Disturbing Ground

by Priscilla Masters

  Megan did see, only too clearly. The trouble was she could not picture any other way it could have happened. Bianca’s death must have been an accident. No one would have wanted to murder her, not in such a hit and miss, cold blooded, calculated way as to first of all lure her to the Slaggy Pool, risking being seen, hit her on the head and push her in. Particularly when she could have paddled out of a three foot pond. But on the other hand the drowning bore none of the hallmarks of a random mugging, apart from the “head injury”. Megan found herself nodding vigorously in agreement with Bianca’s daughter and was relieved she could not be seen.

  It did not do to plant doubts in the minds of grieving relatives. Grief alone was enough without asking questions no one would be able to answer. So she gave a non-committal, “Ye-e-es,” realised she was not being much help or support and waited for Carole to continue.

  But Carole was answering her own questions. “She must have wandered up there and fallen. Just chance she had the bit of stone in her pocket. There’s no other way it could have happened.” She still sounded dubious and she had not finished.

  “There’s another funny thing, Doctor. No one saw her on the Saturday. Not all day. And that’s really peculiar - don’t you think?”

  “Ye-e-s.”

  “I’ve asked around. She wasn’t at any of her usual haunts.”

  “Did you speak to Esther Magellan?”

  Carole’s laugh was explosive. “You know what she’s like. Still expects Mam to walk in. It hasn’t sunk in at all that she’s not comin’ back.”

  “But did you ask her about the weekend?”

  “She doesn’t know what day of the week it is, let alone when she last saw Mam.”

  “Well, what about Doris Baker?”

  “She gave Mam her medication Saturday morning and never saw her again. She says she put it out Sunday but Mam wasn’t around. Monday when she saw the tablets were still there she was going to ring the police but then she heard the news and they rang her instead.”

  “So you don’t really know whether your Mum was home over the weekend or not.”

  “Not for sure. But you know Mam. Hung around the shops for her entertainment. She went there every day. That’s why they noticed that she wasn’t there Saturday or Sunday. I spoke to the girls at the Co-op. They hadn’t seen her. I asked at the chippie and I went in the video club. Not one of them had seen her. Not all day Saturday and not on the Sunday either.”

  But she had not died until Sunday night. After dark.

  “She could have stayed in the house all day.”

  “She didn’t used to do that.” Surprisingly Carole laughed. “She didn’t do that even if the weather was awful. Used to say stayin’ in all day with Esther drove her mad.”

  Megan found herself joining Carole’s daughter and laughing too with wry humour.

  But when they both stopped Carole’s voice was still troubled. “And I can’t see her going up to that pool after dark. You knew my mam, Doctor Banesto. She never went out at night. Barricaded herself and Esther in as though they were under siege. She wouldn’t even let me in after dark. So why did she go out?”

  Megan had met all this before, this pondering over questions that never would be explained. Sometimes it was a necessary part of the grief process. Why had they gone out? Why hadn’t they worn a seat belt? Why had they had that one last drink? Why had they made that final, fatal mistake? At other times it delayed recovering from grief because it was a pointless, round and round and round again thought process, which lead nowhere but back to the beginning. Why?

  So she fed Bianca’s daughter with the empty truth that they would probably never have answers to these questions and Carole Symmonds wound up the conversation. “Ah well, doctor. I just wanted to go over these few things that have been bothering me, to thank you again for all you did for my mam. She thought the world of you, you know.” Another sniff. “The funeral’s set for next Thursday. Two o’ clock at the church.”

  “I’ll be there, Carole.” It was the final courtesy that could be paid to her ex-patient, one that would be noted and approved in Llancloudy. Funerals were important to the valleys folk.

  “She wanted to be buried but she didn’t want a tombstone, you see. Didn’t like ‘em. Said she worried what we’d put on it.”

