Fragile Minds

TUESDAY 25TH JULY KENTON



Kenton was sweating profusely when she reached the hospital reception.

‘Claudie Scott.’ She could hardly speak, she was so desperate. ‘Just brought in by ambulance.’

‘Are you family?’ The blank-eyed receptionist gazed at Kenton, tapping bejewelled pink talons on the desk before her.

‘No, I’m police, and I have reason to believe her life might be in danger. I need to find her NOW.’

But by the time Kenton reached Claudie Scott’s room, Helen Ganymede was nowhere to be seen and Claudie Scott was sleeping.

‘Stop everyone leaving the building,’ Kenton instructed the policeman who had been stationed outside Claudie’s room – but she knew it was too late. She sent Tina Price to check the hospital CCTV, but she knew that Ganymede – aka Rosalind Lamont – would be long gone.

Natalie Lord arrived as Kenton tried to reach Silver; he didn’t answer. Kenton went into the little room where Claudie was asleep.

‘I can’t wake her.’ Natalie was holding her sister’s hand, which was entirely limp, her broad brow furrowed with concern. ‘She seems very deeply asleep.’

A middle-aged nurse with exhaustion written all over her face arrived in the room with Claudie’s medication.

‘Is my sister all right?’ Natalie asked the woman. ‘I can’t wake her at all.’

The nurse checked Claudie’s pulse, frowning as she did so. She called her colleague who was at the nurse’s station outside.

‘Her BP’s incredibly low. And someone’s been fiddling with this drip.’

The other nurse frowned and pressed her pager.

‘What’s wrong?’ Kenton took a step forward.

‘I’m not sure.’ The first nurse looked up at her colleague. ‘Her breathing’s very shallow; bp 70/40.’

The nurse tried to smile at Natalie, but she was obviously tense. She kicked something inadvertently as she leant over Claudie. Kenton swiped it off the floor.

‘What’s this?’ Kenton asked.

The nurse took it.

‘It’s a morphine vial.’ The woman pressed the emergency button by Claudie’s head over and again. ‘But not one of ours. I don’t know what the hell’s happened here, but we need a doctor, now. She’s crashing.’





TUESDAY 25TH JULY SILVER



Silver and Sadie stared at each other across the great stage.

‘Sadie,’ he was calm. ‘Don’t do anything silly, lass. Let’s have a chat, shall we?’

Silver yanked Lucie Duffy with him as he slowly stepped towards the girl.

‘You need to speak to your friend,’ he muttered. ‘Quickly.’

‘Bring down the safety curtain now,’ Okeke snapped at the stage manager. ‘Now!’

For once, the fuzzy-headed woman did as she was told, eyes wide with fear. ‘Is this a prank?’ she mumbled.

‘Does it look like one?’ Okeke muttered back.

On the other side of the stage, the white-faced dancers in their courtly dress were frozen in fear behind Sadie.

‘Sadie,’ Silver said quietly. ‘We need to talk. Can you walk towards me please? Just a little.’

‘Come on, Sadie,’ Lucie’s voice was thick with fear. ‘What have you got on? Doesn’t go with your dress, babe.’ She faltered. Silver squeezed her hand hard. Silver heard her inhale. ‘I’ll lend you the Westwood.’

Sadie took a few steps towards the middle of the stage, Silver and Lucie walked slowly to meet her. They faced each other.

‘What’s this about, Sadie?’ Silver asked the girl. Up close, she didn’t look quite so calm, her whole body was trembling, her feet filthy and bare, her eyes wild.

‘The Archangel has spoken,’ she said. ‘I am here to deliver us from evil.’

‘Evil? Look where you are, lovie,’ Silver was gentle, like he was coaxing a child or a nervous animal. ‘There’s no evil here. This is what you loved, isn’t it, Sadie?’

‘Sadie,’ Lucie Duffy was trying not to cry, her terror was so immense. ‘If you stop being so silly, I’ll get you a part in the ballet. I swear. I’ll talk to Monica Mason. She needs dancers like you. Don’t do this, Sadie.’ Lucie started to cry, tears rolling through the thick make-up. ‘Please don’t do this. I don’t want to die.’ She was sobbing properly now.

