The Winter Foundlings
Read The Winter Foundlings Online
Authors: Kate Rhodes
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CONTENTS
For all the children cared for by the Foundling Hospital
‘Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.’
Socrates (469
BC
–399
BC
)
Ella stands on the school steps, shivering in the cold. The playground’s almost empty, and two girls from year six run past like she doesn’t exist. They don’t even notice her shoes glittering. Her granddad bought them for her on Saturday, and she can’t stop admiring them – cherry red, shining like mirrors. It’s the buckles she loves best, round and glossy as new pennies. She’s longing to dance across the playground, tapping a bright red tune into the snow. One last boy passes through the school gates, dragging his satchel behind him, and then she’s alone.
She’s been waiting so long, the smile has frozen from her face. She scans the road for a glimpse of her grandfather’s car. It must have broken down again. She’ll have to walk home without him for the first time, but she doesn’t mind. It will make him realise that she’s almost grown up. She was ten last birthday, plenty old enough to walk a mile on her own.
Coloured lights flick on in people’s houses as she sets off along the street. Christmas is only a few days away, and she’s excited about the tree waiting in the living room. Tonight Suzanne will help her to decorate it with tinsel and baubles. She treads carefully on the ice, taking care not to slip. The street’s quiet, apart from a man loading shopping into a van. His bags are too full, and one splits as she passes, pieces of fruit scattering across the pavement. He sighs as an orange rolls past her feet.
‘Can you fetch that for me, love?’ the man asks.
Over his shoulder, Ella sees her granddad’s car arriving, then the man’s arm catches her waist, his hand stifling her mouth. She’s too shocked to scream as he bundles her into the van. The door slams shut and there’s a scratching sound behind her. When she spins round, a ghost is hovering in the shadows. A girl in a white dress, her hair an ugly nest of rats’ tails. She’s bone-thin, knees pressed against her chest, her body tightly folded. Her dead-eyed stare is terrifying. Suddenly Ella’s yelling for help, fists battering the door. Through the van’s smoky window she sees her granddad rushing up the school steps, and one of her shoes lying on the snow, among the apples and oranges. When the van pulls away, her head knocks against something solid. The pain is a sharp white knife, separating her from everything she knows.
The chill attacked me as soon as I stepped out of the car. It made me wish I’d worn a thicker coat, but at least it made a change from the misery on the radio – weathermen predicting more snow, train services at a standstill, and another girl missing from the streets of north London. I picked my way across the ice, pausing to admire Northwood in its winter glory. Rows of dark Victorian tenements stood shoulder to shoulder, braced against the wind. My colleagues at Guy’s thought that I’d taken leave of my senses. Why would anyone rent out their London flat and swap a comfortable hospital consultancy for a six-month sabbatical at the country’s biggest psychiatric prison? But I knew I’d made the right choice. The British Psychological Society had invited me to write the first-ever in-depth study of the regime at the Laurels, home to some of the country’s most violent criminals. The work would be fascinating, and provide an ideal subject for my next book, but that was just part of the reason. If I could handle six months in the company of serial rapists and mass murderers, it meant that I was cured. The suffering and deaths I’d witnessed during the Angel case hadn’t left a scratch.
A mixture of curiosity and fear quickened my heart rate as I approached the entrance gates. The warning signs grew more obvious with each step – barred ground-floor windows, razor wire and searchlights. Dozens of reminders that the place was a prison for the criminally insane, as well as a hospital. The security guards gave cautious smiles when I reached reception: two middle-aged women, one tall, one short. Neither seemed overjoyed by their choice of career.
‘Bitter out there, isn’t it?’ the tall one said.
The smaller woman gave me an apologetic look before turning my handbag upside down and shaking it vigorously. A flurry of biros, lipstick cases and old receipts scattered across the counter.
‘I’m afraid mobiles aren’t allowed,’ she said.
‘Sorry, I forgot.’
‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff people try and take inside. Drugs, flick knives, you name it.’
I processed the idea while she searched my belongings. It was hard to imagine anyone bringing weapons into a building packed with psychopaths, unless they had a death wish themselves. She led me to a machine in the corner of the room.
‘The card’s just for identity,’ she said. ‘Our doors open with keys or fingerprint recognition.’
I pressed my index finger onto a glass plate, then a light flared, and the machine spat out my ID card. The woman in the photo looked unfamiliar. She had a caught-in-the-headlights stare, cheeks blanched by the cold.
