2004 - The Reunion

by Sue Walker

  There was the briefest of hiatuses. He knew all three of them had to think this one of the bizarrest situations possible. He’d handled it well, was holding his own. And then suddenly he’d run out of steam. Had to get out…

  And within four minutes he was here, ordering brandies by the barrelful. She’d been a pretty cool customer too. He’d no doubt that she was right about the Unit staff being pleased at his progress, long after discharge. They probably had kept tabs on, or at least taken some kind of active interest in, high-achieving ex-patients. His entrance into a branch of medicine allied to their own would have been significant to them. They probably did feel a sense of achievement themselves. Especially given the aspirations of the Unit itself. No, that all had the ring of truth. And she also seemed completely relaxed about her relationship with Debbie Fry. They were clearly open about it and why not, in this day and age, in comfortable, professional, middle-class Edinburgh? The only thing was that it confirmed what he had thought about Sarah Melville then, back in the Unit. That she was interested in women. Though it hadn’t really been that significant at the time. Not to any of the patients, to any great extent. Not even to Alex, who, in retrospect, he didn’t think even knew her sexuality then. No, gay culture and its social acceptance were essentially unknown quantities in those days. If Sarah Melville had been an active gay woman at that time, she would, he was sure, have kept it from everyone. It would have been just too risky.

  The surprise meeting had set off a host of questions and worries in him. And it was those that had him sitting in the pub in the middle of the day. She and her partner were bound to discuss him. He already had a gnawing anxiety about indiscretions between Debbie Fry and Sheena, as well as with his wife. How much would Sarah Melville tell her partner? She had said something about the Unit days being so long ago and a very faint memory. That was probably true, and anyway she’d worked on at the Unit for a while—she’d have had a host of other patients far more interesting than him. No, an ex-patient was bound to attach more significance to their time in the Unit, indeed, to their time in any psychiatric institution, than would the staff. And as for the staff? They were doing a job and couldn’t be expected to remember everyone and what went on during their time there.

  He stopped his line of thinking. Of course he wanted, needed to think that this was true. And yes, in his own practice some patients were more memorable than others. But, what it came down to was, were he and his fellow Unit patients uniquely different from others, in the separate or collective memories of the Unit’s staff? He truly hoped not. No, he felt satisfied that Sarah would recall very little detail about him from that time. But he would be a conversation piece between her and Fry. How could he not be? And there was a more horrifying possibility. What if Sarah had seen the press reports about Katie? If so, it was worryingly likely that she’d given chapter and verse about him to her partner. Fry, in her turn, would be off, saying that she was treating Katie! True, he saw no hint that Sarah was anything other than completely taken by surprise at seeing him. And Fry made formal introductions, giving no hint that she knew of any connection between them..

  He needed to calm down. There was no rational evidence that Sarah knew anything about his reasons for being there. Strictly speaking, Fry shouldn’t say anything to her partner about why he was at her house. But he knew she would. That led to further worries about what might pass between Fry and his wife and also his boss.

  On balance, he thought she’d tread carefully with Rachel. But what he was worried about was what might be said to Sheena. As a trusted and respected member of her department, he had assured her that things were going along okay and that he was ready for work. He didn’t want her asking any searching questions about his decision to absent himself from Katie’s treatment that might, in turn, affect his professional standing in her eyes. Maybe he was getting things out of proportion, though, and it wouldn’t come to anything like that. He’d made the confidential nature of his conversation with Fry crystal clear. She couldn’t have missed it, despite what happened in her hallway half an hour ago. Though the additional problem of Sheena meeting Sarah Melville raised its head. God, that would be a nightmare! But Sheena hadn’t given the impression of being so chummy with Fry that she was meeting her partner.

  He finished his drink. The rapid hits of alcohol in the middle of the day were having their effect on him now. Despite feeling more than a bit gone, there was something else nagging away at him about Sarah Melville. There was something…something else about her…something subtle. He thought about the encounter as if it had been a consultation with a new patient. The meeting and greeting so important. Her demeanour, what she said, how she said it, the body language, the tone of her voice, her facial expressions, her eyes. And then he had it. Her eyes. Shining, healthy, bright, aware. And a flicker of something else. Anxiety? Alarm? No, he knew what it was, and he didn’t know why it was there. But he was now convinced that what he’d seen had been deep worry, even fear. Why?

