1
The dark hair, hacked off with a kitchen knife, was the only sign of anything wrong. Asleep in the narrow bed, her face scrubbed clean of make-up, she could be any ordinary girl, dreaming of boys and Saturdays at the mall. But once the drugs wore off, she would surely resurface to whatever nightmare had brought her here.
Erin pressed her fingers to the girl’s wrist and waited for the flutter of blood. Like any good doctor, she tried to keep her emotions in check, but some patients distressed her more than others. If one of the staff going off their shift hadn’t spotted the girl’s body in a snowbank by the gate, she would not have survived the night. In her shoulder bag, they’d found a four-inch paring knife, a handful of hair, and two keys on a plain metal ring. But no ID, and six hours later still no news from the police.
During those first frantic minutes in the clinic’s emergency bay, after they carried her inside, Erin had stripped off the glittery top and torn tights, desperate to rub some life into the girl’s frozen limbs. Only to find that the skin on her arms and thighs had been cut and re-cut. A network of hash marks, intricate as fish scales.
Pellets of snow ticked against the window. Erin turned her head, sensing rather than seeing the snowdrifts banked against the glass. Too dark to see much of anything beyond the spectral shrubs, shrouded in snow.
A commotion broke the silence. High heels smacking the stone floor like gunshots. Erin stepped into the hall to see a young nurse hurrying towards her, a panicky look in her eyes.
‘We’ve got trouble. I paged Dr Westlund, but he’s not here yet.’
At the far end of the reception hall, a woman in a short coat and black leather boots was arguing with the duty nurse. She slammed her palm on the counter, hissed through her teeth. Tall, taffy-blonde hair, the mouth a red slash.
Erin froze. Could it be? No. She hesitated in the shadows, her heart bumping her ribs.
‘I want to see my daughter. Cassie Gray. Where is she?’
Cassie. And this was the girl’s mother. Not the warm, suburban matron Erin was hoping for.
The duty nurse seemed to have the situation under control, but where was Niels? They had a protocol for cases like this. But he wasn’t here, and this couldn’t wait.
Erin straightened her shoulders and approached the desk. ‘I’m Dr Cartwright. Your daughter is out of danger, but she’s sleeping now. If you could perhaps keep your voice down…’
Spiky earrings, cheap perfume, that hard red mouth. The woman towered over her like a Valkyrie. ‘What are you looking at, Tinkerbell?’
Tinkerbell. Was it her size or the British accent that set the woman off?
A retort sprang to mind, but Erin stifled the urge. She was used to dealing with angry parents. ‘I’m sure this is all very upsetting, but if you’ll just try to stay calm—’
‘Calm? I get a call from some punk in the middle of the night that my daughter’s in this nuthouse, and you want me to stay calm? Screw you.’ She shoved Erin hard on the shoulder and pushed past.
Pain shot down Erin’s arm and she gasped. Before she could react, the woman had clattered halfway down the hall in those ridiculous boots. If someone didn’t stop her, she’d wake the entire clinic.
But there was Niels at last, striding through the vaulted atrium, jaunty and alert at six in the morning. His blue Oxford shirt and tan chinos were perfectly pressed, the parting in his hair razor-straight. Was that where he’d been, standing in front of a mirror combing his hair?
As he approached Cassie’s mother, his broad face was wreathed in the appropriate degree of concern. ‘I’m Dr Westlund.’ He extended his hand. ‘Please be assured your daughter is getting the very best care.’
The woman jerked back before he could touch her. ‘If you think I’m going to let you people mess with her head, you’ve got another thing coming. I want to see her.’
‘Let’s wait until she’s awake, shall we?’ Niels flicked a piece of lint from the sleeve of his white coat. ‘If it were up to me, Mrs Gray, I’d let you have a quick peek in her room, just to ease your mind. But I don’t make the rules.’
‘I have a right to see her. I’m her mother.’ Her face was deathly pale in the muted light.
‘I’m sorry.’ He shook his head. ‘Why don’t you go home now and get some rest. We’ll call you as soon as we know more.’
With a determined look, she pushed past Niels and continued down the hall, shouting her daughter’s name. But she didn’t get far before a security guard emerged from the shadows and blocked her path. For a moment, she seemed poised to lunge at the guard’s throat, but stopped short and whirled to face them.
‘All right, I’ll go. You can call off your thugs.’
