JT02 - To The Grave

by Steve Robinson

  He decided to put the search on hold while he had a line of communication open with Audrey. He had some more questions to ask and he didn’t want to lose her, so he sent another message, asking if she recalled anything that Mena used to talk about when she wasn’t supposed to talk. It had intrigued him that she would blatantly go against the rules, knowing that she would be punished. He wondered what was so important to her that she couldn’t seem to help herself. The reply came back within a few minutes.

  Mr Tayte,

  Mena used to talk about the war as I recall. She would say that when it was over her husband was coming for her and that they were going to live somewhere far away from there. I don’t recall where, but she used to talk about a river. It was a little fantasy she’d made up, I suppose, because of course if she had been married she wouldn’t have been at Trinity House in the first place.

  She was a quiet girl most of the time. Then suddenly she would start talking and talking and none of the sisters could stop her. I remember laughing at her the first few times and I came to be very sorry for doing so when I saw the trouble it got her into. It was 1955 and she seemed to think the war was still on. One of the older girls - we were all ‘girls’ to the sisters regardless of how old we were - used to try to tell her that the war had been over for years, but she wouldn’t believe it. She would get angry in the long run and the orderlies soon came for her then. I suppose her rationale was that if the war was over, her man would have come for her. But because he hadn’t - because she was still there - the war must therefore still be on.

  That’s about all I remember about her. It’s funny how some things stay with you, isn’t it? But then I can still recall so much about those years, even though I would sooner forget them.

  Good luck with your search, Mr Tayte.

  Audrey.

  Tayte sent a final message to Audrey, thanking her, knowing that it must have been painful for to recall those times. He read through her last message again and it seemed clear to him that by 1955, when Audrey was sent to Trinity House, Mena was already suffering a mental breakdown. He wondered how bad she was and would later become; what drugs and treatments had been administered and whether any of it had helped her or made matters worse. He went back to his Google search and added the word, ‘Asylum’, which he knew was still a common term for psychiatric hospitals at the time, despite changing attitudes to such naming conventions. The first three results that came back were links to the UK National Archives.

  He followed the first link and quickly learned that the Leicester Borough Lunatic Asylum had indeed changed its name at some point to the Leicester Towers Hospital. The catalogue referred largely to building works so he checked the second link and this proved more useful. It contained an administrative history that told him the asylum had opened in 1869, that it had changed from lunatic asylum to mental hospital in 1912, and that it had acquired its present name of the Towers Hospital in 1947, which had been its registered name when Mena was admitted in 1957.

  She would have been in her late twenties - maybe thirty, Tayte thought, wondering how old she was when she left.

  He scanned the catalogue entries, which were exactly what he was looking for: admission and patient registers, observations, treatments and discharge books. He saw that the records had been deposited at the record office in Wigston and he hurriedly wrote the catalogue reference number in his notepad. Then he held his breath as he read the words, ‘Mental health has always been a sensitive social issue. Therefore, this collection is closed for one hundred years in order to protect patients both living and within living memory.’

  Tayte just stared at the text. Of course they were closed. Such records invariably were, he knew that. He figured he was just so tired and so caught up in the chase that he hadn’t given it a thought until it had hit him in the face.

  “That’s just great,” he said to his laptop screen. “Now I need to see records that do exist, but which I’m not allowed access to.”

  Knowing that they were just a few miles from his hotel room didn’t make him feel any better and he started to wonder how he could get to them, maybe under the pretence of seeing something he was allowed to see. Then, when no one was looking, he could… He curled his hands into fists and pressed them into his temples.

  “Get a grip, JT,” he told himself. “This is real life, not some damn movie.” He stood up. “More coffee. More research. That’s what you need.”

  He scanned the detritus around him - the battlefield that had become his hotel room - and thought that he needed to clean the place up - and himself while he was at it.

  Soon, he thought. Let’s just find out some more about the Towers Hospital first.

  A few minutes later he was sipping hot coffee at his laptop again, promising his groaning stomach that he would feed it soon. On his screen was a website that told him the hospital had closed to patients in the summer of 2005. He saw images of an imposing three-storey Victorian gothic building with a black slate roof, stone mullioned windows and Dutch gables. He learnt that this was the original part of what had since become a sprawling fifty-eight acre complex. Other images showed parts of the complex, inside and out, that looked like they hadn’t been touched in years, although there was no indication as to when the photographs had been taken.

  He moved on, gathering information. On another website he read that the hospital had sold off parts of the complex to housing developers who planned to turn the original grade II listed building into apartments. That news made his heart sink until he read that the Leicestershire NHS Partnership Trust had its headquarters in part of the hospital complex and that it still employed hundreds of people.

  Hundreds of people…

  He started to wonder where all the patients went when the hospital closed in 2005 and he realised then that it had only closed to new patients. Since then the hospital had gradually been wound down. He didn’t like to think that Mena could still be there after all this time, but he thought there was a chance that if not then maybe some of the patients were. Why else keep staff at the premises?