Sadie was faltering, shaking, unsure what to do. Silver knew she was terrified.

‘Sadie.’ Silver took another small step towards her. In the wings, behind her, Okeke was moving the dancers slowly away. ‘I saw your mum a few days ago. She’s dying to see you.’ A better choice of words would have been preferable, he thought, too late. ‘She’s waiting to see you. She’s so proud of you. Think of Colin and your mam. Think of,’ he took a deep breath, it was a risk, he knew. ‘Think of little Jaime. She wouldn’t want this, would she? Her big sister dying in agony?’

‘Jaime?’ Sadie frowned. ‘What’s Jaime got to do with it?’

‘She loved you so much, Sadie, and she wouldn’t want you to die. Not so young. Not with so much life to live.’

‘But it’s a bad life.’ Sadie stuck her chin out in defiance. ‘We need to take the message to the world.’

‘And who told you that?’

‘The Archangel.’

‘And is the Archangel dying, Sadie? No, I don’t think so.’ Silver had nearly reached her side by now. ‘No, he’s sitting pretty, watching you do his dirty work.’

‘Not he,’ Sadie corrected carefully. ‘She.’

‘He, she,’ Silver reached out for her hand. ‘Whoever. Listen to me, lovie. Meriel’s death wasn’t pretty, Sadie – and it was entirely pointless. She died screaming. It will achieve nothing, lass, your death. It might be headlines for one or two days. And people won’t understand, and they won’t change their lives. But we want you to live. Don’t we, Lucie?’

Lucie was crying so hard now she could hardly speak, but she nodded her head vehemently.

‘Of course,’ she managed. ‘Please, Sadie.’

‘Come on, Sadie.’ Silver took her freezing hand in his. ‘Let’s take this silly thing off, shall we?’

And Sadie stared up at him, and he held her gaze, and he saw all of humanity’s frailty reflected in her frightened eyes.





TUESDAY 25TH JULY CLAUDIE



I am in the kitchen and there you are; you come trundling round the door, following the cat, and you are grinning in a way that means you have done something naughty.

‘Thomas through the flapjack,’ you chuckle, a single trail of dribble on your chin, and you have put your Thomas the Tank Engine train through the cat-flap so it’s fallen down into the mud. And I laugh, and scoop you up, your fat tummy swelling in your starry pyjamas, and I kiss it, and you chortle.

‘Through the flapjack, hey?’ I say, ‘how about that?’ and I press you to me and you smell so nice, you smell like life, and I hold you tighter, your pudgy wrist; I bury my face in your soft hair, and it tickles my nose.

And Helen always said the pain would lessen, and for all her madness and evil, she had helped a little. But the pain always comes again suddenly so I am transfixed by it, by a state I thought had lessened; that doesn’t ever die down, that takes me by surprise, knocks me off my feet, comes in great waves like a wild sea; rendering me breathless and momentarily desperate. Trapping me as if I was in a small room pushing at each wall, only to find there was no way out. There is no way of winning, I know that now.

‘Where do you go?’ Will kept saying to me plaintively after you finally went, and I couldn’t explain. But now I know. I went to the place where I could grab at ghosts.

‘It will die down in time,’ Helen had said, ‘the pain.’ But do you know, it never really has – and so I am happy to go now.

I am not coming back. Not without you.





TUESDAY 25TH JULY SILVER



They laid the crude belt down on the stage and after a while, the Explosives team came to disarm it.

Silver took a still-shaking Sadie Malvern to sit in a dressing room whilst he waited for uniform to finish dealing with the evacuation of the building. Okeke was with Rafe Longley; Silver had asked him to hold him in the Green Room for now. It was apparent that Lucie Duffy, once she had stopped hyperventilating, didn’t know whether to be glad that her friend had made the right choice, or angry that her chance to shine in front of minor royalty had been thwarted. She stood in front of Sadie for a moment, hands on her hips above her snowy tutu.

‘Honestly, Sadie, are you completely mad?’ She glared down at her. ‘Actually, don’t answer that. It’s quite bloody obvious.’

