The Devil You Know

First I had to go and see Rafi.

I changed my clothes in the car, experiencing a palpable prickle of relief as I dumped the green dinner jacket in the backseat. It wasn’t the ridiculous color of the thing, it was the feeling of being without my tin whistle, as necessary to me as a piece is to an American private eye. As I shrugged my greatcoat back on over my shoulders—hard work in that confined space—I had to reassure myself that the whistle was still there, in the long, sewn-in pocket on the right-hand side at chest height, where I can hook it out with my left hand while it looks like I’m just checking my watch. The dagger and the silver cup are useful tools in their way, but the whistle is more like a part of me—an extra limb.

It’s a Clarke Original, key of D, with hand-painted diamonds around the stops and the sweetest chiff I ever came across. It comes in a C, too, but like David St. Hubbins once said, “D is the saddest chord.” I feel at home there.

Satisfied that the whistle was back where it was meant to be, I started the car and drove away from the office with the familiar mixed feelings of relief and cold-turkey disgruntlement.

The Charles Stanger Care Facility is a discreet little place about a third of the way down the long bow bend of Coppetts Road, just off the North Circular. The spine of it was made by knocking a whole row of workers’ cottages together into one building, and although there are some odd, misshapen limbs growing off that spine now, with Coldfall Wood as its backdrop the place still manages to look idyllic if you approach it on a summer’s day—and if you can ignore the colonnade of spavined bed frames and dead fridges left along the margins of the lane in the venerable English pastime of fly-tipping.

But a wet November evening shows the place off in a bleaker light, and once you get through the entrance door, which is actually two doors and can only be released by buzzer from the inside, you have to dump what’s left of the idyll in the receptacle provided. Pain and madness seem to be stewed into the walls of the place like stale sweat, and there’s always someone crying or someone cursing at the limit of hearing. For me, it’s as though I’m walking out of sunlight into shadow, even though they keep the heating turned up a degree or two too warm. I don’t know how far that’s down to me being what I am and how far it’s purely autosuggestion.

Charles Stanger was a paranoid schizophrenic who murdered three children in one of those workers’ cottages just after the Second World War. The books say two, but it was three—I’ve met them. He spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and in his more lucid stretches—because Charlie was Cambridge-educated and could turn a sentence like a joiner turns a table leg—he wrote eloquent letters to the Home Secretary, the president of the Howard League for Penal Reform, and anyone else who showed an interest, bewailing the lack of adequate facilities for the long-term incarceration of those whose crimes were occasioned not by malice or deviant passion but purely and simply by their being as crazy as shithouse rats.

After he died, it was discovered that he owned not just the cottage he lived in but the one next door, too. His will stipulated that they should be given over to a trust in the hope that they might someday become the seed and template for a more humane and less alienating institution in which the dangerously disturbed could live out their days safely sequestered from ordinary punters.

It’s quite a touching story, really. A bit sad for the three little ghosts, of course, because they’re now spending the afterlife in the company of an endless stream of violently disturbed men who probably bring back to them the circumstances of their own demise. But the dead have no rights. The mentally ill do, at least on paper, and the Charles Stanger Care Facility walks the usual line between respecting those rights and trimming the edges of them. Mostly the inmates are treated pretty well, unless they cut up rough with the wrong attendant at the wrong time. The place had only had four deaths in care in the last twenty years, and only one that could fairly be called suspicious. I would have liked to have met him, too, but he hadn’t stuck around.

The Stanger doesn’t pin its faith to last April’s rowan switch, and if you’ve ever seen the effect a haunting can have on the psychologically fractured or fragile, you’ll know why. The wards here are maintained on a week-by-week basis, and they come in all three flavors: a cross and a mezuzah, representing the religious worldview, a sprig of pagan woodbine, and a necromantic circle meticulously drawn around the words HOC FUGERE—flee this place.

The staff nurse at the reception desk looked up as I walked in and gave me a warm smile. Carla. She’s an old hand, and she knows why I have strolling-in-off-the-street privileges here.