So, I’ve just found out the answer to something that’s been bothering me for a while. Actually, it’s two things: where Tess and Adrian met, and where Tess was during that missing three months in the first half of 2008. But the answer for both is the same. A residential psychiatric clinic in West London called the Zetland Centre, colloquially known as ‘the Zetty’.
If I hadn’t heard that nickname I probably would never have worked it out. Since coming home I haven’t made much progress with my investigations, but tonight the Google alert on Adrian’s name delivered an item of interest. In a newspaper interview, a man claimed he had once shared a room at a clinic with the ‘evil Internet predator’ Adrian Dervish. Except that wasn’t what he, Adrian, was called then; he said his name was Stuart Walls. And apparently he didn’t have an American accent then, either. He told this man he was from Worcester, which is in the middle of England.
Stuart Walls from Worcester. I could understand him taking on a pseudonym to run Red Pill, but why also assume a different nationality? It seemed an unnecessary risk, as someone who knew a lot about American accents might have listened to his podcasts and detected a false note in all those ‘hey there’s and ‘shucks’.
Maybe the risk was the point.
Anyway, in the interview, this man described Adrian keeping him up all night with his plans for world domination and never changing his jumper, and he happened to refer to the clinic as ‘the Zetty’.
The name rang a faint bell in connection to Tess. I went back through my notes and found that in 2008 the phrase cropped up in her emails. I hadn’t been able to work out what it meant and Tess had said she couldn’t remember when I asked her during one of our question sessions, so, as I had considered it a low-priority matter, I put it to one side. My best guess was that it was the nickname of a short-lived boyfriend or friend. You see, she sometimes did that – put ‘the’ in front of someone’s name for no discernible reason. Shall we ask the Jack if he can DJ? she’d write; or Sounds like the kind of crap the Big Mel would come out with. The unnecessary definite article – it was one of her habits.
So now my theory is this: after a suicide attempt at the beginning of 2008 Tess had been admitted, voluntarily or otherwise, to the Zetland Clinic, where she had stayed for around ten weeks. And during that time she had met Adrian, another patient. They had stayed in touch – by phone, I suppose, as I never found any emails between them – and three years later, by which time he was running Red Pill, she had asked him to help her to die. Or perhaps he had offered. Maybe the other people, like Randall Howard’s ‘Mark’, met Adrian there, too.
Obviously, I can understand why Adrian wouldn’t want me to know about ‘the Zetty’ – but Tess? She was hardly reticent, and had freely told me about other suicide attempts and breakdowns and unsavoury sexual encounters. Why not admit she had been to this clinic? I can’t believe she had genuinely forgotten. Or maybe she had. Maybe it had been a particularly bad period and she had blocked it out. I suppose I’ll never know.
They still haven’t found Adrian. To be honest, my interest in his whereabouts is fading. The last time I properly thought about it was a month ago, spurred by something Jonty told me. He had just had dinner with his sister and her new boyfriend who was, in Jonty’s words, a ‘conspiraloon’. ‘He banged on and on about how Obama had been behind the whole banking crisis, that it was a false-flag operation,’ he said. ‘I wanted to bury my head in the couscous.’
I remembered a throwaway remark of Adrian’s when we met on the Heath that day, about how easy it would be to make up a conspiracy theory about Obama and banks. I was curious enough to Google, and indeed a site came up that was devoted to that particular line of thought.
In 2008, two momentous events occurred. Barack Obama became the most powerful man in the world, and the global economy went into meltdown. Coincidence? Really? …
The site consisted of little more than a hastily thrown-together homepage, and, beyond an anonymous email address, there were no details about the person behind it. This, of course, wasn’t surprising if it was Adrian. The only possible clue was a quote at the bottom of the page – ‘The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me’ – by Ayn Rand, Adrian’s heroine. But that’s hardly conclusive evidence. And even if I did have proof that Adrian was behind the site, I wouldn’t tell the police. I don’t want to have anything more to do with him, but neither do I want to cause him to be found.
