A Plea of Insanity

by Priscilla Masters

  She flopped into the ‘patient’s’ chair. ‘Only Barclay gate-crashing my outpatient clinic to make the same sort of threats he used to make to his ex-girlfriend.’

  ‘How do you know his ex-girlfriend?’

  ‘I chased her up,’ she admitted. ‘He worried me – right from the first – so I thought I’d find out a bit more about him.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she sighed, ‘but I almost wish I hadn’t. He’s an unsavoury character, a danger. And yet I have so little to go on to get him Sectioned. It’s all in my mind, Rolf.’

  He touched her arm then and she was reminded of one of the last meetings when they had all been together and him stroking Kristyna’s arm. It seemed a friendly gesture – as though he was singling her out for friendship – rather than sexual.

  ‘What sort of threats?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh – Barclay, you mean? He has this thing about fire destroying bodies, bones splintering, underwires – nothing left but teeth etcetera etcetera.’

  ‘He does? Now that’s interesting –’

  She grinned across at him. ‘Well, I’m glad you find it so,’ she said. ‘Because I find it alternatively intimidating and downright frightening.’ She stood up. ‘But I feel better for having chatted about it. Thanks, Rolf.’

  ‘Any time,’ he said.

  As she reached the door she paused. ‘I spoke to the Defence Union,’ she said. ‘I think I will have a word with the police. As a sort of insurance policy.’

  ‘Good idea,’ he said.

  Claire spoke to DC Martin and this time held nothing back. The acid attacks, Heidi’s death, the death of Cynthia Barclay and finally Barclay’s hints on Kristyna’s disappearance.

  Martin listened for a while then asked some questions about Jerome Barclay’s condition without comprehension.

  ‘Just what are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying he is a psychopath,’ she said. ‘I’m saying he is capable of committing crime and feeling no remorse – no pity. I’m saying he is clever and should be watched, that his idea of fun is to unnerve people, make them frightened, control them. I’m saying that it is possible he abducted Kristyna Gale. I’m telling you he is capable of it.’

  ‘And you really think?’

  She knew what he was building up to saying. ‘I did believe he killed Heidi Faro. Now I’m not so sure. I met Gulio. Maybe I didn’t see him as a killer but it’s possible. I don’t know how thorough your original investigation was – whether there’s room for doubt. Whether my patient, Jerome Barclay, was even on the premises at the time of Doctor Faro’s murder.’

  ‘As far as I remember,’ DC Martin said slowly, ‘there isn’t any record of someone called Barclay being questioned or in the vicinity of the assault.’

  ‘We don’t like re-opening cases,’ he added. ‘Makes a lot of extra work. Causes no end of trouble. But I can look into things if you like.’

  She left the sentence dangling.

  She needed someone of higher rank than a Detective Constable.

  Chapter Twelve

  There were other events to absorb her mind. Mavis Abiloney had spent a successful Christmas with her husband, daughter and granddaughter and Claire felt it was time for her to be discharged. She spent time preparing Mavis and watched the woman gradually come to terms with the fact that she could not stay at Greatbach for ever. She must pick up the strands of her life. But as she talked to the middle-aged woman she watched a spasm of fear tighten her face. She called in Karl Abiloney.

  He was a small man, no more than 5 feet 4 inches tall, with dyed black hair slicked back from his face, a swarthy complexion and over-large hands with stumpy, out-of-proportion fingers. He was slim and wiry-looking with an accent she found hard to trace. From Mavis’s records she knew he was an electrician.

  He seemed genuinely concerned about his wife’s condition. ‘I can’t understand it, doctor,’ he said worriedly. ‘I never have raised a finger towards my wife. I am fond of her but when she comes home from here she seems always to accuse me of all sorts of things. I am upset. I defend myself. We argue. I shout. I don’t deny that. But almost the next thing I know is that she is back in the hospital threatening death again.’

