by Simon Toyne
‘Jefferson Hawdon was having problems of his own during most of this time, managing all the family interests as well as developing and battling his own addictions. It is not generally the custom of the rich and privileged to look after their young anyway, or at least not the men, not when they can pay other people to do that for them. His mother could have done the same, of course, handed her son over to a succession of nannies and tutors, but she didn’t. Honoria was utterly devoted to her son. Besotted. Which makes what happened to her all the more inexplicable.
‘When James Hawdon was twelve years old there was an incident. Police were called to the Hawdon estate after a housekeeper found James’s mother bloody and unconscious on her bedroom floor. She had been badly beaten – broken ribs, cracked skull, a dangerous swelling on the brain. She was in a coma for several weeks. When questioned by the police, Jefferson Hawdon told them his son James was responsible. The boy had always been close to his mother, but on reaching puberty the relationship had developed into something more sinister, a sexual obsession as well as a growing hatred of his father – classic Freudian, Oedipus complex stuff. He said his wife had confided in him that she felt increasingly uncomfortable around their son, that his demands for attention were becoming insistent and inappropriate. He claimed she’d been trying to distance herself, redraw the boundaries and make their relationship less intense, but this had only served to anger and confuse James even more, until she had become afraid of him.’
Amand looked across at Magellan. ‘You keep saying “claimed”. You don’t believe him?’
Magellan shook his head. ‘When Honoria eventually came out of the coma, she refuted everything her husband had said. Though she claimed she didn’t know who had attacked her, she insisted it wasn’t James. She denied there was anything inappropriate about their relationship. Her husband said she was hysterical and confused and only doing what any mother would do to try and protect her son. While she had been in her coma the doctors had found historical evidence of physical abuse: unexplained scars, cracked finger bones that had healed. Jefferson said it proved his son’s abuse had been going on for a while and that his wife had clearly been too afraid to tell anyone. He argued that things would only get worse if his son remained in the family home and that his priority was to protect his wife. He had James committed to a juvenile psychiatric facility.’
‘Did no one suspect the father?’
‘Maybe. But the Hawdon family wealth and name clearly carried more weight with the police than the urge to follow correct procedure. So James was committed and his mother, utterly inconsolable at the loss of her son, was released into her husband’s care and removed to the Hawdon estate where a private medical team was hired to look after her and nurse her back to health.’
‘How long did James Hawdon remain in the institute?’
‘Well now, there’s the real tragedy. You’d probably think, given James’s privileged background, that he would have been committed to some country-club facility, something that resembled a health spa, but he wasn’t. The place his father sent him was called Bethlehem Hospital, a bleak and backward institute on the north-eastern coast of England, built in the nineteenth century by a Victorian philanthropist and family friend of the Hawdons. It was modelled on the hospital in London of the same name. Bethlehem Hospital is where the word bedlam comes from, meaning chaos and uproar – and that was exactly what was recreated on the Northumberland shoreline. It was a truly horrible place.
‘I visited it once as a student, long before James was incarcerated there, and Bedlam was the right name for it. This was no place for getting well; it was a place to suffer and get worse. I saw patients wandering through the grounds and white-tiled wards, lost in delirium, their white gowns making them appear more like ghosts than people. I don’t know if James was genuinely psychologically disturbed when he arrived there – we only have his father’s word on that, along with the paid-off quacks who committed him. What is certain is that he did become genuinely disturbed once he got there. Who wouldn’t? There he was, this unworldly, delicate boy genius in possession of a colossal intellect and vast knowledge of the world in the abstract, but with almost no real experience of it. He had travelled, of course, but always in his privileged bubble and with his mother as his constant companion and confidant. Being removed from her must have been extraordinarily traumatic, like having a limb torn away.
‘James’s notes record a predictable reaction from the moment of admission: paranoia, terror, anger. I imagine he thought it was all a terrible mistake and that someone would come along to rescue him. But nobody did. People were not sent to Bethlehem Hospital to be cured, they were sent there to be forgotten. And as days became weeks, James slipped into a deep despair. Without his mother, he would have felt frightened, abandoned, betrayed – not only by her but also by his father. And if he was innocent, as I believe he was, he would also have burned with the injustice of it all.
‘But survival is a powerful and primal instinct, and the human mind will try to make sense of even the most nonsensical and unbearable of situations. James Hawdon’s mind, marinaded in all that classical learning, began to create a narrative to explain what had happened to him. He believed that the hospital was in fact Hell and his father was God who had cast him out from the heaven of his life and into this hellhole populated by other lost souls like him.
‘Delusions such as these often come hand in hand with strategies for potential salvation, and in James Hawdon’s case this took the form of a redemptive quest. He began to believe the only way he could save himself was by saving others, and that each “soul” saved would take him a step closer to his own redemption. Had he been my patient, I would have worked with this delusion and attempted to steer him back to a more solid sense of reality through therapy and medication. Unfortunately, at Bethlehem Hospital the favoured treatment was sedation and electro-shock therapy, which only made him worse.
