The Mind of Mr Soames (18 page)

‘It looks as if that’s what he’s doing now,’ Conway agreed.

Mr Soames was, indeed, returning nonchalantly to the main building, making his way round the side where the psychiatric wards with their annexes were located. He was now about one hundred and fifty yards away and scarcely visible at all in the darkness, so Takaito and Conway began to walk forward, skirting the lake and closing up on their quarry.

‘This is where the trouble may start,’ Takaito pointed out. ‘He may not remember the door through which he made his escape. He may become confused, perhaps desperate. He may enter the wrong door and find himself in strange surroundings and be overcome by panic...’

Dr Takaito’s surmises were never destined to reach the point of practical test. While Mr Soames was still a considerable distance from the building, a door opened suddenly, casting an elongated rectangle of yellow light across the rain-soaked grass. Silhouetted in the opening were the recognisable shapes of the male nurse and tall, lean Dr Hoff, who was on duty for the night. The male nurse was carrying a big electric torch which he switched on and swung around, scanning the night like a searchlight in a prisoner-of-war camp. They emerged from the building into the rain, advancing steadily and purposefully towards the lake.

Mr Soames halted—no more, no less. Perhaps he sensed danger and froze, like a wild animal, or perhaps he realised the inevitability of discovery and recapture. The beam of the swinging torch outlined him in liquid light within a minute. For a few moments he remained stiff and paralysed, then with a distinctly audible animal grunt he flung himself to one side, out of reach of the probing finger of light. It seemed to Conway that he fell to the ground and rolled over and over in the darkness. The torch quivered uncertainly and began to cast about inquisitively like a radar beam in search of its target. Presently it found Mr Soames. He was running back towards the lake, crouching as he ran, weaving to and fro instinctively in an attempt to throw off pursuit.

‘Fools,’ Dr Takaito hissed. Immediately he began to hurry forward, his shoes slopping heavily over the saturated grass. Conway followed close behind. Presently the beam of the torch intersected both of them, swept on, then curved back and remained static, like a spotlight. The surrounding night condensed into solid ebony.

‘Stop Soames,’ came Dr Hoff’s frantic voice, as one might shout ‘stop thief’. A pause, then: ‘Soames has escaped—stop him.’

Dr Takaito slackened his pace so that Conway was able to catch up with him. ‘Fools,’ he repeated vehemently. ‘Utter imbeciles.’

‘They weren’t to know,’ Conway pointed out.

‘One would think Mr Soames was a prisoner escaping from jail, or a criminal lunatic from an asylum,’ Takaito stated with heavy derision. ‘They don’t seem to realise that he is a child. One does not treat a child in this way—not even a dog.’

Conway made no comment. He was torn between two conflicting points of view, appreciating Takaito’s logic and at the same time realising only too well that he himself would probably have acted in precisely the same manner as Dr Hoff under the circumstances.

‘He’s afraid of them,’ Takaito went on, ‘and everything they do makes him even more afraid. He was going back, Conway, of his own free will, and now they’ve scared him off. He’s likely to do anything.’

‘We’d better try to find him,’ Conway suggested.

They moved forward, cursing the torch which kept hovering between them, flicking from one to the other Conway found himself acquiring a considerable sympathy with. Takaito’s point of view. They were fools indeed—one might imagine they were hunting the Japanese doctor and himself instead of Mr Soames. The latter had vanished without trace into the night, and it seemed almost impossible to predict his likely movements.

‘Soames has escaped,’ Dr Hoff shouted. ‘Hare you seen him, Conway?’

Conway muttered a terse obscenity. The torch flashed in his eyes, momentarily blinding him. ‘Take that bloody light away,’ he shouted furiously. ‘You’re supposed to be looking for Soames, not admiring me!’

The male nurse made a vaguely apologetic noise, and the torch began to swing around again, scanning the grass and sweeping across the lake. Of Mr Soames there was no further sign. He had dissolved into the darkness like a wraith.

Presently Conway and Takaito found themselves face to face with Dr Hoff and the male nurse. The atmosphere was electric with bad feeling emanating principally from Takaito himself.

‘Do you
have
to hunt this wretched man as if he were a convict?’ Takaito demanded.

‘But he escaped, sir,’ Hoff replied apologetically.

‘What do you mean, he
escaped
? Has he been committed to prison or certified insane?’

‘Well, not exactly.’

