by Ellis, Tim
‘Feel free to walk.’
As he climbed into the passenger seat and put the seat belt on, he had the feeling the journey would be akin to going over Niagara Falls in a cardboard box.
Due to road works, heavy traffic and a burst water main, it took them three-quarters of an hour to reach the El Dorado Care Home, which was on the B491 heading towards Turnham Green. The El Dorado chain was owned by a Russian oligarch called Mikhail Aprashin who supposedly had links to the mafia, but no one could prove it.
‘I’ll probably be about an hour,’ he said. ‘You could listen to your CD collection, or dwell on how clean you are after your shower earlier.’
She switched off the engine and opened her door. ‘I’m clean enough to come with you.’
‘That’s not what we agreed.’
‘I didn’t agree to anything.’
‘It’s going to be like that, is it?’
‘I’m not sitting in the car while you have all the fun.’
‘I’ll hardly be having fun.’
‘I can help, anyway. I can take notes in shorthand.’
Without Kline he’d have to take his own notes, which was disconcerting and time-consuming. Having someone there to record what was said would certainly be less of a hassle. He could then concentrate on wringing as much information out of Dr Hudson as he could.
‘You come in, take notes, keep your mouth shut.’
‘That seems clear enough.’
‘Good.’
They found the Warden – Irene Miller – in the care home reception.
‘Detective Inspector Quigg?’ she asked.
He showed his warrant card.
‘You’re here to see our Dr Hudson?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble?’
‘Please follow me.’
The El Dorado catered for the spectrum of old age care: residential; the complete range of nursing care; and warden-controlled for those who wanted their independence, but also needed a lifeline to someone who could help them in an emergency.
Mrs Miller led them to the rear of the main building via an external concrete path – wide enough to take a wheelchair – edged with block pavers. Dr Hudson lived at number seventeen.
‘Alex, your guests have arrived,’ Irene Miller called out.
A white-haired old woman with large thick glasses, a round face and a bulbous nose opened the door. She had deep v-shaped laughter lines either side of her mouth, and wore a large brick-red canvas shirt over a green skirt.
‘Have you checked them out?’
Miller pointed to Quigg. ‘He has a warrant card.’
‘Does it look real?’
‘I could ring the police station, if you want me to?’
‘Who’s she?’
Tolliver put out her hand. ‘Jessie Tolliver, I’m with the Hammersmith Examiner . . .’
‘A reporter?’
‘Yes, with . . .’
‘I don’t talk to reporters.’
‘She’s just here to take notes,’ Quigg said.
‘If she talks I’ll call security to have her thrown out.’
Quigg smiled. ‘That suits me fine.’
‘You’d better come in,’ Hudson said.
Irene Miller left.
They followed the old woman into the living room. There was a smell he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It wasn’t urine, it wasn’t faeces, it wasn’t death . . . Tolliver glanced at him.
He pulled a face to emphasise that he was at a loss.
‘You don’t want anything to drink, do you?’
‘No thank you,’ Quigg said.
Tolliver opened her mouth, but Quigg nudged her.
‘Nothing for either of us.’
‘Good. I don’t do drinks.’
They both sat on the two-seater sofa. Hudson dropped into an extendable chair opposite. There was a thin wood coffee table positioned between them.
Hung all around the walls was her life story: certificates, photographs, newspaper cuttings, memorabilia.
‘Do you mind?’ he said, pointing at the walls.
‘Feel free. Everybody who comes in here likes to do the grand tour.’
Tolliver moved to join him, but Hudson said, ‘Not you. I don’t allow reporters in here usually. All they do is tell filthy lies.’
‘You know why we’re here?’ Quigg asked.
‘The murders at the Waterbury?’
‘Yes. We think they might be connected to the past, but we’re not exactly clear about what happened. I’d be grateful if you could fill in some gaps for us.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
He pulled out a room plan of the Waterbury Asylum. ‘I’ve brought this drawing of the asylum, and the staff and patient lists to help us. If possible, I’d like to place each patient in a room, find out their diagnosis and any significant history relating to either staff or patients.’
‘You don’t want a lot then.’
‘If it’s too much . . . ?’
‘We’ll see,’ Hudson said. ‘Waterbury was my life.’
He laid the room plan out facing her on the coffee table. ‘How would you like to start?’
She extended the chair until she was nearly lying down. ‘I have to keep my legs raised, otherwise they swell to the size of balloons. Then, I have to take my water retention tablets, which cause more problems. It’s no joke being old when you’re a doctor – you know exactly what’s going to happen to you.’
‘If you’re lying down, you won’t be able to . . .’
‘I don’t need to see drawings or lists. I was the doctor there for twenty years. I close my eyes and there it all is.’
‘Oh, all right.’
‘You don’t want me to go back to 1953, do you?’
‘No. Let’s start with how it was when it closed in 1973.’
‘Of course, Cora Jiggins. I’ll start at the top and work down, but first you should be aware that the rooms in the basement weren’t rooms for patients, they were boiler rooms, store rooms and such like. I know that they’ve now made them into hotel rooms, but there were only forty-eight patient rooms in 1973. Now, of course, I believe there are seventy-two rooms.’
