by Ann Gosslin
‘You look puzzled, Dr Cartwright, so I won’t keep you in suspense. You trained in forensic psychiatry under Gordon Hobart, am I correct?’
Alert now, she tightened her grip on the arms of the chair.
‘Wonderful fellow, Gordon. We were students at Imperial College together but lost touch after I moved to America. A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting up with him at a medical conference in Boston. While chatting over coffee, your name came up. The way he sang your praises had me convinced you’d be the best person to evaluate Tim.’
Surprised by the connection to her former mentor, Erin tried to keep her face impassive. Harrison might simply be conveying his awareness of her role in the Leonard Whidby case as a junior doctor under Hobart’s supervision. Or perhaps it was a ploy and, right from the start, Harrison was counting on her skittishness to deliver his preferred outcome: that Tim Stern remain in an institution for the rest of his life.
‘He’s doing wonderful work at Sheffield, as I’m sure you know,’ Harrison continued. ‘Thirty-three years I’ve lived over here, but I still get bouts of homesickness.’ He looked at her keenly. ‘By the sound of it, I’d say you aren’t from Sheffield, though, not originally.’ His unspoken question hung in the air.
She met his eyes. ‘I grew up in Reading.’
He flipped open the file in front of him. ‘Well, it takes some getting used to, America. But it’s not a bad place to live.’ He smiled. ‘I, for one, am very glad you’re here. As Tim’s treating psychiatrist, I’m too close to the patient, so I’m just as anxious as our review board to have an unbiased opinion of his readiness to rejoin the world.’
Erin struggled to sit properly on the slippery leather, wishing she’d worn her fake glasses, so she would appear less like an awkward teenager and more like a bona fide psychiatrist. ‘I can certainly understand that,’ she said, ‘though, I’d like to mention up front that I might not be able to take the case.’
His eyebrows rose slightly, though he didn’t take the bait. ‘Understood. But why don’t you meet the patient first, before taking any decisions?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Tim should be in the dayroom now. He keeps very regular habits.’
9
Harrison slid his arms into a starched white coat and led her along the corridor. ‘This ward is one of four in Unit B,’ he said, punching a code into a panel on the wall. A buzzer sounded as the door swung open. ‘A high-security unit, though not as restrictive as Unit A. That section houses our most violent patients.’
The stench of bleach and something else – cooked cabbage, spoiled meat? – stung her nose. Before they reached the dayroom, Harrison unlocked a door and herded her into a space that was scarcely larger than a broom cupboard. A monitor bolted to the wall provided a bird’s-eye view of the patients in the dayroom.
‘I thought it best if your first impression of Tim was on the screen. He tends to tense up when he meets someone new.’
Erin stepped close to the black-and-white image. Would she recognise him? Perhaps a fractured memory from a long-ago summer. She peered at the monitor. In the dayroom, the windows were fitted with bars. No one sat in the scattering of plastic tables and chairs, bolted to the floor. An elfin man, not much more than a boy, with translucent skin and hair like chick fluff, crouched on the linoleum, shaking his fist at someone who wasn’t there. Another man, round as a beach ball, pressed his face against the scratched acrylic box that protected the TV.
Erin indicated a dark-haired man seated on the floor. ‘Is that Tim?’
‘No, that’s Alan. Tim’s sitting at a table by the window.’ Harrison tapped the keyboard. ‘I’ll zoom in a bit, so you can get a closer look.’
A heavyset man swam into view. Lank brown hair, a pale, slack jaw. She blinked hard, waiting for the flicker of recognition that failed to arrive. Instead, the photos of the crime scene flashed through her mind. The mother, her head cleaved in two, splayed on the floor in a pool of blood. Great splashes of blood on the walls and splattered across the cooktop. The two girls stretched out on the beds. Pillows pressed over their faces, and their throats cut with surgical precision.
Alone at the table, Tim hunched his shoulders over a paperback book, pressing the spine flat with his right hand. With his left hand, crabbed around a pencil stub, he made little stabbing motions on the paper.
‘What’s he doing?’
