Father of Lies

by Sarah England

  She stuck a finger in her ear and shouted into the phone, over the noise of passing medics. “Are you all right, Jack?”

  A screeching noise came over the air waves like a microphone fault, before the line cut dead.

  She speed-dialled straight back but there was no reply.

  She rang Claire.

  “Yes,” said Claire. “There is something wrong - he’s behaving really oddly. It’s bizarre.”

  “In what way?”

  Claire hesitated. “Oh God, Kristy, I don’t know if I should say.”

  “Claire - he’s just been talking to me in gobble-de-gook. What’s going on - is he ill?”

  Claire’s answer flew at her in a panic. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t. All I know is he’s rushing about giggling to himself. Swearing. Stuff like that.”

  “Sounds like he needs time off. He’s not seeing patients, is he?”

  “Well he went off sick after treating Ruby a couple of weeks ago - he did some hypnosis on her and Ruby had a bad reaction - it really drained him. Anyway, we thought he was better, but yesterday when he came into the team meeting he clearly wasn’t well - he was acting strangely and really rude to Martha. No one thought it was a good idea but he went off to talk to Ruby. Becky tried to stop him but she had an accident - tripped - and because we all rushed to help her we couldn’t stop him in time. We didn‘t realise.”

  “What happened?”

  “Noah caught him putting Ruby into a trance. He didn’t think he’d got very far with it, but Ruby was completely unresponsive for hours, and she hasn‘t properly come round again since. It’s like she’s not really with us - just staring into the distance. And he disappeared afterwards without a word. I hate to say this but he’s really scaring us. With Becky still in hospital…”

  “What? Becky’s in hospital? I thought you said she just tripped - I was picturing a sprained ankle or something.”

  “No - she fell against the crash trolley and hit her head - it’s suspected concussion and they’re keeping her in for a second night. Kristy, I think Jack’s having some kind of breakdown. And now he’s…”

  “Have you spoken to Hannah?”

  “Yes. I was really uncomfortable about it but she jumped at me down the phone - pouring it all out - his insomnia, outbursts, foul language - moving furniture in the middle of the night, smirking to himself - oh all sorts of stuff. She’s got one of the children sleep walking and another saying one of her dolls is talking to her during the night. She sounded at the end of her rope, to be honest.”

  Kristy listened to the static coming down the phone for a moment, while her thoughts processed. First they had to get Jack away from the patients. She’d need to speak to Isaac Hardy as soon as possible. No one needed a consultant psychiatrist with a mental breakdown treating forensic patients. Jack needed help and he needed it immediately.

  Next she had to see Ruby: there was a connection between her and Tommy for sure, and Jack McGowan going off the rails was not going to stop her helping her clients. Finally, the whole thing was vital to her research project: Disassociative Identity Disorder was political, and she was going to back its existence and pioneer its treatment if it was the very last thing she did.

  “Claire. First things first. What’s been done about Jack? He can’t be allowed to treat patients the way he is.”

  “Yes well we’ve tried to talk to him but as I was about to say, he’s barricaded himself into his office. Someone’s coming from the crisis team as soon as possible, and yesterday Isaac informed the Board of Directors, so he’s technically suspended.”

  “I beg your pardon? Boarded himself in? I’m so glad I rang you - I had no idea. Oh poor Jack. Poor Hannah! Oh my God.”

  “You know, what happened with Ruby was really traumatic, but I never thought Jack would crack under the strain. Never. I always thought he’d be the very last psychiatrist on earth to let it get to him.”

  “Me too. It’s come at the worst possible time too because you’ve had a breakthrough with Ruby and I’ve had a breakthrough here - we’re onto something! There’s a connection, I’m sure of it. So with or without Jack, our work has to go on - I need to see Ruby. Well actually I’d like to oversee her care altogether - something I was going to talk to Jack about. Would tomorrow afternoon be all right if I come over?”

  “Yes - tomorrow’s fine. Ruby’s stable, although not talking. Jack wasn’t with her long.”

  ***

  Kristy’s lecture was delivered on auto-pilot, her thoughts elsewhere - Woodsend village: Tommy Blackmore had grown up there. Admitted a couple of years ago as a young adult with chronic depression and symptoms of P.T.S.D. he’d been slow to respond to therapy, but once he’d been on the ward for a while, the staff noticed he lost hours of time in trance like states - often lying on the floor sucking his thumb with no recollection afterwards of having done so. A diagnosis of DID. was eventually made after episodes of switching personalities had been observed. With 90% of D.I.D. cases originating from child abuse, Kristy had started to ask his alters, when they presented, more searching questions about his life growing up in Woodsend.

  Then on hearing about Ruby she’d started to wonder. Could it be that both patients had been victims of child abuse in that particular village?

  There was more evidence to substantiate the theory. After a few hours Googling, ‘Woodsend’, she’d stumbled on the witch hunt articles from 1996: a lady called Celeste Frost had been hounded from her home by villagers who claimed she was a black witch. All sorts of ‘goings-on’ had been cited, from black cats appearing at their windows, to sudden childhood illnesses, to chanting distinctly heard through the thin walls of her council house. Then a young girl found spinning on her head had been taken from her farmhouse home by police after her grandmother claimed the girl had been a victim of witchcraft.

