by Tammy Cohen
JUSTIN: You think Charlotte Chadwick took her own life to copy Sofia Redding?
ROBERTS: I’m only saying that’s one of the lines of enquiry we are pursuing, but as I say, we are carrying out a very thorough investigation into the circumstances that led up to both deaths. And of course, we will be reporting back to the Mental Health NHS Trust.
JUSTIN: So what would you say to reassure the families of other residents in the clinic who might now be anxious about whether their loved ones are safe here?
ROBERTS: While we understand the concerns of the families, there is absolutely no indication that these were anything more than two tragic, but unconnected, incidents. Both the women involved had histories of self-harm and suicide attempts so, while their deaths are deeply regrettable, sadly they tie into a pattern of behaviour that was already in place long before they arrived here.
JUSTIN: But surely the very function of a clinic such as this one is to supervise these vulnerable patients to protect them from themselves? And yet you’ve managed to take your eye off the ball twice in less than two months.
ROBERTS: If I could just correct you there, Justin. While it’s true that Charlotte Chadwick’s death took place at the clinic itself, we mustn’t forget that Sofia Redding was on day leave when she took her own life. We had reached the decision, after lengthy consultations with Sofia and her family, that she was stable enough for occasional day visits home or out shopping as part of the gradual process of phasing her back into normal life. She’d already been on several such visits without incident. It was unfortunate that, on this occasion, her husband had to take one of their children to a dentist’s appointment, so he couldn’t drive her back to the clinic and he accepted her assurances that she’d be fine catching the train, a decision he, of course, now bitterly regrets.
JUSTIN: For anyone not familiar with the case, Sofia Redding was dropped off in the centre of Watford to catch a train back to the clinic, but she never arrived. She was found some hours later in scrubland behind a multi-storey car park near the station. She’d thrown herself off the fifth floor.
ROBERTS: Sofia had made a very strong recovery during her time here. She had convinced everyone, including her own family, that she no longer presented a risk to herself. We were talking about fixing a release date in the not too distant future. This seems to have been an opportunistic decision on her part, something that no one could reasonably have foreseen. This is an issue I go into in some detail in my book Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown. I’m afraid that, when you enter the world of the suicidal mindset the only golden rule is that there are no rules.
JUSTIN: Is that a quote?
ROBERTS: I’m sorry?
JUSTIN: From your book?
ROBERTS: I do say something of the kind, but I really can’t remember the exact wording. Anyway, do you think you have enough now? I have a very hectic schedule today.
JUSTIN: Oh, but I had some more—
ROBERTS: We’ll have to schedule in another time. Sort it out with Bridget, would you?
9
Hannah
If I see another adult colouring book, I think I might explode. You’ll find bits of me all over the day room – tucked behind sofa cushions, trapped in the windows that only open three inches so that on sunny days you feel as if you’re proving like dough in the oven. Before I came here, I knew they were a thing. I work in publishing, and they basically kept us all going for a couple of years. But I’d never really given them a second thought, let alone used one.
The first day, Mum came in with a towering pile of novels and stacked them up next to my bed, but I never even opened them. It was as if my mind had literally broken and there was nothing there any more. And then Becs at work sent over a package containing three adult colouring books.
‘Thought you might appreciate something mindless,’ she wrote. Which was apt on many levels.
Suffering from mental illness is like suddenly becoming a foreigner in your own country. Close friends and relatives start talking very loudly and very slowly in the belief that you might understand them better. They don’t realize it’s not the understanding that’s the problem, it’s the application. When everything that made you you has disintegrated, it’s possible to make abstract sense of things without having the first clue how they might be relevant to you.
The first three days in here passed in a black fug and I still remember very little, apart from odd moments that flicker in and out of my head like subliminal images in a film. Danny sitting on a chair in the day room with his head in his hands, his fingers wound up in his hair and me focusing only on how split the ends were. Mum talking too brightly, enthusing over my bedroom like it was the presidential suite at The Ritz or something – ‘Look, what a state-of-the-art shower, darling!’ – and her face when she realized that the unusual recessed nozzle wasn’t an avant-garde design feature but to prevent someone from hanging themselves from the showerhead.
