Mirror Mirror: A shatteringly powerful page-turner

by Nick Louth

  ‘That’s a very graphic image,’ Virgil laughed. This was turning out to be an even bigger education than he expected.

  Kelly sat down and leafed through the file in front of her. ‘This is Mira’s post, just for today. There’s far more online of course, but these are more interesting. Gifts, pictures and other weird items.’

  ‘Hello. Another one of these.’ She held up a large manila envelope. It had been franked by the West London Mental Health Trust. She opened it and slid out two items. One was a form to fill in and return, in case the post was either unwanted or deemed offensive to the recipient. The second was a thick greeting card envelope. It was stamped with an intimidating warning in red:

  Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital: Section 134 of the Mental Health Act 1983 (amended 2007) provides authority for the inspection and withholding of detained patients’ outgoing and incoming mail. Contents may have been censored.

  Kelly opened it carefully, and slid out a thick handmade card. The front cover was an extraordinary pen and ink drawing, a series of angels and cherubs depicted in the classical style, trailing up a watercoloured banner in the palest rose pink bearing Mira’s full name. Inside the card was a message written in copperplate, in a foreign language.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she said.

  ‘No doubt, but what’s it say?’ Virgil said.

  ‘Let’s see.’ Kelly led Virgil back to her office, opened the browser on her PC and typed it into Google translate.

  Happy Birthday, Lydia. For years I have waited for you, longed for you, dreamed about you. For how long must I wait for the redemption from this hell to which I have been consigned?

  ‘God, it’s in Latin. How lovely! My useless boyfriend can’t even write me a birthday card in proper English.’

  ‘But he does have one advantage. He’s not in Broadmoor. At least I presume not.’

  Kelly laughed. ‘Good point. But he might as well be for the amount of time he spends at his office.’ She looked at the card again. ‘Well, she certainly attracts some lunatics.’

  ‘Artistically gifted Latin-speaking lunatics, though,’ Virgil added.

  ‘I’m sure she’d like to see this. What do you reckon, mister security guy, what is the risk assessment? Should I add it to the post for her to see?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Virgil. ‘It’s the crazy people who aren’t locked up that I’m supposed to worry about.’

  Chapter Seven

  There is not an adult in the United Kingdom who does not know the name Broadmoor. The country’s most high profile secure psychiatric hospital is notorious because of the roll call of the evil and the insane it has at various times contained. Men like Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, East End gangster Ronnie Kray, Son of God killer Robert Torto and Stockwell Strangler Kenneth Erskine.

  Dawn Evans worked at Broadmoor. She’d worked for West London Mental Health Trust for six years and two years ago had been offered a pay rise to be assigned to Broadmoor as a psychiatric nursing assistant. Her job varied while she trained, but was mainly in the low-risk Boxhill Ward. Tonight, because of staff shortages, she had been asked to cover a night shift, her first ever, in Cavendish Ward. That was an unsettling place, where new patients were assessed and the most difficult remained. The shift turned out to be a nightmare she would never forget.

  She had been taking a coffee break when at 2.18 am she had been told she would have to take part in an SMU, a six man unlock, the most terrifyingly confrontational procedure in the secure psychiatric system. That was frightening enough. When she had been told the name of the patient involved she spilled her drink.

  Lucy.

  Leonard Lucifer Smith. Britain’s most violent prisoner, now Broadmoor’s most awkward patient. Six-foot-ten inches and three hundred pounds of paranoid schizophrenic. Lucifer Smith was legendary. He’d been the subject of articles, biographies and TV documentaries. Without ever having seen the Internet himself, he had spawned numerous online copycats and fans. His shaven scarred head and huge black beard were all intimidating enough. But then there were the tattoos. Years ago, when he was the enforcer for a Manchester crime gang, he had had the entire text of chapter twenty of the Book of Revelation inked across his enormous torso, limbs and head. Even his eyeballs. Injections of black pigment under the conjunctiva of each eye had permanently turned the whites jet black.

