Lost Lives (Emily Swanson Mystery Thriller Series Book 1)

by Malcolm Richards

  “Miserable, isn’t it?” Claudine sighed. “Her wall of pain, Reina called it. I can’t imagine trying to sleep in here at night.”

  Emily moved from photograph to photograph, from article to article, feeling Reina’s anguish and outrage sink fingers into her chest, piercing its stone-like veneer. Suddenly, she felt small and insignificant, with nothing to offer the world that would help to heal it. But that was wrong. She did have something. She had Alina Engel. And now she had Reina Tammerworth. They mattered, and so did finding them.

  Downstairs, a telephone began to ring.

  “I should answer that,” Claudine said, glad to have a reason to pull herself from the gloom. “Probably a sales call. I tell them not to bother, but they just can’t help themselves. Close the door behind you when you’ve finished looking. And try not to touch anything. Reina doesn’t like it when things get moved around. She can always tell.”

  When she was certain she was alone, Emily moved to the desk and pawed through notes and documents. Most of it was related to various world crises past and present, her more recent research concerning the implosion of the global economy.

  There had to be something here; evidence that had driven her to seek out Alina and to advise Rosa to be careful of whom she trusted at Ever After. The question that Emily now asked herself was, evidence of what? Did this have something to do with one of Reina’s conspiracy theories? Emily wasn’t so sure. The theories Reina obsessed over were of global proportions that involved whole nations, entire cultures and continents. The more Emily thought about it as she waded through wads of notes, web printouts and clippings, the more preposterous it seemed that Alina might be tied to one of Reina’s shadowy theories.

  Eyeing the computer monitor, Emily glanced over her shoulder, then ducked under the desk to hit the power button on the systems tower. The monitor lit up. As she waited for the system to boot, she pulled open the desk drawer. A stack of three notebooks sat inside. Picking them up, she read each handwritten label. Carmilla: Ravenshill Clinic, 1977. Carmilla: Ravenshill Clinic—Patient interviews; Carmilla: Ravenshill Clinic—Doctors Chelmsford and Williams.

  Emily felt her pulse quicken. There it was. The link.

  A sudden burst of noise blared from the computer’s speakers, announcing that the system had finished booting. A login form flashed on the screen, requesting Emily to enter a username and password. She was about to search through the desk again, to see if she might find them written down somewhere, when Claudine’s voice rang out from downstairs.

  “Are you finished up there?”

  Emily stared from the computer screen to the notebooks, suspecting that Claudine’s bizarre lack of suspicion had now been stretched thin.

  Her heart palpitated. Shutting down the computer, she stared at the notebooks in her hand. She had to take them. She had no choice. Lifting up her pullover, she stuffed the books down the back of her jeans. Once she had disguised them as best as she could, she gave Reina’s room one last look, then headed out towards the stairs.

  “Did you close the door?” Claudine asked, once she had re-joined her in the living room.

  Emily nodded. “Thank you very much for your time, Mrs Tammerworth.”

  “Claudine,” the elderly woman said, a hint of a frown rippling her brow.

  “Claudine,” Emily repeated. The notebooks pressed against the small of her back.

  “Are you going now? You won’t stay for more tea?”

  “I should probably catch my train. The snow has the whole network on red alert. A couple of flakes on the line and mass hysteria ensues.”

  “Quite. You must at least wait for your taxi.”

  In her haste, Emily had forgotten that she would need a ride back to the station. Calling the taxi company, she hurried out into the hallway, pulled the notebooks from their hiding place and slung them into her bag. She returned to the living room with her coat buttoned up and the bag over her shoulder.

  “Thanks again,” she said, aware that her desire to leave this house was all too apparent. “I hope Reina calls you soon. And I’m sure she’ll be back in time to celebrate Christmas with you.”

  Claudine was silent, staring into space. When she looked up again, it was as if all the loneliness she felt was etched into her features.

