A Plea of Insanity

by Priscilla Masters

  ‘We never thought so,’ Claire said stiffly.

  ‘And I thought you were the psychiatrist,’ the detective said, laughing. ‘I thought the new thinking was that there is no such thing as these “cries for help”. I thought they were all serious attempts to die.’

  She dipped her head. He was right. It was the current thinking. But she simply didn’t agree with it. She thought the other way round, that the deaths were more often attempts gone wrong. But that didn’t stop her being impressed that this “copper” was up-to-date with contemporary and fashionable medical thinking.

  He put a friendly arm on her shoulder. ‘You can’t blame yourself for everything that goes wrong,’ he said. ‘It’s like my job. The bottom line is your clients are nuts, ours are criminals. We do our best to keep law and order, you to keep some semblance of mental health. The lines where we cross are the most difficult. There are limitations but we all do our best. That’s it, Doctor.’

  She managed a smile. ‘So what did you come about?’

  ‘The coat,’ he said.

  She had a hundred thousand questions to ask about the coat and he seemed to sense it.

  ‘First things first,’ he said. ‘We’ve confirmed it was Kristyna Gale’s coat. We found some hairs on it which have been positively identified as hers. She’d used a quite distinctive mix of hair dyes,’ he added with a mischievous smile that crinkled his eyes.

  ‘We know that they got into your car with a key. It isn’t difficult. A twelve-year-old with the right intentions would have managed it.’

  ‘But it wasn’t a twelve-year-old, was it?’ she said wearily.

  Frank shook his head. ‘No.’

  The unspoken words were the most fearsome. It was Kristyna’s killer.

  ‘Did you find anything else?’

  ‘Plenty. Probably too much to go into now but there were rain spots on it which implies she’d walked at least some part of the way in the rain the night she was abducted.’

  ‘And?’

  That was when the detective’s face changed. It became graver, older, sadder. She thought it must mirror her own face when she had to break bad news.

  Sometimes we can only despair at the human race.

  Claire gripped the sides of her chair as though she was on a terrifying death-defying fairground ride, the anticipation making her queasy.

  ‘I’m afraid we did,’ he admitted. ‘There was some blood-staining.’

  She let out a little gasp of air. ‘How extensive?’

  ‘Quite a bit on the collar,’ he said. ‘A lot.’

  Throat cut?

  ‘What does the pathologist say?’

  Detective Inspector Paul Frank looked haggard. ‘I don’t have to point out that this is not to be in the public domain,’ he said, his voice hoarse with anguish.

  ‘How much blood?’ she asked again. ‘Does it mean she’s dead?’

  ‘Hard to say.’ He counter-attacked. ‘You’re a doctor. You know you can lose a great deal of blood without necessarily dying.’

  She waited.

  ‘This is only an opinion,’ he said wearily. ‘The pathologist thought the amount of blood and the distribution indicated she –’ His eyes were almost hooded. He didn’t want to say it. He cleared his throat noisily, wiped the skin underneath his eyes. ‘He thought that it was compatible with a major wound, something like having her ears cut off.’

  ‘While she was still alive?’

  The room receded and swam back into focus. Frank was nodding.

  That was when the room span. She just made it to the sink to vomit up her lunch while the Detective Inspector stood by, helplessly watching.

  She emptied her entire stomach contents before she stopped retching, made a futile attempt to clean the sink out. Frank was quiet, not embarrassed, watching her without emotion. It must have drained from him when he had learned the facts from the pathologist.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I have this tendency to …’ She didn’t really need to elaborate.

  And now Barclay’s opportunity for confidentiality had passed.

  She had to tell him.

  Without speaking she fumbled beneath the desk for her handbag, took her keys from it and opened the filing cabinet, found the letter ‘B’ and removed Barclay’s folder. She opened it to the right place and turned it round so the policeman could read the relevant paragraph. Then she sat back opposite.

  He took a minute or two to read through, re-read then looked across at her.

