Dangerous Minds

by Priscilla Masters

  ‘I’ll talk to him about that today,’ she said.

  Salena Urbi was shaking her head, her long earrings dancing at the side of her face. She was wearing her hijab loose so they could see the shining black hair underneath. ‘It would be a good solution,’ she said. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time speaking to Stan and I don’t think he’s going be able to resist the drugs. And with that …’ Her dark eyes looked around the room with a hint of sorrow behind them. ‘With that,’ she continued, ‘comes the clumsy petty crime. With the petty crime comes the arrests. Goodness.’ She flashed white teeth. ‘He doesn’t even try to avoid it. The police can’t fail to pick him up every time. Every time,’ she repeated. ‘It’s ridiculous. But …’ She leaned forward, eager to find a solution to this small problem, ‘if we can put him in Psyche-o-More …’ She couldn’t resist a smile. ‘And he can be watched – maybe, just maybe, we can keep him out of trouble.’ She hesitated. ‘Keep him away from whoever’s supplying him.’

  Claire liked the girl. One could not do this job without a huge dollop of optimism, equally as important as a spoonful of realism.

  ‘OK. Are you all right with that then, Astrid?’ The girl nodded, displaying neither enthusiasm nor a lack of it for her task. But Claire knew she would succeed. The girl had a very good record of success.

  But Salena hadn’t finished. Her eyes looked troubled. ‘But this fit is a disturbing symptom,’ she said. ‘So before we send him to Psyche-o-More, we have to stabilize his physical condition. For now he goes nowhere.’

  Later Claire would reflect on those four small words: stabilize his physical condition.

  Her registrar had picked up on something she should have done. And would have done had she not been distracted.

  For now she hurried on. ‘Right then,’ she said. ‘Now David Gad.’ She had filled them all in on his background and the reason behind his recurrent suicide attempts. ‘He’s currently having psychotherapy and CBT and then we think we can have a couple of tries at abreaction.’ This involved administering an intravenous dose of a major tranquillizer such as phenobarbitone or sodium amytal, and under this influence the trauma was revisited and a different outcome or settlement substituted; thus, hopefully, giving the victim, finally, some peace of mind. In general it was a successful treatment used on the right patients.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘when he’s had a couple of weeks of this we can probably discharge him safely. We trust there will be no more suicide attempts.’

  No one looked particularly convinced at her statement and she knew why. Gad had suffered from these memories for just too long. Nearly seventy years. A lifetime. The experience would have been deeply embedded. She knew that as well as anyone in the room, but …

  ‘Does anyone have a better suggestion?’ she asked crisply and, as she had anticipated, they all averted their eyes, except Edward who gave her a half-smile in tacit support.

  Inwardly she sighed. However many multidisciplinary meetings they held, the buck stopped with her. The buck always stopped with her. Ultimately only she was responsible for all these decisions. Then she remembered one of the many laconic conversations she’d had with Grant. ‘That’s what you get paid for, my sweet,’ he’d said in his lazy, detached way before pressing his full lips down on hers.

  She squeezed her eyes tight shut against the memory, and when she opened them again Edward was watching her, his eyebrows slightly raised in the faint question, Are you OK? She looked away. She wasn’t sure she wanted her colleague to learn about her sad personal life.

  She regained control. ‘Is there anything else anyone wants to bring up?’

  There were general shakes of the head and she stood up, went to her office, and started checking her diary.

  It was now less than a week until Barclay’s wedding, nearly seven months since Grant had gone. And since seeing him with that pretty, fragile girl, she had recast him as a coward. A coward to simply go, a coward to avoid confessing and a bloody coward now to leave her so much in the dark.

  When he had first gone she had dropped into the habit of making up her own explanations. He was tired of her. The life of domestication hadn’t suited him. He had someone else. He had felt insecure in the face of her career. He hadn’t wanted stability and predictability. There could be a plethora of reasons. She could take her pick like choosing a bloom from a bouquet. But now she knew. And she had to deal with it.