‘Sudoku.’ Harrison smiled. ‘He’s quite good, actually. Rather amazing how quickly he can solve them. Whenever he’s not eating or sleeping or in group therapy, that’s what he does.’
Erin studied the angle of Tim’s shoulders, his iron grip on the pencil. She turned away from the monitor. ‘To your knowledge, has he ever shown any sociopathic tendencies?’
The surprise on the older man’s face seemed genuine.
‘What I mean is,’ she said, back-pedalling, ‘have you ever thought that Tim might be… faking his symptoms?’
Harrison tugged his ear. ‘Not in the fifteen years I’ve been treating him.’ He examined a patch of scaly skin on his wrist. ‘From the time of his arrest, he’s always maintained he has no memory of the murders. A sociopath would be more inclined to brag about what he’d done.’ As if anticipating Erin’s next question, he pressed on, ‘If he’d been deemed a violent psychopath on admission, he would have gone straight into Unit A with our more dangerous patients. Since I’ve been here, I’ve never known Tim to be anything other than docile. But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’ His smile looked strained. ‘To provide a fresh perspective. I may be too close to Tim to see all the ways he might be manipulating me. To you, he’s a blank slate.’
Surely, there was no such thing. Not in a case like this, where a crime of such brutality cast an epically long shadow.
A glance at the monitor showed Tim still madly scribbling. ‘In the file I received there was no mention of Tim’s eligibility for release prior to this.’ Erin studied his rigid posture, the intensity of concentration. ‘Is this the first time his case has come up for review?’
‘Indeed, no.’ Harrison looked at his watch. ‘There were two previous occasions, but with no one to take him in, or space in a suitable group home, there was little point in petitioning the state.’
‘What’s different this time?’
‘Improved readiness, for the most part.’ Harrison pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead. The air in the cramped room was uncomfortably warm. ‘More importantly, we have a sponsor.’
A sponsor? Erin pictured a well-meaning but misguided do-gooder, or an older, churchy woman, coming forward to save a fallen man’s soul.
‘Tim’s father.’
It was impossible to hide her surprise. This was more than she’d bargained for. Why would an elderly man take in the person, filial relation aside, who’d brutally murdered his wife and daughters? Even with Tim’s mental health as a mitigating factor, it was still a shock.
She dropped her gaze, keenly aware of Harrison’s eyes boring into her skull in a poorly disguised attempt to probe her mind. What made her tick? Where was she wounded?
A movement on the screen caught her eye. Tim closed the book of Sudoku and shambled towards the window. While his back was turned, a man with the face of a ferret leapt from his spot in the corner and made a beeline for the Sudoku. As soon as the man reached the table, his hand above the prize, Tim turned and pegged him with an Arctic stare. For several seconds they faced each other, predator and prey, before the ferrety man stepped away and slunk back to his seat.
What was that? A prickle of fear needled her gut. She stared at the monitor. It looked like Tim had been seconds away from lunging at the other man’s throat. ‘Did you see that?’
‘Oh, that’s just Darryl.’ Harrison chuckled. ‘Tim will leave something on a table in the dayroom – the Sudoku, a pencil, or a piece of paper – and as soon as Darryl thinks Tim’s not looking, he slinks over and makes as if to touch it. They’ve been doing this for months. Darryl has ye
t to take anything. It’s never gone quite that far.’
‘So you don’t know how Tim would react if Darryl actually grabbed the book?’
He kept his eyes on the screen. ‘No.’
The air in the room had grown unbearably close. As always, when trapped in a tight space, Erin experienced a flutter of panic.
‘Are you ready to meet Tim? Instead of telling him the reason you’re here, I thought I’d introduce you as a colleague from downstate who’s visiting our facility. That way he won’t feel put on the spot.’
*
A sharp rap on the door and an attendant prodded Tim into Harrison’s office. Erin hovered by the bookcase, nervous he would recognise her, though the chance was remote. She looked nothing like the girl she once was. The only possible giveaway was the unusual colour of her eyes. Celadon, a man had told her once. Mermaid eyes. But the thought that Tim might notice something familiar about her, however slight, was enough to quicken her pulse.