In his absence, Adrian has been variously diagnosed by the media as both a ‘narcissistic psychopath’ and suffering from ‘antisocial personality disorder’. I thought the latter didn’t sound that bad – in fact, it sounds like something I could have – but I looked it up and it’s actually quite serious. ‘A persuasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others.’ ‘Deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.’
Adrian would have rejected any such labelling. He didn’t believe in mental illness. He spoke about the subject in several of his podcasts: doctors, he said, pathologized perfectly normal reactions to life in order to make money and control unruly members of society. I listened carefully to his argument and I subscribed to it too. After all, that’s why I helped Tess: because I believed that her desire to end her life was a legitimate feeling, not to be denied or smothered with drugs.
But I thought then that Adrian was rational. That was the point. If I knew he had been diagnosed with a mental illness before he had told me that mental illness didn’t exist, would I have listened to him in the same way?
I suppose I’ll never know for sure. All I do know is that I don’t regret what I did. It may have been Adrian who got me into it in the first place but after that, during all those weeks of preparation before checkout, it was just me and Tess. However dismissive Marion was of me, I really do believe I knew Tess better than anyone else in the world and, aside from that single, understandable moment of fear on Skype that one evening, she never wavered in her long-held desire to disappear from the world. I helped her achieve that.
Not that a resolution has been reached with Tess; or, rather, not in the way I had been planning when I started writing this in Spain. I know nothing more concrete about her movements after checkout than when I got off the plane in Malaga in August. Her body has not been found. But now I have what I think is a pretty good theory.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I need to explain what happened to me in Spain, and why I left the commune so abruptly.
On the Wednesday morning, I was dozing under the tree when I heard the sound of first Spanish being spoken close by, then English. I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake. Semi-conscious, my first thought was that it was Milo, but this grip was far heavier and more insistent, and I opened my eyes to see a man looming over me. The sun was behind him, so at first I couldn’t see that he was wearing a uniform, and my first thought was that he was someone from the commune, perhaps sent by the annoying woman who kept going on about me not using the official toilet.
Then he said, in heavily accented English, ‘Please, get up.’
I sat up and saw that there was another man there too, standing off to one side, and that they were wearing police uniforms. Such was my befuddled state, I had the notion that the account I had been writing of Tess had somehow bled into real life. After all, I had reached the point in the story when I was at the police station in London: by writing about the police, perhaps I had conjured them into existence. Somehow, they had found out why I had come to the commune and were here to tell me that Tess’s body had been discovered.
I got to my feet. They were both large, bulky men, wearing sunglasses and sweating in their uniforms. Behind them there was a police car and, beside it, a flattened rectangle of grass where Annie’s van had been. One of them asked me to spell my name, and then informed me that I was being arrested on suspicion of murdering my mother.
Feeling like I still wasn’t
fully conscious, I got into the back seat of the car. Oddly, I didn’t feel nervous. We drove back down the track and towards the main town. The two men didn’t speak, to me or to each other, and the only sound was the occasional outburst in fast Spanish from the radio. When we reached the plastic greenhouses, I thought of my tent and belongings and wondered what was going to happen to them now. Apart from that, and odd though it may sound, I didn’t really think or feel anything during the journey. It was as if my brain was offline. The air-conditioning was on full blast and it was deliciously cool. Sitting on that cracked plastic seat, I was the most comfortable I had been throughout my week in Spain.
At the police station, I was taken into a room, decorated with tatty posters warning of the dangers of thieves and timeshare touts. Other than that, the set-up was the same as it was in Fleet Street – a table, four chairs and a tape recorder, which was even more clunky than the one in London.
As he stated the charge and read me my rights, the policeman’s voice was flat, as if this matter was of no more importance than a stolen handbag. I had the right to an English-speaking solicitor, did I know of one? After he repeated the question, I found the strength to shake my head. Would I like them to find me one? I nodded.
