But he read her mind, snatched the strap, threw it on the floor. Then he met her eyes with happiness and triumph.
She looked away from it.
The steps were little more than wooden planks forming a staircase to the third floor. They looked unsafe and wobbled as she climbed. The bricks were a mixture of red and yellow, stained with years of grime. The windows were dirty too. It had the air of a derelict site. In the centre stood a fat-bellied bottle kiln.
Still dizzy from the assault on her vagus nerve she stumbled upwards, he dragging her behind him by the sailing twine. He threw open a door with flaking red paint and threw her in to a large, dingy room. ‘And if you have any ideas of escaping,’ he said, ‘just look at the window.’
There was only one. Tiny, covered with chicken wire. As instinctively as a newly wed viewing a house she crossed over to it and peered through. On to people, small as Playpersons, far below, going about their business in a supermarket car park. The one place where people are guaranteed not to look around them. Certainly not up at an ugly, derelict building. Too much is going on at floor level. The daily trial of life of everyday shopping. The search for a parking lot, acquiring a trolley, making sure car doors don’t bump, controlling the kids, locating the elusive shopping list. And that is before you have run the gauntlet of double-glazing saleswomen and charity collectors to arrive at the shop itself. And after you have spent twice as much as you intended the whole rigmarole starts all over again, loading up the car and dumping the trolley somewhere where it won’t cause damage. Then there is the trip home.
No – no one has time to stand and stare. They are all far too busy.
Claire put her hands up against the window and saw where other hands had prayed too. This peek at normal life was tantalising and awful. Extra torture.
Fairweather slammed the door behind him and walked towards her.
‘You just had to meddle, didn’t you, Claire? Spy on me from the window. Play the clever doctor. I did try to warn you, didn’t I?’
She could still play at being in control.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You were the one to suggest Barclay to me. You did nothing to allay my suspicions about Gulio being responsible for Heidi’s death. You wanted me here, Rolf.’
His eyes were expressionless.
He didn’t care. Whatever she felt, however frightened she was was immaterial.
He simply didn’t care.
He walked towards the door, passed through.
Then she was alone.
She heard him shoot a bolt, the rattle of a padlock and chain, footsteps receding down the steps.
When he came back she knew he would kill her.
Even so, she didn’t feel frightened now but very very angry.
Chapter Twenty-Six
She knew it all now – too late.
Rolf had been in a position of authority, deceiving all who came into contact with him. He had that most dangerous attribute of the psychopath – plausibility.
Nancy Gold with her desperation for a child must have been an easy target. She would have suited him well, childlike, easy to influence, available.
But one thing she couldn’t work out. Fairweather must have realised the child Nancy bore would ultimately be tracked back to him. Surely he wouldn’t have taken such a risk? It would have meant at the very least losing his job, at the absolute worst a prison sentence.
He couldn’t have afforded to take such a risk.
But he had.
Heidi, with her understanding of personality disorder, must have suspected something about her colleague was not quite right. Maybe she had had her suspicions about Fairweather and the female patients or maybe he had said or done something that made her doubt his integrity.
Possibly one of the patients had said something. Possibly even she had had even more concrete evidence.
Something beyond mere suspicion.
Like watching him through a window.
She must have rumbled him somehow, realised exactly what he was doing, challenged him. And the drama had begun.
It must have suited Rolf to watch Gulio being bundled into the police car. In fact she wondered whether he had been the one to summon Gulio to Heidi’s office. It had always puzzled her what he had been doing there at that time of day, long after she would have normally stopped seeing patients.
Through the gloom she looked at her watch. Seven o’clock. It would be dark soon. Panic burst through her reason. She must get out of here. He would return, find her, kill her. The door. She ran to it, flung herself at it, pulling and pushing on the handle. But it didn’t budge an inch. The window. But it was covered.
She pulled her shoe off, tried to break the glass. Then saw the scratches on the window frame and knew it would be reinforced. Panic burst through again like a drowning man breaking the water-surface. Kristyna tried this. And Kristyna had died.
‘Not you too, Claire,’ she whispered.
Next she walked the perimeter of the room. It was large, rectangular, darkening and cold but not damp.
It smelt clean and dusty. Dry, old dust. Crushed bones.
In the corner someone had swept a small pile of pottery dust, china clay and ground bone, tiny, glassy flakes of glaze. Her footsteps sounded muffled and hollow as they paced the room. She tried to distract herself by humming and walking the length and then the width.
There was no escape.
And he will return.
There are always questions you can whisper to yourself when you think you might die. Have I led the life I wanted to live? What more did I want from it? In some crystal ball is there only blackness and oblivion for me? Do I have a future?
