As she queued at traffic lights to cross the North Circular Road, the afternoon after the encounter with Steffie Garitson, Corinne’s thoughts were still racing.
It was so long since she’d held a baby. She’d forgotten just how small they were, and the funny little grunting noises they made, and how their whole faces scrunched up when they cried.
Eleanor had needed changing and feeding after her long nap in the car and, by the time that had been accomplished and Corinne had finished telling Steffie off for leaving her unattended, even if the car was directly outside and the front door open, the moment for anger seemed to have passed.
It wasn’t until later that the inappropriateness of the whole situation had struck her. Her son-in-law had had a baby with another woman and then kept it secret from his wife. What was this news going to do to Hannah?
Steffie had apologized for shocking her. She’d assumed Corinne already knew about Eleanor. Though she admitted she’d at first told Danny she’d lost the baby, reeling from discovering he was still married, she’d relented and told him the truth once Eleanor was born, nearly a month ago. Even so, she hadn’t given him the option of coming to visit, nor had he asked. She had considered herself completely done with the man who’d lied to her so blatantly. In fact, it was only Corinne’s ill-fated trip to Tunbridge Wells that had brought Steffie back into their lives. ‘I knew my mother would have been filling your ear with poison,’ Steffie had said. ‘I just wanted to see you, to give you some context.’
Corinne had looked at the dark rings around her eyes, and the practised way she paced and rocked her screaming daughter, as if they’d done this particular dance many times before, and she felt sorry for the girl. How could she not?
She’d tried to call on Corinne before, she said. Ringing the bell repeatedly before deciding no one was in and hurrying away, not realizing she’d dropped Eleanor’s hat on the doorstep. Corinne remembered being in the shower. The insistent ringing of the bell. Her worry that it could be the clinic calling about some emergency.
After Steffie left, Corinne had tried to call Duncan, but his phone went straight to voicemail, and the idea that Gigi might have seen her name flashing up on his screen and ordered him not to answer made her hang up without leaving a message.
Then she’d FaceTimed Megan, who had only just got up and had seemed bewildered when Corinne mentioned Steffie, which then meant having to explain about going to the house in Tunbridge Wells, at which Megan’s face sharpened to a point and she yelled at Corinne for having kept her in the dark about what was going on.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Megan had spared little sympathy for Steffie, no matter how many times Corinne tried to tell her that she hadn’t known Danny was married. She saved most of her vitriol for her brother-in-law, and Corinne felt a creeping sense of dread as she realized how irreparable the rift would be between her daughters when Hannah finally moved back home.
If she moved back home.
Unsurprisingly, sleep had been hard to come by and, now, parking her car in the near-deserted car park of The Meadows, Corinne felt as if her brain had been scooped out and replaced by cotton wadding.
Her phone rang as she was waiting to be buzzed through the front door, and she answered, only registering too late that she didn’t recognize the number.
‘Yes.’ It was her clipped ‘don’t you dare engage me in conversation’ voice. Already she could feel fury bubbling inside her, looking for release. Whoever wanted to talk to her about PPI or that car accident she’d never had was going to get more than they bargained for.
By the time she’d belatedly recognized the voice on the line, the tone had been set.
‘I can tell I’ve caught you at a bad time,’ said Paddy, coming to the end of a rambling question about a text he couldn’t decide whether or not to include.
‘Yes, it is rather.’
Even as she was speaking, Corinne realized she was coming across as cold. Rude, even.
‘I won’t take up any more of your time then.’
And before she had a chance to explain herself, he’d hung up.
Afterwards, she couldn’t help wondering how necessary it had really been for him to call her. Surely an email would have done? Might he actually have been trying to find an excuse to talk to her?
Well. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
‘Mrs Harris?’ Bridget Ashworth had a habit of materializing out of the blue. She hovered by the entrance to the old building, twiddling her lanyard and blocking Corinne’s path to the day room.
‘Dr Roberts was wondering if you could just pop in to his office. It won’t take long.’
She was smiling, but it was that kind of default smile that could mean good news or ‘sorry to tell you …’ news.
Corinne’s feet, as they followed Bridget’s up the staircase, felt leaden.
‘Ah, thank you for coming, Corinne.’
Dr Roberts got up from his chair as Corinne came in, and walked around his desk to clasp her hand in his, which immediately put her on her guard.
What now?
‘I’ll get straight to the point. I’m sorry to say that, after making great progress recently, there’s been a slight glitch in Hannah’s recovery.’