  He drained his coffee back and stood up. If he wasn’t allowed to see the hospital records, he was resolved to go there and see what else he could find. He thought he’d call Jonathan to see if he wanted to go along, but not until he’d shaved and showered and felt human again.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Outside, it was another bright and crisp morning, the pale sun still low over Oadby’s fields as Tayte pulled up outside the Lasseter house. He was about to get out of the car when he saw Jonathan come to meet him and he grinned to himself at seeing this man, who had so willingly become his assignment companion, skip across the gravel as he fought to put his coat on. He had something in his hands, which he began to wave at Tayte as he approached.

  “I’ve realised what else was familiar about that photo from Paris,” he said, his face alive with enthusiasm. “Can I see it again? Do you have it with you?”

  Tayte wondered what he was holding. It looked like another photograph.

  “It’s in my briefcase,” he said as he reached behind him and retrieved it from the back seat.

  Jonathan got in. “It’s Mary,” he said. “I’m sure of it, but I’d like another look just to be certain.”

  “Mary?”

  Tayte wondered what he’d missed. He quickly found the photograph and passed it to Jonathan, who placed his photograph alongside it. It was a family scene with George Lasseter - Pop - and his wife, Margaret in the foreground, and various other family members were in the background.

  “See here,” Jonathan said, tapping the image of one of the background figures, whom Tayte clearly recognised as Mary Lasseter in her ATS uniform. “Look at the pose,” Jonathan added. “Note the cigarette.”

  Tayte nodded. “Got it.”

  “Now look at this.” Jonathan slid his hand across to the Paris bar scene. There were people in the background there, too. “He tapped a finger on an indistinct shape, a silhouette
almost, of someone standing further back and to the left of Edward Buckley. “I’m sure that’s Mary,” he said. “Look at the way she’s holding her cigarette.”

  Tayte leant in and brought the images closer together until they overlapped. There was no way of knowing who the person Jonathan had highlighted in Mel’s photograph was, but the size and shape of what was evidently a woman’s figure was very similar. He studied the way Mary held her arm at her side, elbow bent in a V-shape so that the cigarette in her hand hovered close to ear. It was perhaps not a unique way to hold a cigarette, but it was identical in both images.

  “It has to be her,” Jonathan said. “It’s been bothering me all night and this morning after you called I started going through all the old family photos again. I must have seen it when we looked through them before.”

  Tayte was still studying the images. “If it is her,” he said. “It’s some coincidence that they both happened to be there in what we know to have been allied occupied Paris around the time Danny was reported missing.”

  Tayte liked the coincidence less for knowing now that Danny had not gone AWOL for Mena. He had not come back for her as he’d hoped. At least, if he had then he had not found her - and how could he when she’d been secretly incarcerated at the Trinity House home for unmarried mothers and later transferred to the ‘Borough’ mental hospital?

  So why did Danny Danielson go missing in allied territory in November 1944?

  He turned to Jonathan, thinking the unthinkable and seeing those dark thoughts reflected in Jonathan’s earnest stare.

  Did Mary or Edward have anything to do with it? Could they both be implicated?

  His thoughts strayed to Buckley’s murder two days ago and then to the man who had telephoned Joan Cartwright, looking for Mena. Was there a connection? He supposed there was and he thought again that whatever was being played out now had been triggered by Mary’s recent death - the catalyst that had caused the ghosts of the past to catch up with the present.

  Tayte picked up the images. He knew he could speculate all he wanted to on why Edward and now Mary, it seemed, were there in Paris with Danny around the time he went missing, but what did he have? A photograph of three wartime friends in Paris. It didn’t mean a thing and he knew that it proved even less.

  He turned to Jonathan again. “Let’s not get carried away,” he said. “Do you mind if I keep both pictures together for now?”

  Jonathan shook his head and Tayte slid them into his briefcase.

  “I’d like to stick with trying to find Mena for now,” he said. “Do you know where Humberstone is?”

  “It’s just a few miles north-east from here.”

  “Good. I have a feeling that if we can find Mena, we’ll find the answers to a lot of things.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  When they arrived at what was formerly the Borough Lunatic Asylum, Tayte thought it looked every bit as gothic as it had in the images he’d seen online. What he hadn’t been able to appreciate on his small laptop screen was the almost overwhelming size of the 19th century main building, with its watchful towers and myriad windows, behind which he imagined countless rooms linked by endless corridors. On the way there, Tayte had brought Jonathan up to date with his research and the reason he wanted to visit the site.

  “But surely you don’t think she’s still here?” Jonathan said.

  Tayte turned the car off Gipsy Lane, heading further into the complex. “No, I don’t,” he said. “I just wanted to see the place and ask a few questions if I can. You never know when another door’s going to open and apart from getting an idea of how someone lived, visiting the places they inhabited can be a great stimulus.”

  Jonathan was still taking it all in, eyes fixed out of the front window as they drew closer. “It’s hard to believe that Mena was so close to home all these years and no one knew,” he said. He sighed. “And while I was growing up, enjoying a normal, happy childhood.”