‘He began to believe he could see the dead and that they were there to help guide him on his quest. He interrogated other patients about their own delusions, searching for people to save. He was probably the only one in the place who took any real interest in the patients and the act of listening is powerful medicine. As a result, this pale, charismatic, genius kid became a figurehead for the inmates of Bethlehem Hospital. Someone who would listen to them when no one else would. A kind of prophet of the abandoned and the damned. And all of this fed into James’s growing delusions that he was some kind of Messianic figure, sent to save the damned so that he might ultimately find his way back to God, his father – and also his mother. The tragic irony, of course, was that his deepening delusions made a return to his family impossible. As far as his father was concerned, it merely proved what he had always claimed: that his son was a dangerous lunatic who needed to remain in full-time, high-security psychiatric care.
‘And he did. James Hawdon grew up in that facility. He became a man there, or more accurately he became a more grown-up projection of his delusions. He shifted through different names to identify his proliferating identities – Adam, Zachariah, Solomon – and began to hold sermons in the main hall, predicting a coming day of resurrection when he would walk through the walls, be reborn in the world outside and begin his journey towards salvation.
‘Then one day, just over a year ago, he did exactly that. He orchestrated a mass riot, used the chaos to slip away from the hospital and turned up a few days later at the Hawdon family estate, having walked the whole way there. Whether he was looking for a reconciliation with his father or not is unclear. What he found was his mother, home alone, playing with her eight-year-old son Henry – James Hawdon’s brother.
‘One can only begin to imagine the shock James must have felt when he discovered, after all those years of clinging to the hope of one day being reconciled with his adoring mother, that she had effectively replaced him. It must have broken his heart. It certainly broke his mind.
‘Jefferson Hawdon came home later that day t
o discover that his family had finally been united – but only in death. His wife had been eviscerated, her entrails wrapped around the bloody corpse of his young son, as well as James, who was lying naked on the floor, curled up in the foetal position as if attempting a form of rebirth. I think if Jefferson had realized that James was still alive, he would have killed him. As it was, he went into his office, called a close friend at the justice department to come and deal with it, and began a narcotics and alcohol binge that is ongoing. I was treating Jefferson for his addictions by this stage, so knew the family and its history. That’s how James came into my care.
‘Bethlehem Hospital had burned down during the riot James had started, so a return there was impossible. His father also wanted to remove him from England, and put physical distance between him and the family, so he sent him to my facility in Mexico, a maximum-security hospital set up to study and treat the most dangerous criminals in the world.’
‘And this is the place he escaped from three weeks ago? The place where you removed his memory?’
‘Not removed, subdued, by using a combination of therapy and a subcutaneous implant of antipsychotic drugs here –’ He pointed at a spot on his shoulder.
‘The implant that’s about to wear out?’
‘Indeed. I believe you are also looking for someone other than James in connection with the recent murder, correct?’
Amand nodded. ‘A woman and her son.’
‘I hardly need point out the dangerous symbol a mother and young boy might represent to James Hawdon, given the history I have told you. I’m not saying he would harm them, but I can’t say he wouldn’t either. And if he is travelling with this woman and her son, then you and I must find him before that implant runs out, or we will both have to live with the consequences.’
48
Baptiste stayed low in his seat as LePoux drove them into Cordes, his face covered by a cap so anyone glancing in the car would see someone sleeping instead of Jean Baptiste, disgraced local son, skulking back to town after four long years away. He had imagined his return many times while staring at the concrete ceiling of his cell, though never like this or in these circumstances.
He could see fragments of the town now, the underside of trees, the tops of stone houses, corrugated red-tiled roofs and the blue sky beyond. He smiled as the bell tower on the Rue D’Horloge struck the hour, marking time even though time stood still here. Every day the shadows shifted and the sun slid across the sky, but the town stayed the same.
The car turned, the view shifted and they started to slow. ‘We’re here,’ LePoux grunted.
Baptiste synchronized his watch with the one in the car. ‘Check there’s no one around, then drop me off and drive away. Come back in twenty minutes.’
‘But what if someone comes along?’
‘I’ll be fine. Just make sure you get back on time.’
They pulled to a halt and LePoux looked around in a way that was so unsubtle he might as well have been leaning on the horn. ‘There’s no one here,’ he said.
‘That’s lucky,’ Baptiste muttered. He opened the door and stepped back on to a street of his home town for the first time in four years.
La Rue des Lices was one of the less pretty side roads, lined with hundred-year-old workers’ cottages that were practically new in Cordes terms. Most had been split into apartments. Marie-Claude had a ground-floor garden flat, which made things easier for Baptiste. He moved towards the passage that ran between her address and next door, and disappeared into it, listening ahead for any sound, and slowing as he neared the rear of the house. He peered round the edge of the wall, swallowed at the sight of the kid’s bike lying on its side, then moved forward, keeping close to the house.
The back door was locked but one of the panes of glass in it had been broken. He looked through it into the kitchen beyond, saw a dark pool of something like blood on the kitchen floor and felt a rush of anger at this evidence of violence in his son’s home.
