A Plea of Insanity

by Priscilla Masters

  Claire held her breath. She wasn’t anxious for the police to even land on the fringe of Heidi’s trial. Barclay fixed his eyes on Claire, knowing he had her on the run now. ‘She let us down, you know. Used us. She didn’t need to keep seeing me. She’d make appointments and then not turn up. She was unprofessional. She stopped some treatment which had been helping.’

  This was news to Claire. ‘What treatment?’

  ‘I’d been having sessions with Rolf, the clinical psychologist. He’d been very pleased with my progress.’

  Rolf had said nothing to Claire.

  Paul Frank sucked on his lips. ‘So – to recap – the evening Doctor Faro was murdered you were with your girlfriend, watching a film. All evening?’

  ‘That’s right, Inspector. Sorry to disappoint you.’

  If the policeman had picked up on Barclay’s little hints he had passed by on the opportunity.

  ‘OK. Let’s skip a few months forward to December the 10th.’

  Barclay looked disappointed. ‘Don’t you want to ask me about my mother? She died too, you know.’

  ‘Do you want us to?’

  Claire tried to send DI Frank messages, not to get sidetracked. This was a delaying tactic. She was sure.

  Barclay looked sulky. ‘You did want to question me about her round about the time she died.’

  Frank responded quickly. ‘Well –’ Her advice must have got through. ‘I think we’ll concentrate on the two murders for now. If you want to add something about your mother later on we can talk about that.’

  Barclay looked even more grumpy.

  ‘Now then,’ the DI prompted. ‘Tell us about Kristyna. How well did you know her?’

  Barclay pretended to think for half a minute or so. ‘I suppose I really got to know her after Doctor Faro died,’ he said. ‘You see – she took over some of the clinics and spent quite a bit of time with me. I found her very pleasant. I liked her.’

  To Claire it was a bland statement yet sinister considering her suspicions.

  She felt she must speak. ‘How did you feel about her?’

  Surprise registered at the question.

  ‘Like I said.’ There was a taut warning in his face. ‘I liked her. She was a pleasant person, quite helpful. Easy to talk to. Gave me a few pointers about how to behave if something annoyed me. How to make sure I stayed out of trouble. She wasn’t like Doctor Faro. She was gentle – and more honest.’

  ‘You didn’t like Doctor Faro then?’

  He was practised at an expressionless face.

  ‘Not really.’

  Still no emotion. Claire badly wanted to shock him into saying something.

  ‘Do you remember making a comment about Kristyna’s ears?’

  Barclay looked at her as though she was odd. ‘Her ears?’

  It was turned into a joke which had the desired effect. Claire felt herself faltering.

  ‘No. I don’t remember saying anything about her – ears.’ His smile reduced her to a fool.

  But he didn’t ask why she’d asked about ears particularly, she noted.

  Frank must have sensed her discomfort. He butted in. ‘And where were you on December the 10th last year, the day Kristyna disappeared?’

  ‘In France,’ Barclay said, with a bland smile. ‘I sent you all a postcard, didn’t I, Doctor Roget?’

  She gave a reluctant nod.

  ‘I returned on the 20th. Just in time to do my Christmas shopping like the rest of the population.’

  ‘Not Kristyna,’ Claire said through gritted teeth.

  She was hating this levity when the very name, Kristyna, conjured up the terrible picture of that blackened corpse, fists up, ready for a fight. She felt a sudden rise of bile and desperately wanted to get out of the room, away from Jerome Barclay’s mocking face.

  ‘You can check my credit card statements if you want,’ Barclay proffered.

  She remembered the coat. ‘And the night of February the 2nd?’

  Some emotion crossed Barclay’s face.

  Triumph!

  He hesitated before speaking. ‘I think, Inspector,’ he said, ‘that you haven’t done your homework thoroughly. I think you’ll find that I wasn’t in the country then either.’

  Claire felt suddenly clammy and cold and recognised the symptom for what it signified.

  Doubt.

  And Barclay looked that little bit too confident.

