by J. S. Monroe
‘What did Lando decide on?’ Silas asks, glancing at Mel. For once, she seems happy for him to be thinking about work when they’re visiting Conor.
‘I believe he gave them a gift,’ Jonathan says.
‘A gift?’ Silas asks, surprised. He wouldn’t like to be at Lando’s house for Christmas.
‘In both cases, their delusions were rooted in reality,’ Jonathan says, indulging Silas’s confusion with a smile. ‘Bella had been offered a place to read English at Oxford before her breakdown. Jim had worked at Porton Down during two summer university holidays as an intern. Unfortunately, he had a psychotic episode sometime after he graduated and before he was due to start at Porton. His troubled brain processed his recovery at Cranham Hall as a three-year secondment to an affiliated site at Harwell, where he believed he oversaw – and was subjected to – chemical weapons experiments.’
‘What was the gift, then?’ Silas asks, still baffled.
‘The crop circles. They gave Bella a genuine news story and Jim real evidence of unethical experiments – evidence that only he, the amateur mathematician and chemist, could decode. Never mind that he got the formulas wrong. Jim sees patterns and meaning everywhere – a form of what we psychiatrists call apophenia – and he was the only one to make the link between the circles and drug trials. Lando sent the pair on a journey that ended with them discovering their delusions for themselves.’
‘He let them down gently,’ Silas says, intrigued.
‘Exactly,’ Jonathan says. ‘Jim was spot on about the bigger picture: people were still being subjected to horrific experiments in twenty-first-century Britain. Only they were taking place at an American-owned psychiatric hospital rather than a secret British military base. And Bella was right to investigate. Like her father, she had a nose for a good story. What she didn’t know was that she was part of the experiment too. In effect, she was investigating herself.’
‘Will they both be OK?’ Mel asks, taking Silas’s hand.
‘With time and the right treatment, they should go on to live meaningful lives,’ Jonathan says. ‘Like Conor.’
Mel squeezes Silas’s hand.
‘And what if the experiment had been allowed to run its course?’ Silas asks.
‘A good question,’ Jonathan says. ‘They would have needed another depot injection after six months but I’m sure Dr Haslam would have found a way to weave that into the narrative of their fantasy lives. He was certainly keeping a close eye on them in the real world – he even had people posted outside Bella’s newspaper office in London. Jim’s delusions were also becoming increasingly persecutory and paranoid. Who knows what dangers they might have led him to? He already had a history of self-harming – trying to knock himself out. Bella’s delusions were generally more benign but at some point she would have been found out. And the shock of someone else discovering that she’d spent three years at an acute mental health facility rather than an Oxford college might have triggered a far more severe psychotic episode.’
‘Some might argue there’s little to choose between the two establishments,’ Silas says.
Mel nudges him in the ribs as Jonathan’s face breaks into an uneven, mischievous smile.
‘As a Cambridge man, I couldn’t possibly comment,’ he says. ‘It was better that she found out herself, in the way she did – on a story,’ he adds. ‘There’s also the fact that the meds seem to have triggered highly dangerous delusions in some of the other patients – the ones who died. It can happen – I won’t go into the details, but take a look at dopamine supersensitivity psychosis when you can’t get to sleep. Poor Erin, for example, had long thought she was a rook. But when she was given one of these experimental drugs, her delusions became more extreme and she actually thought she could fly. Tragically, she eluded the unit’s shockingly lax safety measures and jumped off the main staircase at Cranham Hall.’
Silas closes his eyes. Erin was important all along. As was Bella. Strover had seen it from the start. He hadn’t. He’ll listen to his colleague more carefully next time.
‘There’s only one thing that I’m still unsure about,’ Jonathan says, leaning back, hands behind his head as if he’s on a sun lounger. ‘Jed Lando trained as a pathologist, as we all now know, but he retrained as a psychologist in America, where he seems to have become obsessed with a rare condition known as folie à deux.’
Silas glances at Mel. He’s told her about the words whispered in the night by Lando before he was killed in hospital and it’s baffled him too.
