The Girl From Yesterday (24 page)

Then he was gone, off somewhere among the myriad service corridors of the old hotel.

Sid came in, looked around for me, waved and came over.

‘Do you eat here a lot?’ I asked as he put his pack down on the empty chair beside him.

‘No, I’ve never eaten here at all,’ he said.

‘So why did you ask to meet here then?’

Sid thought for a moment.

‘It’s near where you work. I thought it would be convenient.’

I smiled and nodded – convenient, if uncomfortable – but then, how was he to know?

‘Well, that is thoughtful of you.’

I asked the waitress if I could just have a toasted ham and cheese sandwich, mustard on the side, and a bowl of soup (I reckoned I would brave it). Sid got the steak sandwich.

‘So how has the campaign been going?’ I asked when she went to get our food.

‘Well, as you know, I have launched a challenge against the injunction.’

‘Do we have a time frame for that?’

‘I wish it were so simple,’ Sid said.

The waitress returned, bringing Sid a pot of tea and me a cup of coffee. I took a sip. It was hot.

‘Tell me about the complications.’

‘Well, according to the rules of discovery, our lawyer has to be given all the paperwork and information from their side. So we now have the full picture on how the injunction got through, despite all the evidence we had that the Blaneys are not only unfit, but are actively abusive.’

‘And?’

‘Well, as we already knew, the process was paid for by the Church through the offices of the Knights of the Crucified Emperor. But in reality, they’re just a front.’

‘For whom?’

‘The injunction very probably would never have gotten through by itself. It was accompanied by a – well, a petition, really. It goes on for a bit, so I’ll paraphrase it for you: it posits that Tom and Dora Blaney are exemplary parents, who are utterly devoted to their children, all of whom are glowing examples of well-rounded, articulate, athletic youth. It suggests that the decision to cast aside the trappings of modern twenty-first-century life is just one example of how Tom and Dora have made sacrifices to ensure their children’s safe, unpolluted upbringing, and that they should be looked upon as shining examples of how children
should
be parented. Finally, it puts forward that certain members of the town have made it their business to try and tarnish the reputation of this great family, and that it is the duty of the court to prevent such a travesty occurring.’

‘Sounds like quite a piece of writing,’ I said, laughing.

‘This letter is signed by Father Loughrey, but is then co-signed by twenty other names. Most are business people – farmers, accountants, lawyers, local politicians. They wouldn’t worry me – you could fairly easily show that they have never even seen Tom Blaney with his children. No, the name that bothers me is that of Nathalie Lassiter.’

‘Nathalie signed it?’

‘She did. It looks like she was the last one to do so, but her name is on the page and that is very damaging to our case.’

‘She was wavering when we met last,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t have taken much to turn her.’

The food arrived. We had some. The ham and cheese wasn’t bad. The soup was awful, and that it was hot was still the kindest thing I could say about the coffee.

‘How’s your steak sandwich?’ I asked as Sid chewed.

‘Well in fairness, they don’t specify which part of the cow they’re using,’ Sid said, around a mouthful.

We worked on in silence.

‘So what are we really talking about here?’ I said when my sandwich was gone and I’d had as much of the soup as I could cope with. ‘Why would a bunch of professional, generally decent people go out of their way to stop some children being taken from a situation that is harmful to them?’

‘There’s a long tradition hereabouts of not interfering with what goes on behind the walls of a family home,’ Sid said, giving up on his own meal and leaving it half finished. ‘People don’t like to be seen as informers or squealers.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said, ‘but this isn’t like that. It’s not that these guys are being
asked
to get involved by telling us anything about how the Blaneys are with their children. They are choosing to throw their tuppence ha’penny worth in. They’re
putting themselves
into the picture.’

‘I have a policy when it comes to anything involving business people,’ Sid said.

‘Do tell.’

‘You can apply it to almost anything involving the Blaneys, too,’ he said. ‘When in doubt, follow the money trail.’

‘That had occurred to me, too,’ I said.

‘I haven’t worked out how it all fits yet,’ Sid said, ‘but it’s the only thing that makes any sense.’

We talked about it for another hour, and still couldn’t get the pieces of the puzzle to come together.

