I spent the next four hours confined in a police cell at Bristol police station.
‘But I’ve done nothing wrong,’ I complained.
‘It’s for your own protection,’ they said. ‘It won’t be for long. We’ve sent for a doctor.’
I sat on the solid concrete bed and stared at the stark grey walls.
How perfectly they summed up my life.
For the last year, I may have been walking around and seemingly living a normal existence but, inside, I was locked into a grey prison cell – closed in by four great walls created by my own consciousness. I was trapped and, like in the nightmare, the four walls were getting ever closer. I felt I could easily reach out and touch them all at once. One day soon they would undoubtedly squeeze the very breath from my body.
Grant arrived before the doctor but, even so, not until nine-thirty.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been so long,’ he said. ‘I had to get the boys ready for school and also arrange a day off from work.’
I was not much placated. ‘You said you were on your way here over four hours ago.’
‘I know I did. I’m sorry.’ He was embarrassed. ‘I did set out to come but I also called the police and begged them to go and find you. I was still in Cheltenham when they called me back to tell me they had found you and you were all right.’ He was almost in tears. ‘So I went back home to see to the boys.’
I sighed.
‘What did you tell them?’
‘I said that you’d had to stay at the hospital for an emergency.’
‘How did you know that I hadn’t?’ I asked.
‘I woke just before five and you weren’t in the bed. I tried calling your phone but you didn’t answer so I called the hospital. Someone told me you hadn’t been working and you’d been sent home at seven o’clock last night. That made me desperately worried and very frightened.’
Now he was in tears.
‘Please take me home,’ I said.
‘I can’t. We have to wait for the doctor.’
‘I’m perfectly OK. I don’t want to see another doctor.’
‘Darling, you’re not OK. You just tried to commit suicide.’
‘I did not,’ I said indignantly. ‘If I had tried, I would be dead already. I admit that I did think about it but I didn’t do it. I’m fine.’
He shook his head. ‘Chris, you are not fine. You’re just skin and bone. You won’t eat. You don’t sleep. You don’t talk to me. You’ve cut yourself off from all our friends. You don’t even speak to your mother any more. You need help.’
‘What I need is to go home.’
We did go home but not until the afternoon, after I’d been seen by not one but two doctors.
Both of them recommended sending me to a psychiatric hospital.
‘Why?’ I asked them.
‘For your own safety.’
‘But I am perfectly safe with my husband looking after me.’
However, my husband wasn’t so sure.
‘Maybe it would be for the best to do as the doctors ask,’ he said.
‘No. I want to go home.’
The doctors had a conference between just the two of them.
I was worried.
I was all too aware that they had the ability to detain me against my will under the terms of the Mental Health Act. I had even occasionally used the powers myself for seriously disturbed patients, especially those brought in after self-harming. It is known colloquially as being ‘sectioned’ because it refers to the various ‘sections’ of the Act that allow for compulsory hospital treatment for individuals considered to be a danger to themselves or to others.
‘Don’t let them force me to go,’ I said urgently to Grant. ‘You are what is officially known as my Nearest Relative and you have the power to prevent it.’ I could tell that I was putting him in a difficult situation. ‘I promise not to do anything like this again.’ I grabbed his hand. ‘Darling, please!’
He looked at me.
‘But you don’t keep your promises,’ he said. ‘You’re always promising that you will eat something but then you don’t. So why should I believe you this time?’
‘You must.’ I was almost begging. ‘I didn’t do anything, did I? I would never do that to the boys.’
Grant shook his head and, not for the first time, I wondered if he was on my side.
The doctors finished their discussion.
‘It is our joint opinion,’ one of them said, ‘that you should be in hospital. Are you prepared to be admitted as a voluntary patient?’
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Then we consider that you should be detained for assessment under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act.’
‘My husband is my Nearest Relative and he disagrees.’
I stared imploringly at Grant and he looked long and hard at me then turned to the doctors.
‘I am prepared to take Chris home with me and look after her there. I will ensure that she sees her psychiatrist as soon as possible.’
The doctors would have known as well as I did that the patient’s Nearest Relative could discharge a patient detained under Section 2 unless there were overpowering reasons why they should not. I couldn’t think that any such overpowering reasons would exist in this case. It wasn’t as if I’d threatened to harm any other person.
‘I didn’t actually attempt to kill myself, did I?’ I said quickly. ‘I accept that I did think about it, but then I decided not to. So I am clearly not a danger to myself or anyone else.’
