A Plea of Insanity (7 page)

‘Your future depends on it,’ Claire said coolly. ‘It’s up to you, really.’

‘You don’t have the same … interests as Doctor Faro?’

‘I do but you know in the Health Service these days we are measured by outcomes. I can’t see what Doctor Faro really achieved by her intense interest in you.’

‘I’ve kept out of trouble.’

He was sparring.

She couldn’t voice her theory that maybe the lack of complaint from Barclay’s mother was due to another reason – fear.

But Barclay was smart. And quick. ‘Oh I get it,’ he drawled. ‘You think my old mum doesn’t complain because she’s frightened of me.’

How easy is it to stand over an old lady and get her to sign the cheques?

‘Well,’ she said again quite coolly. ‘It’s up to you, really.’

‘So it is. Well. I shall talk to Mummy and let you know. Is that all right, Doctor Roget?’

‘Fine.’

She put the phone down with a smug feeling. She had anticipated his responses correctly.

It was up to her now. Not Heidi. For unlike the Health Service the police did not have the time to show ongoing interest in a non-case. No prosecution. No case. No witnesses (prepared to testify). No case. No certainty of conviction (according to the Crown Prosecution Service). No case.

Unlike her.
She
could work through the shadowy realms. The Land of Possibility. Not for her this black and white certainty. What Barclay
might
do was not necessarily what Barclay
would
do.

Criminal law depends on both evil mind and evil act.

Mens rea; actus reus
. One without the other collapses the case.

Psychiatry is so different. So much more subtle and clever. An evil mind is recognised as potential. The question that interested her was what was Barclay capable of? Ultimately?

Claire cupped her chin in her hand and drifted off into a dream of Heidi, remembering her many encounters with her, the animated way she had talked, hands tensely to her side, voice enthuiastically high, the way she had flicked her shining hair away from her face. Clever, with an Honours degree in medicine, swiftly gaining her MRC Psych before she was thirty. Unmarried, with a succession of partners of both sexes, no children. All this had been in the newspapers both at the time of the murder and the subsequent trial of Gulio. Heidi’s life had been subjected to the full glare of publicity, leaving no shadows.

She bent her head again, saddened by the sudden, vivid presence and an unexpected waft of Chanel Number 19, recognisable through the smell of paint. A stiff, strange scent for a psychiatrist to wear but over dinner one evening she had confessed to Claire that to her, Chanel was the epitomy of luxury, of Western wealth, of complete indulgent hedonism.

Claire felt a hot shaft of anger. Why did it have to be Heidi who had died in so cruel and pointless a crime? They could
have worked here, together, as colleagues. Together they might have uncovered the secretive nature of a remorseless mind. Now she was left to struggle on alone. Without her.

And all because Stefan Gulio had suffered brain damage at the hand of a bunch of hooligans.

She felt angry because Heidi’s death had been so futile, so pointless as to be almost banal.

She leafed through the rest of Barclay’s notes.

Most of the interviews held nothing. Time after time Barclay had refused to talk, been silent in response to questions. But he did not default on his appointments. Heidi had set out quite clearly that if he did not turn up the police would be empowered to bring him in.

Once or twice Barclay had become annoyed with her but he had not threatened her – not overtly.

One interview, however, stood out.

J asked me whether I was ever frightened of any of my patients. I told him no, I was not. He then asked me whether I was frightened of what they could do to me. Of humiliation or pain?

I said I didn’t think about it, that I had a job to do, that I must assess and protect my patients and the public and it was a job like any other.

He seemed dissatisfied by this and asked me what I was frightened of.

I answered – being wrong. Letting someone out of their section and them committing a crime. I said I would feel responsible and that frightened me.

I then asked him whether he was ever afraid of what he might do.

He just gave me a long stare then said no.

He was trying the old trick of trying to frighten me.

I asked him how he was getting on, living at home. He said
 
OK.

I asked him whether he went out much?

He said sometimes.

I asked him who with?

He said, girls. Stupid, stupid girls.

I said, were they stupid because they were going out with him and he said, stupid to trust him. He named Kristyna Gale, saying she was typical of that type. That he would enjoy feeling her underneath him. He said she had nice ears. I did talk to her about him and warned her to be careful. To be very very careful
.

A week later Barclay had again lost his temper with her probing and had threatened to cut her throat.

