As Strike approached Henlys Corner on the North Circular Road the following afternoon, he saw, with a muttered oath, that traffic ahead had come to a halt. The junction, which was a notorious hotspot for congestion, had supposedly been improved earlier that year. As he joined the stationary queue, Strike wound down his window, lit a cigarette and glanced at his dashboard clock, with the familiar sensation of angry impotence that driving in London so often engendered. He had wondered whether it might be wiser to take the Tube north, but the psychiatric hospital lay a good mile from the nearest station, and the BMW was marginally easier on his still sore leg. Now he feared that he was going to be late for an interview that he was determined not to miss, firstly because he had no wish to disoblige the psychiatric team who were letting him see Billy Knight, and secondly because Strike didn’t know when there would next be an opportunity to speak to the younger brother without fear of running into the older. Barclay had assured him that morning that Jimmy’s plans for the day comprised writing a polemic on Rothschild’s global influence for the Real Socialist website and sampling some of Barclay’s new stash.
Scowling and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, Strike fell back to ruminating on a question that had been nagging at him since the previous evening: whether or not the cut connection halfway through his call to Robin had really been due to Matthew snatching the phone out of her hand. He had not found Robin’s subsequent assurances that all was well particularly convincing.
While heating himself baked beans on his one-ringed hob, because he was still attempting to lose weight, Strike had debated calling Robin back. Eating his meatless dinner unenthusiastically in front of the television, supposedly watching highlights of the Olympics closing ceremony, his attention was barely held by the sight of the Spice Girls zooming around on top of London cabs. I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it, Della Winn had said. Perhaps Robin and Matthew were even now in bed together. Was pulling a phone out of her hand any worse than deleting her call history? She had stayed with Matthew after that. Where was her red line?
And Matthew was surely too careful of his own reputation and prospects to abandon all civilized norms. One of Strike’s last thoughts before falling asleep the night before had been that Robin had successfully fought off the Shacklewell Ripper, a grisly reflection, perhaps, but one that brought a certain reassurance.
The detective was perfectly aware that the state of his junior partner’s marriage ought to be the least of his worries, given that he so far had no concrete information for the client who was currently paying three full-time investigators to find out the facts about her father’s death. Nevertheless, as the traffic finally moved on, Strike’s thoughts continued to eddy around Robin and Matthew until at last he saw a signpost to the psychiatric clinic and, with an effort, focused his mind on the forthcoming interview.
Unlike the gigantic rectangular prism of concrete and black glass where Jack had been admitted a few weeks earlier, the hospital outside which Strike parked twenty minutes later boasted crocketed spires and byzantine windows covered with iron bars. In Strike’s opinion it looked like the bastard offspring of a gingerbread palace and a gothic prison. A Victorian stonemason had carved the word “Sanatorium” into the dirty redbrick arch over the double doorway.
Already five minutes late, Strike flung open the driver’s door and, not bothering to change his trainers for smarter footwear, locked the BMW and hurried, limping, up the grubby front steps.
Inside he found a chilly hallway with high, off-white ceilings, churchlike windows and a general suspicion of decay barely kept at bay by the fug of disinfectant. Spotting the ward number he had been given by phone, he set off along a corridor to the left.
Sunlight falling through the barred windows cast striped patches onto the off-white walls, which were hung crookedly with art, some of which had been done by former patients. As Strike passed a series of collages depicting detailed farmyard scenes in felt, tinsel and yarn, a skeletal teenage girl emerged from a bathroom alongside a nurse. Neither of them seemed to notice Strike. Indeed, the girl’s dull eyes were focused, it seemed to him, inward upon a battle she was waging far from the real world.
Strike was faintly surprised to discover the double doors to the locked ward at the end of the ground floor corridor. Some vague association with belfries and Rochester’s first wife had led him to picture it on an upper floor, hidden perhaps in one of those pointed spires. The reality was entirely prosaic: a large green buzzer on the wall, which Strike pressed, and a male nurse with bright red hair peering through a small glass window, who turned to speak to somebody behind him. The door opened and Strike was admitted.
The ward had four beds and a seating area, where two patients in day clothes were sitting, playing drafts: an older, apparently toothless man and a pale youth with a thickly bandaged neck. A cluster of people were standing around a workstation just inside the door: an orderly, two more nurses, and what Strike assumed to be two doctors, one male, one female. All turned to stare at him as he entered. One of the nurses nudged the other.
“Mr. Strike,” said the male doctor, who was short, rather foxy in appearance and had a strong Mancunian accent. “How do you do? Colin Hepworth, we spoke on the phone. This is my colleague, Kamila Muhammad.”
Strike shook hands with the woman, whose navy trouser suit reminded him of a policewoman’s.
“We’re both going to be sitting in on your interview with Billy,” she said. “He’s just gone to the bathroom. He’s quite excited about seeing you again. We thought we’d use one of our interview rooms. It’s right here.”
She led him around the workstation, the nurses still watching avidly, into a small room containing four chairs and a desk that had been bolted to the floor. The walls were pale pink but otherwise bare.
“Ideal,” said Strike. It was like a hundred interview rooms he had used in the military police. There, too, third parties had often been present, usually lawyers.
“A quick word before we start,” said Kamila Muhammad, pulling the door to on Strike and her colleague, so that the nurses couldn’t hear their conversation. “I don’t know how much you know about Billy’s condition?”
“His brother told me it’s schizoid affective disorder.”
“That’s right,” she said. “He went off his medication and ended up in a full-blown psychotic episode, which by the sounds of it is when he came to see you.”
“Yeah, he seemed pretty disturbed at the time. He looked as though he’d been sleeping rough, as well.”
“He probably had been. His brother told us he’d been missing around a week at that point. We don’t believe Billy’s psychotic anymore,” she said, “but he’s still quite closed down, so it’s hard to gauge to what degree he’s engaged with reality. It can be difficult to get an accurate picture of someone’s mental state where there are paranoid and delusional symptoms.”
“We’re hoping that you can help us disentangle some of the facts from the fiction,” said the Mancunian. “You’ve been a recurring motif in his conversation ever since he was sectioned. He’s been very keen to talk to you, but not so much to any of us. He’s also expressed fear of—of repercussions if he confides in anyone and, again, it’s difficult to know whether that fear is part of his illness or, ah, whether there’s someone who he genuinely has reason to fear. Because, ah—”
He hesitated, as though trying to choose his words carefully. Strike said: “I’d imagine his brother could be scary if he chose to be,” and the psychiatrist seemed relieved to have been understood without breaking confidentiality.