A Mind to Kill

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘The press have been barred from the house,’ he announced to Annabelle. ‘And I don’t think you’ll have any problems going home. If you do, call me immediately.’ He encompassed the other two in the room. ‘Can Emily go home?’

  ‘Whenever she wants. We just waited for you,’ said Mason.

  ‘You’ve got to put Ronnie Rabbit to bed, haven’t you?’ encouraged the bespectacled girl to Emily.

  The child ignored her, gazing up at Hall instead. ‘Why doesn’t Mummy like me any more? Annabelle won’t tell me.’

  ‘Your mummy does like you,’ said Hall, totally out of his depth and looking desperately at the others for help. ‘She loves you: she told me.’

  ‘She tried to hurt me, like the men.’

  ‘I’ve told Emily it’s the medicine her mummy’s taking to make her better,’ offered Annabelle.

  ‘That’s what it is,’ seized Hall. ‘She has to take the medicine to make her better. But it makes her do funny things, like today.’

  ‘Will she do it again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She didn’t want my drawing.’

  ‘She did. She’s got it now.’

  ‘Will I see her again?’

  ‘She’s asleep now. Getting better.’

  ‘Let’s go home,’ said Annabelle, briskly. ‘It’ll be late, by the time we get there. We’ll come and see Mummy another day.’

  ‘Will the men chase us, like before?’

  ‘No,’ promised Hall.

  ‘Good,’ said Emily, positively.

  Hall and Mason walked Annabelle and the child to Johnson’s waiting car. At the entrance Emily perceptibly held back, frowning through the glass. There was no traffic jam or obvious press pack.

  ‘I’m sorry about today,’ Hall told Annabelle.

  ‘So am I,’ said the girl. ‘I suppose nobody could have guessed it would happen.’

  Hall looked at Mason but said nothing, waiting until the Bentley eased from the hospital and turned immediately left towards the bridge. ‘Is it going to affect the child?’

  ‘Not permanently,’ said Mason. ‘It won’t have helped Jennifer, though.’

  ‘I’m not sure there is anything that will,’ said the lawyer.

  Everyone was assembled, waiting in Proudfoot’s river-view office, when Jeremy Hall got back to chambers. The QC and Feltham were drinking whisky. There was a half-empty sherry glass on the table beside Perry. There was no immediate invitation to Hall.

  Proudfoot said, ‘I thought it was time we had an assessment.’

  ‘The child is going to be OK. There’s still a lot more tests to be carried out upon Mrs Lomax.’

  ‘I meant legal assessment,’ said Proudfoot, impatiently. He indicated Perry. ‘We’ve heard what happened at the hearing.’

  ‘We’ve got protection from the press, which was very necessary,’ said Hall.

  ‘Bentley’s a headline hunter,’ chipped in Feltham, wheezily. ‘He’ll tell his press friends why the child collapsed and they’ll tell their lawyers. Who’ll make damned sure it gets hack to Jarvis. He won’t rescind his order hut he’ll make equally damned sure every judge on the circuit knows what you did. He’ll think he’s been made a fool of.’

  ‘You didn’t do yourself – or the chambers – any favours today,’ said Proudfoot.

  ‘It was right that the restrictions were imposed,’ insisted Hall.

  ‘You’ve alienated the press and the bench, in one go,’ said Feltham, just as insistently.

  ‘In the best interests of a client,’ fought back Hall. He was tempted to help himself to sherry, uninvited, but decided against it.

  ‘Aren’t you losing perspective here?’ asked Proudfoot. ‘It’s right that we’ve taken this case and it’s right – a matter of professional integrity – that we defend it to the best of our ability. But at the end of the day, it comes down to mitigation. The plea for which, after what happened with the child, seems perfectly obvious.’

  ‘Shouldn’t the application have been made?’ challenged Hall.

  ‘I’ve no fault with the application,’ accepted the chamber’s leader. ‘But the press undertaking would have achieved the same effect as the definite order and we – you – wouldn’t have been exposed to judges’ irritation.’

  ‘Do you wish to transfer the brief?’

  ‘No,’ said Proudfoot, quickly. ‘Just remember that if you’d like to discuss anything, my door’s always open…’ He made a general movement with his whisky glass towards the chief clerk. ‘And I’ve never found Bert’s advice unwelcome.’

  But I don’t want it, from either of you, thought Hall. ‘Thank you, for your support and confidence.’

  When he got home there was a message on his answering machine from Patricia Boxall that she couldn’t make the following evening. She’d call. Hall felt relieved.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jennifer gave up. On everything. On everyone. Even Jane. Particularly Jane. The voice was always there, mocking, goading, jeering. And Jennifer said words that weren’t hers and swore when she wouldn’t have sworn. She didn’t argue any more: didn’t try to win any mental battles. Didn’t care.

