A Plea of Insanity

by Priscilla Masters

  She shook her head.

  She would not go the way of Kristyna.

  All was still muddled in her brain except that in the distance she could see the blurred halo of the truth. It was out there, simply needing to be discovered and recognised.

  She knew bits.

  They wandered across the road to the pub.

  It was quiet, few people at the bar. They were served straightaway.

  ‘White wine spritzer,’ she said, ‘with Slimline tonic.’

  Rolf bought himself a pint and they sat and faced each other.

  That was when she realised she did not know where to begin.

  ‘I don’t know much about you,’ she said. ‘Not really.’

  Something in the dark eyes recognised the fact that she was fishing for anything that would nibble.

  ‘What do you feel you want to know?’

  ‘Let’s start with your family, Rolf.’

  ‘Why do you want to know, Claire?’

  An innocent enough sounding question but his response was not innocent. He was a man who had something to hide.

  ‘I already told you,’ he said carefully. ‘I have had the same partner for a number of years. She works at the university.’

  It told her nothing. None of the members of staff had ever met Rolf’s partner. He came to all the events – dinners out, Christmas party – alone. It sounded reassuringly normal. But who could know? Only two people had had open access to Nancy Gold. And if her theory was correct one of them had begun the chain of events which had led to three murders.

  So she played the game, gazed innocently back at Rolf Fairweather and asked him whether he would have liked children.

  ‘My partner already has a child,’ he said.

  ‘How old? A son or a daughter?’

  Something bold beamed back. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  It was no use pretending. He knew this was not a social question.

  So she said nothing.

  He took a deep draught from his pint and set it down on the table hard enough for a little to slosh out and form a puddle. In it she watched the reflection of the one-armed bandits flashing out their garish colours, red, blue, yellow.

  ‘My partner is thirty-nine,’ he said, watching her face for any response. ‘She was a psychologist too. We met in university. Her son is ten years old and has severe autism. He is a full time job. She switched departments so she could look after him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, knowing that the ‘full-time job’ would get no easier and would never end except with death.

  ‘Our lives have been completely changed,’ he said, with another sharp swig at the beer and a twisted smile, ‘by Martin’s illness. We thought – oh never mind what we thought. When we met we certainly didn’t imagine our lives following this particular path. Still.’ He finished the beer while she searched his face for bitterness of resentment. She did not see it. Either it was not there or he was very good at concealing his innermost emotions. She didn’t know which was true.

  Suddenly his focus turned away from himself. ‘And what about you, Claire? Life has changed for you in the last year, hasn’t it?’

  She couldn’t deny it. ‘It certainly has. Another beer?’

  ‘Half,’ he said. She bought it and herself a Diet Coke and returned to the table.

  ‘Why did you take the job in the first place?’ he asked curiously. ‘Most psychiatrists would have gone anywhere but Greatbach. Why did you walk into a dead woman’s room, a murder scene?’

  ‘Because …’ She thought for a moment. ‘Because I admired Heidi. I wanted to continue the work she had started. I’m interested in personality disorder. It fascinates me.’

  Fairweather sneered. ‘This isn’t an interview,’ he said. ‘This is for real.’

  What it is to see the skull beneath the skin.

  Fairweather’s face had altered. There was something greedy in it.

  She wanted to get out of the pub. But – she looked around her. In here were half a dozen people – maybe a dozen. The beer-bellied landlord. Phones, barmaids, civilization. Out there …

  She shivered. Out there was an empty car park.

  Images of the scene of crime pictures of Heidi’s murder scene flashed back into her mind.

  Gulio, cowering in the corner, knees hunched up to his chin.

  She stared helplessly at Fairweather.

  ‘Was it you?’ he asked.

  ‘Sorry?’ Her voice sounded strangled.

  ‘Who suggested they DNA test us?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To find out who was the father of Nancy Gold’s baby.’

  ‘You suspect a member of staff?’

  He sounded genuinely horrified.

  She nodded. ‘But …

  She grabbed her bag. ‘Don’t you think we should talk about this somewhere more appropriate?’

  ‘Fine by me,’ he said carelessly. ‘I’ll call in tomorrow.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  So this, then, was how it had been done. She was beginning to understand that the deaths at Greatbach had followed a pattern. Except that it had not been one pattern but two. Barclay’s pathological character had been intertwined with a deeper character, one who had been capable of so much worse. Not only the teasing, cowardly hints and provocations but murder.

  The double helix of evil.

  But ideas were not enough. If the case of both Barclay’s parents had served anything it had proved that you needed evidence. Hard evidence. Suspicion alone was not enough. Whether he was innocent or guilty of murdering his parents or not she would never really know. Except that he would never be successfully convicted of either crime. She needed this burden of proof. And for the first time in her life she understood the true weight of the word. It was a burden.

  She sat in her office the next day, restless and distracted, finding it hard to concentrate until she gave up and walked across to the ward. Siôna was in one of the side rooms, talking to a patient. A new, young patient named Julie-Anne who had suffocated her baby brother in a fit of jealousy.