  1996 - so both Ruby and Tommy would have been around eight years old. What was going on there? Anything, or a series of coincidences? Certainly there was no denying both Tommy and Ruby had similar symptoms. That kind of serious mental illness didn’t happen for no reason. Had that woman gathered together some kind of satanic cult involving children? And what had Jack found out during the hypnosis session, which had left him seriously disturbed? It would have been good to talk to Becky, who had witnessed it, but, and there was another coincidence - Becky was also off work!

  Well, with the pressure having got to Jack, she’d have to get to the bottom of this alone. Maybe start with a drive out to Woodsend when she’d finished up here? Just to get the feel of the place. See it for herself.

  ***

  At just before 4 p.m. Kristy jumped into her white Audi A4 and backed out of the cramped, hospital staff car-park. The plan was to make a quick detour to Woodsend and then back to her city flat.

  It would be nicer, far nicer though, to go straight home. Home as it now was for a divorced consultant psychiatrist - comfortable, spacious, elegant and all white. White walls punctuated with shockingly bright paintings. White rugs on polished floorboards. White bedclothes. Lots of sparkling crystal. Shards of light. A kind of heavenly, high-rise duplex, a cocoon in the sky - from where, depending on which direction you looked, you could see the neon city lights reflected from rooftops, or fleeting clouds scudding over the moors on a blue-sky day. Most of all - it was a retreat. For God only knew, a psychiatrist needed to re-centre themselves after a day with the most disturbed and disturbing people on earth.

  All a far cry, and sometimes the sadness welled up inside, from the life originally envisaged in what now seemed another lifetime. But life moved on like the rushing of a river downstream, to the inevitable. So here she was. Craving solitude. Searching for the meaning inside her.

  Alone and without distractions, her sharp, incisive mind focused on the mission - to lead the way in the treatment of patients with identity disorders. Without doubt her obsessive dedication had taken its toll. Relationships, friendships, a social life - all had fallen away to the edges of he
r consciousness, with the red-blooded woman in her swallowed by the machine she had become. Her whole being now concentrated on breaking through to the cause, treatment and future for these damaged people.

  A migraine sparked suddenly in the trigeminal nerve above her right eye, as her thoughts deepened, tunnelling through the doorways of her mind as each fresh seam of ideas opened up. The sickly cramp escalated rapidly, forcing her to pull over and take an habitual supply of Sumatriptan and Migraleve with a few gulps of bottled water. She’d be okay for a while, but the fatigue would hit soon. Probably an hour. She pushed aside the annoyance, firing up the ignition again - the curse of the forty-something peri-menopausal woman. So much easier to have been a man. She allowed herself a smile. Put her foot down. Not as much fun though.

  Right, where was she? Okay, on The Old Coach Road heading out towards Bridesmoor. On the left, sprawling for bog-ridden miles, was Bridestone Moor. Ahead - the blackened corpse-wheel of Bridestone Pithead. There’d been riots up here in the eighties when closures were announced. And before that, many a mining accident. As a medical student she’d witnessed a few stretchered cases rushed into A&E - blackened with soot and gasping for air - and her young mind had fallen prey in the early hours, to rumours about the miners who were never found - the ones who still lay trapped hundreds of feet underground. If you went hiking out on the moors, people said, you could still hear their moaning cries carrying on the wind.

  She kept her eyes fixed on the long, straight road ahead. So many spooky tales about this area…The Old Coach Road having been a favourite haunt for highway men; or horse-drawn carriages racing in the dead of night with gruesome cargoes of disinterred dead bodies for sale. On their way to Leeds or Sheffield.

  A belt of November fog was rolling in, and night fell as abruptly as a theatre curtain. An instant wall of grey. Visibility nil.

  She hit the brakes in surprise, reaching for the Audi’s fog lights, at the same moment the signpost to Bridesmoor Village flashed into view. A steep lane veered downwards, and a church spire pierced the smoky dusk from somewhere in a hollow of trees.

  Woodsend should be next on the right, then. From looking at the map, there was only an area of common land separating the two, so any second now…

  Spectres of mist crawled across the road in shifting shapes, making it difficult to see. Then suddenly a right fork appeared, so she took it. Foxley Lane. Not the main road down to Woodsend, which was Ravenshill, but probably a cut across the common. So straight ahead should be…ah yes… a row of council houses, which backed onto the woods. No facilities here, apparently. Just the row of houses, the farmhouse off the main road at the top, a couple of cottages - including the one her patient, Tommy Blackmore, had grown up in - and a caravan site down by the river, apparently. Goodness, what on earth was she hoping to achieve by this?

  At the end of Foxley Lane, she turned right and drove carefully downhill. Abruptly the fog cleared to reveal a charcoal sky streaked with fuchsia, and plumes of wood smoke coiling up from various chimneys. Sodden leaves plastered the lane, and ahead lay the gurgling freshness of a swelling river.

  She parked and got out.