  Since Saturday she had deleted his number from her phone so now she couldn’t ring or text him any more. She had caller ID on her landline as well as on her mobile and rarely picked it up, preferring to avoid cold calls and rely on answerphone. So now she felt as though she had built a small wall around herself. Hardly a fortress, impossible to breach, but behind that small wall she felt a little more secure. She was still hurt at his abandonment and lack of explanation, still to some extent damaged and insecure. In future liaisons she swore she would be more guarded, more careful. Keep her feelings wrapped up. Less raw. This was what she promised herself.

  FOURTEEN

  Tuesday, 30 September

  The day was going well until round about three in the afternoon when she was passing the door of one of the interview rooms. It was propped open. The afternoon was warm and humid so the air circulation would have made the atmosphere in the small area more bearable. But as she passed she heard Astrid’s voice speaking to Stan Moudel.

  ‘You don’t have a choice, mate. It’s that or fucking prison. Get it? And you know only too well what happens in prison. You’ll get buggered.’

  There was a small noise from Moudel. More a whimper than a comment or a response.

  ‘You’re doomed, matey.’

  Stan’s response was another whimper and Astrid continued, ‘So you going to go for it? Or take the alternative? Your choice, mate. Not mine.’

  Claire stood outside, shocked at the girl’s tone. So different from the cool, detached, controlled manner she normally displayed. She was bullying him. She hesitated for a moment. She had eavesdropped here and wasn’t sure how best to deal with the subject. One thing was for certain. Astrid would get results all right, but Claire couldn’t tolerate her method.

  She must choose her moment to speak. There was something else. It was the use of the word doomed. The same word that Jerome Barclay had muttered. Maybe Barclay was not psychic. Maybe he had a friend on the inside, just like Julia had suggested. For the moment she continued along the corridor, but questions buzzed inside her brain like flies round a rotting corpse.

  Hayley was sitting on her bed, a pile of magazines at her side. She was leafing through them as Claire entered. Fashion magazines full of celebrity gossip, new partners, new diets, new babies, new beauty advice, new quarrels, new splits, new exercise regimes and the odd wedding. Plus some horror pictures of plastic surgery gone wrong. Enough to frighten anyone off going under the surgeon’s knife to look more beautiful. Judging by the pictures, the reverse seemed the case. Claire looked at the top one and smiled. Here was news guaranteed to warm your heart. Prince George two years on, a sister by his side.

  She sat in the chair at the window and surveyed her patient.

  ‘Hayley,’ she said gently, ‘we’re going to have to transfer you to hospital.’

  Hayley didn’t look up but continued looking down at her magazine. No response, apparently. Then Claire saw a single tear roll slowly down her cheek. Hayley was shaking her head, her shoulders tensed. ‘Please no,’ she said. ‘Please don’t send me there. You know what they do? I’ll have tubes sticking out of everywhere.’ She gave a mischievous smile. ‘Everywhere except my arse,’ she corrected.

  ‘We or rather you have three choices,’ Claire said. ‘You either eat or you go to hospital or you die.’

  The girl’s shoulders jerked up as though to say, ‘And I care?’

  ‘You make the choice.’

  And Hayley’s shoulders drooped again. ‘But …’ she objected.

  ‘Whoever is whispering poisonous words into you
r ear, listen to me. You do need to eat, otherwise your organs will fail and you will die.’

  There was no response from Hayley so Claire continued. ‘We’ll make arrangements for you to be transferred this afternoon.’

  There was a flash in her pale eyes, a moment of challenge. ‘I thought you said I have a choice?’

  There was despair in her voice. Claire shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said, ‘and neither do we.’

  Next she had to tackle Astrid. She drew in a deep breath and walked along the corridor to the girl’s office, knocked on the door and waited.

  Astrid opened the door with a sharp tug and looked surprised. ‘Claire,’ she said.

  ‘Do you mind if I come in?’

  ‘Sure. Sure.’

  Claire knew this was an awkward situation. She had overheard the conversation quite accidentally. She hadn’t been snooping. But …

  ‘Astrid,’ she began, ‘I overheard you talking to Stan earlier today.’

