The Deceit

19

The winter weather up here was significantly worse than the drizzliness of the Cornish coast: the fierce wind carried flurries of snow and Dozmary Pool was showing shoulders of ice. The great granite outcrops that made Bodmin Moor visible from thirty miles away — Rough Tor, the Minions — sheltered the huddled, grey little sheep from the worst of the piercing gales.

Karen braked, slowed, and took a right turn off the A30, making her careful way down a narrow and sombre lane lined with high blackthorn hedges. The road was muddy, but the mud was frozen.

It was a suitably bleak landscape, a suitable place for a lunatic asylum. Except of course it wasn’t called the Cornwall County Lunatic Asylum any more — it was now the Bodmin PCT Psychiatric Hospital and Mental Health Unit. But the Cornish still referred to it as they had always done: anyone who went mad, anyone who was sectioned and sent here, was said to have ‘gone up Bodmin’.

The car park was empty. The car indicators blinked, obediently, as she locked her Toyota and walked towards the main asylum buildings. The architecture was a mix of ambitious Victorian Gothic and some 1980s wards and offices. The new bits were not ageing as well as the gloomy, redbrick grandeur of the old stuff. The Victorians built to last: they liked to incarcerate their lunatics in style.

The wind was biting. Karen was relieved to get inside the warm, brightly lit reception, where a sweet, plump nurse took her credentials and led her down maybe seventeen corridors to a large reinforced glass door with an elaborate system of locks.

The sign beside it read, SECURE UNIT and WARNING.

The nurse keyed a code, and they waited for something to happen. With nothing to do, the nurse made small talk, glancing at Karen.

‘Bit blowy out there?’

‘Freezing!’

‘Yes. You get used to it, up here on the moor.’ She smiled. ‘Actually that’s a lie, you don’t. January is a shocker, every time. Here we go.’

The door was opened from the inside by a tall security guard: once again, Karen showed her police credentials. She was escorted to a desk in an open-plan office, and introduced to a senior staff nurse, Nurse Hawley, a thin woman with an even thinner smile. They shook hands. Nurse Hawley invited Karen to sit: and got straight to it, opening a file.

‘Alicia Rothley, twenty-seven years old, white female, brought in by Bodmin police two days ago: she was in a café in Bodmin town centre, raving, throwing coffee.’

‘At customers?’

‘Everywhere, but mainly over herself. Swearing and cursing, tearing her clothes. A classic and severe psychosis. She has been officially sectioned, under the Mental Health Act. She is very …’ For the first time, the thin, efficient woman hesitated. ‘Well, she is very unbalanced, put it that way. Unstable. Labile. We can only give you a few minutes. Much of the time we are having to sedate her, and sometimes restrain her. She is unmedicated at the moment, so you can talk to her.’

‘She’s suicidal?’

‘Quite possibly. She’s certainly intent on self-harm. Please don’t give her anything, not even a pen, that she might use — that way.’

‘Has she said anything about … why she is like this? What brought her here?’

‘Not really, no. Nothing comprehensible, at any rate. Perhaps you will have more luck than us. We are having her assessed for long-term care this week. But I’ll show you to her room.’

‘Room’ was the wrong word, Karen thought, as she was guided down yet another corridor with a series of doors on either side. These weren’t rooms, they were cells.

A card opened the electronic lock, like a hotel keycard; the door swung open. Alicia Rothley was huddled at the end of her spartan bed, her knees to her chest, staring at the two women framed by the door.

‘Just a few minutes,’ Nurse Hawley said. ‘There’s a panic button right here — for staff, not patients.’ She spoke these last words very quietly. ‘The code is three three four.’

The door was closed. Karen was alone with Alicia Rothley.

The first thing she noticed was how pretty this girl was: she had fine, actressy cheekbones, dark hair, even darker eyes. The staff had dressed her in a white T-shirt and old jeans, no shoes, socks, no belt. A pair of white slippers sat neatly paired on the carpeted floor but the clean room was otherwise devoid of decoration or distraction. A small CCTV camera was positioned unreachably high in the top corner, a red light showing that it functioned.

