by J. S. Monroe
The three of them are seated at the end of a large oval table in one of the college’s more formal rooms near the library. Dark, oak-panelled walls, a high white ceiling with ornate cornicing, an old crest of arms above a brick fireplace. This was only ever for the staff. Bella had assumed it was the fellows’ dining room, or for ‘viva’ exams, which makes her feel even more uncomfortable being here now. Her mum is in tears but Dr Haslam is seemingly unmoved, eyes shifting from Bella to her mum and back again like a poker player. A porter stands guard outside the half-open door.
‘If you don’t tell her, I will,’ her mum says, reaching across the polished table to clasp Bella’s hands in hers.
Dr Haslam raises his own hand, as if he’s stopping traffic. Bella watches as her fingers start to slide away from her mum’s and she puts them in her lap. And then her back straightens and she’s sitting upright like an attentive student.
‘That’s better,’ Dr Haslam says quietly. He lets her mum’s snivelling subside until there is silence in the room. His tutorials were often like this, she remembers now. A terrible quiet, broken only by distant, tormented wails.
‘We all delude ourselves in life,’ he says, getting up from the table to walk around. ‘After a particularly good violin practice, I tell myself that I’m a worthy match for Yehudi Menuhin. And who is anyone to say otherwise? It’s what keeps us going. The lies we tell ourselves.’
He stops behind Bella, hands coming to rest on her shoulders. She doesn’t flinch this time, not even when he leans down to talk into her ear.
‘You believe you studied here for three years, improved yourself, came to understand the works of Wordsworth and Shakespeare, had your awakening in the shadow of Oxford’s dreaming spires. That’s your reality. And it served you well when you went out into the world.’
He removes his hands and sets off around the table again, holding court.
‘You know my thoughts on the media as a career, but you told yourself you were a journalist, just like your father, and look at you now. Here on your first story for a national newspaper. How wonderful!’
He waves his arms about theatrically, as if he’s introducing Bella to an audience. And then he returns to his seat, milking the tension, before turning his eyes on Bella.
‘But from where I’m sitting,’ he says, ‘from where your mother’s sitting, none of it is true.’
The room falls quiet again, apart from her mum’s muffled sobs.
‘How do you mean?’ Bella asks, turning to her mum for an explanation.
‘He means you didn’t…’
Dr Haslam interrupts her with a raised hand again, his fingers pale and clammy.
‘But that’s not to say your reality is devalued, just because it doesn’t equate to mine, or to your mother’s,’ he continues. ‘It only becomes delusional when you compare yourself to others. For you, it’s the truth and that’s all that matters. No one can take it away from you. And nor should they.’ He throws a glance at her mum. ‘It can be dangerous, wilfully trashing other people’s private worlds, puncturing the bubbles they choose to inhabit, destroying what they believe in.’
‘I studied here for three years,’ Bella says slowly, her voice shaking. ‘Three long, hard years,’ she adds, stabbing at the table with her finger. She looks from Dr Haslam to her mum and back again at Dr Haslam. ‘Are you trying to tell me I didn’t?’
‘Far from it,’ Dr Haslam says, hands held up in innocent protest. ‘It was an education – for all of us. You arrived a mess and left us as a together young woman.’
Dr Haslam has no idea how patronising he can sound.
‘And I’m now working on a national newspaper,’ Bella continues. ‘As an investigative journalist.’
The room is starting to spin.
‘Absolutely,’ Dr Haslam says. ‘You say as a journalist, your mother says as a secretary. Take your pick. I know which one I’d choose in your position. And that’s what you’ve done. “Fake it until you make it” – isn’t that what the young say these days? Good for you.’
Bella flashes a look at her mum, who turns away, embarrassed, in pieces.
‘Is that really what you think I do at work?’ Bella asks her.
A sudden commotion outside. Dr Haslam looks up at the door, concern on his face. The porter seems shocked too and disappears down the corridor.
Bella senses time is running out. She needs to remember why she’s here. The room spins faster, forcing her to grip the sides of the table, close her eyes. She’s come back to her old college for Erin.
