Mirror Mirror: A shatteringly powerful page-turner

by Nick Louth

  Mordant pulled out his sketchpad and a soft 3b pencil, and once again tried to capture the ethereal beauty of this young woman who so occupied his thoughts. Twenty minutes later he set the pad down. He’d certainly drawn a face of beauty, recognisable as the subject. Most art students would have been more than happy with the result. But Mordant was quite unlike most art students, and was far from satisfied. Very far. Mordant was a seeker after perfection. And this young woman was absolute perfection. Ultimate beauty in a tarnished world. She was the one subject he regarded as beyond his artistic ability, the one who despite repeated effort he only perfectly captured in the cavernous halls of his imagination.

  Mira Roskova was William Mordant’s obsession. And no-one does obsession quite like those within the walls of Broadmoor. Mordant had been diagnosed with a severe personality disorder, exhibiting manipulative and highly intelligent narcissistic psychopathy. A man for whom taking a life is no more troubling than clipping his nails. But one eminent former professor of psychiatry, who himself suffered a nervous breakdown after his very first session with Mordant, had a different view. It was expressed in a clinical assessment unusually free of psychiatric jargon: ‘William Mordant may appear perfectly normal and well-adjusted. But underneath he is a cauldron of simmering, concentrated evil.’

  That was Professor Shapiro’s view, though Mordant had heard it before from others. But it was merely that in his pursuit of beauty Mordant detested anything unsightly. Of course the ugly and the repulsive, the twisted or the crippled sullied his life in this place. To be immersed so unjustly in such a place was of course a test, and a superlative one, of his aspiration for the flawless and the sublime. It was one to which he was equal. Disciplining his mind to filter out the dirt, tuning out the dissonance left him free to wander as the god of his own ethereal and immaculate world.

  Almost always.

  Just two weeks ago, Leonard Lucifer Smith was being escorted by two male nurses from the visits centre through Boxhill Ward, when he should have gone the direct route to Cavendish. Smith and Mordant had history and were considered incompatible. They were not supposed to run into each other. But when Mordant looked up in Boxhill’s refectory, he saw Smith shambling towards him, ignoring the calls from the two male nurses. Smith looked at the copy of Cosmopolitan on whose cover Mira was quite demurely displayed. He bent over Mordant and said: ‘I know who’s shagging her. And I hear she’s a dirty little bitch.’

  Chapter Eight

  Across the prosperous and leafy suburbs of Berkshire sirens began to wail, drowning out conversation over fifty square miles. While these aged sirens evoke a half-remembered dread of air raids among those old enough to recall World War II, they now have a more practical purpose. They are Broadmoor escape alarms, tested every Monday morning at ten o’clock precisely. They are a reminder that while this secure psychiatric hospital is no longer listed as a home for the criminally insane, that is still a very good working definition for its most dangerous patients. Especially those minded to escape.

  As the two-minute all clear sounded, Richard Lamb called the Serious Incident Review meeting to order. With him was Clive Harrington, Smith’s primary nurse. Harrington’s relaxed manner belied the huge experience that the gangly British-born Jamaican had. If anyone understood Lunatic Lucy, Harrington did. Also around the table were Lucy’s forensic psychiatrist Dr Miguel Kasovas, police liaison officer Sergeant Deborah Crooke, and head of security Geoff Featherstone.

  ‘Down to business, then,’ Lamb said. ‘As you know, yesterday Smith had a partial colectomy in Frimley Park Hospital in which a length of razor wire was removed from his large intestine.’ He looked around. Even though everyone had heard what had happened, there were cringes around the table. ‘He may just avoid having to use a colostomy bag for the rest of his life.’

  Harrington grinned. ‘I don’t think SMUs and colostomy bags would mix very well.’

  ‘How on earth did razor wire get inside him?’ Crooke asked. ‘If he couldn’t have done it to himself, then someone did it to him. And then we have a crime.’

  ‘Let’s not be too hasty,’ Lamb said, mindful of the burdensome regulatory oversight that registering a crime would incur. ‘Can you remind us what Smith himself said about it, Geoff?’

