Dark Choir Read online

  “Does any of the things I’ve said ring a bell with you?”

  “Just one thing,” she said. “I was involved in an abuse case. A patient from St. Vincent’s had been abusing a man with learning disabilities for years. It ended when the patient was moved into Blackthorn Ward at St. Brendan’s. Or so we thought. Anyway, this man was a schizophrenic with a dual diagnosis of personality disorder. A psychopath in layman’s terms. I had to interview him and he said the Dark Choir were coming for him. I thought it was part of his psychosis. You don’t think he’s doing this, do you?”

  “The person who attacked my Beverly and Widdowson was female. Can you give me this patient’s name?”

  “I shouldn’t. Patient confidentiality and all that, but it’s far too late for me to adhere to the rules now. His name is Connor Pendred.”

  “What was the victim’s name? He might be able to give me a clue?”

  “He’s severely cognitively impaired so I doubt he will be much help. His name is Patrick Leeman.”

  “Bloody hell, I know him. He’s at Willow House with my sister.”

  She leaned forwards, staring intently at him. “And how well do you know Brendan Widdowson? Is he a friend of yours?”

  Dan paused, wondering if this woman was a friend of his. She didn’t know anything about the ghost choir, but she had pointed him in the direction of Connor Pendred. He didn’t have anything to lose by telling the truth.

  “I hate him,” Dan replied. “Last time I saw him I physically threw him out of my house.”

  “Then you are a very brave and a very stupid young man. Brendan Widdowson is dangerous. Dangerous and evil. He destroyed my life and my career.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a long story,” she said. “Are you sure you want to hear it? It does involve your sister.”

  “I know he abused her. He told me.” Dan leaned forwards, eager to hear her every word. “Go on.”

  “During the eighties I was head of nursing at St. Brendan’s. As you know, there were around eight wards each with around twenty-five patients residing in them. The only way I could describe them was that they were like hospital wards with bays and five men or women sharing a bay. Strange to think, really. A hospital where nobody gets better. There were only three caregivers to look after twenty-five people with learning disabilities. They weren’t all like your sister. Most of them had nothing physically wrong with them, so they could move about. There was a day centre on site where they would go every day and get taken out on the bus rambling up to Dovedale or somewhere. There were trips out with the Sunshine Coaches, and we’d go on holidays with them. Your sister came on a couple of those holidays when she was with us. I was glad when it changed and they went to individual units with their own rooms, like Willow House. Now they are given their own flats out in the community which is more dignified, I suppose. Sorry, I digress. Yes, units of twenty-five patients. It was around this time the rot set in. Back in the seventies and eighties.

  “Most people who wanted to work at St. Brendan’s did so because they have a knack with people. I’d go so far to say a love for people. I worked as a nurse in learning disabilities because of my faith primarily. I’m a Christian and I believe we must truly love people. Especially those the world has shunned, like the people at St. Brendan’s. They’d spent so many years locked away that they needed to be brought out into the light, so to speak.

  “It all began when I was coming off my shift one night and saw Connor Pendred hanging around the orchard that backed into Blackthorn Ward. You see, when I’d been a nurse at the children’s ward next door to St. Vincent’, years before I’d nursed Patrick Leeman, he was on the children’s ward. Patrick was turning sixteen and was due to move up to the adult ward. He’d been put with people like Connor Pendred. I’d lied about his age to spare him from this, but when he was seventeen, not sixteen, he went up to the adult ward. I didn’t see him much after that, but he had changed. He became frightened and skittish. He was one of the first ones I got into St. Brendan’s when it opened in the sixties to get him away from people like Pendred.

  “Back to that evening. So, I saw Connor Pendred slip in the back way to Blackthorn Ward, so I followed him. He was in Patrick’s dorm, sodomizing him. I’d never seen anything so…awful. Pendred was slapping him as he did it, calling him names. The staff who were supposed to be looking after Patrick and the others were asleep in the lounge. I sacked three of them on the spot. I called the police and they took Pendred away. I personally made sure he was put back on his section and was never allowed to go near Patrick again. Soon after, that’s when he started going on about this Dark Choir.

