‘You’re interested in names, aren’t you, Leo?’
Something jabbed at her arm. Her eyes flew open. He was bent over her, a syringe in his hand. She bounded up, struggled against him, managed to get to her feet.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘My work, Leo. What else would I be doing?’
A cold malevolence sharpened his features. The eyes glinted. The nose flared. The lips curled in a malign grin as he flung the syringe into the bin.
Suddenly, with a surging sense of horror, she saw it all.
‘What did you do to her? What did you do to her?’ She was screaming, flailing out at him. ‘You killed her. Isabel. Isabel.’
‘Lie down, Leo.’ His voice was like a mallet. A slap descended on her face. ‘Lie down.’
Her head felt woozy. Her legs trembled, too fragile for her weight. Her eyes were moving in and out of focus, so that his flesh and his voice seemed to fill the room. She lurched onto the divan.
‘Now tell me everything you know about this Iris Morgenstern.’
She tried to get up again. She wanted to leave. But his icy voice cut through her movement
‘Lie down, Leonora, or you’ll fall over. Fall over just like the friend you love so much.’
‘Fall over.’ The words reverberated through her. Her tongue felt thick. Blood swirled round it, pounding through her head. She lay back, despite herself as docile as a performing poodle.
‘Tell me.’
The command crumbled a barrier in her mind. Words poured out of her of their own accord. She couldn’t catch hold of them, couldn’t get a grip on what she was saying. But the words tumbled. And with them, hatred. Hatred of him. His power. The poison he had poured into her.
‘A ripe bitch,’ she heard him mutter. ‘Talked too much. An orgy of accusations. Just like her mother.’
‘What did you do to her?’ She was shouting. ‘What did you do to her?’
‘You want to know what I did to her?’ A low-pitched, devilish rumble came from his throat. ‘Little Leo wants to know.’ His hand was on her thigh. He squeezed. ‘I’ll tell you. Why not?’ That sneer again. Contempt. ‘You won’t remember a thing, after all. Not a single thing.’
He laughed and prodded at her stomach, jabbed ‘I did that. Just that.’ He prodded again, his fist hard like one of his stones. ‘And she fell. Fell like a leaf. Bye, bye blackmailing bitch. So easy. So very easy.’
Vertigo gripped her. She saw the precipice. Isabel was falling. Leo was falling. Coming apart. Coming apart together.’
‘You killed your daughter.’ Water washed over her ears, drowning her breath.
The ragged head towered above her. Too big. Huge. She could no longer make out its outlines, only the pinkness of tongue, like a lapping dog, over jagged white teeth, and yellow - gold frazzle where a chin should be. The lips were pursed. He blew through them, a low moan like the wind.
‘She fell like a leaf in a sudden gust. A sacrifice. For the Sanctuary. Like Iphigenia. Agamemnon and Iphigenia. But hardly as innocent.’
It was a whisper and she craned her head to hear. She could see his hand on her breast. No, not her breast. There was no sensation. A crab scuttling on a field of white.
His voice was a long way away. ‘Now tell me, does Lukas do this for you?’
Lukas, she thought. Daniel. Where was he? She lay back, whimpered. Then she remembered something. A scratched, ashen face. ‘And Jill Reid. What happened to her?’
A sound like a hiss. From a long way away, she felt another jab in her arm. Words, like gibberish. The room was swirling.
‘Isabel and Jill went up the hill. Another spying bitch. Watching. Blabbing. Had to be stopped. Couldn’t be helped.’
Malign laughter boomed around her. It came from the ceiling, a long distance away, as if they were in a church and everything was amplified and resonant. A roar interrupted it, an unbreachable edict uttered by some infernal god.
‘You won’t remember a thing. The beauty is, you won’t remember a thing.’
Hands were holding her down. Large hands. Too big. Too strong. She fought against them. She was at a dentist’s. In some foreign country where the air was heavy and thick. There were hands pressing on her. She clawed at them. A mask came towards her face. Big and black, obliterating her breath. Obliterating her. Black. Everything was black.