  The screaming from Lunatic Lucy’s room had to be heard to be believed. The cries of anguish, and the roar of oaths and threats carried all the way down the ward’s east corridor through two reinforced steel security doors and into the security muster station where Dawn Evans and five other members of staff were assembling their riot gear: helmet with shatterproof visor, stab-proof vest, reinforced trousers, steel-toe-capped boots. Dawn had only ever kitted up for SMU in training. Now, as then, she could hardly find any of it small enough to fit her five-foot-four frame. Packed into the muster station with her was the reassuring presence of Geoff Featherstone, a six-foot slab of Geordie and a former Royal Marine. He was Broadmoor’s head of security. With him was Tyrone Mgonwe, an athletic Ghanaian with a wonderful smile, and two of the night duty security men, Karl Sullivan and Trevor Cooke. Hope Trenchtown was the only other woman. Hope was incredibly patient, experienced, and empathic. She looked like a solidly-built West Indian dinner lady. No one would guess that the laughing woman with the purple lipstick could benchpress two hundred pounds and had a black belt in karate. But Dawn could see that even Hope’s hands were shaking as she buckled up her stab vest.

  The six man unlock is designed to bring down even the worst and most disturbed patients. Once the cell door is open, four staffers each immobilise a limb, another the head. The head was Hope’s speciality. She had been head-butted, bitten, and showered with bodily fluids more times than she cared to remember but she had a quick and effective headlock technique: the patient’s head would be pressed hard to the floor, squeezed between her knees, using only enough force to do the job without compressing his airway. Brutal, but necessary.

  Dawn’s job as sixth “man” was supposed to be easier, and only began once the patient was face down on the cell floor. She was to pull down his trousers, and administer an injection into the buttock of Clopixol Acuphase, a potent anti-psychotic drug. There was no finesse to this. The training had made that clear. The syringe was huge, like something designed to knock out a horse, because you could not risk a needle break. Likewise, no gentle easing in of the liquid over the course of a few seconds. This was more like a stabbing, and from the roars of pain from the patient, felt just like one. Hope had smiled at her when Dawn had screwed it up during training. ‘You’ll be fine. It always seems frightening the first time.’

  But that was before they knew they were going to tackle Lucy.

  First banged up in Wakefield Prison in 2007, Lucy became a one-man riot. On day one in solitary he head-butted the steel door so hard that he dented it. The next day he picked up a sixteen stone warder by the throat with one hand, and held him in midair for half a minute as he struggled to breathe. Wakefield’s governor soon learned the lesson. Room was quickly made in the new Supermax high security unit in the prison’s basement, where Lucy’s cell had bulletproof glass walls, a metal toilet and sink bolted to the floor, a concrete bed and cardboard furniture. His only contact was twice a day when pre-cut food was posted through a slot in the door on a cardboard tray.

  In 2010 Lucifer Smith was finally assigned to Broadmoor. His arrival was part of staff folklore. Dozens assembled to watch a ten-tonne Serco prison van rocking in the secure parking bay as Smith threw himself from side to side within it, despite being handcuffed, and despite the efforts of half a dozen accompanying security staff to restrain him. On that day, and every day for six months at Broadmoor, he was confined twenty-four hours a day to a maximum security seclusion room in Cavendish. No exercise. A six-man unlock every day just to give him his medication. Sometimes he still had the energy to kick at the reinforced door for half an hour afterwards, the deafeni
ng crash echoing like a tolling bell, before the anti-psychosis drugs finally overcame his resistance. This battle of wills went on week after week. Dozens of nurses were hurt or injured, staff went off sick to avoid being on control and restraint duty. A few resigned.

  Then, finally, a change of behaviour. A quieter and more manageable Lucy had slowly emerged over the last six months. Richard Lamb, Broadmoor’s clinical director, had even allowed Lucy a little associative time in the day with other patients recently. It had all gone swimmingly.

  Until tonight. Now, six frightened staff had to take on Lucy again, and in a hurry. They were all kitted up, but there had been no time for a proper team talk. This was not a time of their choosing. Featherstone, who had seen action in the Falklands War of 1982, flipped up his visor and turned to them. ‘Everyone okay? Ready for this?’