  Megan smiled at the strange request, at the same time almost sympathising with Bianca’s suddenly sharp perception. Not wanting a stone of her own must surely be the final anomaly of Bianca’s life and death. As she put the phone down she was still smiling. Why should she be surprised at the unusual circumstances of Bianca’s death and interment when everything about the woman had been unexpected, unexplained.

  She suddenly realised how much she would miss her, leaning against the door of the video shop, falling in every time it was opened, smoking revolting-looking rollups made from a kit housed in a tobacco tin which she replenished not only with Rizlas and shop-bought tobacco but dog ends rescued from the gutter and gifts from the generous valleys folk, or wandering around the Spar or the Co-op with a huge trolley empty except for a battered red leather purse. Megan felt a wave of sadness. Bianca had gone and behind her she had left people memories they could smile at. She would be remembered. She took her bag from the desk drawer. It was time to go home. She stood up, preparing to leave the surgery. But her eyes were caught - and held.

  The walls of her surgery were washed in pale pink with only one picture - a print of a portrait by Gericault. Megan crossed the room and stood in front of it. She knew the title but today, now, it seemed subtly pertinent.

  Madwoman afflicted with envy.

  She had always loved the painting because it intrigued her. Was it really envy that peered out from the woman’s eyes? Not blunt envy as we would understand it but a distortion of the emotion.

  “She thought the world of you.”

  As she stared at the print her eyes lost focus so it was not Gericault’s inhabitant of a French lunatic asylum but Bianca who stared down at her from the pink walls. Wall merged into hair and she stared down at her as though she hated her. Megan was transfixed - as though she had never seen either the painting or her ex-patient properly before. And deep behind the brushwork she seemed to find a frightening dimension of insanity. The expression in the old woman’s eyes was a distortion of human emotion. And distorted who knew what it really meant? “She thought the world of you …”

  Megan stared at the painting for a further minute or two. Then she moved, snapped the light off and left the room behind her empty - apart from the mad woman, still staring down from the pale pink walls.

  She hurried out of the surgery. It was late. Almost seven thirty. A balmy, golden evening. Time to go home. The receptionists were waiting to lock up. The cleaners had finished. But Megan was pulled back, suddenly aware that she was letting Bianca down. How little she had really known about her patient. She had understood her illness but there were glaring gaps in her life that Megan knew nothing about. And again the Hood poem was supplying the words.

  Who was her father? Who was her mother?

  Had she a sister? Had she a brother?

  Resolutely she turned back, startling the receptionist shuffling the last of the notes back onto the shelves.

  “Have we still got Bianca Rhys’s notes, Hazel?”

  “They were just about to be sent back to the Health Authority, Megan. Did you want to have a look at them before they go? I’ll put them in your room ready for tomorrow, if you like.”

  But Megan shook her head. “No, tonight. Don’t worry. I’ll lock up.”

  Hazel looked surprised but she shrugged and seconds later was handing Megan the notes and a cup of tea. “If you’re going to read the latest bestseller,” she said, “you’d better have something to whet your whistle”.

  Megan took the tea, waited for Hazel to close the door behind her and shook the notes out onto the desk. They were a thick set, two beige, Lloyd George envelopes sellotaped together. And apart from the GPs crypti
c consultations they were full of letters from family doctor to psychiatrist, psychiatrist back to family doctor, community psychiatric nurse to family doctor and to psychiatrist.

  Bianca had beem christened plain Bianca Owen. Born 1945 at the Brynhafod Maternity Hospital to one Catherine Owen and her husband Gethin - a normal daughter. There were early documentations of the “usual childhood ailments”: mumps, German measles and whooping cough. There was a greenstick fracture of the left radius aged fourteen and an admission to hospital aged fifteen with abdominal pain which had resolved spontaneously leading to her discharge two days later without treatment. Then, when she was sixteen years old, strange things began to happen to Bianca Owen. She began to imagine the girls at school were calling her names. Nothing strange in that - except that she claimed they also got into her bedroom at night, still calling her names, shouting in her ear and preventing her from sleeping. At first her parents had believed that her victimisation at school was giving her nightmares and had complained to the teachers. When all the accusations had been hotly denied and not before the police had been hauled in to talk to her schoolmates’ parents, her frantic parents had brought her to the family doctor, Megan’s predecessor’s predecessor, a Doctor Parry-Jones. He had talked to Bianca and reassured her parents.

