by Rod Madocks
“Thank you. There is only the work now, you understand,” he had said before tramping away down the corridor, holding his usual bundle of case files.
Bartram went into the staff canteen with his junior. I turned back to the annexe to my second floor offices. I felt restless. Something about Yunus had stirred at feelings that rose like black mud within me. It had been his self-centred rage, his denial of what he had done and his wish to have rights when he had taken everything that was important from someone else. Perhaps it was easier to hate someone so alien and so obdurate. Such feelings were usually dormant in this place now, occasionally flaring up like today, although at some level I was always searching for someone who was responsible.
My fear of discovery had diminished over the years as I had justified to myself that what had happened to Kress had somehow been necessary, a cleansing. I also respected those nobler, caring spirits who worked around me; but I was sure there were other men who worked here for their own reasons and there were some who hid their dislike for the patients more imperfectly than I did.
A light breeze moved through the bars of my office window, stirring the desk papers and front sheets of the case notes lying there. Those clinical notes and legal depositions were often a walk into hell where the victims crowded to me. I still did not know what exactly had happened to Rachel and I did not realise then that it was all soon going to blow wide open. The investigation was no further on and birthday dates and anniversary days came and went, still with nothing known. September days especially reminded me of Rachel and fifteen years had elapsed without news. I kept a folder in my rooms at home about serial predators that had been caught, bodies found, forensic discoveries made and articles about the advent of offender profiling. Rachel was quite gone. She had been declared dead after the required seven years by her sister and a death certificate had been issued. The original details of the investigation now gathered dust in a folder somewhere in Central Police Station, the reports and the photos by SOCO of her room still preserved. The man with cropped hair in the white tee shirt had never been found, Kress had been ruled out as a suspect, and Jayney Kirkman remained missing. Inspector Bain had retired and new priorities pressed in, controlling Yardie gangs in the city, keeping alert to terrorism and pursuing affirmative action in police recruiting.
My restlessness that day made reading files impossible and I decided to walk the perimeter of the hospital. I went out and through the new gates. Hospital security had been revamped and there were glass sliding doors and sophisticated scanners in the reception area although the same wooden carousels still rotated, bearing bunches of keys that were watched over by leathery old guardians. There had been an expensive complete relock by the Home Office after a set of keys had been taken from an unwary student nurse at a patient dance and not recovered. The new keys gleamed in their serried ranks. New double mesh perimeter wire with concrete aprons and deeper ditches had been sited all around the hospital and smooth round coping topped the walls. Pressure sensors were now placed under the grass margins next to the wire. Cameras swivelled at every corridor and were angled densely above the main entrance. Leaving my keys and relieved to be free of their weight, I went down the lodge house steps, counting them as I went. I struck out west along the staff sports ground where the corner flags tugged in a warm breeze. The old, overgrown staff cricket ground and bowls courts were disused now and adjacent the new, gleaming Personality Disorder Unit loomed over them. I walked briskly around the perimeter of this unit and headed off towards the fields through stands of rustling poplars that I had first seen at the hospital years ago on that September day with Louie.
I cut through a salvage dump for the maintenance gangs, and passed heaps of discarded hospital fittings. Then I was out onto the fields with their margins of red soil framing the wheat stubble. After a while I became conscious of my breathing after the surprising exertion of picking my way down the rutted track. I paused and looked around. Far off on a ridge, a tractor toiled over a field carving a dark brown plough line in the pale stubble. A white spume of gulls writhed in its wake. The path where I was walking was littered with wheat chaff and harvest debris. I resumed my stumbly walk and turned over thoughts of the morning as Meadow Brown butterflies flickered up from the dusty grasses. I remember thinking that I had read somewhere that country folk used to say that butterflies were the spirits of the dead, coming back, signalling, and reminding the living of their presence.
My momentum slowed and I stopped and looked back at the hospital, not really far off but seeming quite distant, the boiler house chimney like a silver pencil, the perimeter wire invisible, and the brown-roofed villas looking like little knots of suburban houses. The silence seemed profound, exaggerated by the discordant song of tree sparrows feeding off the harvest chaff.
I would often think of the victims on walks like this. A host of them unshriven, restless, reproachful, their lives cut short, tainted by those contained over there in that clump of buildings. My life had little else to counter those thoughts. I had some professional satisfactions in a job well done, sometimes just relief at getting through a day. I still dreamt of finding Rachel and of discovering what happened to her; but mostly that urge had ebbed to a dormant ache. Those other victims stood in for Rachel in my mind. She occupied a separate place where I would not allow thoughts of the cruelty and torment she may have suffered to develop. No, those other victims represented that. I found it hard to forget all the details I had gleaned from the files and the confessions of the perpetrators themselves.