‘So Room 13 has moved?’ he said.
She laughed. ‘You’ll be getting locked up yourself if you ask questions like that. There’s no Room 13 in an insane asylum . . . or a mental health hospital, as they like to call them now. There’s far too much superstition attached to the number 13 for it to be used in a mental health facility. They don’t even use the number in hotels . . . oh, I know the Waterbury is different.’
He looked at the room plan. ‘There’s no room numbers on the drawing.’
She righted herself, peered at the plan and quickly wrote in the numbers.
‘No thirteen?’ he verified.
Hudson put herself in the reclined position again. ‘No thirteen.’
‘The numbering has completely changed,’ he observed.
‘Take out the basement, remove number thirteen, and start counting from a different room – it’s bound to change.’
‘Okay, I think we’re ready,’ he said.
‘All this talking is making me thirsty.’ She pointed a withered finger at Tolliver. ‘Make yourself useful. I’ll have a cup of tea with seven sugars . . .’
‘Seven . . . ?’
Quigg elbowed her.
Hudson held up a rubber bulb at the end of a wire with a red button in the centre. ‘All I have to do is press this alarm and security will appear to drag you out by your ankles.’
Tolliver made her way into the kitchen.
‘I’ll have a coffee with two sugars,’ he called after her.
‘We may as well continue,’ Hudson said and proceeded to tell him the names of the patients in every room just before the asylum closed in October 1973. He crossed them off the list as he wrote each name inside a room on the plan.
‘And Cora Jiggins?’
‘She was dead by then, of course.’
&nb
sp; ‘Can you tell me what happened?’
‘It wasn’t until the 1950s that mental illness became part of mainstream medicine and psychiatrists were considered proper doctors. The American Psychiatric Association published the first Diagnostic Statistical Manual in 1952. It was – if you like – the dawn of psychiatry and I thought I could make a difference . . .’
‘I’m sure you did make a difference,’ he said.
A shadow of a smile crossed her lips. ‘I was at the top of my profession, but then I came to Waterbury. You know that it was opened in 1898?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, in those days the asylums were little more than warehouses for the chronically insane and demented. The inmates were chained up, treated like wild animals and packed together in foul-smelling cells. We hadn’t moved much beyond the idea of the insane being possessed by demons. The staff weren’t trained and in most cases were as crazy as the inmates. Gradually, new treatments were developed, but they were barbaric to say the least. We used to treat the majority of mental conditions in much the same ways. Pre-frontal lobotomies destroyed part of the brain and the personality; electro-convulsive therapy – ECT for short – also destroyed parts of the brain and a person’s memory; and anti-psychotic drugs turned the inmates into zombies. Asylums were completely different places to the psychiatric hospitals of today.’
Tolliver came in carrying two mugs, put one on a side table next to Hudson’s recliner and sat down with the other one.
Quigg spread his hands. ‘Didn’t you hear me say I’d like . . . ?’
Tolliver looked at him and pointed to her closed mouth.
‘I see. It’s like that is it?’
She nodded slowly.
Dr Hudson made a guttural noise. ‘What the hell is this?’
Tolliver shrugged, but didn’t say anything.
‘You have my permission to speak,’ Hudson said.
‘My granny had an ulcer on her leg as a result of diabetes. The ulcer grew and she had to have her leg cut off. Then she died. I wouldn’t wish diabetes on anyone, so I’ve put one sugar in your tea. If you want seven sugars you can put them in yourself.’
‘Your reporter friend has got a nerve, Inspector Quigg.’
‘So it would seem. Can we get back to what happened in the basement?’
‘Cora Jiggins was killed in one of the store rooms,’ Hudson continued. ‘Now, we have a problem here, because I wasn’t appointed as Head of Psychiatry at Waterbury until 1970, by which time it had already happened.’
‘What had?’
‘The exorcism.’
Chapter Twelve
Avery Malpass had a headache. It wasn’t any ordinary run-of-the-mill headache – it was the mother of all headaches. It was the type of headache that might have registered nine on the Richter scale. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly where it was hurting, because it hurt all over and he wondered if he had a fractured skull and/or brain damage. He kept his eyes squeezed shut, because he knew that if he opened them his head would probably explode. Remaining perfectly still was also part of his strategy for preventing his head thinking it was a volcano.
‘Dad, are you awake?’
He knew that voice. He’d heard it before – before the throbbing in his head had begun. Opening his eyes and responding to the voice would have meant certain death – never gonna happen.
‘Dad, it’s Willow.’
He opened his eyes, but closed them almost immediately. ‘Oh God!’
‘Yeah, you’ve got a bit of a lump on the back of your head.’
Slowly, he reached up and felt the back of his head. ‘A bit of a lump! I have two heads.’
‘You always did exaggerate.’
‘And you were always too damned smart for your own good.’
She hugged him and cried.
He tried to sit up.
She helped him slide up the wall to a sitting position.
A faint light came through the grill in the door. There were five more people in the twelve-by-twelve foot cell. They either gave him a quick nod, or stared at him knowing that the one opportunity he’d had to get them out of here had gone. Now, he couldn’t help them, so was of no further interest.
