Amy, My Daughter by Mitch Winehouse Page B

cab that night and luckily I wasn’t too far away. I got to the hospital about fifteen minutes later. By the time I arrived Blake had gone and Amy had had her stomach pumped. It was reported in the press that she was given an adrenalin shot, but that’s not true. She was very woozy and I couldn’t get much sense out of her. I thought drinking might have caused the seizure.
    When I got home, I wanted to get my head down for a couple of hours but I couldn’t switch my thoughts off. I had a cup of tea and replayed the events of the night. I tried to remember how Amy’s behaviour had changed since she’d got married, and realized I needed to start keeping a daily diary. I wanted a record of events as they happened. Maybe I’d been a bit naïve and missed some obvious signs. How much was she drinking? She was probably still smoking ‘puff’, as she called it, but was there anything else? What had I not noticed?
    The next morning I met Raye and Nick Shymansky at the hospital. Amy was still asleep and I found out that there had been no sign of Blake since the previous day – as far as I knew he hadn’t even bothered to phone the hospital. However, in the press, there were pictures of him outside the hospital with a bunch of flowers for Amy – pity he never made it to her bedside while I was there.
    We decided when Amy was discharged that she could do with a change of scene so I arranged for us to go and stay at the Four Seasons Hotel in Surrey for a few days. To cheer her up, we also booked a room for her friends Juliette and Lauren. Amy wanted to turn it into a girly thing and I hoped that might keep Blake away.
    Amy left hospital the following afternoon and we drove her straight to the hotel, where she settled into her room. Unbeknown to me, though, she had phoned Blake and told him where we were going. At ten o’clock that night he turned up at the hotel.
    Amy wasn’t her usual self. She’d been talking a lot of nonsense throughout the evening, so I made some calls and arranged for a doctor to see her straight away. At eleven p.m. Dr Marios Pierides, a consultant psychiatrist at the Capio Nightingale Hospital, in north-west London, arrived and examined Amy. He said that she had just taken drugs, probably crack cocaine. He warned Amy that if she continued she could have another seizure at any time.
    Words cannot describe the depths to which I plummeted. I had to sit down before I fell. This was a bombshell. Amy had always been dead against hard drugs. Why had that changed? What could I do? I couldn’t believe that Amy was taking drugs but the evidence was there. Now I knew I’d been wrong in thinking Amy was stronger than Blake and had weaned him off class-A drugs. It appeared to be the opposite. But, even so, how had the drugs got into the hotel? I didn’t know what to do, who to turn to. I tried talking to Amy, but she was out of it. I wanted to hear what she had to say for herself. Maybe it had been a one-off. I lay awake all night wondering.
    I didn’t see much of Amy the following day and neither did her friends. She spent most of it in bed with Blake. Juliette and Lauren were really worried about her too and kept going up to the room, but Amy didn’t want to see them because she was with Blake. I was told that Blake, as a result of his ‘withdrawal’, was having a very bad time. Finally people were acknowledging that he was a drug-user.
    Blake and Amy surfaced at about nine p.m. and we sat down to have something to eat, except Blake, who went for a walk in the hotel grounds. I guessed that he’d made arrangements for drugs to be delivered, and when he returned, the look on his face suggested that they had arrived. Later Juliette and I managed to get into the room while Amy and Blake were out. I didn’t know what I was looking for but we came across a scorched strip of silver foil in the bin. This confirmed what we had suspected: