KILLER T

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Upstairs we have thirty-six rooms where people in crisis can stay for a few nights. On the top floor there’s an education unit for trainee therapists and a safe-play area for kids. All the first-floor rooms have outside access and an independent air supply, so we can function as a bereavement centre if there’s a major epidemic.’

  ‘Impressive,’ Kirsten said as she stepped round a chubby construction worker gluing bright blue floor tiles, then admired the sunlight pouring through an atrium above.

  ‘I need to warm this bottle before Harry gets grumpy,’ Charlie said. She pulled an electronic pass and blipped a door.

  Kirsten followed Charlie into a kitchen area, so new it had plastic dust sheets over the worktops and unfinished light fixtures. As the microwave took the chill off Harry’s lunch, Sister Miraculous arrived with a squeak of orthopaedic shoes.

  ‘This must be Kirsten,’ the sister beamed, blowing a kiss for the sake of hygiene and rattling words like machine-gun bullets. ‘Isn’t this place beautiful? Charlie claims to be an atheist, but I prayed to our Lord. This wonderful girl was delivered to me and the dark Janssen money has been turned to holy light.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Charlie laughed.

  ‘And isn’t this tiny man adorable?’ the sister continued. ‘Even if he is a mutated bastard born out of wedlock!’

  Kirsten gulped, half expecting Charlie to sock Sister Miraculous for insulting her kid. But Charlie laughed as she grabbed Harry’s bottle out of the microwave and gave it a shake.

  ‘There’s a lot of construction dust upstairs,’ Charlie said. ‘Sister, would you like to feed my evil mutant while I show Kirsten around?’

  ‘Oh, you like me, don’t you, Harry!’ Sister Miraculous said eagerly as she sat at a table and took hold of the baby.

  ‘Sister Miraculous seems a little eccentric,’ Kirsten noted as they set off.

  ‘Some people have a screw loose – Sister Miraculous hasn’t got a single screw tightened,’ Charlie grinned. ‘She’s not officially a nun any more. She caused so many fights with the rest of her order the bishop gave her the boot.’

  Kirsten laughed noisily as they passed a bunch of WET PAINT signs and rode an elevator that had new-car smell.

  ‘Charlie, this centre is amazing, but I feel so guilty.’

  Charlie looked puzzled. ‘How so?’

  ‘I used to tell Harry that he spent too much time with you. That you were in prison for a reason. That you were a bad influence, who’d wind up breaking his heart.’

  ‘I did break his heart back then,’ Charlie pointed out. ‘Though he broke mine when he died, so I guess we’re even now.’

  The elevator doors opened and Charlie tapped her pass, unlocking the doors of a huge play space.

  ‘Wow,’ Kirsten said as she studied a climbing wall, basketball hoops and trampolines built into the floor.

  ‘Kids can’t play outdoors with all the synthetic organisms,’ Charlie explained. ‘A lot of private play spaces have opened up, but poor families can’t afford them. And kids can run wild in here, while adults get treatment.’

  ‘Harry had Vegas Local and a burning ambition to follow in his mum’s footsteps,’ Kirsten observed as she strolled deeper into the space. ‘You have this charity and sixty coffee shops. You two were perfect for each other.’

  Kirsten saw that Charlie was tearing up.

  ‘Oh, I’m such an idiot,’ Kirsten said, stepping back. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, I appreciate your honesty,’ Charlie said, peeling down her virus mask to dab one eye. ‘I’ve seen a few men since he died, but Harry’s still my guy.’

  ‘Healing takes time,’ Kirsten said. ‘And I’m twice your age and still seeking my Mr Perfect.’

  ‘Sometimes it feels like a waste of time,’ Charlie said, staring at the floor. ‘We strive and learn, and raise kids and build stuff. But somewhere on the other side of the world there’s some nineteen-year-old sociopath. He built a DNA printer in his mom’s basement and he’s working on the perfect germ that’s gonna wipe all of us out.’

  Kirsten tried thinking of an intelligent reply, but nothing came so she slipped off her pumps and stepped barefoot on to one of the trampolines.

  ‘Harry had a trampoline for his eighth birthday,’ Kirsten said as she began a gentle bounce. ‘Almost filled my little garden in Kentish Town.’

