Girl on the Landing

by Paul Torday

  The next morning I was on Stephen Gunnerton’s doorstep at half past eight. I wasn’t sure whether anyone would be there that early, but when I pressed the bell it was Stephen Gunnerton’s voice that spoke down the intercom.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he said.

  ‘It’s Elizabeth Gascoigne, Mr Gunnerton. I don’t have an appointment, but please will you see me for a few moments? It’s urgent.’

  ‘Are you alone?’ said the voice suspiciously. A whining above my head distracted me and I looked up to see what I had not noticed on my last visit: a small CCTV camera fixed to the wall above the door frame. It panned the street and then pointed itself down at me again.

  ‘I’m on my own,’ I told the intercom.

  ‘Look around the street again. Anyone you recognise?’

  But the street was still quite empty. A few figures were walking quickly through the dark morning, faces averted from a keen wind that had begun to blow. ‘I’m absolutely on my own,’ I repeated, ‘and it’s important. Can I come in for a moment, please?’

  There was a buzz and then the sound of an electrically operated lock. I pushed the door open and went inside. It shut behind me with a loud click. The reception desk was empty. I wondered whether I should wait, but then Stephen Gunnerton appeared in the corridor and waved to me.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he said, ‘I haven’t got much time. Where’s your husband?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘He went to Scotland on a golf trip and hasn’t come back. He should have been home yesterday.’

  We went into the consulting room I had been in a few days before. A large black suitcase stood in the middle of the room. Stephen Gunnerton was staring at me and I noticed that there were beads of sweat on his forehead. His charcoal suit was immaculate, his grey silk tie was carefully knotted against a cream silk shirt, and yet he gave the impression of nothing so much as a forest animal in full flight.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked. As he spoke, he walked across to a double-fronted bookcase and opened the central section, to reveal some decanters and glasses. He poured himself a large neat whisky, while he waited for my reply.

  ‘I want you to tell me everything you didn’t tell me when I came here the other day. There’s no point in worrying about your stupid medical ethics any more, is there?’

  ‘I won’t offer you a whisky,’ he said. ‘It’s probably a bit early for you. A bit early for me, too; steadies the nerves, though. I don’t know everything. Some of it is speculation. But it’s in the public domain now, or soon will be.’

  He took a gulp from his glass.

  ‘Michael was referred to me years ago by his GP, Dr Grant. Dr Grant thought that his patient was exhibiting classic symptoms of an acute form of psychosis. He also thought, but couldn’t prove, that Michael had killed his own mother a few years earlier. Faked a boating accident, I believe.’

  I expelled all the breath in my body in a gasp, as if someone had punched me in the pit of the stomach.

  ‘Michael was an interesting patient. He had developed a complex delusional construct that was quite unique in my clinical experience. Not because it was bizarre - they’re always bizarre. People hear God talking to them. They hear their dead ancestors telling them to do things. They invent detailed fantastical explanations to justify themselves. Sometimes their delusions are complicated by drugs like cannabis. Not in this case. What made Michael different, on the rare occasions when he spoke for any length of time, was the absolute sense of conviction he conveyed when he spoke.’

  He sipped some more whisky, and grimaced.

  ‘He believed that, since childhood, he had been able to communicate with the spirits of ancient hunter-gatherers who had roamed the hills and woods of Glen Gala long ago. Michael’s conviction that he was communicating with people none of the rest of us could see was classic delusional stuff; it was the detail that was so unusual. He said that they taught him forgotten magic; primitive enchantments, using the berries and branches of the rowan tree, herbs, other things now forgotten by modern man. He told me that they taught him the art of concealment, how to stalk larger and more dangerous animals than he and kill them before they knew he was there. They taught him he had to learn how to survive at all costs.’

  ‘He told me they spoke to him by gesture,’ I said.

  ‘Sometimes when he is asleep I’ve seen his hands twitching and fluttering - it really does look like some kind of sign language.’

  ‘Yes, that was one of his fantasies,’ Stephen Gunnerton said. ‘He believed - he’d read somewhere, I suspect - that sign language preceded speech in human development, and that the evolution of the vocal cord is - in evolutionary terms - a recent development. I am afraid he was probably rationalising the trembling that was starting in his own hands. That’s an early symptom of a condition rather like Parkinson’s disease. It’s almost certainly a side effect of some of the drug treatments he was on before he came to me.’

  He sipped again, and coughed, then put his whisky tumbler down on his desk. He had drunk two inches in about the same number of minutes.

  ‘I’m not used to this stuff,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘Anyway, Michael’s delusional construct was classic. Alex Grant was quite right. It was a metaphor for concealing his own illness, for learning to hide his true nature from others, in order to survive. When I first met him he was intense, vivid in his language, unexpected in his movements. It was sometimes very disquieting, being with him. I thought he was potentially the most dangerous individual I had ever treated. For a year he was kept in a maximum-security institution in South London, and I visited him twice a week. Eventually, NICE approved Serendipozan just as I was wondering what the next step would be. It seemed an ideal solution. We started treating him, and he responded. We were able to move him to a medium-security institution, and then the time came when we could think about returning him to the community. That is now best practice: to provide a patient with a good safety network in the form of a case officer from social services, and then to continue to see them as an outpatient until we can tell whether their condition is stable or not.’