The walls were padded. The single chair, which Karen sat in, was soft and plastic, like something from a kindergarten. The only window was high and barred: revealing the high branches of leafless trees outside, clawing at a very white sky.

‘Hello, Alicia. I’m Karen.’

The girl said nothing though her eyes said a lot: fear, confusion, horror. Now that she was closer, Karen noticed there were tiny pink scratches on her face. From the cats? The scratches were all across her neck, and under her chin. Odd.

‘Why are you here, Alicia?’

Nothing.

‘What happened to you in Bodmin? Do you remember that? Why did they …? What happened to you a few days ago?’

The girl averted her face, and shut her mouth tight, like a three-year-old refusing food.

This was pointless. Karen tried again, sensing her few minutes ticking away, but each question got the same blank, mute response. The frustration rose inside her; they really needed this girl to open up. Her elder brother, Mark Lucas Rothley — Luke Rothley to his friends — was possibly the key to all this. A few hours’ research had told her Rothley was the son of a diplomat, from a fairly wealthy family. His father was dead, his mother retired to Spain. Rothley had attended Marlborough College, where he was ‘popular and liked’, though perhaps a little arrogant. He’d then refused a scholarship to Cambridge and instead gone north to Durham University, because of the more challenging rowing on the Wear, or so everyone said; he was definitely quite an athlete. He was also an impressive student: after taking a first in neurobiology and psychology, Rothley had gone on to do his postgraduate degree at Yale, where he had also excelled, if not quite so superbly. There were rumours of some drug use in America, as there were rumours that he had dabbled in the occult at Durham.

But then, his friends claimed, he had changed. He used the inheritance from his father to go backpacking for a couple of years — India, China, Egypt, southeast Asia. He went through a Buddhist phase, then a vegan phase, and then a phase of hard partying in Thailand. And then, finally, he’d disappeared off the screen, moving into a kibbutz in Israel. That was the last place any of his old friends claimed to have heard from him. His Facebook page had stopped updating nearly two years ago. His mother said she got the odd email, supposedly from Israel.

Yet he was not in Israel.

Karen gazed at his sister. ‘Alicia?’

Nothing.

‘You can talk to me, it might help. We need help. A young man has died.’

Nothing.

Karen sighed. Although the UK Border Agency had no record of Luke Rothley re-entering the country, that was hardly a surprise: they didn’t record the movement of UK citizens, as a rule. The only conclusion was that Rothley had surreptitiously slipped back into the country at some point in the last couple of years. But why? To do what? Just to torch all the cats in West Cornwall? Why? And where was he getting his money?

Rothley had, of course, used cash to rent the Lodge, so they couldn’t trace him by his plastic. He also, apparently, owned no car, and no mobile — at least, not under his own name — so that route to his whereabouts was also blocked. Consequently their best and possibly only hope of finding him swiftly was his sister, Alicia. Who was struck dumb with madness. Or terror.

Karen pulled her plastic chair closer to the bed. ‘OK, Alicia, let’s try again. We need your help. Really. We think people might be in danger — your friends, the friends who were with you in the cottage. The night you burned the cats.’

The girl closed her dark eyes, and lowered her face, clutching her knees even more tightly to her chest. The interview was going nowhere. The girl was locked in: literally and emotionally. Karen had seen this before. But she couldn’t give up.

‘That was you, wasn’t it? Alicia? You were up there, on Zennor Hill, that night? You burned the cats?’

Was that a shake of the head? A tiny response? Was she opening up?

‘Alicia, tell me. Did you burn the cats? Did you?’

Silence.

‘Did you? Did you burn all those cats to death?’

‘Cats.’

A tiny little voice, girlish and sad; but she had spoken.

‘What? Alicia? Tell me about the night, when you killed the cats.’

‘Didn’t.’

‘You didn’t kill them?’

‘He killed them. Burning them, all night.’

‘Your brother Luke?’