Leo woke to the sensation of blood. Blood thick and too sweet in her mouth. She could feel it streaming through her lips onto the white towel. She tried to spit but her head was too heavy to lift. She opened her eyes, looked round for the dentist’s cup which should have been sitting there on the white porcelain ledge next to the chair. But there was no ledge, nor cup, nor chair. Perspiration gathered on her brow. With it came a cold, clammy fear. She wasn’t at the dentist’s. She wasn’t a child. Who was she?
Her head swirled with the effort of orientation. It was heavier than a cement mixer’s load of concrete. She sunk back onto the pillow in despair. A pillow. She was in bed. Everything grey as sludge. Dim with red pinpricks of light flashing at the corners.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Her chest felt constricted. Sleep pressed against her eyelids. She fought it.
Slowly the room acquired a shape. It was a small room. The bed was too high up. At her side, she made out the shape of a table. Something on it. She reached and fumbled. A lamp. She managed to pull the cord and faint light filled the room. Not her room. Not any room she recognized. The objects refused to mirror her. Panic clutched, churned her stomach.
There was a sink. Water. Her dry mouth ached for it. Carefully she lifted alien feet off the bed, felt them at last reach a distant floor. Dizziness swooned through her.
She sat very still for she didn’t know how long and then with enormous effort walked towards the sink, grasping at it to steady her balance. She reached for the plastic cup with trembling hands, filled it with water and drank, the water dribbling down her chin. She drank and drank, splashed water on her face.
Not her room. Not her room. The words set up a refrain in her head. A refrain amidst a delirium of voices, shouting now. In her head. Battling. Too loud. Drowning out her own.
How had she come here?
There was a hole where her mind should be.
She forced herself to the window. Small short steps. Better now. She took a larger one and she was there. A white curtain. She pushed it aside, pressed her face to the glass. Bars. Bars and a charcoal expanse of nothing, except her face come back to her, its outlines wavering. She shuddered.
She made herself walk towards the door. One step at a time. One step at a time. Maybe she was still asleep. She turned the knob. Nothing. Locked. A scream rose to her throat. She made it real. She screamed and screamed, pounded against the wood of the door.
It opened so abruptly that she fell backwards. A woman stood above her.
‘None of that now. Quite unnecessary.’ The woman half carried her back into bed. A big woman with steel-grey hair and an unmoving face.
‘Where am I?’ Leo’s voice was a croak.
‘Hush.’ The blankets came round her, tighter than swaddling clothes. Her arm lay against them, too white. Something jabbed at it. A spot of red appeared and then disappeared with the lights.
If only there weren’t this dizzy thudding in her head. And the voices, scrambled. If only she could think straight. How long had she been here?
Her mind refused sequence and order. Somebody had rolled all the cells flat, taken a large pair of scissors and begun to snip randomly. The cut-outs were scattered on the floor, but she couldn’t make out their shapes.
No shapes. She was ill. Alone. She burrowed under the blanket and hugged herself.
Utterly alone.
A dying animal.
21
Daniel Lukas shifted gears and veered round what he hoped would be the last bend in this desolate road. He had anticipated neither the wild beauty of the surroundings, nor the remoteness, nor the length of tim
e it would take him to get here. He had set out early, well before Robbie had left for school and he had rashly hoped that he would make it back before bedtime. If he were lucky and there was nothing amiss, that might still be the case. But it was precisely because everything told him that something was amiss, that he had made the journey. As it was, he felt he had prevaricated for too long.
It was only as he had mulled things over after that evening at the Savoy, when Leonora had mentioned that Isabel had been using the name Morgenstern, that it had come home to him just how remiss he had been. If Isabel was now masquerading under the name he remembered she had told him was her father’s, if she was suddenly so enmeshed with him that she had abandoned her everyday life, then serious trouble was indeed brewing.
