by Andy Maslen
They pedalled away towards the rubbish bins, not looking back, as Collier strolled away, back to his car, holstering his pistol and wishing it was standard equipment. When he reached the safety of the Audi’s leather-scented interior, he thumbed the “lock all doors” button and drove away. Once out of the wannabe thugs’ fiefdom, he pulled over and made a call.
10
New Admission
Monica Zerafa stood at the main reception desk, five hundred yards away from the psychiatric ward, and her target. Grey-faced people dragging oxygen bottles or saline drips on precarious wheeled stands shuffled past her. She leaned over the counter and pinned the young, tired-looking receptionist with an intense stare.
“I want to be admitted to the psychiatric ward,” she said in a low voice so that the woman had to lean forward to catch her words.
“Can you tell me why you want that, please?”
To Monica’s way of thinking, the woman with dark circles under her eyes wasn’t displaying the correct amount of concern. Maybe her next line, worked out with Collier, would do it.
“He is inside my head,” she said, tapping her left temple for emphasis and then crossing herself. “He told me to kill myself. He said his father,” another crossing, forehead to belly, breast to breast, “would welcome me in Heaven personally.”
The receptionist sighed. Maybe she was used to mad people turning up in front of her, demanding sanctuary.
“Name?”
“His name is Jesus.”
“Your name, madam.”
“Gloria Danktesh. Mrs.”
The receptionist made a note on a pad in front of her.
“Can you wait over there, please, Mrs Danktesh?” she asked, pointing at a row of seats beneath a notice board advertising free chlamydia testing kits. “I need to call a doctor.”
“Hurry, please,” Monica hissed. “He’s getting impatient.”
She wandered over to the seats and lowered her bulky frame into the endmost chair, next to a bright orange dump-bin full of cardboard cartons marked, “1 in 12 of your friends probably has it.”
She passed the ten-minute wait observing the comings and goings through the sliding doors. She amused herself by trying to guess the ailments that had brought so many people to the hospital. She considered herself a student of human nature. It was helpful in her line of work. Figuring out what people needed was one step away from meeting that need. For a profit, naturally. Her philosophising was interrupted by the arrival of a man in his midthirties wearing a dark blue cardigan over a white shirt. Handsome, Monica thought. Lovely eyes.
“Mrs Danktesh? Gloria?” he asked. His accent was one of those northern ones. Monica herself had never travelled further north than Camden.
“Yes, Doctor.”
He took the next seat to her. He smelled of soap.
“My name is Dan. Can you tell me why you’re here today? Laura over there,” he pointed at the reception desk, “told me you want to voluntarily admit yourself to the psychiatric ward. I am in charge there and before we take that step, I need to understand your reasons for coming here today.”
Monica looked up at the ceiling before returning her gaze to those wide, trusting, brown eyes.
“Jesus tells me to kill myself so I can be with God. I’m a good Catholic. From Malta. Valetta. I don’t want to disobey him, but I’m frightened. What if he’s Lucifer in disguise?”
Dan smiled and laid a hand on her right forearm, covering a tattoo of a rose.
“Don’t worry. We’ll keep you safe. At least for a few days while we work out what’s going on. Why don’t you stand up and come with me? We can fill out a couple of forms and then find you somewhere to stay.” He looked down at her rings. “Strictly speaking, we should take those away from you, but I think you can be trusted to be a good girl, can’t you?”
She looked down at her hands and flexed her thick fingers.
“Completely, Dan,” she said, then winked.
Back in his office, Dan closed the door and sat at his desk. Resting dead centre on the closed lid of his laptop was a small, padded envelope. In neat black capitals across the front, someone had written DAN HOCKLEY. He picked it up and squeezed it experimentally. Whatever it contained was hard and irregularly shaped. It moved under his fingers as if jointed somehow.
He pulled the red tab at the side of the sealed flap to open the envelope. He upended it and smiled when he saw what slid out onto his palm. A black leather key fob bearing a metal shield, quartered with red and black stripes and deer antlers, with a black prancing horse in the centre. Across the top, in the unmistakeable font of the German car maker, was the word, PORSCHE. A cardboard label was attached to the split-ring by a piece of white cotton. On it, in more black capitals, someone had printed:
FOR SERVICES RENDERED.
He picked up the internal phone to speak to his secretary.
“Fran, who put this Jiffy Bag on my desk?”
“I did, Dan. A motorbike courier dropped it off ten minutes ago. Is there a problem? Do you want me to call security?”
“No, no, it’s fine. Just curious, that’s all. It’s probably a medical sample. One of those creative pharmaceutical PR companies having a bit of fun, I expect. Listen, can you reschedule the rest of my appointments for this afternoon? I have to go out.”
The call ended, he slid the key fob into his pocket, grabbed his jacket from the hook on the back of his door and headed for the lift. His normal walk to the car park took five minutes. This one took four.
As a consultant, Hockley had his own space, with his surname painted in tall white letters at the front edge. Usually, his two-year-old VW Golf GTI would have occupied the space, but today it was being serviced and the space should have been empty. Instead, facing out and broadening his smile to a full grin, sat a scarlet 1980s Porsche 911 Cabriolet. As bright and shiny as the day it had rolled off the production line. It was a sunny day and the roof was down.
