Stranger Than Kindness

by Mark A Radcliffe

  Anna shook her head and laughed. ‘So why even bother commissioning this research?’ Cassells nodded at Black. ‘Mr Portier?’

  Black hadn’t moved since he had entered the room. Now he stepped forward and started nodding. ‘Well,’ he said earnestly, ‘you don’t measure freedom according to the range of answers available to a question, you measure it according to the range of questions people are allowed to ask.’

  ‘What?’ said Anna impatiently.

  ‘Open mindededness, academic freedom, progressive thinking… These slightly fatuous ideas oil the economic wheels, Anna.’ Cassells spoke with a flourish, waving his hand in the air as if he was conducting music only he could hear.

  Black said: ‘The research profile overseen by CREAK, and indeed right across the board, needs to demonstrate a willingness to ask questions that service all political perspectives. Nobody really believed that you would come up with findings that suggest there are better ways than drugs of treating psychosis.’

  ‘Yes but we have, so what’s the problem?’

  ‘Well, for one thing the problem is, as Dr Cassells has explained, one of simple economics. We don’t turn our back on our friends in times of trouble.’

  ‘Whose trouble?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Our trouble, Ms Newton,’ said Cassells. ‘Industry is not so buoyant that we can undermine one of our most effective and consistent exports: pharmaceuticals.’

  ‘Furthermore,’ said Black, trying to sound like a government official, ‘quite frankly, drugs are cheaper than the holiday camps that CCT provide. It’s all well and good for a handful of celebrities to fund a handful of centres, but if that responsibility fell to the NHS you could kiss goodbye to just about everything else. Cancer care, dementia care, chronic health problems: they cost money. We need affordable solutions and we need them presented in such a way as to ensure people don’t believe they are being given the cheap option.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘Isn’t the point of research to simply put the findings out there and let the world manage what they mean?’

  ‘Now you’re just taking the piss,’ said Cassells.

  ‘Who set up Paul Stern?’ Anna asked.

  Cassells shrugged. ‘Who says he was set up?’

  ‘I do,’ said Anna.

  ‘If that is the case I have no doubt the police will exonerate him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna sarcastically. ‘Because if the last fifteen minutes have shown me anything it is that the authorities are to be trusted in all things.’

  Cassells was getting bored. ‘Anna, you are contractually obliged not to publish, comment, present or even hint at findings until CREAK says you can.’

  Black spoke quietly: ‘And as Leichter and Wallace have enjoyed pointing out, we are contracted to not release data without agreeing a timetable with them. If we breach that contract they will claim we are going off half-cocked and sue us.’

  ‘I think that this transcends contracts,’ said Anna.

  ‘Do you? Hannah?’ said Cassells quietly before saying more loudly: ‘Look, this research amounts to whimsy. It doesn’t offer anything scientific, progressive or constructive. It amounts to a single study that suggests offering luxury, attention and unlimited patience to the mad might offer a better clinical outcome than antipsychotics. Think of what taking that seriously means, Anna, economically and politically. Hell, if people were paying attention it would challenge the underpinning knowledge base for the whole of psychiatry. Do you know how many jobs that could affect?’

  ‘Firstly,’ Anna spoke quietly, ‘Don’t call me Hannah. Secondly, you are interested in sustaining an industry for ideological and economic reasons. I am not so stupid as to imagine that the CCT research is going to bring your house tumbling down, but I do think it might help cleverer people than me ask more questions and maybe get to a point where the money being pumped into your precious drug companies goes somewhere else, somewhere more helpful.’

  ‘My precious drug companies use the money they get from psychiatry to develop drugs to combat all sorts of things Anna: cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s. I understand your father developed Alzheimer’s. I understand he used to go out looking for you, long after you had gone. That had to hurt your mother and your brother. CCT wouldn’t have been much use for him, would it?’

  ‘How do you know anything about my family?’ Anna said. The coldness had left her and she could feel something else rising up from the base of her spine: not fear, more likely rage.

  ‘Mr Portier, you may recall, had a brief admission some years ago. I was his psychologist. He told me he knew you and over the course of many sessions he told me the same things you had told him: your story. After he selected you for this piece of work, a romantic gesture as far as I can tell, he was curious about your son. So many secrets, Ms Newton! Anyway, after he had selected you and Dr Stern had submitted his interim report, I found my curiosity running away with me and I looked into what had happened to your family. Should I tell you?’

  Adam had wandered past the toilet and was walking down the central corridor of the second floor. It was the antithesis of the celebration of reinforced glass downstairs, a conventional floor of offices. He had his phone at his ear, ready to pretend to talk earnestly into it should anyone with a badge eye him and his plimsolls suspiciously. But nobody did. The second floor appeared as quiet as the reception area. Walking deeper into the building, past the toilets, there was an office with two voices chatting quietly about a restaurant but nobody in the office opposite. Further along there were two doors facing each other. One had a silver nameplate that read ‘Dr Carla Tandy’ on it, the other—an incongruous large oak door more suited to a 1930s mansion—had the name ‘Dr David Cassells’ in gold lettering. Adam opened the door confidently. He knew Cassells wouldn’t be there, and if there was a secretary he would smile and say that he and Davie used to work together and it felt ridiculous being in the same building and not coming to say hello and to find out which of them had aged the best. But there was nobody, just a very large oval shaped office with a stunning panoramic view of the countryside. In the middle of the office, in front of a leather chair facing away from the view, was a very large round desk. Adam walked over and sat down. He touched the space bar of the computer in front of him. The screen sprang into life asking for a password. He typed in the word ‘password’ but it was rejected. He stared at the screen for a moment and shook his head. He spun round in the chair and looked at the view. It was all cultivated land but beautiful nonetheless. Adam wondered how often Cassells looked at that landscape, and wondered why you would have your back to it all day but be facing the door in a building where, as far as Adam could tell, about seven people worked.