  He shrugged to himself and got ready to go. Beyond all these worries, uppermost in his mind was the significance of meeting someone from those days now. It was yet another symbol. Like Katie’s being taken. Most clearly, most urgently of all, was that it reinforced his need to do something about his past. Reinforced his decision to answer Danny’s letter. Maybe it was all just meant to be. And God knows where it would lead.

  ’ACCIDENTS’

  Six months later—2004, and 1977

  Handover note. Sister Anna Cockburn to Nurse Sarah Melville

  2 November 1977

  RE: Staffing for holiday in Argyll

  I’m leaving early tonight before you get on night duty, so won’t have time for verbal handover.

  I’ve consulted with Adrian and Ranjit and we all agree that you should accompany me and Ranjit as the third staff member on the holiday. Granted, there are main-hospital staff who are experienced in taking patient groups on holiday, but Adrian stressed that what we don’t want is any further rupturing of the group, given the recent atmosphere in the Unit. A new and temporary staff member just for the holiday may cause severe disruption among the patients.

  Also, Ranjit pointed out, and I agree with him, that your work with Alex is going really well, and she has shown some positive behaviour of late. We don’t want that to be interrupted. You’re doing really well with that.

  Who knows, we may even enjoy ourselves!

  Copy to: Handover File only

  SEVENTEEN

  The room was a bomb-site. Every photo, scrap of paper, scribbled note seemed to be glaring up at her. She clumsily sloshed the remnants of a second bottle of wine into her glass. Quietly pissed. Solitarily pissed. A good feeling. A feeling she needed. Cut off from the outside world in this upmarket yet comforting hotel. No visitors welcomed or expected. No calls answered. Innes Haldane was out. Out of it.

  She fingered the ageing photograph. It had once been stuck up somewhere in Danny’s life. The back had the telltale, dirty, grey marks of Blu-Tack. Who’d taken the photo of that last afternoon of their camping holiday? That’s right…it was Ranj’s fancy camera. He’d set it and run back to take his position with the rest of them. She remembered now. He’d given them all a copy. She’d burned her copy soon after her release. No doubt in an attempt at denial and obliteration of her past. Denial and obliteration she’d carried with her until these recent weeks. She shook her head at the photo.

  God, that bloody camping holiday! Not really camping, though, except for one disastrous night that she’d cried off from, exaggerating the beginnings of a flu that, in reality, was nothing more than a heavy cold. The outward-bound centre itself had been comfortable. Little roughing-it involved. She slugged back her drink, a trickle running, down her chin and drip, drip, dripping on to the photo. Along with the beginnings of tears. What the hell was she doing getting maudlin with all this drink, for God’s sake! Get a grip!

  She ran her palm across Danny’s effects. And the printout from his computer d
isk. There’d been no household accounts on it, despite its label to that effect. Was Danny anxious to hide its contents? After all, it was a special file. Very special. Of names that shot her back into adolescence.

  CAROLINE FRANKS. Deceased. Drugs overdose, Edinburgh, 1984.

  ALEXANDRA BAXENDALE. Married (second time) but retains maiden name. Internet entrepreneur (formerly City of London trader). Home: 112 Gamekeeper’s Gardens, Edinburgh. Second residence in Sussex—rarely used.

  DANNY RINTOUL. Unmarried, crofter on Isle of Lewis. Moved there in eighties. Home: ‘Sula’, Calanais, Isle of Lewis.

  *INNES HALDANE. Trained as lawyer, specializing in civil/commercial law. Now Senior Manager, Official Receiver’s Office. Divorced. Childless. Home: 29 Primrose Hill Gardens, London NW3.

  *LYDIA YOUNG. Married (name ‘Shaw’). Three children. Home: ‘Craigleith’, Dunes Road, Yellowcraigs, East Lothian, Scotland.

  ??ISABELLA VELASCO. Dental surgeon. Divorced. Childless. Home: 12 Belsize Park Square, London NW3.

  DR SIMON CALDER. Clinical psychologist in Edinburgh. -Married with two daughters. Home: The Old Manse’, Fillan’s Lane, St Monans, Fife. Second home in France.