  “I thought it was all over. I kept a close eye on Blackthorn Ward after that. I noticed another patient, Stephen Shell, had very bad wounds to his face. He has Apert syndrome, you may have seen him over at Willow. Apert syndrome is genetic and causes a deformity in the skull. It can slow down intellectual development as the brain continues to grow in the skull. I was never sure if Stephen actually had anything wrong with his brain, as such. I always wondered how aware he was. He would laugh at comedy programmes and seemed to be watching films and I swear he knew what was going on. He cried at sad films too. He hated seeing his own reflection. We removed all the mirrors from his dormitory. I monitored the times when the scratches appeared and they always appeared when a caregiver named Dennis Gillits was on duty. He was a weird individual. Snake like eyes and absolutely no compassion whatsoever. One of the other caregivers said he used to take Stephen into the gym at night. She was scared of Gillits, so she wouldn’t make a formal complaint. I planned to go to the ward one night when he was on to see exactly what was happening, but Stephen was hospitalised when he’d tried to scratch his eyes out. Gillits said he’d just found him in bed like that. I moved him soon after and began compiling my report.

  “That wasn’t the only thing happening I didn’t like there. Do you know Jackie O’Shea, Dan? She was a caregiver for Lindsey up at Farm Road for a while. Awful woman. Mouth like a sewer. One of the managers, senior to me, got her the job because they were cousins. I heard she’d been dragging poor Nigel Wright into the shower and giving him cold showers. When he had to go to hospital with pneumonia, I confronted her about it and she confessed. I sacked her on the spot. The next day she was back at work, reinstated by her manager cousin, and I got an official warning. Poor Nigel suffered at her hands for years.

  “Another poor victim was Shelly Vis. She was an Asian girl. Wheelchair bound like your Lindsey. A caregiver called Angela Teal used to take her home and…well…I’m convinced she sexually abused her. We had a meeting to address it, but by that time the structure of management was changing. I didn’t have the power I once had and my hands were tied. I tried to get Teal suspended and stop the weekend visits to Teal’s house. It was falling on deaf ears. All these patient’s getting abused and there was nothing I could do about it. No one wanted to listen.

  “In 1988 this new guy turned up to work as a caregiver at Blackthorn Ward. His name was Jason Hereford. He was young, bright, and worked there while he was at university. He wanted to be a teacher. I thought he’d be a breath of fresh air. I remember him telling me not to worry because he was one of the good guys. He wasn’t. He used to think it was funny to walk Greg, a small guy with Down syndrome, over to the closed down wards of St. Vincent’s and scare him half to death. His mates used to meet him there. Every time he did a night shift. He openly and fearlessly told me about it. He said they were all spastics and it didn’t matter what you did to them. He left in 1995. He teaches in Scarsdale Upper School now.”

  “Did Lindsey ever get abused by any of these people?” asked Dan. He could feel his gut churning and wanted an answer from her quickly.

  “No, they’d left by the time Lindsey got there, the place had changed. The abusers were gone by then, filed quietly away. Of course, given jobs in other parts of the hospital. I’d left by that time.”

  “Did
you quit?”

  She sighed. “No. I tried to get the perpetrators sacked. They were all in with the various managers in the hospital. Jason Hereford was having an affair with Lynn Oxley, one of the higher-ranking managers so she wasn’t going to do anything. Jackie O’Shea’s cousin had put the brakes on any disciplinary action I wanted to take against her. The rest of them, well, if action had been taken against any of them then they’d make a fuss about O’Shea and Hereford getting away with it and the hospital would have to act. Managers wanted to keep all this within the hospital where as I wanted to involve the Nursing and Midwifery Council, Social Services, even the Police. I was told by higher management that in no uncertain terms, I mustn’t take this further. I tried to involve the police, but they wanted evidence. I compiled a report, extensive, with times, dates, even photographic images of injuries I’d taken on my Polaroid. Things were getting very nasty. I had dog mess put through my post box, half the people at the hospital weren’t talking to me.”

