Pulling into the car park, with the gravel crunching under the wheels of her car, Corinne’s chest was tight and painful, as if someone was sewing tiny stitches across the breadth of it.
As soon as she’d registered the import of what she’d discovered – namely that Laura Whittaker had a very good reason for wanting revenge on Dr Roberts – she’d tried to get hold of Hannah on The Meadows office phone, sitting rigid with tension while Bridget Ashworth went off to find her.
Please let her be safe. Please let her be safe.
But the longer the clinic manager was away from the phone, the more convinced Corinne became that something was wrong. And when Bridget did finally get back on the line to tell Corinne, in a tone soaked in disapproval, that Hannah seemed to have left the premises without letting anyone know or signing herself out in the ‘special book’, Corinne was already out of the door before she’d finished her sentence.
All the way there, she’d repeated her new mantra.
Please let her be safe. Please let her be safe.
Pulling into a space, Corinne cast her eye around the car park, feeling a soft sag of relief at the sight of Laura’s bubblegum-pink car. Wherever Hannah had disappeared to, at least she wasn’t with her. Thank God.
Inside, she all but threw her bag at Joni, who was sitting on the reception desk.
‘Someone’s in a hurry,’ said Joni, raising her already artificially arched eyebrows. She searched through the bag with what felt to Corinne like exaggerated thoroughness.
By the time Corinne reached the art room a balloon of tension had inflated inside her and was threatening to burst. Through the open doorway she saw that Laura was taking an art-therapy session. One of the patients, the woman who had only recently been admitted, was sitting on a striped deckchair, staring fixedly ahead as if in a dentist’s waiting room, while the others worked on their drawings with sticks of charcoal.
Blindfold.
‘Corinne! Do come in. I expect I’d better explain what we’re doing. The ladies spent a good while studying Katy here before I put the blindfolds on, so they know roughly where the lines and curves should be. This exercise is about memory and interpretation and the things our minds hold on to.’
‘Hannah?’
Corinne didn’t trust herself to say more.
Laura frowned, wrinkling her nose and tilting her head to one side.
‘I’m afraid Hannah isn’t here, Corinne. She was here about half an hour ago, but she didn’t come back, which is unusual. She normally never misses a class.’
Laura’s brown eyes were melting chocolate pools of empathy and, suddenly, Corinne found herself doubting everything she’d just learned. You could tell, couldn’t you, if someone was pretending to be something they weren’t? Once you knew what you were looking for, anyway. Yet everything about Laura screamed sincerity.
‘Help!’ The high-pitched cry caused Corinne’s nerves, already stretched as tight as snare-drum skin, to snap.
Over on the far side of the room, near the window, Frannie was struggling with her blindfold, clearly in the grip of a sudden panic. As she stumbled, she knocked over her easel, sending it crashing to the ground.
‘Oh my God!’ cried Odelle, turning her face towards the source of the racket. ‘What’s happening?’
Laura hurried over to comfort the now semi-hysterical Frannie, and Corinne took the opportunity to slip out of the room. Every single cell and tissue fibre of her body strained to find her daughter and take her home.
She hurried up the stairs and along the corridor towards Dr Roberts’ office.
‘Excuse me! He’s actually with someone at the moment,’ Bridget Ashworth called out as Corinne passed the tiny admin office, but Corinne ignored her.
At Roberts’ door, she knocked, and paused briefly before throwing it open and marching inside, only to stop short when she saw that Roberts was indeed not alone.
And the person with him was Danny.
‘Corinne.’ Danny was the first to recover. ‘I’m just having a progress update from Oliver.’
Oliver?
‘Oliver is strongly of the belief that Hannah is not yet well enough to come home, and I have to tell you I agree.’
‘Where is she? Where’s Hannah?’
The two men exchanged a glance and an almost imperceptible shrug that ignited a spark of rage inside Corinne.
Dr Roberts spoke. ‘Hannah seems to have taken herself off somewhere without notifying anyone or following procedures. Now, I appreciate she’s a woman who knows her own mind and needs to assert her independence, but to me there are still question marks over this and some of her other recent behaviour.’
Question marks? The arrogance of him.
‘I know who you are.’
‘What?’
Roberts was caught off guard, his default smile frozen on to his face even while his eyes were clouding with confusion.
‘How have you got away with it all this time? This criminal reinvention of yourself?’
‘I’m afraid, Mrs Harris, I don’t know what you’re—’
‘William Kingsley.’