  Detective Inspector Frank must have picked up on it. ‘OK’, he said, ‘we’ll take a break now.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Outside Paul Frank looked concerned. ‘You know as well as I do that if he didn’t put the coat in your car he almost certainly couldn’t have done either of the other two murders.’

  ‘There are ways round it,’ she protested. ‘He could have …’

  But she knew already that if Barclay had persuaded someone else to plant the coat it would imply collusion. And there was no one he could trust. She felt her case erode like a sandcastle confronting the incoming tide. It was melting away in front of her very eyes.

  ‘Go home,’ Paul Frank said kindly. ‘We’ll keep him in the cells overnight, take a look at his passport and check with immigration. If we have any news I’ll ring you.’

  She dipped her head, exhausted now, by the effort, by the recent hype, by the sudden drop in her adrenalin level. She felt unbearably tired.

  On the way home she chewed through every single possibility. Barclay had somehow slipped back from France, that any stamp found on his passport was a fake, that immigration would be mistaken. That someone else had masqueraded as him.

  That … But none of it washed. He had looked just that bit too confident.

  Grant was waiting up for her. At least she found him slumped across the sofa, barely moving as she let herself in.

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t be in for hours,’ he mumbled.

  She flopped down beside him. He sat up with a jerk. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I need a glass of wine first.’

  He was soon back with a glass of rosé. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Drink this then tell me.’

  She took two gulps before blurting out, ‘It can’t be Barclay.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he wasn’t even in the country either when Kristyna was abducted or on the night the coat was planted.’

  As concisely as possible she explained. Grant was frowning by the time she’d finished. He rapped out a couple of questions but ten minutes later the only question he was asking was the same one that had been burning holes into her mind. ‘If not Barclay, then who?’

  ‘Not Stefan Gulio,’ she said. ‘He was safely locked up when Kristyna was abducted.’

  ‘He might still have killed Heidi though …’

  ‘It’s not impossible,’ she admitted. ‘People do commit crimes out of character sometimes. But …’

  But underneath she was still doubtful. She had met Gulio, spent some time with him, made a brief assessment of his mental state and capacity. And she was as sure as she could be that Stefan Gulio had not strung his psychiatrist upside down before slitting her throat.

  She looked helplessly at Grant. ‘It wasn’t Stefan,’ she said. ‘It just wasn’t. He isn’t capable of such practised evil. Barclay is. I sensed it clinging around him like London smog. But being capable of evil doesn’t mean you committed the crime. He can’t have killed Kristyna. It simply isn’t possible.’

  ‘Correction.’ Grant interrupted. ‘He could have killed Kristyna but he can’t have put the coat in your car.’

  ‘What good is that?’ she asked. ‘They are two halves of the same crime. The strange thing is that I can really imagine him planting that coat. It was just the sort of thing he would do.’

  He yawned. ‘Let Inspector Frank sort it out,’ he said. ‘It’s time we went to bed.’

  But in bed she couldn’t sleep. Grant was tired and breathed heavily at her side but strangely enough, instead of finding it a disturbance, she l
iked it. It comforted her, soothed her, made her feel safe and secure.

  There was another reason why she could relax that night. Barclay was in police custody.

  She must have dozed and then awoken. It was lightening outside though still quite dark. She heard odd stirrings beyond the window, the sound of the next door neighbour’s dog give his sharp bark once … twice.

  In her mind she walked through the sequence of events slowly, trying to keep the pictures from being too graphic. Heidi. Cynthia. Kristyna. Nancy Gold. Their looks and sounds intertwined.

  Blue eyelids, a pierced nose, an irritatingly flat voice with a slight Southern twang, Nancy’s sweet, childish voice singing ever-so-softly, Golden slumbers, Kiss your eyes. Heidi, tossing her dyed hair self-consciously while expounding her theories on psychosis, Kristyna’s silver-link bracelet jangling. Nancy rhythmically rocking – a pillow. Cynthia’s wrinkled, pale hand, reaching for more pills, more gin. A cigarette. The deaths of four very different women.