The site map the security guards gave me turned out to be useless. Paths narrow as shoelaces twisted through the maze of tenements packed tight inside the walls of the compound. The architecture was designed for maximum surveillance, hundreds of windows staring down as I wandered in circles, until the Laurels loomed into view. The building had been a cause célèbre when it opened five years ago, protesters outraged that it had consumed thirty-six million pounds of taxpayers’ cash. It was a stark monument to modern architecture, surfaces cut from steel and glass. Walking inside felt like entering a futurist hotel, apart from the security measures. Two sets of doors snapped at my heels as I crossed the threshold.
I felt apprehensive as I searched for the centre director’s office. Dr Aleks Gorski had a formidable reputation. When a prisoner escaped from the Laurels the previous year, he had refused to take responsibility, blaming the government for cutting his security budget. Gorski went on the offensive as soon as the prisoner was recaptured, giving angry interviews to the press. His outspoken style had cost him some important allies. It was common knowledge that his seniors were longing to have him removed.
Gorski seemed to be fighting a losing battle with his temper when I found the right door. He was around forty, wearing a tight suit and highly polished shoes, black hair shorn to a savage crew cut. His smile was too brief to be interpreted as a welcome.
‘Our appointment was at nine, Dr Quentin.’
‘Sorry I’m late, the M25’s closed. Didn’t you get my message?’
He sat behind his desk, eyeing me across yards of dark brown mahogany. ‘Your head of department says you want to write a book about us. What do you plan to focus on?’ Gorski’s speech was rapid and a fraction too loud, with a strong Polish inflection.
‘I’m interested in your treatments for Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder. I’d like to learn more about your rehabilitation work before release.’
‘Very few of our men ever leave, but you’re in the right place to study mental disorder. This is the DSPD capital of the world. The only reason our inmates are here is because the prison system spat them out.’ He observed me coolly. ‘Do you know how long our female employees normally last?’
‘A year?’
‘Four months. Only a few stay the distance; the ones that carry on fall into two categories – the flirts and the lion tamers. Some are attracted to violent men, and the rest have got something to prove. It’s too soon to guess which category you belong to.’
I gazed at him in amazement. Surely statements like that had been outlawed years ago? ‘That’s irrelevant, Dr Gorski. I’m here to learn about the welfare of your patients.’
‘It’s your own welfare you should worry about. Last summer an inmate attacked one of our nurses so savagely she was in intensive care for a week. These men will hurt you, if you fail to look after yourself. Do you understand?’
‘Of course.’
He gave a curt nod. ‘In that case, I’ll give you a tour.’
By now I was yearning for my regular boss at Guy’s. He was so chilled out that he had a sedative effect on everyone he met, but Gorski seemed as volatile as his patients. He would register a high score on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, ticking all the boxes for aggression and lack of respect for social boundaries.
I inhaled a lungful of the building’s smell as we crossed the corridor. It reminded me of all the hospitals I’d ever visited: antiseptic, air freshener, and something indescribable being char-grilled in a distant kitchen. An overweight young man was being led towards us. Two orderlies were flanking him, another following at a respectful distance, as if a backwards kick might be delivered at any minute.
‘What’s your staff-to-patient ratio?’ I asked.
‘We’re short-staffed, but it should be three to one.’
‘Is that level always necessary?’
He nodded vigorously. ‘Fights break out all the time. Yesterday an inmate had his throat slashed with a broken CD case. He needed twenty stitches.’
The day room seemed to tell a different story. A cluster of grey-haired men were huddled in armchairs, watching
A Place in the Sun.
From a distance they looked like a gang of mild-mannered granddads, dressed in jeans and tracksuits, sipping from mugs of tea. Female staff must have been a rarity because their heads swivelled towards me in perfect unison. Lacklustre Christmas decorations dangled from the ceiling, but everything else at the Laurels looked brand new. There was a games room for table tennis and pool, and a gym packed with running and rowing machines. The place even had its own cinema.
I saw a different side to Gorski as we wandered through the building. He spoke passionately as he explained the holistic approach he planned to adopt, if funding increased. Psychologists and psychiatrists would work alongside creative therapists, to create individual treatment programmes, and inmates would spend far more time outside their cells. At present the centre could only afford to employ one part-time art therapist. It was snowing again when we came to a halt beside a set of sealed windows.
‘Do your patients ever use the main hospital facilities?’ I asked.
‘If they make good enough progress. I can show you an example.’
Gorski pressed a touch pad and the doors released us into the compound. I had to trot to keep up, brushing snowflakes from my face. Two male nurses were loitering outside the library, shivering in the cold. The building’s high ceilings and stained-glass windows suggested that it had been the hospital chapel once, but the place had been neglected. Many of the shelves were empty, out-of-date books stacked in piles by the door. The choice of DVDs was limited to
The Green Mile, Top Gun
and
The Shawshank Redemption.
Apart from a librarian sitting on the other side of the room, head bowed over a pile of papers, the reading area was empty.