He settled himself into the caramel-coloured leather seat and twisted the key in the ignition. The roar from the engine set his pulse racing and he pulled away making a mental note to write a proper thank-you letter.
11
Gloria. From Malta
“Well?”
Other Stella was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the communal area, glaring at Stella. Stella glared back.
“Well, what?” she whispered.
“Well, how are you going to get out of this loony bin, dummy? Or did you plan to spend the rest of your days doing fucking jigsaws and popping Prozac?”
“I’m going to demonstrate to Dan that contrary to what that bastard Akuminde said about me, I am perfectly sane.”
“Good luck with that. You don’t think the whole ‘I’m gonna moiderize ya’ business with the Glock will be a problem, then?”
“I’ve thought about that. We’ve been looking at it the wrong way. Treating it as part of this situation instead of something separate.”
“Explain?”
“It’s simple. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to figure it out. Look. The first problem is getting out of here. That requires them to agree I have capacity. That I’m mentally stable, in other words.”
“Yep, got that. I know exactly the same amount of law as you do, remember?”
“Fine. So they do that and they can’t hold me under the section any more. It might take twenty-eight days but I can wait that long.”
“And then what? You’re out and facing firearms charges at best and attempted murder at worst.”
“No! That’s just it, don’t you see? How can Collier possibly charge me? He’d end up having to expose PPM. He’d be putting himself at the centre of the investigation. That’s why he put me in here. Out of the way.”
Other Stella shifted her weight in her chair.
“Just for a moment, let’s say you’re right. And I agree, what you’re saying does have merit. They won’t be able to hold you here for ever. So my question to you is, why?”<
br />
“Why, what?”
“Why did he stick you in here, dipshit? What’s the plan?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s going to try to have me moved to a high-security psychiatric hospital. But I won’t let that happen. Despite everything he and his little gang of murderers have got up to, this is still England. We don’t stuff people away in psych hospitals just to make them disappear.”
Stella suddenly tired of being interrogated by her inner demon. She rose from the chair and walked to the far end of the room, relieved to see that Other Stella had vanished once more. She found a free armchair by one of the tall windows that overlooked an inner courtyard. She’d just picked up a celebrity magazine when a heavyset woman with dyed blonde hair and a smoker’s lined face slumped into the chair opposite her. Her nicotine-stained fingers were adorned with chunky gold rings.
Stella stared down at the pages before her. They depicted a young couple smiling vapidly at the camera, both dressed in white, with identical orange tans and over-styled hair. The woman, “model and aspiring actress, Tia,” had thick brown eyebrows and about fifty thousand quid’s worth of plastic surgery between her hairline and the “stunning diamond necklace” that descended into a cleavage as deep as the Grand Canyon. Her “ecstatic husband-to-be, Caspian” had skin that appeared to have been polished using an industrial buffer. His designer stubble couldn’t mask a weak chin that seemed to recede into his open-necked silk shirt.
“All the same, aren’t they?”
Stella looked up.
The woman opposite her was pointing a brown-tipped index finger at the photograph.
“Who are?”
“Them celebrities! They never done a proper day’s work in their life, have they? Just famous for being famous. I mean, look at her. If those boobs are real then I’m Margaret Thatcher.”
Stella laughed. It was the first time she’d been able to since she’d seen her niece, Polly. When was that? Jesus! It seemed such a long time ago.
“I was never a fan, to be honest.”
“What?” The woman’s eyes widened. “She put this country back on its feet, she did. Plus, she was a woman. You should be a fan.”
“Just because she had tits and a handbag doesn’t make her a role model for women. I never saw the benefits.”
“She wasn’t afraid of hard work. And she liked people who were the same. Take the Jews, for example. She liked them because they worked hard. Pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Like us.”
“Us?”
“Sorry, darling. Where are my manners? I’m Gloria. I’m Maltese. Came here in the nineties. So I’m an immigrant. But she didn’t mind where you came from as long as you worked hard and didn’t sponge off the state.”
Stella leaned across the table and shook hands.
“Stella. Maybe we should just agree to differ about Thatcher.”
“Fair enough. Sorry. I get a bit over-excited sometimes, that’s all.”
“Is that why you’re in here?”
“Oh, no. I’m here to get you out.”
12
A Friend of Vicky’s
Whatever Stella had been expecting the woman to say, it wasn’t this.
“I beg your pardon?”
The woman smiled. She looked behind her. The duty nurse, a slender blonde about Stella’s age, was sitting with a young woman with straggly black hair and a ladder of scars up the inside of her left arm.
“I’m a friend of a friend of yours. Vicky Riley.”
Stella sat back in her chair. She hadn’t spoken to the freelance journalist since the day she’d thrown Charlie Howarth out of his own office window. Now, a middle-aged Maltese woman built like a professional wrestler had appeared in a psychiatric ward claiming to know her.
“How do you know Vicky?”
