Claire interrupted. ‘Why on earth did you get into this in the first place?’
Sadie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. When Guy dumped me – went off with a so-called-friend – they rubbed my face in it – I felt hopeless. Useless. I lost all confidence. I felt that people were talking about me, laughing behind my back. Even strangers. I could be on a bus or walking in the Potteries Shopping Centre or even at work and I would hear them making fun. In the end I found it hard to go anywhere. The night out with my friends was my first night out for ages. I was a mess. He seemed to latch on to it as though this was exactly what he wanted. I guess if I’d had more about me he wouldn’t have got such a hold in the first place. I’d have moved on.’
‘And then after the assault he threatened you if you gave a statement to the police.’
Sadie nodded. ‘It was out of my hands at first. I was badly hurt and gave statements to the police from my hospital bed. I felt safe in hospital. There were people around twenty-four hours a day and I felt protected. When I realised what I’d done I was frightened.’
She drew in closer, held Claire’s eyes with a stare. ‘He had this little saying that went round and round my head. “Imagine a funeral pyre,” he’d say. “The body burning in a car. Nothing left except splintered bones and melted jewellery, and those lovely teeth of yours.” He’d watch me while he was speaking, seeing the effect every single syllable had on me. I’d start to shake. It was so graphic, Claire, and personal. He knew I always wore an underwired bra. He knew my jewellery. He knew the fact that my dress had caught fire when I was a child – from a firework – and that of all things I was most frightened of fire. Of being burnt. It felt so directed towards me. Tailor-made. The more he knew about me the better the hold he had. And I knew he was capable of doing it. All. So when I got out of hospital I retracted my statement. Terror, Doctor Roget, is a powerful tool and he knew how to use it to its greatest effect.’
She stood up abruptly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, politely, but there was an undercurrent of panic. ‘I’m really sorry but I can’t help you. I can’t help you decide whether Jerome was a danger purely to me or to the public at large. I don’t know. It’s your decision,’ she said brutally. ‘You must make up your own mind. All I can say is that I never want to see him again. Not in my life. And not in Hell either.’
Claire watched her slip out of the hotel, this slim, almost invisible girl and wondered.
There was no doubt about it. Sadie Whittaker’s words had unnerved her too.
A week later she applied for an interview with Stefan Gulio.
For which she had to give a valid reason.
And for that she could only tell the truth. That, filling Heidi’s post, made vacant by such a violent crime, apparently caused by one of her own patients, she felt she must convince herself that the conviction was sound, that Gulio had done it and therefore no one else was under suspicion. And by extrapolation she was in no danger. Further that by understanding the assault she might, in the future, recognise some of the warning signals. She penned a careful letter to the prison governor deliberately using emotive words.
She must see Gulio, convince herself he really was guilty.
‘If there is any doubt – any doubt at all in my mind that Gulio is the guilty party you realise my own misgivings could multiply and that it would make it difficult for me to function at Greatbach.’ And two paragraphs later, ‘I use the same office that Heidi Faro was butchered in.’
She smiled to herself. Sometimes simple phrases were the best.
She promised not to upset or quiz Gulio unduly but to use the interview merely to put her own mind at rest, adding the titbit that it would be a useful learning curve and may, in the future, forewarn her of a patient who was likely to commit an offence. The buzz phrase was bound to tip the scales in her balance.
She signed the letter, Claire Roget, leaving out none of her qualifications. MB CHb; FRC Psych. MRCP.
You don’t expect Broadmoor hospital to be in the leafy lanes of Surrey. But that is where it is, and that was where Gulio was being held. A Victorian, Gothic monstrosity which houses the most diseased brains in our country. Men and women who will tear you limb from limb and are directed to commit every perversion known to man – and some our minds are unable to imagine. She had set out in the early morning, anxious to avoid the inevitable jam on the M25, reaching a late dawn through mists and sleeting rain, flicking the radio from news analysis on Radio Four, through some beaty rhythms of Radio One, accidentally a local golden oldies’ station, Classic FM and finally moving through the tracks of a Robbie Williams album. The traffic was light then heavy, then stop-start, nose to bumper, unreal through the windscreen until she turned off the motorway when the chill of who she was about to meet and the crime he had committed seemed to enter the car and made the horror vivid and the music merely a backtrack. She switched the crooner off, followed the signs to Crowthorne – and arrived.
There it lay, granite-grey, sinister as you imagine in your nightmares, inspired by old black and white chiller films like Great Expectations, with Magwitch ready to spring from behind a tombstone. She hugged her briefcase to her, locked the car and reached the huge door, under the CCTV camera eye, while her own eye wandered across the grey slabs of stone and towering turrets. And she wondered: how many different shades of grey are there?
Hundreds.