  She must have dozed off again or relaxed deep enough to allow the four women to creep from the shadows only to merge into one another. No longer four crimes but one.

  Like the Chinese cube made of rectangles of wood it was a puzzle that seemed impossible to fit together to make one whole. But the law of medicine is to connect seemingly irrelevant symptoms into one logical sequence which is an illness then call it a syndrome. This happened so that happened which led to this and then to that and so on. Using this law of connection these were not random or disconnected murders but part of a wider, so far incomplete picture. Heidi could have been killed by Barclay or by Gulio or even by someone else. Cynthia could have committed suicide. It was possible that no one would ever know the truth about Kristyna – not even how or when exactly she had died unless the killer made a full confession. The only fact they all knew for certain was that someone had planted her coat stained with the blood of an animal in Claire’s car and a few weeks later deliberately torched her body in her own car. Why was a matter for conjecture but destruction of forensic evidence was the most probable explanation.

  Claire lay with her eyes wide open and willed her mind to meander along the dark crevices of the sulci of the brain and play the game of What If?

  So she lay perfectly still, waiting for Grant to stir, welcoming the silence, the quiet and the almost dark, the lack of sensory stimulus. She stared into nothing and saw and heard nothing except the voices of the dead women and the people around them.

  Whining. ‘They’re not being fair on my son.’

  Victimised. ‘I hear screams. I run along the corridor. I see blood on my hands. I pick up a knife.’

  Jingling. ‘If you want to meet a real psychopath —’ Rolf’s words.

  Confidently didactic. ‘Patients diagnosed as having a personality disorder are notoriously difficult to treat. If you then explore those subdivisions of, say, schizoid, or dissocial, psychopathic, sociopathic, amoral and antisocial we then border on the criminal. Occasionally on the dangerous. It is this class of people that are troublesome to society.’ Heidi’s words.

  Serenading a pillow with a crooning lullaby. Nancy.

  And finally Barclay – threatening. ‘Have you ever asked yourself what is the most indestructible part of a body? Teeth, bones, the underwires of a bra. Jewellery.’

  ‘Keep thinking of the car, Barclay’, she whispered. ‘Think of the wires in the tyres, the numberplate, a body entangled. Think then of the two together. We will have you.’

  The coat. She focused on the coat, recalling the scent of damp wool, Kristyna wearing it. Full and long, swishing as she walked. It had been an unusual coat for her to wear, rather conventional and old-fashioned compared to her usual style. The recall was so vivid that when Claire breathed in she inhaled not the musty bedroom air but Kristyna’s perfume, an unconventional, kasbah scent. For some reason this brought vivid recall of her odd hair, spiky and red. And she asked herself a question she should have posed months ago. Why had Kristyna worn that conventional coat when a leather jacket would have been more her scene?

  For forensics?

  It was the nonsense answer. But leather doesn’t hold on to cells and hair, like wool does.

  It was a blind alley but with lighted windows staring down. She could make no possible connection between Kristyna’s choice of clothes that day and her disappearance. It was something else to tuck away in an attic room, never to be used.

  But the last vision was hers alone – a child, stealing towards a baby’s cot, a thick blanket in her hand.

  Most of us have intent. Only for a few does it translate into action.

  We all have memories we must conceal to preserve our sanity. It was time she came to terms with this one. She had wished Adam harm but not acted on it. She had committed thought-crime. Was it then possible that in this Brave New World she was, in fact, a murderess?

  No. She was not. So why was she accusing Barclay of murder?

  The radio alarm started beeping very softly. In ten minutes it would grow louder. And then louder still. She slipped from between the sheets and padded downstairs to make coffee.

  Grant mumbled something back as she placed the mug down on his bedside cabinet. Then he was suddenly sitting upright.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ he said gratefully. ‘Thanks.’

  It took seconds for the caffeine to find its way into his bloodstream. ‘So,’ he said, yawning. ‘Where are you up to?’

  She set her mug down deliberately on the bedside cabinet. ‘I don’t know where I am,’ she said. ‘I know where I should be. I’m a psychiatrist. My office is the bloody murder scene. I know all the protagonists in this. If I really understand anything about psychopathy I should have arrived at the solution before the police and the evidence should be supporting me.’