  “When I was your age, maybe a little younger, I hadn’t a care in the world,” she said. “The idea of having children didn’t come easily to me. I was happy with who I was. I enjoyed my marriage, our social engagements, time alone with my friends. The idea of giving birth filled me with terror. But it was the responsibility of caring for the life I created that really frightened me. What if I got it wrong? What if my mistakes meant my children would grow up to lead troubled lives? When I became pregnant with Carmilla, it was as if time stopped. At first I was angry. I wanted her out of me. But gradually, as she grew bigger, as I felt her kicking inside me, I changed. Whether it was my hormones or a change in attitude I don’t know, but suddenly, I couldn’t imagine leaving this earth without having given something back to it.”

  She glanced over at the photographs on the mantelpiece, the irony of those last words hanging bitterly in the room.

  “I’ll be sure to tell Reina you came by.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By the time the train pulled into Blackfriars station, darkness had fallen. Frustrated passengers spewed from cramped carriages onto the platform and ran for connecting trains.

  Her anxiety levels reaching dizzying heights, Emily stumbled through the hordes towards the station exit. Outside, the snow was dissolving into banks of black slush. Bus stop queues were long and dense, the buses so overcrowded that the possibility of catching a ride back to The Holmeswood became remoter by the second.

  Deciding to walk, Emily hurried through the busy streets. On the train, she had been too preoccupied with counting her breaths to look at the stolen notebooks. Now, she could feel the weight of them in her bag, guilt making them as heavy as rocks.

  She thought about Claudine Tammerworth. To have Carmilla stolen away from her, snatched from her arms—it was unimaginable how deep the hole left behind might be. Another child entered her mind. She closed down her thoughts, but there he was, his face among passing pedestrians, his eyes boring into her. Phillip.

  Emily quickened her pace. Soon, she was in familiar territory. She could see The Holmeswood looming up ahead, and opposite, the brightly lit window of Il Cuore.

  She headed towards the café and peering through the glass, saw Jerome taking down orders from a table of customers. Deciding not to interrupt him, she turned to cross the road. Then she stopped dead in her tracks.

  Standing outside The Holmeswood was a giant of a man. He was in his mid-forties, dressed in work overalls and a donkey jacket. Dark hair was shaved to the scalp and two day old stubble shadowed his jaw. He had a wrestler’s build, one whose formidable muscle tone had begun to slacken with age but was no less intimidating for it. The man stood, unmoving. Passing crowds took a wide berth around him, as if a magnetic force thrust them away. He stared at Emily, his eyes black and narrow. She could feel his gaze seeping into her like poison, paralysing her cell by cell, until she could not move.

  Behind her in the café, Jerome poured coffee and took more orders. Customers chatted and read newspapers. Emily tried to turn, but it was as if unseen hands were holding her there, a prisoner to the man’s glare. She waited for him to move. To cross the road towards her. To say something. But the man remained where he was, sending out waves of anger and malevolence, his cruel eyes unblinking.

  Then, he slowly turned, stared up at The Holmeswood, and strode away, stalking through the crowds until he came to a side street and disappeared.

  Now that he was gone, Emily found she could move again. She turned to see Jerome arguing with one of the baristas before storming off towards the kitchen. She looked towards The Holmeswood. Trembling, she saw a break in the traffic and bolted across the road.

  Inside, she waited for the li
ft to make its creaky descent. Twice she looked over her shoulder towards the front door, scanning the crowds through the glass and wondering who the man could have been. His presence still lingered, pervading her body like disease, refusing to leave. Who was he? The more she thought about it, the more certain she was of his identity. Karl Henry. If she was right it could only mean one thing—that she was stumbling (albeit blindly) towards the truth, getting closer to Alina. The realization both thrilled and frightened her.

  But then a moment of clarity struck her. Who was Emily Swanson but a little brown mouse from the backend of nowhere; the quiet girl at school who was the subject of playground whispers and taunts? The girl who had no father, whose mother was strange and nervous, never making eye contact with the other villagers. The girl who had no friends, who went straight home from school, never daring to hang out in the square after dusk with the other kids, drinking stolen alcohol. What was this brown mouse doing, involving herself in matters so grave and worrisome that she now felt endangered?

