by Max Hardy
Dr Hanlon’s eyebrows raised, and he nodded gently. ‘There’s no pulling the wool over your eyes, is there.’ They sat staring at one another for a few seconds, neither one wavering, before Dr Hanlon continued. ‘I think I can trust you. There’s only one way to find out.’ he said, standing up and loosening the straps on her arms and wrists.
Rebecca stretched them out as he did, rubbing her hands together, letting the fingers play over the lesions on her wrists, pressurising them as she looked at Dr Hanlon. ‘I am curious.’ she said, running fingers up and down her arms, revelling in the movement that she now had, returning to her wrists again and again, and digging what finger nails she had into the open wounds.
‘Curious about what?’ Dr Hanlon asked.
‘About why you are helping me? About who you are? About where we are?’ she said, looking down towards the old trolley, then around the stained and ripped padding on the cell walls around her. ‘This place is old, nothing like the facilities I’ve come across either as a patient, or when I was a professional working in healthcare. Where are the orderlies? Where are the guards? That door has been open for the past half an hour and I haven’t seen or heard a single person walking up and down the corridor. Look at the floor out there, the parquet is lifting, the tiles are broken’ she said, her gaze returning to look at him quizzically after sweeping the room. ‘Can I have that breakfast now? I’m starving.’
‘That’s a lot of questions. A lot of curiosity.’ he reflected, lifting a plate from the trolley and putting it onto her lap. He picked up a knife and fork -a metal knife and fork- and paused, looking at her intently, before handing them over.
She took them, holding the fork up to her eye line. She then brought it forward, pushing the end of the prongs into her soft, scarred lips, continually looking at Dr Hanlon as she did, deliberately defiant. She moved the prongs onto her cheek, digging them in, the cold metal leaving four red imprints in the hollow where she applied the pressure.
‘I think,’ she began, the fork snaking up her face towards her eyeball.
‘At the moment,’ she continued, the prongs now less than a millimetre away from her contracting iris, her hand as steady as the gaze which hadn’t blinked at all while staring at Dr Hanlon.
‘The urge to eat this breakfast is probably just beating the urge to kill myself.’ With that, she dropped the fork to the plate and with the knife, cut off a piece of bacon and devoured it with obvious relish, saliva dribbling from the corner of her mouth as she continued to speak while chewing.
‘So, who are you?’ she asked mid chomp.
He sat down in his chair and crossed his legs, enjoying the vigour with which she devoured the meal. ‘Who I am isn’t important. But if it helps, I’m Ben Hanlon. I am a psychiatrist and I am here to care for you. Why you are here is important. Do you know why you were committed?’
She stopped chewing and laughed on a full mouth of food, little bits of bacon popping out of her lips. ‘I think that is pretty damn obvious isn’t it. Raving psychopath, rips the heart out of her son and eats it.’
‘You might think it’s obvious, but it’s not. You have no recollection at all, either consciously, or subconsciously of carrying out that act. Dr Ennis believes you suffer from a condition known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, that’s why you were certified. Do you know what that is?’
‘Multiple personalities.’ she shot back, straight away, devouring the last of her sausages. ‘I know that. They think Madame Evangeline is just a figment of my imagination. They are probably right. It doesn’t detract from the fact I, whichever personality that is, am a raving psychopath. I, whichever personality that is, killed my son. I, with the personality I am now, doesn’t have a clue how that happened.’ She was getting agitated as she spoke, still chewing, but now on her bottom lip, a drip of blood slipping down her chin. Her arms were shaking and her knuckles where white as she gripped the cutlery in each hand tightly and started to bang the base of each against the arms of the chair.
‘I. Still. Killed. Him.’ she pronounced, spitting each word, banging the cutlery in time. Then she stopped, suddenly, tension flowing from her body, and took the last piece of bacon from the plate, speaking as she chewed, in a convivial manner. ‘Now, stop changing the subject. Tell me why we are here. Where the hell is here?’