  Charlie smiled as she tugged off her All Stars and hopped on to the next pad. ‘You did say you needed to burn energy.’

  Kirsten was cautious, but Charlie bounced high, doing a back flip, then leaping back and forth between two pads.

  ‘Show off,’ Kirsten laughed, then attempted a flip and face planted.

  Charlie got the giggles, and Kirsten clapped as she pulled off a barrel roll. The two women wound up flat on their backs, smirking and out of breath.

  ‘I think the world’s gonna be fine,’ Kirsten said, lifting her virus mask to help catch her breath. ‘I’m gonna get more anti-ageing mods. I’ll have my first kid at a hundred and thirty and I’ll die at two hundred.’

  ‘Harry got his sense of humour from you,’ Charlie told Kirsten fondly. ‘I’m so glad you came over for the centre’s opening.’

  ‘I needed that stretch after quarantine,’ Kirsten said, rubbing one knee as she stumbled towards her shoes.

  ‘It’s nice to act like a kid sometimes,’ Charlie said, still smiling as she started putting her sneakers back on. ‘But I’d better go rescue my baby from the crazy nun.’

  ‘Harry would be so proud of what you’ve done,’ Kirsten said as Charlie flicked her hand at the no-touch elevator button.

  ‘I’d give anything to have one more day with him,’ Charlie admitted, climbing into the elevator. ‘But the fight goes on, right?’

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  Read on for a sneak peek …

  Walter J Freeman Adolescent Mental Health Unit – East Grinstead, UK

  Georgia Pack tilted on the back legs of a plastic stacking chair, curling socked toes into the therapy room’s grungy turquoise carpet. Her eyes scanned the ceiling tiles, as she tuned out, letting Henry’s voice merge with rattling air-con.

  Georgia was fifteen and she’d been on the unit long enough to know things. Like the knack for opening the jammed dryer in the laundry room and that Monday night’s Quorn Bolognese was best avoided. On weekdays, patients who weren’t psychotic or sedated had group therapy. Georgia shared the circle of chairs with four fellow teens, and a slight Indian therapist named Tanvi.

  Henry dominated the therapy session. Seventeen and pretty. Floppy hair, stout legs. Canterbury training pants tucked into striped rugby socks. His posh accent and machine-gun laugh were everywhere on the unit, carrying up stairwells and booming in the dining room. Georgia even heard blasts of Henry from the smokers’ patio if she opened the window in her room to shift the unit’s hot, dead air.

  At thirteen, Ross was the youngest patient in the unit. He sat fidgeting with a stick of lip balm and nodding approval at every word out of Henry’s mouth. Laura was a shy new arrival, with elastic bandage up the arm she’d gouged when she tried to kill herself three nights earlier. The last patient in the group was Georgia’s friend Alex. Broad-shouldered, with the number nine peeling off the back of an old Newcastle United shirt.

  Georgia knew something was up with Alex. She liked to spar with Henry in group, but today her friend had let him grind on, ignoring obvious chances to swat his ego.

  ‘Our au-pair drove all the bloody way from Hertfordshire with my Xbox,’ Henry ranted, growing more irate with every sentence. ‘I set up a death match with my buddies in the rec room. Then Keith the nurse strides in. Sees my HDMI lead going from the Xbox to the telly on the wall and tells us it’s too long.

  ‘I know
we’re not allowed to have long cables so we can’t neck ourselves. But he wanted to take it right there, with the three of us mid-tournament. I said I’d hand the cable in at the nurses’ station when we’d finished playing and get the au-pair to bring a shorter cable …’

  Tanvi the therapist made a stop-talking gesture. Then spoke with a lisp that made sss come out like thh.

  ‘This is where you lost your temper and there was an incident?’

  ‘I hardly lothht my temper,’ Henry mocked, sitting up defensively and tucking his feet under the chair. ‘Keith tried to yank the cable. I pushed him away and he tripped on the stack of board games. Keith charged back to the nurses’ station and made a tiny incident into this huge thing. The night manager came out, saying she was locking the rec room, and made us all go back to our rooms …’

  ‘Let’s pause there,’ Tanvi interrupted. ‘Henry has issues with impulse control and this is a good opportunity to discuss techniques that could have stopped a situation from escalating.’