He reached through the broken glass, unlocked the door and went inside. Everything was still and silent, no sign of anyone at home. He looked around the kitchen and pictured his son here, sitting at the table, getting a glass of water from the sink. The breakfast things were out: a bowl with a puddle of milk and a red-handled spoon next to a box of Cini Minis, which angered him further. She shouldn’t be giving him sugar-filled crap for breakfast.
He looked at the bloodstain, the broken glass on the floor. Who else had been here? What had they been looking for?
He spotted a pile of unopened letters on the worktop next to the toaster and some unpaid bills stuck to the fridge alongside drawings of action scenes and hero figures: men flying, men fighting, some wearing armour, others wearing capes. One looked like an ordinary guy apart from the knives coming out of his fists. The drawing was good, the snarl on the man’s face angry and convincing. It looked a little like him. Baptiste freed it from the rest and traced the name scrawled in the corner in pencil – Léo. He folded it, put it in his pocket, and moved deeper into the house.
He spotted the superhero drawings and cut-out images covering the partly open door opposite and Lego and comic books scattered across the floor beyond it. He could see the corner of a bed too, and a rumpled duvet cover with more superheroes on it. He imagined that Léo was curled up in it, unaware that his father was standing on the other side of the door. He pictured the slow rise and fall of his chest as he slept, his long eyelashes on his cheek, and felt a pricking at the back of his eyes. He turned away to check the other rooms first, putting off for a little longer the moment when he would push the door open and see that he wasn’t really there.
He checked Marie-Claude’s bedroom first and felt a twist of disgust when he saw the mess inside – the unmade bed, the underwear. She had always been untidy. Living alone had seemingly made her worse. And she did live alone, he could tell that as he quickly tossed the room. There were no men’s shirts or boxer shorts mixed in with her clothes, and that made him feel happy. He was an alpha male: territorial, like all dominant male animals. Just because he had rejected Marie-Claude did not mean he wanted someone else to have her, and he did not like the idea of someone else playing daddy to Léo either. He noticed the upturned chair, the mattress out of place. Someone had searched the room before him. Cops? Someone else? The man who had broken the window? He thought about Josef Engel’s murderer coming here to where his son lived, bringing this violence. He would kill him if he found him. When he found him.
He checked his watch. Ten minutes left before LePoux returned. He walked back to Léo’s bedroom, pushed open the door of superheroes and stared down at his son’s empty bed. It was unmade and in disarray, like Marie-Claude’s had been, but Baptiste could see the ghost of Léo in it, an indentation in the middle of the pillow and a creased outline in the centre of the sheets where he’d slept.
Baptiste moved over to the bed, picking his way through comics and clothes, and sat gently on the edge of the mattress, like he was checking on his sleeping son or preparing to read him a bedtime story. The dent in the pillow was perfectly head-shaped and he bent down and buried his face in it, breathing in the faint smell of his boy lingering on the cotton. It was a puppyish smell, like hair and soap, earth and hay. He picked up the pillow and pressed it to his face, breathing in the scent and swallowing a painful lump that appeared in his throat. He put the pillow to one side and moved down to the sheet, breathing in the same sweet, musky smell, and pushed his face deep into the mattress to muffle his sobs. He wanted to lie down, pull the duvet around him and fall asleep, breathing in the smell of his lost boy. He had spent a lot of time in prison imagining what his son might be like – what he sounded like, the things he might be interested in, the things he might be good at. But he had never considered his son’s scent and the sudden, raw reality of it had caught him off guard and left him sobbing.
He stayed like this for long minutes, clutching the duvet and pillow to his chest and pressing them to his face, as i
f he was holding Léo. Then he sat back up, wiped his face with the back of his hand and arranged the bed in a semblance of how he had found it.
He stood and looked around the room, searching for anything that might tell him something new about his son, something that might help find him. There was a heavy-duty case for spectacles on the bedside table; there was a small plastic tag and hook attached to the zipper, presumably so it could clip on to a bag or a coat. Baptiste picked the case up and opened it. The glasses weren’t there but the soft cloth to clean them was. He put the case back and moved over to the small wardrobe in the corner of the room. The smell of his son escaped as he opened the door. There were one or two empty hangers, but most of the clothes were still there, spilling from the shelves in a jumble of cotton and colours as though they had been searched, or his wife and son had packed for a trip in a hurry.
He stepped back out into the hallway and looked over at the front door. A row of hooks was fixed to the wall, clogged with coats and hats and caps in various sizes and colours. There was no empty hook, nothing obvious missing. A pile of shoes and boots lay on the floor beneath them, but there was too much inherent chaos and mess to tell if anything was missing. He moved over to it and went through pockets, finding receipts and sweet wrappers but nothing useful. He took Léo’s coat off the hook and held it up, trying to imagine the boy inside it. He heard a car approaching and saw the dark shape of it moving behind the rippled glass by the front door.
He pressed Léo’s coat to his face and breathed the sense of him again like a bloodhound getting the scent before the hunt. The zipper had a small plastic tag attached to it, exactly like the one on the glasses case. It was made of heavy-duty white plastic and had the word ‘tile’ embossed on it.
Baptiste smiled when he realized what it was. He unclipped the tag and headed to the kitchen, grabbing the stack of mail on his way out and dumping the Cini Minis in the rubbish.