The last Silver saw of Lucie Duffy was her stomping upstairs with her partner Kiko, intermittently swearing like a trooper and sobbing, her thick, black eye make-up running down her face in rivulets. As usual with Lucie, Silver was unsure of how pure her motives were.

‘Would you like to speak to your mum?’ Silver asked Sadie gently. ‘We can call her if you like.’

Sadie shrugged her narrow shoulders, a birthmark the shape of a love-heart adorning the left one. ‘Not really.’

‘Oh come on,’ Silver coaxed.

‘It’s not me she really cares about. Me mam.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ Silver frowned. He took off his jacket and wrapped it around her shivering shoulders. He noticed his own hand was trembling slightly.

‘She never cared much, not since our Jaime passed.’ Sadie turned those huge blue eyes on him, like fog-lamps they were, or scraps of sky. ‘I recognise you, don’t I?’

Silver shifted uncomfortably. ‘Yes, kiddo, I’m afraid you do.’

Sadie shrugged a tiny shrug. ‘Best off away from that lot, I am. I’ve got a new family now.’

They sat in silence for a minute.

‘What’s going to happen to me, Mr Silver?’ she said eventually.

‘I’m not exactly sure, Sadie.’ He weighed up the truth; whether it was worth telling. ‘You’ll be charged with attempted murder, I imagine – but there might well be extenuating circumstances.’

‘Like what?’ The girl gazed at him.

‘Well, who made you do this? Was it Longley? Your boyfriend? The Prince?’

‘No.’ She shook her head fervently. ‘He’s not my boyfriend. He’s been shagging Lucie, but he’s nowt to do with me, that Rafe. He’s a stuck-up tosser.’

‘So,’ Silver prompted gently. ‘The Archangel, who is he? Do you know his real name?’

‘Her real name,’ she reproved him. She wound her friendship bracelet, a little string of sky blue, round and round her wrist until it was tight. ‘I told you. Her.’

‘Who is she?’

‘John’s wife. Helen.’

Silver stared at her. ‘Helen? The psychiatrist? Who’s John?’

‘John?’ Sadie blinked up at him. ‘John’s Helen’s husband. I think she is going to leave him though. She is so – pure and he, he is about money and stuff she hates.’

‘Sadie, love, you’ve lost me. Why does she call herself the Archangel?’

‘Because she is leading the revolt in heaven.’

‘And John? The husband? Is he in heaven too?’

‘Hardly,’ Sadie’s lip curled. ‘Only when he’s f*cking young girls. It’s not his real name. His real name is Ivan Adanov, Helen told me, but he’d kill you if you called him that. John owns Sugar and Spice. He used to be the same as Helen but she says he’s changed. Still, he lets Helen do what she likes, and she looks the other way.’

Craven arrived at the door of the dressing room now, lumbering like an old bear in a zoo.

‘We picked up a woman called Miriam round the corner; she was driving the white Golf from the CCTV footage. And Kenton’s trying to get hold of you, guv. Urgent.’

The white Golf. Of course. Silver stood now. ‘Where is Kenton?’

‘At the Royal Free Hospital. The girl Claudie Scott,’ Craven was mumbling now, he could see the distress on Silver’s face and for once he was sensitive to it. ‘I’m afraid it’s not good news, guv.’

Silver thought of the psychiatrist’s perfect house, of the Renaissance print of the Archangels’ battle in heaven, of the photos on the sideboard. Of the husband with the dog. The husband whose face he thought he recognised in the photos; of the man sitting in Sugar and Spice quietly adding up figures. Of the instinct Silver had ignored when he chose to fly down to Norfolk that night.

‘F*ck.’

‘Stay with her,’ Silver ordered Craven, indicating Sadie who was staring at the ceiling, murmuring quietly to herself, and he walked out of the room. He kicked the next door along the corridor so hard that it cracked. Then he kicked it again. He walked down the hall and the bastard Beer was screaming in both ears, and he knew he’d messed up fatally.





TUESDAY 25TH JULY KENTON



Kenton took the call from Silver as she was leaving the hospital.

‘Get to Helen f*cking Ganymede’s house now and check the bitch isn’t there. I doubt she’d be so stupid – but you never know with a lunatic like her. Apparently she is the infernal Archangel!’