  Georgia cringed at Tanvi calling Henry’s problem impulse control. Nasty thug felt more truthful.

  Henry’s story was known around the unit. He’d been dumped by his boarding-school girlfriend. A couple of months later, he’d seen her kissing a music student at a house party. Henry sucker-punched the student, shoved him down a flight of stairs and stomped his head into a four-day coma.

  Any ordinary brat would have bounced to jail, but Henry’s daddy found a fancy lawyer, who paid an even fancier psychiatrist to write a report claiming that Henry had cognitive issues and had been suffering from depression, which led to his outburst of ‘uncharacteristic behaviour’.

  So, Henry got to spend nine months at the Freeman Unit, bleating about his Xbox getting confiscated, instead of three years in young offenders with lads whose parents didn’t own three houses and a sixteen-metre racing yacht.

  ‘What behavioural technique could Henry have used to help control his anger?’ Tanvi asked the five patients.

  Ross broke a moment’s silence. ‘That thought, feeling, behaviour, triangle thingy?’ he guessed, keen to please.

  Tanvi shook her head. ‘The cognitive triangle is used to understand how our feelings affect our behaviour. I’m talking about a specific technique that I mentioned earlier in this session …’

  Ross blurted when he got it. ‘Transposition. Like, when before reacting, you try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes.’

  ‘Brilliant, Ross,’ Tanvi said brightly. ‘Henry, instead of jumping straight to anger, try to imagine Kevin’s position. When a nurse in a mental-health facility walks into a room and sees a length of cable that a patient might use to harm themselves, what might they be thinking?’

  ‘Kevin is only a student nurse,’ Ross said, lapping up the therapist’s approval. ‘He’s probably scared about losing his job or getting in trouble with management.’

  Georgia nodded supportively. ‘The nurses work twelve-hour shifts. Kevin was probably wiped by the time he came in and saw Henry playing video games …’

  Georgia had eight million Instagram followers and a face that had been on magazine covers. Henry couldn’t look down on her, so focused his resentment on Ross.

  ‘Why are you against me?’ Henry growled menacingly.

  ‘Henry,’ Tanvi said sternly. Therapists were supposed to stay neutral, but she couldn’t completely hide her irritation. ‘I’m trying to help you deal with anger issues. Please tell me something Keith might have been thinking during the confrontation?’

  Henry didn’t want to play. He folded his arms and his voice went high.

  ‘God!’ he blurted, knee bouncing and knuckles turning white. ‘I feel like everyone in this room is attacking me!’

  Tanvi was about to speak, but Alex finally broke silence.

  ‘You’re a total drama queen, Henry,’ Alex blurted. ‘Your stupid voice has been drilling into my head for most of the last hour. Nothing is ever your fault. Your au-pair brought the wrong clothes, some of the night staff don’t let you have pizza delivered, your Xbox, blah, blah, blah … And the second someone disagrees or challenges, you claim we’re attacking you.’

  Tanvi made a simmer-down gesture to Alex. ‘It’s good to finally hear you contribute, Alex, but you know the group rules. Remain fully in your seat and make sure comments are constructive, not abusive.’

  Alex moaned with exasperation. ‘Henry almost stamped a guy to death. In the six weeks since I got here, I’ve heard him verbally bully younger patients, like Ross. He’s yelled at nurses and lobbed scrambled eggs at kitchen staff. The point of group therapy is to talk through your problems. But how can that work with a person who can’t handle the slightest suggestion that that something might be his own fault?’

  Henry looked at Tanvi, clutching his chest like he’d been shot. ‘Are you going to let her attack me like that?’

  Tanvi paused for a deep breath, stressed but projecting calm. ‘Alex’s tone could be less aggressive, but she’s raised an interesting point about how we need to examine ourselves honestly to benefit from group therapy.’

  ‘I’m stuck in this place, aren’t I?’ Henry spat. ‘I got expelled from one of the best schools in the country. Am I not being punished?’

  Alex tutted and grabbed her hair. ‘I’ve been in young offenders. This place is a Holiday Inn by comparison.’

  ‘Why should I justify myself to a girl who smoked crack when she was twelve?’ Henry blurted.