‘Erin’s body was found in a crop circle in Wiltshire,’ she says, fixing Dr Haslam in the eye. He doesn’t like that, fighting fire with fire. This time it’s him who seems agitated, troubled. More noise outside.
‘I know it was her,’ Bella continues, ‘and I need to know why she got from here to there, how she died, what it all means. The patterns, the codes. And you’re the one person who can tell me.’
As if on cue, a parliament of rooks rises up from the sycamores outside. Something has disturbed them. They fly around the treetops, urging Bella on with their hideous cries.
‘She was my best friend,’ she says, dizzy now from the spinning. ‘We laughed and cried, here in this building where we studied together as undergraduates. Out there in the college gardens. Ornithology for her, English literature for me. She did too many drugs, everyone knows that. But she came from a broken home and found a family here. Friends. And then one day she disappeared and I let her down. I didn’t do enough to find out what happened, how she ended up dead on a hillside in Wiltshire. We were college friends but life moves on out there. People go their separate ways. It’s no excuse, though. I failed her. But I’m back here now and I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what happened to Erin. Lil fucking crazy Erin.’
The door is flung wide open and Bella screams. Jim is standing there, his head bandaged and a deranged look in his blinking eyes. But he’s not on his own. One arm is wrapped around a terrified woman’s neck and in his other hand he’s holding a shard of mirror, pressing its jagged edge against the soft skin of the woman’s throat.
Bella screams again.
‘Nobody move and everyone will be fine,’ Jim says. Bella stares at him. No glasses. He can’t see properly. What’s he doing here? At her old college? His cheeks are criss-crossed with deep cuts and a patch of crimson is seeping through his head bandage. Bella glances at the woman, who’s wearing a uniform of some sort. Who is she? The college nurse? Bella’s seen her before somewhere.
‘Jim,’ Bella says, in case he hasn’t spotted her. His eyes dart around the room and his nostrils flare. All his senses are heightened, assessing risks at a primal level. For a second, Bella thinks of Rocky, his chameleon, and imagines Jim’s forked tongue lashing out at Dr Haslam.
‘Put the glass down,’ Dr Haslam says, in a tone that Bella has come to fear. Prospero talking to his Caliban. She knows that Jim won’t be able to resist his words. No one ever can. But Jim just smiles, a bruised, painful smile. What a bloody legend. She just wishes he’d let the poor woman go.
‘Have you given your side of the story, then?’ Jim asks, addressing Dr Haslam, whose spell appears to have finally been broken. ‘Told Bella about all the experiments that go on here?’
‘What experiments?’ Bella says.
Jim looks thrown by the question. Dr Haslam sits back, happy to listen.
‘The ones I told you about,’ Jim says. ‘In the USB files.’
‘But… they were all at Harwell,’ Bella says. She looks around the room, rocking like a ship in a storm now, the floor heaving up and down. It smells like college, that weird mix of furniture polish and sanitiser, and the windows have familiar bars on the outside, just like those in her old room. What’s Jim talking about?
‘And?’ Jim asks.
‘We’re at my old college,’ she says, eyes widening in fear and confusion.
Jim shakes his head, his own eyes defiant with conviction. ‘We’
re at Harwell, Bella. This is Harwell.’
‘And I can play the violin like Yehudi Menuhin,’ Dr Haslam says, standing up to face Jim. Her mum puts her head in her hands as Bella looks around for somewhere to be sick.
‘Now, if you’d kindly let my duty manager go,’ Dr Haslam continues, ‘we can all sit down, get our quotes, talk about the experiments and behave like civilised human beings.’ He pauses, fixing Jim in the eye. ‘Let her go, Jim.’
This time, Jim is no longer immune to Dr Haslam’s sorcery and begins to lower the sliver of glass, inch by inch, away from the woman’s neck, his face full of disappointment at what his hand is doing. Dr Haslam reaches out his own hand but as his fingers circle the glass, a cry rings out from down the corridor, followed by the sound of running.
