Dark Saturday

by Nicci French

  “Isn’t she interesting?” said Frieda.

  “Everybody here is interesting. I’m curious about why she is of special interest to you.”

  “I’m looking at the crime she was involved in.”

  “The crime she committed.” Mendoza looked at Berryman. “You’re being very quiet.”

  “Don’t mind me,” said Berryman. “I’m just the Dr. Watson. Or the Sancho Panza, or whatever.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.” Mendoza looked back at Frieda. “I understand you’ve already met Hannah.”

  “I talked to her, but she didn’t talk back. So, before seeing her again, I thought it would be useful to get some kind of account of her time here.”

  “What would you like to know?”

  Frieda thought for a moment. There was so much. “What was her condition when she arrived?”

  “Of course, I wasn’t here then. I came in 2007. But I’ve looked at her file. She was committed here in a floridly psychotic state.”

  “Which was treated how?”

  Mendoza shrugged. “As you’d expect, with a regime of antipsychotic drugs and therapy.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She received ECT from time to time.”

  “I’d generally thought of ECT as a treatment for morbid depression,” said Frieda.

  “Are you here to question our treatment?”

  “I’m just trying to build up a picture of her state of health.”

  “I can give you that in two words,” said Mendoza. “Not good.”

  “Over thirteen years.”

  “Over thirteen years.”

  “When she arrived,” said Frieda, “she was a convicted killer of her parents and of her teenage brother. Did that make her a target?”

  “You mean of other patients?”

  “That’s right.”

  “As I said, I wasn’t here then. But as I understand it, it was the other way round. You’ve met Hannah. She’s a pretty formidable figure. She quickly acquired a reputation.”

  “For violence.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And how do you respond here to someone with a reputation for violence?”

  “We’re a hospital,” said Mendoza. “Our first responsibility is to our patients, to maintain their well-being and their safety.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Frieda. “In practical terms?”

  “For Hannah Docherty’s safety and for the safety of others, her medication was increased, she was kept under restraint and, when necessary, she was kept in solitary confinement.”

  “How often?” asked Berryman.

  “How often what?”

  “Was she kept in solitary confinement?”

  “When it was necessary.”

  “And her periods of solitary confinement, would these be a matter of hours or days?”

  “Whatever was deemed necessary.”

  “How many days?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all in her files.”

  Berryman pointed at the files on Mendoza’s desk. “Are those them?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I?”

  Mendoza contemplated the files. “You can look,” he said. “But you can’t take them away and you can’t make copies.”

  “I just want to look.”

  “And you need to see it all in context. Hannah Docherty killed her whole family. While here, she has been consistently antisocial and lacks all self-control. She has committed serious acts of violence against nurses, doctors and fellow patients. The most recent was just a few days ago. She stabbed a woman with her own knife.”

  “You mean the knife was in Hannah’s possession, or was it the other woman who’d got hold of it?” said Frieda.

  “It’s not an important distinction.”

  “I think it is.”

  “It belonged to the other woman.”

  “So Hannah was being threatened?”

  “However hard we try,” said Mendoza, “Chelsworth Hospital unfortunately has its share of violent incidents.”

  “I’ve read about them.”

  “We deal with the most difficult patients in the country, the ones people want to shut away and forget about. You should remember that.”

  Meanwhile, Berryman had taken the file and was flicking quickly through the papers with a glare of concentration.

  “Is she seeing a therapist at the moment?” Frieda asked.

  “She’s seeing Dr. Styles. Julia Styles. I’m not sure how effective it is.”

  “Can we talk to her?”

  “I was hoping I could deal with any questions you had.”

  “I would like to know about her therapy with Hannah Docherty.”

  “All right,” said Mendoza. “Wait here. I’ll talk to my assistant.” He left the room.

  Berryman got up and walked toward the window. “Quite a place, isn’t it?” he said. “You half expect to see a bat or a headless monk.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “I’m not surprised you didn’t get anything out of Hannah Docherty.”

  “ECT isn’t as bad as they make out in the movies.”

  Berryman smiled. “Yes, I believe I may have read something about that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking of. If you or I or an average person was put in solitary confinement, after about three or four days we’d be hearing voices. After a month most of us would be experiencing psychotic symptoms. Our brains aren’t designed for isolation. It’s like a plant being without light, except that we don’t die, unless we kill ourselves. Instead the brain does strange things to fill the void.”

  “And Hannah Docherty was often kept in solitary confinement?”

  “You heard my question to the good doctor. At first I thought it was the equivalent of locking her in a cupboard for a few hours until she stopped screaming. That would have been bad enough. But looking through the file, I just stopped counting. For example, in 2003 she was in solitary for one continuous seven-month stretch. In 2005 she assaulted a warder and was in what they call ‘solitary-plus’ for a year and a half.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It sounds like the sort of experiment on brain plasticity that we’re unfortunately not allowed to carry out because it would be unethical. But I would make a hypothesis that after a year in solitary-plus the brain has become a different physical object.”