‘Glitch?’
‘Hannah went to the high street yesterday with Stella. To a pub.’
Corinne breathed again. A pub? She could deal with that.
‘And when they came out of the pub, Hannah stepped off the kerb in front of a lorry. Don’t be alarmed, Corinne – Stella managed to pull her back out of the way and she is completely unharmed. But, as you can imagine, we’re rather concerned.’
‘Surely you don’t think she did it on purpose? Hannah would never—’
Roberts held up his hand.
‘We are not jumping to any conclusions. Hannah insists it was an accident and she was just distracted. But either way, it’s something we have to pay very close attention to. Let’s not forget, Hannah is still a very vulnerable young woman. We know she has taken the death of Charlie Chadwick very hard. It’s not unheard of in such cases for someone to display copycat behaviour.’
Now the shock was wearing off, Corinne was conscious of a dull pain under her ribs.
‘I’m afraid this means she needs to be with us slightly longer than we initially thought,’ Dr Roberts continued.
‘But she thinks she’s leaving this week.’
Roberts shook his head.
‘That’s not advisable. Not until we’re sure she’s not a danger to herself. I’m very much hoping she’ll agree to stay a little while longer but, if not, I do have the authority, under the Mental Health Act, to seek a short-term compulsory order to keep her here, just while we reassure ourselves there won’t be any repeat incidents.’
Corinne left Dr Roberts’ office with that now all too familiar sense of being out of sync with the world.
‘Mum! Where have you been? I saw you drive in ages ago.’
Hannah must have been sitting by the window in the day room watching for her. She looked flushed as she jumped up from the sofa to greet Corinne, as if it was too warm in the room. Corinne felt sick, thinking about Hannah stepping off the kerb like that. There was no way she could tell her about the baby now.
‘Dr Roberts wanted to talk to me. About the lorry. Darling, what happened? Are you OK?’
Hannah made a pffff noise, as if it was an irrelevance that didn’t merit discussion.
Stella was sitting on the other end of the sofa, and her presence elicited conflicting emotions in Corinne. According to Roberts, she’d saved Hannah’s life. Yet there was still no explanation for why she was here, with a new face and a new identity.
‘I believe thanks are in order,’ she said, groaning inwardly at the sound of her pompous voice.
Stella flapped her hand in a dismissive gesture.
‘I need to talk to you, Mum. It’s really important. Shall we go for a walk?’
Before Corinne could reply, Hannah had grabbed her arm and was bundling her into the hallway with that enormous crystal chandelier overhead.
‘But it’s cold,’ Corinne protested feebly. Hannah ignored her, pressing the green release button so they could exit through the little-used front door, dragging her mother with her. To Corinne’s surprise, Stella followed them out. She expected Hannah to make some sort of excuse to Stella, about needing to have a private chat, but her daughter seemed in no hurry to shake her off.
‘I also have something I need to discuss with you, Hannah, but I’ll save it for when you’re stronger,’ she said, when they’d followed the gravel path around the building to the smoking bench in the rose garden.
To her surprise, Hannah didn’t pick her up on that word ‘stronger’; in fact, she hardly seemed to have registered anything Corinne had said.
‘Mum,’ she said, before they’d even sat down, ‘you mustn’t listen to Roberts. He’s not what he seems.’
Hannah was gazing intently at Corinne, as if she was supposed to know what she was talking about.
‘Is this to do with what we talked about before,’ asked Corinne, with a subtle nod in Stella’s direction.
‘No. Not Westbridge House. Nothing to do with that.’
Immediately, Corinne felt wrong-footed. So Hannah had already confronted Stella about Westbridge House and her past dealings with Roberts. Then what was all this about?
‘His name wasn’t always Oliver Roberts.’ Hannah was almost tripping over her own words in her hurry to get them out. ‘It used to be William Kingsley. William Robert Kingsley. He was a neurologist who testified against two women accused of shaking their babies to death. Largely because of him, both of them were jailed, but they were released in the mid-1990s, when it was proved that the babies were far more likely to have died from complications resulting from illness or infection.’
Corinne was struggling to keep up.
‘Are you saying he was struck off and then changed his name and continued practising medicine? Because surely that’s illegal?’
Sitting on the bench, with her arms wrapped around her knees for warmth, Stella started giggling.
‘I always think it’s so funny when people say “practising medicine”,’ she said. ‘As if it’s a hobby.’