  Featherstone responded, ‘Not too much. When he was asked if he had hurt himself, he replied, and I quote: “Not me. It was GCHQ. I won’t listen to the messages they beam into my head, so now they want me fucking dead.” Unquote. He wasn’t very coherent, but claimed no memory of anything after watching TV in the afternoon. He thought he’d been hypnotised by GCHQ while watching.’

  ‘That sounds significant,’ said Kasovas, a small and balding figure, sucking ruminatively on the arm of his spectacles. ‘Could he have been sedated by someone else?’

  ‘I have to confess it’s hard to see how anyone else but him could have done it,’ Featherstone said.

  ‘His blood tests will be through in a day or two,’ Lamb said. ‘If we can untangle his own extensive medication regime from something he should not have been given.’

  ‘There’s nothing on the CCTV record,’ Featherstone said. ‘No one went to his room. It corresponds with the duty log. Smith had been seen watching TV in the afternoon. He was absent for the evening meal. His room was checked about half an hour afterwards, and he was inside, apparently asleep. There was no reply when the Cavendish ward night duty nurse called to him.’

  ‘Which nurse?’ Crooke asked.

  ‘Dawn Evans,’ Harrington said.

  Featherstone continued. ‘There was no further contact until 10.48pm. The duty nurse on the east corridor checked to see Smith was inside, which he was, apparently asleep, and locked the door. Then the corridor locks were set at 11pm, which I checked personally.’ Featherstone flicked over the page and then continued. ‘It was 2.08am when the duty medic was called.’

  ‘When did Smith first complain of being unwell?’ Dr Kasovas asked.

  ‘He started shouting at about one, one-thirty,’ Featherstone said, scanning his notes.

  ‘That sounds a bit vague. Who was on duty for his corridor?’ Lamb asked.

  ‘Tyrone Mgonwe. When I spoke to him he said that he ignored it for a while, knowing what Smith is like.’

  ‘But he was in pain, Geoffrey,’ said Kasovas.

  ‘To be fair, Mgonwe couldn’t know that. Obviously, we’ve had no end of shenanigans from Smith over the years, yelling, and shouting and getting attention. I can well understand why he took a while to register that it wasn’t the usual nonsense.’

  Lamb leaned forward, hands steepled before him. ‘The fact remains, Geoff, that Smith was in pain for an hour or so before help was called.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s hindsight. We’ve had times in the past when we would have needed an extra nurse just to check up on him every time he made a racket.’

  ‘This is a hospital. It’s not a prison. We’re here to make people better,’ Lamb said gently. ‘Look at it through an inspector’s eyes. They won’t care if Smith cries wolf a dozen times a day. It will go down as a lapse in clinical care.’

  ‘Clive and I had a look in Smith’s room yesterday,’ said Crooke, pushing her fringe of grey hair aside. ‘No one’s to go in there, in case it is declared a crime scene. I can’t remember ever seeing so much blood.’

  ‘If you think that was bad, you should have seen how much was on him,’ Featherstone said. ‘He’d smeared it all over himself. After the SMU we all looked like him.’

  ‘I want to see all the CCTV again, for the twelve hours leading up to the intervention,’ said Lamb. ‘By Thursday morning I want to be able to answer the following questions: One, did he do it himself? Two, was it another patient…’

  ‘Or a member of staff with a grudge,’ Crooke interjected. ‘We can’t rule that out.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Lamb conceded. ‘And three, how was razor wire and whatever else was required, procured within Britain’s allegedly most secure psychiatric hospital.�
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  * * *

  It was gone eleven on a Wednesday evening. Lamb sat next to the bulky figure of security chief Geoff Featherstone in the Broadmoor CCTV control centre. They had polished off three packets of crisps, two Mars Bars and a Twix in the last four hours as they screened the most boring re-runs in television history: Broadmoor doors, corridors and fences. Lamb thought wistfully of the leftover boeuf bourguignon that his wife would have waiting for him at their home in Crowthorne when he finally finished.

