Chapter 103: Unannounced
I was not there, and I will not invent a scene I did not see.
What follows is what Fiona Hale told me on the telephone on the Saturday, and what appeared later in a document.
Where the two disagree I have used the document.
They arrived at six forty on the Thursday. Three of them.
An inspection manager, an inspector, and a pharmacist inspector, which is the detail Priya seized on when I told her.
You do not send a pharmacist inspector to look at the flooring.
They came in through the main door, showed identification to the night senior, and asked her to continue her handover as normal.
Nobody was arrested. Nobody was removed. No blue light came anywhere near that building, then or afterwards.
They asked for the staff rota for the previous eighteen months and the agency booking records.
They asked for the controlled drugs register and the medication administration charts for every resident on the ground floor.
The pharmacist inspector counted the controlled drugs cupboard against the register at seven fifteen in the morning.
That takes forty minutes and two signatures.
Denise Corrigan is the registered manager. She was not on site. She arrived at eight fifteen.
Fiona said you could hear her heels the length of the corridor.
That is the only cinematic detail in this chapter, and I have kept it because Fiona is a reliable woman.
They stayed three days. Thursday, Friday, and a half day on Saturday.
They interviewed nineteen members of staff, individually, in the visitors' room with the door shut.
They spoke to residents. They spoke to relatives who happened to be visiting and telephoned others who were not.
Fiona Hale was one of the ones they telephoned.
Her mother is Marjorie Hale, ninety-one, room fourteen, no dementia, sings in the corridor.
She once told me my hair made me look like a policeman.
Marjorie is one of the twenty-seven.
I need to say that here, and I need to say the rest of it in its proper place.
“They asked me strange questions,” Fiona said. “Whether Mum was ever drowsy in the afternoons.”
“And whether I'd ever been asked to bring medication in from home.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no to both. Should I have said something else?”
“You should say what's true. That's the entire point of it.”
She was quiet, and then she said, “Is this you?”
I had rehearsed an answer to that question and the rehearsed answer was worse than the real one.
“Somebody sent them information in February,” I said. “I gave some of it. A pharmacist wrote it up.”
“I can't tell you more, because I'm on bail and I have a solicitor who would prefer I said nothing at all.”
“On bail for what?”
“For putting my brother-in-law on a floor at Christmas.”
Fiona Hale said, “Oh,” and then, after a pause I could have driven a car through, “Marjorie will be delighted.”
The inspection ended on the Saturday lunchtime and then nothing happened for five weeks.
That is the part I want to be honest about, because in every version of this story that people tell afterwards, the inspection is the ending.
It is not the ending.
It is a fortnight of counting, then a draft report, then a factual accuracy check in which the provider writes back and argues.
Nobody put a notice on the door. The home kept taking residents. Denise Corrigan kept managing it.
Two agency nurses stopped appearing on the rota in the second week, and nobody said why, and nobody had to.
I learned all of this in pieces, on a phone, in a laundry, from a woman whose mother sings.
Ruth's advice throughout was one sentence long and she gave it to me four times.
Do not go near that building. Do not telephone anybody who works there.
Do not put anything in writing to anybody except me.
I did as I was told, which is not a sentence I have written often.
The nearest I came to breaking it was the Sunday, when I walked the towpath as far as the bridge that looks across at the west extension.
I stood there eleven minutes.
Two windows were lit on the first floor at half past nine at night.
That is a nurse doing the late round with a torch on her phone.
Forty-one rooms, two staff after eight, one of them agency four nights in seven.
That was the arithmetic I had watched for three years and had never once thought to write down as arithmetic.
I walked back.
On the Tuesday, Achterberg's clerk sent Ruth a note confirming a five-day fixture.
Ruth forwarded it to me with no message attached.
Six days to the twelfth of March.
The trial came first. It was always going to come first.
The court is faster, exactly as she had told me in a lift.