  To her right the River Whisper. To her left, a public footpath trailed into woodland. She grabbed a torch from the glove compartment, locked the car and headed left. Half an hour at the most before the light would be lost completely, she estimated. It was just to see. To satisfy a curiosity, and be able to relate better to her patients - to understand the geography and picture what they were remembering. That was all.

  The peacefulness was silvery in its beauty as she strode away from the river and up the well-worn path towards the back of the council houses. Presumably local dog walkers and maybe, because there was a caravan park on the opposite side of the woods, holiday makers used it too. An owl hooted and she smiled. How magical. Like a fairy tale.

  The path began to arch to the left, and it looked like it would come out just below the council houses. A perfect triangle for a little dog walk. So if she carried on climbing then she would surely come to more tracks for the cottages, which would have drives connected to Ravenshill. It would be possible to double back at any time. Any time at all.

  From the back of the houses, lights spread buttery oblongs onto gloomy lawns, plunging the adjacent woods into blackness…it was okay - yes really - she could quit at any time. No need for the disquiet at her back. No need… An ancient fear, she told herself, a woman alone in the darkening woods - it was natural - and besides she could take that straight path she’d just passed - turn and quicken her pace at any time! Tell that to herself enough times and she’d believe it.

  After a while there came only the sound of her own breathing, heavier now as the hill steepened and the muscles in her hamstrings began to ache. Here the path was much narrower and more overgrown, branches swiping at her face with scratchy fingers.

  Darkness descended in an instant.

  One moment the forest had been shaded grey. The next it was utterly black. The beam from her torch mingled with wisps of mist as she climbed. Actually, this was stupid. To have put herself in this position. She ought to turn around and go home right now: it didn’t feel safe. What if there was something going on here for real and…

  Kristy stopped dead in her tracks.

  In front lay a clearing, and in the centre was what appeared to be a dilapidated cottage. Covered in ivy, shrouded with evergreens, it sat in darkness, save for a single lamp on in an upstairs window.

  She looked from left to right. There didn’t appear to be a driveway, a path, or a car. How did the occupant get in or out? She switched off the torch to disguise her presence, and picked her way through the undergrowth, as far as a rickety, heavily rusted gate which sagged from its hinges. ‘Woodpecker Cottage,’ had once been painted in fine italics on a crumbling wooden plaque, which hung crookedly from one side.

  So this was where Tommy Blackmore grew up. A flicker of a chill chased up her spine. Like someone was behind her. Pure imagination, of course, but even so…

  She backed up, branches snapping in her face, snagging in her hair. Time to retrace her steps towards the safety of the car immediately. But…Kristy looked ahead into the fog-cloaked woods. Her eyes had adjusted to the gloom now and she must be near the top, so it may be as well to keep going - do a big loop and then walk back down Ravenshill? Seeing as she was here? It could only be a few more minutes.

  Honestly, she was such a scaredy cat!

  After all, if Tommy had been a victim of abuse it wasn’t the village ghosts, was it? No, she’d spooked herself with it being dark, that was all.

  ***

  Chapter 12

  One hour later.

  The journey home was a blur of shock. Kristy gripped the steering wheel with ice-numb fingers. Her heart pulsed through her body in thick, sickly waves. Everything was so much worse than she’d feared. The whole visit had been on a whim, a hunch, curiosity…call it what you will, but now…now it was like having walked through the back of a wardrobe into a fairytale horror and not being able to get home again. Something was very, very wrong in Woodsend.

  She turned up the heater and flicked on all the lights because at this speed no one would see her coming. The Audi powered at 80 mph through thick, grey fog, driven by a woman with the devil on her back.

  On either side of her, the waterlogged moors seeped darkly. As if in wait for that second’s loss of concentration, a swerving of the wheel, a screech of tyres, and the sucking of metal drowning in the bog.

  Squinting into the mist, her eyes flicked to the lit dashboard - how odd - the temperature was dropping rapidly. Why? The car had just been serviced. Her breath steamed on the air. Muscles rigid. She wriggled her toes - no, nothing - no warmth from the engine at all. There should have been heat surging through by now. Instead it was getting colder than it was outside. Freezing, in fact.

  A creeping awareness was how it started, she recalled later - as she lay awake night after night trying to unders
tand, to rationalise what happened next - a musty smell like unwashed clothes on an unwashed body; a sigh of sour breath on the side of her face; a feeling that someone or something, was on the passenger seat beside her, waiting for her to take her eyes off the road and look round. No, not waiting - willing her to…

  A shape. Growing. The sound of salivating, raspy breathing. Like a very old man smacking his gums, drawing air from diseased lungs.

  Kristy concentrated hard on the road ahead. This was just fear talking. It had a hold on her mind. Focus on the job in hand - on driving safely home - reduce speed and don’t take your eyes off the road for a moment…The car’s headlights reflected their own swirling white light. A fragment of memory - being in a plane - engines humming in a blanket of grey over the North Sea - the unrelenting aborted landings, one after the other, and being unable to see a damn thing. Then suddenly the tarmac and a crack, a bounce, and the relief of touching ground. Soon the lights of town would be ahead and the fog would lift.

  But someone really was in the passenger seat.

  The strength of presence grew, along with the irresistible desire to turn and see who it was.