  ANNA COCKBURN. Deceased. Road traffic accident, 1989.

  DR ADRIAN LAURIE. Since 1996, Professor of Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Chicago, USA.

  RANJIT SINGH. Former Charge Nurse. Whereabouts unknown. Ceased working at the Unit late 1978. No longer on Nursing Register.

  SARAH MELVILLE. Former student nurse. Left nursing late eighties. Retrained as psychoanalytic psychotherapist, with practice in Glasgow.

  She’d spent the entire ferry journey back to the mainland poring over the list, emotions bobbing to and fro with the sea swell. That seemed like a lifetime away from the warm familiarity of the fashionable Edinburgh hotel that she found herself in now. Given what she’d been looking at, there was no way she was ready to go back to London.

  Staring back down at the list, she felt just the same as when she’d first read it. Puzzlement at what Danny was doing with it. The second page had further details on it: full postal addresses, some landline and mobile numbers, including her own. It couldn’t be his own work, since there was no reason to have his own details on it, though on checking when it was last accessed and edited, she could see that it was sometime before his death.

  She shook her head again in amazement that she’d been living in such close proximity to Isabella but had never seen her. Or had they passed each other on the street, in a shop, cafe, bar? The thought was too strange and sad to mull over any longer. Another part of her looked at the list in wonder at the paths people’s lives had taken. Hardly a surprise that Simon was indeed now a ‘heid doctor’ as he, backed up by Carrie, had always promised. And Alex? Again no surprises. Her ingrained aggression would have made her a great City trader, and no doubt now she was a rip-roaring success as an internet entrepreneur. How fitting. Innes paused a moment over the sad inevitability of Caroline’s fate. Hardly a surprise. And then the other feelings seeped through. Shock at Anna’s death. Confusion at the significance of the various asterisks and question marks, including the asterisk against her own name.

  But all that paled beside the real shocker. She’d found the two clippings stuffed inside a recent gas bill. They were dated only weeks before Danny’s death. With disbelief she read them again.

  Father and three children die in Christmas-fire tragedy—mother ‘critical’

  A father and his three children died last night in a fire that destroyed their house. The mother survived but is on the critical list at East Lothian General Hospital. Firemen were unable to save Robin Shaw (44), an officer in the Royal Navy, or his three children, Angus (12), Harriet (9) and Hamish (5), as flames engulfed the family home, ‘Craigleith’, a detached house on the exclusive Dunes Road, overlooking the spectacular beach of Yellowcraigs.

  Mr Shaw’s wife, Lydia (42), was spotted trapped under fallen roof timbers and cut free by firemen.

  Local fire-investigation officers have yet to confirm the cause of the blaze but a spokeswoman said, “We are not at this stage ruling out the possibility that the fire may have been started deliberately.”

  §

  Inquiry finds family-death fire ‘may have been started deliberately’

  A fatal-accident inquiry has issued an open verdict on the deaths of a father and his three children, stating that the fire in which they died ‘may have been started deliberately’. Naval officer Robin Shaw (44) and his three children, Angus (12), Harriet (9) and Hamish (5), may have been the victims of arson at their exclusive beach-front home in Dunes Road, Yellowcraigs. Their mother, Lydia Shaw (42), remains critically ill with serious head injuries in East Lothian General Hospital, after being pulled alive from underneath the collapsed roof of the house.

  Police and fire-investigation experts gave evidence that traces of ‘an accelerant, thought probably to be petrol’ were found at the scene and may have been used to start the fire in the cellar of the six-bedroomed mansion.

  Lieutenant Shaw was a keen amateur racing enthusiast and had several cars and motorbikes garaged at the home, along with oil and petrol supplies that may have led to the fire being started accidentally.

  Police have indicated that, if the blaze was started deliberately, then they are ‘baffled’ as to why the ‘quiet but well-liked’ family of five would have been targeted. However, neighbours and the family’s GP have offered some clues that may be relevant if arson was involved. They told the inquiry that Mrs Shaw had seemed depressed and anxious in recent weeks. Local GP Dr Richard Buchanan said that Mrs Shaw had consulted him recently with severe symptoms of anxiety and depression, and he had prescribed appropriate medication for her. It is thought that police are pursuing, among several lines of inquiry, the theory that Mrs Shaw may have been aware of some threat to her family. She remains unconscious and unable to talk to police.