Dr Hanlon laughed, a huge guffaw and threw himself back into his seat. ‘Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. I am really not avoiding the subject. I am a psychiatrist. You know what we are like, we always answer a question with a question. By the way that was impressive, truly impressive self-restraint. Which only strengthens my belief that you are far from psychotic. Right. Straight answers. We are in Broadmoor, in an older part of the hospital, well away from the wards. I have been trying, unsuccessfully I may add, to bring out Madame Evangeline. In the past two weeks you have been weaned off your sedatives and have had various sessions of hypnotherapy to try and break down the mental barriers between your personality and Madame Evangeline’s. Nothing, absolutely nothing I have tried either psychologically or physiologically has found even a glimmer of a suggestion that she is inside you. She is real Rebecca. You are not delusional, you do not have DID and in my informed medical opinion you are perfectly sane, cognitive and rational, if ever so slightly OCD.’
‘But I still killed my son.’ she answered, softly, yet intently, finishing off the last of the egg on her plate.
‘You may have been involved in his death, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you killed him. We have to try and fill in the blanks of your recollection. You told me certain things under hypnosis. We need to try and get you to remember them while you are conscious and yourself. Some of the things you told me have to do with your care, how you were treated at the Fielding Institute. That’s one of the reasons I brought you to this part of the hospital, away from the main body of staff, away from anyone else who might feedback to Dr Ennis what you have already told me about him and his team, and other things you might not have remembered yet.’
He handed her a napkin, taking the empty plate from her. She wiped her lips, wiped the blood off her chin and started to play with the edge ply of the napkin between her thumb and forefinger, the rest balled into her hand. Her eyes were welling up with tears, and she dabbed them away with the napkin. ‘I want to understand why, I want to understand how. If you have found out things in my subconscious that can help me make some sense of this, give some credence to the madness of it all, then I want to know. I promise, I will not try and harm myself: at least, not until we have worked out what happened. After that, I can’t promise anything.’
He reached over and cupped both of his hands over her balled fist holding the napkin and squeezed. She didn’t pull away, she looked down with the saddest smile on her lips as he said, ‘I will do everything in my power to help you remember, to help you get to the truth, to help you understand: I promise that. After that, hopefully we won’t need promises, hopefully you will see a light that’s worth following.’
‘Thank you Doc.’ she said, putting her free hand over his. ‘One thing I do remember, one thing I always knew, but never told anyone. I didn’t think it was important and to be honest, given what even I thought about my state of mind, it could have been just one of my own delusions. Now I know it wasn’t. It’s about Dr Ennis.’
‘Go on.’ encouraged Ben.
‘When I told you earlier that I knew what he was like, how I knew all about his voyeuristic tendencies. It wasn’t just what happened in the hospital, it wasn’t just that I have lived those tendencies too. After the first time I went to the lap dancing club, on the hen night, I went back many, many times afterwards. To that club and many others. As a voyeur, you like to keep your anonymity. Going back to the same place too many times gets you known, it takes the edge of the thrill. However, you do start to see regulars, people with the same fetishes. I started to go to straight as well as gay clubs, to be honest, anywhere I could watch. It was in one particular S&M club I had visited a few t
imes that I saw him. He was there every time. I didn’t know who he was and never spoke to him. I just saw him. It was only the very first time I was being fingered by a guard at the institute, and caught the sight of him staring at me through the door, masturbating, that the memory of him came back to me. It was Dr Ennis, he used to frequent the S&M clubs in Edinburgh.’
7:30 am
The deep resonating thrum of a yellow Air-Sea Rescue helicopter rose above the background noise of early morning traffic driving past on the A1 trunk road next to the Services that Saul was parked up in. He was leaning against the boot of his SLK, still in his Tux, drinking a coffee. He watched the helicopter fly overhead and out towards Holy Island, the Castle on the Island just coming into silhouette as the dawn broke in talons of ruddy orange on the horizon out to sea behind it. A filthy, scratched and dented grey Volvo, the driver’s wing mirror held in place with gaffer tape, pulled off the main road and parked up beside him. A few seconds behind it, wailing sirens announcing its arrival before it could be seen, a police car sped by and took a right turn onto the road towards the Island.
Saul stood and picked up another coffee which was sitting on the boot of his car and watched as a burly, broad, blonde haired man stepped out of the Volvo. He was wearing a Mac that was covered in dog hair. Barking could be heard as he shut the car door, shouting, ‘Shut yer yappin, Jackson.’ before turning to Saul, looking him up and down.