But on day four, one of the nurses – Darren, probably, as he’s the only one who really notices anything – picked up one of the colouring books Becs had sent over, plonked it on the table in the day room and me in the chair next to it with a box of felt-tip pens. Whether it was because I was institutionalized sufficiently by then to follow any line of action suggested to me, or because I genuinely thought colouring in between lines might be a cool way to spend some time, I picked up a felt-tip pen and started.
And I’ve discovered that, even if it’s not cool, it is at least a pleasant way to spend time. Since then, I’ve lost count of the number of books I’ve filled in, painstakingly colouring the tiniest of areas, making sure I don’t go over the lines. I know it winds Danny up. ‘She used to read Hilary Mantel and watch films in French without subtitles, and now she’s fucking crayoning!’ I heard him say to Mum once, when they were outside the day room and thought I couldn’t hear.
But still I can’t quite kick the habit. Becs gets her assistant to send them to me. Brown envelopes arrive every few days, even though it now makes me feel a bit ashamed.
When the door of the day room bursts open and Trevor and Sandra Chadwick walk in, I shut the book so violently that Stella, who has been sitting opposite me at the oval wooden table writing her journal for Dr Chakraborty, looks up, startled.
Charlie’s dad comes right over to me so he is blocking out the light from the window.
‘I want to know what she told you,’ he says, and his voice is not kind. ‘She didn’t leave a note. She must have talked to someone. Confided in someone. What did she say?’
Sandra Chadwick hovers behind her husband. ‘What Trevor means is—’
‘What I mean is, she seemed to be so much better. So why do this now? Someone must know.’
‘I don’t think she did,’ I say, before I can stop myself. ‘Do it, I mean.’
Stella makes the noise she always makes when she gets anxious. A kind of excited squeak in the back of her mouth like when you accidentally tread on a dog’s paw. I watch Trevor Chadwick’s reaction as he notices Stella for the first time. There’s a moment of shock in those magnified eyes, followed by a kind of knowing look that upsets me a lot more than the shock. I want to step in front of her. To shield her from him. Instead, I say:
‘This is Stella. She was also a friend of Charlie’s.’
‘Oh yes,’ says Charlie’s dad. And he’s not smiling. ‘We’ve heard all about Stella.’ Then he switches his attention back to me. ‘What do you mean, you don’t think Charlie did it? Are you saying you don’t think she killed herself?’
‘No, I don’t. I was with her that day. She was fine. She didn’t give any indication—’
‘You don’t have a clue.’
Sandra Chadwick’s voice – suddenly loud and cold – seems to belong to someone else, and I freeze. She continues, moderating her tone only slightly. Her neck is thin and taut like a steel cable, and her eyes pop as if they’re too big for her face.
‘Did you know Charlotte and I share a bir
thday?’
I shake my head.
‘No? Well, there’s a lot you didn’t know about my daughter. A lot she didn’t want people to know. When it was her thirtieth birthday and my fifty-fifth, we went away to Cornwall together, as a family, and stayed in a gorgeous hotel overlooking the sea. And on the day itself, the sun shone like it had been ordered specially and we had lunch in a restaurant on the beach – chilled champagne and grilled fish – and Charlotte said she couldn’t think of a better way of spending her birthday. Then we went back to the hotel to get ready for the party we were having that evening with friends who’d come down specially – hers and mine – and when I went through the interconnecting door to see what she was wearing, I found her with a plastic bag over her head, opening a canister of camping gas she’d bought from the outdoors shop in the town.’
‘Exit bag,’ says Stella, in that breathy voice of hers.
‘What?’
‘That’s what they’re called. When you put a plastic bag over your head and let off some gas inside.’
Trevor Chadwick glares at her.
