Eat the Poor (Galbraith & Pole Book 2) by Tom Williams

Author:Tom Williams [Williams, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Red
Published: 2022-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9: In which Garold seeks professional help

Garold had wasted no time in getting an appointment with the counselling service. He’d called late on Friday once he was at home. It wasn’t a call he wanted to make from the office. In theory his privacy was well protected there but, ever since Matt Hancock’s unfortunate carelessness with a surveillance camera, Garold, like many of his colleagues, preferred to do anything really confidential outside the Palace of Westminster.

He rehearsed before the call, checking how he looked in the bathroom mirror. He’d read that your expression reflects in the voice you use on the phone, so he’d practised with a hangdog look quite unlike the confident face he usually showed the world. When he got through, he had sounded convincingly depressed with a slight tremor in his voice that suggested a terrible underlying tension.

The young woman he spoke to had seemed very apologetic about not being able to offer him an appointment until Monday morning.

“Of course, if it’s urgent …”

She was obviously concerned that this might be another MP about to go spectacularly off the rails over the weekend but Garold had assured her that he could cope until Monday. The plan depended on his seeming like someone who needed help dealing with stress but not someone who couldn’t be trusted with their own medication.

The hardest bit of getting that first appointment was finding Room 537. When people said that it was hidden in the bowels of the palace, they weren’t joking. It turned out to be in a corridor leading from the cellar which was ritually searched by Yeomen of the Guard every year on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. Perhaps, Christopher Garold thought, if poor Guido Fawkes had had the benefit of counselling services, he wouldn’t have felt the need to blow up Parliament.

Garold had spent an hour or more on Google researching his symptoms and, once he had located Room 537, he had no problem convincing the earnest young counsellor that he needed more than a shoulder to cry on and a few reassuring words. He needed, at the least, something to help him sleep. That meant a prescription, so he was booked in to see the psychiatrist on Wednesday. There he explained again about his panic attacks and struggles to sleep. He was confident that he sounded convincing – so convincing that he almost believed in them himself. He needed, he explained, something to break the cycle of a poor night’s sleep followed by anxiety, followed by a panic attack and another night tossing and turning. The psychiatrist started to explain that he would be prescribed Valium but Garold insisted he had taken Valium before. (It was true: he had, like many students, taken it in the weeks ahead of finals and this was duly recorded in his medical notes.) He wasn’t looking to take drugs over a long period – just a short course of something powerful to get his sleep back on track. He was sure he had heard of something: “Clone-something-or-other, doctor.

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