  Anyone who was in the vicinity of Dunes Road on the evening of Saturday, 12 December, is being asked to contact their local police station.

  The surprising fact that Lydia had married well, given birth to three children and presumably found some form of domestic happiness was obliterated in Innes’s mind by the imagined horror of the event. The inescapable knowledge that Lydia had a background in fire-starting left a chilling and overwhelming question mark in her mind. Could Lydia really be responsible for killing her husband and three little ones? She hauled herself back into the present. What in God’s name was happening? Three fatal incidents within a few months. Only one an ‘accident’. Maybe.

  She shook her head at the shocking news of Lydia. A strange and petulant girl, always attention-seeking, always putting everyone’s back up…

  EIGHTEEN

  “Ach! Fir Christ’s sake! Whit’s she done now? Innes? D’you know what the fuck she’s moaning about now?” Innes shrugged her reply as Caroline tugged painfully at tangled wet hair with a brush and headed over towards the source of the noise. Innes decided to follow, more out of boredom than curiosity. She had a bad cold and was not going to be able to take part in the day’s orienteering challenge or stay in tents overnight at a planned bivouac a few miles north. She was very happy with that and began, for the umpteenth time, ostentatiously blowing her running nose. She hated camping and hated roughing it. The screaming and yelling was reaching banshee proportions. She saw Ranj and Anna clustered around a now well-nigh hysterical Lydia, who was rolling on her side, clutching her left knee.

  “The monkey rope broke! My knee! It’s bleeding! Waaaaaaa!”

  Caroline had stuffed the brush into a back pocket of her jeans and rubbed at the frayed end of rope hanging from the stout oak. She quipped, “Aye. It wasnae designed wi’ elephants in mind. Yer too fat! That’s how it broke. Silly coo.”

  But Anna rounded on her. “Cut it out, Carrie. Be useful for once. Go and get Sarah and tell her to bring the first-aid box! Go on! Now!”

  Innes watched Caroline saunter off, insolence in ever
y casual step. “Aye, aye. Keep yer knickers on, Sis.”

  Half an hour later Innes joined a few of them sitting around a blazing fire, slurping lunchtime soup. Lydia had been persisting in her claims, claims that had replaced the weeping and wailing. “I’m telling you, someone cut that rope. They wanted me to break my neck!” And then she’d limped off to skulk in her bunk.

  Alex was hunched forward, anorak hood covering her shaven head. She’d disappeared for most of the morning into the dorm hut, refusing to talk to anyone. But now she seemed, to Innes, strangely and unexpectedly animated. She was nodding vigorously and talking to no one in particular. “Well? We couldn’t have bloody Lydia trailing along with us today. She’d be rucking hopeless.”

  Innes listened to the general murmur of agreement from Danny, Simon and Carrie. She raised an eyebrow at Isabella, who asked the obvious.

  “What? So you did tamper with the rope? That’s a bit iffy. Lydia could’ve been really hurt.”

  “Rubbish!” Carrie tossed a bread crust into the fire and watched it incinerate. “It wasn’t very far to fall, for fuck’s sake. Listen, this orienteering, camping thing today and tonight is about our only chance for a bit of fun before we go back. That fat cow would just hold us back. I’m with Alex. It’ll be better with just us lot, except for you, Innes. How’s ‘the flu’ anyway? Skiver!”

  Innes felt the rush of red to her face, annoyed and surprised at her plan being flushed out so easily. But she tried a nonchalant shrug. “I’m really feeling crap, Carrie, whatever you think. You’ll be better off without me. Anyway, have fun. I’m off to bed.” She stood up, flashing a conspiratorial smile at Abby. Yeah, she hoped at least Abby would have a good time.

  The shouting and banging woke her up with a start, heart hammering away from being shocked out of such a deep and badly needed sleep. It was pitch black. Hurriedly, she scrambled out of her bunk and switched a side light on. Her watch said ten twenty-five. She’d been asleep for hours! Outside, she could make out Sarah battering against the door of the female staff’s hut.