  None of the drawers were locked but there was nothing immediately interesting in any of them. Not that Adam was looking for anything in particular. He was just looking, mostly because he shouldn’t. Adam looked at his phone, sighed and phoned Freaky Bob.

  Freaky Bob believed that nobody had been to the moon and Michael Jackson was alive and well and living in Malta. He could talk for months about Roswell, the JFK cover up and the fact that the internet was essentially a very efficient CCTV system that could, if an increasingly tired and unfocused government wanted it to, find out everything about anyone who used it. Freaky Bob thought they were out to get you, and after a few pints he behaved as though Star Wars was a documentary, but he knew more about computers than Bill Gates and had once hacked into the American FBI database from a pub in Herne Bay on a borrowed laptop for a bet. He won five pints of ‘Badgers Golden Champion’ and a signed photograph of Fidel Castro. The owner of the laptop, a mouthy out-of-towner, is still facing extradition charges. Freaky Bob could have done anything in the world he had wanted. Mostly he wanted to read obscure political analysis, mend phones and computers for money and wait for aliens.

  ‘Freaky Bob? Adam Sands. How do you break into a computer? No,
it’s not a personal computer. No, I’m in an office. Not really broken in, no, but… yeah… no… no… I’m not meant to be… its sort of a government office. Not really central government, no… well I don’t know if they do the dirty work, mate, I can’t get into their computer to find out… you can do that? But I don’t have the password… Stop laughing, I thought that was important. What, everything? Are you sure? Oh, OK. Well… yeah OK… No, I’d like everything if you can do that please. Yeah? Cool. Hey, when I get back you get to pick whatever books you want for free. No, not all of them, five of them… Cool… So what do I have to do?’

  Anna knew that there were a handful of fundamental principles that became embodied as you lived your life. There was one that she had carried around in her liver since she had left home as a furious sixteen year old: she would not be bullied by a man. No matter what.

  ‘What’s in this for you, Black?’

  ‘Mostly I am doing my job, Anna. I liked to think I was doing you a favour when I, shall I say, helped you get the job. Frankly, there were about thirty researchers who could do it: those things tend to be a bit random. And if it wasn’t for me the research would not have been funded. It was me who went to Leichter and Wallace to negotiate funding.’

  ‘And now?

  ‘I’m here because Dr Cassells asked me to be here. I assumed I was coming to a debriefing.’ He looked mildly uncomfortable.

  ‘Black is here because he has played a key role in co-ordinating not only the establishment of this project but the information management that has followed,’ said Cassells. ‘And anyway, I thought it might be a nice opportunity for you two to catch up.’

  ‘What the fuck has it got to do with you?’ spat Anna.

  Cassells put his hands up and gave an exaggerated shrug.

  ‘Actually, Anna, it isn’t really fair that you didn’t tell me about Tom. I had the right to know,’ said Black.

  Anna dropped her head to her chest and put both her hands to her face. Black looked anxiously at Cassells, who smiled reassuringly: he had expected tears, he was used to them. But when Anna lifted her head she was laughing.

  Adam had retained one or two skills from his long distant nursing days. One was never to give the impression of rushing. Rushing unnerved people, it made them imagine there may be a fire they should worry about. The other was to never appear surprised, and so when Carla Tandy walked into Cassells office to find Adam sitting at the desk tapping the computer keyboard, while she was shocked he simply nodded and said ‘Hello.’

  She was as thin as she had been nearly twenty five years earlier but now that showed mostly around her eyes, making her look gaunt and surprised.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here? You can’t be in here. I’m calling security.’ But she didn’t move.

  ‘There’s security?’ Adam said with surprise. ‘Looks to me as though you have to send out to get your photocopying done.’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘But I thought it would be good to say hello to Dave. I bumped into him downstairs and he said to wait in here.’ Tandy looked uncertain for a moment. ‘So how are you? Still obnoxious?’

  Tandy sneered at him. ‘You dress like a tramp. I assume you never got over the drug problems?’

  Adam smiled. ‘I can certainly see why you got out of clinical work. Have you been a secretary long?’

  ‘I earn more in a month than you do in a year.’

  ‘But you can’t afford the occasional pizza? Maybe a Mars bar? No?’

  Tandy reddened. ‘Why are you here?’