I was told I could make a phone call, and was shown to a plastic covered phone in the corner of the room. The problem was, I didn’t know who to call. The only person I could think of was Jonty, but I didn’t have his mobile number on me. So I phoned the only number I knew off by heart, which was the landline of our old house in Leverton Street. A man answered, presumably the person we had sold the place to. ‘Yes? Who is this?’ he said, and when I didn’t reply, he swore and put down the phone.
I returned to my seat. One policeman had left the room, presumably to find a solicitor for me; the other sat by the door, showing so little movement he could have been asleep behind his sunglasses. I looked at the posters on the walls, with their cartoon warnings against tourist crime – one showed a handbag hanging over the back of a chair with a red line through it – and thought that by the time people saw them, here in the police station, surely it would be too late to heed the advice.
I stared at the words BE CAREFUL!, and thought about the flattened rectangle of grass where Annie’s van had been. I wasn’t disappointed with her for telling the police, but rather with myself and my judgement. I had got her wrong. ‘I understand,’ she’d said when I told her, but she hadn’t, really. Just like Connor had said ‘I love you’ but he hadn’t, really. I should have learned by now that people do not always mean what they say.
Then I thought about the word ‘murder’, and the idea of it being applied to what I did to mum was so ludicrous I almost laughed.
And then, suddenly, I was very scared. I did not want to be locked up. That I knew with absolute certainty. When I had walked into the police station in London, I welcomed the idea of prison, but now things were different. The thought of it made panic course through me; I glanced at the non-moving policeman and, for a wild moment, considered making a run for it.
Part of me felt that if I explained it all, they would understand – how could anyone not? – but I was not naive. Since mum had died I had kept an eye on reports of euthanasia trials and knew that whilst some judges were sympathetic and showed leniency, others did not. The fact that mum had not been a member of a right-to-die organization and had never publicly registered her wishes would not count in my favour, nor would the fact that I was the sole beneficiary of her estate.
Suddenly, I missed my mum so much it stopped my breath. I pictured the door opening and her rushing in to rescue me. She would hold me and take care of me, just as I had taken care of her. We would burst out laughing; it had all been a terrible mistake and she was fit and well again, we were back in Leverton Street, me sitting at the table, her jiggling around to Radio 2 whilst she cooked. I was safe and loved, and when they bullied me at school she would be waiting at the gate with a bag of doughnuts from Greggs the bakers, and she would hold my hand tightly, just as I held hers when her own breath finally stopped.
The policeman looked in my direction. I gripped the plastic table and inhaled deeply, trying to regain control. Then the door opened and the other policeman reappeared. Behind him was someone else, but it was not an English-speaking solicitor. It was Annie.
She had Milo and the baby in tow, and looked even more pink than usual, her hair damp and plastered to her face.
‘Are you OK?’ she said.
I looked at her in astonishment, and nodded.
‘I was at the supermarket,’ she said. ‘When I got back, I couldn’t see you and then I heard that you’d been taken away by the police.’
She said it was Synth who had told her, and that she could tell by her expression that it was she who had called them. Synth must have overheard us talking at the bonfire.
‘I’ve been explaining to the police that there’s been a misunderstanding,’ she said. ‘Synth’s English isn’t good, and she misheard what you said. You didn’t mean killed, you meant died. You meant your mother had died naturally, as a result of her illness.’ She looked straight into my eyes. ‘I told the police that you’d be prepared to make a statement confirming this, and that you’d cooperate fully in giving them details of your mother’s death so they can corroborate the facts.’
I just nodded. Annie then addressed the police, speaking in fast, complicated Spanish. I didn’t know she could speak so fluently.
Annie and I were in the police station for another three hours. They found me an English-speaking solicitor, a thin middle-aged woman called Maria, and I repeated Annie’s story. I talked them through the night mum died, omitting my involvement, and gave them the name of Dr Wahiri, who had come in the next morning and signed the death certificate stating she died of complications arising from MS.