‘I really don’t think we need a how-to guide, thank you very much. What my wife is trying to tell you is that it’s impossible to judge Charlotte’s state of mind. All that day, she gave the appearance of being perfectly at peace, and yet she walked to the camping store and bought the gas. She planned it.’
‘But I still think—’
Whatever I’m about to say is drowned out by the arrival of Bridget Ashworth, looking pink and out of breath, her lanyard hooked around her left shoulder. And just behind her, the blue chips of Dr Roberts’ eyes.
‘There you are. I’ve been searching all over.’
Bridget stops short, as if she’s just remembered she’s talking to grieving parents rather than obstinate patients. Then a thin smile spreads on her face, as though she’s scraped the bottom of the smile jar and that’s all that’s left.
‘How lovely that you’ve managed to find two of Charlotte’s closest friends to reminisce with. I do hope they’ve been sharing some of the many special moments we enjoyed with Charlie during her time with us.’
Trevor Chadwick turns his magnified eyes to me and I’m shocked to see how much he resents me. It’s there in his wife’s face too, the face that is so much like Charlie’s. The question they don’t bother to disguise: Why couldn’t it have been you, and not her?
‘I’m so glad I caught you before you left,’ Roberts tells them. ‘I wanted to bring you up to date on the steps we are taking to investigate what happened. Shall we go into my office for a few minutes?’
The Chadwicks turn as one towards the clinic’s director, but they make no move to accept the invitation in his outstretched arm.
‘I hold you personally responsible.’
Trevor doesn’t raise his voice, just says the words in a dead tone, as if he’s remarking on the weather.
Bridget Ashworth makes a little gasping sound and immediately starts speaking.
‘It’s natural for families in your position to look around for someone to blame but—’
‘She was here to be protected from herself. You were supposed to protect her.’
Trevor is directing his comments solely at Dr Roberts, as if Bridget Ashworth and the rest of us don’t exist.
‘God knows you charge enough. I wonder whether the families of the rest of your patients—’
‘We prefer to use the term “clients”,’ murmurs Bridget.
But Charlie’s father continues right over the top of her: ‘… will want to go on paying the exorbitant fees, knowing that you and your staff are incapable of keeping the women in your charge safe.’
Dr Roberts adopts the face I recognize from his fundraising events and media appearances. Polite, interested, sympathetic. But only skin deep.
‘Mr and Mrs Chadwick, I completely understand your concern and I want to reassure you that everything humanly possible is done here to look after our residents. But part of the process of being here is to prepare our clients to go back into the wider world, which entails a certain amount of trust. We cannot, and should not, watch them twenty-four seven.’
‘But that’s exactly why she was here,’ says Sandra Chadwick. ‘So you could watch her.’
Dr Roberts closes his eyes briefly and nods in that way of his that means he’s about to disagree with whatever it is you’ve just said, but before he can reply Trevor Chadwick grabs his wife’s elbow and steers her towards the door, passing inches from Roberts in his sharp, grey designer suit, and brushing past Bridget Ashworth as if she is part of the furnishings.
‘We’re going now. We have a funeral to plan. But let me assure you, Dr Roberts, you haven’t heard the last from us. We will be making some very unfortunate publicity for you and for this clinic. You’d better start making contingency plans, because there are going to be some lean times ahead once it gets out how you let two women die on your watch. We intend to make sure this never happens to anyone else.’
In the doorway, Sandra Chadwick stops. Turns back towards Roberts. Her face – Charlie’s face – is a mask of pain.
‘Do you have children?’ she asks him.
He blinks, and Bridget Ashworth steps forward as if to protect him. The light coming in through the large sash window glints off the lenses of her glasses so it’s impossible to see her eyes.
‘I really don’t think …’ she says. But Mrs Chadwick has already gone.
Roberts and Bridget Ashworth exchange a long look, and for a moment I see a twinge of something like fear in his expression. Then he looks over at me and Stella with a small, sad smile.