Harrison motioned to the chair opposite the desk. ‘Have a seat, Tim. I’d like to introduce you to a colleague from downstate. Dr Cartwright is here to tour our facility. I’ve given her permission to talk to some of our patients. After we finish our session, you’ll have a chance to meet with her. Is that all right with you?’ He spoke in a normal tone of voice, though with longer pauses between sentences. Looking Tim in the eye and affecting a hearty manner, as if the two of them were mates meeting over a pint, rather than doctor and patient. Tim avoided the attempt at eye contact. Not unusual in a paranoid schizophrenic.
‘Okay.’ A mumble, scarcely audible, his eyes focused somewhere to the left of Harrison’s desk. He hadn’t looked at Erin when he came in the room, but he glanced at her now from his spot near the corner. A flick of the eye, as if measuring the distance between them, or assessing a threat. Like a fox in the wild, easily spooked.
She tried not to look directly at him. So far, nothing about his face or form was familiar. She exhaled, relieved. He was a stranger to her, and she to him.
Tim edged towards the leather chair and slid into it sideways, shoulders sloped, legs sprawled. His lank hair showed a hint of grey at the temples, but otherwise he looked younger than his forty-three years. His face and hands were pale and unlined. Years spent indoors and idle would do that to a person.
‘Hello, Tim,’ Erin said. ‘I look forward to speaking with you later.’
At a nod from Harrison, she backed out of the office, nearly bumping into the attendant waiting outside, a solidly built woman with her black hair scraped into a topknot and a no-nonsense demeanour.
‘I’m to take you to the staff lounge,’ she said tonelessly, as if Erin was one more thing to check off a list. ‘You can wait there till someone comes for you.’
The staff lounge, an unadorned box of a room at the far end of the ward, was equipped with two threadbare sofas, a tottering pile of outdated medical journals, and a coffee maker. Helping herself to a chipped ceramic mug from the cupboard, Erin poured coffee from the pot, thick as treacle. Cradling the mug in her hands, she looked out the barred window at the car park. A gust of wind blew bits of plastic and tattered newsprint across the frozen ground. The sky was a sickly shade of grey. All she needed now was for some freak storm to trap her here. The warm lights and familiar routines of the Meadows seemed impossibly far away.
The coffee was too bitter to drink, and she poured it down the drain. Behind her, someone coughed. She turned to find the attendant standing in the doorway, a dour look on her face.
*
At the far end of a narrow corridor, a dim bulb protected by a metal grille provided the only light. The attendant pointed to a half-closed door. ‘He’s in there.’
Before Erin could step inside, the woman gripped her arm.
‘There’s a panic button on the wall behind the desk.’ She looked Erin in the eye. ‘Don’t be afraid to use it.’
Erin nodded and shut the door behind her, testing the handle to be sure it opened from the inside. A battered desk and tattered chair. A single barred window, smeared with handprints. Tim stood in the far corner, his back pressed to the wall. Panic buttons and body alarms were standard equipment on high-security wards. But the attendant’s warning… Was that normal procedure, or was she trying to tell her something? So far, nothing Erin had seen suggested that Tim was ready for life outside the hospital.
Through his bedraggled fringe of hair, he squinted at the fluorescent tubes fixed to the ceiling.
‘Do the lights bother you? I can turn them off if you’d like.’ She hit the switch by the door, plunging the room in shadow. With only a square of wintry light from the window, the room took on a subterranean hue, more suitable to interrogation by hooded operatives, than a friendly chat with a doctor. To improve the atmosphere, she switched on the small lamp bolted to the table. ‘That’s better. I don’t like fluorescent lights either. Too bright.’ She smiled in a way she hoped was reassuring.
But Tim had turned his face to the window. On the other side of the razor wire, an abandoned factory with shattered windows and blackened bricks squatted on a barren patch of land. Three large crows, the colour of soot, pecked at the frozen ground.
In the slanting light, the sickle-shaped scar stood out on Tim’s cheek. His arms hung at his sides, and his shoulders slumped forward, as if standing upright was an effort not worth making. ‘A murder of crows.’ His voice was muffled.
A murder… of what? Erin’s neck tingled. ‘Why don’t you take a seat, Tim.’