‘Gladly, sir.’

Price put the blues and twos on and they drove, sounding like banshees from hell; from the hospital to Hampstead Heath. They skidded down Ganymede’s road and Kenton took the drive corner far too fast and they—

They hit Helen’s Range Rover head on.

Of course, Helen was far too elegant and restrained to even show the tiniest amount of terror or regret, and she certainly wasn’t about to try to run. But Helen Ganymede – aka Rosalind Lamont – had finally slipped up. She should never have gone home, but she was exactly the kind of solipsistic sociopath who would believe she could get away with behaving however she wanted. Her black Range Rover was packed to the hilt, and they learnt later that she had locked up the house, alone apparently, and was about to head for the Eurotunnel when Price and Kenton had apprehended her. She had greeted them with a smile as she stepped down from her car, holding a book carefully against her leather jacket, and had remained entirely calm during her arrest. As Kenton thought of Claudie Scott lying in that hospital bed, she felt hot tears spring to her eyes.

‘How could you?’ Kenton said as she escorted Helen to the marked car that had just arrived. ‘She trusted you, absolutely.’

‘She was right to trust me. She has gone to the best place, poor Claudia,’ the woman smiled beatifically, and ducked her head gracefully as she was pushed into the car, and Kenton found that she had no strength left to argue. Because who was to say that Helen wasn’t right? Claudie Scott had lived in purgatory; she had given up the fight for life the day her son died. As Kenton went to shut the door, Helen held out the old book she had been clutching. It was a dog-eared volume of nursery rhymes.

‘It was mine when I was a child. I don’t need it any more,’ Helen said as Kenton flipped open the front page. Rosalind Lamont was scrawled there in spindly writing, the ink faded. ‘I never had my own kids,’ Helen blinked once, twice. ‘So I was mother to those poor lost girls instead.’

Kenton slammed the door hard.

She gave the book to Price and walked off for a moment. She stood on the edge of Hampstead Heath as Helen was driven away, hands deep in her pockets, and she breathed a huge breath – but still she felt she couldn’t drag enough air into her lungs. She was exhausted, right down to her trainered toes. It was the end of a truly terrible day, and she didn’t trust herself to speak to anyone right now; but at least they had apprehended the chief suspect.

Uniform had gone straight to Sugar and Spice. The club had been closed and the entire contents of its offices impounded. But Kenton had a nasty feeling that they would find nothing much. Already the Russians’ lawyers were screaming, forming a pincer-like movement around the police investigation; already the Chief Superintendent’s phone was ringing. Kenton had learnt from Silver that Lamont’s husband was John Adamson, aka Ivan Adanov, formerly of the Hoffman Bank, now partnered with two Russian oligarchs in Sugar and Spice. Apparently they enticed various girls into their ring of vice. But of Ivan Adanov, aka John Adamson, there was as yet no trace.

Francis Watts had apparently told the truth; that he had been approached by Helen soon after he’d met Tessa when Helen had tried to coerce him into joining her and the Daughters of Light. When he refused, she had used Tessa to demonstrate her power, although Francis swore he had no idea. To Helen, it was obviously all a game. Just like the name changing was a game long indulged in by the pair, since student days. Lamont and Watson, changing their identities to fit with their favourite books. Michael Watson, sometime Gabriel Oak, now Francis for the reprobate Captain Francis Troy in Far From the Madding Crowd. And Ganymede – Rosalind’s alias in Shakespeare’s As You Like It; the whimsical code Tessa Lethbridge had faithfully recorded as she tried to crack it.

Further lost souls Sadie Malvern and Pritti Vershani languished in the cells at the police station, poor misled girls. The post mortem on Edna Lamont had showed an excess of diamorphine in her blood; the implication was that Vershani had been coerced into administering it by the Archangel. She had met Helen Ganymede at the clinic they both worked in a few years ago, and Ganymede had got her a job at the nursing home to keep an eye on her aunt. A fatal eye, as it turned out; disposing of the old lady when she threatened to reveal Ganymede’s true identity. Too late, Henrietta Lamont, Rosalind’s younger sister, had flown in for the funeral. Too late for Claudie Scott.