‘I think he couldn’t resist the opportunity of putting Jim and Bella together, two intelligent misfits, to see if they bought into each other’s delusions, which they did, of course,’ Jonathan continues.
‘The typed reader’s letter he sent to Bella at the newspaper,’ Silas says, turning to Mel. They’d matched the font with the old Remington found in his office at Cranham Hall.
‘Exactly,’ Jonathan says. ‘Bella became more paranoid and Jim believed Bel was a journalist. But Lando also hoped that, once he’d brought the two of them together, their shared delusions would help them to discover the awful truth about AP Brigham’s experiments – and about themselves.’
104
Bella
‘You’ve got a visitor,’ the nurse says, walking over to Bella. She looks up from the table, where she’s playing Bananagrams with Jim, and manages a smile.
‘Thank you,’ she says quietly.
‘You were beating me anyway,’ Jim says. They are sitting in the family room of a progressive psychiatric unit in Oxford – not Cranham Hall, not her old college and certainly not Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. This place is bright and airy, all big windows and pot plants, and flooded with sunlight.
‘And you spell “psychotic” with a “y” not an “i”,’ she says, glancing at his letters.
‘I think I’ll stick to sudoku,’ Jim says. ‘I’ve never been good with letters anyway.’
‘Your diary was great,’ she says.
He smiles awkwardly. ‘Here’s your visitor.’
Bella turns to see her mum and a man walking across the room towards them. For a second she doesn’t recognise him but then, as her mum bends down to kiss her, she remembers.
‘I hope it’s not a problem,’ the man says, hanging back. ‘Your mother said you wouldn’t mind if I didn’t stay too long, tire you out.’
It’s the news editor – at the newspaper where she was briefly a secretary, on work experience, a placement arranged entirely by her mum, Bella now knows.
‘Of course, that’s fine,’ Bella says, blushing. ‘Take a seat.’
In truth Bella’s exhausted, more tired than she’s felt in her life. She’s been sleeping day and night since the shock of discovering the reality of the past three years. That Dr Haslam, ‘English tutor and head of pastoral’, was in fact a deeply fucked-up psychiatrist, and her Oxford college was a medium-secure mental hospital. That the incidents of Freshers’ Week hazing she remembers, broken up by porters, was Erin being forcibly medicated by the hospital’s control and restraint team. That her best friend’s drug habit was anything but recreational, the heavy doses designed to dampen a once fiery spirit and a strong conviction that she was a rook. That her own ‘final examination’ was not a test of her knowledge of Wordsworth and Shakespeare, but a last medical check-up before she was released into the world, fuelled by an untested antipsychotic depot injection that nurtured delusions.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
Bella’s exhaustion is partly her medication, but it’s also the daunting thought of what lies ahead, the rebuilding of an entire life. A task not made any easier by her inability to remember much of her old one. Delusions and amnesia seem to go together, one feeding off the other.
‘Why don’t you and I go for a walk in the gardens,’ her mum says, taking Jim by the arm and patting his hand.
Bella smiles as Jim is led away, leaving her with the news editor.
‘I’m so sorry, I’ve just g
ot to take this,’ he says, his phone ringing. ‘My boss.’
‘That’s OK,’ Bella says.
She turns to look out onto the garden. Her mum’s still feeling guilty about everything, keeps saying that she believed she was doing what was best for Bella. She’d also believed Dr Haslam when he’d reassured her that Erin was recovering in hospital. It was only when his lackeys bundled her into a car outside the house in Homerton and held her captive that she knew something was hideously amiss. Up until then, she had no idea that Bella was the subject of an illegal drugs trial – Dr Haslam had sugar-spun her daughter’s recovery, her ‘awakening’, as an example of youthful resilience and determination, insisting that she mustn’t do anything to puncture Bella’s delusions.
She’d nearly blown it on the very first day, when she came to pick Bella up in the car.