  “So you don’t think there’s much point in talking to her.”

  “No, no. I’m fascinated to meet her. Now someone’s done the experiment, I might as well look at the results.”

  Frieda frowned at him. “You’re not really like this, are you?”

  “You think I might be nice underneath?”

  Berryman had no interest in meeting Julia Styles. “That’s your territory,” he said, flapping his hand and barely looking up from the files. “Since we can’t take them away, I’m just making sure I have them in here.” He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Come and fetch me when you’re done.”

  Julia Styles’s room was near Dr. Mendoza’s office, but her windows looked in the other direction, onto the courtyard where Frieda could see men walking, heads down against the strengthening wind.

  “What can I do for you?” asked the woman, who had risen from her neat desk (one file, presumably Hannah’s, one notebook turned to a blank page, one small potted plant with a single flower rising above the coppery leaves). She was small, neat, her blouse crisply ironed. Her tone was cool, her handshake firm but brief.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Hannah Docherty.”

  “I’m not sure what you want to know—and, of course, what Hannah says to me is in confidence. I can’t divulge any details.”

  Frieda took a seat opposite her. “I don’t want you to betray her confidences.”

  “There aren’t many of those.”

  “She doesn’t tell you much?”

  “She hardly talks at all.”r />
  “How long have you been seeing her?”

  “On and off for the last nine years.”

  “A long time. Has she changed a lot in those years?”

  “She’s got older. She’s got tougher. She’s got quieter. She’s become more violent, more unhappy, more disturbed.” She met Frieda’s gaze. “She hates me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” She gave a small, contained laugh. “Not transference, don’t go thinking that. She hates being in the same room. Very often she refuses to see me—and when a patient doesn’t want to even see you, let alone say anything, well, there’s not much you can do, is there?”

  “I don’t know if that’s right.”

  “Of course you don’t know.” There was no mistaking the hostility in Julia Styles’s voice now. “You work at the Warehouse, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And you have private patients as well.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you treat the discontents of the rich. Here, we deal with real madness, real despair, with dangerous rage, with minds that are so chaotic you can’t penetrate them at all, or make any sense of what they’re communicating.”

  Frieda looked at Julia Styles curiously. Her cheeks were flushed; she was obviously angry. “You think I don’t understand what you have to deal with here.”

  “Of course you don’t. How could you? I gather from Dr. Mendoza that you are here to establish whether Hannah Docherty is clinically insane or not.”

  “Is she?”

  “Look, Dr. Klein. Hannah was a troubled and dysfunctional teenager who killed her mother, her brother, her stepfather. She is my patient, and my job is to help her recover. But ask yourself, what would that mean? It would mean she had gained insight into what she had done. She would have to confront the horror of it. She would have to acknowledge her guilt. Sometimes I think the kindest thing to do with people like Hannah is to leave them in their delusions.”

  “I see.”

  “You probably don’t. I had a patient who killed his wife and his three young children while he was in a schizophrenic frenzy. A voice in his head was telling him that they were going to be brutally tortured, so he thought he was saving them. With medication and with therapy he came to understand what he had done. But is that such a good thing?”

  “I don’t know. And of course you’re right that I can’t understand what you face every day. But that’s why I’m here: to learn from you.” She saw some of the tension go from Julia Styles’s shoulders; her fist unclenched on the desk. “Are you saying she has never acknowledged her guilt?”

  “There’s a phrase she repeats—the nursing staff tell me she does it in her room as well. They hear her howling it.”

  “What?”

  “She says, “It’s me, it’s me.”’

  “She said that to me as well.” Frieda considered this. “Never “It was me”?”

  “No. Always in the present.”

  “It could be some kind of confession, of course—or it could be a way of asserting her identity.”

  “It could be.” Julia Styles nodded.

  A glimmer of understanding seemed to pass between them. Frieda nodded at her and smiled. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Have I?”

  “Yes.”

  Frieda stood up and the two women shook hands, for longer this time.

  “She’s one of my failures.”

  “Because you can’t help her at all?”

  “Because I can’t reach her.”

  Andrew Berryman was no longer poring over Hannah’s files. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands clasped beneath his head, and gazing at the ceiling as if something was written on it. “Fruitful?” he asked, as Frieda came in.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shall we go and get that nice Dr. Mendoza to take us to see Hannah?” He unlocked his hands and sat up. “It should be interesting.”

  But nice Dr. Mendoza looked at them with a solemn expression.

  “I’m afraid you can’t see her today after all,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He shook his head from side to side. “She is unwell.”

  “In what sense unwell?” asked Frieda. “We’ve come all this way specifically to see her, as you know.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “It’s a shame,” he said. “A great inconvenience for you.”

