by Tim Weaver
‘In what sense?’
‘I asked him that, and he said, “Simon was pretty rough and ready. He’d come home drunk at night, the whole street could hear him swearing when something wasn’t going his way, but she seemed a lot softer. Not a mouse. Not someone who could be pushed around. But quieter.” He said you could tell she was smart. “You could tell she had a lot going on up top” are the exact words he used. So I asked him, if she was so smart, why was she shacked up with a scumbag like Simon Preston? He said he didn’t know, but when they were arguing – and this was often; like, blazing rows once or twice a week – he said she never backed down. Not ever. I asked him if he ever saw evidence of physical abuse, and he said no – not anything obvious, anyway. He told me, if he had, he would have called the police.’ She shrugged, a twist of frustration. ‘To be honest, it would have been better if he had called the police. Then we would have had her name.’
‘Stricker didn’t know her name?’
‘He said he overheard Preston calling her Kay.’
‘K-A-Y?’
‘Presumably.’ She took a long, deep breath. ‘The only other thing Stricker said he could recall clearly was this one fight they had, just before they moved out in September 2010. He said he remembered overhearing an argument about going to a hospital.’
‘Hospital? Was Preston ill?’
‘No. I looked through the autopsy notes. He was on his way to screwing up his liver and lungs with all the shite he was putting in his body, but he wasn’t hospital bad. So maybe they were talking about the woman he lived with.’
‘Who we can’t find.’
‘Right.’
But then, unexpectedly, I felt a buzz of familiarity, the sense that I’d made some sort of connection without knowing it. Slowly, the outline of a memory emerged from the darkness. My eyes drifted back to the wall, to the board full of faces, to the house on the Old Kent Road where Reynolds was holed up. What is it? What am I seeing? Murray was studying me now, as if she’d noted the realization in my face, the shift in my thoughts.
And then it hit me like a train.
The two photographs Reynolds had in his flat.
One had been of a cavernous, abandoned Victorian building, with a spire and stained-glass windows, fenced in, with a glimpse of a river or a lake in the background.
The second was of a corridor with glass blocks either side of it, its walls peeling, a thick arched door partially open at its end. Through the doorway, there had been some kind of metal stand, coated in cobwebs. Somehow, it had looked out of place in a church, as if it didn’t belong there, but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on why at the time.
Now I knew: it was a stand for an IV drip.
Because it wasn’t a church in the photographs.
‘It was a hospital,’ I said quietly.
‘What?’
‘Did you do a search for “Kay”?’
She nodded. ‘Yes. I didn’t find anything.’
‘Nothing related to Preston, or Reynolds, or Franks?’
‘No.’
‘What about when you searched for “Kay” and “hospital”?’
‘Nothing,’ Murray said again. ‘This woman’s a ghost.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We can find her.’
A frown. ‘Why, do you know her?’
I removed my notepad, trying to zero in on the drawing that Franks had made on the scrap of paper. I’d copied down a rough approximation of it – and now, finally, I knew why, every time I’d looked at it, a vague sense of recollection hit me.
‘You remember I asked about this?’
I turned the sketch to Murray, so she could see it.
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Paige thought it was a stick man.’
‘It’s not?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘This rogue triangle on the top there – I know it. I recognize it. I think it’s a greenhouse. This is the layout for a building.’
As I said that, my mind flooded with memories: a fuzzy, sun-bleached flicker of images from an August in 1978 when my mum and I had stood on the edges of the sea, looking out into the English Channel.
‘What is that place, Mum?’
She looked out at the channel, unsure how to respond.
‘Mum?’
‘It’s … It’s, uh …’
‘What? What is it, Mum?’
And then slowly, automatically, she brought me into her, pressing me to her hip, and she said to me, ‘It’s somewhere bad, sweetheart. It’s somewhere very bad.’
I looked at Murray.
‘Whoever Kay is,’ I said, ‘I think she was a patient at Bethlehem.’
Bethlehem
November 2010 | Three Years Ago
The sea lapped at the wheels of the vehicle as it crossed the causeway. Further out, it was choppy, waves rolling in, ceaseless, unyielding, consuming each other as they raced for the shore – but here, on the other side of the sandbank, it was almost still, like a sheet of frosted glass. The only thing disturbing it was the vehicle’s wake, fanning out in a cone.
She looked ahead of the ferry, to the hospital.
Bethlehem.
This early in the morning, most of it was just a silhouette, grey and indistinct against the sky, its T-shaped wings gripping the curves and chasms of the tidal island. As the sun rose to the east, the colour drained from its western side, and the banks of windows – running in three lines, one on top of the other – somehow seemed to blend with the walls and appear to fade from view. Once they did, she always thought the western wall became more ominous: black, monolithic, sinister.
Mesh fencing traced the entire circumference of the island, side to side, north to south, its undulation, its flow, and was topped with two cords of razorwire and a guard tower, giving it the feel of a prison camp. At the jetty, security guards stood sentry at the main gate; another two were stationed fifty feet further in. Beyond that, the road snaked around a knot in the island and up to the front of the main hospital building.