  The girl’s eyes flashed. She knew what was coming.

  ‘The door was open. To be honest I was shocked.’

  Astrid was defensive. ‘It’s the only way to get through to some people.’

  Claire shook her head. ‘It isn’t the way,’ she said. ‘It may be that in the prison you were harsh with your inmates, but not here.’

  She met Astrid’s eyes and read defiance.

  ‘You understand?’ she said sharply. ‘Not here. Not with my patients.’

  The girl’s eyes still flashed.

  ‘If it comes to my notice that your treatment of our patients is not what I would expect, I shall have no alternative but to ask you to find other employment.’

  At last Astrid was paying attention. Bristling, but listening.

  ‘I shall document this conversation,’ Claire continued. ‘Take this as a verbal warning.’

  She knew there was only one way to play this. Tough.

  The right way. She was almost out of the room when she turned back. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘you don’t know a guy called Jerome Barclay, do you?’

  Astrid’s response was predictable. ‘Not that I remember,’ she said coolly. ‘Is he one of our patients?’

  But Claire could be devious too. ‘Not an inpatient,’ she said.

  FIFTEEN

  Thursday, 2 October, 1 p.m.

  And now it was four days before the wedding and Claire suddenly realized she should look for an outfit to wear. She didn’t want to let Jerome down, did she? Her mouth twisted. So what was really behind this decision of his to invite her? She would know when she met the bride and she was curious. Would Roxanne Trigg be someone vulnerable, someone easily frightened? Or would she be Barclay’s equal? Someone feisty and strong. Another psycho, perhaps, to join in the fun? There were plenty of cases where two were more than twice as deadly as one. Two people with evil intent could goad each other into deeper and deeper crime. Think Myra and Ian, Fred and Rosie, even Bonnie and Clyde, to name a few of the most notorious.

  She’d soon find out.

  But the wedding had had one good consequence. She had made contact with Adam, started to heal old wounds. And the tinge of regret that she was not going to the wedding with Grant was slowly fading. He had someone else now. He just hadn’t had the guts to tell her, but had crept away, tail between his legs, ashamed and ultimately a coward.

  She was quite excited about going to The Moat House. She had been to one wedding there as well as a couple of times for dinner before it had been upgraded. It was a smart establishment near Junction 13 of the M6 – Stafford South. It had beautiful grounds and was licensed for weddings. One of her school friends had been married there eight years ago. She had taken Grant’s predecessor, a tall, handsome guy – over six feet tall – named Conrad. Now what had happened to him? Oh yes. He had joined the Forces and vanished from her life.

  She knew how to pick them.

  But her immediate problem was finding something to wear.

  Claire had never liked shopping with a girlfriend – or a boyfriend, for that matter. She invariably got talked into buying something unsuitable, expensive and unflattering. And to top it all, they were usually the outfits she felt most uncomfortable in. So why the hell did she buy them? Coercion. That was why.

  She had Thursday afternoon off and decided, instead of searching round the Potteries, with a vague chance she might bump into Grant and his lady again, she would head south to Eccleshall, a small town down the A518. There were three good dress shops there. She had bought a fabulous New Year’s Eve party dress there, last December, a couple of months before Grant’s desertion, and she thought one of the three was bound to have something suitable: smart – and a bit different. Also she’d noticed when there before that they had a lively hat-hire business. And so that was where she ended up on that warm October afternoon, thinking as she drove down the road, which followed the M6 southbound for a while, how curious it was that she was shopping for an outfit to wear to Jerome Barclay’s wedding. Of all people! Blood and guts, she thought. Jerome Barclay, who had given her bad dreams over the last five years. And she was going with Adam, whom she had plotted to kill when she had been a little over eight years old.

  How strange life was.