‘Armed police! Armed police!’
Two officers in black helmets and goggles burst through the doorway and point their guns at Dr Haslam.
‘Drop it,’ the officer shouts, glancing back down the corridor. ‘Drop it now.’
Dr Haslam lets the glass fall to the floor as is if he’s releasing a potion.
‘Everyone put their hands in the air,’ the other officer says, his voice bursting with adrenaline. A third armed officer runs into the room, radio crackling.
‘We have two casualties on the second floor, old building,’ he says into his lapel mic. ‘Request urgent medical support.’
‘Oh Jim,’ Dr Haslam says, shaking his head in disappointment. ‘What have you done?’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ one of the officers shouts, pointing his gun at Dr Haslam’s chest. Bella stares in disbelief. Her tutor – head of pastoral care at the college, a ‘big don’, as Erin called him, feared by all – has no sway over anyone any more. No one at all. All respect gone. The officers bark more orders into their radio mics as they check everyone for weapons.
Bella, arms above her head, feeling faint, is back on Studland beach.
Dad’s dead, Bel, and he’s never coming back.
The police had intervened then too, shouting at her as if she were a wild animal. Her mum had also screamed.
Let go of her, Bel! Bel! Please! Helen can’t breathe!
Everyone was so angry with her. Did Helen die that day? Did Bella tighten her grip until her sister’s eyes popped with fear and her breathing ceased? Christ, is that what really happened? Did she kill Helen? Is that why her heart’s racing now? Or did she let her go and allow her to live? She flexes her sweating hands. If only she could remember.
Bella looks up as a man in a suit enters the room and walks over to Dr Haslam. Bella’s vision is blurred but she recognises him as DI Hart, the detective who came to Jim’s home. A familiar woman walks in behind him. DC Strover. She glances at Bella, a look of reassurance in her eyes.
‘Dr Haslam, I’m arresting you in connection with the death of two psychiatric inpatients here at Cranham Hall,’ the detective says.
His words are faint, drowned out by another police voice in Bella’s head.
I am detaining you under section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983.
‘And for ordering the murder of your former colleague Jed Lando,’ the detective continues, but Bella can only hear her mum now.
We just want you to get well again. They’ll take good care of you, I promise, my flower. And once you’re better, you can go to uni, get a job in journalism, make Dad proud.
‘I’m also arresting you in connection with the death of five other inpatients as well as on suspicion of administering unlicensed drugs in contravention of the Medicines Act 1968.’
The detective glances at Jim and Bella, but all she can hear is Dr Haslam on her first day at college.
Welcome to Cranham Hall, Bella.
‘You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
Dr Haslam stares back at the detective, powerless, emasculated, a shadow of the man he once was. And now Bella understands, remembers his more recent words.
The college nurse is going to try you on some new medication, long lasting, a single depot injection. I think you’ll do well on it, Bella. It should help you to concentrate better on your studies. And farewell to pills and weight gain and all those other nasty side effects. You might forget a few things about your time here with us but we’ll have you ready for the real world before you know it. We’ll miss you, Bella. Your love of reading, of Wordsworth and Shakespeare. Your search for the truth.
Outside, high up in the sycamores, a rook calls out in approval as Bella collapses unconscious into her mum’s arms.
103
Silas
One week later
Silas squeezes Conor’s shoulder and gives him a smile, watching as Mel leans over to kiss their son goodbye. He’s doing well, responding to a mix of lighter medication and something called Open Dialogue, an alternative, more family-based approach to mental health issues developed in Finland. Jonathan, the psychiatrist, is a big fan.
He is waiting in the corridor and ushers them into a small side room, where Silas’s eyes alight on a tray of dark chocolate digestives. It would be rude not to.
‘Thanks for your time,’ Silas says, tucking into a biscuit as they sit down. He expects Mel to remove the tray, but she leans forward and takes a biscuit herself, smiling at him.