That mouth, that sneer. Erin’s heart missed a beat. Only after the woman was escorted to the door and through the front gate could she breathe normally.
Cassie.
She hurried to the girl’s room. Still asleep, her wan face framed by the sad tufts of hair. Erin smoothed the blanket under her chin. ‘You’re safe here,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll protect you.’ A prickling sensation needled her palms.
You wish. No one is safe.
That voice again – whose? She covered her ears to smother the sound. Cassie was safe. Of course, she was. As long as she remained within the Meadows’ sheltered embrace. Out in the world, that’s where the trouble began.
* * *
Curled in the window seat in her office upstairs, Erin studied the snowy grounds, silent under an oyster-coloured sky. It was quiet enough to hear a clock ticking, but there were no clocks here, nothing to show the passage of time. The scarlet flash of a cardinal provided the only bright spot in the wintry landscape. In the stillness, the stone manor felt more like an English country house than a psychiatric hospital.
Her eyelids drooped. What little rest she’d managed to get last night was on the hard leather sofa in the corner of her office. Not an auspicious start to what was supposed to be a day of celebration. After three months of intensive treatment, one of her patients, a girl named Sara whom they’d almost lost, was well enough to go home.
‘Knock, knock.’ Niels stood in the doorway, waving an envelope like a flag. ‘This came yesterday. I meant to drop it by earlier, but with all the ruckus last night and this morning, I plain forgot.’ In two quick strides, he crossed the space between them. ‘I had a heads-up on this last week. Pre-approved by the board.’
Erin rose from the window seat and took the envelope with a twinge of foreboding. It must be one of those pro bono things she’d agreed to when they hired her. A worthy initiative, at least in principle, but so far she’d managed to avoid any cases. What with settling into the clinic’s routines and her own patients to care for – wasn’t that why the board had wooed her away from London? – there was little time for anything else.
She glanced at the return address: Greenlake Psychiatric Facility, Atherton, New York.
Greenlake? The name rang a bell, but it wasn’t always called that. Atherton State Asylum for the Criminally Insane, that’s what it was, back in the day. Before asylums were repackaged as psychiatric hospitals to lessen the taint of notoriety, though the name change was often little more than window dressing. ‘Isn’t that a forensic facility?’
‘Sure is.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Right up your alley.’
She dropped the envelope as if stung. ‘I don’t handle criminal cases.’ She busied herself with some papers on her desk to avoid his eyes. ‘Not any more.’ Certainly not if they involved violently disturbed men.
‘Do me a favour and say yes to this one.’ He popped a breath mint in his mouth. ‘The board meets next week. It will be awkward to tell them you haven’t signed onto a project yet.’
He had a point. A certain amount of community outreach was a condition of her employment, and she’d already turned down three requests. But nothing in her contract mentioned anything like this.
‘If it helps, the director at Greenlake asked for you personally.’ Niels parked his hip on her desk and crunched the mint between his teeth.
‘Me?’ Who even knew she was here?
‘Some guy named Harrison. Said you’d be perfect for this.’
A muscle twitched near her eye. She didn’t know anyone named Harrison.
She waited for Niels’ footsteps to die away before carrying the Greenlake file to the window, where the light was better. She hadn’t meant to read it straight away, but thought it best to know what she was in for. With a letter opener, she sliced through the flap, nicking her finger. A bead of blood formed on her skin, and she licked it away.
Dear Dr Cartwright… On behalf of the State of New York, I am writing to request your services in the matter of a patient. It was worse than she thought. A forensic patient up for release required an independent psychiatric evaluation. White male, aged 43. Incarcerated since 1978 for the murders of his mother and two sisters. The letter was signed by a Dr Robert K Harrison. How could he claim to know her when she’d only been back in the country a few months? The name meant nothing.
She sank onto the window seat and leaned against the glass. Set amongst the shimmering snowfields, the wrought- iron gazebo resembled a colossal birdcage dropped from the sky.
White male, 43. Mother and sisters brutally slain. A patient with that particular history was out of the question.
It was unlikely Niels knew about her role in the Leonard Whidby case, though it might have been notorious enough to reach the newspapers in the States. And she had no intention of telling him. Why dig up old wounds? One thing was certain, though. She hadn’t returned to America after twenty years to work with the criminally insane.
Copyright © Ann Gosslin 2020