  Georgia shot up and yelled, ‘That’s out of order, Henry.’

  Tanvi made two sharp claps, asserting herself before her group got out of control.

  ‘Cool heads,’ she said firmly. ‘Abuse is never acceptable during group work. Settle in your chairs … We only have a few minutes of the session left. Let’s take out the sting with some breathing exercises.’

  ‘I can’t be in a room with that knobhead,’ Alex spat, hooking her fingertips inside the wrecked pair of New Balance under her chair and making for the door. ‘Sorry …’

  ‘We all agreed to abide by the group rules,’ Tanvi pleaded. ‘That includes staying in the room for the full hour.’

  Georgia glowered at Henry, now wearing a triumphant smirk. When she heard Alex smash her palm against the vending machine in the lounge outside she didn’t want to stay in the therapy room either. But unlike Henry, the expensive psychiatrist had yet to write her report on Georgia. She had to toe the line if she wanted to stay out of prison.

  ‘This session is almost over,’ Tanvi said, gesturing Georgia towards the door. ‘Alex probably needs you more than we do.’

  The deserted lounge area had a dozen sofas. Patients did group or addiction therapy in rooms that branched off either side. The coffee and snack machines were against the wall by the main doors and Alex pounded the machine again as Georgia closed in.

  ‘Henry sucks!’ Alex said, eyes glazing as Georgia gave her a hug.

  Georgia knew that something more than Henry was bugging her friend.

  ‘You were so quiet in there,’ Georgia said.

  Alex shrugged as she jabbed the button for hot chocolate. ‘You didn’t have to run out after me. You’ve got your sentencing coming up.’

  ‘At least we beat the queue for drinks,’ Georgia said.

  When the clock hit four, the unit’s teenage patients would stream out of therapy rooms, checking phones and forming a queue for hot drinks, chocolate bars and McCoy’s crinkle-cut crisps. The Henry types would sprawl over the lounge, flirting and yapping until the kitchen opened for dinner, while the shy and desperate hid in their rooms.

  ‘My stepdad spoke to his insurance company,’ Alex confessed reluctantly, as her drink spattered into a cardboard cup. ‘They won’t extend my stay here beyond forty-five days. He can’t afford to pay himself. With my drugs and psychiatrist bills, it’s a thousand quid a day.’

  ‘Sucks here anyway,’ Georgia said, trying to smile, but hating that so many kids left the unit when insurance money ran out, instead
of when they’d got better. ‘What happened to that NHS programme you applied to?’

  Alex sighed. ‘Dad drove me up for an assessment, but there’s eighty people on the waiting list and I’m low priority, since I’ve never tried suicide and I don’t present a danger to the public …’

  ‘They’d let you in if you stabbed Henry,’ Georgia joked darkly, as she pushed the button for a caramel latte.

  Before Alex could react, the double doors by the snack machine flew open. One door crashed the wall loudly as a wailing, half-dressed, figure burst through.

  ‘I am not to be touched!’ the runner shouted desperately.

  The runner had been dragged out of school, wearing the bottom half of his PE kit, and a deckchair-striped school blazer over a bare chest. As he reached a dead end at the far side of the lounge, a burly Spanish nurse named Carlos and the two green-uniformed paramedics charged through the doors in pursuit.

  ‘Julius, calm down, mate,’ one of the paramedics begged in cockney. ‘They’re all right here.’

  ‘Remember our chat in the ambulance?’ the other one added. ‘There’s nothing to fear.’

  ‘I am not mental,’ Julius shouted.

  Arrivals on the unit were often dramatic. Georgia had seen bodies flopped into their rooms under sedation, sobbers grasping parents, kids withdrawing from heroin wheeled to the addiction ward with puke buckets between their knees. Most common were teens who’d attempted suicide, fresh from the casualty department with neck braces, or bloody bandages.

  But overpowering the admissions staff and doing a runner was something new. Julius’s shocked white eyes contrasted with his sweat-beaded black face as he frantically sought an escape route. His physique was more Buddha than bodybuilder, but he was huge so it was still scary.

  ‘Move aside,’ Julius roared, as Carlos stepped closer. ‘I cannot be here.’