Poisoned Ground: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 3) (3 page)

Lee had his head in the gas cooker when the doorbell rang. It was only seven o’clock in the fucking morning and he was up to his rubber-gloved elbows in oven cleaner. He swore out loud, took the gloves off, threw them in the kitchen bin and walked to the front door. In the living room, Chronus, his mynah bird, shouted, ‘West Ham till we die!’

Lee ignored him. He’d indoctrinated the poor thing with West Ham United songs and chants, which he yelled out whenever anything happened in the flat. Lee only had himself to blame. He opened the door and saw a fifty-something woman in a cheap but stylish purple skirt-suit smoking in his porch.

‘Hi, Vi,’ he said. ‘It’s seven o’clock. What’s the emergency?’

‘No emergency,’ Detective Inspector Violet Collins said as she pushed her way past him into his hall. ‘What you up to?’

‘Cleaning the oven,’ he said.

‘Don’t you have a woman to do it for you?’ She walked into the living room and blew a kiss at the mynah bird, who squawked in response. She took a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket and looked at Lee. ‘Fag?’

He shrugged. She threw a cigarette at him, he caught it and they both sat down.

‘I’d’ve thought that your bird would’ve done that cooker for you,’ Vi said.

‘What? Chronus? He don’t have opposable thumbs.’

‘Not the fucking parrot,’ Vi said. ‘Your woman. You know, what’s-er-name from Sarfend …’

Lee lit his cigarette and said, ‘Don’t be jealous, Vi, it doesn’t suit you.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ But she looked away from him when she spoke.

The night he’d met Susan at the casino he’d been with Vi, her DS, Tony Bracci, and a bunch of other colleagues from his old nick in Forest Gate. Coppers on a night out with booze and gambling included wasn’t a pretty sight by anyone’s standards, but one croupier, Susan, hadn’t minded. Well, she hadn’t minded Lee. If he recalled that night correctly, she’d not exactly taken a shine to Vi Collins. But then Vi had been arse’oled and she had said some less than complimentary things to Susan once she’d realized she had her cap tipped at Lee. He might have expected something like that. Although Lee had occasionally slept with Vi over the years since his divorce, it wasn’t a serious relationship, not on his part. Vi, on the other hand, in spite of her liking for the young lads she had sex with on her holidays, had wanted more from Lee Arnold for a long time.

‘So, to what do I owe the pleasure?’ Lee asked. Vi’s eyes were wet with what could be tears. That wasn’t her at all.

‘Gotta have a bit of time off,’ she said. ‘Thought I’d better let you know.’

The wet eyes, as well as the fact she’d come to see him, told Lee it was serious. When Vi went on a sex trip to Morocco she just buggered off.

Lee smoked. ‘So what’s the deal?’

‘I go into the London in two weeks’ time,’ Vi said.

‘The London?’

‘Hospital,’ she said. ‘You know, Whitechapel …’

‘I know where it is, but …’

Vi put a hand up to her neck. ‘It’s gotta go,’ she said.

‘What, your—’

‘Gordon’s time has come,’ she said.

‘Oh, fuck.’ He leant forward in his chair, both wanting and not wanting to take her hand. Vi had a goitre, or enlarged thyroid gland, which she called ‘Gordon’, round her throat which had been there for years. And although in her case the goitre wasn’t an indication of a malfunctioning thyroid, Lee knew that it sometimes bothered her by interfering with her breathing. But it had been doing that for years. What, suddenly, had changed?

Vi laughed. ‘Oh, Christ,’ she said, ‘you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘What?’

‘Gone all pale and interesting, love.’

‘Yeah, but Gordon …’

‘Gordon’s been a pain in the arse for years, as you know,’ Vi said. ‘And when I went to see the endocrinologist a couple of months ago he said that Gordon had got bigger and needed to go.’

‘So you’re going to have it removed?’

‘Yeah.’ And then she gave him one of those tight little smiles she only ever dished out when she was absolutely terrified.

‘I see.’

The only thing Lee Arnold had ever known to frighten Vi Collins was her own body. Police medicals were a nightmare for her
and any visit to a hospital meant that she had to take beta-blockers in large doses. He’d never known her to have an operation.

‘The boys’ll look after the cat,’ she said. Vi had two sons who worshipped the ground she walked on and so Lee had no doubt that they’d do a lot more than just feed her moggie. ‘Should be back at work a fortnight after the op.’