‘I asked him why he considered using that particular method of murder.’

He stared back at me. ‘Lots of blood,’ he said. ‘Nice and quick. No hanging around, waiting for someone to die.’ He thought again. ‘Completely certain,’ he said. ‘No paramedical intervention. The deed is done. And there is something ritualistic – almost religious about it, don’t you think?’

There is no doubt that he said this deliberately to try and intimidate me. The attempt failed.

Two weeks after that Heidi had died
.

Claire shut the notes feeling that by reading them she had learned as much about Heidi Faro as Jerome Barclay.

In fact, she mused, had Gulio not been around to admit to the murder, had the confession not damned him she would have pointed the finger at Jerome Barclay. He was a crime waiting to happen, a time-bomb ticking away. A potential killer.

She wondered where Barclay had been when Heidi had been murdered?

Then she wondered what had made the police grab Gulio for the crime? Had it only been that he had been on the scene and only too ready to confess?

At the same time she relished and feared her next encounter with Barclay.

What would she unearth?

One of the occupational hazards of being a psychiatrist is that you become neurotic about your own mental health. You start to analyse your own behaviour, spiral into introspection, find it obsessional or odd in some way. In the end you come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as normal behaviour. It simply does not exist. It is both an urban and rural myth.

As she joined the traffic queues on the A500 she hardly saw the long streets of terraced houses or the light bouncing off the slate roofs, the steep hill into Wolstanton, the pubs with their red crosses pronouncing their football allegiance or even the four-wheel-drives taking the children to school.

She crawled for a while behind a red single-decker bus almost empty of people then took her place in the queue behind even more red lights.

Such is city life.

She was glad to have the question of normal behaviour to occupy her mind.

As soon as she arrived at the staffroom she cornered Siôna and questioned him more closely about Nancy Gold. She wondered why he looked so troubled and went for the full frontal.

‘What’s really bothering you, Siôna?’

‘She was coming up to a release order.’ His manner was hesitant – stumbling. But defiant too. He was not a man who would readily admit to being wrong.

She waited.

‘She’d been taking short visits out.’

Kristyna had entered the room. Behind her Claire could hear the jangling bangles. Neither of them turned to
acknowledge her.

‘She isn’t a danger to the community.’

He was justifying something. A tension grew between them.

‘Alone,’ he finished. ‘We hadn’t realised she was still so –’ He fished around for a word. ‘Unbalanced.’

His face was suffused and red with embarrassment then pale with guilt, his eyes watery and far away. ‘We haven’t had a proper senior psychiatrist since Heidi … Just a succession of locums. And half of those can’t speak English.’

Claire listened with the growing dread you experience when you sense the first vibration tingling the railway track. You know something enormous is approaching. Equally you know that nothing can stop it. Whatever it was it – was – inevitable. Already written in the shifting sands of time. Destined. She could guess the content of his next words.

‘The last time she was reported as behaving like this was when she was three months pregnant a year ago.’

‘And?’

‘She had a termination. When it was put to her that she wouldn’t be allowed to keep the baby unsupervised she agreed to it.’

‘And the father?’

‘She was still seeing Watson then. He raised no objection.’

She was angry. ‘Don’t we administer birth control on these girls, supervise their visitors?’

Siôna raised his eyebrows quizzically. ‘How long does it take?’

She didn’t answer.

‘She’s been on the contraceptive injections since.’

‘So –?’ She couldn’t keep the anger out of her voice. But
it was an emotive subject, this mother and baby, infanticide case. With women’s activists so articulate, so pro-active and vociferous the mental health team and the police tiptoed across the thinnest sheet of ice. Barbaric was the word most commonly used for anyone who came between woman and her right to bear children.

Even if she subsequently drowned them
.

Sometimes the tunnel through which you must pass is so dark, so damp and cold and unknown that instinctively you draw back. You do not want to touch the sides because you know it is slimy. Rats scuttle across the floor. But you know that you have no option but to move forward and keep moving. Towards the light.

‘Do we keep a record of her periods?’

Siôna shook his head, his eyes never leaving her face but swinging in their sockets.

Best to face the truth – whatever that might be. ‘Then we must do a pregnancy test,’ she said matter-of-factly.

The worst was she hardly needed to authorise a pregnancy test. She did not doubt the nurse’s instinct for the truth. Surely Siôna would not hide behind a lie just because it was more comfortable there. He knew Nancy Gold better than she did and even she had caught a whiff of motherhood at the way Nancy had sung to the soft little bundle.