‘Do I need some secret passcode to talk to you then? The pheasants in Lothian are remarkably gamey for a chilly October, or some such nonsense?’ he said as Saul proffered him the coffee.
Saul frowned, ‘No, just a hello will do. It’s not my usual getup, trust me. John Saul, DI Bentley I presume?’ he said, offering his hand to shake as Bentley took the coffee.
‘Aye, that’s me, let’s get the jokes over now. Names Fenny Bentley. There’s nothing you can say I haven’t heard before, so try your worst.’ he dared Saul, wiping his hand on his raincoat, which covered it in more dog hair, before grabbing Saul’s hand and shaking it vigorously. ‘What in god’s name is the commotion with the helicopter and blues and two’s all about. Some kind of raid going on?’ he asked, looking down the road at the receding flashing lights on the police car.
‘I doubt it. Someone is probably stranded on the causeway to the Island again. The tide will have come in and caught them. That’s usually why the helicopter comes out. There are huge signs up warning people not to cross when the tide is coming in, but it must just be in our DNA to ignore the bloody things. They have to rescue hundreds of people a year for the same stupid mistake. It costs a fortune.’ said Saul.
‘Aye, there’s nowt as queer as folk. Tell them not to do something and bugger me, they will. So, I hear you Sassenachs have stumbled onto one of our old cases.’ Bentley said, joining Saul in leaning on the boot of the SLK, both of them watching the traffic now as it sped past on the A1, the sun rising behind them.
‘I wouldn’t say stumbled, more setup. We’ve also just found out that Rebecca Angus has gone missing, either broken out of the Institute or kidnapped.’
‘Jeez, it’s a bad day knowing that loon isn’t locked away safely. Now if it was me, I would have strung the bitch up straight away. I’m surprised she never managed to top herself, the amount of times she tried. Would have done us all a favour.’
‘Did you ever have anyone come and visit her while she was in custody, specifically an Irishman by the name of Hanlon, Ben Hanlon?’ Saul asked.
‘No. No one at all came to see her. She had no family. She was an orphan. Been in and out of care and foster homes. Also spent the odd spell in juvenile centres when she was a kid. She was ‘married’ to another dyke for a while and they had the son, Michael. Sick if you ask me. Took the egg out of Rebecca, implanted it into her missus. Bobs your uncle, fanny’s your aunt, or in this case fanny’s your uncle as well, and you’ve got a bastard baby. Her missus died in a car crash as they were going to hospital to give birth to Michael. Justice of a sorts. She never mentioned anyone of that name.’
‘What about Madame Evangeline. What did you find out about her?’
Bentley smirked, shaking his head as he did so. ‘There was no Madame Evangeline. If you want my opinion, she made her up so we would all think she was a sandwich short of a picnic. Worked too, kept her out of real prison and on her jollies in a hospital. We checked out every single sex club that Rebecca told us about, and believe me, there were lots, just about every single one in the Lothian area, a few I didn’t even know about. No one, not one person ever recalled seeing Rebecca with anyone else. Everyone recognised Rebecca. There’s a photo-fit in the evidence boxes of how Rebecca described this Evangeline tart. She’s the spit of Rebecca but with red hair.’
‘Yes, Dr Ennis gave me a copy of that.’
‘We talked to the club owners and showed them the photo-fit. They said that’s how Rebecca would come in occasionally. That’s why Dr Ennis thought she was schizo. Same person, different colour hair, schizo personality.’
‘Did anyone from the clubs have any kind of relationship with her?’
‘You might think that. I mean, if you are going to a sex club, the least you think you would be getting is a good shag. She didn’t. She watched. She just watched. Pervert. No one can even recall a conversation with her beyond a polite hello. She was a loner. A crazy loon.’
Saul took a sideways look at him, disdain on his face. ‘Do you want to tone down the bigoted comments a little there?’
Bentley turned too, curling his lip in a sneer as he answered. ‘Look, you arrogant twat, I just speak as I find, if you don’t like it, then fuck off. I’ve trawled my arse all the way down that excuse of a road for the past hour to help you out. I’d welcome a little gratitude rather than attitude.’ he said, coffee spilling on his hands and down onto his and Saul’s trousers as he raised the cup animatedly while speaking. ‘Fuck, now look what you’ve made me do.’ he finished, wiping the spill on his Mac.
‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry.’ Saul began, rubbing the coffee off himself. ‘We do appreciate the time you’ve spared us assisting in our efforts to stop a potential murderer. What about her son. What did you find out about their relationship?’
‘Well now, she definitely did fuck him, and if you try to tell me that’s not sick, then you are one twisted prick too.’ he challenged.
Saul didn’t bite. ‘Anything else about their relationship.’ he asked.
Bentley backed down slightly. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, other than that. They were close according to her work colleagues, even after he went to Uni. He still went home a couple of times a month and would call her regularly. He had a circle of friends at Uni. None of them were aware he was having a sexual relationship with his mother. He had been seeing a few girls but hadn’t been in any long term serious relationships. He hadn’t tried any kinky stuff with them. His best friend, a Joe Magnus, had no idea he enjoyed gimping up. None of the neighbours where she lived knew them that well either.’
‘Did she ever talk about visiting an old, dilapidated country house out in Northumberland, either by herself or with her son?’
‘No, not that I can recall. She did talk about visiting Madame Evangeline’s place, or what she thought was Madame Evangeline’s place, on the night of Michael’s murder. That’s where she claimed to have killed him, but she never described it as dilapidated.’
‘Hold on, I thought she killed him in her flat?’
‘She did. However, during questioning she claimed the three of them had left a New Year’s Eve Masquerade Ball in a taxi and gone back to what she thought was Madame Evangeline’s apartment. In another story, she has them getting into a limousine. She couldn’t remember how they got there or even where there was. She could only describe the sick sex they got up during the journey and when they arrived. We checked out the sex club hosting the ball. They remember her and a guy all gimped up, presumably her son, but no one else with them. CCTV has them getting into a taxi, and that taxi
took them back to her flat. All just part of her schizo life.’ said Bentley, finishing off his coffee and throwing the cup on the floor.
‘Apart from the sick sex, was there anything else that stood out about the apartment she described?’ asked Saul.
‘I’ve told you, it was her screwed up mind, it wasn’t real: she wasn’t really there. She was at her flat ripping the fucking heart out of her son. Look, I have to get back to a real case, where there are real murderers to catch. Get the files, and if you’ve got any more stupid fucking questions, look in them.’ he scowled, going to his car and opening the boot. A black lab covered in mud jumped out and made a beeline for Saul, sniffing his trouser leg before pissing up against him.
Bentley laughed, ‘Good boy Jackson,’ he said, ‘Open your boot up.’ he ordered Saul, who was trying to get out of the dogs way. Saul blipped it with his key and it popped open.
‘So, she didn’t describe anything like a black fireplace, with gargoyles and cherubs on it. Or leather chesterfield sofas. How about a Steinway grand piano?’ Saul asked, frustration evident in his tone as he tried to avoid the dog circling him.
Bentley threw the box into the boot and turned to face him abruptly. ‘How do you know that?’ he questioned, confusion in his chubby features. ‘Yes, that’s exactly how she described the apartment.’
‘Then it wasn’t a figment of her imagination,’ Saul answered, shaking his leg as the dog started to chew on the bottom of the trouser, ‘because that’s where we found her son’s exhumed body this morning.’
7:52 am
‘These clubs don’t have big flashing neon lights outside. They are a lot more discreet, a lot more private. I found out about the first one I went to from Destiny, the hostesses at the lap dancing bar. After frequenting Labia’s for a number of months, I suppose becoming a regular, one evening she slipped a card into my hand as I was going into a booth to watch. She said to me, ‘If you fancy something a little different, try this. Take the card and let them know I sent you. There’s a lot more to watch, and to take part in.’ she continued, smiling, stroking the back of her hand down my cheek as I walked by. ‘You never know, you might see me there.’ she finished. I flushed red immediately, with embarrassment but also with the sharp thrill of excitement that her touch sent searing through my body. The place was called ‘Sodom & Gomorrah’s’ with the S&M’s emboldened on the card. There was an address and a note about the dress code: Leather. It was only a ten minute walk away from Labia’s.’
