A Plea of Insanity (5 page)

‘Perfectly, Doctor Roget.’

‘So sit down.’

Now he wasn’t bored. He was angry.

‘Have you a girlfriend at the moment?’

He yawned again. ‘No one special.’

‘Not Sadie?’

He looked really amused then. ‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’

She felt at a disadvantage but recovered herself. ‘I’ll learn, Mr Barclay, I’ll learn. Quickly.’

His smile was supercilious now.

‘Well,’ she stood up now. ‘Thank you for coming.’

Barclay shook her hand, smiled, asked when she wanted to see him again and made for the door. But just before he passed through it he turned, gave her another of his bland smiles. Nothing threatening. ‘Might I make a suggestion, Doctor Roget?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Read my notes. Thoroughly. From beginning to end. Get to know me, Doctor.’

She didn’t press the buzzer for another patient for a few minutes. Barclay had left her feeling drained, vulnerable, inadequate and thoughtful. She regained her equilibrium then started again, working her way steadily through the rest of the afternoon’s patients. At the end she picked up Jerome Barclay’s buff file with the blue star in the corner. He had thrown down the gauntlet. It was difficult not to pick it up.

But she had other patients.

At the end of her clinic Claire had promised to see both Kap Oseo and Nancy Gold. She had enough to do but still she parcelled up Jerome Barclay’s files. She would take them back to her office and read through them there. They would be a useful case study.

She found Kap on the locked ward, heavily sedated, lying in his bed. He’d wet himself. She could smell the
ammonia-stink
of urine as soon she walked through the door.

‘Kap,’ she ventured. ‘Kap?’

He rolled towards her, the whites of his eyes showing clearly. A skinny Jamaican with closely cropped hair. She sat down in the chair. Less threatening than bending over him.

‘I’m Doctor Roget, here to help you, Kap.’

He grunted.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Bad, man. I feel rough.’

‘Kap – no one wants to hurt you here.’

He gave a long sigh. ‘You just don’t understand.’

‘I do – at least I try to. No one is against you here. We’re trying to help you.’

‘Why they talk about me, then? You tell me. Why they do that?’

‘I don’t think they talk about you, Kap.’

Frank contradiction is not a good idea. Always leave a chink of daylight for the paranoiac to creep through.

The patient is not wrong but possibly mistaken.

‘Kap, they said you picked up a knife. Why did you do that?’

His eyes seemed to lose their focus. ‘I got to protect myself.’

‘Who from?’

He waved a hand around the room. ‘I just got to. Nobody seem to do it for me.’

‘You don’t need protection.’

He rolled away, back to face the wall. ‘Like I said, Sister, you just don’t understand.’

‘OK then, try and explain to me. Who do you need protecting from?’

‘They come in the night,’ he whispered, ‘This place full of tears. I don’t want to die, Sister. Not like the doctor.’

There was something shocking about the matter-of-fact way that he spoke, as though Heidi’s murder was fact, well known and widely accepted. Kap Oseo didn’t display horror – or shock or even distaste.

She protested. ‘What do you mean – not like the doctor?’

Kap Oseo sat up then, bolt upright. He really was frightened. ‘Doctor Faro. She always was good for me. Look what happen to her.’ He spoke with a mature tinge of sympathy. ‘Jus’ look. She didn’t deserve that, Sister. No one lookin’ after her.’

Claire tried again. ‘Kap – I don’t want you to worry. The nurses are here to look after you.’

He flopped down, curved his back towards her, spoke to the wall. ‘That’s what you think. But maybe not all of them are to be trusted. Some of them might be listenin’ to another and persuaded.’

It is easy to become involved in a paranoiac’s delusions, to be sucked in to their horrid fantasy world where everyone wishes them harm. Claire could see that knowledge of Heidi Faro’s death would have leaked into their brains to pollute their minds further. Maybe it explained why Kap, who had never been violent, had taken to carrying a knife.

They were both silent until Oseo started muttering to the wall. ‘Anyway – who tells them to have anythin’ to do with me?’

Claire answered. ‘It’s their job, Kap. It’s what they’re paid for.’

She touched his shoulder. His skin was slimy with sweat. It was starting to soak through the sheet in dark circles, making it damp and sticky, clinging to his bones. She could smell it – and mingled in was the very real scent of fear.

Drug-induced paranoia or did Oseo really have something to be frightened of?

He rolled back again, towards her. ‘Who pays their money?’ he asked. ‘The nurses. You tell me that.’

‘The government, Kap.’