The sour smell of defeat hung in the air. She checked her watch, anxious to get this over with and back on the road before the weather blocked her in.
He turned away from the window and focused on a point just beyond her left shoulder. His eyes, the colour of pond water, were blank. ‘My name is Timothy.’
‘Timothy?’ She scribbled a note. ‘I heard Dr Harrison call you Tim.’
‘I told him to call me Timothy. He forgets.’
‘Is there a reason you don’t want to be called Tim any more?’
He pivoted back towards the window and pressed his hands against the glass. ‘My father’s called Tim. I used to be Timmy. But I’m too old for that now.’
In the still air, the only sound was the scratch of her pencil on paper. ‘Is there anything special you’d like to talk about?’
He edged close to the chair and dropped into it like a sack of flour. ‘You’re not a visitor,’ he said, looking at his shoes. ‘You’re part of that… review, something. Board. Panel. People. I know about it.’ He rubbed his hands across his chest. ‘I can’t leave until another doctor says it’s okay. Someone who doesn’t know me.’ His eyes shifted to the general direction of her face, then skittered away. ‘You don’t know me.’
Erin was startled but tried not to show it. Maintaining a neutral face was part of the trade. How did he know this? Listening at doors? Or was Harrison’s ploy of introducing her as a ‘visitor from downstate’ so transparent that even to a patient doped up on meds, it was an obvious charade?
‘That’s right.’ She studied his face. ‘I’m sorry Dr Harrison told you that. It’s always better to be honest. It’s true I’m here to get to know you better. But it’s not a test you need to pass, like in school. If it turns out that I’m the right doctor to help with your case – and that hasn’t been decided yet – then we’ll meet with each other a few more times.’ She fiddled with the cap on her pen. ‘But it could be that we only meet today, just this once. Is that okay?
He rubbed a stain on his jeans with his thumb.
‘You mentioned your father just now,’ Erin said. ‘Would you like to talk about him?’
Tim’s hand twitched. ‘Why?’
‘You told me about the name change to Timothy, so I thought you might want to say more about what he’s like, your father.’ She was treading on fragile ground. Harrison had warned her about Tim’s refusal to talk about his family, or anything to do with his hometown and the past. But it was her job to test t
he boundaries. Wasn’t that why she was here?
He tugged the book of Sudoku from the waistband of his jeans. As he riffled the pages, a scrap of paper fluttered to the floor. Erin caught a brief look of the pencilled scrawl.
Hey Timmy, Timbo. I’m talking to you. Cat got yer tongue? Mister Golden Hair surprise. Too cool for school. The Viking. Rat-a-tat-tat. Movie night. History girl mystery girl. Three across one down.
Before she could make sense of the jumble of words, he snatched the paper off the floor and stuck it between the pages of his book. What was this? Delusional nonsense? Or possibly snatches of memory. Who was history girl? The Viking?
A chill passed through her. No. It was impossible. Across a desert of time, a memory bloomed like a noxious weed. Could there have been more than one? She knew of only one person who called himself ‘the Viking’.
Afraid of breaking the spell, she kept utterly still, hardly daring to breathe. ‘Is that a poem you wrote?’
‘No.’
Hailstones clattered against the window, and she jumped as if struck. When a blast of wind rattled the glass, the desk lamp flickered. She stared at it, expecting the electricity to cut out, plunging the ward in darkness. As it flickered again, she tensed, praying for the gods to be kind. In that moment, hands clasped in her lap, desperately hoping the lights stayed on, the role she was meant to play in Tim’s life clicked into place.
She couldn’t walk away. Not after stumbling upon a doorway, however narrow, into Tim’s damaged psyche. Any other doctor would have dismissed that jumble of words as the product of a delusional mind. But to Erin it was a coded missive from Tim’s past, of his life before he killed his family. Impossible to turn her back on him now.
Her mind fizzed with a million questions, but if she pushed too far, it might scare him off. Take a breath, tread carefully.
Tim picked at the loose skin on his thumb. When a bright spot of blood appeared, he rubbed it away on his sleeve. ‘You talk like Dr Harrison.’