‘A fortnight?’ Lee said. ‘Don’t they have to cut your throat when they take out your thyroid gland?’

‘Course they do, doughnut!’ she said. ‘But once it starts to heal, provided I don’t get MRSA, or that thing where your skin goes black and …’ She lurched forward and howled. ‘Fucking hell, I’m frightened!’

Although he’d known her for decades, Lee didn’t know whether to give Vi a hug or not. Sometimes she hated that ‘sentimental stuff’ and sometimes she took it as some sort of sexual invitation. In the end he just spoke. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘It’s a good hospital.’

She looked up, her eyes red. ‘That don’t make no difference these days! What if I get something like that flesh-rotting thing? I can’t expect my boys to look after me if the hospital chucks me out with my legs rotting off!’

‘They won’t.’ He walked over to her, squatted down by her chair and this time put an arm around her shoulder.

‘When my brother Tommy went into the old Poplar Hospital to have his appendix out, my mum said he’d never come out again except feet first and she was right.’

Part of Vi’s problem with hospitals stemmed from her mother. A deeply superstitious Irish gypsy, Vi’s mum had helped to form her children’s opinions via reference to folk beliefs and the more lurid manifestations of Catholicism. Her Jewish father had been mainly absent during Vi’s childhood.

‘Vi,’ Lee said, ‘your mum’s long dead and so are the nineteen sixties.’

‘East End was still wrecked by the war back in the old days.’

‘Yeah and you knew people who’d had polio and TB – even I remember a few,’ Lee said. Ten years Vi’s junior, Lee could nevertheless remember most of the things she talked about when she referred to the ‘old days’. They had lasted for a very long time in the East End of London, especially in Newham, where in places the ‘old days’ still persisted. He kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’ll come and visit you. You’ll be fine.’

But Vi shook her head. ‘Don’t you read the papers, Arnold?’ she said. ‘People are terrified of hospitals these days. Full of dirt and psycho doctors and nurses who don’t give a shit. Most people’d rather die at home on the floor than go into one of them places. It’s going back to how it was before the National Health Service – if you ain’t got money they don’t give a fuck about you.’

*

It had to be one of the last working bins in the country. That was what psychiatric hospitals or asylums had been called, ‘bins’ – somewhere you chucked away the rubbish. However, since the arrival of modern psychiatric drugs in the 1950s, the bins had gradually closed as patients were moved out into their local communities with varying degrees of success – and more than a few dramatic failures. However, Ilford Hospital Psychiatric Unit, or Mental Health Unit, as its management preferred it to be called, seemed to be an exception.

Mumtaz looked around at dirty cream walls, scarred doors – one of which was an incongruous shade of lime green – and the lino-covered floor flecked with strands of tobacco and the odd sweet wrapper. In spite of the litter, the lino itself shone and,
underneath the smell of urine that pervaded even the corridor she had been sent to wait in, there was a faint odour of disinfectant. Ilford was that rare thing, a working bin that housed up to a hundred patients at any one time. The bored receptionist who had sent Mumtaz to this benighted corner of the building had told her it was closing ‘soon’, but she had no idea when.

By the look of it, Ilford Hospital had been built in the late 1800s. During her time at university, Mumtaz had once visited a semi-derelict asylum in Kent. It reminded her of that. All long corridors, vast windows high off the floor and a grand central clock tower. Late Victorian philanthropic splendour.

‘Miss Huq?’

A woman with long iron-grey hair pushed the lime-green door open and smiled at her.

Mumtaz walked towards her. ‘Mrs Mayfield?’

‘Shirley.’ She was probably about sixty, a little overweight and clearly had a liking for cheesecloth. ‘Come in.’

The advocacy office was vast. Mumtaz had imagined it would be an afterthought, a tiny sliver tacked onto the side of a ward. Shirley sat down behind an old wooden desk in front of a huge bay window and asked Mumtaz if she’d like tea or coffee. Soon both the women were talking.

‘We don’t often get people as qualified as you coming to us to be advocates,’ Shirley said. She had the yellow-stained fingers of the avid cigarette smoker, Mumtaz noticed.

‘As I explained to the girl at the Volunteer Centre, my daughter is due to leave home to go to university in just over a year and I’d like to get some work experience.’

‘Goodness me, you were a young mother!’ Shirley said.