Then the practical issues. Who will miss me? Who is missing me right now? Grant. What is he thinking, right now? That I am working late, that I have forgotten to tell him about a medical meeting or a social engagement? He will be trying my phone, puzzled – and a little hurt, possibily irritated, in view of this new détente we have achieved between us.
I wish I could tell him that I loved him, that I did care, that I did value the person he is.
There was paper and a pen in her pocket. An old, necessary habit, for a forgetful mind.
She began to write.
Gradually the light leaked away through the window and she was alone with her thoughts. Cold and numbed, hardly able to think, she made an ill-formed plan.
She would escape. She would not be another victim for Fairweather.
She did not sleep but dozed like the condemned woman in her cell, trying not to think about death but life.
At some time in the night she heard some scratching and knew there were mice here. Little friends.
She began to dream, still awake.
If this were Disney I would tie a note to the mouse’s neck, having coaxed him towards me with chocolate crumbs I found in my pocket. He would scamper to the Tesco’s car park and alert some of the late night shoppers. They, in turn, would look upwards to the window and see my frantic wavings before storming the building with their lists and their trolleys.
It made a nice, comforting dream.
She sat, propped up against the wall, half in and half out of the dream, fumbled in the inside pocket of her coat and found her one chance at salvation.
A steel nailfile.
It was not exactly an automatic machine gun but it was a chance. Her only chance.
She must go for the neck or the eyes. Somewhere easily vulnerable.
Dawn stole in through the window watching her practise how to hold this feeble weapon, how to thrust, how to make contact. Maim, disable, take out. The euphemisms we associate with war and killing.
It was still early when she heard footsteps steal up the stairs, the subdued rattle of chains, the click of an oiled lock being slipped back. She scrambled to her feet. Upright she would have a better chance of survival.
The door yawned open.
In battle they yell to frighten their opponent, confuse him, startle him, intimidat
e him.
Instinctively she did just that. Yelled and screamed like a mad Mohican, belted towards him and thrust the nailfile deep into his neck where she hoped his carotid artery was.
He gurgled and, stronger than she, pulled her hand away, put his finger over the tiny wound. She thrust again. Surprise was on her side. That and desperation gave her strength.
This time she did catch the carotid artery in the angle of his jaw. Just where you might feel for a pulse. There was a satisfying spurt. His eyes rolled. He knew he was in trouble.
She thrust again, found the jugular vein this time.
Heard screaming, ‘I will kill you. I will kill you.’
Caught the shock in his face and knew the voice was hers.
Then she ran.
Out of the door, stumbled down a few steps, grabbed the hand rail and looked up. Above her Rolf Fairweather was staggering out of the door, his hand held to his neck, blood seeping through his fingers and she knew she had not disabled him sufficiently yet.
She heard his strangled cry of hatred, saw the rope looped in his hands and knew how Kristyna had met her death.
Mumbled a prayer for the dead and prayed that she would not join them.
Ran down to the ground floor. Two steps at a time and felt as trapped as a rat in a cage.
There was no escape.
He was three flights up, his hand held to his throat, blood not seeping now but spurting through his fingers.
She read the coldness in his eyes.
His car had been reversed into the yard, behind the gates ten feet high, padlocked and impenetrable.
Still she ran towards it. Rattled it impotently, turned to the car.
It was locked. And Fairweather would have both the keys to the car and to the tall, steel doors she could not possibly climb.
‘Shit,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’
She heard the clatter of footsteps on the stairs and knew he still had a chance while maybe she did not.
How quickly the tables turn in this terrible game of life and death.
His finger was pressing hard to his neck wound.
He had reached the ground floor. Without surprise now to give her strength and opportunity she could not overpower him. He was in the yard. They skirted each warily, like a pair of sumo wrestlers in a too-small ring.
She read murder in his face and knew if she did not think of something she would soon die.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Crazily she could hear everyday sounds outside the steel doors. Police sirens, traffic jams, car radios, people. Normal people. Leading normal lives.
A possibility of salvation?
Slowly she took off her coat and threw it as high as she could over the door. But it stuck on the razor wire, a beacon – if anyone cared to look.
Fairweather’s eyes flickered from her to the coat. Blood still dripped through his fingers but it was not spurting. It must have started to coagulate. The wound had been too small – too shallow.
You can lose pints of blood this slowly before the body registers shock.
She ran to the gates, began kicking them. Found a sliver of the world in the crack between the two doors. One centimetre wide.
This was how desperate she was to re-enter that real world. One centimetre.
An eye peered back at her. Unblinking.
Then she felt herself grabbed from behind, felt the warm stickiness of his blood on her neck – the rope loop around her neck. He tried to jerk the life out of her. She put her hands inside the rope and sunk to her knees.
He’d been ready for this – a penalty of both being trained by the same Protect yourself in the Health Service practical session.