There were no cars parked outside.
There were never any cars. The hospital had been built at a time when most people didn’t have a vehicle to get around in. It wasn’t a problem one hundred years ago.
It was now.
These days, most employees crossed the causeway on a second, separate vehicle – both vehicles referred to as ferries, even though they weren’t boats – once in the morning, once again at the end of the day: it came across twice, specifically for them, and was kept at a farmhouse half a mile inland. The patients never got to ride that one.
Theirs – the one she was on at the moment – was more stripped back, basically just seats and windows, everything screwed down and reinforced to ensure it couldn’t be used as a weapon. It was almost comical to look at – a reconditioned bus carriage sitting on top of a huge trailer, pulled by a tractor with oversized wheels – but she’d been coming here so long, it didn’t seem strange any more. Despite how it looked, it was effective: she’d read that they’d only had one serious incident in the entire forty-six years the ferry had been crossing the causeway – which was just as well because, once a week on a Friday, they ran the secure transfer. That was different from the days she came. That was when they brought in the killers, the people who were never going to be released. In hushed whispers, she’d heard some of the non-medical staff call it ‘Psyday’ instead of Friday.
Because that was when the psychos arrived.
Back at the start, she’d spent almost a year at the hospital as an inpatient, looking out across the sea from the inside of those windows, listening to her first doctor – Poulter – trying to talk her back from the edge. After she got better, she began returning to Bethlehem as an outpatient, three days a week to start with – and when Garrick replaced Poulter, it was reduced to Tuesdays and Wednesdays because that was when Garrick was in. He’d speak softly to her, like she was easily frightened, trying to get her to talk about Lucas, about her divorce from Robert, about her suicide
attempts. Despite everything, she enjoyed the routine, coming back to this place when he was in, having a conversation with someone who wanted to listen. Sometimes she’d held things back from Garrick, other times she’d tried to trade with him, telling him she was ready to open up if he told her more about him. She trusted him, but there were still things – even five years on – that she’d chosen not to tell him.
‘So, it’s been two months since Simon left.’
She roused herself from her thoughts and looked across the room at Garrick. He was leaning forward, one hand clutching his fountain pen, one handing her a glass of water. She thanked him and took the glass, placing it down on the table between them.
‘How would you say that time has been?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t miss him, if that’s what you mean.’
‘I didn’t really expect that to be the case.’ He smiled at her. ‘Has Simon been in touch with you since he moved to London?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘I couldn’t care less.’
Garrick nodded, and noted something down. ‘You told me once that you never loved him. If that was the case, why did you stay with him for five years?’
‘I suppose he helped numb my pain.’
‘You mean Lucas?’
‘I mean, Lucas, Robert …’
‘What else?’
She stopped; a small, sad smile. ‘My dog.’
‘How did he help you forget those things?’
‘By just being himself. Simon was a snide, selfish bastard, so when I was with him, that took my full powers of concentration. It was good for me. It stopped my mind from wandering. Plus I got a roof over my head. I paid him a little rent, from the money I earned working at the shoe store, but it wasn’t much. As I’m starting to find out, even if you want to live in abject squalor, you still have to pay for it.’
‘How is the new place?’
‘It’s been two months. It’s not so new any more.’
‘Of course. So how is it?’
‘It’s okay. As much as you’d expect when you’re renting a small room in a small house. Four walls. A bed. It’s better than being on the streets. The old woman who rents it to me is deaf as a post, though, so I sit in my room at night and have to listen to her guessing answers on game shows.’
Garrick nodded. ‘It’s an adjustment.’
She didn’t say anything.
‘Is there something else bothering you?’
She glanced at Garrick. She shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d read her so easily – not after all this time. At the start, even until recently, she’d been able to hold her thoughts back from him, disguise them, and he’d always fail to see the concealment in her face. But not now. Now the two of them were so familiar with each other.
‘Simon …’ She stopped. ‘Simon found something.’
‘When was this?’
‘Two months ago. Before he kicked me out.’
‘What did he find?’
‘My box of regrets.’
If Garrick was surprised by the news – by the fact she hadn’t mentioned anything until now – he didn’t show it.
‘Did he actually open it up and go through your things?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did that make you feel?’
‘Annoyed. I’d got sloppy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was tucked away, into a corner of the loft, and he never went up there because that was where all my crap was dumped, and all he cared about was that none of it took up space in his house. But then, when he put the house on the market without even telling me, and especially after he sold it, he started to prepare for the move, and he went up there … and he found it.’
Garrick shrugged. ‘He knew about Lucas already, though.’
‘That’s the thing …’
‘What?’
‘That box was about more than Lucas.’
‘So what else was it about?’
She paused. ‘It was about Pamela Welland.’