The name was lobbed into the room like a live grenade and, for a split second, the three of them watched it in silence.
‘Corinne, I really don’t know what—’ Danny began, but Roberts cut across him.
‘I see you’ve been checking up on me.’
His voice was higher and tighter than normal, but still infuriatingly measured. He went on:
‘Many professional people, medical staff included, change their names for one reason or another. I expect you changed your name when you were married. It’s not unheard of.’
Danny turned his chair so he could see Corinne more easily and glanced from one to the other, his dark eyebrows furrowed.
‘Are you honestly saying you didn’t change your name and your medical specialty because two women wrongly went to jail on your account?’
Still Roberts remained calm, but at the top of his cheeks a network of burst capillaries burned a pattern of red lace into his skin.
‘I still have faith I made the right judgement in those cases, Mrs Harris. And I had solid personal reasons for wanting to dissociate myself from my past. None of which have any bearing on my subsequent decision to retrain in psychiatry or my ability to do my job. I have an excellent reputation in this field, as you know, or you’d never have entrusted your daughter to us.’
‘So it won’t bother you to learn that the daughter of one of the women whose lives you destroyed is currently a paid member of your staff?’
Now she had him. Now he lost his loose-limbed, laid-back, stuck-on-smile demeanour and sat up straight, both his feet, in their leather brogues, flat on the floor.
Danny noticed the change, the question writing itself all over his face as he gazed at Roberts.
‘Will someone please tell me what’s going on?’
‘Laura Whittaker,’ Corinne said, still addressing herself directly to Roberts, ‘is the daughter of Barbara Phillips, one of the women you helped put away for two years.’
She turned her eyes towards Danny.
‘Barbara tried to kill herself a few years after she was released and hasn’t been able to walk or talk or feed herself since. You could say Laura has grounds for bearing a grudge.’
‘You can’t seriously be saying …’
Roberts was on his feet. Now that the poise he wore like a Savile Row suit had been ripped away, he seemed sagging and older, his face collapsed, as if its customary smile was all that had been holding it up.
‘You know she hypnotizes them?’ said Danny, finally recovering himself.
‘I know that’s one of her areas, but I can assure you Laura Whittaker has never been given leave to practise hypnotherapy at The Meadows.’
‘She might never have been given leave, but that hasn’t stopped her bloody well doing it,’ said Corinne. ‘She’s done them all. Charlie, Sofia, Hannah. Do you think that’s a coincidence?’
‘Are you suggesting she hypnotizes them to harm themselves? You know that would never work, don’t you? Hypnosis can’t persuade someone to do something against their will. That’s not how the human psyche works.’
‘Oh, and you’d know how the human psyche works, would you?’ Corinne was furious. ‘Even though you failed to spot that one of your patients here is someone you’ve treated before – and let down badly?’
‘Now you’ve completely lost me, Mrs Harris. Laura Whittaker was never my patient, and neither was her mother.’
‘No, but Catherine Pryor was.’
Roberts was still standing by his desk, as if caught on the cusp of an exit he never quite managed to execute. His face betrayed a fleeting recognition, as if the name was familiar but too elusive to place.
‘I can’t discuss my patients with you, Mrs Harris.’
‘I’ll fill you in then. She was the twelve-year-old who confided in you about her abusive stepfather and who you chose not to believe, effectively sending her back into his care.’
Now, finally, Roberts became angry, the skin on his cheeks darkening.
‘I imagine you are talking about a patient from Westbridge House. I don’t need to tell you I was not implicated in any wrongdoing there. Whatever fault there was was deemed to lie with the clinic’s director Professor Dunmore, who turned out to be quite a dangerous individual. I have to tell you, Mrs Harris, I do not appreciate the direction this meeting is going in. Your insinuations are beginning to border on the slanderous. I must ask you to leave and to put any issues you might have in writing, and I will do my best to address them – once the clinic’s legal adviser has checked them over.’
‘I’m not going anywhere without my daughter. And nobody here seems to know where she is.’
Danny sprang to his feet.
‘If that woman has her somewhere—’
‘She’s not with Laura. I’ve already checked.’
‘But what if she’s told her to do something to herself? Got into her subconscious. I don’t know how it works.’
‘I’ve told you,’ said Roberts, ‘that’s just not possible.’
Danny made a sudden movement towards Roberts, and for a moment Corinne thought he was about to hit him, but instead he pushed past.
‘I’m going to look for her,’ he said, throwing open the door.
‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ Roberts repeated after Danny’s retreating back, his voice paper thin.