He jerked upright, looked incredulous. ‘And you still say no one watching me?’

It was twisted, psycho-logic. And she played along. ‘Is anyone watching you now?’

Frightened eyes searched all four corners of the tiny room, finally resting on the blinds. ‘Behind there,’ he said, not taking his eyes off. ‘All the time. Peeping through the slats with they big eyes.’

She stood up, pulled the cord, lifted the blinds
completely to uncover the window, the reflection of the pair of them, he all black and bones with staring eyes, she a white, trouser-suited professional, cross-legged in the chair oozing concern. She shook her head. ‘No, Kap. No one is there. No one is watching you. You’re safe. You’re alone. It’s peaceful here. Try to rest. Sleep. Relax.’

‘Listen, Sister,’ the deep voice answered, ‘one thing do I know for certain. It isn’t safe to sleep. Not with your eyes closed. Not in here.’

She must drag him back to reality. ‘Where is here, Kap?’

He laughed. ‘That a trick question, doctor, by the trick-cyclist to see if I am mad or confused. I tell you now, Sister, Doctor Roget, this is Greatbach Secure Psychiatric Unit and there are people here who are under an influence other than the one you think is in charge.’

‘Whose influence? What influence?’

‘The influence of evil. Of the devil. Beelzebub.’ Something strange and fearful was held in his eyes. ‘You are not in control here. Don’t delude yourself you are. Now get out.’

She made the decision as she left the room. They would have to give him extra medication. His persecutionary delusions were increasing dangerously. This was his first really violent outburst. It was even possible that Kap’s paranoia was tipping him into psychosis.

The women’s ward was two floors up, again behind a keypad. She pressed the number in and the door clicked behind her. A long, windowless corridor lay ahead, parquet flooring, doors off. Halfway along, on the right hand side, was the nurses’ station. She started walking. In one of the rooms a television chattered brightly. From somewhere else wafted a breeze of cheap perfume, elsewhere the sound of bath water gurgling out, muted voices. She reached the
nurses’ station. Siôna was playing cards with a youth and two females, the older of whom she recognised from the bench in the garden, a staring, thin woman with straggly hair framing the wrinkled face of the chronically anxious chain-smoker. Both women ignored her to concentrate on their game. Siôna eyed her. The youth simply looked her up and down, his face pale and expressionless.

‘I thought I’d pop in on Nancy,’ she said feeling, somehow, as though the male nurse resented her presence – misread it as an attempt to check up on him.

He stood up and ushered her out of the nurses’ station. ‘She’s keeping to her room,’ he said, ‘little rebel. I agree with Kristyna. There is something funny about her.’

‘What?’ She felt slightly irritated. He was a nurse. Not a member of the general public. She expected something a bit more professional that simply,
something funny about her
.

‘You’ll see.’ The answer was deliberately mysterious. Almost dramatic. Unhelpful too. She didn’t know these patients yet. They were still strangers to her. What she needed was help. Not veiled hints.

‘Give me a clue,’ she said to the bluff Welshman.

‘You’re the doctor,’ he said. ‘Make your own judgement.’

‘I will.’ She wondered whether Heidi had found him as much trouble.

‘Second door on the right,’ Siôna said. He put his hand on her arm with a tight grip. ‘Watch her first, for a minute, through the window.’

He returned to the nurses’ station and she approached Nancy’s room.

She heard singing first, soft humming. ‘La la la, La la la. Mm. Mm mmm mm m mm m …’

A girl’s voice. The tune immediately recognisable.
Brahms’ Lullaby. The tune to send thousands of babies to sleep.

We all have some memory of this melody, tucked away in the distant rooms of our childhood. Hers of her mother humming it. Not to her. To her-half brother, eight years younger than herself, adored by his parents. And she, putting her hands over her ears, trying to block out the sickly song. Her mother and stepfather standing, arms entwined, staring down into the crib, as though the child was the best – the only really good – thing that had ever happened to them.

Adam.

Not half a bloody frog like Mademoiselle Roget. Adam was English to the core. She’d heard them say it.

‘I’ll show them,’ she’d vowed. And had never stopped trying to prove herself, find their love which had somehow been displaced on to her brother.

What complicated people the human race consists of
.

The sound grew no louder as she neared the room. That was the strange thing about it. It was constant. Soft. Haunting. Filling the air yet coming from nowhere.

She peered through the porthole and had a second’s panicked shock.

Surely. Nancy had no baby. She had murdered it. Hidden the corpse until it mummified, like a cat or a monkey. That was why she was here.