  Adam stood up. ‘I came with Anna Newton. I didn’t know Dave worked here until I got here. Small world, I thought. Until three days ago I hadn’t seen Anna for twenty-three years. I’m half expecting Maureen Marley to walk in next.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The patient you were so desperate to interview.’ Tandy pursed her lips. ‘Under the circumstances, if you find yourself in the same building as someone you used to work with twenty five years ago and he was talking with someone else you used to work with at the same time it would have felt odd, rude, a bit bizarre, not to say hello. A very charming young woman downstairs said the best way to catch him would be to come up here—’

  ‘You said David had told you—’

  ‘I think of it all as a hall really…’ Adam muttered.

  ‘Did David tell you to wait in here?’

  Adam walked away from the desk, to the window. Turning his back on Carla Tandy and staring out at the trees. ‘He hasn’t aged well has he? Lovely view. He ought to try hiking.’

  Tandy stared at him.‘I think you should go. I will tell David that you are here and you can wait downstairs.’

  Adam didn’t turn to face her; instead he stretched his arms over his head and nodded.

  ‘Yeah, OK. I’ll wait downstairs. Tell Dave won’t you?’ Tandy nodded and Adam turned and walked out of the room without looking at her. She followed him and closed the door behind her.

  ‘Why don’t you get gold lettering, Carla?’ Adam said, staring at her door. She said nothing and so he walked, quite slowly, toward the lift.

  ‘OK,’ said Anna. ‘Bored now. Black, my son is twenty-three. He is getting married. He is a grown-up. Who knows, you may get an invite to the wedding but I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you. David, you appear to harbour the illusion that you are a good psychologist because you can gather things which look like insight into other people and use them in a way that other people don’t. That doesn’t actually make you a good psychologist: it means you are a psychopath. I will not be manipulated by you or anyone like you. I don’t know if you were behind the fire at Meena’s or if that was Black here, or even the drug company. I don’t know which of you set up Paul or who hired the two men who came to my home. I do know that I will not be bullied by inadequate tossers like you.’ Anna stood up and offered Cassells all the contempt she could cram into one parting glance. She didn’t look at Black as she walked toward the door but something occurred to her before she touched the handle: she had done a little too much running lately. So she stopped still, took a deep breath and turned round. Cassells stared at her. She looked him in the eyes and could see nothing. She nodded to herself and said quietly: ‘The night Tim Leith died. You were there.’ Cassells looked impassively at her but he swallowed and that, for Anna was enough. ‘You’d arranged that silly talk, you left. You went to ward 6 and you were with Tim.’ Cassells laughed quietly and went to shake his head. ‘I saw you, David. I went back to the ward and I saw you, talking in the office. What did you talk about?’

  Cassells folded his arms across his body and pursed his lips. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. Anna nodded. ‘What did you say to him David? You’d been stirring things up, trying to get underneath people’s skin, playing silly games… You said something to Tim. Come on David, it was twenty-four years ago and he was dying anyway.’ Cassells didn’t change expression. ‘Did you know that? You couldn’t have known that. How could you know that? So, what did you say?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything really. I asked him about his judgement. I was interested in what he would say, if he reflected much on what he did… It appears that he did. He reflected a great deal, too much maybe. I asked him about the Marley woman, and about the schizophrenic on all the drugs, the one who had taken his teeth out. I asked him if there might be anything affecting his judgement because he seemed uncertain, like he kept changing his mind. I talked about what a lack of clear thinking could do when directed at vulnerable people. It really surprised me how upset he was. Positively unprofessional really.’

  Anna stared at him. She could see no remorse, no sense of sadness or regret. He looked like a child explaining how many legs he had collected from a family of spiders. She shook her head. She tried to sneer but realized she might cry. Not through fury or powerlessness but for Tim. ‘You unutterable piece of shit,’ she sai
d quietly. She glanced at Black with contempt, turned around and left, walking along the long corridor with both men watching her from behind the glass.

  When Anna got out of the lift Adam was sitting where she had left him.

  ‘Let’s go please,’ she said as she approached.

  ‘Good idea.’ He waved at the receptionist, who waved back.

  In the car Anna stared straight ahead, not talking until they were half way down the drive. ‘Do you know who was in there?’

  ‘Tom’s other dad.’

  ‘Don’t call him that,’ she snapped. ‘And how did you know?’

  ‘Well, he came in the front door and the receptionist called his name. I’m not Sherlock Holmes but…’

  ‘Cassells is a slime ball,’ she spat. ‘He thinks he can intimidate me into supporting his cover-up.’

  ‘Can he?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Can he fuck,’ she said.

  ‘Good. So what are we going to do?’

  ‘We?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Guess who else works in there?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You remember that stick-thin trainee of his? The one who didn’t like patients, nurses or Kit Kats?’

  ‘Carla Tandy?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I went for a wander round.’

  Anna drove on for a while.

  ‘He knew about my family: he had been snooping around. He wanted to intimidate me and he does… in a way. Not because of what he says but because of what happened to Meena and is happening to Paul. It makes you doubt everything, going to the police, speaking out. He doesn’t have any boundaries.’

  Adam just nodded. ‘I think it is what people like Cassells do, Anna, make you believe that he has all the knowledge and the power, that he is the one establishing all the rules and you, or whoever else he is messing with, has to abide by them.’