  Stephen Gunnerton then unnerved me by going to the window and looking out into the street for a moment. He came back and said, ‘It all worked. It all so nearly worked. Michael responded to treatment, he calmed down and became less volatile; lethargic and dull, in fact, but that was a small price to pay. After a while we let him back into the community, and he came to the clinic as an outpatient, as good as gold, never missing an appointment. Where it went wrong was that after six months the case officer assigned to Michael resigned, and they never got around to replacing him. I didn’t find this out until a few days ago. When you told me you knew nothing about Michael’s condition, I realised you should have done. He should have been receiving visits from someone. Obviously you knew nothing about that.’

  I shook my head. The words condemned me too. Stephen Gunnerton looked at his watch. ‘I must go,’ he said. ‘I’m catching the Eurostar to Paris in an hour.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘I could go on if I had the time, but you wouldn’t learn much more. I don’t even really know what Michael is. I know that, underneath the drugs, there is a great deal of intelligence that he tried to conceal from me, and from others who tried to help him. I don’t think I ever really understood him. I will tell you one thing I used to think, sometimes, when he was talking to me, when he was going on about how the old people had taught him how to hunt, how he could hide himself from anyone and run for days in pursuit of his prey. You don’t want to know the detail. It isn’t pleasant to recall, not at the moment.’

  I stared at him. ‘What was the one thing you were going to tell me?’

  ‘I found myself wondering: what if it is all true? What if his world is no less real than ours?’

  Then Stephen Gunnerton began to make shooing gestures with his arms, as if I were a hen or a sheep.

  ‘You must go
,’ he said. ‘So must I. Michael will come looking for me soon, Mrs Gascoigne. He might be on his way here now. He thinks I’m his enemy, someone who tried to take his life away from him. Maybe he thinks you’re his enemy, too. I don’t plan to let Michael Gascoigne find me. I don’t know what happened to Alex Grant and I don’t want to find out the hard way. Yes, the police have been here, a little man called Henshaw. Thank God, he seems competent. Maybe they’ll find Michael first, but I’m not taking any chances. Goodbye, Mrs Gascoigne, and good luck.’

  16

  He Could Run for Days in Pursuit of His Prey

  I left Stephen Gunnerton’s clinic, and I walked and walked. At first I headed towards home but then I realised there was no point. I didn’t have a home. There was a flat I still had the keys to, but I didn’t have a home. A home was somewhere you came back to, and somebody else was there doing the crossword, or writing out golf team lists for his club, and usually a home had a dog in it, which lifted its black head and thumped its tail when you came in. I didn’t have a home, I didn’t have a dog, and I didn’t have a husband.

  There was someone out there who used to be my husband, who used to say in a dull grey voice, ‘Looks like the sun might come out later,’ when he knew and I knew that I was just off to work for nine hours in a crowded open-plan office that barely let in any light at all. How bad had that really been? It had seemed as if it had been bad, painfully bad sometimes, but all the time I was grinding my teeth at the monotony of his conversation, or the even greater monotony of no conversation at all, I hadn’t known what this would feel like, this fractured reality, and I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a terrible abyss.

  I wondered how long it would be before the police caught him. Not long, I supposed, with their devices for tracking mobile phones, and their CCTVs on every corner: somewhereMikey would emerge from whichever shadows he had wrapped himself in and then they would have him. They couldn’t lock him away in jail. He would be put in a ‘secure institution’. Perhaps after a few years they would rebuild my beloved Mikey, re-engineer him with more drugs, shatter the bad parts of his brain, the bits they didn’t understand, with more powerful chemicals. Then they might eventually hand him back to me, my very own bespoke grey zombie unable to feed himself.

  Suddenly I felt very tired, very cold and very alone. I reached into my bag and pulled out my mobile. It was after one o’clock. I had been in some sort of a trance for the last few hours and now I was God knows where, somewhere in Fulham probably, without the slightest recollection of how I had got here. I looked at the phone and saw that I had a missed call, from a few minutes ago. I hadn’t heard the phone ring, but it must have done. It was from Mary Robinson. I didn’t really want to speak to Mary at the moment, but then I realised I needed some form of human contact or I would start to go mad myself.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ said Mary’s voice. ‘I rang your office and they said you were away from your desk. I rang twice and I rang your mobile twice. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m not at work,’ I explained. ‘I’m just wandering about, trying to think things through.’

  ‘Well, get over here as fast as you can,’ said Mary. ‘Peter and the club secretary are here, and they want to see you.’

  The last thing I wanted to do was talk to Peter or that dreadful old man Verey-Jones, whom I had met once or twice at Grouchers functions I had been unable to excuse myself from. But before I could think of a reason not to go, Mary said, ‘They’ve seen Michael.’

  ‘What? Where? What was he doing?’

  Mary wouldn’t tell me and just repeated that I should get over there as soon as possible. By some miracle of divine intervention, an empty taxi came along a few minutes later, probably the only taxi to go along that road in weeks. I flagged it down and gave the driver Mary’s address.