They came to me like ghosts, those old ladies found dead with semen in their mouths, the little girl hanging all night in a wood from the bending sycamore branch; the ligature deeply incising the neck, naked apart from one remaining sock and sandal, leaking blood from her cleft. Her killer was caged over there and I passed him every working day. Partners and wives also killed by those close to them, stunned, stabbed, battered, slashed at, often with samurai swords; a weapon for the righteous and the deluded. Whole households burned by arsonists, known and unknown to the victims. Children killed by their parents, like the little girl strangled with flex by her mother who announced in therapy “I didn’t want her to be raped like me.” Victims in droves. The wounded also, the little boy with his penis severed by his father’s cleaver, “because Elijah demands a sacrifice”. The child stabbed in the vulva with a biro by the school bus driver, “Mr Billy has gone and poked me,” she cried to her teachers. Rape victims, so many, their accounts covering pages of witness statements and their shaky signatures at the foot of every page. The statements often ended with a pitiful inventory of clothing taken from them in evidence: skirts, bras, tights, and shredded knickers, referred to as police exhibits numbers one to infinity. So much taken from them and no note as to how they had fared subsequently, for the rights of the perpetrator had primacy in these times. The children of those victims, their wives and husbands, bereaved lovers and their families living on in the knowledge of what had happened. They also haunted me.
Standing there in the heat of that fine day, the September dust blowing over my office shoes, I felt lost, unsure of what I was doing, unconsciously following this path in a place that I hated and needed. I surveyed the reeling vista of the empty fields with the distant shadowy stain of the hospital, then plodded back down the track.
I came back through the hospital grounds on the lawns leading to the lodge house steps and joined a column of staff coming in for the next shift. They went in to work quietly with their heads down, flicking away cig stubs, not noticing the glossy-backed, young starlings, scrambling and pecking at the fallen apples under the fruit trees outside the lodge. I recalled one grizzled, old charge-hand explaining to me the feeling of imprisonment among the warders themselves, “You see, Jack; there is a walking-in walk and a walking-out walk.”
I joined the line of men going in, those quiet somnambulists who shuffled in line through the sliding doors of reinforced plexi-glass and submitted to a body search
. I watched on the scanner screen as my leather jacket passed through it, showing a ghostly image, an orange shadow with the zip, black and distinct, curling within, like the skeletal backbone of a snake. I was processed on from one check to another, received my keys, clipped them to the key belt and followed the early afternoon tide of staff flooding the block corridors. I passed through the Eaton airlock and walked down the familiar central corridor with its unchanging smell of floor polish, of cooking and stale, imprisoned bodies. Most of the patients had gone from my first years at the hospital. Grau had left for medium secure. JJ went to a specialist head injuries unit, Grimpen was long dead. He had died of a heart attack on the ward. Unwanted by his family, he had been buried under one of the lop-sided gravestones in the village hospital graveyard alongside Hunter and the rest. Most had been transferred in the endless hospital shuffle from ward to villa and back again.
I stood with a group of staff who were waiting for afternoon review rounds. We gathered near the door to the patients’ smoke room. A few of them were sitting there with a TV flickering high up on a wall. I noticed Yunus lounging in a chair among the others. As soon as he spotted me he leaped up and approached me.
“You sir! You! You! You are not a bad man. Help me! You can help me! Talk to Dr Bartram please!”
“Stand back, Yunus. The decision has been made,” I replied.
Yunus began to wail and slap his head. One of his flailing arms brushed against me. I called to the Team Leader, “This man is assaultative!” Three burly staff appeared and began to drag Yunus to the seclusion room. He twisted in their grasp and began calling to me, “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”
* * *
Hospital security was on the alert at the Millennium and they had more work to do after the world terror events. The Muslim patients were carefully noted and some were segregated because the other patients had begun to attack them. Security was stepped up. The paranoiacs breathed new life and fed off the malign energies that had been released. I remember Halliday particularly, a young man who had killed his girlfriend in a seaside town four years before. He had attempted to mummify her body according to ancient Egyptian practices, the techniques of which he had gleaned and adapted from history books. His girlfriend’s body had been found wrapped tightly with bandages and tape in his bed-sit rooms with biro tubes inserted in her nostrils to drain the fluids from the brain.
Halliday entered the ward review rooms and distributed a neatly presented manifesto to us. He had created it during his day activities in occupational therapy and the opening paragraph read:
Exposure of world plot to implant humans with dragon fly mouthparts, electronic chips and metallic implants under surgery, at the dentist or the doctors. Radio wave activated. You are then controlled. Those involved in this: CIA, IRA, the Iraqis, the Illuminati, John deLorean, the Matrix, Al Qu’aeda.
“And you and you,” he also said, pointing at us clinicians sitting there, “Doctors especially.”
He swept back his long hair to reveal a handsome face with intense dark eyes. He frowned as he spoke about the conspiracies raging about him and sometimes he laughed a little to himself, showing his stained, sharp teeth. Our attempts to reason with him seemed to amuse him greatly, as if he had caught us out in some way.
Something about Halliday’s terrible certainties seemed to infect me with fear and there were days when I could not help from trying to make sure that Irina was safe. I would submit to the urge to drive to her home in a suburban road a few miles from my place in the city. Her house was an elegant, two storey building faced with white stucco. The suburbs had crept round the old place and were kept at bay by a sagging brick wall. I often sat in my car, discreetly parked across the street, and was relieved to see activity in the house beyond the wall. As I sat there, I remembered those times when I stayed there myself, nine years before, when her husband was away, sometimes cradling her infant son, or sitting down to meals or us lying together in the marital bed. I had waited outside in the street like this so often, out in the cold, after she had sent me away at the end of our relationship, but had kept away these last few years. But now I would return for a while, staying on until I was satisfied that all was well and thinking about our brief, intense affair.