‘The Chadwicks are hurting,’ he says to us. ‘And as we all know, hurt people hurt people.’
It’s one of his favourite mantras.
After Bridget and Roberts have left, Stella and I gaze at each other dumbly. I see that her hands are shaking, so I take one of them in mine and squeeze. The unpleasant confrontation between Roberts and the Chadwicks has left me knotted up inside, but when the adrenaline has died down I return to the scene that preceded it, with Sandra Chadwick telling me about Charlie’s suicide attempt, and I feel as if someone is steadily letting the air out of me.
What a fool I have been. Charlie was a high suicide risk. That’s why she was here. And despite the face she wore to protect everyone around her, she must have been planning this, or something like this, all along, just waiting for the right moment. And that moment came five days ago.
As so often, Stella’s thoughts seem to be running along a parallel track to my own, because she says:
‘She didn’t do it. Right, Hannah?’
Though I feel her blue eyes fixed on me, expectant, I cannot force my own to meet them.
10
Corinne
‘You don’t think I should ask Danny?’
‘No, Corinne. He’ll think you’ve been snooping around their bedroom. What am I saying? You were snooping around their bedroom.’
‘I wasn’t snooping. I was just …’
But what was she just? Now, when Corinne tried to remember how she’d ended up in Danny and Hannah’s bedroom two days before, her reasons seemed woolly and ill formed.
She put down the phone to Duncan, and picked up the photograph on the coffee table in front of her.
The woman’s angry red gaze glared back at her and, though she’d now examined it over and over, looking for clues, Corinne still flinched from the violence of those deep, red lines.
How angry would a person have to be to do that?
What else was a person that angry capable of?
Hurriedly, she turned the photograph over. The word BITCH slapped her in the face. Who was the woman with the dark curls and the dimple like a wink in the middle of her cheek?
And who on earth was her daughter?
Sitting on the charcoal-grey sofa in the lobby of the publisher where Hannah used to work – no, still works, she reminded herself – Corinne felt a tug of pure grief for the Hanna
h who used to be at home here in this bustling office, with the male receptionist who was always climbing mountains or running marathons for charity dressed up as a chicken or a giant burger, and the young girls with high ponytails sweeping in and out with piles of books and soft, pink cheeks.
How many times over the years had Corinne sat here on this same bloody uncomfortable sofa, leaning back against the orange cushions, leafing through one of the titles artfully laid out on the coffee table – many of which Hannah had fallen in love with and developed clever campaigns around and cried proud tears over when they made bestseller lists or were awarded prizes – waiting for Hannah to finish work so they could go to a movie or to dinner or to some publishing event? With Danny working away so much, Corinne had been glad to stand in as her daughter’s date.
‘Corinne. How lovely to see you again.’
Hannah’s friend, Becs, swooped in and wrapped Corinne in a tight hug before she had a chance to react. She smelled of handwash and cinnamon-flavoured nicotine gum.
‘I think coffee is called for. Don’t you think? Or gin, perhaps? Let’s get out of here.’
In the lift mirror, Corinne had a chance to study Becs’ outfit, a voluminous black affair. Becs only ever wore black. ‘Not because it’s slimming, because it bloody well isn’t,’ she once told her. ‘I go around perpetually looking like a fat person at a funeral. But it saves all that faffing about trying to match your clothes to each other.’
Today, she had on a long black velvet tunic over a long black skirt, with biker boots and a chunky silver necklace of mayoral chain proportions. Her frizzy brown hair stood out around her round face like the coir of a coconut, and her washed-out blue eyes gazed out serenely from behind a pair of severe, black-framed glasses, at exactly the height of Corinne’s shoulder.
They went to the coffee shop next door to the office building, where they were served by a man with a complicated top knot.
Corinne took the photograph out of her bag and lay it on the distressed-wood table between them. In the two days since she had found it in Hannah’s room, she’d handled it so much it was going soft at the edges. The dark-haired woman smiled up at them over the top of one bare, shiny, tanned knee.