The door was guarded by an intercom and swiftly opened by a round-faced man of about fifty who had obviously been briefed.
‘Doctor Roget,’ he said, cheerily pumping her hand. ‘So you’ve come on a social visit to Gulio, have you? Well – he’s one of our quieter inmates. Reads his books all day. No trouble at all.’
He ushered her into a small, square office, messy with the typical government noticeboard, objectives and notices pinned to cork.
From plaintive, ‘And will the joker who nicked my diary please let me have it back because I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing’ to the humorous comment underneath, ‘Forgetting which doll you’re meant to be out with, Marty?’
And finally artistic, two tits and a bum with an arrow. ‘This one.’
Obviously the government directives on sexual predation didn’t apply here. She signed in and pinned a security badge to her jacket. ‘Trouble is,’ the officer offered, ‘Gulio forgets everything he reads. So he could go over the same book over and over again. Shame really. Probably was quite bright, once upon a time.’
Once upon a time.
The opening words to every single fairy story and fable. And the closing words to a promising life.
So was this another fable?
The officer gave her a brief, curious look, beetling his eyebrows. ‘Are you here because you think he didn’t do it?’
She knew what his next sentence would be – that no one in here had ‘done it’. That prisons were, famously, full of people who were innocent.
She forestalled him. ‘I don’t think that,’ she said briskly. ‘I simply want to interview him.’
The officer was miffed at this and led her without further comment along the corridor, jangling his keys along the way, fastidiously locking, waiting, unlocking, locking again.
The visitors’ room was suitably spartan, tables, chairs, more CCTV, grills over the windows, guards at the doors. Painted mushroom with grey floors there was nothing in it to lift the feeling of crushing depression.
Which hurtled Claire into wishing she had worn something other than the plainest brown Next trouser suit. Something pink – or red – or orange to introduce colour.
The door opened.
During the drive she had formed a picture of Stefan Gulio. We all do in circumstances like this. He would be tall and thin, prematurely bent up. His eyes (colour indeterminate) would slide from side to side, never quite settling, like a butterfly on a hot day. His hair would be dark and scraggy, greasy even. He might smell.
He would shuffle and manifest some of the signs of brain damage, an inabilit
y to focus either with his mind or his eye. This would be accompanied by an odd look, fidgety hands, inappropriate behaviour. A smile, a frown, a stare. All in the wrong place. There would be external clues to his turmoil.
But there was nothing.
As the door was opening she turned her head to see a slim young man of about thirty, with neat, clean, short dark hair, wearing brown trousers and a loose-fitting shirt walking slowly towards her. Was this really Heidi’s killer?
He smiled tentatively, a hesitant, surprisingly attractive smile, and settled into the chair on the other side of the table, linking his fingers together loosely. They were long and bony and drew her gaze and she could not picture them covered in blood or committing that one terrible, slashing act.
She even felt herself warm to him.
But was this simply Gulio’s trick? To appear so very different from the person he really was?
She stood, introduced herself and scrutinised his face.
It was bland, unsure, with a slightly vacant expression in hazel eyes and a quiet, studious tilt of the lips. His skin was unhealthily pale and there was a vague eight o’clock shadow on his chin and around his mouth. Was this really the man responsible for Heidi’s murder?
‘I’ve taken over Doctor Faro’s job,’ she said, matter of factly. ‘A couple of months ago.’
He nodded very slowly, as though absorbing this one, significant fact took a great deal of comprehension. He crossed his legs at the ankles. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because there’s a lot I don’t understand.’
His returned smile was both shallow and sad, little more than a token tilt of his mouth. ‘Such as?’
‘Do you remember Heidi?’
‘I’m not sure.’ It was an odd response.
‘She was your doctor at Greatbach, Stefan.’
Again Gulio nodded. And there was another, tentative smile. A little rounder this time.
‘Do you remember her, Stefan?’
A cloud dropped over his face. He was struggling. Finally he shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said frankly. ‘It’s just a little …’ He pressed his lips together and swayed ever-so-slightly. ‘I’m afraid it’s beyond me. Outside my mind. Just. But they tell me. They do tell me.’
She tried another tack. ‘You saw quite a lot of her in the months before.’ She stopped dead. On the edge of a tumbling cliff. ‘Before she died. Just describe her to me. Please.’
The bony fingers stilled. ‘Perhaps … She was very kind. She had a nice voice. Foreign, I think.’
‘She was Austrian. I heard her lecture a few times. You could hardly tell English wasn’t her native tongue.’
He dipped his head, agreeing.
‘Tell me what you do remember about her.’
‘She wore trousers?’
‘Yes. I remember that too.’
‘She was a bit plump, I think.’ Another smile. Mischievous. She glimpsed a boy behind the face.
‘Yes,’ she agreed.
‘And she didn’t really ask questions so much as talk about subjects.’
