by Tom Pollock
Thirty thousand: in the grand scheme of things it’s not so many. Less than one two-thousandth of the population of the country. But it adds up. Over my lifetime it’ll be more than two million. Do I think there are two million people in Britain who are a bigger danger to themselves than I am?
—Pitching, heels over shoulders. Wind rushing. Red brick blurring. Heads or tails, heads or tails—
I do not.
For at least half a decade I’ve accepted my path will one day lead to an asylum. So I’ve taken precautions. I grasped my gargantuan powers of obsessive nerdism and trained them on the Mental Health Act 1983. I memorised everything the law permitted, and everything it forbade. Every trick, every loophole, every drop of bureaucratic oil that might one day grease my passage between the toothy cogs of the psych ward machine is stored safely in my brain for the day I hear the ambulance outside my door.
I just never, ever thought I’d go looking for it.
At a chipped Formica table, a grizzled man is crying. It started out as a low murmur, but now he’s wailing, unselfconscious as a baby, and just as inconsolable; not that that matters, as nobody is trying to console him. No one’s even looking at him. I wince at one especially loud shriek and dig my nails into my palms. I feel the familiar pressure building in my chest, the room starting to tunnel. In my head I can hear the click of doors locking, of tumblers turning. I’m starting to sweat. The hiss of a leaking radiator is playing out the voice in my head:
. . . get out get out get out . . .
Focus, Pete. Concentrate. Breathe. Do not panic. There’s no time to panic. A door swings open at the corner of my peripheral vision and I stand, and try to smile, even though this will be the cruellest thing I’ve ever done.
I turn, my stomach churning like a washing machine, and there she stands, a pitifully small suitcase at her side.
She’s changed from the photo Ingrid dredged up. Her hair’s almost completely grey, even though she’s only been inside for eighteen months. She looks nervous and birdlike, with a turkey wattle of skin at the neck where her flesh has ebbed away. Her fingers, stained yellow with nicotine, peck restlessly at the front of her jumper.
Even so, I was always going to recognise Rachel Rigby instantly. The face of the son who so took after her is acid-etched on my brain.
I just about manage to pry my mouth open and say, “Mum.”
It’s up to her now. She stares at me for a second and I see it, fleeing her face like a shadow in front of a torch beam: hope.
Dear Christ, she was still hoping.
Eighteen months she’s spent buried on this ward, seventy-eight weeks, five hundred and forty-six slow days and nights, pleading and protesting, over and over: My son’s been murdered, please believe me, I shouldn’t be here, help me, please help me. Hushed and ignored and, for all I know, strapped down and sedated, she was told she was disturbed, told that Ben was fine, that he’d be in to see her soon. You’re out of sorts, you’re not well, rest, calm down, just a little longer and you’ll see.
And now on day five hundred and forty-seven, they walk in and tell her that the son she was so insistent was a rotting corpse is waiting in the sunroom, come to take her home.
You wouldn’t be human, would you, if in the minutes it took you to walk from your cell, you didn’t begin to doubt yourself? If you didn’t begin to think that the doctors with all the impressive letters after their names were right; that this had all been a bad dream, and when you push open the door, your son will be there to wake you up and guide you finally back to your old life?
And instead all you’re faced with—staring at you with the same eyes as the woman who put you here and pleading with you to play along—is me.
Shit, lady. I am so sorry.
I see micro details in slow motion: the muscles in her jaw, her chapped lips parting. She’s going to scream, I’m sure of it. She’s going to shriek Liar, impostor, and blow the whole game. My legs tense to run but I know that the second she cries out, burly nurses will burst through that door, pin Ingrid and me down, and drip benzodiazepines into our veins until the cavalry from 57 arrives.
Ingrid’s staring at me, aghast. I’ve fucked us.
“Ben,” Rachel Rigby says.