  The lift shuddered open and Andrew Golding stepped out. He was dressed in a long tweed winter coat and matching trilby, and reeked of cheap cologne.

  “Good evening,” he said in his odd, formal way.

  Startled, it took a moment for Emily to find her voice. “Hello, Andrew. Going out?”

  His body made little jerking forward movements, as if it were trying to squeeze by Emily unnoticed. He stared down at his feet, then puffed out his chest.

  “Yes. Sometimes mother falls asleep early, so I like to leave her in peace.”

  Emily stepped to one side to let him pass. He remained in the lift.

  Leaning towards her, he dropped his voice to a whisper, he said, “Sometimes I like to meet women. Mother doesn’t like it. She gets jealous, you see. She doesn’t like to be left alone.”

  His left eye twitched and as if regretting his spontaneous confession, he scowled at Emily, nodded goodbye and prowled towards the front door.

  The lift took her upwards, lights blinking all the way. Stepping out into the hall, she darted towards her apartment and let herself in, locking the door and sliding the bolt into place. Next, she moved from room to room, switching on every light until the apartment was lit up like a department store window display. When every shadow had been exorcised, she opened the bathroom medicine cabinet and stared at the array of pill bottles lined up like bowling pins. She selected one, tapped out a capsule into her palm, and swallowed it down with handfuls of water.

  ***

  When Jerome arrived an hour later, Emily’s head was as light as clouds. Any trace of fear was gone.

  “From your description I’d say that sounds like him. But that’s not good news, Emily. I’ve said it before, Karl Henry is someone to stay very much away from.”

  They were sat down at the table, Reina Tammerworth’s notebooks in front of them.

  “Are you all right? You’ve lost some colour.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Frowning, Jerome returned his attention to Reina’s notes. “Well let’s take a look through these and see what we can find. And if we do find something incriminating, no matter how small, then that’s it—we take it to the police and we’re done with the whole thing. I for one have no intention of going missing or getting myself killed.”

  Emily floated back to the room, her eyes focusing on the two newspaper articles she’d found tucked inside the first notebook: Carmilla: Ravenshill Clinic, 1977. They were small stories, not sensationalist enough to have been awarded the front pages of the nationals, but still lurid enough to be featured. Both articles contained the same grainy black and white photograph—Carmilla Tammerworth’s portrait taken in her final year of school. She looked so young and happy, and yet on closer inspection there was something off about her expression, a shadow across the eyes.

  DOCTORS INVESTIGATED AFTER TEEN MENTAL PATIENT DIES, screamed the headline of the first article. It told much of the same story that Claudine had relayed. Carmilla Tammerworth, seventeen, was admitted to Ravenshill Clinic under the care of Doctor Chelmsford for the treatment of anorexia nervosa—a mental health condition that had only recently reached public awareness. Just one week into treatment, the young girl, who had loved dancing and the arts, was dead. An ongoing inquest to determine the cause of death revealed an unusually high level of barbiturates in Carmilla’s blood. The clinic’s director, Doctor Chelmsford, and his associate, Doctor Williams, were working with police to rule out claims of malpractice. Psychiatrist Chelmsford stated that Tammerworth developed pneumonia during the treatment process due to an irreparably damaged immune system.

  The second article began with the headline, DEATH CLINIC TO CLOSE—FUNDERS BACK OUT. Although an inquest determined Carmilla Tammerworth’s death had been the result of starvation and self-neglect, and not by any form of malpractice, Ravenshill Clinic was set to close after its main investors pulled their funding. Speculation suggested that the stigma of a young girl’s death was one they did not wish to be attached to. Their unease was made all the more palpable following public complaints made by a fellow patient, who claimed to have been drugged and treated without his consent. Although these claims were unfounded, they sealed the fate of the recently opened clinic.

  Moving onto the notebook, Emily skimmed through the barely legible scrawl to find more of the same—details of Carmilla’s death and of Ravenshill’s closure—and a number of thoughts, memos and cryptic lists that made no sense outside of Reina Tammerworth’s mind. One thing was clear, however—Reina was angry. Angry that her sister had been taken away from her. Angry that a gross injustice had been exacted, which no one else was prepared to rebuke.