She was intrigued. ‘Such as?’
‘The Big Bang,’ he said. ‘The origin.’
She waited but he had lost it. ‘The origin of what?’
This was a struggle for the poor, damaged brain. Bits were there but disjointed. He had understood – once. He fumbled and tried, even opened his mouth to speak – and gave up, his eyes beseeching her to go – no – further. ‘Sorry, I don’t know,’ he apologised.
She must try another angle. ‘Did you like Heidi?’
‘Oh yes. I think I did.’
So – to another subject less taxing. ‘Do you ever see your mother here?’
The same expression returned. That fug of confusion. ‘I’m not really sure,’ he said politely. ‘I think we’re a long way from home.’
‘What do you do all day?’
‘I read. I watch the television. I think I sleep quite a lot. More than before.’
‘Do you work here?’
‘I help,’ he said, still politely, ‘in the library sometimes. I classify the books.’
‘Do you have any idea why you’re …?’
He knew exactly what she was asking.
‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘I don’t think about it much. I try not to. Sometimes though I have nightmares. I hear a scream. One very long scream. I run along the corridor. I run very fast. I see blood on my hands. I try –’ He swallowed. ‘– I try to help. But I don’t know what to do. I tend to panic and run away. I don’t like those dreams. They upset me. Then they give me an injection – something to calm me down and I feel better but still not right – something is never right but I don’t know what.’
Gulio’s brain had been mashed to a pulp. Only tiny windows of rational or intelligent thought still existed. The tragedy had not only been Heidi’s but his too. Claire had known it but not as graphically as this. And now she was witnessing the result of the wasted intelligence.
And she had had a wasted journey.
She said her goodbyes to Gulio feeling he had been of little help. He stood as she stood, in the polite way that only well brought up men do. And the glimpse was of the intellectual he might have become. A scientist. A chemist. A physicist. A quiet man.
On the way out she spoke again to the prison warder with the rosy face. ‘Does he have explosions of temper?’
‘Not that I’ve ever seen. He’s subdued is Gulio.’
‘What medication is he on?’
‘Couple of Stelazine a day. Keeps him tranquil.’
She nodded. It was rational prescribing.
But on the way home she tried to piece together the events of that day. Stefan had been in the room and had run along the corridor, meeting Siôna halfway down. Siôna had returned to Heidi’s room, pressing the panic button on the way, but been unable to open the door. So he had pulled Rolf from his office. Together they had forced an entry and seen. But if Heidi’s body had been so heavy how come Gulio had been able to get out? He was not a strong-looking guy.
Claire stopped and thought about this one. What had Siôna been doing in the building that day and why had Rolf heard nothing?
And the real question, of course, was this: had Jerome Barclay been anywhere near?
They were all curious the next morning when she returned to Greatbach. Rolf and Siôna, Kristyna, Dawn and Bec. Their questions were endless.
‘So how is he bearing up?’
‘Does he remember the assault?’
‘How does he look?’
‘Does he still bury his head in his books all day?’
‘Has he got fatter?’
‘Thinner?’
‘Does he look older?’
‘Younger?’
‘Is there any sign of his brain function returning?’
But as she had never met Gulio before Claire could make no comparison. She could only comment that he seemed quiet. So Claire reflected that they had all been fond of Gulio. The murder had not altered their affection for him. Almost as a cancer wouldn’t steal our affection from a loved one.
She eyed the watching faces, soft in their benevolence, and felt a wave of fondness for them all and thoughts of Barclay and Nancy, Kap Oseo and Mavis Abiloney and Marcus Bourne faded into the background like textured wall hangings.
So the days passed peacefully.
Without drama for a while.
* * *
The cliché is that bad news travels fast.
Sometimes not fast enough. Bad news should gallop like a horse. Rip like a forest fire through tinder-dry grass. The speed of sound is too slow. It should beam at the speed of light. No – faster even than that. Everyone who has an interest in disaster should be aware within milleseconds of a terrible event happening. They should not have one fragment of a minute’s peace of mind. Twin towers. Kennedy’s death, Concorde crashing.
It is not so in real life.
Bad news travels slowly.
We cling
to oblivion, living our ordinary lives on borrowed time.
Three – maybe four – days must have passed during which she, Claire, was happily unaware. You could also say that she was, in some measure, ultimately responsible. That she had stirred the wasps’ nest. Awakened the beast.
But the next few days were spent in this illusion – this cocoon of a close, professional team working together, pooling their knowledge. Even an evening at the pub telling secret little jokes about the inmates, glances tossed over shoulders to make sure no one who was not part of their circle could possibly hear.
So it was a Tuesday morning at one of their newly chummy meetings, when she was feeling untouchable, that Siôna dropped his bombshell.
A Plea of Insanity Page 11
