A Plea of Insanity (18 page)

Most cities have their green areas, pretty places set aside for the urban dwellers to kid themselves the countryside is all around them, that they are cocooned in fields and trees and ozone. Stoke on Trent, being a loose collection of towns which ran in to one another, formed a long, thin city, bordered by ex opencast mining areas. (‘Go for a walk in Bemersley,’ the old-timers would say, ‘and you can pick up lumps of coal from the path.’)

Like the Cattle Market Pub in Leek, or the Boathorse canal-side drinking houses, the names of the pubs give clues to the environment. The Lump Of Coal, The Winding Wheel, The Miners Arms, The Miners Rest, The Potters Wheel, The Jolly Potter.

And there is a trade-off to opencast mining. Part of the contract is to landscape the sites once the coal has been extracted, to improve the scenery and make it more environmentally friendly than before. Not as much altruism is involved as you might expect. The sites make poor building ground anyway, prone, as they are, to shifting and subsidence. Houses have to be built on rafts which makes them vastly too expensive. So instead these derelict opencast sites are transformed into Stoke on Trent’s green areas, places where children might play, folk may take their dog for a walk or cyclists and runners get fit. They form nature reserves around ponds and seats are placed in arbours facing modern sculptures. But there is a downside too. These Arcadian fields are too near the city. Leafy glades can be places of concealment. They may form lovers’ lanes but they are also hidey-holes where assaults could be committed or bags might be stolen, drugs can be shot into already
scarred veins. Or it might be the place where you could take a car if you wanted to torch it.

One of these green areas is Bemersley, near the source of the River Trent. Bordering Bemersley is a picturesque country park containing two pools, Knypersley Pool and the Serpentine, both managed by Staffordshire County Council. Watching the pools and the car park beyond, stand two small semi-detached white-washed cotttages. Two up, two down.

Very early, on a frosty morning, in the house nearer the pool, Richard Dennis, a chartered accountant, lay in bed, silently staring at the window, alert only to the fact that something was not quite normal.

It is the light, flickering
.

The phrase registered before the argument. It should not
be
light. A slight turn of the head confirmed the fact that by the LED radio alarm it was 3 a.m. Hours before dawn. As he watched, the radio alarm changed to 3:01.

That was when he heard the noise, a raging, crackling, angry sort of noise
.

He sat up, threw his bedclothes off, glanced at the unconscious lump next to him which was his wife, padded to the bedroom window, drew aside the curtains and stared out.

A car full of petrol makes a fine blaze. Flames shoot ten feet high. It is a firework display with explosions of glass and sudden flares when the plastic melts and ignites. He watched the show and listened to the noise for a few seconds, the crackle, the air whoosh, the glass cracking like ice over a pond. Nothing more, he would say at the inquest. No screams.

The car must have burned, they estimated, for about an hour. The heat was so intense the fire-fighters could not get within thirty yards of it for twenty-five minutes. No one, sitting inside the car, could have survived for more than a few seconds. She must have been already dead before Richard Dennis had woken up. At the inquest all these statistics would worm their way into Claire’s brain, boring trails so deep she would never forget them in either her waking or sleeping moments.

But on that frosty morning as Richard Dennis stared through the window and watched the car burn he knew only a small part of the story. So he cursed, assuming it was simply another stolen car dumped by joy-riders – not the first to be torched here. He’d asked the Council to close the car park at sunset but they had used the dual arguments of night fishermen’s access and straggling hikers who roamed the country park and were late returning to their vehicle. So Dennis always lost the argument. And this, he thought angrily, knotting his dressing gown cord around his waist, sliding his feet into slippers and stumping noisily down the narrow stairs, was the result. He rang the emergency services before stepping outside to the crisp, wintry air, and the still exploding car beneath a night sky speckled with a hundred million stars. When he was near enough to feel the heat he stood and waited for the fire engine and the police.

Minutes later he was waving in a tanker with flashing blue strobes.

There is something surprisingly bouncy about firemen summoned to a blaze in the dead of night. If you ask them how they can be so lively they will tell you that from the
moment they get the call adrenalin floods their blood stream. Foam and hoses, noises and flashing blue lights. Further sparks to ignite their love of the job. The chance of heroism and bravery complete the adrenalin surge.

An hour later the car was a smoking, blackened wreck, smothered in foam like suds of washing up liquid and the firemen were staring at the unmistakable human form which lay, face up, on the floor (the seats having melted), fists bared, ready for a fight.

The well-documented, pugilistic attitude formed by the biological fact that muscle contraction is stronger in the flexor groups than the extensors. Knees, elbows and wrists are affected
.

So the burning car had served as a funeral pyre. Not sandalwood on the banks of the Ganges but rubber and plastic, fuelled by petrol on the edge of a Northern English city. There was no religious significance to the burning car – only expediency.

Immediately the crime scene switched gears. Not just a stolen car any more but a potential homicide enquiry.

In such a state of destruction it can be hard to identify a body and almost impossible to ever know for sure whether the victim was alive or dead when the car was set alight. Inexperienced pathologists might well mistake injuries for effects of the fire. Fractures, unexplained marks on the body, presence or absence of soot in the air passages, skin peeling. Strangely, other aspects of the crime scene can be easier to detect. Keys, still in the ignition, car doors open or closed, locked or unlocked, which gear the vehicle was in, handbrake engaged or not and the identity of the car itself with all the knowledge this brings in its wake. Stolen?
Owner? Desire for discovery is implicit. A burning car is a beacon to draw the emergency services and the source of a fund of information via the police computer.