I blink. She crosses the carpet towards me in four steps and falls into my stranger’s embrace. Her arms clamp around me; they’re thin, but they grip like steel bands. She pulls away and looks at my face intently. Then she closes her eyes and leans into my shoulder. She’s the consummate actress, I’ll give her that. There’s no sign in her voice or expression of the lie. Only I, with her sparrow’s body pressed against me, can feel the tremor running through her.
“Bring me the forms,” I say over her shoulder to the chief administrator, who, having escorted her in, is still hovering by the door.
“This is . . . rather irregular, Mr. Rigby.” He walked towards us. “We need seventy-two hours’ notice to release a patient.”
“You’ve had them. Check your records.”
“And a patient’s release has to be on the instruction of his or her nearest relative, who we have on file as your father, Dominic.”
“Dad’s in a coma up the road at the Royal Infirmary.”
Rachel Rigby stiffens in my arms but doesn’t let go.
“Feel free to call them. I’m her nearest responsible relative now, and I’m discharging her as is her right, under Section Three of the Mental Health Act.”
He wavers for a second. He looks uneasy and I’m instantly alert.
You know, I realise. Someone’s told you this one’s special. Someone’s told you not to release her. They haven’t told you why, but you know your job’s on the line if you let her go.
And suddenly I’m sure of it; he won’t let us go. He doesn’t have an excuse to keep her; he doesn’t need one. In his eyes I’m still a kid. I can feel the plan unravelling around me like toilet paper in the jaws of a puppy.
Desperately, I grope for some way to tip him, and that’s when I recall a name I saw over Ingrid’s shoulder on the screen last night.
“Sir John Ferguson. You know who he is?”
He blinks at me. “Of course; he’s the chief inspector of hospitals.”
“He’s also a close family friend. Bring me the forms or don’t bring me the forms, but in ten minutes’ time, we’re walking out of here, and if you stop us, he’s the first person I’ll be calling. Your reasons for ignoring the law will have to be pretty convincing if you want to avoid a full-on, messy spot audit. You know, the sort that turns up the kind of gory breaches of procedure that play so well on the front page of the Mail.”
At the table, the grizzled guy is still crying.
On the steps outside, Ingrid whispers, “The chief inspector of hospitals? A family friend?”
“You know what they say, Ingrid: blind panic is the mother of invention.”
“Literally no one says that.”
“That’s because they haven’t met me.”
Rachel Rigby doesn’t speak until we’re well clear of the hospital. As soon as its Georgian crags are out of sight, she makes a beeline for the nearest corner shop.
“Money,” she says shortly. I pull a tenner out of my pocket and hand it to her. She hesitates, composes herself, then vanishes inside. She reemerges with a carton of Marlboros and four packets of Maltesers. She sits down on a bollard and, ignoring the cars blaring past, systematically opens each pack, popping the chocolate-covered spheres into her mouth one by one and sucking them clean before crunching down on them.
Finally, she crumples the last bright red packet in her palm, stares out at the traffic, sighs, and lights a cigarette.
“You look like her,” she says without turning her head. I don’t need to ask which her she means.
“She’s my mum.”
She smiles. In the sunshine, her narrowed eyes are li
ke liquid lead.
“So it’s a family business, is it? Fucking up lives? Am I to take it that your . . . intervention just now is because your mum’s reconsidered, and chosen to take her thousand-pound designer heel off my throat?”
I swallow.
“No.”
She peers at me through the smoke.
“No?”
“We’re on our own. And so are you. If you want to stay free, you’re going to have to run. It’ll be hard, but not impossible.”
I look to Ingrid, who’s leaning against a lamppost, arms folded, with this “oh, we’re having this conversation out here on the street, are we? Well, fuck everything I learned at spy school, then” expression on her face.
“I have some experience with the organisation Louise Blankman works for,” she says reluctantly. “I can tell you the kinds of trail they’ll look for and how to avoid leaving them.”
“Your timing’s good,” I add. “Mum’s firm has got its hands kind of full at the moment.”