Garrick sat back in his chair, a frown creasing his brow. ‘I don’t understand why that should matter, though? I think I understand why you stayed with Simon. I get that your relationship with him was …’ He took a long breath as he tried to find the right word. ‘Convenient, for whatever reason. I hope, one day, you will share more on that particular subject.’
She didn’t reply.
When it became clear she wasn’t going to help him out, he continued: ‘I get that you didn’t trust Simon enough to share all of your past with him. But he knew about Lucas. He knew you lived and worked in London before you moved down here to Devon. What difference does it make if he knows about Pamela Welland? That case is over. The man who killed her is in jail – and has been for fourteen years.’
Again, no response.
Garrick tilted his head. ‘Kay? Why is that girl’s murder so important to you?’
She glanced at Garrick.
‘Why does it matter if Simon found out about Pamela?’
‘It’s not her,’ she said.
‘Not her what?’
‘None of this is about Pamela Welland. Not really.’
‘What are you talking about?’
She looked up at the window, at the endless sky, at the seagulls squawking as they glided past. Then she turned back to Garrick. ‘Pamela Welland’s just where it starts.’
Part Three
42
The tidal island was six miles from where I’d grown up in south Devon, and about two miles west of Start Point lighthouse. Between them was a gentle, V-shaped bay, gouged out of coastline at the tip of the county, and surrounded by blue water and jagged rock. Before the construction of the lighthouse, the whole area had been a graveyard for ships.
But that wasn’t what made the island famous.
Once a monastery, and then a small fishing village, in the early 1850s the tidal island, and what remained of the buildings that existed on it, were razed.
In its place, a psychiatric hospital was built.
When it first opened its doors, institutional psychiatry didn’t even exist as an idea, so locals just called it the asylum, even though its actual name was Keel Point, after the region in which it had been built. But in 1897, a minister from Salcombe called Balthazar Rowe was put in charge, in an effort to bring an overcrowded, dangerous and fractious patient population into line with some old-fashioned fire and brimstone. Inevitably it failed: five years later, Rowe was killed by what modern doctors would probably call a schizophrenic – but not before he’d renamed Keel Point ‘Bethlehem’.
The name stuck.
As the building was six hundred yards across and a quarter of a mile from the mainland, the original thinking was that it would be easy to contain patients and prevent escape when the tide was in. But to ensure the place remained secure, even when the tide was out and the causeway between the mainland and island could be crossed – albeit with difficulty – on foot, a three-metre fence had been erected around the circumference of the island. I’d read about Bethlehem many times, seen articles about it in the local press, subconsciously absorbed its unique layout – the ‘stick man’ and the triangle – over and over again, without even realizing it. I would pass it in the back seat of my parents’ car when we took the coastal road, the glass panels of the greenhouse winking in the sun as they funnelled to a point at the south of the island. But I’d only ever been close to it once: my parents had taken me to Keel Point beach at eight years old, and I’d looked out to where it was perched on the undulating grass like the broken claws of a bird, and thought it was a prison camp.
It’s bad, sweetheart.
It’s somewhere very bad.
The catalyst for Mum’s warning had, most likely, come four years before, when a patient called William Silas ran amok in the place. Silas had murdered three men in a bedsit in Bristol in 1974, and stored their bodies in an outhouse at the bott
om of his garden. Over the course of the next three weeks, he repeatedly returned to where he’d left them, cutting pieces from their bodies and cooking them. He’d eaten two of the men before neighbours started to become suspicious about his journeys to the outhouse in the middle of the night. Silas was told he would never be released, and sent to Keel Point.
On the ferry trip across to the island, he managed to break his thumb and two of his fingers, and slip one of his handcuffs. Once he was off the bus, he made a break for it, taking a guard hostage, killing another, then murdering four kitchen staff once he found a secure space to hole up. When armed response units finally got to him, he was sitting in the middle of the kitchen in a pool of blood, carving chunks off the people he’d killed.
After that, there were always stories about Bethlehem.
Locals would talk for years after about how blood from Silas’s victims washed up on the shore that day, but while that seemed unlikely – even if my mum believed it – there were other stories that were harder to dispel: the accounts from people who lived nearby who said, on a still night, you could hear screams carry across the water; the way that, when the sun set in the summer, it looked like the walls of the hospital were bleeding; or how the three banks of windows on its eastern wall – built so patients could look out to the channel – darkened like the eyes of the dead when the sun went down.
But then, in November 2011, all of it was consigned to history.
Unable to afford the running costs, criticized for security measures that didn’t come up to modern standards, and under pressure from locals who hated having it so close, Bethlehem closed its doors. Since then, there had been talk about tearing it down – countless, endless discussions about it – and yet still it remained: a ghostly, decaying memory on a slab of land a quarter of a mile out to sea.
43
As the sun came up four hours later, bleeding across a cloud-streaked sky, I arrived at the beach I’d been on thirty-five years ago. The drive down from London had been quick, the motorway empty, concrete giving way to fields, then fields giving way to coastline.