But Mumtaz just smiled. Then she said, ‘I wrote my dissertation about the demise of the asylum system.’

‘What do you think about Care in the Community?’

‘I think it needs more resources to make it work properly,’ Mumtaz said.

Shirley smiled. ‘We get a lot of criticism here in this old place,’ she said. ‘People look on the secure psychiatric wards as symbols of repression. Not that they ever want our service users living on their doorsteps when they do get out of here.’

‘NIMBYism,’ Mumtaz said.

‘Not In My Back Yard. Yes.’

‘And yet, now the process has started …’

‘Oh, there’s no going back,’ Shirley said. ‘Although quite how the community would deal with some of our chronics if any of them were ever to be discharged, I don’t know. But that’s not on the cards, as yet.’ She shook her head and then smiled again and said, ‘Well, anyway, for the moment there are three main wards here at Ilford. One is an old cubicle-style dormitory, which is for our long-term chronic service users, while the other two are made up of small single and twin units designed for short-stay acute clients. There’s also a very small forensic unit for mentally disordered offenders, which is used mainly for clients awaiting transfer from big institutions like Broadmoor and Ashworth back to a more community-based type of accommodation.’

‘And the Advocacy services all these wards?’

‘That’s what we’re contracted to do, yes. We have one formal advocacy surgery per ward per week where service users can come to us with their complaints, worries et cetera, plus we go out to patients when requested, tour the wards on a regular basis, help out in Admissions and also at mental health tribunals. I’ve two trained volunteer advocates at the moment, but of course they’re only part, time. As the coordinator, I’m the only
full-time paid worker. It’s varied and demanding, often frustrating, and we’re not always popular with the hospital staff.’

‘Because you represent the views of the patients?’

‘We call them service users or clients. Yes. We’re chronically short-staffed too,’ Shirley said. ‘Getting volunteers like yourself to come up here and talk to very often completely disconnected people about things that cannot possibly be real is not easy.’

‘Are the complaints the service users make always just artefacts of their illnesses?’ Mumtaz said.

‘No, of course not. We always take what a client is saying as gospel, but …’ She sighed. ‘But sometimes patients can take against members of staff for no real reason. This can be very distressing and possibly career-destroying for staff and so one has to be careful how one proceeds.’

‘I see.’ Mumtaz wanted to say, ‘But surely, as an advocacy service, we’re here for the patients and the patients alone,’ but she felt that although Shirley might agree with that notion, she would not welcome the opportunity to say so.

‘We have to tread carefully,’ Shirley said. ‘However, if there is anything you don’t understand or are unsure about, I’m always here for you.’

Mumtaz asked if there was any formal training on offer. Shirley told her this would consist of shadowing her and the other advocates. ‘And of course you’ll be instructed about how to fill out paperwork.’

Ah, yes, the infamous institutional paperwork, the Kafkaesque nightmare that many said was in the process of strangling the UK’s public health service.

‘So, let me get this right,’ Mumtaz said. ‘We always believe what a pati – a service user tells us, on principle.’

‘In essence,’ Shirley said. ‘But particularly where complaints against staff go, I’d have to say you should always run it by me first. I know this client base. Their preferences, sometimes their obsessions and delusions.’ She laughed. ‘But if they complain about the food then go straight ahead!’

‘Is it bad?’ Mumtaz asked.

‘Well, if you do decide to come and volunteer for us you’ll find out.’

They talked for another half an hour. Shirley photocopied Mumtaz’s CRB certificate as well as her birth certificate and then she asked her whether she thought that advocacy was going to be for her.

‘I’d like to give it a try,’ Mumtaz said.

Shirley smiled. ‘I’m pleased,’ she said. ‘I think you’ll enjoy working with our small team.’

‘I’m sure that I will.’

‘And the hospital staff are very nice too, very caring,’ Shirley said.

‘And the patients – sorry, the service users?’

‘Oh, well, they are why we’re all here, aren’t they?’ Shirley said. ‘Nobody wants to be in hospital these days, do they? Bless them.’

But then her face fell and Mumtaz felt a small cold ripple snake down her spine.

Shirley brightened again. ‘Can you start tomorrow?’ she said.

*

Derek Salmon was not the sort of solicitor who wrapped things up in nice language.

‘The fucking shit’s done a runner,’ he said as he pushed a photograph of a good-looking blond man in his thirties across his desk towards Lee Arnold.