‘I allowed him to escape,’ Takaito said bluntly. ‘I followed him to observe his behaviour, and Conway joined me. He acted in a perfectly normal manner, the way one would expect him to act at his level of mental development. He was on his way back to his room when you two came bursting out like policemen hunting a homicidal maniac. You terrified him. He’s probably hiding among the trees like some petrified animal pursued by howling dogs.’

‘I’m sorry, sir—I’m afraid I didn’t realise,’ Hoff ventured.

Takaito gave vent to a contemptuous snorting sound. ‘Now we are committed to finding him,’ he said bitterly. ‘We must track him down like a common thief for his own good. Do you imagine this will benefit him psychologically?’

‘If you bad only advised us,’ Hoff said with a certain restrained dignity. ‘After all, so far we were concerned the patient had disappeared, and he is potentially dangerous in certain respects.’

Takaito sighed impatiently. ‘Very well. You acted according to your principles and instructions. The important thing here and now is to find Mr Soames. Give me the lantern.’

The male nurse handed over the torch without question.

‘Go back to Dr Breuer,’ Takaito ordered. ‘Have him call out all available staff to patrol the grounds. Mr Soames
must
be found immediately. After this episode he will never return of his own free will.’

‘Very well,’ Hoff said stiffly and formally. He and the male nurse returned to the building.

‘Perhaps you see what I mean?’ Takaito said to Conway.

‘Yes, in a way I think I do. At the same time, Dr Takaito, you carried out what was in effect an experiment without letting anyone know. You can hardly blame Dr Hoff for doing what he did.’

‘I don’t blame anybody,’ Takaito said calmly. ‘Least of all do I blame fools. If I had asked permission to allow Mr Soames to escape, it would have been refused. If only’—he sighed—‘if only that stupid male nurse and Dr Hoff had discovered Mr Soames’s absence five minutes later. What I mean is—by that time he would have been back in his room, thoroughly wet and dirty, but contented in his own childish way. It might have been an important milestone in his education.’

Conway pouted to himself in the darkness. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s no point in wasting time. We’d better look around and see if we can pin down Mr Soames.’

‘Unfortunately, pin down is the correct expression,’ Takaito said with irony.

He swung the torch in a wide circle and began to walk back towards the lake.

It
was nearly three a.m. before they found Mr Soames. Dr Breuer himself had taken charge of tie proceedings, having conscripted about a dozen members of the staff including the three male nurses, and set up sentries at strategic points around the main buildings and at the main gate so that Mr Soames could not re-enter the blocks or leave the grounds unobserved. It seemed unlikely that he could successfully scale the perimeter wall without the aid of a ladder, but to be on the safe side Breuer deployed his men, armed with torches, in fan formation along the wail, instructing them to move inwards towards the lake and not overlook the fact that Mr Soames might have climbed a tree. Three of the doctors carried hypodermic syringes loaded with sedative in anticipation of violent resistance, but in fact Mr Soames put up no resistance whatever.

They discovered him eventually, after beating the grounds without success, hiding among the cars parked on the gravelled area at the rear of the clinic. He was in a wretched condition, thoroughly wet and miserable, his pyjamas torn and dirty, and shivering uncontrollably from cold and exposure. Even so, he did not surrender immediately, but ran. crouching between the cars in obvious terror, seeking to avoid the inevitable recapture. Hoff caught him finally, coming up unexpectedly from behind a car and tripping him as he ran past. Two other figures leaped on him, securing his arms and dragging him to his feet. In the stark focus of several torch-light beams Mr Soames blinked in fearful confusion at his captors. Blood ran down the side of his face where he had fallen headlong on the gravel, and his black hair was matted with rain and dirt ‘All right,’ Dr Breuer said with some relief. ‘Take him in and clean him up. He’ll need a hot bath and some hot soup. After that a long sleep. Nembutal should do the trick. As for the rest of us—hot cocoa, I think, and perhaps some brandy.’

Dr Hoff and the male nurses escorted Soames towards the side entrance of the psychiatric block, while the rest of the search party began to disperse and return to the main building in desultory groups. Conway found himself walking alongside Dr Takaito, but neither said anything. Fatigue and a grey sense of depression made conversation seem pointless and out of place.