  ‘You were the senior investigating officer for Heidi Faro’s death,’ Claire said. ‘Are you still sure you got the right guy?’

  His face was set, old-stone. ‘If I hadn’t been sure, Doctor, I wouldn’t have brought the case to court.’ The suspicion of a smile softened his face. ‘I do have my morals, you know. Jerome Barclay wasn’t even in the picture.’

  ‘And now?’

  His eyes dropped to the file again. It was an answer.

  ‘All I want is for you to contemplate,’ she urged. ‘If there is any doubt. Just look again at them all, Cynthia Barclay’s death and Heidi’s murder, in the new light. Then consider the fact that not only is Kristyna dead but she almost certainly suffered terribly before she died. Please. Just consider the entire scenario as a whole with Greatbach as your background.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  They had trouble enough at Greatbach without anything more happening. But trouble is a fickle entity. It seeks out those who already have an overload and dumps more misfortune on them.

  And so …

  Only Nancy Gold seemed impervious to the atmosphere which had stretched as taut as the ‘E’ string on a violin. She alone seemed detached, floating in clouds of baby pink and blue, humming lullabies softly to herself as she sat cross-legged on her bed, smiling dreamily and waiting for her baby. Claire spent time observing her through the porthole window, wondering what was going on in that pretty little head as she sat and hugged her swelling abdomen. But there was something guileless about Nancy, something small, child-like and innocent that misled you so no matter how frequently you recalled her history you were inclined to disbelieve it, to tell yourself that someone, in the past, must have made a mistake.

  Afterwards Claire wondered how she could have been so wrong and made the excuse that the minute she stopped watching Nancy she forgot about her because at the time her mind was too saturated with another worry – Barclay.

  She sensed him always behind her but however fast she turned her head she never quite caught him, only his shadow, marked by the swiftest of movements, little more than an alteration in the arrangement of light and shade. Still a threat.

  She dared not confide in Rolf or Siôna or any of the others that DI Frank was questioning Stefan’s guilt and, encouraged by her, focusing his attention on Barclay. But typically Rolf picked up that something had changed. He just wasn’t sure what.

  The following day he too knocked on her office door and invited himself in.

  People react differently to worry. Rolf had lost weight, making his face appear longer and thinner, and with his small, pointed beard he reminded her of the man in an El Greco painting, The Burial of Count Orgaz.

  ‘Umm, hi, Claire.’ He began with a friendly note. ‘I know we’re all upset about Kristyna.’ He sat down, uninvited. ‘I wondered if you wanted to talk about it?’ Said with a bright, encouraging smile that belied the sadness in his eyes.

  It made Claire remember. He had been fond of Kristyna.

  She longed to tell him that the investigation had taken a turn but none of this was her secret to confide. ‘I can’t,’ she said, a smile softening the refusal. ‘I’m sworn to secrecy, Rolf.’

  ‘It is something about Kristyna, isn’t it?’ he prompted.

  She nodded.

  ‘Just tell me,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m a friend too. I’ve known her longer than you. Have they found her? Is she dead?’

  ‘They don’t know she’s dead, Rolf,’ she said softly, ‘but I think sh
e must be.’

  ‘What have they found?’

  ‘Her coat’s turned up,’ she said. No need to tell him where. ‘It was heavily bloodstained. I’m sorry, Rolf. If I was allowed to say more I would. I really would but there’s more to this than meets the eye and … I just can’t say more.’

  A certain steeliness set his face. His pupils were pinpoints, the eyes hard and unforgiving, the face still El Greco’s but hostile now instead of sad. She watched him with a detached fascination. This was not the Rolf Fairweather she knew, not the gentle, counselling psychologist, but an angry man. Who had lost a friend. It was an intriguing transformation. He stared around the room, his Adam’s apple very prominent as he gulped and swallowed, finally regaining his composure before leaning forward from the waist. ‘There’s a lot you’re not telling me, Claire.’

  It was almost hypnotic.

  She could only nod.