We had met in the first weeks after my entry to the hospital. She also worked the Eaton Ward like me. I sensed something untoward about her from the other staff, something apparent in the way they looked at each other when her name was mentioned. At first I thought it was some sordid scandal or gossip about her but later I heard that there had been a security alert when a notorious psychopathic patient had fallen in love with her during therapy and had planned to take her hostage, but had been thwarted. This incident seemed to have given her a certain glamour among the nursing staff. I think that this was somehow an acknowledgement of her seductive power.
I first saw her in ward clinical meetings and remember noticing her incredibly lustrous hair, which often fell forward across her face and watching her small-boned feet in trim, white socks and sandals as they tapped impatiently during the meetings. I also remember her slipping into a seat beside me at the directorate referral panel, with a fleeting whiff of some heady scent. I saw a crescentic scar on the smooth skin near her wrist bone on her right hand. There was something exciting about that scar and I found that my eyes fixed on her restless, long-fingered hands. I recall too, standing behind her in the line for security search, that first autumn in the hospital, as she irritably turned out her pockets at the staff security gate and seeing a little bottle of Chanel’s Cuir de Russie rolling out onto the examination tray. The security staff searcher held up the flask of amber liquid and announced in a triumphant, and an accusatory tone, that this was a forbidden substance and she replied in her accented English, “Really, this is ridiculous,” turning to me for support with arched eyebrows.
I had walked quickly after her in the corridors, trying to keep up with her fast, swaying pace, noticing how she occasionally gave a nervous head toss, flicking back her hair from her face. I found myself wanting to know more about her. I manoeuvred to get close to her, rationalising that she would be a useful ally in my campaign to transfer Kress to Eaton. In reality I began to enjoy being near her, smiling as she sniped at the doctors in meetings, or defended the departmental position in a feisty exchange with hospital managers. She was a serious and sharp presence, yet mysterious and also vulnerable in some way. I found myself marking out her place at meetings and looking for her in the long, block corridors. I might have waited months, years, like this, admiring her, mildly intrigued by her, sometimes my attention waning, swept up in my losses, still raw with the loss of Rachel. Then one winter’s day, a year since I had come to the hospital, and two months after the extinction of Kress, I was called to the medical offices by Dr Colt who thumped down a bundle of reports on the desk in front of me and growled, “Now this is a case for a bright spark, Hosannah Njie, the sleeping beauty of Calder Ward, who has got them all stumped. Why don’t you team up with Irina and take a look, a second opinion to help the clinicians there? That would earn us brownie points with the Directorate.”
And thus I was drawn in, to become a fly that shakes in the web.
Hosannah Njie slept day and night on a wheeled bed on Calder Ward, one of the block admission wards three stories up. Hosannah had been sleeping like this for two months. It had started in the autumn, staff had begun to find him huddled in a chair in the smoke room or slumped in the latrines. He was locked out of his room in the day time in an effort to keep him on his feet, but eventually he lodged in his bed, first of all sleeping right through a few days and nights, and afterwards wandering the ward with blank, dead eyes; then spending longer and longer periods in his bed and now permanently slumbering. He laid full stretch on his back, his dreadlocks hanging down the sides of the bed almost to the floor. A bottle of saline had lately been attached to one of his arms out of concern that he was dehydrating. When staff came into his room, with food or drink, he w
ould allow them to sit him up and he would silently take nourishment from them, spooned into his mouth, his arms remaining slackly by his sides. Once his attendants had gone he would lapse back, only his chest faintly rising and falling with an even breath. Sometimes his bed would be wheeled out to catch some winter sunshine in the day room, where the other patients regarding him warily, or down the corridor to a treatment room for physiotherapy and for neurological tests.
He would lie unresponsively wherever he was taken, his eyes closed, a huge dark shape covered by a sheet, his once powerful legs stretched out straight, his feet overhanging the end rail. A specialist hairdresser would come every two weeks to dress his locks and rub oil into his skin. His mother would arrive from time to time and sweep through the ward with her flowing bright robes and toque-like head scarf wailing, “Hosannah, Hosannah, what have they done to you, my innocent boy!”
Hosannah slept on through everything, except sometimes in the deep watches of the night shift he would suddenly jerk upright. In a sideways swinging motion he would slide out of the bed with incredible speed, his catheter and drip swaying and rattling, to void a heap of faeces onto the floor, then as quickly he would be lying back in his usual prone position by the time the night staff had put their heads round the door to his cell.
I was delighted with Colt’s suggestion, read the copy reports and rang Irina about our proposed joint work. Her initial response was cool and guarded.
“I don’t see why we should do Calder’s work for them,” she told me, but I explained what a strange case this was, a challenge and a curiosity.