“With what?”
Ingrid and I look at each other. With the girl who slashed your son’s throat and got me to cling-film his body inside a mouldy carpet and stage a gas explosion to get rid of it—is what we emphatically do not say aloud.
“What you said in there,” Rachel Rigby asks, “about Dom. Is it true?”
“Near enough.” It’s blunt, but I figure she’s had enough of being treated fragile to last a lifetime.
“He gonna make it?”
“I don’t know. The doctors aren’t optimistic.”
She blows out a long stream of smoke and her lips are trembling.
“Good,” she says. “I don’t know if I could stand being out here knowing he was too.”
Cars whine past the roundabout, their horns filling the silence as they swing up towards the hill and Edinburgh Castle sitting dark and craggy on top of it. Ingrid kicks herself off her lamppost.
“We need to get on with this, Pete.”
“Mrs. Rigby—” I begin.
“Rachel.” The correction’s not a friendly gesture.
“Rachel, it’s kind of noisy here, and there’s a lot you need to hear. Can we go somewhere quieter?”
Without a word, Rachel stands and starts walking, her suitcase wheels burring behind her over the pavement. We follow her in silence to a muddy meadow hemmed in by the talons of winter trees. Now we walk on either side of her: seven circuits, eight, while I tell her what I know about Mum’s work, and Ingrid quietly relays the tedious, crucial details that must form the spine of her life from now on: what bank accounts she should access in the next two hours, the black databases on the Internet where she can safely stash the money until she can open clean ones in a new identity, what she can get away with in the first 12 hours, then 24, then 48; the address of a man in Glasgow who can arrange a fake passport and the countries that have weak enough surveillance setups that she can settle in them long term. Listening to her I feel a chill that’s nothing to do with the autumn wind—it could be my future she’s describing. My life.
At the end of circuit nine, we’re done. Ingrid hesitates and reaches out and touches Rachel’s shoulder. “Good luck,” she says. Rachel hasn’t made a sound this whole time. She keeps her eyes fixed on the ground as she says, “I’m not going to run.”
She lights another cigarette, the last in the pack. She looks up at me.
“Your mother told me I had thirty years left to live and that I shouldn’t waste them. Well, I don’t intend to. I’m going to dedicate every minute of them to getting the opportunity, and then, when I have it, I’m going to kill her.”
She says it clearly and simply, as if she’s predicting the afternoon’s weather.
“I’m going to kill your mother. I think you should know that.”
Her certainty leaves an icy footprint on my heart, but what can I say? I nod once, and she turns and walks away.
It’s only when we’re back amidst the bustle and bagpipe whine of the Royal Mile that I notice Ingrid’s shaking.
“What is it?” I ask urgently. She’s rubbing her hands and plucking at her gloves. Her fingers curl and she starts to dig her nails in. Her eyes are open but unseeing. I have to yank her back when she almost steps into the road as a black cab blares past. I recognise the symptoms; she’s having an attack—a six-pointer on the ballsuck at the very least.
I hesitate for a second, but there’s nothing for it.
I pull her sideways into an alley between two close-leaning medieval buildings and into the open door of a pub.
Thank the saltire for Scottish drinking culture, because even though it’s barely 11:30 in the morning, there are seven punters to distract the barmaid as I barrel Ingrid into the ladies’. The bottles of hand wash and iodine she keeps in her jacket clatter into the sink. The tap roars and she gets her hands under the flow. Her movements are sharp, frantic, but the rest of her seems to calm. That’s the thing about crutches—sometimes you need them to hold you up.
“Ingrid,” I say gently. “What is it?”
“Rachel,” she gasps through a thin film of saliva that stretches between her lips. Her eyes are unfocussed, still staring blindly at her hands. “She’s just . . . she’s so lonely. I got swamped by it. I tried not to but . . .” She exhaled hard. “She has no one. You understand? Her son’s dead. Her husband’s soon to be, and she hates him anyway, and who could blame her?”
