Let Me Lie(17)

Murray was familiar with most parts of Highfield. There was a well-attended drop-in centre, with craft activities, a patient-run café and a peer support group. There were outpatient clinics, counselling services, and cookery classes for patients with eating disorders. There were wards for patients with various mental health problems, requiring varying levels of support, including a high-security ward on which Sarah had spent ten days in 2007, and which Murray could no longer pass without remembering the awful day he had pleaded with the doctors to section his wife.

Sarah had been upfront about her diagnosis the first time she and Murray had met; at the buffet lunch laid on after Murray’s passing-out parade. Her older brother Karl had been part of the same intake, and although the two men hadn’t been friends, Murray had been drawn to the vivacious girl standing with Karl’s family. He’d wondered if she was Karl’s girlfriend; had been relieved to discover she wasn’t.

‘You know I’m mental, right?’ Sarah had thrown it down like a challenge. She’d been wearing enormous silver hooped earrings that swung when she laughed, and a luminous pink batwing jumper that hurt his eyes.

Murray hadn’t laughed. Partly because political correctness had been part of his make-up long before it had become part of police vocabulary, but mainly because he couldn’t reconcile the term with the woman opposite him. She had so much energy she couldn’t stay still, and her eyes sparkled as though they saw joy in everything. There was nothing ‘mental’ about Sarah.

‘Borderline Personality Disorder.’ She’d smiled that big smile again. ‘It sounds worse than it is, I promise.’

BPD. Those three letters had bookended their relationship ever since. Murray had swiftly realised the sparkle appeared only on Sarah’s better days, and that between times the pain and fear in those slate grey eyes would be unbearable.

Currently Sarah was a voluntary patient on a ward where Murray knew everyone by name. Visiting hours were restricted, but staff were understanding about Murray’s shift patterns, and he signed his name in the book and waited in the family room while someone fetched Sarah.

Family rooms were different in every hospital and clinic. Sometimes you’d feel you were in a prison visiting centre, with stark walls and a uniformed member of staff watching over you. In other places they were more relaxed, with sofas and a TV, and staff dressed so casually you’d have to check for a name badge to make sure they weren’t patients.

The family room at Highfield fell somewhere in between. It was divided into two sections. In the first, an arts and craft table boasted coloured paper and pots of felt-tip pens. Fiddly sticky pads were provided for children and their parents to embellish their homemade cards, without the safety risks presented by stolen rolls of Sellotape. The scissors were plastic-coated with rounded ends. In the second part of the room, where Murray took a seat, were sofas and low coffee tables scattered with magazines several months out of date.

Sarah put her arms around him and hugged him hard.

‘How are you feeling?’

Sarah wrinkled her nose. ‘There’s a new girl in the room next to me who bangs her head against the wall when she’s stressed.’ She paused. ‘She’s stressed a lot.’

‘Hard to sleep?’

Sarah nodded.

‘Be quieter at home …’ Murray saw the flicker of anxiety across Sarah’s face. He didn’t push it. It had been three weeks since Sarah had cut herself so badly she’d needed stitches in both wrists. A cry for help, the A&E sister had said, when it was discovered that Sarah had already called an ambulance; a bag in the hall containing the few things she’d need at Highfield.

‘I could feel it happening again,’ she’d said to Murray, when he’d broken every speed limit to get to the hospital.

It. An indefinable, overwhelming presence in their lives. It stopped Sarah going out. It meant she found it hard to make friends and even harder to keep them. It lay beneath the surface of Murray’s and Sarah’s lives. Always there, always waiting.

‘Why didn’t you phone Mr Chaudhury?’ Murray had said.

‘He wouldn’t admit me.’

Murray had held her, trying to empathise but finding it impossible to relate to a logic that saw self-harming as the only route into a place of safety.

‘I had an interesting day,’ he said now.

Sarah’s eyes lit up. She sat on the sofa cross-legged, with her back against the arm. Murray had never seen his wife sit properly on a sofa. She would lie on the floor, or sprawl with her head dangling off the edge of the seat and her legs stretched up so her toes touched the wall. Today Sarah was wearing a long grey linen dress, teamed with a bright orange hoodie with sleeves that she’d pulled over her hands so often they now stayed there of their own accord.

‘A woman came in to report that her parents’ suicides were, in fact, murders.’

‘Do you believe her?’ As usual, Sarah cut straight to the chase.

Murray hesitated. Did he? ‘I honestly don’t know.’ He told Sarah about Tom and Caroline Johnson: about their rucksacks filled with rocks, the witness reports, the chaplain’s intervention. Finally, he told her about the anonymous anniversary card, and Anna Johnson’s insistence that he re-open the investigations into her parents’ deaths.

‘Were either of the parents suicidal?’