  And Astrid? How should she deal with the nurse? Watch her carefully in case she was abusive towards a patient again. Beyond that, she was starting to believe that the way Barclay knew so much about her patients, both inpatients and outpatients, was that there was some connection between him and Astrid. How they knew each other wasn’t clear. Maybe it was simply through work, but it stood to reason. Even the cynical but correct descriptions of her patients – the stupid clever, the haunted Jew, the hungry child, the doomed homeless man – were cold but true … if you forgot they were human beings. The phrases evoked Astrid’s attitude, which she had kept carefully hidden. She would deal with it later. For now she needed to focus on clothes. What to wear to a psycho’s wedding.

  An hour later she was sorted. Black shoes (high-heeled but comfortable); a black and white jacket over a plain black dress that she could wear again. Instead of a hat she tried on what was called a scarlet ‘fascinator’. It felt suitable headgear for a psychiatrist.

  She looked at herself in the full-length mirror. Her hair, always blonde, had lightened over the summer and her skin was looking good. She would paint her nails the same bright scarlet of her fascinator and carry a scarlet clutch bag. She had lost a tiny bit of weight from around her middle – due, no doubt, to the time now spent at the gym instead of cosying up on the sofa with a bottle of wine after a two-course dinner that Grant had cooked. Her evening meals these days tended to be scratchy rather than Grant’s favoured meat and two veg, and this too had had an impact on her weight. She looked more closely at herself. In her facial expression her look of unhappy confusion had been replaced with calm acceptance. She actually liked what she saw.

  Teach me to accept the things I cannot change. A slight misquote from the serenity prayer seemed appropriate.

  So she smiled at herself. Serenity felt so much better than puzzlement, or anguish, or grief.

  The only thing nagging at her mind was that she would need Grant’s signature to sell the house. So she would have to make contact at some point. Right now she wasn’t absolutely sure she did want to sell up, but she didn’t want any avenue denied to her for want of a signature. If she did decide to sell she wanted to be able to do it pronto, not wait around for a solicitor to track him down. As she’d seen him in the Potteries Shopping Centre, he probably wasn’t living very far away.

  She’d deleted his number from her mobile, but she could easily access it through an old phone bill – through an old phone, even, if she charged it up. She would prefer to write a letter, though – more formal; less of a surprise – to give him time to think up a response and, most importantly, to avoid any physical contact. She could choose her words carefully.

  The problem was, she didn’t have his address.

  SI
XTEEN

  Saturday evening, 4 October

  Adam turned up as arranged at seven. As she answered the door to him, Claire reflected that they looked nothing alike. He had coppery-coloured hair and green eyes; pale, freckly skin. He was tall and slight almost to the point of being thin, and was short sighted, so usually wore glasses. It was that or fumble around half blind, he was fond of saying. This evening he was casually dressed in jeans and a rugby shirt but, as he had climbed out of the car, he had manoeuvred a suit-bag off the back seat and a small attaché case. He grinned at Claire. ‘Hi, sis,’ he said.

  ‘Hi, Adam.’ She gave him an awkward kiss on the cheek. ‘Come in.’ She stood back and he entered the hall, sniffing as he stepped inside. ‘Something cooking?’

  She nodded. ‘Nothing fancy. Just pasta – and some salmon.’

  ‘Just pasta?’ He had the bachelor’s enthusiasm of being cooked for.

  She laughed. ‘Glass of wine, Ad?’

  He followed her into the kitchen, stood, leaning against the cooker, and spoke uncomfortably. ‘I thought Grant, maybe, you know. I thought he’d hang around a bit longer.’

  ‘Ah.’ She pulled the cork out of a bottle of Rioja and poured two glasses. ‘Well, he didn’t, I’m afraid. He just went.’ They clinked glasses and she drew in a deep sigh. ‘I think he’s got someone else. I saw him in Hanley one Saturday. He didn’t see me.’

  Adam’s face changed. ‘Men are such cowards, sis. Duck away when there’s something they don’t want to face up to.’

  She wheeled around, hearing something in his tone. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Adam Spencer?’

  ‘No,’ he said hastily. ‘No. Absolutely not. No way, Claire.’ His grin grew. ‘Don’t get all paranoid on me. I wasn’t in Grant’s confidence.’