  They all nodded, then touched their gloved knuckles together for good luck, just like boxers at the start of a bout. Dawn’s heart was fluttering in her throat, pulse pounding in her ears, breath fogging up her visor. She’d forgotten to rub the inside with a cut onion, an old motorcyclist’s trick that Featherstone had told her during training. They marched down the corridor and Featherstone unlocked each door in turn until they got to the seclusion unit. The roaring was deafening now, like a caged bull. The door to Lucy’s cell was booming every few seconds, and she could see it vibrate. Ahead of her, Karl Sullivan, who had been shaking worse than anyone, stepped out of formation. He flipped up his visor and bent over, an arm braced on the corridor wall. As the retching sounds began, Dawn turned away, anxious in case he set her off.

  ‘Dawn!’ Featherstone yelled into her helmet, trying to make himself heard over the racket. ‘You are going to be fine. Okay, pet? Stand well back until you’re ready to give it to him. Don’t get kicked. If you stick yourself, you’ll be a zombie for a fortnight.’

  She nodded.

  Lucifer Smith, now aware of their presence, bellowed Featherstone’s name and then roared: ‘I’m going to chew your fucking heart out!’

  Featherstone managed half a smile, as if to say: What a scamp you are, Lucy. He turned back to Dawn. ‘How much Acuphase you got in that syringe?’

  ‘A hundred and fifty milligrams,’ she shouted. ‘I thought I’d go for the maximum safe intramuscular dose.’

  Featherstone shook his head. ‘That’s the maximum for humans, pet. But that’s Lucy we’ve got in there.’ He winked and grinned. ‘Make it two fifty, that’s the dose for monsters.’

  Dawn took out the half-full bottle of oily yellowish liquid and looked at it. ‘But Geoff, what if I hit a vein?’

  Her question was lost in the noise as Featherstone turned to the cell and peered through the armoured inspection glass. His jaw hung open at what he saw. ‘Jesus Christ almighty,’ he said.

  ‘What is it, boss?’ asked Tyrone.

  ‘Nothing. Forget it.’ Featherstone then pulled himself up to his full height. ‘Leonard Lucifer Smith,’ he bellowed, ‘listen to me. Stand away from the door and then lie face down on the floor, limbs outstretched, with your head towards the door. We’re coming in. Do you understand?’

  Receiving nothing but obscenities and a body check against the door, Featherstone took out his huge bunch of keys, inserted one in the lock and turned it. With Tyrone Mgonwe to his left, and Trevor to his right, he pushed the door open.

  What they saw next none of them would ever forget.

  * * *

  Richard Lamb had been the clinical director at Broadmoor Hospital for almost twenty years. During decades of experience with psychiatric patients he had seen almost everything that the most dangerous and disturbed were capable of. But some things defied belief. This was one of them.

  An urgent call had awoken Lamb at home on Sunday morning at 2.57am. ‘I’m afraid it’s about Lucy,’ said Trevor Cooke, the night duty medical staffer.

  Lamb groaned.

  ‘He was going crazy in his cell, and there was blood everywhere. The SMU was a disaster, everyone sliding and slipping, took us half an hour to get the needle in. Looked like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by the time we got him tranquilised. But no serious injuries to staff. He was then taken by ambulance to Frimley Park Hospital.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Agonising internal pains. That was no act. I thought it might be peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, given the amount of blood he’s passed, so I authorised the transfer immediately as an emergency. I hope that’s alright?’

  ‘Of course. Broadmoor is a hospital. We want people to get better, and this is clearly beyond our resources.’ Lamb was normally reluctant to sanction external treatment. Medical outings to the nearest accident and emergency department, either Frimley Park or Wokingham General, were highly prized by patients as antidotes to institutional boredom. Broadmoor’s many attention-seekers and self-harmers thirsted to be beyond the high fences, to enjoy the stares of the public in A&E, and to revel in being so dangerous they needed a small accompanying army to restrain them. That was no exaggeration in Lucy’s case.

  ‘I’ll ring you back, Director, when we know more.’

  ‘Okay, okay. Goodbye.’ Lamb hung up and rubbed his eyes, feeling that one of his few aspiring success stories was now in danger.

  It was nearly 5am and Lamb was just falling back to sleep when the next call came. Dr Prakesh Choudary, Frimley’s hospital registrar, was on the line. He wanted high-level consent for the operation that he was proposing. What he described led Lamb to do something he had never done before. To get up at night and go to the hospital to see what a patient had apparently done to himself. What he had just been told did not make sense, because Lucy for all his troubles had not once in four years self-harmed. But there was apparently an X-ray to prove it. He had to see it for himself.