  It was hard not to feel some sympathy for the man. Looking at the situation from his point of view he hadn’t had much of a married life and yet Claire knew he was not strictly speaking the whole truth. A few times on re-admission Mavis had displayed bruises on her chest, her upper legs, back and bottom. They had got there somehow. There had been no explanation from either daughter or husband and the bruises had been puzzled over but no explanation found. Yet she did not believe Karl Abiloney was violent towards his wife. It was more probable that she had inflicted self-harm. Heidi had concentrated on the repeated suicide attempts and glossed over the cause, a fatal omission, Claire thought smugly. More evidence that her idol had had feet of clay.

  She decided to try herself. ‘Mr Abiloney,’ she began. ‘When Mavis has returned to us she has, at times, displayed some bruising.’ He was watching her very warily, keeping as still as a cat.

  ‘She’s not able to explain how she came by them. Have you any idea?’

  ‘She is – clumsy.’ He waved his big hands. ‘She has a drink. She falls. She does not always remember things.’

  ‘Are you saying that when at home Mavis drinks excessive amounts of alcohol? That she falls because she is drunk?’

  He defended her. ‘Not drunk,’ he said.

  She waited for further explanation.

  He answered obliquely. ‘My wife,’ he said sedately, ‘has had a very strange life.’

  There had been little focus of Mavis’s history in her notes. ‘Tell me more, Mr Abiloney.’

  He folded the big hands away. ‘She comes from a country background. Somewhere in West Wales. Far away. Her father was a farm labourer. They had not much money. Mavis told me she was isolated as a child, that she was frequently in trouble with her father and punished for her misdemeanours. When she misbehaved she was made to sleep in the cowshed with the cows and the rats and mice. She was told she was not fit to come in the house. Naturally she then got dirty, even more of an animal, and even less was able to live in the family house. When she was fifteen she became pregnant. She never told me who was the father. I have my suspicions but,’ he shrugged, ‘who can tell? Who can be sure what has happened in someone’s life before you knew them and were a part of that life yourself. It is not right to point the finger.’

  ‘Quite. And Mavis’s mother?’

  ‘She does not mention her. I think she did not know her – ever.’

  ‘And you, Mr Abiloney, what about you?’

  ‘I am from a small island in the Pacific,’ he said. ‘I too have had an isolated life away from twentieth century living but thankfully, unlike my wife, not a cruel upbringing. I came to England when I was seventeen and learned my trade.’ His face was sweating.

  ‘We were married when I was twenty-one years old. Unfortunately, Doctor Roget, when we leave a country we do not leave the past behind. We take it with us. Mavis was fine for a small while before the wedding but once we were married she seemed to fear I would change, in a bad way. And she has not stopped expecting that. Into what I do not know. Maybe into her father. Maybe we should separate but where would she go? It is not me who is the problem, Doctor. It is Mavis herself. Something inside herself. I think she will not be cured. Not ever.’

  ‘How much is she drinking?’

  ‘Some,’ he said warily. ‘I do not know the exact amount.’

  ‘Than maybe you should have no alcohol in the house,’ Claire suggested. ‘Or pills. After discharge I’ll see her every week for a period of time then every fortnight and so on. We’ll arrange therapy for her and hopefully bring around a change or at least some stability.’

  Karl Abiloney stood up. ‘I don’t mind to have her home,’ he said wearily. ‘I do understand about cuts in the Health Service. All this is okay but …
’ He stopped mid sentence. ‘I’ll be honest with you, Doctor. I don’t even mind if she were to die because …’ Again he stopped. ‘Because really we have had no life. I have a fine daughter. I have a job I understand. I have a home. When I left my island at seventeen I was full of all sorts of dreams but now I am not. Love, money, success, status. One by one each little dream has disappeared. I have no dream left now except to find warmth, food, peace. And to be frank I could have had that back on my island home. I’m happy to have Mavis back,’ he said again, ‘but I would not want her to die in this miserable way of suicide, trying to escape imaginary threats. It has not been a good life. Not for her; not for me.’