  ‘And some of it …’ Again his glance was rolling around the room. ‘… Some of it,’ he repeated slowly, intuition surfacing with an air of satisfaction, ‘is not only to do with Kristyna. It’s Heidi too, isn’t it?’

  She nodded again, realising fully, perhaps for the first time, what a very good psychologist Rolf Fairweather was.

  He spoke slowly and very deliberately. ‘You never did seem very convinced it was Gulio. That’s why you went down to see him, isn’t it?’

  He was getting there patiently, inch by inch, scrabbling with his fingernails over loose rocks.

  ‘You’ve got your sights set on Barclay, haven’t you?’

  A penetrating perception.

  Another nod from her as she watched him unravel events with the precision of a heart surgeon.

  Rolf was so clever she feared he would work it all out before her. And yet until she had come he had not travelled along this path.

  His eyes narrowed and he looked down his nose at her. ‘Have you got any real evidence, Claire, or is this pure guesswork?’

  She did not want him to explore any further. ‘I can’t go into it, Rolf.’

  ‘That means you have got something.’ Intuitively he snatched at it, terrier-like, and worried at it. ‘And either you’ve persuaded the police round to your point of view or they’ve got there on their own.’ He scrutinised her. ‘My guess is a bit of both. But,’ he mused, ‘it must be something concrete. Not just an idea, a feeling or intuition. They wouldn’t listen to that.’

  When she still said nothing he stood up, tall and thin, reminding her now more of Charles I, King of the Cavaliers, sartorially elegant, dressed today in a wine-coloured cravat over a dark shirt and black narrow-legged jeans. ‘OK, Claire,’ he said. ‘But be careful. Be aware. If it is Barclay you’ve got in your sights he is frighteningly dangerous. Be very very careful. Please.’ A hand brushed her shoulder.

  And then he was gone, closing the door softly behind him.

  It is difficult to worry about more than one thing at a time. The brain reaches saturation level. Enough is enough. Barclay held the central position while Nancy Gold was relegated. As with Mavis Abiloney, Claire was too preoccupied and her management was not square. Maybe if she had not been so taken up with Kristyna’s disappearance she might have spent more time worrying about Nancy and her unborn child. As it was she gave her fleeting, cursory thoughts and then continued with the work which swamped her. Sometimes it seemed that the five towns had more than their fair share of people with mental problems. She found herself working late simply to see her quota of patients and dictating long into the evenings, taking work home.

  She could not keep this up for ever.

  The house was sold and they were doing their best to keep the purchasers at bay, spending all their spare time hunting for their new house. But Grant was fussy. He wanted to try his hand at some building work. He wanted somewhere with potential. Suddenly, fearsomely, he wanted to make money. Sometimes in the evenings, Claire would look up from the sheaves of house details and muse. They had both changed – altered in their preoccupations and perceptions over the last few months. Why? And why this search for the perfect house when Claire wondered whether it even existed outside her partner’s brain.

  The shame was that while Grant’s waking and sleeping moments were filled with Shangri La hers were always spent with the same person and the eternal question.

  What more could she do?

  Echoed a week or so later with another, worse question.

  What more could she have done?

  And later still.

  What more should she have done to prevent …?

  But there was no answer.

  A week after the coat had been found in her car Paul Frank rang her.

  And asked her to put an hour aside to speak to him.

  Apprehensive and intrigued, she used her office again.

  There is a belief that inanimate objects or a location hold atmosphere in their air or their very fabric. This is why the price of haunted houses or houses where there has been disaster or violent crime is sometimes low. Paradoxically it is also the reason why major auction houses sell for huge prices the shoe of someone who drowned on the Titanic or the notebook of the well known poisoner from Rugeley, the waistcoat of a Victorian felon, the bridle of Dick Turpin’s Bess. People are intrigued by tragedy. They fear it. They respect it. They are endlessly fascinated by it.

  Claire was not immune from this superstition. That was why she chose to use the room where Heidi had died to begin to learn the truth.