Alicia raised her face, and gazed hard and fierce at Karen. The policewoman got a sudden and intense sense of threat. Reflexively, she pushed her chair back. But the girl came closer, and now she was on all fours on the bed, her voice a low growl. ‘He killed them, the Devil killed them.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The Devil, my brother is the Devil. He killed the cats. The Devil came and entered him. Fuck you!’

The girl was almost snarling now. Karen tried to calm her. ‘Alicia, it’s OK, we just want to—’

‘He will kill you, bitch. Luke will smell your fear. He will kill you.’

‘Alicia?’

The girl was muttering.

‘Lal Moulal. Ananias, Azarias—’

‘Alicia?’

Her voice rose again. ‘He did it! He killed all the cats one by one. They screamed. He did it, the magic, the Araki magic, the fucking Egypt magic. And they burned! Atha atha atharim! They fucking shrieked and he made us all do it!’

‘We just—’

‘He is the devil, he is. You think you can catch him, silly bitch! Luke will rape you, he will rape the fucking smile off your face.’

Karen stepped up, inching towards the alarm.

‘He fucked me like a dog, made me pregnant, atha atharim, he is the Devil now!’

Karen was furiously pressing the panic code. The girl came across the room; she was on Karen in a second, tearing at Karen’s jeans, trying to kiss her. Karen thrust her away, horrified and nauseated. Alicia Rothley was licking Karen’s face; laughing, and licking—

Quickly, thought Karen. Quickly quickly quickly!

The girl’s hand was inside Karen’s bra, thrusting like a man, groping, her fingers were clawing in Karen’s groin, forcing their way inside; her pungent saliva was wet on Karen’s face—

The door swung open and two security guards rushed in. A doctor grabbed Alicia by the waist and dragged her away from Karen, onto the bed. Straps were flourished, and tied around her wrists. The girl began howling, like a tortured dog.

‘Atha atharim, atha atharim!’

Her heart thumping with horror, Karen stepped outside the cell. For some reason she thought of her mother, burning. The crematorium. The flames burning the flesh.

Deep breaths, deep breaths. Slowly, she did up her unbuttoned jeans, and her shirt, as best she could; one shirt-button had been ripped away entirely. Seeing a hand sanitizer on the wall, she grabbed it, pressed the button and rubbed the gunk on her hands and on her face.

She felt violated. She felt violated by a girl. The girl’s tongue had licked her face. Like a dog.

The noise behind the cell door had subsided. Karen paused, inhaled, exhaled, then summoned her composure and made her own way back to Nurse Hawley’s office.

The thin-lipped nurse gave her a sad and sympathetic nod. ‘I was watching on CCTV.’

‘You were watching?’

‘I’m sorry. I sent security right away. You are all right?’

Karen sat down. And gazed at her trembling hands. ‘Yes. I think so.’

The nurse picked up the file on ROTHLEY, ALICIA.

‘As I said, it is an unusually pure and dramatic psychosis. We usually give her hefty dosages of anti-psychotics. The police at Truro, Sally Pascoe, gives me to understand she was involved in some Satanic rite? Some ritual?’

‘Yes.’

Nurse Hawley opened the file. ‘Whatever it was, it probably tipped her over into psychosis. Of course she may have been schizotypal anyway; but she needed a catalyst. And she got it. Did she give you any useful information?’

‘No … not really. It was … sorry, I’m a bit shaken. She said her brother was the Devil. They did some magic, she said he got her pregnant. Just crazy stuff, I think. Then she went for me.’

‘Yes.’

Karen closed her eyes, trying to forget. Then she remembered she had a job to do, and answers she needed. ‘What are those scratches on her chin, and her neck? Have you checked them? Must be from the cats, right?’

Nurse Hawley shook her head. ‘Well, no. Not exactly.’ A slow pause. ‘Many of the scratches are from, uh, shaving. She resists but we have to do it.’

Karen sat forward. ‘What?’

‘Yes. We have to shave her. Every day. Like a man.’