‘I so wanted to tell you,’ she’d said on her last visit. ‘You can’t imagine how difficult it was for me. I had no one to discuss it with… I felt very alone. But I had no reason not to trust Dr Haslam. You were looking better than you’d been for years – in great shape. He’d turned you around. And I bought into the idea of one injection every six months with none of the awful negative symptoms. It sounded like a miracle cure, allowing you to live a near-normal life, and I so wanted it to work. For you, for me. For us as a family. But I guess in the end it was all too good to be true.’
It will take time but Bella is beginning to comprehend everything that’s happened. Each morning she wakes shocked all over again, but she’s having counselling as well as visits from Jonathan, a psychiatrist friend of DI Hart’s, who says her mum was put in an impossible position and was right not to rush in and destroy her daughter’s elaborately constructed delusions.
Bella has forgiven her mum and she hopes others will too. She still believes she’s got what it takes to be a journalist and her real Oxford college has been in touch, promising that a place remains open for her when she’s ready – three years after she was first meant to go there. In some ways, there’s not so much to get her head around. As Jonathan says, delusions are often no more than expressions of our deepest wishes – and of our most profound fears.
‘Sorry about that,’ the news editor says, coming off his phone to talk to Bella.
‘That’s OK,’ Bella says. In truth, she’d forgotten all about him, lost in her thoughts.
‘I wanted to thank you for that piece you sent us,’ he says, sitting down opposite her and glancing at the Bananagrams game. There are a couple of sexual words in there – Jim’s – and Bella finds herself blushing again.
‘A bag of shite,’ she says, remembering one of Erin’s favourite expressions.
‘Not at all,’ he says. ‘Clearly, some of the detail wasn’t quite right – well, a lot of it – but the essence of the story was spot on. And very moving. Which is partly why I’m here. We’ve been looking into your friend Erin and managed to establish some more details about her.
‘Sadly, it seems her mother’s dead too and she had no other living relatives but we’ve pieced together her early life in Dublin and, with your permission, we’d like to run it – as a tribute to her – beside the main piece that will carry your exclusive byline.’
Bella’s pleased. It turns out Erin’s dad was a gifted musician, even had a record deal at one time, before his drinking ended his marriage, career and finally his life. When he died, that night in a tent in Dublin, Erin was sent to stay with an aunt in London, who developed a crack habit before also dying. Erin didn’t have much luck when it came to family. After being taken into care, she ended up at Cranham Hall and never really stood a chance – cannon fodder for AP Brigham, who used ‘expendable’ people like Erin for more high-risk trials.
‘I need to check with Jim, but all your quotes from him still stand, of course,’ he continues. ‘About the experiments, the hell he went through. We just need to change a few locations – Harwell to Cranham Hall – and the medications – chemical warfare agents to antipsychotics.’
‘Nothing too major then,’ Bella says, smiling again.
‘A little bit of heavy lifting but the essence of the story is still true,’ he says. ‘The shocking reality of illegal drugs trials on unsuspecting victims.’
‘I’d like to read the piece on Erin first, if that’s OK,’ Bella says. She’d neglected her friend when she was alive. The least she can do is look after her in death. Erin hadn’t broken the spell of Bella’s Oxford fantasy while they were at Cranham Hall. She was too preoccupied with being a rook. Everyone had their own issues and even if they were aware of other people’s delusions, they seemed to accommodate them into their own – Bella thought Erin was studying ornithology, after all.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘And please feel free to add any anecdotes from college – from Cranham Hall.’
‘It’s catching,’ Bella says.
‘I’ll email it all over for you to read,’ he says, getting up to leave. ‘Mark sends his best wishes, by the way. And he’s looking forward to reading your “Overheard” column. He says he never actually commissioned it, but he’ll happily run it – and pay any expenses, of course.’
Five minutes later, her mum and Jim come back into the room after their walk in the garden. They are getting on well in a way that makes Bella feel a little jealous, if she’s honest. The small asides, exchanged glances. Maybe she just needs a break from all Bella’s questions. The only topic they haven’t tackled yet is Helen. Bella’s tried, but her mum bursts into tears whenever her sister’s name is mentioned.
