Corinne loved her office.
It was in one of the university’s cramped department buildings, a gloomy, red-brick, monolithic structure with creaking floors and an antiquated heating system that meant they all boiled through the summer because the radiators never quite turned off while, in winter, the cold wind came gusting through the cracks in the wooden window frames. But her room had a high ceiling and a huge window through which she could observe the goings-on in the swanky high-rise apartment block on the other side of the street. It was lined with shelves on which books, many of them by people Corinne knew well, were stacked two and sometimes three deep.
Corinne’s name was on the door, and every time she came in, no matter how stressful the day – and university life was becoming increasingly so – she felt a sense of homecoming. Though she’d come to adore her little house, this was definitely the place she felt most convincingly herself.
Settling down in her padded desk chair, Corinne sighed at the chequerboard of pink and yellow Post-it notes all over her desk. They’d been put there by the new departmental secretary, who looked about twelve, had round writing like a child’s and finished off each message and telephone number with a smiley face. It made Corinne feel old.
There was a ‘stuff to be dealt with’ pile in the middle of Corinne’s desk that seemed to have doubled in size since she was last in. She pulled the top document off, a printout of a chapter she’d contributed to a book about whether the internet had destroyed pop culture, which had been sent to her for proofreading. She’d written it in that magical period after Hannah announced she was pregnant but before the first signs of odd behaviour, when the world had seemed absurdly benevolent and the future bursting with possibility.
Even re-reading the first paragraph, a typically dry academic introduction, Corinne was transported back to that time, when the most she had to worry about was getting this chapter written so she could put another tick in the box when it came to personal-assessment time. When she first started at the university, academia was all about the teaching, the interaction with students, the transfer of ideas. But nowadays you were too busy justifying your existence for any of that. Where was the passion? Where was that practically audible mental click when a student finally got it? It was all about value for money these days. Students liked to see exactly what they were paying for. Spreadsheet education, she called it.
A knock on the door halted Corinne’s musings.
The man who came in was tall and broad with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a smile that split his face.
‘I’m Paddy?’ he said, seeing her blank look. ‘I’m doing an MA in sociology and anthropology. You’ve kindly agreed to be joint supervisor for my dissertation.’
‘Oh God. It’s today! I completely forgot. Of course. Come in.’
She glanced over to her academic flip calendar, and there he was: Paddy Collins. Mature Student. 11.30 a.m.
Corinne was so flustered that it took her a good ten minutes, until Paddy was well into his list of the research documents he intended to use, to realize how handsome he was. Not pretty-boy handsome like Danny, but the kind of handsome that crept up on you so you felt you’d discovered it for yourself, like treasure other people had overlooked, and doubly valuable for being hard to find.
‘Tell me a bit about yourself,’ she asked when he’d finished. ‘You’re slightly older than my usual students.’
‘I’ve got a sourdough starter that’s older than your usual students.’
Corinne must have looked confused, because he said, ‘You’re not a baker then? Starters are those natural leavening agents you use to make some types of bread. They can last for years. And now I’ve had to explain the hell out of that joke I feel like a right idiot.’
Paddy smiled and Corinne felt a curious sense of recognition, as if she knew him from somewhere. After they’d finished discussing his dissertation, Paddy seemed in no hurry to leave, happily answering her questions about his background. He’d been a firefighter until he was laid off five years earlier and since then he’d taken a degree and was now doing an MA. He wanted to write a book, make his children proud. Then they talked about children, and divorce. His children were teenagers, still angry about their parents’ split. ‘They get over it,’ she said. Then she wondered if, in fact, that was true.
They were talking so naturally that for a moment Corinne thought about telling him about Hannah. It was on the tip of her tongue, but then she swallowed it back down. My daughter is in a psychiatric institution. It wasn’t the sort of thing you told strangers. Paddy was her student. She needed to keep a professional distance.
After he had gone, Corinne couldn’t settle back into work. She gazed out of the window. The luxury flat directly opposite her office was occupied by a middle-aged couple. Sometimes, if Corinne stayed working late, the woman would be there, with her cloud of fair hair and dark, formal clothes, but mostly it was the man she saw. Clearly, he worked from home, because he spent many hours a day at a computer screen, which was framed against one of the windows of the flat. Over the years, Corinne had imagined many careers for him. He was a famous poet, tapping out his latest opus. Or he was a designer, someone creative. At one point, she’d even been convinced he was a politician, certain she recognized him from Question Time.
