February 18
A night alone with Indira. Wine, food, more bad telly. Up close, Indira is sickeningly symmetrical. She has that gazelle-like, wafty presence. My mum loves her, Dad too. They wish I was more Indy and less me.
Like all creatives, I do fireball intensity, a Jekyll-and-Hyde act that blows loud and mute, depending on how the mood takes me. Indira belongs on Mount Rushmore or among the statues in Parliament Square. Economics degree, Finance master’s, Bloomberg grad scheme. Master of the Media Universe.
I have seen the latest emails on the takeover. I glimpsed Douglas’s Proton account when he was too stoned to notice. Lawyers. Accountants. The CFO at GV Media. The big boys and girls. Figures mooted. Dates referenced. Terms and conditions scrutinised.
Indira asks how I’m feeling. She notes my symptoms: red-eyed, sleeping pills, GP appointment, specialist referral. She has no idea about the locks, the chair, the ritual of night-time. She doesn’t know about the past or what I am capable of.
I lie and say everything is okay. I am a decent liar.
I beg off early and go to my room.
In bed, the sleep research continues. I type and click and scroll. I get deeper into the theme of sleeping sickness. I discover an article in the New Yorker from 2017 on refugee children in Sweden who fall into a permanent sleep as they face deportation. In particular, the heartbreaking tale of a Russian refugee called Georgi:
All he wanted to do was close his eyes. Even swallowing required an effort that he didn’t feel he could muster . . . He hadn’t eaten for four days and had not spoken a full sentence in a week . . . The next day, a doctor inserted a feeding tube through Georgi’s nostril . . . Georgi was given a diagnosis of uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome.
I type ‘resignation syndrome’ into Google. Even more stories come up:
‘Resignation syndrome: Sweden’s mystery illness’
(BBC News, October 26, 2017)
‘Resignation syndrome in refugee children – a new hypothesis’
(Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics, February 22, 2016)
‘Resignation syndrome: Catatonia? Culture-bound?’
(Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, January 26, 2016)
I click on the links and continue reading.
I forget about Indira and the takeover.
There is no chance of sleep tonight.
February 22
Westminster. The Old Palace. Another parental pistols-at-dawn moment. It is the time-honoured tale. Dad has a thing with one of his co-workers in the office. Mum finds out. The Other Woman. Or Yet Another Other Woman. Mum worries rumours will spread among her political enemies.
She needs me as a prop again.
So here we are. We sit in the middle of the Peers’ Dining Room with our stodgy puddings and prattle on about nothing. Politics is perception. We play happy families, like we always do when one of Dad’s indiscretions flares.
I mentally list all the Other Women there have been. I want to find her name this time. The latest threat to our nuclear family unit.
I almost tell Mum about the fear, the recurrence. How scared I am. How helpless I feel. But she, too, is consumed by the Other Woman.
So I stay silent and say nothing at all.
February 25
The perfect murder is a postmodern enterprise. Discuss.
I am knee-deep now. Sleep and murder. The sickness of sleeping. Sleep as death. Or death as sleeping. I will purge my own sleepwalking demons with an exploration of someone else’s.
This is my long-read for the magazine. I will write the definitive case history of the Stockwell Monster with all its contemporary resonances: sleep crime, automatism, the fallen woman, the blended family, insanity and femininity, the terrors of dreams, contested facts and multiple truths.
And I already have my first lead.
The expert witness at Court 1 of the Old Bailey. The sleep expert who testified that Sally Turner was sleepwalking when she killed her two stepsons. An expert in non-REM parasomnia.
I review the woman’s CV again. She’s worked as a consultant clinical psychologist at Broadmoor; Professor of Clinical Psychology at King’s College, London; Managing Partner at the Abbey Sleep Clinic in Harley Street.
She was on the staff at Broadmoor when Sally Turner was sent there.
Witness and therapist, saviour and supervisor.
I make a note of her name.
Professor V. Bloom.
She is my way into this case.