“You think I should have told her?” I ask.
“Told her what?”
“What he told us. The reason he did it. That he loved her. That he was trying to protect her.”
She turns slowly and the look in her eye chills me.
“Don’t do that, Pete.”
“What?”
“Make excuses for him. Every prick who does this has a reason, and it’s never, ever good enough. Dominic Rigby had exactly the same reason as every other man who’s ever put their knuckles to their wife. I—” She hisses in frustration and corrects herself. There’s something birdlike in the way she’s holding her head. “She made a choice he didn’t like, and he used his fists to take that choice away from her. And when she was too strong for that to work, he called in the rest of the fucking state to finish the job.”
“Your old firm would have killed her—you know that.”
“Then she would have died,” she says flatly. There’s blood in the sink now. “But that was her decision to make, not his.”
The door creaks open and I look round. A woman in a biker jacket enters, takes one look at us, and walks out. Behind me, Ingrid says softly, “Pete, how many times have I washed my hands?”
“Seventeen.”
“You’re sure?”
“If you can’t trust yourself . . .”
She snorts, but a few seconds later the tap squeaks shut. She bends over the sink and just breathes, long and slow.
“Now,” she says at last, dabbing iodine against the back of her hands and tearing off a plaster with her teeth. “Can we get out of this bloody city before my firm shows up? I don’t much fancy an extended holiday in Diego Garcia.”
“Absolutely . . .”
“Thank you.” She begins to gather her things.
“But you won’t like where we’re going.”
She stops, throwing another anxious glance at the sink.
“Where?” She reads my face and goes very white.
“No,” she says firmly.
“We have to.”
“It’s the first place 57 will look!”
“I know.”
“Pete, I worked for these people for a decade, so trust me. When they’re hunting you, you run and you hide; you do not get up all in their face like this. There’s only one way that ends.”
“Even so.”
“Pete—” She’s pleading with me.
&
nbsp; “We have to find out why Bel flipped on Mum,” I insist. “Mum was covering up a murder she committed. There must be a reason Bel attacked her.”
Ingrid starts to protest. “Pete—”
“You saw what she did to him.” I cut her off. “And yeah maybe he deserved it, but she was enraged. This was personal. Please, Ingrid. You don’t have to come, but I have to know. I have to keep following her footsteps.”
“But we followed her footsteps; they led us here. The trail’s dead.”
“It’s not. There’s the notebook; Rigby said Bel had a black notebook.”
In my mind’s eye I see my mother: in our devastated kitchen in her dressing gown, in a dark blue cocktail dress waiting to receive her award, rushing after me to meet her daughter’s knife. And in every one of those images, she’s carrying her slim black hardback notebook.
“Bel’s been reading Mum’s notes. There’s something in her work that set her off—there must be.”
“Pete—”
“Think about it.” I’m pleading now. This has to be it. “Who are the only two people to survive Bel’s attacks? Rigby and Mum. Both times she was enraged. She wasn’t as clinical as usual. With Rigby she’d been reading Mum’s work notes, and then at the museum . . .”
“She was about to watch her get an award for that work.” Ingrid finished the sentence, sounding troubled.
“It’s Mum’s work. Something in those notes that turned Bel against her. Something bad enough that she couldn’t stand watching her glory in it.”
“You can’t be sure.” Ingrid’s protest has the tone of a last-ditch effort. “Your sister’s crazy. What if she doesn’t need reasons? You already asked her why once, remember? She said your mum made her mad. What if that’s all there is to it? After all”—she shrugs sullenly—“nothing ‘turned her’ on her first victim. Nothing sent her gunning for Ben Rigby.”
I feel the base of my throat close up.
I see Bel sitting on my hospital bed. She’s holding my hand, avoiding the needle lodged in my skin. Her voice is gentle, but her eyes are hard. “Who did this to you, Pete?”