But I knew we were getting close.

The court date for the civil dispute surrounding old man Blaney’s will finally arrived. The notoriety and celebrity nature of the case meant that the court was full. I sat beside Robert Chaplin, my boss virtually trembling with excitement – moments like this were defining moments in his life. Tom and Dora, wearing exactly the same clothes they were dressed in the last time I saw them, sat looking decidedly shop-worn and rumpled, front and left. Beside Tom was Keith Dignam, the solicitor who had tried to work his charms on me. I laughed to myself – the dots were beginning to join up.

Gerry, escorted by a blonde woman thirty years his junior and a foot-and-a-half taller, sat front and right, a snappy young lawyer I did not know accompanying him.

Judge Xavier Grundy (willow thin, rheumy eyed and tight lipped) oversaw proceedings. There was, at first, a lot of boring evidence from friends and associates on both sides, who were either falling over themselves to say that, yes, they were in absolutely no doubt at all that Jacob Blaney was in the best psychiatric health imaginable, or no, that he was a raving lunatic who ate his own faeces and believed he was receiving messages from an alien race. Neither group was wholly plausible or completely unbelievable. If anything, they all looked like they were being paid to be there.

Then Gerry’s side called their secret weapon.

‘Would Doctor Roger Brunswick take the stand, please,’ Gerry’s lawyer, whose name was Steven Horton, said.

Doctor Brunswick was as diminutive as Gerry, with a head of thick greying curls and an impressive pair of beer-bottle glasses. He wore a brown tweed suit and an old-fashioned cravat-style tie. I could see how Jacob Blaney would have liked him – he was old school.

‘I have been a practising psychiatrist at St Brandon’s since 1975,’ he said, after he was sworn in and stated his name and credentials. ‘I began treating Jacob Blaney three weeks later. He came to me as an outpatient, and regularly for weeks and sometimes months at a time as an inpatient from then until he died in 2001.’

‘Why did Jacob Blaney require your good offices, doctor?’

‘He suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. From what I could piece together he began to exhibit symptoms in his teens. Now, let me be clear: schizophrenia is a difficult disorder to explain – there are many symptoms and every patient is different. Jacob showed all the classic traits: extreme paranoia, auditory and visual hallucinations, violent mood swings and wild erratic behaviours. But he could also have periods of lucidity where he would appear perfectly normal. He was, like all the Blaney men, I suppose, intensely proud of his family heritage and he fought hard to keep his illness a secret.’

‘Did you condone this course of action?’

‘If people were more open about their mental illness there would be far less stigma attached to it!’ Brunswick snapped. ‘Of course I didn’t. Eventually he agreed to tell his wife. He was adamant that his children were never to find out, and the deal we made was that he would agree to a course of drug treatment – I used neuroleptics – and that he come in to the hospital if his symptoms started to grow severe. I regret that that responsibility fell mostly to his wife, who cared for him selflessly.’

‘As Jacob got older, did his condition improve?’

‘If anything it got worse. The periods of time he needed to be in full-time care got longer and more regular. His tendency towards violence became much, much greater. I did see some improvement with a new course of drugs, the so-called “atypical antipsychotics” which he did respond well to, but the lessening of symptoms was very slight.’

‘Would you say that a man with this level of schizophrenia was of sound mind –
fit to write a will
, for example?’

‘That is not a simple question,’ Brunswick said. ‘I suppose the simplest way to answer it would be to say that, should Jacob Blaney have tried to write his will during a period of illness – when he was in the throes of the disorder – and he was sick far more often than he was well, towards the end; if he were to try and write any kind of legal document under those conditions then no, he would not have been of sound mind.’

‘No further questions,’ Stephen Horton said.

Keith Dignam stood up. He cut a far less dashing figure than his opposite, but he knew how to hold his own.

‘Doctor Brunswick,’ Dignam said, pronouncing each syllable slowly. ‘You have stated that Mr Blaney, God rest his soul, experienced periods of clear lucidity, when he, and I quote, “could appear quite normal”. Doctor, would it be fair to say that, during these periods, Mr Blaney was fully functioning as an individual?’