‘Are you sure she’s not dead?’ Bella asks, each time they meet.
She is struggling to know who or what to believe any more. So much of the past three years has proved to be untrue. Her unanswered letters and emails to Helen, the voicemail messages – what if they were simply the desperate actions of a deluded woman? Her nights are filled with dreams of Helen and they always end in the same way. Her sister lying dead at her feet in the soft Studland sand, Bella’s red fingermarks imprinted on her broken neck.
It’s time to ask again.
105
Bella
‘How did it go?’ Jim asks, sitting down opposite Bella. ‘With that guy from the paper?’
‘They’re running my piece,’ Bella says. ‘As an exclusive.’
‘That’s great.’
Jim seems better after his walk. Her mum went off to talk to the duty psychiatrist when she came in from the garden with him, but she’s been gone for a while now.
‘They’re also going to print a profile of Erin,’ Bella adds. ‘A tribute.’
Bella feels a sudden, overwhelming sadness for her friend.
‘It’s OK,’ Jim says, putting a hand on hers. Jim played the piano at Erin’s funeral, the Aria from Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’. His way of trying to make sense of her death. As Bella watched Jim play, lost in the music, humming to himself, she realised how much she loved him. The funeral ended with a live rendition of ‘Farewell to Erin’, a popular Irish reel that Erin used to step dance to on the streets of Dublin, leaving the congregation in pieces.
Bella looks up as her mum comes back into the room to join them. Something’s wrong. She’s agitated, not her normal calm self.
‘Is everything OK?’ Bella asks, her stomach tightening.
‘You’ve got another visitor,’ her mum says, sitting down to pour herself a cup of tea. Her hand’s shaking as she stirs in some sugar. She never takes sugar.
‘The Pulitzer committee?’ Bella says, trying to dissipate the tension. ‘Here to present my prize for services to accurate journalism.’
‘Someone a little closer to home,’ she says, glancing at Jim, who looks over to the door, eyes widening.
Bella turns to see who it is. She blinks, twisting a fold of skin on her arm until it hurts, desperate to believe, to prove she’s not dreaming. She’s not. There she is in the doorway, more tanned than she remembers, carefree, the hint of bohemian that Bella could never quite mana
ge.
‘Helen,’ Bella whispers, wiping away a tear as her sister approaches.
She’s alive – and no one can tell her otherwise.
106
Jim
One month later
Jim watched Bella hug her sister that day and for the rest of the week, when Helen visited the unit every afternoon. He’s never seen such overt displays of affection. Never had a sibling. Helen hugged Jim too, which was tricky – she’s about half his height – but sweet of her. She’s a good person, funny, more relaxed than Bella. She’s also the spitting image of her mum and now back in Australia, having made her peace with her sister.
She’d left Britain after the attack in Studland three years ago, vowing never to return. And clearly fearful for her life. If it hadn’t been for the Special Constable who’d prised Bella’s hands from her throat, she would have died on the beach. During her three years at Cranham Hall, Bella had sent her hundreds of letters and Helen had read every one of them. Just as she had listened to all the voicemail messages and read Bella’s emails. She had wanted to reply, to speak to her sister, but her mum had advised against it, as had Dr Haslam, until Bella was well again.
It’s not been an easy month for Jim, despite the love he’s felt from Bella. He’s not sure if he’ll ever get over the discovery that he hadn’t been seconded to a biosafety level four high-containment facility at Harwell but was, in fact, being detained in a high-dependency psychiatric unit in Oxford. That all the classified information he’d leaked about Porton Down was open source, widely available on the internet. That he’d been working in a pet shop for the last three months and not at The Lab.
It’s obvious to everyone that Bella’s recovery is going better than his. Even the arrival of Rocky, who has become something of a celebrity in the unit, has failed to help. With a bit of luck, though, today’s outing will go some way to closing the gap between his fantasy past and future reality.