  Claire had read the notes and met the girl briefly, feeling a shudder of recognition as the girl had told her the stories which proved how much more her parents had loved the child than her.

  She had lifted a tear-stained face up to Claire’s. ‘And now they’ll always hate me.’

  Claire had felt physically sick.

  It could have been her.

  Siôna had lost weight; his beer paunch had vanished with the worry and his face seemed lined and set in a permanent scowl which he failed to eradicate as Claire walked in. She knew he simply wasn’t enjoying his work any more. She had heard rumours that he was considering emigrating to Australia.

  And she suddenly didn’t know what to say.

  She felt embarrassed and responsible because Siôna had only altered since she had been here and events had spiralled right out of control. She felt she should have done something. But what could she have done? She was as much a victim of events as he was.

  She sat down in the chair next to Julie-Anne and motioned to Siôna to continue with his “chat”. He was good, there was no doubt about this, teasing out the most relevant facts – how much planning had gone into the assault, what she had done when she had realised the child was dead, how her feelings were now.

  The three main ingredients of murder – forethought, the deed itself, remorse.

  All documented neatly, pigeon-holed, as eventually all crimes must be. They all follow their own predictably straight lines. However dreadful a crime is committed they’ve all been done before and will happen again. And again. They are lined up in all our futures, waiting for the necessary elements: an evil mind, an evil act, a victim. An opportunity.

  Claire interjected with a couple of questions of her own and the three of them talked for an hour – an hour and a half – while really she wanted to ask Siôna two questions:

  Who? And why?


  With his perceptive skills how much did he understand?

  But the opportunity did not present and she wandered, still fidgety and dissatisfied, back to her room, frustrated again that the window would open only a regulation four inches.

  She stood and stared out at the concrete square, the four benches, the pots of flowers. She smiled. As usual patients and staff were mingling. Sometimes difficult to tell them apart.

  The thought struck her then. This had been Heidi’s window too. Maybe she had seen something from it. The next question, inevitably, was what? What could she have seen?

  When the magician whips his black cloth off the audience gasp with shock. Because what they see is not what they expected to see. They have been deceived. But it is only a trick of the eye, a diversion of the concentration.

  Claire gasped.

  Seeing all. Seeing what Heidi Faro had seen and challenged. Then died for that knowledge because it is what we protect, our secret self, the part we try to hide from public view. That inner, shameful self.

  Claire stared, weakened, stared again and felt frightened. Because she knew now it had been the view from this window which had led to Heidi’s death. And seeing it she too was in that same danger. So real she could taste it. Rancid and sweet. Foul and sickly, as deadly as sugar had been to Barclay’s father.

  Rolf stood with his arm casually draped around a young, female, inmate. No more than eighteen years old, the girl was small for her age and immature in character too. She had been sentenced to Greatbach for an indefinite period after setting fire to her parents’ house following a family quarrel. The immature do this, an inappropriate response to a crisis. Except that her mother, her step-father and her younger brother had all died in the fire while she had watched and exulted. Even observed by bystanders to be fanning the flames with a teenage magazine.

  Inappropriate behaviour

  At any other time, without this heightened sensitivity the atmosphere at Greatbach had created, she might have taken Rolf’s casual gesture for nothing more than a close chat. But as she stared and studied, she read anguish and discomfort in the girl’s face, perceived that the girl was trying to pull away and that Rolf’s grip on her shoulder was tight and making her wince.

  He was taking risks. Who knew who might be watching?

  She was.

  Heidi had.

  There was a quick movement in a window opposite. Little more than a flutter of the wind, something dark, altering the light and shade behind the glass.

  Claire jerked away from the window. She did not care to be observed taking the part of a voyeur.

  Her eyes roamed along the windows and she reflected what a sinister place Greatbach really was, full of watching eyes and people who had done terrible things to other people, family, friends, strangers. All in the name of an imbalance of the mind. According to some psychiatrists no more than a microscopic amount too little or too much of aluminium or magnesium or some other element in the brain.

  Suddenly mental illness seemed to her the most terrifying of all diseases. Invisible. Unpredictable. And worse – hijacked by evil people as an explanation for their cruelty.

  She moved back to the window, mesmerised, drawn to it as though it was a sticky surface and she a fly. Watching as Harry Sowerby, suicidal after a recent high, shuffled towards the pair, Rolf and the girl. Rolf’s eyes flicked upwards, towards the windows or the sky. There was another movement behind the window opposite. When she looked back down she looked right into Rolf’s eyes. He knew he was being observed.

  She jerked backwards again, out of sight, knowing he was grooming the girl.

  As he had seduced Nancy Gold. And made her pregnant.

  The DNA would prove it.

  But the result would take a week.

  He had until then.

  Claire put her hand to her mouth and tasted the danger in this place.