‘He wasn’t struck off, Mum,’ said Hannah, impatiently. ‘But he was publicly discredited. He must have thought it was easier to start again under a different name, in a different branch of medicine, without any question marks hanging over his reputation. You know how ambitious he is. That’s probably what led him to volunteer himself as an expert in those cases in the first place. Wanting to make a name for himself as quickly as he could.’
Corinne could imagine it. The young Roberts. Handsome, charismatic and impatient to prove himself. Becoming known as an expert in a highly controversial, headline-making field would have seemed like an excellent shortcut to fame and glory.
‘Oh, those poor women. Can you even imagine it – losing your baby, and then being accused of killing it yourself?’
As soon as she’d said it, Corinne wished it unsaid. Wasn’t that just what had happened to Hannah? The baby had been real to her, and she’d lost her. Of course she could imagine it.
‘Do you think the other patients ought to know his background?’ asked Corinne. ‘I mean, I thought full transparency was one of the cornerstones of public life these days.’
Hannah put a finger sideways into her mouth and sucked on the nail. It was a new gesture since her arrival at The Meadows, and it made the muscles in Corinne’s chest constrict. She remembered how Roberts had called Hannah ‘vulnerable’ and she fought an urge to knock the finger out of her daughter’s mouth, to force her back to the Hannah she used to be.
‘I don’t know,’ said Hannah slowly, as if thinking aloud. ‘If there seems to be anything dodgy in Roberts’ past, chances are the families will lose confidence. That means some of the parents, like Odelle’s and Frannie’s, will almost certainly pull them out of here.’
‘Which is a good thing, isn’t it?’ Corinne persisted. ‘You’ve always thought there was something not right about the way Sofia and Charlie died. Now here’s a chance to raise the alarm and find out exactly what’s been happening. I mean, it’s not as if Roberts has an unblemished track record since switching to psychiatry. Look at what happened to Stella.’
It was the first time she’d alluded directly to the fact that she knew about Stella’s past connection to Roberts, and for a moment she was worried she might have overstepped the mark. But Stella merely fixed her with those stretched blue eyes and said nothing.
‘I don’t know, Mum, I feel really torn,’ said Hannah. ‘On the one hand, I do want everyone to know what kind of man Roberts really is – how ambitious and self-serving. But not until I know what’s going to happen to the patients and staff here if he has to resign. People like Frannie and Odelle are so settled here. Everyone knows their stories. If the clinic closes down, it will be a huge wrench for them. And what about Dr Chakraborty, and Darren and Laura? I’d hate for them all to lose their jobs because of me.’
‘You’re not seriously suggesting we do nothing?’
‘No. At the very least, the trustees of the clinic deserve to know about Roberts’ background. But I’d prefer to hold off for a bit until we find out exactly what it’s going to mean for everyone. I mean, it’s not as if any of us in here are in any immediate danger from him. And the clinic does get results. You said so yourself. That’s why you chose it.’
‘Yes, but …’
Corinne stopped herself saying what she wanted to say, which was to ask where the results were for Hannah herself? Why her daughter, having seemed so much more herself, had stepped off a kerb in front of a lorry. Where was the quick fix she’d been so convinced they would find?
‘I’m worried about you,’ she said instead. ‘I want to keep you safe, and I don’t know if you are safe in here.’
She debated telling Hannah what Roberts had said about her being detained there against her will but, just as she was about to speak, the back door to the clinic was thrown open.
‘There you are! I’ve been looking for you two everywhere. Why on earth are you standing out here in the cold?’
Laura was hopping from foot to foot in a blue-and-white stripy jumper, her short black hair spiky with rain.
‘Hello, Hannah’s mum!’ she called out in a sing-song voice, before adding, ‘Hannah, how about we go inside for our session now, hey? It’s bloody well freezing out here.’
Corinne considered all the things she had still not told Hannah – about Steffie and the baby, and the secrets and lies with which her daughter’s husband had coated his life.
‘But Hannah, darling, I was hoping we’d be able to chat.’
‘Later, Mum. I’ll call you from the office phone.’
After they’d gone, Corinne and Stella gazed at one another. Stella had two spots of pink colour in her cheeks, like an old-fashioned doll.
‘I expect you’ll be taking Hannah away?’ she said. ‘The people I love always seem to be leaving me.’
‘You need to get away from here too, Stella.’
Corinne waited for the inevitable question – ‘But where would I go?’ – and wondered how she would answer it.
So she was nonplussed when Stella raised those artificially blue eyes to her and asked something quite different.
‘But who would I be?’