  “Anything interesting?” Jerome asked

  “Nothing Claudine didn’t already tell me.” Perturbed, Emily looked down at the newspaper articles. It hadn’t been so long ago that her own name had been in print, surrounded by scandalous words. “How about you?”

  Jerome leafed through the second notebook: Carmilla: Ravenshill Clinic—Patient Interviews.

  “These are going to take a while to read through. But from a quick glance it looks like Reina was in contact with at least four former patients from Ravenshill. Looks like there’s handwritten interview transcripts with those patients, and with family members of patients who died.”

  “Died how exactly?”

  Jerome flipped through the pages, his face lining with concern as he read aloud.

  “‘A year after Ravenshill’s closure, seven of its patients were dead, either from seizures brought on by irreversible brain damage or by suicide. By then, both doctors had discreetly gone their separate ways. Doctor Chelmsford spent a number of years practising psychiatry in Australia, before vanishing seemingly into thin air. Doctor Williams worked a number of private practices before establishing the Ever After Care Foundation in nineteen eighty-five. Whether they were in touch during that time has yet to be determined.’”

  Jerome paused, allowing the magnitude of his findings to sink in. Emily picked up the last notebook: Carmilla: Ravenshill Clinic—Doctors Chelmsford and Williams.

  “The good doctors studied medicine together,” she said, skimming through the first few pages of notes. “Chelmsford later retrained in psychiatry. They founded Ravenshill in January, nineteen seventy-four. Large asylums were under heavy scrutiny. With doctors now preferring the use of pharmaceuticals over incarceration, most were shut down. Ravenshill was established as a centre for rehabilitation, treating both mental health and addiction issues. It lasted precisely eight months.”

  Jerome read another passage. “‘Patients complained of unorthodox and experimental treatments being used, with some claiming they were administered drugs without their consent, or were held at the clinic against their will. Other patients reported waking up naked and soiled in their hospital bed, not knowing where they were or what had happened to them. David Sigworth was the first patient to complain to authorities. His claims were discredited as the ravings of an alcoholi
c and drug user attempting to cash in on the very real tragedy of Carmilla’s death. Sigworth himself was dead three months later, the result of a heroin overdose.’”

  An unnerving silence fell across the table.

  “This is all hearsay,” Jerome said, when the quiet began to overwhelm. “It’s really disturbing hearsay, but it’s hearsay all the same.”

  Emily opened the browser on her laptop and headed to theunsavourytruth.com. Clicking on the site’s search engine, she typed in Ravenshill Clinic.

  “There,” she said, tapping the screen. The search had found one result, an article written by a site contributor named TruthTeller74. “Nineteen seventy-four—the year Carmilla died.”

  Posted in July, a month before Alina’s disappearance, the article was titled DARK MEDICINE: EXPOSING THE LEGACY OF THE DOCTORS OF DEATH, and it detailed much of the contents of Reina’s notebooks, some of it verbatim. They scrolled through until they came to her final words, which Emily read aloud.

  “‘If the inhumane experimentation that patients were subjected to had occurred even two decades before, then perhaps this would be the point where, as fellow human beings, we shamefully hang our heads in acknowledgement of more draconian times. However, we are talking about the nineteen seventies, when attitudes towards mental health were beginning to shift towards empathy and understanding—a shift which Doctors Alan Chelmsford and Augustine Williams wilfully ignored. To forget their crimes—for their actions are indeed criminal—is to turn our backs on the innocent victims they perpetrated. Carmilla Tammerworth, my sister, was one of those victims. It is my intent to bring these despicable men to justice. With fresh evidence, I will prove that their cruelty reached far beyond the walls of Ravenshill Clinic.’”

  The post came to an end. Emily stared at the words on the screen, reading them over, hoping she had missed some small detail that would point her to the truth of what was happening at the Ever After Care Foundation. Frustrated, she stood and moved over to the windows. Fresh snow fell down. Over in the next building, people cooked and watched television, getting on with normal lives.