June 21
Ogilvy Towers Part II. Mum is back. Dad is away. I remain barricaded inside my childhood bedroom. The elaborate security measures continue. The bedroom door is locked when I sleep. Two chairs block the exit with excellent toe-stubbing potential. I position other items – books, shoes, whatever I can find – in the path between bed and door. Getting out of this room will require pain. Which is good.
Pain will wake me. Pain will be cathartic, saving me from sin. It’s all very Catholic. The Opus Dei of sleepwalkers. Mum is concerned. She has finally noticed there is something wrong. Theo drops by and laughs at my hermit-like behaviour. I snoop remotely on Indira and Doug’s encrypted emails and texts and know the GVM deal is inching closer. My absence is working in their favour. I feel my irritation building. My hatred for them both.
I sit in my bedroom with the curtains closed. I still haven’t written a word of the article. I am too scared of what I might do. I think of Lady Macbeth washing her hands of blood as she sleepwalks:
DOCTOR: You see her eyes are open.
GENTLEWOMAN: Ay, but their sense is shut . . .
DOCTOR: A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep and do the effects of watching! . . .
LADY MACBETH: To bed, to bed; there’s knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone.
More FOIs. Home Office, MoJ, Department of Health, NHS England, Her Majesty’s Prison Service. There are no matches for the keyword ‘MEDEA’. That means no official documents exist, or the keyword is too sensitive to be included under Freedom of Information rules.
I consider some old-school journalism and more vigils outside the Abbey. I should doorstep Bloom and put the questions to her directly. Stop being cowardly. I have tried to find out more about others who worked on the Cranfield Ward at Broadmoor in the late nineties. But few people publicly admit to having worked there. The odour of the place is too great.
Instead, I read Bloom’s old academic papers, trying to get inside her head. I must understand what types of psychological experiments – or ‘interventions’ as they are technically known – might have been carried out on a patient as infamous as Sally Turner, aka the Stockwell Monster. What @PatientX could be referring to by the special project.
I also keep returning to my suspect for Sally Turner’s biological child. The one we know she had but was never named. The person @PatientX claims is behind all this. That, after all, is the crux of the matter. Everything, I feel, hinges on the identity of that person. If I figure that out, all the rest will follow.
The name is too sensitive, or libellous, to be said out loud. My methods of narrowing the suspect list are not entirely legal. But a recent yearbook spurred a chain of thought. I have followed it ever since. I may be totally wrong. Or not. It is a hunch in search of evidence.
For now, until I have further proof, I will simply refer to them by a codename of my own devising, a classical flourish that is both literal and disguised: MARATHON.
I read for another two hours. Then when everything is in place – chairs, shoes, etc. – I lie on the bed and allow my eyes to close. I try and summon happy thoughts. No blood, no bodies. No knives. No Medea or Lady Macbeth. I am a child again, poised between ignorance and knowledge. I am watching a United game with Dad. Or listening to Mum play the piano. I am happy, unthinking, free.
I will turn back the clock. I will cure myself of this.
What’s done cannot be undone.
June 24
The Camden flat. I feel better. Facing the demons of this place helps too. I see the kitchen knife back in place. The flat has been cleaned. Indira and Doug sit at the kitchen table with laptops crunching data on the summer issue of Elementary. Our recent subscription drive has produced results. Ad revenue is up. Newsstand sales are marginally higher. Cancellations have dropped to under 4 per cent. Reader satisfaction is peaking. This despite the Creative Director and Chief Content Officer – yours truly – displaying key signs of anxiety and agoraphobia.
They ask me about my flu. I lie well. I remind myself that neither Doug nor Indy knows about The Incident. Only I do. How close I came to plunging the twenty-centimetre kitchen knife into someone else’s skin. A belated revenge for their secret plotting. A blood-splattered detail in a murder case.
I unpack my things. I play happy flatmates again. Indira is regal and serene. Doug is busy on calls. Clients, dealers. I wonder whether to confront them now over the takeover. But I do not. I eat. I laugh. I drink. I wonder if they are together. If Indira, the numerate Roman goddess, has fallen for Doug, the pretty-boy marketeer.
Part of me hopes that life might be normal again. My friends are still my friends. The Incident is just a wake-up call (no pun intended). Sleep can once again be dull and comforting not dangerous.
But I feel the madness gather. I hear the witches’ cry:
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
June 27
The London Library. I have started writing. The printing schedule for the summer issue has been pushed back. Indira and Douglas are predictably furious. Doug does drunken, drugged-up verbals. Indy is far sneakier. She radiates disapproval through looks and gestures. Nothing is ever said. I feel her fury through a thousand micro-aggressions. It stings.
They fear cancelled subscriptions. Really, they worry GV Media will take fright and drop the acquisition of Elementary Media Ltd. Boo-hoo. Content is king. I am the Elementary brand. Without me, they have nothing. That was their mistake. They are courtiers, not the monarch. They are plotting a coup. My fingers are still on the throne.
I bring up the Word document. I select all, change the font – Times New Roman to Garamond – and read my opening again:
The true crime cases that grab the headlines tend to involve two things: an angelic girl and a monstrous man. Think of Soham, Milly Dowler, Madeleine McCann. The list goes on. But this issue of Elementary delves into a true crime story that came before all of those. It was the original tabloid crime, caught between the shock of the Bulger case and the unfathomable evil of the Shipman conviction. There have been no Netflix documentaries or BBC Storyville films. But that may be about to change. It was a case that book-ended the twentieth century. The bloodiest century in human history. It encapsulated so much of that transition moment: the last hurrah of print newspapers, five channels and flip phones. It was an analogue world where one story could hold an entire nation’s attention. This piece is about the trial of Sally Turner, known in true crime history as the Stockwell Monster. Arrested, convicted, sectioned and dead all within the year 1999.
But this long-read for the summer issue explores more than blood and gore. It looks at the long-tail that violent crime leaves behind. After all, the facts leading up to the Turner murders are well known: Sally Turner’s new relationship, the cuckooing ploy, drug-running, two stepsons raised in violence and bullying their stand-in mother figure, Sally’s tragic wish for a ‘perfect family’, the bloody finale, her sleepwalking defence and the ‘insane automatism’ verdict at the Old Bailey.
Less well known are the months after the verdict when Sally was held indefinitely at Broadmoor Hospital. She was detained on Broadmoor’s most sensitive ward – Cranfield. She was held in solitary and used as a subject for a psychological intervention codenamed MEDEA which was carried out under the clinical supervision of Dr Virginia Bloom, a consultant clinical psychologist who specialised in parasomnia and who testified at Turner’s Old Bailey trial. Months after the experiment started, Sally Turner was found dead in her room.
But did she really kill herself, or is there a more sinister explanation? Turn to page five of this issue to read our full piece and find out the answer to that tantalising question and so much more . . .
I mutter the words to myself. I reread that penultimate line. I wonder if that’s what drew me to this story all along. I am using Sally Turner as an avatar. If I can understand Sally Turner’s actions, monstrous as they are, maybe I can understand my own.
I think about my suspect MARATHON – Sally Turner’s biological child, potentially her killer too – and the life they’ve led. Publishing a name like that without enough evidence could bankrupt the magazine. The defamation case that ruins me. MARATHON is my secret for now. I don’t want Doug or Indy snooping on these journals and stealing my scoop. The real name is only in my head. It will stay there until I have enough proof. I can’t lose everything on a hunch.
I save the Word document. I see another secure message arrive. After a week of silence, my contact is back.
I am inching closer to the truth.
I open the latest message from @PatientX.