Today, he’d shifted his computer screen to the side and was sitting staring down at his desk top, reading something. Whatever it was, it wasn’t holding his attention. He looked up frequently, gazing through the window as if searching for inspiration. Before she could duck, his eyes locked with Corinne’s and, after a split-second delay, he raised his hand to wave. She lifted her own half-heartedly and then made a show of picking up her red pen and turning her attention back to the chapter printout on the desk in front of her.
But the words swam in front of her eyes.
Ever since she had got the call from Danny nearly ten weeks ago, his voice tight with all the things he wasn’t saying, nothing in Corinne’s world had made sense.
‘Don’t panic, but we’re in the hospital. Hannah fell down the stairs at home. She’s done something to her wrist.’
‘And the baby?’ Corinne had forced her voice to stay calm but she’d gripped the edge of the table so tightly that, afterwards, all the nails on her right hand were split.
‘We’re just waiting for an ultrasound. Hannah is hysterical. She’s afraid something has happened.’
That was it. The thing he wasn’t saying. The fear that pressed on his voice until it broke.
Then, ‘I have to go. They’re calling us. I’ll phone you afterwards.’
Then the wait. Ten minutes. Twenty. Half an hour. All the different scenarios running through Corinne’s fevered brain.
All except one.
As always, thinking about what had happened made Corinne feel useless. Desperate to do something – anything – she reached down and plucked a piece of blank paper from the tray in the printer by her feet.
‘HANNAH’, she wrote in capital letters across the top of the page in red pen, and then sat back, studying the word carefully. Then she added ‘DANGERS’ and underlined the two words.
Underneath that she divided the page into three columns. At the top of the first one she wrote ‘1) Steffie Garitson’ and underlined it. Number two was ‘The Meadows’. That, too, she underlined. Then she stared at the paper for a long time before adding a third danger to the list: ‘Hannah’s own thoughts’.
Instantly, she wanted to erase the words, feeling as if she had betrayed her own daughter just by writing them.
Steffie Garitson was a little worm of fear wriggling in Corinne’s stomach. The trip to Tunbridge Wells had been so strange, the brother’s warning so ominous, Steffie felt like a malign black shadow over their lives. But aside from hoping that she’d cleared out for good, there was little Corinne could do about her. Instead, she concentrated on the middle column. The Meadows.
Objectively, Corinne knew The Meadows was the best place for Hannah. After the trauma of Hannah’s admission to hospital and her subsequent breakdown, she and Duncan had researched Hannah’s condition exhaustively, looking for places within easy driving distance that had a track record of dealing with delusions like their daughter’s.
In the end, it was Corinne who had stumbled on The Meadows. As soon as she’d seen the well-appointed rooms and the beautifully kept gardens, she’d known Hannah could be all right there. It didn’t look like a psychiatric clinic. It could easily pass as a small, select, five-star hotel discreetly tucked away in the Barnet green belt in the very outer reaches of north London. There was no stigma to being there.
‘Stigma for who, Cor?’ Duncan had asked, when she’d sent him the brochure. ‘You or Hannah?’
But he hadn’t quibbled about contributing to the astronomical fees, even though she was quite sure Gigi would have had plenty to say on the subject.
And she couldn’t deny that Duncan had a point when he implied that one of the biggest selling points about The Meadows was its resemblance to the kind of place they were all familiar with – a hotel or a spa, somewhere that fitted within their sphere of reference. Hannah’s mental illness had plunged them all into a completely unrecognizable world, so it wasn’t surprising that Corinne clung to anything that reminded her of the people they used to be.
Corinne logged on to her office computer, ignoring the 234 unread emails that had appeared in her inbox.
When she typed ‘The Meadows’ into the search engine, she recognized the links as the same ones she’d checked before booking Hannah into the clinic. Care quality inspections passed with flying colours. Glowing testimonials from previous clients – not fully identified, but they had that ring of authenticity.
Then she tried typing in ‘The Meadows danger’, anxiety knotting itself in her stomach as she waited for the results to load, but in the event, there was nothing. Only a link to a speech Dr Chakraborty had made in which he’d talked about ‘the danger of making assumptions about mental illness’.
Now she turned her attention to Dr Roberts. As figurehead of the clinic and its charismatic spokesperson, he was the one who shaped the ethos of the place.
Her search threw up page after page of references. Endless links to papers he’d written and speeches he’d given and celebrity-studded fundraisers he’d attended.
Gradually, she was able to piece together his career path over the previous fifteen years: he had moved from a mid-level post in an exclusive London clinic to set up his own successful private practice and then, five years ago, had opened The Meadows, answering a need for ‘expert, highest-quality psychiatric care in a safe, discreet, luxurious, home-from-home environment’. But about his earliest beginnings, there was surprisingly little.