  Though there were a hundred and twenty-six CCTV cameras in Broadmoor, they did not give total coverage. The architectural peculiarities of the Grade II listed Victorian building provided dozens of blind spots and hidden corners well known to patients. Those corners had over the years been used for pre-arranged fights and the settling of scores, for gambling, for drug-taking and, inevitably, for sex. The only bedrooms covered by CCTV were those for patients in seclusion, where self-harm or suicide were a clear risk. The control room could only display twenty-seven camera views at a time on its monitors, three rows of nine. Those were watched by two security staff, sometimes only one at night. All the camera files were recorded and automatically downloaded every hour to a huge sixty-terabyte database. Even so, the huge data demands of even this low definition video meant that each file was overwritten after thirty days to free up space. That wasn’t a problem because with the staffing levels at Broadmoor, five for every patient, incidents always came to light pretty quickly.

  Featherstone had narrowed down the search on the system. The folder for Saturday 24 January broke down into folders by ward, then by time of day and finally by camera. Eight cameras covered the patient-accessible areas of Cavendish Ward, including one on the east corridor which led to Lucifer Smith’s room. Lamb and Featherstone split the files between them, and fast-forwarded through eight hours of footage per camera to track Lucy’s movements. At four times normal speed, the tattooed giant was frenetic. On Saturday afternoon Smith watched TV, got up, sprinted around, gobbled food, sprinted about, watched more TV, sat around, dozed off, woke up, watched more TV, gobbled more food, and then sprinted off to his room. No-one came to visit him in his room. Indeed, nobody seemed to talk to him much at all. When he walked into a room, other patients and even staff just parted like water beneath the prow of a ship. That presumably was the effect Leonard Lucifer Smith had in mind when he decided to get tattooed to look like the devil incarnate.

  ‘This just doesn’t make sense,’ Lamb said. ‘We’ve seen all the recordings. There is literally nothing to see. No social contact. No one else has been to his room, except staff checking on him.’

  ‘Let’s look at the recreation room again,’ Featherstone said. He clicked on the icon and the video began. Lucy was sitting in his usual place, in front of the big TV holding the remote control, which was supposed to be at the nurse’s station. One of the enduring issues with Lucy was about consideration and sharing. He consistently monopolised the big TV. Many patients shared Smith’s obsession with football so didn’t mind. Those who did mind were too intimidated to contest it or to complain to the staff. Instead they just returned to their rooms where they had their own smaller TV sets. However, it wasn’t sport showing that day, but a children’s cartoon. Lamb recognised the animated features of Princess Fiona.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Lamb said. ‘Freeze that a minute.’ He turned to the computer and searched online for the TV listings. ‘That’s Shrek II on ITV, yes?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Featherstone chuckled. ‘I bought my grandson the DVD. He loves it.’

  ‘Geoff,’ Lamb said, ‘ITV didn’t show Shrek II on 24 January. The listings say they showed it on the seventeenth. But we’ve got it here on the recording for the twenty-fourth.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘That these aren’t the files for the twenty-fourth. Someone’s overwritten them with files from a week earlier.’

  Featherstone frowned. ‘No that can’t be.’

  ‘What else could it be?’

  ‘Okay. There’s one way to check.’ He opened the corresponding camera file for 17 January and ran it side by side with that from 24 January. They were identical.

  ‘Fuck.’ Featherstone leaned back and ran his hands through his cropped greying hair.

  ‘Has this ever happened before?’ Lamb asked.

  ‘It could happen by accident. The overwrites are done manually on a Sunday night. I did them myself yesterday. But 24 January files shouldn’t be overwritten until February. Let me see who edited them.’ He clicked through to a different log.

  The long silence made Lamb look up ‘Who was it?’

  ‘It says I did it. My initials. Someone logged in as me.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘It shouldn’t be. It’s password protected.’ He sat down, head in his hands. ‘I can’t explain this.’

  ‘Geoff, get me a list of all the staff who were on control room duty from Saturday night until nine this morning,’ Lamb said. ‘Do we have a camera that covers this room?’

  ‘The control room? No, we don’t spy on staff.’