  “But you had this report?”

  “Yes. You see, in those days we didn’t use computers that much. This report with the photos, pages of patient notes I’d photocopied, and all my dates and times were damning evidence. I needed to leave it with someone I trusted. I couldn’t leave it at home. I didn’t trust anyone not to break in and steal it, and I couldn’t leave it at work. I wanted to use this report to make the biggest noise I could.

  “I was going to the chapel in town at the time. Pastor Widdowson was relatively new to the area, and he preached a no holds barred gospel. He was very much for condemning sin, and he seemed very moral. He had a big mouth. He’d prayed for me a couple of times when the stress was getting to be too much. He knew all about my situation, so I trusted him with the report. I gave it to him for safe keeping and to read, hoping he’d be so outraged by its contents that he’d help me bring this whole awful affair to light. That was the worst mistake if my life.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “He was so convincing. The congregation was small and loyal. I really thought he would help.”

  “Go on. What did Widdowson do?”

  “Days after I’d given him the document I was called to the head of nursing’s office. I’d been accused of slapping a patient. By Jackie O’Shea. She had witnesses. Many witnesses. Half the hospital had seen me do it. I was supposed to have slapped a patient named Rita Shepard. I wasn’t even on Blackthorn Ward when it happened, but there were enough people to say I was. They threw the book at me. I was subject to an inquiry with the Nursing and Midwifery Council and found guilty. I was struck off. Sacked. The evidence Widdowson had in his possession, my file, never came to light. You see, he was behind all of this, it was his idea to get O’Shea and the others to accuse me. He stopped me from attending the chapel. My calling was to be a nurse. It was a strong as a priest’s calling to be a man of the cloth. Widdowson ripped that away from me.”

  “What do you think he got out of it?

  “He used it to blackmail them. Gillits, Hereford, who had started teacher training by then, O’Shea. He used the information to own them. They all started coming to his church. I imagine there were financial incentives from them to buy his silence, and that was it.”

  “So who do you think is trying to frighten them now? You heard about O’Shea?”

  “Yes. Her poor dog. Pity it wasn’t her. No, I shouldn’t have said that. Forgive me Lord. Someone is digging this up, someone is targeting the abusers. It could be Connor Pendred. He might be mad enough to go around writing ‘choir’ on their walls, he’s certainly mad enough to kill Jackie’s dog, but he’s locked up all the time. It could be Widdowson trying to get more money out of them.”

  “I hardly think he’d try to drown himself. He was badly shaken afterwards. Well, as much as a man like that can be.”

  “It must be someone who wants vengeance. The patients on Blackthorn Ward have no family to speak of. The only ones who would want vengeance would be the patient’s themselves. For them to write on walls and kill a dog, well, that’s impossible. Isn’t it?”

  Thirty-Three

  For Dan, the visit to Ann Prendergast left him with more questions than answers. He still had no idea who the man in the purple robe was or why that strange singing was coming from the asylum at night. Did there exist a group of individuals who were somehow using the memory of the lobotomised choir to try to scare Widdowson and O’Shea? Was it, as Karl insisted, some supernatural occurrence? Dan was no longer ruling out that possibility.

  He needed to get to the museum to see where Karl had got to. He felt he needed to talk to the curator and see if any of this made sense to him. When Dan arrived at the museum the door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open and went upstairs.

  “Fucking hell!” he exclaimed on seeing the mess in the old mill. Laying among the broken glass and trashed artifacts, Karl was sprawled face down, blood staining his grey hoodie.

  “Karl! Karl, mate.” He knelt down beside him and Karl groaned. Dan reached for the phone in his pocket, his mind racing. What had happened here? Had the place been robbed? Dan dialed 999 and asked for an ambulance.

  “No. No ambulance,” Karl croaked and heaved himself onto his back. Karl’s face was cut and bloodied. His lip was split and his face blackened with bruises. Even when his shirt rode over his belly, Dan could see extensive bruising on the stomach and ribs.