They said they would have to phone England and check the story. Whilst we were waiting, Annie pulled up a chair beside me. We didn’t talk about what was going on, but she kept up bright, cheery conversation about other things, whilst Milo wandered around the room, kicking at chair legs. At one point she gave me the baby to hold. It was the first time I’d had one in my arms; it was the same weight and temperature as our old cat, Thomas.
After an hour, Annie went out to buy us some drinks, and while she was gone I heard the sounds of raised, angry voices through the door, coming from the front desk. I became worried, but when Annie returned she told me that the altercation had nothing to do with our case. Whilst she had been grappling with the vending machine in the reception area, two men had been brought in, charged with assault. It was some argument over water, apparently.
‘From what I could hear, one of them’s a farmer,’ she said. ‘He’s been siphoning water from those greenhouses, the ones near us. He says it’s his water because it goes through his land. Everyone’s getting desperate because of the drought.’
I didn’t think much of this at the time. I was still too preoccupied with the police phoning Dr Wahiri. You see, that morning, when he came in to examine mum, and I was telling him about waking up to find her dead beside me, he had given me a look. It was very brief, a fraction of a second, and at the time my reading of it was: I know what you did, and I understand. But perhaps yet again I had misunderstood, and the look was one of suspicion.
Another half-hour passed and I grew more and more worried. The baby started crying so Annie pulled up her T-shirt and started feeding it. Milo was whining, too, so I tried to amuse him by doing the pee-po game through my fingers, the same one mum used to do with me. It worked for a bit – he actually laughed – but then he got bored again and tugged at his mother’s skirt.
Then we heard footsteps approaching. Annie had finished feeding, thank goodness, as the door opened and the older policeman came in. He spoke in Spanish to Annie, who nodded. I couldn’t tell from her expression what he was saying. My heart thumped.
She turned to me and said, ‘Dr Wahiri has confirmed the death was natural. Becau
se the accusation against you was based on hearsay and there’s no supporting evidence, we’re free to leave.’
It was dark by the time we drove back to the commune. Annie asked what I was going to do now.
‘I think I should probably go home,’ I said.
Early the next morning, I packed up my tent and Annie drove me to the airport. We didn’t speak much on the journey. It wasn’t an awkward silence, though. At the airport, she parked her van crookedly, blocking the taxi lane. I said goodbye to Milo and then, to her, ‘Thank you very much.’
She waved it away, as if it didn’t need to be said.
‘Good luck out there.’ And then, as she started the engine and I walked towards the airport entrance, she called after me,
‘I’m on Facebook, look me up.’
Three days ago there was an interesting development.
Annie has Facebooked me several times since my return from Spain – chatty, inconsequential reports of her and Milo and, once, an invitation to an exhibition of wood craft which she helped organize in Connecticut. For my reply to that I recycled Tess’s response to Connor when he first asked her out for dinner: Would love to, but not quite worth a 10,000 mile round trip.
This latest message, however, contained some real news.
Have you heard that it hasn’t rained in the Alpujurras since we were there? It’s the worst drought in living memory, apparently. The river has entirely dried up and there’s been more trouble between the farmers and the agri-business. It’s the poor wildlife I care about.
I checked Spanish news sites, which confirmed the ongoing drought in the region. As I was doing so, a small item caught my eye. It mentioned that a female human skeleton had been revealed on the dry river bed, about four miles from the commune.
I sat there, thinking, for some minutes, until my laptop logged me out.
Once, on the phone, Tess had mentioned drowning. She had just seen a film about a writer called Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide by walking into a river with stones in her pockets. ‘It’s the best way to go, apparently,’ she said. ‘You struggle and panic at first, but then when your oxygen runs out you surrender and then there’s this moment of bliss, and that’s the last thing you know.’
Kiss Me First Page 27