He was also all too aware that if that single night with Isabel had never taken place, he would certainly have reacted differently to that last telephone message she had left him. When had it been? In February sometime. He could still hear her voice, over-wrought, pursued by ghosts, talking a mile-a-minute, telling him that she had recently discovered that her father was alive, had been alive all along. What did it mean for the story she told herself about her past? Should she seek him out? She needed to see Daniel. Needed to see him badly.
Daniel’s response had been considered. He told her he would make an hour to see her first thing the following morning. If she really needed him. But given that she was now Paola Webster’s patient, surely it was Paola she should be consulting.
It was the kind of judicious approach he half-knew Isabel would balk at. And of course, she didn’t take up the hour. Nor did she phone again. He had acted correctly, appropriately, yet, he had also failed her. He might as well have said to her in a moment of pique or wounded male, as well as analytic vanity - you made your bed, now lie in it.
And now, to top it all off, there had been that message on his machine just a few days back from Leonora. Her voice too had been strained, her thoughts jumbled. She had alerted him to the fact that she was checking into The Morgenstern Foundation. No, no, she corrected herself. She meant The Morning Star Foundation. In Devon. She needed his referral. They would ring him. Isabel had gone there.
The alarm bells had gone off in his mind. So Paola had lied. Or she hadn’t followed Isabel’s actions closely enough. He had paused to think through the coincidence of the Morgenstern - Morning Star names and his memory had thrown up an odd fact, garnered years back at some conference in New York. It was when he was working mostly with adolescents and it had to do with some scandal on the West Coast, some clinic that had closed down. The Morgenstern Foundation.
Even before he could assimilate all this, Frederick Hilton’s insinuating voice had oozed off his answering machine, thanking him for his referral. The speed of it. He was so pleased that they had made proper contact at last. He hoped the referral would be the first of many.
He had only met the man two or three times, but he knew he didn’t like him, didn’t trust him. He didn’t like Paola’s link to him either, though she considered him her great friend and collaborator. At its best, he felt that Hilton’s whole enterprise was a suspect mixture of doubtful therapies, bogus mysticism and new age crystals. At its worst, he didn’t like to think.
And now he had two patients in thrall to the man.
He would have left London immediately, had arrangements not had to be made.
At last, a sign announced the place. He parked in the designated space and strode towards the front gates. Locked. He hadn’t expected that. It gave him pause. He looked through the bars at the large gloomy structure, the assortment of outbuildings; then, with a sinking heart, searched out a bell.
‘Dr Daniel Lukas for Mr Frederick Hilton,’ he said authoritatively.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ a bland voice asked.
‘Just tell him I’m here. And I’m in a hurry.’
Moments later, the gate opened. Daniel strode down the drive. From the steps of the rather grand front door, he saw a figure coming towards him. Hilton.
‘Daniel. Welcome. A surprise visit. A pleasure, a great pleasure.’ Hilton was puffing as he stretched out his hand. ‘Let me show you round. It’s quiet now. Everyone’s inside at lunch. Have you eaten?’
‘No need. I haven’t much time. I just wanted to see Leonora Gould-Holland. And to talk to you about a little problem.’
‘Leonora, yes,’ the man rubbed his hands together. ‘A difficult woman.’ Hilton walked with reflective slowness, so that Daniel had to moderate his own pace. ‘I’m afraid it’s not altogether a convenient time. She’s resting. She had something of a turn.’
‘Oh? How’s that? She was fine when I last…’
Hilton cut him off. ‘Yes. We had to sedate her. She was surprisingly violent.’
‘Sedation?’ Daniel stopped in his tracks and stared at him. ‘Are you qualified to…are you permitted to prescribe here?’
Hilton laughed softly. ‘Not myself, of course. But we have a doctor, two doctors on call for the addiction clinic. Plus a trained staff. Perhaps you don’t know. For the heroin addicts, we use the newest Naltrexone program. Rapid opiate detoxification under anesthetic followed by Naltrexone induction, with counselling, of course. Three months can do it. Six months is…’
His words disappeared beneath the stark sound of shattering glass, as loud in the tranquillity of the grounds as a gunshot. In the distance to his left, Daniel made out his name being shouted, over and over again in a rising pitch.