Kenton yawned and pulled her jacket tighter round her in the chilly damp evening. If Kenton had anything to do with it, Jan Martin would also be brought in tomorrow for wasting police time. Despite her protestations, she had deliberately lied to protect Lamont’s identity. Once Lamont had realised she’d been questioned, she had visited Jan Martin in Spitalfields and persuaded her that she was doing the right thing throwing the ‘fascist police’ off the scent.

She thought of Claudie Scott, lying motionless in the Royal Free. This wasn’t the result Kenton had anticipated; it was far far worse.

Tomorrow, she knew, the Royal Opera House incident would be all over the papers … Here comes the chopper to chop off your head.

Tomorrow she was going to interview Helen’s sister Henrietta, forty-eight hours too late, and then she would learn what she could have done so desperately with knowing last week.





Rosalind Lamont’s younger sister looked just like her older sibling, only less expensive and less washed out, with her sunburnt complexion and thick brown eyebrows. Whilst Rosalind had eschewed the hippy apparel of her youth, Henrietta had apparently embraced it, clad now in a paint-stained fisherman’s smock and old denim flares. Her thin hands were coarse and scratched; when she saw Kenton glance at them, she laughed and splayed them out before her.

‘Nature of the beast, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Farming in Nova Scotia is not for the faint-hearted, I’ve learnt in the last five years. Bloody exhilarating sometimes, but exhausting.’

But when she heard the nature of Helen’s crimes, Henrietta stopped laughing, her ruddy face appalled beneath the shock of grey hair.

‘Are you sure?’ she kept repeating at first, though to whom it was unclear. ‘Killing people?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Kenton nodded gravely, and waited for Price to bring the woman sweet tea for the shock before they continued talking.

Henrietta was at least able to shed some light on Helen’s marriage to the mysterious John Adamson.

‘Ivan? Ros met him about eight years ago when she was travelling. Just before she retrained as a shrink.’

‘She wasn’t a proper psychiatrist, was she?’

‘Wasn’t she?’ Henrietta shook her head. ‘I assumed she was. She did so well in everything she set her mind to.’

Like killing innocents. The thought obviously crossed her sister’s mind too as she looked blankly at Kenton, fear in her eyes.

‘No. You have to be a doctor first. Her credentials don’t check out, I’m afraid. Why did she want to retrain?’

‘Said she wanted to “help” people. Had a lot of therapy herself. She was born with a terrible stammer; was teased dreadfully as a child before she overcame it. But I never really bought the helping people line, I have to say. I think it was always about – knowing more than the next person.’

‘And the husband?’ Of whom there was still no trace. Kenton held out little hope that he would be found easily.

‘Russian fellow, apparently related to the Tsar. Ooh, she liked that, my big sis. A snob to the end. A white Prince, she used to boast. My father was so appalled, he kept it from the rest of the family. Damned commies, he used to say.’

‘Was he a communist? John – Ivan?’

‘God, no, I doubt it. He was a professor of politics back in Moscow, but he seemed more intent on capitalism after some time in London. I know Ros thought he’d renounced his principles. Scared me really, the few times I met him. He was very – cold. He would look through you as if you didn’t exist. And as far as I could see,’ Henrietta practically harrumphed, ‘he had no interest in anything but making his next buck. Very clever man, but – you know. Jeremy detested him.’

‘Jeremy?’

‘My husband. Couldn’t stand all that – wealth. You know, ostentation. Common as muck, really. What do they call it? Eurotrash.’

Kenton didn’t bother to point out Russia wasn’t in Europe.

‘And to be honest, Ivan didn’t want to be Russian any more. He changed his name when they married, when he was naturalised.’

And he had covered his tracks very cleverly, Kenton thought, there was no doubt he paid someone at the Deed Poll service to ‘lose’ his original identity so the police could not follow his trail.

‘But why would someone like Helen – sorry, Rosalind – be interested in a man like that?’