This was a problem she had not anticipated.

‘Uum.’ She hesitated to bring the subject up – again. ‘Do you mind if I ask you all something?’

They were all instantly wary. Rolf took his hand away from the arm of the chair where it had lain, brushing against Kristyna’s leg. Kristyna sat bolt upright. Siôna jerked backwards. Even Bec and Dawn stilled their chatter and watched her with big eyes.

‘Did any of you know that Barclay threatened Heidi?’

Kristyna answered for all of them. ‘He’s threatened us all at one time or another.’

‘He threatened to cut her throat.’

Afterwards she realised that no one had looked shocked. ‘Look.’ Rolf speaking patiently. ‘He’s someone who loves to provoke a reaction. He does it to tease and play around. He’s just trouble.’

‘He’s committed at least two major assaults.’

‘It wasn’t him,’ Siôna said gruffly. ‘Whatever he said it
wasn’t
him.’

‘You’re all sure?’ She scanned the room. Not one of them met her eyes.

She knew why.

They were frightened that it wasn’t Gulio, that the police had got the wrong man
.

She dropped the subject but she didn’t forget it.

The meeting grew no easier.

She asked one of the other nurses, Bec Rowe, how Kap was this morning and was not pleased with the answer. ‘Still out of it, Claire, paranoid as hell. Staring around the room like Topsy. I don’t know what we’re going to do with him. If he doesn’t sort himself out he’ll never get out of here.’

The temptation was to tack alive on to the end of the sentence.

But no one did.

Only Mavis Abiloney was causing no trouble. By temporarily extending the Section on her she was as meek as a lamb. Out of danger.

Later that week they carried out the pregnancy test which proved Siôna was right. Claire examined her and confirmed that Nancy was about fourteen weeks pregnant, which made the baby due early in March. Worryingly, no amount
of questioning could extract the name of the father and to their knowledge Watson had disappeared from the scene about a year ago so that let him off the hook. When they questioned Nancy she simply gave a happy, coy smile which quashed any suggestion of a termination. Claire didn’t even suggest it.

No one who watched Nancy rocking the pillow through the tiny porthole could fail to be touched by her plight. But on the other hand any child of hers would be registered at risk and almost certainly removed at birth. Nancy could only be with her child when she was supervised.

Again and again and again Claire questioned her who the father was. She turned into friend, foe, physician, spy, nursemaid. Sometimes all at the same time but Nancy would simply hug her stomach, inspect her filling breasts and sing, which made Claire bite her lip.

‘Baby,’ she’d say ecstatically. ‘I’ll have my baby.’

‘Not for months,’ Claire responded tightly, arranged a visit from an obstetrician and a case conference.

And although Nancy had become pregnant before she had taken up her post at Greatbach, for Claire it was the beginning of a nightmare. Reports to submit, questions to be answered. The psychiatrist’s heartsink – an enquiry.

Totally preoccupied with Nancy and her problem she didn’t see Barclay again for two weeks; neither did she think about him. In the meantime, under pressure she had extended Mavis’s Section again, seen Kap so heavily sedated he had turned into a zombie, and got to know many other patients. Her hall was Dining Room Red, the bedroom Ballroom Blue and it being term-time Grant was out of the house for an hour or two a day. And the only good thing which had happened was that the mood of Harry Sowerby had stabilised and he had been discharged.

Until the next time
.

Like diabetes there is no hope of a cure for bipolar disorder – only intermittent control.

But Barclay was, of course, still part of her caseload.

A fortnight later he was again sitting opposite her, wearing a check shirt and jeans, looking deceptively anxious to please, sitting forward, eagerly in his chair, eyes wide.

Don’t be deceived
.

She welcomed the anonymity of the outpatients’ department. Because a different doctor uses it on different days it is soulless. Neither the chairs nor the desk nor even the telephone feels as though it belongs to you any more than does a hotel room or a cinema seat.

It is yours for the duration only.

She began with the usual preamble, asking him how he had been in the last couple of weeks.

‘Not bad.’

‘Have you been to work?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I didn’t want to. I felt a bit under the weather.’

‘So what have you been doing?’

‘Hanging around.’

‘Where?’

‘The city.’

‘Anywhere else?’