Nothing wrong? Corinne thought as she hurried after her son-in-law. All this damage?
Up ahead, she could see Danny striding towards the art room. She caught up with him just as he burst inside.
‘Where is she?’ he bellowed, advancing on Laura, who was in the far corner of the room, tightening Judith’s blindfold.
‘Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God.’ By the window, Frannie rocked on her chair, plucking at her hair. ‘Oh God, Oh God, Oh God.’
There was a clicking sound to Corinne’s right. Justin Carter, switching on his microphone. ‘Laura, we know who you are,’ she called out. ‘We know who your mother was … and what Roberts did. We know how awful it must have been for you, but you know Hannah had nothing to do with that. We just need her to be safe.’
Laura, still half bent behind Judith, seemed frozen into place, one hand still holding the end of the scarf she had tied around Judith’s eyes.
Danny had crossed so he was just a couple of feet from Laura, with only Judith’s easel standing between them, like a splattered wooden shield.
‘Where is she? Where’s my wife?’
‘You’re intruding into our safe space.’ Odelle put down her brush and was standing by her workspace, her trembling fingers clutching on to the tray of her easel as if to stop her legs snapping under the weight of her upper half like two sticks of dried spaghetti.
‘We have a right to feel protected in our safe space. Isn’t that true, Laura?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Laura, recovering enough to step forward and fling an arm around Odelle’s shoulders. ‘I think Hannah’s mum and husband have misunderstood something, but it’s nothing for the rest of you to worry about.’
Nina, who’d been hopping from foot to foot throughout the entire confrontation, let out a bark of laughter. ‘This is brilliant,’ she said. ‘This is effing brilliant.’
Corinne felt like the room was moving under her feet, the walls coming towards her.
‘Corinne? What’s going on? Is Hannah in trouble?’ It was a measure of Corinne’s distracted state of mind that she hadn’t even noticed Stella standing off to the side, wearing her bright, blonde hair twisted up high on her head and secured with a red clip decorated with tiny, intricate fabric red roses.
‘I don’t know,’ Corinne said. ‘I think she might be. We need to find her.’
Laura stepped forward to stand in front of Corinne, so close Corinne found herself leaning back, just to put space between them.
‘I have no idea where Hannah is,’ said the art therapist in her most honeyed tone. ‘As you can see, I’m in the middle of teaching a class. Like I told you, Hannah was here earlier and she seemed perfectly fine. I’m sure there’s no need to worry.’
Laura’s head was cocked to one side so her smile appeared to slide down one side of her face. She took another step forwards and Corinne breathed in, shrinking back from the ruthless intensity of her.
She was quite mad. Why had no one noticed?
Corinne was conscious of a movement behind her right shoulder. She started when she realized Justin Carter, the documentary maker, was by her side, looking uncharacteristically flustered.
‘Not now,’ she snapped, turning on him. ‘Have you people no shame?’
‘Water,’ he said, nonsensically.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Danny. ‘Now the fucking media are joining in. This place is a circus!’
‘What do you mean “water”?’ Desperation cracked in Corinne’s voice.
‘It’s what Drew told me. Only now I can’t find him to ask him to explain it to you.’
‘Well, you explain then.’
‘Apparently, she’ – he flicked his head in Laura’s direction – ‘said it to Hannah. In hypnosis. She said that if she was stressed she should head for deep water. That would be her safe place. Look, I know this sounds crazy, but Drew said that was Hannah’s trigger.’
‘What the fuck?’ The words exploded out of Danny, and Justin took a step backwards.
‘Apparently, she uses triggers to make them do things. Look, I didn’t really understand half of what he was saying. It was about half an hour ago and he was in a rush to go somewhere and he wasn’t making sense. It didn’t click until just this minute that there might be anything sinister about it.’
Corinne was floundering. She didn’t understand.
‘Oh my God!’ The exclamation went up from the easel nearest to Laura’s office, behind which the new patient, whose name once again escaped Corinne, had been sitting in silence this whole time.
‘I saw her. Hannah. I saw her. Oh my God.’
‘For fuck’s sake, why didn’t you say?’ Danny was across the room in a fraction of a second, his six-foot-two frame looming over the woman’s chair. She crossed her arms over her chest as if under attack, and Corinne rushed over to pull Danny aside.
‘Where did you see Hannah? Please, try to remember. You could really help us.’
The woman seemed mollified and uncrossed her arms.
‘I saw her about half an hour ago when I was on my way here. She was heading down to the lake.’