  But events had become more and more bizarre. Bianca had stopped washing. She had attacked her mother causing a penetrating eye injury. Two months later she had accused her father of sexual abuse and Doctor Parry-Jones had referred her to the psychiatrist at Bridgend. Numerous letters had been exchanged between GP and consultant psychiatrist. The case against her father had been dropped. Bianca had been admitted to the local mental hospital under section 29 of the mental health act for a long term stay and when she had finally been allowed out her lifelong medication had been started. From now until her death she must have an injection of Modecate once a month “to control symptoms of acute paranoic schizophrenia”.

  Megan read on, moving through the years. There had been admissions at regular intervals, various claims of witnessing events, people talking to her. Plenty of callouts to her predecessors for plugs that ticked, wires that hummed, a rat that hid under the sink. The imagination of a schizophrenic was boundless. Unshackled to reality, they were capable of reading threats into the most banal, everyday occurences. Each admission to the institute was followed by quiescent periods and it was during one of these in 1968 that Bianca had changed her name to Rhys by marrying a Thomas Rhys. A few quiet years had followed until 1973 when she had started throwing accusations at her husband. He was a killer, she had claimed, a serial killer who “interfered with little children”. Despite a diagnosis which put any of her statements into doubt, the police had again been called in. After months of investigations during which the psychiatrist firmly lobbed his opinions into the field of battle, the case against Thomas Rhys was finally dropped. A brief stay at the Parc mental hospital followed. And now the psychologist’s letters read like a modern day thriller. Bianca had filled in plenty of details. Children tortured, old people left to starve, chained against walls, a boy, buried in a graveyard, still alive. A serial killer who buried his victims beneath the old mine workings, trains that ran into rusting sidings, driven by a screaming skeleton. The stories were horrific, endless, and graphic. Even the psychologist had professed shock at the horror of it all.

  Bianca’s medication had been increased. There were letters between GP and hospital about drowsiness, side effects, confusion. Somehow in the middle of all this Carole had been born and swiftly made a ward of court. “For her own protection”. Thomas Rhys seemed to have vanished into thin air. There was no mention made of a father in any of the case conferences. And no further accusations were made against him. Whenever Bianca had been admitted to hospital Carole had been cared for by the Social Services. And when Bianca was in charge the supervision had been close and daily. No one had apparently quite trusted Bianca to care for her own daughter. For Carole it hadn’t been much of an upbringing. There was mention of her being teased and bullied at school and requests made to the Social Services that she be admitted to a residential children’s home - permanently. But against all odds Bianca Rhys had largely brought her own daughter up. Megan cupped her chin in her hand and stared out of her window, towards the Slaggy Pool. No wonder there was this dichotomy of emotion between mother and daughter. Love and hate.