In the canteen Conway opted out of cocoa and settled for warm milk and brandy. Takaito and Breuer were involved in a heated discussion which was probably concerned with the propriety of Takaito’s action in liberating Mr Soames for the purpose of private experimental observation, but they were standing in a corner of the room out of hearing of the others, so Conway joined Dr McCabe at a table. McCabe had been wearing a plastic raincoat which he had removed, so that he looked dry and comfortable. Conway’s suit was saturated and shapeless after several hours in the rain.

‘You look a mess,’ McCabe said cheerfully.

‘I am a mess,’ Conway admitted, ‘but not so much of a mess as poor old Soames.’

‘Lucky they caught him,’ McCabe observed. ‘If he’d managed to escape into the outside world there’d have been a hell of a fuss.’

‘I don’t think the idea of escape ever entered his mind,’ Conway said. ‘He was simply wandering around the grounds amusing himself harmlessly in the rain, like a dog let out of its kennel. He just got scared when Hoff started the hue and cry.’

‘How did he break out of the annexe?’

‘That’s the point. He didn’t. Takaito set him loose and kept him under observation. The trouble was that he didn’t tell anybody what he intended to do, so naturally Hoff thought Mr Soames had broken loose.’

McCabe grunted impatiently. ‘That little Jap ought to mind his own damn business. Seems to me Soames is causing enough trouble as it is without active encouragement from Takky. What with that business of attempted rape only a few hours ago...’

‘It wasn’t anything of the sort,’ Conway pointed out ‘Soames came into contact with a very beautiful young girl for the first time in his life. He had no standards by which to judge his reactions, so he reacted instinctively. He simply held on to her, found it pleasurable in some way he couldn’t understand, and kept holding on. The trouble started when she got scared and screamed and others began to intervene. He became frightened and resentful and to some extent violent. In the end we had to give him a sedative shot.’

McCabe looked faintly sceptical. ‘Supposing Soames was to escape,’ he said, pointing a finger at Conway, ‘do you imagine any girl would be safe from his “instinctive reaction”, as you put it?’

Conway shrugged. ‘On the surface it sounds a problem, I’ll admit, but you must remember there’s no positive motivation there. There could never be any intention of, say, criminal assault because he just doesn’t understand what it means. On the other hand, he might be expected to reveal some uninhibited curiosity towards this new phenomenon called a female.’

‘That, for my money, would be criminal assault.’

‘Technically, perhaps, but not with any sense of purpose or guilt. His behaviour would approximate to the kind of superficial erotic play which is common among children...’

‘Except that this particular child is six feet tall, weighs about twelve stone and is capable of carrying his superficial erotic play, as you call it, to the point of violent rape if he feels so inclined. What’s more, he’s never even seen a child as such—probably doesn’t even know what a child is. He has never been a child himself, so far as he can remember. The world consists of adults. To him a small girl—a school-girl, if you like—would simply be a pocket-sized adult, and fair game for his violent line of erotic play. Or hadn’t you thought of that?’

‘No, I hadn’t,’ Conway said gloomily, ‘and I don’t think the point is valid. Mr Soames is not a perverted sex maniac, nor has he shown any perverted or homicidal tendencies. He’s a normal human being in need of standards.’

‘Well, why not give him standards? You psychiatric boys really ought to do something about it.’

Conway finished his milk and stifled a yawn. ‘Frankly, I’m tired,’ he said wearily. ‘It’s been a rough day, quite apart from Mr Soames’s antics. We’ll knock him into shape step by step, don’t worry, but it will take time. We can’t accomplish in a few months what normally needs almost a score of years.’ He pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘Me for bed.’

‘Sleep well,’ McCabe grinned, ‘for what’s left of the night.’

❖

The next morning around ten o’clock Conway looked in on Mr Soames. He was awake, gaunt and hollow-eyed, with pink plaster on the side of his face where he had grazed himself on the gravel of the car park. He hadn’t slept at all, Dr Wilson explained, despite the sedative—it was as if he were deliberately forcing himself to stay awake by sheer effort of sullen will power.

Certainly Mr Soames was in a bitter mood—an ugly mood—which was not entirely surprising, Conway thought. He was sitting astride a chair, staring blankly through the window, his back turned to the door and the room in general. The attitude of defiance was plain enough, and for a few moments Conway wondered whether he should try to talk to Soames, to make contact with his confused, resentful mind, but in the end he thought it wiser to leave him to his own devices for a few hours until the unfortunate happenings of the previous night had receded in his memory.