They didn’t look particularly convinced but the doctors and police finally agreed to leave me in Grant’s care provided we signed some paperwork to the effect that we had both noted their advice and decided not to follow it.
Grant drove home mostly in silence, no doubt worrying if he had done the right thing.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He didn’t reply. He just shook his head slightly and appeared to concentrate hard on the road ahead.
I had been expecting the third degree, starting with Why weren’t you at work last night?, but there was nothing. In truth, he must already know. The complaint had only been the catalyst. The real reason was the mental health issue and Grant knew from experience to tread carefully around that.
We stopped only once, at a motorway service station, to pick up a late lunch – a ham sandwich for him and a lentil salad for me that I didn’t really want, or eat.
‘What about my car?’ I asked as we turned back onto the motorway.
‘I brought Trevor with me from work. He picked it up using the spare keys.’
My Mini was already in Gotherington when we arrived but it wasn’t the only vehicle waiting for us outside our house. There was also a police car parked on the road and a man in civilian clothes climbed out as we pulled into the driveway.
‘What does he want?’ Grant said with a degree of irritation in his voice.
I was worried that the Bristol police had changed their minds about allowing me home with Grant but it wasn’t that.
‘Dr Rankin?’ the man asked as we climbed out of the Audi.
‘Yes.’ Grant and I both answered together. He was a doctor too, with a PhD in mechanical engineering.
‘Dr Christine Rankin?’
‘That’s me,’ I said.
‘My name is Detective Sergeant Merryweather.’ He briefly held up a police identity card. ‘I would like to ask you some questions concerning a man found unconscious at the racecourse on Saturday evening who subsequently died at the hospital under your care.’
I didn’t know whether to run away or to hold my wrists out for the handcuffs.
‘Of course,’ I said, trying to keep the nervousness and panic out of my voice. ‘Come on in.’
The three of us went into the sitting room and sat down.
‘How can I help?’ I said.
‘We are treating this as an unexplained death,’ said the policeman. ‘We have had the preliminary results of the post-mortem that was carried out early this morning. There was no cause of death given in the report so we will have to wait for further analysis of the samples taken. But one of our constables told me that you did some blood tests while the man was still alive.’
I nodded. ‘PC Filippos.’
‘Yes, that’s right. He also said that you mentioned the possibility of a cocaine overdose.’
I nodded again. ‘One of my colleagues told me that the blood test showed cocaine in the man’s system. I didn’t actually see the results myself.’
I’d been too busy dealing with the sick and injured on Saturday night and had intended to look at them on Sunday evening, but other events had overtaken me.
‘Could you get those test results for me?’ asked the detective sergeant, ‘and also copies of the man’s medical file?’
‘Can’t you get them yourself, direct from the hospital?’
‘We only have your name as a contact and the hospital told us you were not working today. I have learned from experience that it is far better to approach a named individual than to try to navigate my way through health-service bureaucracy.’ He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said. Not necessarily that easy when I was suspended from duty and barred from entering the hospital, but I wasn’t going to mention that if he didn’t. ‘Is that all?’
‘No, not quite,’ said the policeman. ‘We are still having difficulty putting a name to the dead man and wondered if you had any further clues to his identity.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Did you remove anything from him that could assist us? An identification bracelet or other jewellery, for example?’
I shook my head. ‘There was nothing at all on him. PC Filippos said that he had searched the man’s pockets while he’d been waiting for the ambulance. He took away the man’s clothes and shoes after he died.’
‘Yes, I am aware of that. We have someone trying to ascertain where the clothes were bought. They don’t appear to have been available for sale in this country.’
‘Have you checked a list of people who are missing?’ I asked.
DS Merryweather looked at me as if I were an imbecile.
‘That was our first line of inquiry. His DNA profile, photo, dental details and fingerprints have also been sent to Interpol and Europol but nothing has turned up so far.’
I felt sorry for the poor fingerprint officer who must have had to take the dabs from the dead man’s digits.
‘How about the betting slip?’
‘The betting slip?’
‘PC Filippos told me that the man had had a crumpled-up betting slip in his pocket. Have you asked the bookmaker?’
‘Not yet.’ He wrote something in his notebook. ‘Do you happen to know the bookmaker’s name?’
‘No, but it should be printed on the slip. They all are these days.’
He wrote it down then looked up at me.
‘Can you tell us anything else about the man that might be useful?’