  One thing did strike Megan as she scanned through the notes. Not once was there mention of a suicide attempt. There were plenty of references to her habit of self mutilation but no one had equated this with anything but a desire for attention. None of the razor slashes which striped her arms were more than skin deep. She had burned herself more than once with cigarettes. But not even a disturbed schizophrenic could believe she could destroy herself by this means. There were references too of her aversion to water. Even a possible explanation, dug up by an unusually thorough counsellor. At three years old the young Bianca had fallen into an ornamental pond belonging to a stately home at the bottom of the valley, Triagwn House. Megan knew the place well. It had once belonged to the owner of Llancloudy mine, a huge, grand place with now neglected gardens. Today it was an old people’s home. And Megan, Andy and Phil were responsible for the inhabitants as the attendant medical officers. Megan even knew the pond. Right at the front, with a cherub doing an ungainly arabesque across its width, water spouting from its mouth. Bianca’s parents must have been looking round the gardens while the child had run off. Minutes later Bianca had been dragged from the water, unconscious, to be resuscitated by one of the gardeners there. Perhaps the memory of drowning had been implanted deep in the child’s brain and led to her pathological phobia. Perhaps even the water spewing from the cherub’s mouth had planted some seed inside an already vulnerable mind. Certainly long before schizophrenia had manifested itself the little girl was displaying an aversion to water, disliking the seaside, hiding when a trip to Porthcawl had been organised by the Sunday School of the Bethesda chapel. By the time Bianca was in her early teens she had begun to manifest one of the signs which later characterised her illness: not bathing. More than once her despairing mother had brought her to the doctor. “To see if anything can be done”. He had documented his hygiene talks to the child but to no avail.

  Megan leafed through the notes, absorbed by a life long history of mental illness culminating in a untimely death. She knew as well as Phil Walsh that statistically it was not entirely unexpected. People with mental illness rarely saw out their expected lifespan. She put the sheets of notes together with the letters back in the beige envelope, pushed her chair away from her desk and sat very still, her eyes again fixed by the Gericault. To her relief the woman looked less like Bianca now. Phrases from the psychiatrist’s letters crawled through her brain. Not a danger to herself. Her grip on reality is tenuous. Bianca will never be capable of independent living. She will always need close supervision. Above all one phrase stuck out in her mind as having some deep, hidden significance. It is not unusual for people who have delusions to retain a good deal of perception and keep in touch with reality. She wondered how much of Bianca’s thoughts had stuck to reality. And who, if anyone, would know which was which.

  There was another small clue. All her life Bianca had been the focus of trained psychiatric personnel - nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists. They had shone the brightest of interrogation lights on her psyche with the result that her attitude to suicide had on more than one occasion been explored by asking her questions specifically structured to expose such a risk. And each time they had come up with the same answer. Bianca Rhys had been assessed a negative risk. Not a danger to herself.

  Megan scooped in a long, deep breath. So was her doctor now to believe she had either deliberately or accidentally approached a body of water which would have filled her with the same amount of horror as a pit of spiders to someone with arachnophobia, having abandoned the safety of her fortress house for no apparent reason and … Again words from the poem see
med to spear her brain. In she plunged boldly.

  Or was it as her daughter had suggested that the voices had finally driven her Mad from life’s history.

  Glad to death’s mystery? Swift to be hurl’d - Anywhere, anywhere Out of the world.

  That truly must be the answer, rather than the unimaginative police suggestion that Bianca had wandered, her voices driving her forward, and she had slipped.

  She folded Doctor Wainwright’s letters together and slotted them back in the Lloyd George envelope. Make no deep scrutiny into her mutiny? The Hood poem seemed to be telling her something else.

  Her eyes flicked across to the wall. The mad woman was still watching her, her expression suspicious, untrusting. The sun had dropped far below the mountain so only the very tips of the hills were still glowing.

  It was time she left.

  Chapter 6

  She locked the surgery door behind her, setting the burglar alarm against the marauding youngsters whose greatest wish was to raid the cupboard for syringes, drugs - or simply fun. It livened up a quiet evening, setting off burglar alarms, waiting for the flashing blue lights to sweep up the valley. The noise, the shouting. It staved off boredom.

  Sitting inside her own car it was that very same boredom which compelled her to dial the police station on her mobile phone and ask for Alun. At least the hot, guilty embarrassment was better than the void which filled her life the moment she stepped outside her doctor’s role. At the same time she lectured herself sternly that Alun was married now, with a child. She’d read both the announcements without emotion in the local paper a couple of years ago. A wife would naturally be suspicious of the motives of an old girlfriend, recently divorced, suddenly turned pally, who followed up a chance meeting with a phone call.