  On the way I tried to think where they could possibly have seen Mikey. Did that mean he was in custody? By the time the taxi reached Peter and Mary’s, I was nearly frantic. I paid the driver off, overtipped in my hurry, went up the steps of the terraced house where the Robinsons lived and pressed the bell. Mary must have been watching out for me because she opened the door so suddenly I almost fell on my face on the doormat.

  ‘They’re in the drawing room,’ was all she said, but as she led me down the corridor she took my hand and gave it a squeeze. When we entered the drawing room, Peter Robinson and Alwyn Verey-Jones were sitting side by side on the sofa, looking uncomfortable. Peter’s forehead gleamed with perspiration, but the rest of his face was pale, almost grey. The room looked as it always did - smart, clean and lifeless. Copies of Country Life, Homes & Gardens and The World of Interiors were neatly laid out on the low glass table in front of the sofa. When I came in, Peter sprang to his feet.

  ‘Ah, Elizabeth,’ he said, turning slightly to indicate the brittle figure of Verey-Jones. ‘You know our secretary, of course?’

  ‘We’ve met,’ I said, and tried to smile, but my lips were too stiff; my whole face felt frozen.

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ said Mary, disappearing out of the door.

  ‘We’ve seen Michael,’ said Peter.

  ‘So I heard,’ I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. ‘Have the police got him? Do you know where he is now?’

  ‘If they have,’ said Verey-Jones, ‘we haven’t been informed; as for where he is now, I have not the slightest idea. But I can tell you where he was,’ he added with an air of triumph. ‘Two hours ago he was in the morning room at Grouchers at our Extraordinary General Meeting.’

  For a moment there was some confusion as Peter Robinson and Alwyn Verey-Jones talked over each other. I knew a meeting had been planned for a while, to discuss an amendment to the club’s constitution: it had arisen from the candidacy of Mr Patel. Michael had told Peter Robinson that Mr Patel no longer wanted to be proposed as a member of the club; had never, in fact, contemplated joining it and would never use it if he did become a member. Mikey told me that Peter Robinson wouldn’t hear of withdrawing his candidate: ‘The wheels have been set in motion,’ he said, ‘and besides, it’s a matter of principle. It’s Patel’s human rights we are talking about here, not to mention the future of Grouchers. I’ll pay his subscription myself, if I have to.’

  The proposed amendment to the club’s constitution simply said, ‘Any candidate who can find six supporters who have themselves been members of the club for five years, and who have known the candidate for at least that number of years, may be elected, provided in the opinion of members he is a gentleman ...’ So far so good. The sting was in the tail, in the last few words that Peter Robinson wanted to add: ‘and without reference to race, nationality, colour or religious creed.’

  It was this suggestion that was dividing Grouchers, like a sword thrust into its ample breast, and which had caused the EGM to be called. Many members, Mikey had told me, believed that whichever way the vote went future historians of Grouchers would look back and say that this meeting and this resolution, carried or not, would mark the beginning of the end for the club.

  ‘Various speeches were made from the floor,’ said Peter. ‘I made one myself, as a matter of fact. I wanted people to understand how important it is for Grouchers to evolve, and adapt to the modern world. I am rather proud of the effect it had on members.’

  From the sofa Verey-Jones said, in a dry voice, ‘It was certainly memorable for its length.’

  Peter was too distracted to allow this to annoy him. At this point Mary must have come back into the room because I found I was clutching a mug of tea. I went over to an armchair, sat down and sipped the tea gratefully.

  ‘David Martin had just taken the floor,’ said Peter shakily. ‘The morning room was full. Every member who could walk, crawl or be carried was in that room. I don’t suppose it has ever been so full. I even saw James, the day porter, lurking somewhere in the background. No one told him off; after all his job is on the line if the club is wound up.’

  ‘And mine,’ added Verey-Jones, ‘n
ot that I matter in the least.’

  ‘There was a commotion near the door,’ said Peter, ‘and then Michael appeared. He had no difficulty getting to the front of the room where the chairman and committee members were sitting because people made way for him. There was something bizarre about his appearance, although at first it didn’t quite register. Then I realised he was wearing the sort of clothes he wears when we go out stalking at Beinn Caorrun.’

  ‘Not the standard of dress we expect from our members,’ said Verey-Jones.

  Peter Robinson looked at the secretary in annoyance, and then continued: ‘There was a stain down the front of Michael’s shirt. I thought it was fruit juice at first. He had a carrier bag in his hand—’

  ‘He had brought it to the office just before going away on the golf tour,’ interrupted Verey-Jones, ‘so he must have been planning what he did next for a while.’

  Peter Robinson said: ‘He put the bag down on the table in front of Andrew Farrell and said something like, “Apologies, Chairman, may I just break in and say a few words?” Andrew nodded. Then we all realised that it wasn’t fruit juice; it was fresh blood running down the front of Michael’s shirt. Michael saw Andrew staring at the stains, looked down at himself, and then he smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Chairman, it’s not mine.” His voice was chilling.’