  ‘Two weeks,’ Claire said, extending her hand. ‘We must prepare her. Then she’ll be home with you.’

  Karl Abiloney walked to the door then turned around. ‘You will not win,’ he said – almost pityingly.

  January passed slowly as January invariably does. Six weeks between pay-days and the hype of Christmas gone like a pricked balloon with almost no difference except huge credit card bills. Claire opened hers and winced. Surely she couldn’t have spent that much? It seemed part of the post-Christmas gloom that there was still no sign of Kristyna.

  All through the entire month Claire had a feeling of impending doom, as though something terrible was about to happen and how ever much she analysed the sensation she was unable to decide on the cause. Adding to the panic this engendered was that she wondered whether the root of the feeling was caused by waiting for Barclay to make the next move, like a very tense game of chess. Or it might simply be waiting for inevitable bad news of Kristyna. Then there was the responsibility of the new job and difficult decisions to be made and stood by. She was not short of areas which could make her stressed and nervous and she knew from experience it was worse not to know from where the threat came.

  Some of the time she acknowledged to herself that they may never know what had happened to Kristyna.

  It didn’t help that Nancy Gold was wandering the corridors patting her stomach and looking increasingly secretive and self-satisfied. Claire sat in the room with her one day and asked her questions.

  ‘I expect you’re very excited about the baby,’ she began.

  Nancy hummed her signature tune, her face turned towards the floor but her eyes were watchful and her shoulders tensed, a kitten ready to spring.

  ‘It won’t be long now,’ Claire commented.

  Nancy seemed to shrink back into the chair, trying to make herself invisible. Her arms folded tighter around her stomach. The humming stopped.

  ‘Nancy, you know that your last baby died?’

  One last sobbing cry. ‘I’ll look after this baby,’ she whispered. ‘I promise I will. Keep its life.’

  Claire wanted to believe her.

  ‘Nancy we can’t take the risk. Someone will have to stay with you. You can’t be alone with the baby.’

  Nancy started humming again. ‘I don’t need anyone.’ This time she spoke fiercely. ‘I don’t need anyone. I don’t want anyone.’

  ‘She’ll help you.’

  ‘Aagh agh.’ A vigorous refusal.

  It was something else to worry about.

  To add to all these worries Kap Oseo had missed his outpatient appointment and telephone calls to his home number had provoked no response. He could be away, staying with relatives, but Claire had tried numerous times, day and night, and it was something else to rock her equilibrium.

  Marcus Bourne had been transferred to another unit and from reports she knew he was becoming increasingly withdrawn and depressed.

  Only Harry Sowerby appeared to be toeing the line, turning up early for each appointment, a fixed smile on his face. And his blood levels proved he was complying with the medication.

  Sometimes the job can be too heavy a burden. One cannot solve the problems of the world. Increasingly she turned to Grant as solace for the job. Bravely they put the house on the market and cast around for somewhere else to renovate. Grant was ecstatic. He kept hugging her and talking about ideas, colour schemes and plumbing. She gave him Karl Abiloney’s card to keep. They may well need a good electrician and he had struck her as just that.

  January is such a glum month.

  Gradually the waters closed over Kristyna and by the end of the month even Roxy had stopped haunting the front gates of Greatbach. It was beginning to seem as though the nurse had never really existed. Rolf had moved the chairs around and now sat in the soft, squashy affair that Kristyna had used while Siôna had changed to Rolf’s old chair. The entire room had been rearranged with the coffee table now against the wall. All was different. And from the police she heard nothing.

  Then on the very last day of January two things happened.

  The first was that someone – they never did find out who – pinned up a photograph of Kristyna Gale. Resplendent in leather mini skirt, leaning across a bar towards the photographer – wearing spiky black mascara and odd plum-coloured lipstick, her hair in asymmetrical bunches which stuck out like a St. Trinians’ schoolgirl.

  The second incident was that she found herself talking for a long time to Rolf Fairweather.