  “Karl. Who did this to you?”

  “I don’t want you calling an ambulance.”

  “Let me call the cops then.”

  “It was the fucking cops who did this. No. No ambulance. I don’t want people seeing me like this. Another one of Widdowson and Gould’s victims carried away in an ambulance for everyone to see.”

  “At least let me get you to a hospital. Do you think you’ve broken anything?”

  He sat up and wrapped his arms around himself and brought his knees up. He tried to see through bruised and swollen eyes. He was finding it difficult to speak.

  “Call Billy and Mooey. They’ll help.”

  Dan called Billy who arrived in his cab in five minutes flat. Mooey came in soon after, still wearing his dusty clothes from where he’d been working at the landfill.

  “What did you do to piss Widdowson off?” asked Billy.

  “Nothing.”

  “It must have been something.”

  Dan spoke up. “Seriously, it was nothing.”

  “He wanted to know about the choir up at the hospital. Him and Gould had these big bastards with them. Coppers.”

  They helped him to his feet and practically carried him downstairs to the cab. They got Karl settled into the back. When Billy closed the door, he turned to Dan.

  “See what happens when you cause trouble for Widdowson?”

  “This has nothing to do with me. Widdowson is looking to blame anyone for this. Karl just happened to be researching the history of St. Vincent’s.”

  “Widdowson and Gould do this. It’s what they do, but you’ve wound him up. That’s why they came here. You don’t know what it’s like here.”

  “I think I do, mate.”

  “Me any Mooey’ll take him to hospital.”

  “No. I’m coming too. Karl’s my mate, too.”

  “This wouldn’t have happened to him of you’d not been here.”

  “Bullshit. This is what Widdowson does. You said that. When will it be your turn? Or Mooey’s?”

  “After he’s been to visit you, I imagine.” Billy was disturbed by this, Dan could tell. Dan wondered what Widdowson had on him. Dan got into the passenger seat of the cab and Billy realised Dan wasn’t going to give up.

  “Get in then,” he said.

  They drove out of Scarsdale to the Royal in Derby. On the way, Dan and Karl explained everything that had happened previous to the attack. Dan also filled Karl in on his visit with Ann Prendergast.

  “That makes sense,” Karl spoke through his bruised lips.

  “What
does?”

  “The choir want this to come out in the open. Remember my ghost story analogy? They want the abuse to be brought to light.”

  Dan rang Alison from the Hospital.

  “Have we had any visitors?”

  “The bald man or your sister’s evil twin?” she replied, sounding unconcerned.

  “Or anyone else?”

  He filled her in on Karl’s beating.

  “After last time, I don’t think Widdowson would dare show his face here,” Alison said.

  “He’s more likely too now. You should see Karl. He’s a mess. No bones broken though.”

  “That’s sounds terrible. No, it’s all quiet here. Don’t worry about me, Dan. I can look after myself. I’ve made a pie for when you get back, but take as long as you need.”

  “Just be careful. Up there on your own with everything that’s happened.”

  “I’ll be fine, Dan. Bye”

  He went back to the table in the WRVS hospital café where Billy waited. Mooey had gone back to work.

  “Was that the nurse?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Shagged her yet?”

  “No.” He sipped his coffee. “But my fiancé probably thinks I have. I’ve not spoken to her for almost a week. It might be over. I don’t know.”

  “That was weird. Her getting attacked like that. Then Widdowson. Are you sure you didn’t do it and just made up this story?”

  “I was arguing with the manager of Morrison’s when Widdowson was getting drowned. Have you got any clue who might be doing this?”

  “Could be Mrs. Briggs from the post office.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “Take your pick. Half the town hates Widdowson. He’s blackmailed so many people now. I think it’s getting to him for him to do this to Karl. We all know Karl’s a harmless weirdo. All his UFO spotting and ghost hunts. He doesn’t even live in the real world. You’re right, this wasn’t your fault. Someone wrote ‘choir’ on the church wall. Karl was looking into this choir up at St. Vincent’s. Widdowson overreacted.”