  She flung off the bedclothes, suddenly energised. ‘I should be there.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said, protesting, laughing and tugging the duvet back over him. ‘Hey. You’re not a copper.’

  ‘I’m better,’ she said, vanishing into the shower. ‘I’m a psychiatrist.’

  Twenty minutes later she was dressed in a short, pleated skirt and cropped sweater with high-heeled cowboy boots. Grant took one look. ‘I see you’re not about to act the shrinking wallflower.’

  ‘I’ve got a reason,’ she said earnestly, ‘for this. I’ve got plans for today.’

  The telephone blasted out and she knew before she answered that it would be Inspector Frank, that he would have confirmed that Barclay had been out of the country when the coat had been planted in her car and that he would have let him go free.

  She just knew it.

  And she was right.

  ‘Have you an address for him?’ she asked, her voice tight with irritation.

  ‘All taken care of. ‘He was soothing but she still fizzed.

  ‘So that’s that?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said warily. ‘We’ve still got unsolved crimes here.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. Her interest was waning. If Barclay was not a killer they were all wrong. Heidi, Kristyna, Siôna, Rolf.

  Rolf. She brushed her teeth hard and fast, spat the toothpaste into the sink.

  Rolf.

  She had a question for him.

  He was in the staff room, eating a biscuit and drinking a mug of tea, looking surprisingly relaxed in a red open-necked shirt and black jeans. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Good morning. How are …’

  ‘The police pulled Barclay in yesterday,’ she said.

  The news seemed to add to his good humour. ‘Wonderful. Good.’

  She regarded him very steadily. ‘Why do you say good?’

  Rolf grinned at her. ‘Now why do you think? Coffee?’

  ‘Mmm.’ This was turning into an interesting conversation.

  ‘What do you think he has got up to?’

  Rolf was too intelligent to do anything but consider the question carefully.

  ‘Well now,’ he said. ‘We have a number of interesting crimes. Four
women. Three certain murders. And we’ve all mooted the point that there could be a Barclay connection.’

  ‘We have,’ she agreed, sitting right back in the chair and crossing her legs.

  ‘So?’ He was puzzled.

  ‘Let’s get at the truth, Rolf,’ she said softly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  For the first time since she had entered the room Fairweather’s confidence wavered.

  She took her advantage. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’

  ‘Not at all.’ The long, thin fingers wafted elegantly.

  ‘The sessions that you had with Barclay,’ she said. ‘He told me that they had helped him. What did you do?’

  ‘Mainly agreed with him when he expressed negative thoughts.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Instead of making it an issue when he didn’t like something I’d agree with him – about people, about situations.’

  ‘Which people?’

  Rolf sucked in a deep breath. ‘Heidi mainly.’

  ‘It was about this trial, wasn’t it?’

  Rolf licked his lips. ‘Mainly that.’

  ‘You sided with him against Heidi, encouraged his aggression against her.’

  Rolf was too smart to fall for this. ‘No,’ he said steadily. ‘Not that. I merely …’

  ‘You merely let him think you were in agreement with him.’

  Rolf said nothing.

  ‘And what did you really think?’

  ‘I was fed up,’ he said. ‘You have to understand. I’d worked with psychopaths for years. We’d got nowhere – ever. Made no difference. Then along comes Heidi. Full of the most wonderful ideas. Completely controversial.’ He took a sideways look at Claire. ‘I don’t know if any of you ever realised just how controversial she was. She was up to all sorts. But she got results. That was the wonderful thing about her.’

  ‘You really liked her?’

  Rolf nodded. ‘Oh I did. I applauded her when she went in for this study. I thought it was wonderful. But it was unethical. It was never going to be used as a treatment programme. It couldn’t have been so it was no use. I tried to get her to switch to another treatment programme – one which might have passed the ethics committee – but she refused. She’d lost her judgement completely. Once Barclay realised that she lost her authority with him.’