Henrietta stared at Kenton. ‘Power, my dear. He was utterly powerful – and utterly deadly I should say. And Ros is all about power. Forget about those stupid hippy ideals – that was all about ruling the world too.’ The woman broke off, gazing into space for a moment. ‘I can’t believe it.’ She shook her head again. ‘I mean, she was always wild, but this—’ She clasped the scratched hands tightly before her. ‘Christ. Thank God my parents are dead. Thank God. Because this would have killed them both.’

For a second her face crumpled, the thick eyebrows drawing in like two teacher’s ticks. ‘I still can’t believe it. How absolutely ghastly.’





TUESDAY 25TH JULY SILVER



Silver had been heading back to the station to interview Helen Ganymede when he had taken the call from Philippa. In an instant, his world turned on its head with such alarming speed that it knocked the very wind from him; it turned in a sickening way that made everything else seem entirely irrelevant.

He couldn’t get to the hospital quickly enough. Okeke drove him, blazing down the wrong side of the road, the siren blaring, and Silver couldn’t speak; found himself praying, his hands clenched so tightly that they hurt for hours afterwards. If he didn’t get there in time, if he didn’t – he couldn’t countenance the thought. An image of Claudie Scott cartwheeled through his aching head, and he thought of her lying prone on the other side of town, the opposite direction to where he was now headed. And the pity he’d felt in that Norfolk interview room for a woman destroyed by the loss of her child became a pain in his chest so intense he almost couldn’t breathe for a moment.

‘Roger,’ he muttered.

‘Boss?’ the other man said, without taking his eyes from the road. They ran the next red light, and the next.

‘Hurry up, for Christ’s sake.’





TUESDAY 25TH JULY KENTON



Kenton breathed the thick London air down into her lungs and turned back to the car. Right now, she needed some respite, and she needed it fast. She called Alison.





Alison brought a copy of the Evening Standard to the noisy pub.

‘Bad day?’ She handed Kenton a pint and ruffled her hair affectionately. ‘Have you seen this, by the way?’

In the paper there was an article about Tessa, the headline beside an old, grainy shot of the woman, her hair much shorter, her smile almost tremulous.

‘The fantasy life and lonely death of the ballet

teacher killed in July 14th bombing.’



Kenton read the piece, heart thumping.


How the Australian primary school teacher Elaine Jensen managed to steal the identity of ballet teacher Tessa Lethbridge and pass herself off as a leading light at our esteemed national ballet school, the Royal Ballet Academy, has caused all sorts of questions to be asked within that organisation. As Jensen’s father Peter arrives in London today to bury his daughter, the tragic irony is that if Jensen hadn’t been killed in Friday 14th’s explosion in Berkeley Square, the truth might never have been unearthed.

So what prompts someone to use an entirely stolen identity? Ordinariness, it seems. 49-year-old Elaine Jensen apparently led a lonely and rather sad life in Melbourne suburb St Kilda, until a chance meeting with the real Tessa Lethbridge at a charity event in the city’s Arts Centre descended into a form of hero-worship. The real Lethbridge is a highly qualified and well-regarded teacher who trained alongside various stars in the late 1980s, and once headed up the prestigious Melbourne Ballet School. But when Jensen became obsessed with her, Lethbridge took out an injunction to stop Jensen hounding her, after she was found by police in the other woman’s flat.

Colleagues of Jensen’s in Melbourne primary St Fitz’s have been commenting on the elaborate stories she would tell, culminating in a fake pregnancy and a death notice that she placed in the Australian Times.

‘She was a perfectly nice woman,’ said Rebecca Learfont, ‘but there was always some drama going on which became ever more complicated. In her last year here, Elaine told us she had had twins in the summer holidays who had then died – but we hadn’t even known she was pregnant. In the end, we began to doubt the veracity of pretty much everything she said.’

In Britain, Academy staff are reticent on the subject of colleague Lethbridge; shock has undoubtedly set in and whilst they mourn her death, it is undoubtedly a strange position to find yourself in when you are not sure who exactly you are mourning.



Elaine Jensen. Even the name had turned out to be ordinary. Kenton chucked the paper back on the table.

‘Shall we get out of here?’ she asked Alison, and Alison stood, shaking back her black curls, and held out a warm hand.

‘Come on then.’