  People were vulnerable. Patients and staff alike because here there was an opportunity to dominate and humiliate.

  The mad are especially vulnerable when they are mixed in with the bad, the sheep with the goats.

  She should know because she understood pathological character and where it could lead people – perpetrator and victim alike. What her patients were ultimately capable of. And the staff.

  The staff. You could not discount them merely because they were health workers. They are not immune from disorders of character. They can dominate, humiliate, lust after, lie, cheat. They are capable of all the usual vices. Plus a few more.

  It was a fine spring evening when she left the hospital that night. The birds were singing their spring mating message, the sky was blue. So she was deluded into feeling safe. This was not a dark, cold night in December.

  But the minute her car failed to start, the engine turning impotently over and over, failing to fire, she felt uneasy.

  She looked right across the almost empty car park, along white-outlined bays with the warmth shimmering above. No one was here. It is strange how there are sudden pools of emptiness in the most normal of days, unexpected silences, an abrupt lack of people as though time holds its breath.

  In a minute – two minutes – the car park would fill again.

  But it didn’t.

  She knew then.

  Kristyna had had trouble with her car.

  Before she had vanished. Before she had turned up in the funeral pyre. She too had fallen through one of these holes in time. We are too dependent on the internal combustion engine. Sometimes it forms the barrier between life and death.

  She lifted the bonnet, hoping for something easy – a stray wire, a loose spark plug.

  There was nothing.

  She locked herself into her car, tugged her mobile phone from her bag and cursed the fact that Grant had no car. He could have picked her up, returned her to normality,

  As it was she could submit to her hysteria and call the emergency services for nothing more than a non-starting car or she could rationalise and ring for a taxi.

  But she had no number.

  Panicking now she sat back in the car, stupidly turned the engine over one last time and wondered which number to ring.

  Only to say she was vulnerable and frightened?

  She would feel foolish.

  So should she walk?

  Eventually she rang the number the insurance company had given her for emergency breakdown – and was put in a queue.

  She heard his approach, softly, steadily, measured, quiet steps. Then the car door was pulled open, the phone taken from her hand, the end call button pressed.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘Get out,’ he said. Not aggressively or roughly but matter-of-factly. In his normal voice.

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’ll be easier for you if you do,’ he said.

  Still she shook her head, tried to pull the door closed. It was futile. He was in the way.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, still in the same tone. ‘Don’t be silly, Claire.’

  But fright can sharpen the senses so she was not paralysed but pumped full of adrenalin. He might have killed Heidi, watched Gulio take the rap, murdered Kristyna, witnessed – even encouraged – her suspicion of Barclay but he had met his match here. She would not submit.

  Foolish woman, do you think Kristyna or Heidi submitted? Do you think Nancy Gold submitted? They all thought they could fight, ultimately win.

  They all lost.

  It was the ordinary voice which made her most frightened. It made her sick, unable to move, unable to think rationally. It fed her terror.

  ‘Please,’ she said and watch his lip curl.

  ‘What are you begging for?’

  ‘You’re not going to get away with it.’

  ‘I suspect not,’ was his answer. ‘Ultimately. Now get in my car.’

  He must have suspected she would try to run because he looped some nylon sailing rope around her hands and pulled her out of her own car. Struggling chafed her wrists and his grip was iron fe
d. The long, thin fingers were too strong and supple. Without any warning he pressed on points either side of her neck and she went faint. Felt sick and dizzy and knew he could kill her here if he wanted to. No one was around to see or care.

  She noticed he took her keys out of the ignition, removed her handbag, locked her car door behind her, made it look like a simple breakdown, less suspicious.

  She was on the back seat of his car, fumbling with the door handle.

  He half-turned. ‘It’s a childproof lock,’ he said disdainfully and concentrated on his driving.

  She knew where he would take her. To the place where bone and china clay lay discarded on the floor. Where shards of porcelain and pottery were broken and sharp. She knew she would see the place where Kristyna had died and that she would share the same fate. Ultimately.

  He manoeuvred through light traffic, swung in the opposite direction to the town centre and drove silently.

  She had known it would be Longton. She could see the tops of bottle kilns, the tall potbank buildings, neglected, dirty, Victorian bricks. She heard traffic splutter and accelerate.

  When they arrived she would have another chance.

  It was a shock when he turned, rattling, into an alleyway, buildings all around and through a steel door topped with razor-wire. He left the car to padlock them shut behind him. More than ten feet high. She knew then she was trapped, seeing the same view that Kristyna had before she died.

  ‘I want you up the steps,’ he ordered, his voice strengthening, becoming more sure of himself. ‘Don’t try anything. It’ll be harder for you if you do. And there’s no point anyway.’

  Her bag was on the front seat. She looked away from it but caught the dark blue of the leather on the bottom corner of her vision. She had a brief flare of hope. Mobile phone. Access so easy to summon help. A swift vision of a police helicopter, hovering in that blue, blue sky.