The boy’s social history made it clear that there was no shortage of reasons for his problems, whatever they might be. Quite apart from his involvement in the murder, the exact extent of which was still unclear, the seventeen-year-old seemed to be all alone in the world, without a home or a history, friends or family. Bureaucratically he didn’t exist. The various agencies concerned with housing and feeding the homeless had no record of a Gary Dunn, and the instances of the name thrown up by official databases all proved to be dead ends. The police lost interest once it became apparent that he wasn’t going to tell them anything they didn’t already know about the murder. He was taken into care by the local authority’s social services department, who assigned him to Pamela Haynes’s supervision. After a few weeks she contacted the Adolescent Psychiatric Unit. No one there took the social worker’s diagnosis of schizophrenia seriously, but there was no question that the boy did need care and treatment. The consultant’s psychiatric assistant, who conducted the initial interview, prescribed a course of anti-depressant drugs and arranged for out-patient treatment consisting of group and occupational therapy.
Aileen’s first contact with the boy had been when one of the nurses brought him into the ward sitting room in the middle of her morning open group, a low-key affair providing general supportive counselling. The moment Aileen caught sight of him, she felt as though someone had laid a velvet-gloved hand on her heart: a touch that was soft, gentle, warm, yet almost unbearably intrusive and intimate. There were at least a dozen people in the room, yet she felt utterly isolated. The surroundings seemed to shimmer and tremble as though she were about to faint. Nor would that have been very surprising, given the strength of her conviction that the boy standing in front of her was her dead child.
It lasted only a few moments. Then, as with deja vu, reality closed ranks and blandly asserted that nothing of the sort had happened, that she must have imagined the whole thing. Aileen’s new patient was an unremarkable adolescent with the puffy unfinished look of his age, like partially baked dough. His reddish hair was cropped close to the skull in one of the currently fashionable styles that Aileen, who struggled to keep up with these things like someone running after a bus, still associated with conscription or lice. He and the nurse were still only midway across the room, which was how Aileen knew that no more than a few moments had passed.
In the course of this and subsequent encounters, Aileen noted her observations for the boy’s file. Apart from a predominantly blank or wary expression, his appearance was fairly normal. His level of education was evidently low to non-existent, although he was intelligent enough. He tended to be shy and withdrawn, never speaking unless spoken to, and then usually only a word or two at a time. It was what he said that revealed disturbance. As Aileen was so unwisely to announce to her husband, Gary Dunn had claimed that someone was trying to kill him.
The Unit’s standard report form contained a box labelled ‘Delusions: systematized/unsystematized’, with space below for further details. Aileen ticked ‘systematized’ and added ‘persecution, guilt (?), ideas of reference’. The consultant psychiatrist would decide, but to Aileen none of this seemed schizoid. The hells in which schizophrenics suffer appallingly real torments look from the outside like a montage cobbled together from a variety of no-hope films featuring leaden plots, unconvincing special effects and rotten acting. But Gary’s story was simple, straightforward and consistent. ‘There’s this bloke, the one who did it. He knows I seen him. He’s after me. He’s going to do me too.’ When asked what this man looked like, the boy replied that he walked funny, like he needed to go to the toilet, and smiled a lot, only it wasn’t a real smile. Aileen highlighted this in her report. Unlike patients suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, who tend to identify their persecutors with anybody and everybody from one of the cleaners to a television announcer, Gary Dunn apparently had a specific individual in mind. As for the famous aural hallucinations, these proved to consist simply of a voice saying such things as ‘You’ll be sorry’, ‘I’ll get you’, and ‘You’ll wind up the same way’. This, too, was quite unlike the sadistic ranting or insinuating murmurs to which schizophrenics are subjected. Finally, Aileen noted that there was no inappropriacy of affect. One characteristic of schizophrenia is that emotional cause and effect gets out of synch. Patients laugh indifferently even as they describe in lurid detail the fiendish schemes which they claim are being devised to bring about their downfall. Gary, on the other hand, evidently found it almost intolerably distressing to talk about the supposed threat to his life. More than once, indeed, Aileen felt almost inclined to doubt whether this was necessarily a delusion. After all, murder had been done and no arrest had been made. The police had released Gary for lack of evidence, but they still suspected that he’d been involved in some way, and probably knew who had done it. Supposing he did, thought Aileen, and the murderer knew that he knew? Then the boy’s life might indeed be in danger.
Paradoxically, the boy himself would have none of this.
‘I’m sick,’ he told Aileen firmly. ‘Sick in the head.’
At first sight this seemed a positive sign. Psychiatric patients display varying degrees of insight into their condition: some stoutly maintain that there is nothing whatever the matter with them, others claim that their symptoms are the side-effects of a purely physical illness; a third group, usually the more hopeful cases, can see that something has gone wrong and that it is connected with what has happened to them in the past. But Gary Dunn did not fit into any of these categories.
‘What do you think is the matter with you?’ Aileen asked him one day.
‘I got schizafreakout, haven’t I?’
She repressed a smile.
‘What makes you think that?’
He shrugged impatiently, as though the answer was both obvious and unimportant.
‘You know when you’ve got something, don’t you? When you’re ill.’
‘How do you mean, ill?’
‘Like a cold and that.’
‘You mean that having a cold and having schizophrenia is just the same?’
‘Course it’s not the same!’ he exclaimed indignantly. ‘What I got, you get locked up for, right? It’s in the head, isn’t it? It’s dangerous. I might do things. There’s no telling what I might do.’
And he rolled his eyes as though appalled by the extent of his potential depravities. At the same time Aileen could hardly keep from smiling, but as the weeks passed it became apparent that the boy really meant it. This was a rarity indeed. The staff at the Unit were used to patients who were more or less unwilling to be admitted or unhappy about staying, but few of them had ever come across someone who was positively eager for admission. Gary’s hints that he should be ‘locked up’ gradually turned to demands which grew ever more strident. To bolster his case, he took to aping the behaviour of the other patients, mimicking their tics and fits. Jenny Wilcox, the occupational therapist whose office was next to Aileen’s, witnessed one of these demonstrations. ‘It was truly awful,’ she reported. ‘Unbelievably bad. Even brain-damaged yobs like Stan and Trevor could see that he was faking it. We all just sat there and cringed for him.’ Gary Dunn’s exhibitions failed to convince not only Jenny’s ‘yobs’ — her term for the more seriously disturbed male adolescents — but everyone else at the Unit from the consultant down. No one understood why he was so anxious to be admitted, but the fact remained that he was just one of many patients whose needs and wishes had to be taken into account. The pressure on beds was so severe that there could be no question of turning one over to a patient whose condition was not serious enough to warrant it. What worried Aileen as she drove down Fulham Palace Road that Tuesday morning was the thought that there was one sure way that the boy could gain instant admission, did he but know it, and that was by making a suicide attempt.