So what was she nursing and singing to? Arms around a swaddled form dressed in baby pink wool, this crooning, traditional lullaby as treacly as honey
?

Claire watched. Mesmerised, her hand raised to open the door. But afraid. Very afraid. Could you do this? Resurrect the dead? Nurse a murdered baby? Oh yes – here in Greatbach you could do anything. Strange events took
place here. You could murder your own psychiatrist. She knew then whatever she might pretend Heidi’s murder had affected her deeply. Oseo’s veiled hints had penetrated the paper-thin armour she had donned to come and work here.

She felt stuck to the floor, her face unable to slide away from the porthole window.

Nancy was crooning to her dead baby
.

What was that in her arms if not …
George
?

Claire watched for minutes.

Until she heard the noise of the television back in her hearing. And from somewhere she found the power to move and pushed the door open. There was a startled cry. The child rolled to the floor. Bounced too softly, the pink wool floating away, as light and insubstantial as a candy-floss cloud and Claire could see. Nancy Gold had been singing to a pillow wrapped up in a cardigan.

Siôna was suddenly behind her, breathing heavily, waiting for her reaction. ‘See what I mean?’ There was an edge of malice in his voice.

She said nothing to him and walked in alone, holding out her hand in friendship. ‘Hello, Nancy,’ she said, ‘I’m Doctor Roget. I’m the new doctor here. How are you?’

Nancy recoiled as though burned. She snatched the pillow from the floor, unravelled the cardigan and twitched it around her shoulders guiltily.

Only then did she respond to Claire’s introduction. ‘Hello back,’ she said shyly.

She was a beautiful young woman, around twenty-three years old with a tumbling mass of blonde curls and huge blue eyes. She was as tiny as a child, no more than six stone. And like a child she fixed Claire with a frank stare. ‘You’d look prettier with makeup,’ she said bluntly, tossing back
her curls.

Claire smiled at her. Woman to woman. Not doctor to patient. ‘I would. I agree. The trouble is that I can’t always be bothered to put it on. And it would all be wiped off by the end of the day anyway.’

Nancy nodded and blinked her beautiful eyes self-consciously.

‘You asked me how I was feeling,’ she said. ‘I miss my baby.’

She could have been talking about a child who was safely at school for the day, expected to return imminently. Not a little boy who had struggled against the mother who had pressed his face underneath the water until he drowned and then concealed his body for six months – just because she saw him as an impediment to her relationship.

Was this then classic denial of her crime?

Claire settled into the armchair by the window. Outside the sun had faded to antique gold. Melting into the horizon behind the silhouette of a blackened, stumpy bottle-kiln.

‘You were fond of your baby?’

Nancy put her head on one side, like a little bird. ‘All mothers love their children,’ she said, like a catechism.

Claire knew she must broach the subject more honestly if she was to achieve anything. ‘But you don’t have yours any more.’

‘I’ve learned,’ Nancy said, sagely oblique, ‘that you can’t have everything in life.’

‘So what is the solution, Nancy?’ Her eyes flickering towards the last ray of sunshine as it dipped towards tomorrow.

‘You have to make choices, Doctor.’ The blue eyes stared innocently into hers. ‘Do you think it’s wrong to make choices?’

‘It isn’t wrong to
make
the choices,’ Claire said, ‘it’s the choice itself which is either right or wrong and the action which follows.’

Nancy grabbed her arm with a sudden, iron grip. ‘I – want – my – baby,’ she said, spitting out venom as though Claire was hiding him herself.

Something cold and hard entered Claire. ‘You can’t have him back, Nancy,’ she said. ‘What’s dead is dead. You can’t reverse death. We cannot resurrect. We can only regret.’

That’s when Nancy’s face altered to a secretive, cunning expression. ‘You can undo it in a way,’ she said. ‘All bad things.’

Claire hesitated, uncertain now how to proceed then Nancy tossed her arm away, dived into her locker, brought out a cheap fabric handbag with a broken zip, fumbling for no longer than a second to bring out crumpled photographs. A baby. The child beautifully dressed in a sailor suit, hair combed, eyes bright, gaze clear. Like a hush-a-bye doll.

Nancy eyes filled with tears. The photographs were blotched again.

‘I want my baby,’ she said. But this time there was defeat, an acceptance in her voice.

Siôna was watching from the doorway. ‘So do you see what I mean?’

‘Yes I do,’ she said. ‘Exactly.’ She knew now why she had been summoned to see Nancy Gold. There was something worrying about Nancy’s condition.