“I’m what she likes to call one of her sources. I’ll be honest with you, Stella. I don’t know what line of work you’re in on the outside. But me, I’m afraid I haven’t always managed to keep my nose clean. Nothing too bad, but I know a few people in the drugs trade. Now and again I let Vicky know little titbits about what’s happening. She thinks she’s found a way to get you out of here. Something about a faulty sectioning process.”
“But how? I mean, it all happened so quickly. How did she know I was in here?”
“She didn’t say. Must have a contact at the hospital. Look. Let’s not talk here. One of these nutcases will probably think we’re plotting to take over his brain and tell one of the doctors. You know the chapel?”
It was one of the few places the residents of the psychiatric ward were allowed to venture unaccompanied. No sharp edges. Nothing they could use to harm themselves. Unless you counted staring at bland art prints of a vaguely spiritual, non-denominational character until they wanted to scream.
Stella nodded.
“Meet me there at lunchtime. I overheard one of the nurses saying it’s always empty.”
With that, the woman rose from the chair with a wheeze of breath and walked off towards the nurses’ station.
Unable to remain in the large, bright room with the mumblers and the shakers, the screamers and the twitchers, the catatonic and the manic, Stella retreated to the sanctuary of her own room. She lay back on the bed, free, for once, of her alter ego’s mocking presence, and closed her eyes. Then she opened them again. They’d allowed her a digital clock-radio. She set it to come on at 12.30 p.m., then lay back and stared at the ceiling. At some point she fell asleep. She dreamed of Lola. A laughing, smiling girl of five who looked a lot like Polly. As she swung her daughter round in a sunlit park fringed with deep-red copper beeches, Lola started crying. Then screaming. Stella watched in horror as her daughter’s face blackened and peeled away before her whole body smouldered for a second then burst into flame. With a scream, she let go of Lola’s crackling hands.
She sat straight up, soaked in sweat.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” she said. “When I get out of here, Adam, I’m going to make you suffer an eternity for every second my little baby was in pain.”
She checked the time. 12:25. She turned off the alarm and got to her feet. On the way to the chapel, she went into the shared bathroom and splashed cold water over her face. Peering at herself in the mirror she saw a red-eyed woman with a haunted expression beneath the pixie cut of bleached-blonde spikes. The light above the mirror was bright, and she held her hands out in front of her, palms up, under the blue-white glare. She’d paid a heroin-addicted Greek plastic surgeon to remove her fingerprints the last time she’d been in Marbella, returning Ronnie Wilks’s holdall of cash. Not being able to spare the enormous sum Yiannis Terzi had asked for, Stella had gone after two Albanians who had blinded his medical student daughter in one eye to encourage him to pay protection. After kneecapping both men, she’d shot one through his own eye, while the other had tumbled, she hoped to his death, over the edge of a ravine.
Without prints, she was freer than the average murderer to go about her business undiscovered. Though as her end-game involved suicide, she wondered why she’d bothered in the first place.
“You never know, Stel,” said the identical woman standing beside her at the sink. “You might find you can make a career out of this. Then being dab-free would be a distinct competitive advantage.”
“Fuck off!” Stella said without looking round.
She left the bathroom, shoving the door hard behind her, though its damped closer rendered the gesture little more than an excuse to jar her shoulder.
The hospital authorities had located the chapel at the very end of the corridor that ran beside the psychiatric ward. Perhaps they were afraid that with so many of their patients suffering from religious delusions, the presence of even a non-denominational place of worship might provide fuel for the fire. In fact, the room beyond the pale pine door wasn’t even labelled as a chapel. The sign on the door read, “Mindfulness Space.” Stella rolled her eyes as she pulled the door towards her and entered.
The room beyond the door was unoccupied. Maybe fifteen feet to a side, it held half a dozen of the ubiquitous armchairs upholstered in royal blue fabric. A window looked out onto a car park. The walls held yet more of the bright, colourful paintings that someone in facilities had clearly bought in a job lot. Stella suspected the artist probably specialised in “uplifting art for troubled minds” or some such rubbish. They made her want to throw them spinning to the ground, three storeys down, had she only been able to open the window beyond the white-painted concertina shutters.
She sat in the chair nearest the window and crossed her legs at the ankle. She folded her arms. Then unfolded them. She stood and paced over to the far wall to inspect the signature at the bottom of a print depicting horses running along a beach, the sun setting in a blaze of orange and red behind them. The door opened, startling her. Turning she saw Gloria enter the room and pull the door closed behind her.
Stella realised her pulse was racing. The woman knew Vicky. Was one of her sources. Maybe she could get her out of here.
“You said you knew Vicky,” she said. “Where is she? Tell me.”
Gloria shook her head.
“Not here. I found somewhere better.”
“Where? There’s only the communal room and our bedrooms. And I think they’re all covered by CCTV.”
By way of answer Gloria held up a small brass key.
“Look what I got.”
“What’s it for?”
“The stairwell.”
“How did you get that?”
“You know I said I was in the drugs trade?” Stella nodded. “Only in a small way, mind. Well, before that I used to help my old man work the crowds up West. Leicester Square, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, you know. He was a dip. Taught me all his tricks before he passed over.”