Chapter 7
SEVEN
ERIN
Eight weeks ago
My name is Erin Santos. And here are a few honest, random and hopefully fun facts about me!
I’m forty years old, 5 feet 4 inches tall and my weight fluctuates somewhere between 110 and 120 lbs.
I was born in York, in the north of England, where I subsequently spent most of my youth, and where, to my knowledge, I still hold the record for winning the hundred metres hurdle race five years in succession while attending St Swythen’s Comprehensive School.
My hair is black and my eyes – inherited from my Venezuelan father – are a striking jade green in colour, and have even been remarked upon by total strangers!
I have arthritis in my left ring finger, brought upon by a historic fracture that I sustained during a netball accident as a teenager. I think it’s a sign I should never marry.
I am terrible at crosswords yet proficient at Scrabble – during my seven years here at Larksmere Hospital I have never been defeated.
I am a convicted killer who was coerced into stabbing a man to death by a sick psychopathic con artist who pretended to be my friend.
OK, so I don’t include the last line on this frankly ridiculous list, though I would’ve liked to just to see the look on Dr Wainwright’s face. Plus it is also a fact, though perhaps not so much of a ‘fun’ one.
Dr Wainwright thinks that this list could act as ‘useful conversation starters’ as I embark upon the process of integrating myself back into society, if they decide I am no longer a danger to it, that is. And they say I’m the mad one.
‘So, Erin,’ Dr Wainwright addresses me with his usual condescending sageness. ‘We all know why we’re here today, don’t we? We’ve been working towards this for some time now, since you were transferred to the low security section of Larksmere last year.’
I nod with a polite smile and remember to maintain eye contact.
I need to demonstrate my sincerity today as well as verbalise it.
I need him – and the rest of the tribunal – to believe it, to believe me, which is something that hasn’t happened in over six years of my life, and is ostensibly the reason why I am still here, stuck in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell.
That and a woman they tell me isn’t, and never was, real anyway.
‘Today is really more about ticking the right boxes, Erin, crossing the i’s and dotting the t’s,’ Nurse Ledbury says, instantly flushing red as she realises her verbal slip-up.
I’ve noticed how she often appears a little flustered in Dr Wainwright’s company and gets her words all in a muddle.
I reckon she’s got the hots for him. Maybe she’s really a secret slut underneath all those roll-neck sweaters and sensible shoes.
Nurse Ledbury is my favourite of all the nurses at Larksmere Hospital, and I don’t even like her all that much.
I imagine she probably has some amusing sticker on the inside of her locker that says something like, You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps!
It sounded promising though, when she said, ‘crossing the i’s and dotting the t’s’.
They’ve allowed me out on day release for five weeks running now without incident.
If they approve my final release, then I could be out of here in a matter of days.
And that really would be something to celebrate.
‘What do you think of now, Erin, when I say the name Samantha Valentine to you?’ Dr Wainwright cocks his head at me, like a dog waiting for a treat. ‘How does it make you feel?’
I can’t tell him the truth of course. That really would be madness.
I can’t tell him that I despise that name with the burning white-hot fire of ten thousand suns, or that it triggers such acute rage and injustice at the years – at the life and future – I have been robbed of that I want to scream until my larynx collapses.
I can’t tell him that it is her who should’ve been here instead of me, slowly decaying, year by year, day by day, hour by hour, or that she is really the dangerous one.
They won’t believe me. No one ever has. In my darkest moments, I have even struggled to believe myself.
‘It makes me feel ashamed,’ I reply, mimicking his sageness back at him. ‘Remorseful, but hopeful too, I suppose.’
‘Hopeful?’ He raises a bushy ginger eyebrow. Dr Wainwright has the wildest eyebrows I’ve ever seen, thick and wiry with rogue grey hairs sticking out at random.
‘For the future, a future in which I can, and intend to, repay my debt to society and become part of humanity again.’ Tick those boxes.
‘Do you still believe that Samantha Valentine exists, or that she ever did?’ Dr Jameson, a cold woman with a pinched face that she deserves, looks up at me from behind the crescent-shaped desk.
I’d anticipated the question of course – not least from her – and had rehearsed my answer, parrot fashion, until the words no longer stuck in my throat.
‘During my time here in Larksmere, in this hospital, throughout the years of different treatments and multiple therapies, the one-to-one sessions and group discussions I’ve engaged in and with, I have gradually come to realise that I was quite ill at the time I committed my crime.’
Dr Wainwright looks at me almost like a proud father. Sally the Social Worker is nodding her head in agreement, and Nurse Ledbury is looking at me in that way she always does, like I am a pitiful lost cause she feels begrudgingly obliged to be kind to lest I may decide to stab her to death.
Old Face-Ache Jameson doesn’t even bother to look up. Miserable cow.
‘I understand now that it was the illness,’ I press on.
‘Although for a long time I struggled to accept that there was a possibility that she never really existed, and that she was just a symptom of my psychosis. But with all the help and support I’ve received here, from you, from everyone at Larksmere, I now understand and have come to terms with this truth. ’
My captors watch me silently, intensely. It feels good to have an audience hanging on my every word for a moment, even if it is only because I’m saying what they want to hear.
‘Why now?’ Jameson pipes up again. ‘You have always been so consistent and insistent in your belief that she was a real person. Throughout most of your sentence you have never deviated from this narrative. So what’s different, Erin?’
