A Plea of Insanity
Page 27
He dealt with them with equanimity and a certain amount of puzzlement.
Months later. And it had all come out. The whole story. Long after the newspapers had finished gorging on the stories of psychologists who lacked principle, psychiatrists who took advantage of their patients’ minds and psychologists who took sexual favours from their patients’ bodies.
Because it all came out in court. Oh yes. Fairweather had pulled out all the organ stops. Pointed the finger at everyone. Typical behaviour this, to fail to take responsibility for his own sins, shifting the blame onto others. And with such rich feedings it is not surprising that it takes the tabloids a long time to abandon the trough of salacious headlines.
Claire had become a mini-celebrity, being challenged once or twice in the street by people demanding why she was ill-treating people with mental disorders, or what she could do for a son with a temper, a daughter with learning difficulties. She had even had an offer from the local TV channel to host a chat show and discuss various current issues concerning mental health.
The fame had become part of her life. She continued working at Greatbach, while moving round the lecture circuit. At the point when she had been closest to death she had known that if she lived her life never would be the same again. Like a scar after an operation the site still sometimes ached. She still had flashbacks. Rolf stroking Kristyna’s arm, that morning in the meeting, Heidi, strutting from one side of the stage to another, pushing back the shining hair while her heels clumped loudly on the boards, Nancy Gold, singing to a wrapped pillow case.
To preserve her sanity and sense of proportion she and Grant distracted themselves by working their way steadily through the house, making it good, forming a small planet from which they could remain untouched by the outside world. She often sat underneath the gnarled apple tree and thought how easily it could all have been so different.
She could have been a celebrity by being another murder victim.
But it was another incident which brought about completion.
It was a Saturday morning, a free weekend for both of them and they were looking at sofas in the Potteries shopping centre, on the top floor of Lewis’s department store. She favoured ivory leather, Grant red, ethnic wool.
A man was standing in the centre of a crowd, shouting that the beers were all on him, that everyone was invited to his house for a party tonight. The man was not young. He was dressed in a scarlet Santa suit which looks odd in late springtime.
He must have hired it.
As she watched two police arrived and good naturedly they hustled the man away.
Harry Sowerby, ready for yet another Section.
Then she noticed someone else.
Standing in front of her, watching the small act being played out in front of them was a black man, standing with his wife and a tall, skinny son. Now the drama had finished he too was looking at the sofas and like Grant his taste was for the ethnic red wool, set out with two armchairs. He looked familiar. As they drew nearer the black man gave her a broad, knowing wink. ‘Why Doctor,’ he said.
It was the voice that told her. She stared at the man, at his smiling wife, at his tall, skinny son.
‘Kap,’ she said softly. ‘Kap. It is you, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right, Doctor. Quite famous lady now.’
‘Still just a doctor.’
Doctors often ask their patients how they are when they meet them, accidentally, in the street. It is only polite. But there was no need to ask Kap anything. His wide smile, the casual way he was linking arms with his wife, the glance of pure affection and admiration his son gave him. Even the acceptance that she was a doctor he had once needed but was now able to discard.
It was a story with a happy end.
Most times psychiatrists get it wrong. Just occasionally, once in a while they get it right.
She knew now why Kap had failed to keep his appointments. Praise be. He had no more need for a psychiatrist. He was better.
She shook his hand, that of his wife and of his tall son, resisted the temptation to pat just one of his thick, Rastafarian dreadlocks.
‘It is so good to see you,’ she said warmly and genuinely.
So they passed by each other, to buy furniture for their homes. She put her hand in her pocket.
Her fingers closed around a scrap of paper. Nothing much, just the top sheet of a stickup pad. She knew instantly what it was.
She linked her arm through Grant’s.
‘When I thought I was going to die,’ she said, ‘I wrote you a note. Telling you things I probably wouldn’t have said.’
He grinned.
‘Do you want to see it?’
In a sudden, husky show of affection, he pulled her head onto his shoulder, his lips brushing her hair, as he drew in a deep suck of air. ‘I don’t need to see it, Claire,’ he said. ‘The fact that you wrote to me is enough. I think I can guess what it says.’
She nodded.
‘No need for words,’ he said, ‘except to say that life will be different because of this experience. We’ll be different. Our relationship will be different. Every time you or I stop valuing life itself we’ll remember.’
‘We’ll remember,’ she echoed. They linked arms and continued walking.
And Jerome Barclay?
He is out there – somewhere, free to continue. With what?
We shall have to wait and see.
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About the Author
Born in Yorkshire and brought up in South Wales, PRISCILLA MASTERS is the author of the popular series set in the Staffordshire moorlands featuring Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy. She has also written several medical standalone mysteries. Priscilla has two sons and lives in Staffordshire. She works part time as a nurse.
By Priscilla Masters
Joanna Piercy series
Winding up the Serpent
Catch the Fallen Sparrow
A Wreath for My Sister
And None Shall Sleep
Scaring Crows
Embroidering Shrouds
Endangering Innocents
Wings Over the Watcher
Grave Stones
Martha Gunn series
River Deep
Slipknot
Other
Night Visit
Disturbing Ground
A Plea of Insanity
The Watchful Eye
Buried in Clay
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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London W1T 6DW
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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2005.
This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2014.
Copyright © 2005 by PRISCILLA MASTERS
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available fr
om
the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1629–6