  The photograph sparked it off. She walked into the staff room one lunchtime and found him peering at it. She approached it too and then she saw that his face was haggard and would have sworn his eyes were bright with unshed tears. Instinctively she put a comforting hand on his shoulder. He started then passed a hand across his eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was miles away.’

  She thought he would say he had pinned the photo up but he didn’t. Instead he wondered when and where the picture had been taken. ‘She looks super-tarted up,’ he commented. ‘On the pull. It must have been before her lesbian days. She’d have sparked off too much hetero-attention like this.’

  ‘What do you think’s happened to her?’ It was the question they’d all asked themselves countless times.

  He sat down, his eyes focused far away, ‘It could be, Claire, that she was abducted and murdered on her way home that night and it could just as easily be that she’d had enough of her life and wanted out or even that she had a secret lover and simply wanted to be with him or her.’ A tinge of humour softened his face. ‘See how little we know.’

  ‘We need to know,’ she said, suddenly realising it herself. ‘We need to be able to draw a line under this experience and move on. Otherwise —’

  ‘Yes, Dawn and Bec will crack. And what with Heidi’s murder last year I wouldn’t take bets on the rest of us either. Greatbach depends on us all, the team, our functioning properly. It’ll fall apart if something doesn’t happen.’

  The worst was she knew he was right.

  This then was the waiting period. The calm before what they all knew would be a catastrophic storm.

  Ominously Barclay stayed silent and invisible. And there was nothing they could all do except wait.

  There is much discussion of how sensitive humans still are after centuries of urban living. It is an uneasy thought that our instincts have been bred out of our inherent character. Yet maybe they have not vanished but changed into something else. Another warning system which utilises other factors.

  Certainly when Claire woke on Monday the 2nd of February with a wrong feeling she lay without moving and wondered what it was. Like Scrooge, she toyed with the idea that it was possibly the result of a bad meal last night. Still sleepy she smiled. Cottage pie and mushy peas were not responsible for this. It was something else. Not a dream this time. She must look elsewhere. Afterwards she would search her mind before attributing it to a sharp, icy stillness. But that was wrong too. So maybe it was this evolved instinct.

  Even before she opened her eyes she knew that something was amiss.

  She turned her head to the side.

  Grant was asleep, an arm flung across her. He grunted and smiled in his sleep. She lay and studied the ceiling. It was still dark with the first glimmer of a light outside the curtains, visible where they f
ailed to meet. She sat upright, pushed Grant’s arm away, showered quickly and while pulling her clothes on drew the curtains back and looked out of the window. That was when she noticed that her car door was not quite shut. The interior light was on. Dimmed but shining.

  Her first thought was prosaic – she would have a flat battery.

  Her second thought was that she’d locked her car door last night.

  Running downstairs, buttoning her blouse, she rationalised.

  Perhaps Grant had wanted something out of her car and pushed the door to without properly locking it and it had wafted open.

  By the time she reached the bottom stair she had already worked out that the thing Grant would have wanted would have been their current favourite CD, a moody work by The Beautiful South.

  So she shouted up to him. ‘What did you want from my car last night? You left the door open, you …’

  He appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘No I didn’t. I never went near your car.’

  By this time she was running towards it, knowing she had locked it firmly. If not Grant, who?

  She pulled the door wide open.

  On the seat, neatly folded, was a camel hair coat.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Time stretched.

  She seemed to stand there for hours, staring at the coat, noting over and over again the fact that it had been so very neatly folded and placed on her seat so carefully.

  She sensed Grant beside her. Heard him speak, puzzled, looking to her for explanation. ‘Claire?’

  Slowly she turned around. ‘It’s Kristyna’s coat.’

  Then he too entered that elongated timezone to stand by her side, stare at the coat, note, like her, that it was displayed neatly enough for a ladies’ dress shop. Neither of them stretched out a hand to touch it. They simply stared, both knowing that this was evidence. Grant spoke softly, in dream words. ‘We – should – tell – someone.’