The clock on the wall of the sterile office ticks loudly and is a little off per second. It’s distracting.
‘For a long time I hid behind self-denial because it was too painful to face up to the realisation that I had committed, or was even capable of committing, such a heinous crime. Creating a fictitious character enabled me to minimise my actions to myself and stay stuck in that denial.’ I scan their faces to check if they are buying it. I can’t call it.
‘The chaplain has helped me enormously in arriving at this point,’ I add, as though it were an afterthought to mention it.
I’m mindful that if I tell them outright that ‘I have found God’, then it might sound contrived, like a cynical and tactical move on my part to bolster my chances of securing my liberty, which is exactly what it is.
‘I pray every day now and ask God for his forgiveness, his guidance and help in coming to terms with my crime, and understanding the illness that led me to commit it. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9,’ I add.
‘So it is God who has helped you to finally accept the truth?’ Dr Wainwright sounds pleased.
He is, after all, a good Christian man himself.
I know this because he wears a small silver crucifix around his neck and sometimes quotes the psalms, though not fanatically.
Despite our weekly therapy sessions together throughout the past six years, I actually know very little about Dr Wainwright, and yet he knows everything about me – everything except the truth anyway.
‘Very much so,’ I agree enthusiastically. ‘Without my Bible studies and sessions with the chaplain, I think it would’ve taken me longer to arrive at the place I find myself at today, or even arrived at all.’
‘And where is this place that you find yourself at today?’ Jameson chimes in again, her pen poised as she scribbles something down onto a notepad in front of her. She looks a bit bored.
‘“A false witness will not go unpunished, and whoever pours out lies will perish.” Proverbs 19:9. And so, put simply, I am no longer prepared to lie anymore, not to others or myself, and especially not to God.’
Jameson is right though. Refusing to confess that Samantha Valentine was – is – a creation of my own damaged mind had, for the most part of my sentence, never been an option.
Accepting it would’ve meant succumbing to the madness they have spent years trying to gaslight me into believing I am suffering from.
And while I am undeniably a killer by default, I still have principles and my integrity. Thou shalt not lie.
But I have to get out of here, and the only conceivable way to do this is by lying about the truth. How’s that for a twisted irony?
I have never once denied my crime, or the fact that I committed it.
When I was arrested at the scene, I went without incident and co-operated with the police as fully and best I could.
I gave them a full and frank confession.
I told them the truth. Only they didn’t believe me.
They decided I was delusional the moment they ran a background medical check on me and discovered I’d spent a stint in a psychiatric ward.
From thereon in they stuck to their narrative and didn’t bother investigating my account in any real detail.
On the surface it seemed as though Samantha Valentine was simply a manifestation of my psychosis – they could find no trace of her anywhere in existence – despite my endless protestations to the contrary.
Lazy, discriminatory policing at its finest, it suited them to write me off as a just another headcase who needed taking off the streets.
If only they had dug deeper, or even bothered to dig at all – but they had their story that wrapped everything up nicely and nothing I said or did could stop them from sticking to it.
I suppose, to give the police their due if I must, it really was, is, a crazy story, the kind of story a crazy person would tell.
Only that doesn’t make it untrue, and neither does it make me mad.
The truth is often stranger than fiction, and in my case, stranger still.
I had wanted to plead not guilty to the charge of second-degree murder and go before a judge and jury to give them my side of events, tell the truth of what had really transpired. But my brief – who I suspected didn’t believe me either – had strongly advised against it.
‘If you lose – and you will lose, Erin – you’ll go to prison, possibly for the rest of your life. But if you plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, then I’m hopeful the judge will be lenient and send you to a psychiatric hospital.’
‘But I don’t need to go to a psychiatric hospital,’ I said. ‘I’m not mad, and I’m not lying!’
I learned then, however, that sometimes the facts have little to do with the truth, or maybe it’s the other way round.
Either way, it meant I was facing a potential lifetime behind bars or the supposedly cushier option of a secure mental asylum.
And so I chose what I was led to believe to be the lesser of two evils, which now, with the benefit of hindsight, was simply yet another example of me putting my faith and trust in the wrong people. I really must stop doing that.
After I was sent to Larksmere Hospital, I knew that either one of two things was probably going to kill me: the guilt that tormented me daily for what I had done, or the hatred for the person who had coerced and tricked me into doing it.
I should say at this point that killers aren’t born, they’re made, and I’m really not a violent person by nature.
I’m a pacifist who has always detested aggression of any kind.
Ironically, this is partially the reason why she was so easily able to manipulate me like she did.
Though why she did remains the biggest mystery still.
Did she choose her victims at random? Were Bojan and I singled out for a reason?
If so, what? The police never even followed up on the neighbour’s statement about a potential stalker; those bozos never followed up on anything.
The judge in my case was sympathetic, citing my childhood trauma as a mitigating factor that ‘No doubt would’ve significantly impacted upon your mental health into adulthood’, and gave me six years for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
My brief was ecstatic at least. It was lenient, a more than fair sentence, I suppose, which is perhaps the only thing in all of this mad, bad and sad story that is – because mine was a crime that should never have happened, orchestrated by someone who didn’t exist. Work that one out if you will.
I knew her as Samantha Valentine – though I know that wasn’t, isn’t her real name – and according to the police and the doctors and the nurses and the social workers and the judges, she was, is simply a creation of my damaged and psychotic mind.
Only, they’re wrong. And once I am out of here, I’m going to prove it.