Heather smiled. “Yeah, a favor for my friend Pamela. She used to visit quite often, I think, but has been rushed off her feet lately. You’ve probably met her?”
“Ms. Whittaker, yes. Well, thank you for taking the time. Anna doesn’t get many visitors, and they really do help. News from the real world always goes down a storm.”
He led her down a series of pleasant corridors, all smelling faintly of disinfectant and floor polish. Heather caught sight of a few people here and there; a young man with an old- fashioned haircut reading a newspaper, an older lady sitting in an armchair, rubbing her hands together over and over.
“Did Ms. Whittaker tell you much about Anna?”
“Not so much. Only that she’s been through a tough time.”
Dr Parvez nodded seriously. “She has, at that. She might lose her train of thought a little, but generally Anna is delightful company. Here you go.”
He stopped at the doorway to a wide, spacious room, tastefully decorated in magnolia and a faint, anemic pink. There were several tables, each set with pairs of chairs, and a handful of people talking quietly. The tall windows looked out across the gardens. Despite the pleasantness of the surroundings, Heather found herself thinking about her visits to Belmarsh to see Michael Reave.
“The people here,” she said suddenly. “They don’t have … a history of violence or anything, do they?”
A flicker of annoyance passed over Dr Parvez’s face, and Heather immediately regretted asking.
“We treat a variety of problems here, Miss Evans—depression, anxiety, various personality disorders—and one of the few things they all have in common is that the patients are much more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else. Shall I introduce you to Anna?”
He took her over to a table in the far corner. Sitting there was a tired looking woman with lank, brown hair and a deeply creased face. Heather found she could not guess at how old she was; she seemed all ages at once. She was wearing a soft hooded top and a T-shirt, and she looked up at Heather with watery eyes.
“Good morning, Anna,” said Dr Parvez, brightly enough. “Pamela sent someone to have a chat with you. Are you feeling up to it today?”
Anna’s eyes wandered back over to the doctor, as if seeing him for the first time, and then she nodded slowly.
“Great.” Dr Parvez turned to Heather and smiled. “I’ll get someone to bring you both a cup of tea.”
Heather seated herself at the table. She felt slightly foolish. What was she supposed to say to this woman? A soft murmur from the corner of the room revealed a television set no one was watching.
“Hi Anna, how are you? I’m Heather Evans. Pamela said I should come and have a chat. Would you like that?” Heather cringed inwardly at the patronizing tone in her own voice. It was because the place felt like an old people’s home; she half expected to have to raise her voice, or avoid talking about politics. The woman sighed heavily.
“A chat. Yeah. That would be good,” she shifted in the chair, bringing her arms up around her chest briefly, as though hugging herself, and then dropped them again. “It’s very boring here,” she said, some animation coming into her eyes. “Not much to do. I’m allowed to go for a wander, usually, but I got into trouble last time.”
“How come? What happened?”
Anna shrugged and looked away, a slightly shifty expression moving over her features, when a short young woman came over with two polystyrene cups of tea for them. Heather thanked her, and she moved to the far side of the room, where an old man was playing checkers by himself.
“So. This seems like a nice place. How did you end up here?”
“Referrals, one place to another, that’s me. They said I have mild paranoid schizophrenia,” she pronounced it carefully, as though reading it off a card in her head. “With long-term delusions, occasional hallucinations.” Then, as an afterthought, “probably exacerbated by drink and drug abuse.”
“That’s a lot to deal with.”
“You’re telling me.” With this out of the way, Anna seemed to brighten a bit. “It’s hard, and I take so many pills I rattle, but this is a nice place. Better than others. Pam sent you, did she?”
“Yeah. I chatted to her about her art work, and she helped me out, so I said I’d come and talk to you.” She cleared her throat. “She says she’s sorry she hasn’t been lately.”
Anna shrugged again. “Poor Pam, she worries a lot. She thinks a lot of this is her fault, when it’s not. It’s just the way my brain is made, but she … she finds it hard to see me when I’m going through a bad patch.”
“Why would Pam think your problems are her fault?”
Again, Anna seemed reluctant to answer. Instead, she took a sip of her tea, grimacing as she swallowed. “Christ, this stuff tastes like piss. That’s the worst thing about being in these places, I think. The bloody tea. There’s no tea quite like the stuff you make yourself at home, is there?” As she put the cup back down, Heather got a glance at the top of her forearm; she only saw it for a second, but there was a tangled knot of scar tissue there, white against the woman’s heavily freckled skin. It was roughly heart-shaped.
Heather forced a smile onto her lips even as her stomach turned over. “You’re definitely right there. So how do you know Pam?”
“We met when I was a girl really, travelling round Europe, getting into all the wrong things.” She grinned briefly, revealing at least one tooth that had turned black. “She was older than me, so I followed her for a bit, and we ended up at this commune place in Lancashire. She loved it at first, Pam did.”
“The commune?”
“Oh yeah. All that nature stuff, she