  Self-harm is a way of life in secure psychiatric hospitals. The obvious objects which patients could use to hurt themselves like razors, scissors and knives are banned. Prohibition also covered some less obvious ones: small batteries which could be swallowed and cause internal burns; DVDs and CDs which could be snapped and turned into blades; sticky tape, lengths of which could be twisted into almost unbreakable ligatures. But there was always something new.

  When Lamb arrived, Featherstone was still there. He said he had sanctioned the full ‘royal procession’ of eight burly escorts for Lucy, two of them handcuffed to him. Despite by then being in a wheelchair, Lucy’s presence and roars of pain had virtually emptied the place. According to Featherstone, the drunken Saturday night girls, tottering on high-heels with semi-conscious friends, the bruised lads recounting the night’s post-pub skirmishes, and the winos with their Carlsberg Special all fell silent. Lamb could imagine it. Lucy was the ultimate sobering vision.

  A nurse quickly took Lamb through to see the registrar. Lucy himself was under sedation, and his many minders were standing around chuckling to themselves at what had happened to him.

  ‘This is what I wanted to show you,’ said Dr Choudary, a short and harried-looking man. The X-ray of Lucy’s abdomen showed the pale grey of massive hip bones and the spine right up to the ribs, with dark smoky shadows for kidneys, spleen and intestines. But that wasn’t where the eye was drawn. Occupying most of the length of what Choudary identified as the colon was something that at first glance resembled the skeleton of a snake. Yet it was too bright, too hard-edged and alien to be that. Even a layman like Lamb could see it did not belong within the soft vulnerable viscera of any creature.

  ‘I’ve been a doctor for fifteen years,’ Choudary said. ‘I’ve seen all sorts of things inside patients. But this,’ he pointed, ‘I have never seen. It could not be swallowed, and if it had been inserted anally there would be even more extensive trauma and blood loss at the point of entry and beyond. But there isn’t. The bleeding is coming from its present location, from intestinal spasms. Somehow I’ve got to get it out without killing him.’

  Lamb felt his testicles contract in sympathy with Lucy’s pain. ‘Is it
really what it appear to be?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. He has eighteen inches of razor wire inside him.’

  * * *

  Back in Broadmoor Hospital, another patient had by Sunday morning heard the news of Smith’s injury. William Mordant was lying on his bed in his cell in the low-security Boxhill Ward with the door open. His blond wavy hair had just been carefully cut, he was meticulously clean shaven and he had an even tan that brought out the perfection of his large whitened teeth. Mordant had acquired the tan from hours spent catching every ray outside the ward, either painting, sketching or working in Broadmoor’s vegetable garden. He was listening on headphones to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on BBC Radio Three, and smiling to himself. Boxhill Ward houses the assertive rehabilitation unit, where patients who are both cooperative and making progress towards normality have some privileges. Key amongst them are unlocked cell doors during daylight hours and monitored times of free association with fellow patients. There was carefully-censored cable TV and a large collection of programmes held on the hospital’s hard drive. But Mordant had even more privileges than this. They had been granted in recognition of his unique standing, unprecedented in the history of British secure psychiatric care. These privileges, and indeed every aspect of his incarceration, were secret. The British public would be outraged, particularly given the horrific nature of his crimes. But then the British public didn’t know about his crimes. Powerful forces within the Home Office had made sure of that.

  Mordant stared up at the pictures and sketches which had been carefully fixed to almost every square inch of his cell walls and ceiling. Most of the photos had been cut from magazines. This was not the pornographic fare which besmirched the cells of the prison system. These were mostly photographs from glossy fashion magazines, Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the weekend magazines of the British press. Every one of those pictures, covering a period of eighteen months, was of the same person. Some were shampoo advertisements that made much of her luxuriant chestnut hair, some were for cosmetics, while one in Vanity Fair showed an emerald pendant to match those astonishing viridian eyes. Among the later issues was one in Hello! of her in a green silk dress on a red carpet for some event. The Elle picture was a front cover just a month old. The headline was ‘Destined for stardom: Meet Mira Roskova’.