His attitude shifted. He had been waiting for this moment. He shot her a challenging smile to warn her he was about to step up to being controversial. ‘I went over to the moorlands,’ he said. ‘Walking.’

The intervening weather had been wet and miserable.

‘Did you see many people?’

His stare was too obviously meant to be disconcerting.

‘Few.’

‘Did you go alone?’

‘No. I went with a girl.’

It registered that he didn’t say girlfriend.

She smiled blandly. ‘But the weather’s been horrible, Jerome.’

‘It has,’ he agreed. ‘Simply horrible. But I think the moorlands have more atmosphere in bad weather and there’s less pests around.’

‘Pests?’

He blinked. A long, slow, blink as though he was waiting for her to understand. ‘Other people, Doctor Roget. Other people. When you want to be alone other people can be pests.’

She was instantly alert. As he had meant her to be. He knew she would have read his notes. Everything in there. ‘Who is the girl, Jerome?’

‘Some slut. What’s it to you?’

‘You know what it is to me.’

‘Ah – yes.’ He put his hands behind his head, elbows wide. ‘My keeper.’

She held his eye contact with a fraction of a nod.

That is exactly who I am. The holder of the key to the cage
.

He broke contact first to lean in so close she was forced to breathe the same air as he. She could almost touch the smooth, girlish skin, the fine lines around his eyes and mouth, the fringe of long, dark lashes, the strange, pale eyes which did not belong to his face, the small, indecisive chin. And for some reason it was this chin, this child-sized chin which offended her most of all. That and the reedy, petulant quality in his voice when he was not too pleased about something.

She changed the subject. ‘What are you living on?’

‘I get sick money.’

‘But you haven’t been sick.’

‘You don’t have to be to get the money.’ A smile. ‘You just have to say you are.’

‘Do you think that’s fair?’

‘What’s fair about life – and death?’

It was another challenge. She knew exactly which death he was talking about. Another piece of bloodied meat tossed in front of her for her to worry at. She wanted to ask him the one question. But would she believe his answer whether denial or assertion?

She shuffled around in her chair, refused to take the bait and turned the question around. ‘What’s
unfair
about life, Jerome?’

He responded with a hard, icy stare of dislike. ‘I hate the way you psychi people ask leading questions that are meant to be so-o clever.’

She waited.

He crossed and uncrossed his legs, dropped his arms down, breathed quickly, showing some emotion for the first time during the interview. ‘OK then. Let’s go for it, Claire, Doctor Roget.’ A bold stare. ‘It’s unfair that my mother holds the purse strings when she’s past enjoying it.’

‘You think the money should all be yours?

Typically he had held his trump card until the end. ‘You can ask her if you like. Surprisingly she agreed to come.’

You allowed her to, you mean
. Which begged the question
Why
?

He had already stood up and walked out to fetch her.

She had had expectations of what Barclay’s mother would be like. She already knew she was almost seventy, that she was a widow, that she had been the victim of at least one serious assault and that she protected her son
with her life. Literally. So Claire had formed a picture of a prematurely aged woman, thin and bent, in old-fashioned clothes, possibly even a little senile.

A victim
.

She couldn’t have been more wrong.

Cynthia Barclay was plump and short, with dyed
brass-blonde
hair and heavy, greasy make-up. As she entered the room she grinned at Claire’s discomfort so the psychiatrist knew that Barclay had deliberately planted the picture in her mind with his phrases. ‘Not in the best of health. My mother is an old woman.’

Priming her so far from the truth.

Claire stood up and shook hands with her. ‘Mrs Barclay,’ she said, noting that the woman’s palms were sweaty with nerves. ‘Thank you for coming. I’m Claire Roget, the new doctor. Doctor Faro’s replacement.’

Cynthia’s stare was disconcertingly like her son’s with the same pale boiled-sweet eyes, eyelids rimmed with blue. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘The doctor who was murdered here in March. She used to see a lot of Jerome.’ Surprisingly she blushed a little. ‘He was upset at what happened.’

The reason for the blush, then, was the lie.

‘Can I ask you a little about your son’s early life?’

Claire could allow half an hour for this interview. It was crucial to her assessment of Barclay. If all went well and she was convinced that Heidi’s interest had not been to protect the public but academic she could afford to relax Barclay’s supervision order. It could be reduced if not dropped completely.