  ‘Perhaps we should,’ Lamb said.

  ‘Okay,’ said Featherstone. He then checked the other seven camera folders on the ward, running corresponding video files side by side for 24 January and 17 January, and for 25 January and 18 January. They were all identical. He checked the deleted file bin, and the data sticks. There was nothing there marked as 24 or 17 January.

  At midnight they had to admit it. ‘We have no record of what happened anywhere in Cavendish Ward from noon on Saturday until 5am on Sunday,’ Featherstone said.

  ‘The first file that hasn’t been overwritten on Sunday was the 6am, so the overwriting must have happened just before that while most of us were at the hospital. Whoever did it needed to hide their tracks for the previous eighteen hours,’ Lamb said.

  ‘Dawn Evans was on duty here alone until 7am after the SMU,’ Featherstone said. ‘But it can’t be her. She’s only been in the control room once before, and only has a training password which gives no access to file editing. And frankly she couldn’t even find her way round the ‘read-only’ screens on the training session I ran.’

  ‘So why was she allowed to be here on her own?’ Lamb asked.

  ‘Because, Richard, we were desperate. I needed everyone else to either escort Lucy or calm the other patients who’d heard him ranting and screaming. We literally had no one else available.’

  Lamb sighed. He understood the difficulty. It was always difficult to recruit and retain the best staff, and even fewer were happy to work night shifts.

  ‘Ah, but we can check exactly when the files were altered,’ Featherstone said, suddenly enthused. ‘There’s a system activity user log, which should give us a time stamp for each type of operation.’

  He called up the file, and then stared in amazement. ‘The clock has been zeroed.’ He cursored down the screen and blew a huge sigh. ‘Everything for both those days happened at 00:00. Christ, I don’t even know how to do that myself. I’d have to look at the manual.’ He reached across and pulled the system manual down from the shelf behind his desk.

  Lamb was silent, stroking his face thoughtfully. ‘Geoff, whoever did this knows more about the system than you. Is that a fair assessment?’

  Featherstone shrugged. ‘I suppose so. It must be staff. I can’t see even our cleverest psychopaths getting in here to do this, Richard.’

  ‘Not without help, that’s for sure.’ Lamb shuddered. ‘Okay, let’s call it a day. Go home. We’ll think more clearly tomorrow.’

  Fifteen minutes later Lamb was walking across the car park, fretting about the report he was going to have to write about this terrible lapse in security. He pressed his key fob and the Volvo flashed its orange welcome. He stowed his briefcase in the boot, then turned around and surveyed Broadmoor’s grim gothic silhouette, the backdrop to his working life. He recalled again the words of the departing clinical director, Gerald Temple
man, on Lamb’s first day in post all those years ago. ‘Never forget, Richard that some of these people are more intelligent than any of us. They have motive, they have ability, and they certainly have lots and lots of time. They are untroubled by moral doubt. Never, ever underestimate them.’

  Chapter Nine

  William Mordant was unique within Broadmoor because he was allowed to set his daily regime. While staff and patients followed the dreary institutional timetable, he had been able to negotiate his own, within limits. He would awaken at 6am, do a brisk thirty minutes of Canadian Air Force exercises in his room, usually while listening to Wagner on cordless headphones, finishing off with a dozen one-armed press-ups, alternating arms, executed to The Flying Dutchman. His door would be unlocked at 6.30am, half an hour earlier than anyone else’s, and he was first in the refectory for a breakfast of fruit and low-sugar muesli before heading for the studio adjoining Boxhill Ward, to which he was allowed a key. The studio was pretty much his personal property every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, which he considered right and proper seeing as it was the sales of his art that had raised most of the one and a quarter million pounds it had cost to build. The vaulted space, designed pro bono by Norman Foster, was only four months old and still had the aromatic sappy smell of new wood. The curved beams underneath the glass-roofed atrium gave it a wonderful lightness. Many of the other patients, uglies and simpletons without an ounce of artistic sentiment or skill, would still come to sit in the studio, simply to feel the wonder of it. He would always shoo them out when he wanted to work.