He took a step back so he was dragging her along the floor.
Her last conscious picture was of the eye, unblinking, in that precious centimetre of the safe world outside.
Her last conscious thought was that the eye was that of a child.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
She found it all out afterwards, that she owed her life to a six-year-old child and his mother who believed the mad story he told.
‘There is a man in there all covered in blood strangling a lady and she wants me to help her.’
Bless all those American movies, E.T., Sleepless in Seattle, where a small child is the hero or heroine. Where children are trusted and believed by adults. Whatever stories they tell.
What did the mother do?
She put her eye to the one centimetre which looked into some movie hell where all that her son had told her was true.
What did she do next?
She fished her Pay As You Go phone from her bag and rang the police.
All this happened while Rolf Fairweather tried to finish her life.
It is all a dream. A yellow helicopter hovers in the grey-blue sky. A police marksman sits in the open doorway, his gun trained on Fairweather. Fairweather staggers towards the steel doors. The doors are sprung. Hundreds, thousands of police pour in like the United States Cavalry in an old Western film. Huge, dark-blue-uniformed Saviours. An ambulance winks its bright blue eye at her. ‘Don’t you worry, duck. You’re going to be fine. We’ll’ave you right as rain and in the ‘ospital in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Just you’ang on in there.’
In books the heroine would lose consciousness.
Claire did not. Dazed, she mumbled nonsense and felt herself bumped on to a stretcher, straps fixed around her chest and lifted into the ambulance where she stared up at the cream-coloured ceiling and the brown eyes of a junior, uniformed officer. She heard the siren slice through the streets of Stoke, felt the bumping and swerving of overexcited ambulance men who cornered too fast while she felt sick, weak and dizzy and mumbled that she wanted Grant.
To feel his arms wrapping around her and his voice telling her that she would be all right, that she would live, that Rolf Fairweather would kill no one ever in his life again, that he would be in police custody and incarcerated.
At the hospital the senior trauma consultant examined her from head to toe and pronounced her fit. She had no injuries except shock and fright and a scar inside her brain.
Scars never really heal. They cease to hurt every day. They don’t bleed or cause problems. But they stay with you for ever. The best you can hope for is numbness.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It all came out in court.
Cynically Rolf Fairweather chose the plea of insanity to explain his actions. As she had known he would. And as she knew he wasn’t.
Insanity is a condition – not an excuse.
Claire herself was too involved in the case to assess his mental condition and she wanted to speak to the psychiatrist herself. But she was not allowed to. She worried he might fool the doctor as he had fooled her and Heidi and Kristyna and Nancy Gold and everyone else at Greatbach Secure Psychiatric Unit.
He was not insane. He was not even disturbed but the prime manipulator in life’s grim game, in the charade that was, to him, simply fun.
Claire faced statements and counter-statements, court appearances and endless interviews. And Fairweather himself across a courtroom crowded with familiar yet unfamiliar faces. No one was quite the person they had initially appeared.
Siôna appeared shifty, Grant a support. And Barclay …?
As the facts came out she still suspected Barclay of having murdered his mother – or as he would have put it, put her out of her misery.
Much of what she had surmised turned out to be true.
Gulio was summoned back to court, blinking in the bright lights and unable to conceive that what everyone had been so sure about was now in doubt.
He had not killed Doctor Heidi Faro.
Somehow a patient psychologist delved into the deepest darkest corners of his memory and found hidden behind all the statements that had been planted there, like a thick hedge, to grow and conceal the truth, a memory that Rolf Fairweather had told him Doctor Faro had wanted to see him that afternoon.
His memories were revised, the sequence at last making sense.
He had heard a scream, run along the corridor, opened the door, seen Heidi and the blood, picked up the knife and run away, the door jamming behind him – only to be found and accused of the crime he had not had the wit to deny.
The DNA test on Nancy’s dead child proved that Rolf Fairweather was the father.
And Kristyna?
Rolf stood in the dock and smiled each time her name was mentioned. His glance across the crowded courtroom at Claire spoke volumes. Allow me to keep some secrets, it whispered.
But she knew that at some point when she had started questioning Heidi’s death it had sparked something off in the psychiatric nurse’s mind so her suspicion had turned. Maybe even Nancy Gold had let something slip.
We never know everything.
The plea of insanity was given due consideration.
Chapter Thirty
And rejected.
In the end Rolf Fairweather was deemed responsible for his actions, found guilty of the murders of Heidi Faro and Kristyna Gale and sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve not less than thirty years.
It was a more satisfactory end.
Stefan Gulio was given an unconditional discharge and compensation paid to the tune of a few hundred thousand. He was reunited with his mother and, briefly, became the target for young, female fortune hunters.
A Plea of Insanity Page 26