A Plea of Insanity

by Priscilla Masters

  ‘Did you read last night’s Sentinel?’

  No one had so the enquiry provoked only a flicker of lame interest.

  ‘It was in the Deaths column.’

  They still looked at him blankly but at least he had their attention now.

  ‘I just happened to see it. The funeral announcement.’

  More blank faces and for Claire still not an inkling of what was to come, of the storm about to break, crashing elements around their heads.

  ‘Barclay’s mother’s died.’

  That was it. Three words. Enough to prick the complacency that all was right in the world and nothing was wrong. She felt the first trickle of unease which would roar into a flood of fear. ‘What did she die of?’

  ‘It didn’t say. Just that she’d died last week and the funeral’s on Thursday, donations to the Samaritans.’

  Claire was silent, her mind clicking onto the sprightly Cynthia Barclay. No sign of a heart condition there. Funeral Thursday so no evidence of delay, a post mortem, coroner’s case, an inquest, unnatural causes. And yet it was all too convenient, just what Barclay would have wanted. To be rid of a cumbersome relative. Particularly if she was about to embark on a détente with his psychiatrist.

  ‘It doesn’t sound as though the death is suspicious.’ Siôna’s helpful comment.

  Claire was silent. Any death within fifty miles of Jerome Barclay should be treated as suspicious.

  All eyes were watching her, wary, this band of happy health colleagues. While she toyed with an idea. Maybe. Just maybe she should shake off the shackles of confidentiality and speak to the police herself.

  Halfway through the morning, a mug of coffee on her desk, she found a window of peace to make the private phone call. Psychiatrists were asked to do this all the time, act as watchdogs for public safety. Guardian angels. To keep police informed of anyone likely to be a danger to the general public – or a specific public. Warn them. The defence union was well named. Not for doctors – for patients. But the confidentiality rules were too ambiguous. While it advised its members to consider the right to privacy it also warned them they had a responsibility to protect the public. Sometimes considering the two was a tightrope. You could so easily fall. And who is a danger to the public?

  We all are capable of being.

  How is a psychiatrist to know absolutely? Is he God to anticipate an evil action? There are so many possibilities: the drunk driver, the mother with an uncontrolled temper, or with post-natal depression, the wife-beater who goes that bit further. Road rage. Sudden hatred. Not only the plotter. We are all capable if you extend the circle. The unskilled builder or electrician. The careless, the mad, the psychopathic. Ah. The psychopathic. This is the one the law of disclosure is specifically aimed at. The psycho of noir fiction. The person diagnosed as having Severe Psychopathic Personality Disorder.

  Barclay.

  But even here there are pitfalls. How can we know who was a potential killer until after they have killed? Psychiatrists do not have foresight or crystal balls, the power of peering into the future although they are supposed to be psychic. All they have are pointers – personality characteristics – to flag up the dangerous psychopath.

  They are: Aggressive.

  Often drunk.

  Full of threats.

  They break the law.

  They accuse others of letting them down. Nothing is ever their fault. They delegate responsibility.

  They lack closeness with another human being, fail to make relationships, keep jobs.

  There is an aura of unprovoked violence that clings to them.

  They are unpredictable, manipulative.

  Claire rolled a biro between her fingers back and forth, back and forth. Barclay fitted the bill perfectly.

  She had the number on the keypad of her mobile phone, the Medical Defence Union. But she was not about to leak information, only to fact-find.

  So instead she dialled directory enquiries and asked the number of the local police station. Then asked to be put through to the officer investigating the death of Mrs Barclay, reading the address from Barclay’s notes.

  ‘There isn’t really one.’

  ‘Then the officer who attended the scene?’

  ‘It was Young. Sergeant Young.’

  She explained who she was and asked again to be put through.

  She was not reassured. A slow, Stoke voice came down the line minutes later, ‘How can I help you, Ma’am?’

  She needed someone of sharper intelligence than this. Someone with subtlety.

  But she tried. ‘I’m a psychiatrist who works at Greatbach Psychiatric Centre.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘I simply wondered how you viewed Mrs Barclay’s death?’

  ‘May I ask what is your interest in this?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to say except that I do have a legitimate interest.’

  ‘I don’t quite see the connection.’

  She backed down. ‘There probably isn’t one. I simply wondered whether Mrs Barclay’s death was being treated as suspicious?’

  A pause. ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Claire Roget. Doctor Claire Roget. I’m a psychiatrist.’ She had a feeling he was scratching it down on some dogeared ledger or tapping it – one-fingered – on a computer. ‘Look – I simply wanted to know whether Cynthia Barclay’s death was considered suspicious.’

  ‘Is that R-o-g-e-t?’

  ‘Sergeant Young,’ she said firmly. ‘If there is nothing unusual about Mrs Barclay’s death then that’s fine. I simply wanted to reassure myself. And –’ she hesitated. ‘I’d really rather you didn’t mention the fact that I’d been in touch to anyone.’

  ‘You want me to keep this phone call a secret?’

  Claire was tapping her foot on the floor in frustration. ‘Please. Can you just answer the question.’