He headed off across the lawn in the direction of the sound, sprinting as he heard the fear in the voice.
Poised at a second floor window of a far building, he saw a ghostly apparition, a gaunt woman he didn’t recognize. She was perfectly still. For a moment, he was bewildered, then his gaze shifted to another window. Leonora. Her hair was dissheveled, as if she had been pulling at it, her eyes so vast in terror that they seemed to obliterate her face.
Hilton caught up to him, panting. ‘Violent, I warned you. We’ll have to give her another injection.’
‘Dr. Lukas. Take me out of here. Please.’ The urgency in Leo’s voice overrode Hilton’s.
Daniel threw him a scathing look. ‘I’d like to see my patient, now. Alone.’
A stocky young man had emerged from the front door of the building to check out the commotion.
‘Bring Dr Lukas up to see Leonora, David. Don’t leave them alone. She can be dangerous.’
‘I beg your pardon.’ Daniel stood to his full height and gave the man an icy glare. ‘You’re out of line, Hilton. Seriously out of line. I’ll talk to you again in a few minutes.’
He raced up the stairs without waiting for an answer.
Leo’s state sent a tremor through him. She was trembling, her face ghostly pale, the pupils of her eyes too bright. She clutched at his arm as if he were a life-raft. There was blood on her hands where the glass had cut.
‘What have you been giving her?’ he addressed the young man, who shrugged in response.
‘Not my department.’
‘No, of course not. Leonora,’ he said softly looking into her eyes. ‘Let’s wash those cuts. And then do you think you can get dressed? I’m going to take you away from here.’
‘I…’ her tongue stumbled, as if it were too thick for speech. ‘My things. I need my things. Room 37.’ She pointed through the window to the main building.
‘I want you to go and fetch Leonora’s things, David. Everything. Every scrap of paper. Every piece of jewellery.’
‘I’ll go. I want to go.’
Daniel studied her. There was determination in those glazed eyes. ‘All right. We’ll all go. Anything in here that’s yours?’
She shook her head and then held it in her hands, covering her face.
‘Are you dizzy, Leo?’
She smiled at him gratefully. ‘A little. Not so bad now. The effort…’
The cuts washed and patched, he walked her slowly along the narrow corridor.
‘Who wa
s that man you were talking to outside?’ she asked.
‘That man?’ He paused for a moment. ‘You mean Frederick Hilton? Don’t you know him?’ He hid his surprise.
‘I…I’m not sure.’ Tears gathered in her eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t think about it now, Leo.’ He veiled his anger in soothing tones. ‘It’ll be fine. We’ll take care of you now.’
Frederick Hilton had disappeared by the time they reached the front door. Running across the lawn towards them was another young man in white. He inclined his head, ‘Dr. Lukas. The Director has sent me to see to you. He was needed elsewhere.’
‘William,’ Leo burst out. ‘Oh good. William. I need to get my things. I’m leaving.’
An unreadable expression played over his face. ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better, Leonora. I’ll go down to the store after I’ve seen you to your room.’
‘My room, yes. Thirty-seven.’ Leo was mumbling to herself. ‘I need to go to my room.’
When they reached it, she made straight for the small cupboard and heaved out her case. It made her stumble. Daniel rushed to help.
There was a rapt smile on her face. ‘Go on William. Get the rest of my things while I pack.’
No sooner had he left them than she whispered. ‘It’s all right. It’s here. I knew it. I knew that. I remembered that.’ She threw things every which way and took out a computer. Before he could stop her, she was plugging it in, accessing files.
‘What’s here, Leonora?’
She didn’t answer. She was searching, reading. Reading with her finger on the screen as if the individual letters refused to stay still and shape themselves into words. She gestured to him and he bent to the screen.
‘It’s Isabel. Her journal,’ she murmured, the tears gathering in her eyes again. ‘I’m not making it out properly.’
Daniel read quickly, his anxiety mounting with each new page. He wanted to ask Leo a host of questions. A knock at the door prevented him.
Sanctuary Page 38