  Frieda clenched her jaw. “We’d like to see her nevertheless.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Klein, but it’s not going to work. Not today.”

  “What I would like to know is whether it was ever going to work.” Berryman’s tone was cheerful.

  Mendoza didn’t reply.

  “Can we at least speak to her for a few minutes?” asked Frieda.

  “She had a severe psychotic episode and has been heavily sedated. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I understand very well,” said Frieda. “Last time I was here, Hannah had been beaten up.”

  “Last time you were here,” said Dr. Mendoza, “Hannah had just stabbed someone and nearly killed them.”

  “And this time she has been drugged so heavily that we can’t see her.”

  “I’m not sure you understand the kind of patients we have to deal with here.”

  “I understand that you want your job to be easy. You don’t want trouble.”

  “My dear Dr.—”

  “If you want my advice,” said Berryman, “you shouldn’t call her that.”

  “But you should understand this—you’ve got trouble. And we will come back and we will see her.”

  Mendoza looked at her, then suddenly stood up. He took off his glasses and, without them, his eyes were defenseless. “You can see her,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

  An orderly took Frieda and Berryman up some stairs, through a room that was empty of people but contained several chairs, a sofa, a television, and through two sets of heavy doors. Now it felt like a prison, not a hospital. They walked along a corridor full of identical green doors with grilles in each one; their footsteps echoed. The orderly stopped at a door near the end and pulled a set of keys from his belt.

  “You asked for it,” he said.

  The room was small and bare: just a cell with a narrow bed beneath the high window that cast little light. He turned a switch and a garish brightness flooded the space. The shape in the bed didn’t move. Frieda could see a greasy tangle of hair and one out-flung hand, a tattoo on its wrist.

  “There she is,” he said.

  Frieda went over to the bed and bent over the figure. “Hannah,” she said softly.

  There was no response. Very gently, she drew down the cover slightly to see Hannah’s clammy, swollen face. There was blood around her nostrils and drool running from her mouth. Her neck was grimy with old dirt. She was breathing hoarsely and her lips puffed with each exhalation. Frieda put a hand on her shoulder and briefly rested it there, but Hannah was deeply asleep. Her eyes moved under their closed lids, and Frieda wondered if her dreams were nightmares or moments of freedom. She lifted a thick strand of hair away from Hannah’s cheek and pulled the cover back over her.

  “Well?” asked Levin. He was drinking peppermint tea from a huge mug and his tortoiseshell spectacles were steamed over. “How was she?”

  “Unavailable.”

  “That’s a pity.” Levin looked across at Keegan, who was on his knees, pulling a large box out of a cupboard marginally too small for it. “Isn’t that a pity, Jock?”

  An indistinguishable grunt came from the cupboard.

  “The case is unsound,” said Frieda.

  “Would you like some peppermint tea?”

  “No.”

  “Of course it’s unsound. We know that. We just want to establish whether she is in any danger of knowing that and of making trouble.”

  “No, she isn’t. I’m certain of that at least.”

  Keegan got up from the floor. He was perspiring. “So that’s that, then,
” he said.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “It’s precisely because she’s in no danger of knowing that that we have to continue.”

  “Continue?” Keegan frowned at her so that his forehead was corrugated with wrinkles. Levin put down his mug and leaned back in his chair. He took off his glasses and began scrupulously to polish them on his frayed orange tie. “Continue with what?”

  “With this investigation.”

  “There is no investigation.”

  “There is now.”

  Keegan turned to Levin. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

  “What would you like me to say?”

  “That this is ridiculous. That this is over. Thank you and goodbye.”

  Levin put his glasses back on and tapped them into position with his forefinger. “What do you want?” he asked Frieda.

  “Her doctor and her therapist have no doubt that Hannah is of unsound mind. But Andrew and I . . .”

  “Andrew?”

  “Professor Berryman.”

  “Whoever he may be,” said Keegan. “And I’m not going to ask what he was doing at Chelsworth Hospital with you.”

  “We believe that her disordered state and her psychotic episodes are probably a result of profound psychological disturbance and prolonged bouts of solitary confinement, not to mention repeated sedation. Anyone would be mad. It only takes days, hours even, before people show the effects of solitary confinement. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate—”

  Keegan sat on the edge of the table next to Levin. “We don’t need this,” he said. “We’ve got enough on our plate without trying to . . .” He stopped and frowned. “To what?” he continued, addressing his words to Frieda now. “I don’t even know what you want. You’re saying that the case was improperly conducted. Well, thank you, but we know that already and it’s why you were asked to assess her mental condition in the first place. You were meant to tick a box, not open bloody Pandora’s. And then you’re saying she’s been sent mad by being locked up alone and heavily drugged. I’m sorry about that, of course, but it’s way outside our remit.” He glared at Frieda. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not here to solve the problems of the world. I’m trying to do a difficult job as well as I can. Whatever the reason, she’s mad now. So what do you want?”