April 1
Brasserie Zédel, Piccadilly Circus. Indira’s birthday! We sit in the red booths. It screams wartime Paris. I think of all those tales about women joining the Special Operations Executive in Baker Street and being parachuted into Vichy France and wonder how I would cope behind enemy lines.
A band plays. Loved-up couples ogle each other. There will be the compulsory celebration in the flat with bad music and worse friends. But tonight it’s just us.
We drink and Indira unwraps my present. I still hope she’ll confess about the secret meetings with GVM. About why my two best friends are secretly plotting behind my back to sell the company I started. She will say it was Doug’s idea to shut me out and I will pretend to be shocked then sympathetic. It will be the two of us against the world. I will tell her about my sleepwalking episode and my fear of it happening again. She will shrink my fear. We will laugh together. Order will be restored.
But she says nothing. Instead, we drink too much. I talk about the Stockwell Monster story. She remembers the Sally Turner case too. That instinctive sense of outrage about a woman breaking society’s greatest taboo. A stepmum killing two kids. Against the laws of nature.
Afterwards we drunkenly patrol the sodium-lit city by ourselves. I am not the only fluent liar. She has no tells. No blinks, shuffles or missteps. I keep waiting even as we return to the flat. But we simply stumble inside. We hug and sigh and go our separate ways. There is no epic showdown or pistols at dawn.
I realise for the first time that I don’t trust her anymore. Or even like her, come to that. This is how flatmates become enemies. We are too timid to openly confront one another, but too scheming to avoid those little coups and landgrabs.
Yes, it could be the drink. But for a moment, as we hug, I actually hate her. The lies, the pretence. Indira with her classical beauty and sculpted body thinks she can flatten me. That I will do nothing. She thinks I’m too naïve to know.
Back in my room I search out that wonkish academic article again from Neuroethics magazine and read the paragraph that haunts me. It is an example from Aristotle’s Ethics. It concerns who is responsible for criminal actions.
Aristotle uses the example of a drunkard:
. . . even though a drunken individual does not act voluntarily or with full capacity while he is intoxicated, he acts voluntarily and with mental capacity when choosing to become intoxicated and should therefore be held accountable for doing so. An individual whose parasomnia episodes are triggered by excessive alcohol consumption or other factors within their control mirrors this example.
Ancient to modern. I think of the Sally Turner case. Alcohol fuelled her parasomnia. She drank heavily in the days before the murders. She precipitated her own madness.
I have broken my vow and drunk more than I should tonight.
I close my laptop. I lie on the bed. Alcohol triggers sleepwalking. So does insomnia. This demon won’t let me live. I am caught between sleep and sanity – damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
Damned from tip to toe.
April 8
The flat again today. I’m still digging.
Back to my true crime piece. The ghost of Sally Turner.
I look through the newspaper clippings of the Stockwell Monster case from twenty years ago. NEW POLL: 74% SAY HANG THE ‘STOCKWELL MONSTER’ (Sun); ‘KIDDIE KILLER’ IN THE DOCK (Daily Express); ‘MONSTER MUM’ FACES JUSTICE (Daily Mail); TURNER USES SLEEPWALKING DEFENCE FOR DOUBLE MURDER (The Times).
I file more Freedom of Information requests to the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Metropolitan Police, West London NHS Trust and the Department for Health. I issue callouts on Twitter through my @AnnaO handle to crowd-source any further leads. Not mentioning specifics but looking for any sources inside Broadmoor.
Cranks, of course, fill my DMs. But there is one message that intrigues me. I see their handle and smile.
It’s catchy if hardly original.
I click open the first message.
@PatientX.