Richard Dennis would not go back to sleep that night. He had caught sight of a smoking ribcage, a corpse which he knew would populate a nightmare the instant he closed his eyes. Besides – the car park opposite his idyllic little cottage was now a bustling crime scene. A tent had been erected, more policemen arrived. And finally a yawning police surgeon in jeans and a thick sweater, soon followed by a pathologist who carried a black Gladstone bag. So Richard Dennis made the coffee and followed events from the warmth of his kitchen. The only person he did not offer freshly-made coffee to was the journalist who arrived with notepad, sound engineer and a spare man balancing a camera on his right shoulder. Something of the accountant in him balked at being filmed relating the drama and seeing it subsequently on the evening news. It took until
midmorning
for the body to be moved and the car-wreck shifted onto a low-loader. It took a whole day for the incident to filter through to Claire.

Like many she had heard the local radio station announce that a body had been found in a burning car near Knypersley Pool. But she did not connect the incident with Kristyna. The pool was at the other end of the city from Greatbach. So she’d simply heard the bulletin and driven on.

This was not what she’d expected
.

Late in the day Paul Frank rang her and told her parts of it, that jewellery, dental records and
other sources
had identified the charred body as Kristyna’s.

Bones, teeth, jewellery, the underwires of her bra
.

The rest she filled in over the next few days from a variety of sources – newspapers, gossip and, worse, her own imagination. The charred and twisted corpse, the heat, the light, the suffering.

Once the car had been removed no mark was left in the gravelled car park but a rectangular, blackened patch in the centre which was soon smothered with bunches of flowers by a soft-hearted public and Kristyna’s heartbroken partner, Roxy.

Paul Frank called in to see her a week later to relay the findings of the post mortem.

‘As far as we can ascertain,’ he said slowly,
‘Kristyna was already dead before the car was set alight but the destruction of her body was …’
He stopped short, finding it hard to continue.

The missing word was
complete. The destruction of her body was (would have been) complete
.

Unlike the policeman Claire could not
reduce
Kristyna to the phrase
her body
. She could not equate that animated figure, always moving, jangling and talking, earrings flicking forwards and backwards, with the picture she held of a blackened corpse.

The one was life and movement, the other unmistakably stillness and death.

She simply gaped at him.

‘There is one other troubling point,’ he added, refusing to meet her eyes.

She listened, apprehensive and puzzled too.

‘The car that Kristyna’s body was found in.’

She waited, not too interested. It would surely be a car stolen in the last twenty-four hours from a nearby housing estate.

Her guess was wrong.

‘It was
her
car. Her
own
car,’ Paul Frank said with difficulty.

‘How?’ The word shot out like an accusation.

‘You remember Kristyna was walking the day she vanished because her car was in for a service?’

She nodded impatiently. She knew that.
Everyone
knew that.

‘We’d looked at it but only briefly. There was nothing there. We decided to leave it at the garage pending our enquiries.’

Claire felt her lip curl. Police incompetence was the phrase that rolled off her brain and over her lips. Even if she only mouthed them Paul Frank heard.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I agree. Incompetence. But with hindsight …’

He shrugged. ‘Anyway – it was on the garage forecourt and was stolen some time last night.’

This too spoke of Barclay. Irony. Such subtle irony. All so fitting
.

She almost smiled. It was so inevitable that she, intimately knowing the machinations of Barclay’s mind, should have been able to predict this.

He
would
use Kristyna’s car to incinerate her body in. After all. It was Kristyna’s car. How apt. How appropriate.

She could picture him saying it, palms showing in the age-old gesture of honesty and inevitability, of something so absolutely fitting as to be obvious.

Paul Frank gave her a few more details, the fact that the body had been released for burial, that the cause of death had had to be listed as uncertain, but she hardly listened and he left soon after.

And now Claire’s life entered a dangerous period. Like oil and water, her two existences slowly separated into two completely different entities – work and home. They could not emulsify and the complete segregation made her feel, at times, almost schizoid.

Home was happy, lively, optimistic, planning a future, swags of material, colour magazines, long discussions on the comfort of furniture, of the expediency of bathrooms, shower units over baths, of reds and greens and purples and gold. Olive-white, barley-white, sherbert-white and so on.

Work was worrying, depressing, anxiety-driven, frightening. Constant meetings were held reviewing security for both patients and staff. And all the time the Press haunted the place. The Medical Defence Union was mobilised, uttering their warning cry of protecting the general public from dangerous inmates while at the same time preserving patients’ right to confidentiality; the illegality of imprisonment without a Section Order and restraint without due authorisation. The buzzwords were “responsibilities” and “reasonable care” and Claire felt she’d defaulted on both.

Most chillingly the Defence Union warned her against playing policeman. ‘It is up to the police,’ the senior barrister said in a condescending tone that made her feel an inadequate amateur, ‘to investigate. Not you. You should neither hinder nor further their inquiries except where it is in furtherance of your professional responsibility which is to protect the general public. Keep your suspicions well wrapped up, Doctor. That,’ he ended pompously, ‘is my advice to you. Breach that and the Defence Union will document the fact that we gave you clear instruction but that you chose to ignore it.’

So at work she sat and worried at her fingernails while
home-life became increasingly surreal in its giddy merry-go-round for a bright, beautiful home.

Sometimes she felt she would go mad with the dichotomy.

And all this time she was aware that Barclay was out there somewhere, watching for her, biding his time. He would come for her at some point as he had come for Kristyna and even possibly Nancy Gold because who knew where she had gone with her unborn child? It was inevitable that Barclay would return for her. She knew it, recognised it as he sent her veiled warnings. Notes were moved, the computer altered. Once his name was inserted into a clinic, double-booking the two o’clock spot and she sat in her room beyond the appointment time, not seeing the flesh and blood patient who sat outside, stoically waiting, but paralysed, watching the door and waiting for Barclay to saunter in.