  ‘Mrs Barclay was in her late sixties. Her doctor tells us she was not in good health. She was very nervy and needed pills to help her sleep. According to the pathologist she took too many, was a bit sick and breathed it in. She’d had a drink or two. She died. There isn’t anything odd about it.’

  Aspiration? Of course there was.

  ‘Her death is not being investigated as suspicious. It was simply an accident.’

  She put the phone down and went home.

  No sign of Grant. There was a football match on at the college. He would be getting muddy, in his strip, and in an hour or so downing his beer like a man. Claire fidgeted and channel-hopped through the entire TV network but sometimes it is not the programmes but our state of mind which makes us bored with the whole spectrum of entertainment. We cannot be entertained.

  Her mind was busy, frantically exploring possibilities.

  Barclay walking. Walking. Peering into basement flats. Peeping Tom into kitchens and living rooms, hallways and bathrooms. Watching.

  And then what?

  Who knows?

  Walking. Stalking.

  She could do the same. She took her coat from the chair, shoved her key in the pocket and slammed the door behind her.

  This was the time of year when the leaves make a noise as they die and fall, dry and crackle. The sky was a luminous navy, bright and speckled with stars, a crescent moon beaming down from the apex. Branches like bony fingers grasped at empty air and the sounds carried clearly through the stillness. TV, car radios, pub doors opening to chatter then closing again, the mournful, enquiring bark of a lone hound. A few walkers, like herself. Some traffic.

  She crossed the road.

  A Mercedes garage boasted its wares, each car on the forecourt carefully clamped. She walked on. A dark road led down to Festival Park, neon lights throwing up to the sky. The light changed subtly, the hues taking on the brittle depth of an October night. She walked on.

  A couple, holding hands, chattering, the girl eager, the boy indulgent, passed by.

  Behind her a car door slammed and she started, aware that whatever her eyes
had seen, her thoughts had been of Barclay.

  Out of town shopping precincts are hell to walk through if you stray from the painted footprints. They deliberately make it hard for the pedestrian with cobbled slopes, walls in the centre of the road, no walkway but a wide sweep for the traffic.

  She left Festival Park.

  In a trance she stepped along a street of terraced houses and did as Jerome Barclay did, peered in, at families, old and young people, girls, boys, men, women.

  All unconscious to the fact that she was watching them.

  It could become a habit.

  She turned to go home feeling detached from the entire human race.

  Except one.

  Barclay was getting under her skin.

  Grant was singing as she put her key in the front door.

  They must have won.

  Chapter Eight

  Though she didn’t want to she knew she must summon Barclay again.

  But, oh, how neat. It was not she who summoned Barclay but Barclay who presented to her, the very next morning. As though he had guessed at the timing. His mother had been dead for a week but he had gauged precisely the length of time between the event and her knowledge.

  The call was put straight through, during the morning meeting, at which she had found herself tongue-tied, unable to voice her suspicion and so isolated from this new warm family circle because she was excluding them from her private thoughts. She had a secret.

  Jerome’s thin, reedy voice followed the formal enquiry as to whether she would speak to a patient.

  She knew it would be Barclay. He would do this, thrust and parry, parry and thrust.

  ‘Doctor Roget.’

  She confirmed.

  Unnecessarily Barclay introduced himself. Then, ‘I don’t know whether you know but my poor mother passed away last week.’

  The euphemism sounded an affectation.

  ‘One of the nurses here saw the funeral announcement in the paper.’ She didn’t offer her sympathy. She would not play that game.

  ‘It’s next week. Next Thursday.’

  He was waiting for her to suggest an appointment.

  She fell in. ‘Did you want to come in and discuss this?’

  ‘Yes.’ Said almost humbly. Was it possible she had been wrong about him – that he was experiencing grief over his mother’s death?

  ‘I have a clinic tomorrow, Jerome. Come at three.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor Roget.’

  Again – said humbly.

  Rolf looked across, a finger stroking the point of his beard. ‘That wasn’t who I think it was, was it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘An appointment.’

  Kristyna was perched on the arm of Rolf’s chair, almost leaning into him. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Maybe the looming appointment excused the fact that her ward round that morning was cursory. Perhaps she should have listened harder to what Nancy was saying, hesitated before discharging Kap Oseo, fought Marcus’s transfer to an open prison. He was no longer deemed a danger to the community at large or to himself. Her excuse was that her mind was fixed on Barclay, firmly focused on the appointment that stuck out in her mind, like a granite headstone. A psychiatrist who deals habitually with such oddities should not allow his or her mind to be distracted. The results are potentially too dangerous.

  Let a tiger out of his cage and see what happens before you recapture him.

  She spent a restless night dreaming up all sorts of scenarios. That he would confess to something. Having killed his mother?

  Unlikely.

  People grow out of personality disorders. We normalise with age. Maybe he was, for the first time, experiencing real grief. But then he was equally likely to try and shock her by telling her he was glad she was dead. Anything really. And this was the trouble. With Barclay, she knew nothing for certain.

  And as he sat down opposite her, in neat dark suit and mourning tie, she still didn’t know what was going on so she let him take the cue.

  ‘Why did you feel you wanted to see me, Jerome?’

  He crossed his legs, treated her to a cold stare. ‘I imagined you’d want to know how I’d react to my mother’s death.’

  ‘Well?’ She returned the coldness. She wasn’t going to help him. No clues.

  ‘I was the one who found her, you know.’ He spoke excitedly, truculently. Eyes bright, mouth shining wet.

  She merely looked enquiringly, with a little lift of the eyebrows. The only way to expose the entrails of Barclay’s mind was to affect indifference. Psychopaths hate indifference, boredom. They hate it so much they will do anything to provoke some emotion – anger, fury, anxiety, fear.

  ‘I found her in the morning,’ he added, agitated now at her refusal to engage. ‘She’d been dead for hours. She was quite cold, you know. My own mother.’ He took a sly glance at her from underneath thick, dark lashes.

  She put her head to one side in an attitude of concern.

  ‘I tried to wake her but I knew really.’ He let the sentence fade away into nothing.

  ‘Jerome, how do you feel about her death?’

  ‘Sad.’

  She tried to search into his eyes, to read off what his involvement had been. Had he fed her the pills? Added alcohol to her drink? Contributed, somehow, to her demise and then exulted? Or was she wrong? Had he entered the bedroom to wake her, only to be horrified at her death and then grieve?

  She looked long and hard into his eyes and read – nothing.

  Did you kill you mother?

  His eyes mocked the silent question.

  She waited. They both waited but there was nothing more.

  She tried to prompt him. ‘What will it mean to you?’

  He thought about this one, tried to work it out. It took a long time. Minutes ticked past before he spoke. ‘Well – I shan’t have her at home, to look after me.’ He sensed this wasn’t good enough. ‘I’ll miss her company.’ He was struggling to find an appropriate response.

  ‘And what will you do now?’

  He couldn’t resist a smirk.

  ‘Well – she’s left everything to me, of course, so I thought I’d sell up.’

  ‘Do you mean the house – everything.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what will you do?’

  ‘Maybe travel a bit. That was one of the reasons why I thought I’d better come in and see you.’ Accompanied by an innocent stare. ‘You don’t have any objection to my being out of the country for a while, do you?’

  His eyes were frank and open, wide, bland, staring. He was calling her bluff – and she had no other way open to her but to let him go.

  He stood up then, taller than she, but not a physically threatening presence – until you read his eyes and the sheer, brittle mockery they held.

  She watched the door swing behind him.

  Let a tiger out of his cage and see what happens before you recapture him. Only then can you truly know whether he is a man-eater.

  Chapter Nine

  Afterwards she could recognise that this had been the turning point, the time when Barclay had ‘gone underground’, stopped playing the part of an errant patient humbly presenting for treatment to a concerned psychiatrist, and started to expose his true colours. The game had changed. The rules had changed. Later she would understand more and even excuse the tangled mess which she misinterpreted, bleating that her attention had been deflected. Events became more complicated – a double helix of characters, a twist of malevolence and intent.

  Cynthia Barclay was buried. No more was said.

  It was almost a month later, during the pre-Christmas frenzy of shopping, eating, parties and hangovers, this chaos that our lives become to celebrate a Christian feast in the most un-Christian ways. Hangovers and lateness had became the norm so when Kristyna Gale failed to turn up for a Wednesday meeting not one of them turned a hair. In fact later they would remember cringingl
y that they had smirked at each other as they had waited. Rolf smothered a giggle as he tried her mobile.

  ‘Switched off,’ he said when he’d dumped a joky message about ‘indulging at the pub last night’.

  Only the shorter psychiatric nurse, Dawn, looked concerned. ‘Funny she didn’t ring in. Not like her.’

  ‘Probably too hung-over.’

  Something – not complete enough to be an instinct or an advance warning – made Claire ask an idle question.

  ‘Does she live with a boyfriend?’

  ‘Girlfriend,’ Rolf said meaningfully. ‘Didn’t you know she’s gay?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She lives with an older woman called Roxy who works for local government. Roxy was in an unhappy marriage when she and Kristyna kind of hooked up through a gay website and that was it. Roxy left her husband, she and Kristyna moved in together and that, as they say,’ said with an expansive wave, ‘was that. They’ve been an item for a couple of years and seem happy.’

  Everybody has somebody.

  Right on cue the telephone rang.

  Rolf reached for it. ‘I bet that’ll be Kristyna now, mobile battery flat and she’s got a puncture.’

  There was an inevitable wait while the switchboard put an outside call through then they all heard the voice of panic, of desperation that Rolf was getting a blast of. They watched his face change from concern through deep frown to worried puzzlement and finally settle into lined anxiety. They listened to his suggestion to the person on the phone that maybe she’d crashed out somewhere then a forceful rejoinder – almost a scream – that they all heard perfectly clearly. ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Then – staying with a friend?’

  Another vehement denial.

  They froze with apprehension. Something bad was happening.

  Finally Rolf covered the mouthpiece with his hand. ‘Looks like Kristyna’s gone missing. I don’t suppose –?’