  Tayte didn’t know what to say about that so he said nothing. Out of the car windows to either side of him he saw line after line of galvanised wire fencing surrounding the buildings to keep people out. It was clear that the developers who had bought the property - whose banners he could see flapping in the light breeze - were well under way with their plans. Further on he saw a sign inviting him to view one of the recently converted show homes and he began to question what he expected to find here, more than a decade after the hospital had closed. He could hear the hum of builders’ machinery somewhere nearby and he wondered where all the health service staff were. The only people he could see were two men in grey suits and white hard-hats. He pulled over just ahead of them and got out of the car.

  “Excuse me!” he called, stepping around the car to meet them. “I was under the impression that the hospital kept a staff on after it closed.” He looked around at the obvious lack of any activity other than building works. “Doesn’t seem to be the case.”

  The shorter of the two men - surveyors, Tayte assumed - stepped closer. “You’ve come to the wrong block,” he said with a strong east-midlands accent. “The NHS reoccupied some of the newer buildings further down.” He pointed over Tayte’s shoulder. “If you go back out onto the main road and -”

  “Reoccupied?” Tayte cut in. “So they can’t have kept any existing patients on,” he added, more to himself than to the surveyor.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” the man said. “I believe it’s all admin now and they won’t be there much longer.”

  Tayte paused, staring at the car while he tried to figure out his next move. It seemed clear to him that if the buildings had been empty and only later reoccupied, he wasn’t going to find anything out from the staff that were there now. In all likelihood they hadn’t been there more than a few years. He turned back to the surveyor.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll find it.”

  With that he got back into the car and drove out the way he’d come.

  “We’ll go and ask a few questions while we’re here,” he said to Jonathan, but I’m not confident that we’re going to get any answers about a girl who was admitted more than sixty years ago.”

  Sitting in a dark green Land Rover Defender, set back in a siding off the main road opposite the former asylum complex, the man at the wheel sat up when he saw Jefferson Tayte’s hire car pull back out onto Gipsy Lane. He turned his key in the ignition and slowly left the cover of trees that lined the roadside, watching intently as the silver Vauxhall completed its right turn. Approximately one hundred metres further along the road, it indicated right again and turned out of sight.

  The man in the Defender sped up, turning as the Vauxhall had turned, entering through galvanised steel gates by a blue and white sign that read, ‘Leicester Partnership NHS Trust - George Hine House.’ There was a small car park beyond the gatehouse buildings and the man held back when he saw his quarry stop and get out of the Vauxhall. He watched them march towards the buildings until they disappeared behind a fringe of trees and shrubbery, and when he could no longer see them he selected an appropriate parking space from which to monitor their return.

  And there he waited.

  Fifteen minutes later he heard a familiar American voice and saw Jefferson Tayte and his companion walking back across the car park, engaged in conversation that he couldn’t make out, but from the body language and the dour expression on the American’s face, he could see that their visit had not proven fruitful. He watched them go to their car and get in, and he was ready to start the Defender up again, but the Vauxhall did not move.

  Tayte stared out of the windscreen with his hand paused on the ignition key. “I should have known that would be a waste of time,” he said.

  “It was worth a try,” Jonathan offered.

  “Yeah, I guess. It’s just so frustrating being referred back to records you know you’re not allowed to look at.

  He started the engine. Then he stopped it again, wondering how long Mena had been at the hospital and what treatment s
he might have undergone. He imagined her condition had begun at Trinity House as a form of nervous or mental breakdown, brought on by everything that had happened in 1944 and soon after: being raped, falling in love and being denied that love, and the great injustice of being incarcerated on the brink of womanhood through no fault of her own. He thought it was more than enough to drive anyone to a place like the former Borough Lunatic asylum.

  “Where might Mena have gone when she left here?” he said, thinking aloud.

  “Are you sure she survived the place?”

  Tayte gave a slow nod. “I’ve thought about that a lot and I’m certain of it. A hospital like this would have registered her death and no death has been registered for Mena Lasseter or Fitch in this county.”

  “So she could have left any time between 1957 and 2005?” Jonathan said. “That’s forty-eight years. It doesn’t help to narrow things down much, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Tayte agreed.

  “Do you think she could still have been here when the hospital closed?” Jonathan asked.

  “If she was, and presuming that she still needed care, she would have been transferred to another hospital that could take care of her. But it’s a long time. I can’t see her being here for forty-eight years.”

  “No,” Jonathan agreed. “Although we can’t rule it out, can we?”

  “No, we can’t,” Tayte conceded. He just didn’t want it to be true; for Mena’s sake and because if she had been transferred to another psychiatric hospital as recently as 2005 he knew that he would never find her. He unclipped his seat belt and slouched a little in his seat. He wasn’t going anywhere yet, not least because he didn’t know where else to go. “Let’s look at what I believe is the only other possible scenario,” he said.