‘If you mean was he capable of carrying out all the normal functions of an adult, then yes, I suppose he was.’

‘So during those times he was of sound mind!’ Dignam shouted dramatically, spinning to face the doctor.

‘No,’ Brunswick said, stopping the lawyer in his tracks.

‘But you just said—’

‘I know what I just said.’

‘Will I have it read back to you?’

‘That will not be necessary. The simple fact is that, even during those moments of clarity, Jacob’s intellectual and logical processing was skewed.’

‘Surely that is a matter of conjecture,’ Dignam said, trying to make out like it was a joke. ‘Come now, doctor, you weren’t with him twenty-four hours a day.’

‘I wasn’t, but I spoke to his wife almost daily while there was still a phone in the house. She told me how things were progressing, and it was very clear that Jacob was descending into a pit of paranoia and depression. I tried to stop it, but he would not listen to me. There were some fixations he had that I could not shift, no matter how hard I tried.’

‘What fixations are you referring to here, doctor?’

‘In the mid 1980s, Jacob began to think that evil thoughts were being implanted into his head down the telephone. He claimed he could hear another voice when he talked on the phone, telling him to hurt his family. It got so he would not use the phone himself, and his wife had to make all calls for him. Eventually he started to think the bad thoughts were going to get her, too. He was convinced she would be induced by them to poison him. So he got rid of the phone. Gradually, over the course of about six months, the TV went, then the radio, then he had the electricity disconnected and after that the mains water – he wanted nothing travelling into the house from outside, he was convinced any medium could be used to transmit these intrusive thoughts. He effectively walled himself and his family into their little kingdom – cut them off from the outside.’

‘Doctor, don’t a lot of people choose to live without a television?’ Dignam asked. ‘I mean, I barely watch the thing myself. That’s not a sign of insanity – many would assert it shows remarkable intelligence.’

‘I would applaud anybody who chooses to blow up their television set because it is a source of lethargy and encourages a small-minded view of the world,’ Doctor Brunswick said matter-of-factly. ‘I would be less enthused by someone who does it because they think the box is telling them – and let me be very clear in this – they believe the television, as an entity, is talking to them directly, not them as part of a large crowd watching the programme they have on, but them, distinctly, one to one. It is talking to them, and telling them to go to their son’s room and smother him with a pillow. Despite Tom Blaney’s protestations otherwise, he knows that his father tried to do that to him. His mother luckily managed to pull him away before he did permanent damage.’

‘That is a lie!’ Tom shouted, standing up and lurching towards the stand.

‘You are in denial, Mr Blaney,’ Doctor Brunswick said. ‘You have followed a lifestyle laid out by your father when he was very sick, and you treat it as if it is a sacred trust he passed on to you. Please believe me – his choices were not informed by anything other than a serious mental illness.’

‘You don’t know what you are talking about!’ Tom shouted.

The judge banged his gavel and called for order.

‘I think you have gone off topic a little bit,’ Keith Dignam said when things had settled down a bit. ‘Let me put it to you like this: during one of his periods of lucidity, could Jacob Blaney have participated in the writing of a will that does not, within the legal passages, contain anything outlandish or out of the ordinary. A father leaves the bulk of his estate to his eldest son, but leaves a sizeable amount of money to his younger son. Quite a fair, sane business, I would say.’

‘Have you seen the letter he left for Tom?’

‘I have, but that was a personal letter, nothing in it was legally binding. Back to the will. I ask you again: during a period of lucidity could Jacob Blaney have – mind fully functional, faculties all intact – could he have overseen the writing of his will?’

Doctor Brunswick paused and took off his glasses, polishing them vigorously with a pocket handkerchief.

‘It is possible he may have had a window of lucidity sufficient to do the job, yes.’

‘I have no further questions,’ Keith Dignam said and sat down.

‘Where the hell does that leave us?’ I whispered to Chaplin.

‘Fucked if I know,’ he said.

I realized that, with both parents in court, the Blaney children were unsupervised and therefore able to take a visit. I packed my picnic basket with sandwiches and rolls, a cooler full of various juices and soft drinks and a chocolate fudge cake and apple crumble I’d baked the night before. I then drove out to the house.