I thought back to Saturday evening. The details were clearly etched in my memory. I had spent much of the previous night in Bristol going over and over the events of those hours, wondering if I should have done anything differently.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘He was in a coma when he arrived at the hospital and he never regained consciousness. Prior to the blood-test results, he gave all the indications of suffering from SVT – supraventricular tachycardia – and that is how we were treating him when I was called away by the arrival of two motorcyclists severely injured in a road-traffic accident. The man died shortly after that.’
He nodded as if he knew. Then he stood up.
‘Thank you for your time, Dr Rankin.’ He handed me a business card with his contact details. ‘Please give me a call when you have the blood-test results or if you think of anything else that might be useful.’
Grant showed him out of the house while I remained sitting on the sofa, shaking.
I had quite expected to be arrested.
The police obviously didn’t know about my suspension from work or else they wouldn’t have asked me to obtain the test results. Maybe they didn’t believe I was responsible for the man’s death. Or were they just waiting for the post-mortem toxicology results?
As was I.
I spent the rest of the day in bed. Not that I was able to sleep.
I should have been tired. I had dozed a little during the night and for the last half-hour on the drive home but it had been thirty hours since I’d got up on Sunday morning. Somehow, it seemed longer.
The twins came home on the school bus at four-thirty and both of them came up to tell me about their day. They thought nothing of the fact that their mother was in bed in the middle of the afternoon. They were well used to me working shifts, leaving, returning and sleeping at odd times. Needless to say, I didn’t enlighten them that I hadn’t been at the hospital the previous night.
‘So what did you learn at school today?’ I asked them.
‘Nothing,’ Oliver said. It was his usual reply to my common question.
‘I did,’ Toby chipped in. ‘I learned that Mr Harris can tell us apart.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said rather sheepishly, ‘me and Olly sometimes swap, like.’
‘Olly and I,’ I corrected.
‘Yeah, right.’ He made a silly face. ‘So me and Olly always swap PE and art on Mondays. I hate art and he can’t stand PE, like, so we just swap. No one notices.’
‘Except Mr Harris?’ I said.
‘Yeah. He grabbed me today in PE and said that he knew that I was Toby when I should have been Olly. Of course, I told him he was wrong, like, but he put his finger up against his nose and winked at me.’
‘He must have been guessing,’ Oliver said. ‘I assume you had my kit on.’
‘Yeah, of course.’ Their school PE kit had to have large nametapes sewn on the outside to prevent ‘borrowing’. ‘But he kept calling me Toby and told me not to do it again next week.’
‘Do you swap a lot?’ I asked.
‘All the time,’ Oliver said with a huge grin. ‘It’s fun.’
Physically, the twins were almost truly identical. Even I had difficulty telling them apart unless they were both together in front of me. Toby’s left ear stuck out very slightly more from his head than Oliver’s, due, I’d been told, to the position he had been lying in my womb when his ear had developed. Other than that I reckoned they were indistinguishable.
Mr Harris must know something I didn’t.
The boys went off, supposedly to do their homework but I knew that they would be playing computer games online first. Only when it was time for bed would they moan that they still had their work to do.
I smiled.
I had been just the same when I was their age, although I’d have been lucky to be allowed to play Pong on an Atari games console plugged into the back of the family television rather than on the ultra-HD virtual-world headsets with interactive surround sound that they had now.
I rolled over in the bed and thought about the boys some more.
They had turned fourteen in September, an age at which, I was reliably informed, they would instantly transform from the sweet and adorable children I knew and loved into the spotty, rude and opinionated monsters that all modern teenagers are.
‘Good luck,’ a friend had said to me last year. ‘I’ve only got one boy and he’s a nightmare. You’re in for twice as much. It’s the surly behaviour and answering back that I can’t stand. It always ends in rows and name-calling. And he’s now got piercings in his lips and even a dragon tattoo on his arm.’
She had shuddered in disgust.
So far, clearly, Grant and I had been lucky. Or maybe our intentional plan of letting the boys have increasingly greater freedom was working. One of my therapists told me that most teenagers want to sack their parents from the job they have done in the past, only to rehire them a few years later, but as consultants not managers – all the while maintaining their current account at the family bank.
But whatever our plan, I suppose we had been fortunate that our boys hadn’t fallen in with a bad crowd where drugs were prevalent.
Drugs.
Cocaine.
The unnamed man.
Anywhere I might try to turn my thoughts, they always twisted back like a magnet in a solenoid. I was becoming almost obsessive about it.
Who was he? And why did he die?