What had started out as a random exercise to make her feel as if she was doing something solidified into a real, burning need for information. This was the man in charge of Hannah’s care. It seemed suddenly imperative that she know everything there was to know about him, from the very start of his career onwards, so she could be sure he was the best person for the job. How else could she persuade her daughter to stay where she was?
Link after link focused on the older, established Roberts. His first steps in psychiatry remained shrouded in mystery until, finally, she came across an article he’d written in an obscure medical journal on a controversial new approach to bulimia in which he referred to a case he’d observed while working in a small private clinic in the Oxfordshire countryside. The clinic wasn’t named in the piece but he gave away sufficient details for Corinne to narrow it down to two options, both of which she found without difficulty on Google.
She picked up her phone but hesitated, then replaced it on the desk. Then she snatched it up again and punched in the first number. Listening to the ringtone, she had no idea what she was going to say, but as soon as the call was answered the lie popped into her head.
‘I’m a journalist with the British Medical Journal. I’m writing a profile piece on Dr Oliver Roberts and I believe he worked with you early in his career.’ If Roberts was now in his late fifties, Corinne was guessing this would have been in the late 1980s.
It wasn’t the greatest cover story. But it wasn’t bad either. Especially not for Corinne, who, like her younger daughter, had been cursed from earliest childhood with an inbuilt inability to lie. Unfortunately, the first clinic drew a blank. ‘We didn’t open until 1998,’ the receptionist told her in a clipped voice.
The phone at the second clinic, Westbridge House, was answered by a man with a strong Eastern European accent who seemed perplexed by her long-winded explanation. ‘I fetch someone,’ he said eventually.
The longer Corinne waited, the more she felt her sense of purpose dissolving away. She was about to hang up when a woman’s voice came on the line.
‘This is Christine Holmes, the administrative manager of Westbridge House. Can I help you?’
She took a deep breath. ‘My name is Corinne Harris. My daughter Hannah is in a psychiatric clinic in Barnet and I’m so worried about her I can’t breathe.’
Where had that come from? That unintentional splurge of honesty? No choice now but to plough on.
‘One of her current … fixations, I think you’d call it, is that she has become convinced she’s in danger, and I’m researching the staff whose care she’s under so I can put her mind at rest.’
To her own ears, she sounded unhinged, but Christine Holmes proved surprisingly sympathetic. ‘I do know what it’s like,’ she said. ‘Wanting to help and not being able to.’
The problem was Dr Roberts’ tenure would have been well before her day, she said. The clinic had had a total overhaul when it changed management thirteen years before with a complete change of personnel. There had been certain irregularities in the way it was previously run.
‘Irregularities?’
‘Oh, nothing illegal. I believe the original director favoured some more unorthodox theories that have since been discredited. But as I say, that was a long time ago, and there are no staff members still remaining from that period. We now have an exemplary assessment record.’
‘There must be some records, though, relating to previous staff members. I’m just looking for basic biographical details I can relay back to my daughter, to reassure her.’
Christine Holmes made a noise that, if she hadn’t been in the office of a medical clinic, Corinne would have sworn was someone taking a long drag on a cigarette; it was probably her sucking in air between her teeth.
‘All the computer systems were replaced when the clinic changed management, I’m afraid.’
‘There must be physical files, though.’
A hesitation. ‘The truth is, all the files from before 2004 are missing. There was a disgruntled employee. My predecessor, in fact. It’s a sad story. She’d been at the clinic since it opened in the mid-1980s but she had problems with alcohol and was dismissed after turning up one too many times half-cut. When she left, she apparently destroyed all the files out of spite, although that was never proven. As I said, a very sad case.’
‘Do you happen to remember her name?’
Corinne was aiming at relaxed, but worry strained the fabric of her voice, and when Christine Holmes replied Corinne could tell that she had registered her desperation.
‘I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you that.’ Her voice was once again detached and professional. ‘Out of respect for the staff member concerned.’
Inwardly cursing, Corinne hung up. Sitting at her computer, she called up her search engine and typed in ‘Westbridge House Clinic’ and ‘administrative manager’, instantly generating a string of hits involving the name Christine Holmes.
She randomly added the year 2003 to the search box, remembering that Christine had told her she’d been there since 2004. This time there was a link to a one-day conference that had been run at the clinic in February 2003. There was a number to ring for more details and a contact name. Clinic manager, Geraldine Buckley.
It wasn’t much. But it was all she had.