He’s in her good books again, not just because he turned up on time for today’s appointment, but because he’s responsible for Jonathan being back on Conor’s ward. Once the American CEO of AP Brigham had been arrested, the company’s aggressive takeover of the psychiatric unit in Swindon fell through, much to everyone’s relief, including Jonathan, who had been transferred to the north-east at short notice.
‘He’s doing really well,’ Jonathan says. ‘You should both be very proud.’
‘Thank you,’ Mel says. ‘For all you’ve done for him.’
‘Thank your husband here,’ he says. ‘For getting my job back – and for saving your son from a course of medication that sounded horrific, to be honest. There’s no other word for it.’
A lot has come out in the media about the drugs that AP Brigham was illegally testing on unsuspecting psychiatric patients at Cranham Hall, not least because of the shocking death rate. Five more bodies were found, thanks to the big red key. Sure enough, they had been taken from Jed Lando’s private morgue to another locked room in the basement.
As the associate professor of chemistry at Imperial had suggested, all three of the experimental drugs, which were administered by one depot injection every six months, blocked the brain’s D2 dopamine receptors, but at lower levels than existing second generation antipsychotics, thereby avoiding extrapyramidal side effects and other negative symptoms such as weight gain. To achieve this, however, not all the so-called positive symptoms – the hallucinations and delusions – were reduced.
Jonathan has already taken time to talk through the case with Silas, explaining about the medication. He’s also met with Jim and Bella, offering to help in their recovery.
‘Some delusions remained and were even heightened by these wretched meds,’ he says, taking a biscuit too. ‘They also seemed to increase the memory loss that’s often associated with antipsychotics.’
The experimental medicines themselves – designed to get people living with schizophrenia out of secure units and into the community, at considerable financial cost, of course – were found in the raid on the Reading HQ and at a nearby laboratory, where the American CEO had squealed like a pig when he was arrested. Most importantly, he revealed the central role of his colleague Dr Haslam, the psychiatrist who oversaw Cranham Hall, and the information was relayed to Silas as he and Strover had entered the building in search of Jim and Bella. The CEO also admitted responsibility for the deaths of Dr Armitage and Jed Lando. The killer he hired – the fake doctor – was subsequently arrested in Cornwall.
As for Cranham Hall, an inquiry ha
s been launched and the hospital closed down, its name joining a growing list of mental health institutions in Britain that have been exposed and shamed for abusing and mistreating their patients. Not all of the dead have been identified yet, but they appear to have been homeless: troubled souls who weren’t missed alive and whose deaths went unmourned, let alone investigated.
Their passing would never have come to light if it wasn’t for Lando, who had become increasingly concerned by his company’s secret drug trials, so much so that he decided to blow the whistle on them by commissioning a series of cryptic crop circles. The corpses that he left in them and their grim condition – lobotomised, straitjacketed – more than achieved his aim of drawing attention to the grim side effects of antipsychotics. Whether it was a twisted act of redemption for past sins, no one will ever know. He might also have felt that he’d tried in vain to blow the whistle at Porton Down, thirty years ago, and this time needed to adopt a different, more dramatic approach. And then there was the last circle, containing his own zombified, cancer-ridden body. Silas will never forget that night when he found him in the moonlight.
‘Jed Lando had a difficult situation on his hands,’ Jonathan continues. ‘Two of the more successful guinea pigs, Bella and Jim, remained in the grip of particularly strong delusions. Bella believed Cranham Hall was an Oxford college, which she attended for three years before becoming an investigative journalist – what we call a “grandiose delusion”. Jim believed he was being followed by MI5 – a classic “persecutory delusion” – as well as working as a top government scientist at Porton Down, when in fact he was selling rabbits at a nearby pet shop.
‘So what was Lando to do? It can be very dangerous to march in and disabuse someone of a psychotic delusion, insisting that they are mistaken. On the other hand, one mustn’t foster the delusion either, as Dr Haslam appears to have done. It’s a fine balance – personally, I try to respect a patient’s very real emotional responses to a particular delusion rather than dwell on its content.’