  DI Frank arrived promptly at two o’clock on the first afternoon of the year that could possibly be thought to herald spring. The air was light and clean outside, the central heating stuffy and cloying inside, the scent of paint still tainting the air, but less noticeably than before. It would soon be a year since Heidi’s death. In an attempt to blow away the ghost Claire had thrown open the window the inches it was allowed and was enjoying the purity of the air that streamed in. Spring air is so much cleaner than summer air full of pollen and flies.

  The detective was carrying a couple of brown manila files which he placed on the desk. He scanned the room curiously before sitting down without making comment.

  ‘This is a private conversation, Doctor,’ he warned. ‘None of this is official. It isn’t on the record and it won’t be used in court. There are no witnesses.’ He settled into his spiel. ‘Think of this as being two friends chatting informally, pooling our resources. You’re a psychiatrist with a depth of knowledge about criminal behaviour and I’m a policeman with years of experience. I suggest we at least start by communicating all that we know.’

  ‘If we’re going to communicate,’ she said – almost archly, ‘I think I should call you Paul and it’ll save a lot of time if you simply call me Claire. Excuse me for being cynical but if this is off the record is there any point to it?’

  ‘Oh there’s point,’ he said, unoffended by her bluntness – rather his pale face softened into humour.

  ‘Have you located Jerome Barclay?’

  ‘No. There haven’t been any definite sightings – except that we do know he’s in the area somewhere. Mobile phone and cashpoint,’ he explained. ‘Just remember, Claire, we’ve no reason to arrest him. We’d like to locate him, watch him even, I agree. But we have nothing admissible on him.’

  ‘Nothing admissible?’

  ‘We can’t charge him with anything. If we bring him in for questioning we’ll have to release him. Likewise if we go after him too hard he’ll go underground and we’ll lose him.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘When we do drag him in we’re possibly going to have to reopen your colleague’s murder, look at the death of his mother and try and get something on Kristyna. As it is there is a chance.’ He held his hand up to fend off her comment. ‘Just a chance that she could still be alive. I don’t want to find out we’d scuppered her chance of survival by being too heavy-handed. I don’t want that on my conscience.’

  Claire was silent. She was recalling the details she had learned ab
out Heidi Faro’s murder. It had been brutal, cruel, without compunction. In spite of herself her head was shaking. ‘Kristyna won’t be alive, Paul,’ she said.

  He stared at her for seconds, must have followed her thought processes and nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I agree. But …’

  She chipped in, frowning. ‘There isn’t a but, is there? So let’s get on with it. Have you any leads?’

  A swift vision of Kristyna, small and blonde, in khaki, golden bangles shaking on the slim wrist, the stud glinting in the pointed nose, the dark tattoo on the smooth skin, tiny, golden hairs, almost animal. The vision hurt her more than she expected. She winced in real pain.

  Perhaps he didn’t notice, too busy shaking his head. ‘Not a thing except the coat. We’ll have more when he chooses to give it.’

  ‘Defeatist,’ she said, bordering on angrily. ‘We must pursue. What did you find on the coat? Apart from blood?’

  ‘Trace elements. Potash, bone, chinaclay. Cobwebs. Dirt, dust, some glaze. Lead.’

  She sat, mesmerised. A vision rising in front of her eyes. Period Stoke, the land of the bottle kiln, place of the manufacture of the country’s china and porcelain, fired in the stumpy little bottle kilns, each one now with a preservation order. Almost too late. Thought to be ugly hundreds had been knocked down. Few remained. They were a sign of the past. Kilns were electric now. Not coal-fired bottle kilns. But the Potteries had originally been built on clay and coal. You cannot eradicate the past. Slash a potter’s wrist and clay pours out. The women may have contracted breast cancer from feckling and filing cup rims smooth enough for a lady’s lips. The men may have got coal dust and clay dust in their lungs. But they had loved their heritage, felt real pride in it. Then progress had roared in. The electric kilns had been installed and the Potteries had almost completely lost their emblem. And yet bottle kilns were still their heritage.