He had a manacle around his right ankle, which was attached to a chain secured to a solid ring in the centre of the floor. His left ankle was as painful as his head.
‘What are you doing here, dad?’
‘I could ask you the same thing.’
‘I was here with the others . . .’ She indicated the other people in the room, all of whom were shackled to the central ring.
‘Which one is Twelvetrees?’
‘He’s in another cell, but he’s dead anyway.’
‘The end of the world came for him, did it?’
‘Have you come here to make fun of us?’
He touched her hand. ‘No, that’s not why I’m here. How many are there in the cult?’
‘Well, there were twenty-seven, but I don’t know how many there are now – the clown took some of us.’
He remembered the woman warning him about the clown, and put his hand up to the lump on his head. ‘Who is he?’
‘We don’t know. A couple of weeks ago he arrived and held Hugo hostage with a knife. He said that if we didn’t do as he said he’d kill him. Well, Hugo was our leader, so we did as he said. He put us all in these cells and then he killed Hugo anyway.
‘And you don’t know why he’s doing it?’
‘We don’t know anything. He brings us water and some cold food scraps, but he doesn’t speak.’
‘What about the people he took?’
Willow shrugged. ‘We haven’t seen them again.’
‘And I walked right into it.’
‘You still haven’t said what you’re doing here.’
‘I should think that’s obvious. I came to take you home.’
She gave half a laugh. ‘I would have let you as well, but it doesn’t look as though any of us will be going home ever again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s not chained us up in here to let us go again. This is where we’re going to die.’
‘I didn’t sacrifice everything and come all this way to die, Willow. One way or another, I’m going to take you home.’
‘How’s mum?’
He told her what had happened.
‘You’re a fool, dad. You should have just forgotten about me like mum did.’
‘So, that’s the thanks I get. You’re my only daughter, the baby girl I held in my arms, the toddler I helped to walk, who begged me for bedtime stories and a whole jumble of other memories. I could never forget you. You’re my child, and a father never gives up on his own flesh and blood.’
She hugged him and sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry, dad. I’ve been the worst daughter in the world, haven’t I?’
‘You certainly have.’ He held her tight as if the years had fallen away.
‘And you’ve been the best dad.’
‘I certainly have.’
‘What are we going to do now?’
He checked his boot. The knife was still there. ‘Now, we have to get out of here.’
***
‘An exorcism?’ Quigg said.
Dr Hudson nodded. ‘That’s when the trouble really began.’
‘What trouble?’
‘Let’s go back to the start, shall we? For a short period, before she was raped and murdered in the storeroom, Cora Jiggins was a patient at Waterbury in 1903.’
Tolliver rummaged in her bag and pulled out the photocopied manuscript of Elijah Teal’s ordeal.
‘We know Jiggins’ history,’ Quigg said.
‘You may know her history before she arrived at Waterbury, but not during her time there. What happened in 1973 was exactly what happened in 1903. Cora Jiggins’ body was found in the very same place in that storeroom in the basement. The door had been locked from the inside, but the key was never found. She had been tortured, mutilated and sexually abused before
her throat was cut, and her clothes were folded neatly beside her. The stain on the concrete floor was left by this first murder, not the second.’
‘Were there any other murders between 1903 and 1973?’
‘All the records, such as the Daily Occurrence Book and the patients’ notes – excluding the ones that were transferred to Shenley in 1973 – are held in the archives at Bethlem Royal Hospital in Beckenham, Kent. As far as I know, no other murders are documented. As I said, I arrived in 1970. The psychiatrist before me was a Dr David Ferris, who was only in the post for three months, and then one night he disappeared.’
‘Disappeared? Where?’
‘That’s what disappeared means, Inspector – to vanish. Nobody saw him leave and nobody knew where he’d gone. As far as I’m aware, he never returned and he was never found.’
‘What about the headless body that construction workers found in the sewers shortly after the asylum closed?’
‘Yes, the police came to see me at the time. I had to look at the body to see if I recognised him. Even though the corpse was dressed in second-hand clothes that had come from the asylum, I didn’t recognise him.’
‘I was wondering about the clothes.’
‘We used to get a lot of charitable donations. Not just clothes, but board games, electrical goods, vinyl records because music used to calm the patients – although some records were wholly inappropriate, such as rock n’ roll, heavy iron . . .’
‘Heavy metal?’ Quigg ventured. Not that he knew much about the subject, but he was partial to the Rolling Stones.
‘If you say so. Anyway, the clothes had the Waterbury label sewn into them, but as I said to the police at the time – it might just be that the labels came from the asylum and not the clothes. They weren’t really interested. The body was in a ghastly state. The pathologist thought it had been in the sewers for at least five years, and apart from the missing head, there wasn’t a lot left of the body either. A Coroner’s Inquest was held and the verdict was accidental death. I can tell you now, it wasn’t an accident. The police wanted to close the file, so that’s what it was classified as.’
‘And no patients had gone missing at that time?’
‘I think someone would have noticed a missing inmate.’