Mark Billingham Rabbit Hole: Bloody Scotland extract

In the interests of getting the key information across as efficiently as possible, as well as jazzing the story up a tad, I’ve decided to pretend this is a job interview. I think I can still remember what one of those is like. So, imagine that I’m dressed up to the nines, selling myself to you in pursuit of some once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity, and not just mooching about in a nuthouse, wearing tracksuit bottoms and slippers, like some saddo.

Right, nuthouse. Probably not the most politically correct terminology, I accept that, even though it’s what the people in here call it.

So . . .

Acute. Psychiatric. Ward.

That better? Can we crack on? Last thing I want to do is offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities.

My name is Alice Frances Armitage. Al, sometimes. I am thirty-one years old. Average height, average weight – though I’m a bit skinnier than usual right this minute – average . . . everything. I’m a dirty-blonde, curly-haired northerner – Huddersfield, if you’re interested – something of a gobshite if my mother is to be believed, and up until several months ago I was a detective constable in north London with one of the Metropolitan Police’s homicide units.

To all intents and purposes, I still am.

By which I mean it’s something of a moot point.

By which I mean it’s . . . complicated.

The Met were very understanding about the PTSD. I mean, they have to be, considering it’s more or less an occupational hazard, but they were a little less sympathetic once the drink and drugs kicked in, despite the fact that they only kicked in at all because of the aforementioned trauma. See how tricky this is? The so-called ‘psychosis’ is a little harder to pin down in terms of the chronology. It’s all a bit . . . chicken and egg. No, I’m not daft enough to think the wine and the weed did a lot to help matters, but I’m positive that most of the strange stuff in my head was/is trauma-related and it’s far too easy to put what happened down to external and self-inflicted influences.

In a nutshell, you can’t blame it all on Merlot and skunk.

Very easy for the Met though, obviously, because that was when the sympathy and understanding went out of the window and a period of paid compassionate leave became

something very different. I’m fighting it, of course, and my Federation rep thinks I’ve got an excellent chance of reinstatement once I’m out of here. Not to mention a strong case for unfair dismissal and a claim for loss of earnings that he’s bang up for chasing.

So, let The Thing and the rest of them take the piss all they like. I might not have my warrant card to hand at the moment, but, as far as I’m concerned, I am still a police officer.

I think I’ll knock the job-interview angle on the head now. I can’t really be bothered keeping it up, besides which I’m not sure the drink and drugs stuff would be going down too well in an interview anyway and the work experience does come to something of an abrupt halt.

So, Miss Armitage, what happened in January? You don’t appear to have worked at all after that . . .

Yeah, there are some things I would definitely be leaving out, like the whole assault thing, and, to be fair, Detained under Sections 2 and 3 of the Mental Health Act, 1983 doesn’t tend to look awfully good on a CV.

Actually, limited job opportunities aside, there’s all sorts of stuff that gets a bit more complicated once you’ve been sectioned, certainly after a ‘three’. Everything changes, basically. You can choose not to tell people and I mean most people do, for obvious reasons, but it’s all there on your records. Your time in the bin, every nasty little detail laid bare at the click of a mouse. Insurance for a start: that’s a bloody nightmare afterwards and travelling anywhere is a whole lot more hassle. There are some places that really don’t want you popping over for a holiday, America for one, which is pretty bloody ironic really, considering who they used to have running the place.

It’s the way things work, I get that, but still.

You’re struggling with shit, so you get help – whether you asked for it or not – you recover, to one degree or another, then you have loads more shit to deal with once you’re back in the real world. It’s no wonder so many people end up in places like this time and time again.

There’s no stigma when you’re all in the same boat.

Anyway, that’s probably as much as you need to know for now. That’s the what-do-you-call-it, the context. There’s plenty more to come, obviously, and even though I’ve mentioned a few characters already, there’s loads you still need to know about each of them and about everything that happened. I’ll try not to leave anything important out, but a lot of it will depend on how I’m doing on a particular day and whether the most recent meds have kicked in or are just starting to wear off.

You’ll have to bear with me, is what I’m saying.

Difficult to believe, some of it, I can promise you that, but not once you know what it’s like in here. Certainly not when you’re dealing with it every minute. When you know the people and what they’re capable of on a bad day, it’s really not surprising at all. To be honest, that’s surprising is that stuff like this doesn’t happen more often.

I remember talking to The Thing about it one morning at the meds hatch and that’s pretty much what we were saying. You take a bunch of people who are all going through the worst time in their life, who are prone to mood swings like you wouldn’t believe and are all capable of kicking off at a moment’s notice. Who see and hear things that aren’t real. Who are paranoid or delusional or more often both, and are seriously unpredictable even when they’re drugged off their tits. Who are angry or jumpy or nervy or any of the other seven dwarves of lunacy that knock around in here twenty-four hours a day. You take those people and lock them all up together and it’s like you’re asking for trouble, wouldn’t you say?

A good day is when something awful doesn’t happen.

A murder isn’t really anything to write home about in a place like this, not when you think about it. It’s almost inevitable, I reckon, like the noise and the smell. You ask me, a murder’s par for the course.

Even two of them.

Mark Billingham appears at the Bloody Scotland International Crime Festival in Stirling and on-line 17-19 September. For tickets and further information go to www.bloodyscotland.com. Rabbit Hole by Mark Billingham is published by Little, Brown (£20)

Tomorrow: Alan Parks