  Awake or asleep – even drugged sleep – there was a constant image blocking her mind more than Jane occupied it. Emily’s face. Emily’s face contorted in open-eyed terror, Emily’s face broken in disbelieving fear as she twisted away, Emily’s face blanking in horrified dread as she briefly lay, helplessly, on the floor. Emily’s face, screaming. Always Emily’s face, the face of an Emily knowing her mother wanted to kill her – would have killed her – until she’d been stopped. Only just stopped. Wouldn’t have been without the hypnotic key implanted in her brain. Thank God. Except there wasn’t a God. Couldn’t be. What God would let this happen.

  ‘ That’s right. Prayers – exorcism – won’t help. You haven’t got anyone. Not even Emily any more. Alone. Lost.’

  Jennifer’s lassitude was absolute. She wouldn’t have washed unless she’d been washed or brushed her hair if it hadn’t been brushed for her or dressed if she hadn’t been dressed or undressed. Make-up wasn’t considered. She made the very slightest effort with Mason, because he’d saved Emily, but didn’t bother with the other psychiatrists or psychologists or neurologists who followed intermittently, with their questions and their tests, but not any more trying to prove her sanity because she wasn’t sane: she’d known for every second what she was doing when she’d tried to get her hands around Emily’s throat but hadn’t been able to stop herself. Only a mad woman would have behaved like that. Sometimes mad, sometimes sane. But mad when Jane made her so. Couldn’t win. Jane had won. So why bother? Lost, like Jane said. All gone. Everything gone.

  Jennifer didn’t try to stop herself, to stop Jane, during the examinations – several more hypnosis sessions and more brain scans and having her head connected to electrical sensors and three times being injected with a drug they’d identified by name but which she couldn’t remember, any more than she could remember the names of all the experts who’d conducted all the tests. Or in front of the rigid-haired magistrate whom Jane called a menstrual cow and a menopausal mare and asked if she fucked pigs, to the woman’s fury and who, at the second hearing, moved the remand to a women’s prison. The hospital pressed for the transfer, citing the attack on Dr Lloyd as well as that upon the child and arguing their concern for other patients. Jennifer had heard the hospital lawyer’s argument and agreed with it: Jane had told her to agree with it, shouting out.

  Jennifer was only vaguely aware but totally disinterested that Jeremy Hall or Humphrey Perry didn’t any longer come so regularly, although both attended the magistrate’s hearings, as unconcerned as she was by their travelling with her in the ambulance to the prison. On the way Hall said she was going into the ward there, not the general prison, so it was nothing more than a change of hospitals.

  ‘You’ll be looked after there. Safe.’

  ‘ He’s lying again. Full of dykes. Tongues in your pussy. Dild
o rape. You’ll be popular. Fresh meat. Your pussy will be red raw. Bleed maybe. They won’t care.’

  With the exception of the bars it did appear exactly like the hospital she’d left, even to the small separate room into which she was settled, at the far end of the general, ground-floor ward in which lay two women, one with both wrists heavily bandaged. The other called out something to Hall and Perry as they escorted Jennifer through the long room. Neither man reacted and Jennifer didn’t hear but there was laughter from everyone else, two uniformed nurses and two trustees in prison drab. David Emerson, the white-coated prison doctor who was walking with them, called out, ‘That’s enough, girls.’

  The woman who’d made the unheard remark said, ‘There’s never enough. That’s how I stopped being an innocent virgin,’ and there was fresh laughter.

  A big-busted, broad-shouldered matron who hadn’t been in her office at the ward entrance abruptly bustled into the private room after them and said, ‘Right now, let’s get you settled in, shall we, my love?’ and at once began hanging Jennifer’s belongings in the closet from a suitcase she opened without asking.

  ‘Lovely clothes,’ she said, admiringly.

  ‘ Didn’t take long, did it? ’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’ frowned the matron.

  ‘It’s a psychiatric situation,’ Emerson explained to her.

  At Perry’s gesture the doctor followed him out into the corridor, with Hall trailing uncertainly behind. The more experienced solicitor, to whom the remark about the clothes had registered, like the suitcase opening, said, ‘You won’t forget that Mrs Lomax is a remand prisoner, will you?’

  ‘Mrs Lomax will get as good care here as she got in St Thomas’s.’

  ‘It’s the particular type of that care to which I was referring,’ said the solicitor, pointedly.

  Hall looked quickly back into the ward, understanding. Jennifer was sitting docilely in the chair, oblivious to what the other woman was doing. The larger case was unpacked and she’d started on the smaller one, examining each article as she took it out, fingering the material and looking at the labels.

  ‘I don’t understand that remark,’ Emerson was saying. He was a dark-skinned man with wiry hair and a rugby-flattened nose.

  ‘Mrs Lomax’s psychiatric symptoms are still being assessed but she’s obviously traumatized,’ said Hall. ‘I don’t want anything to occur that might worsen her condition.’

  ‘I don’t…’ the doctor began to repeat and then stopped. For several moments he looked between the two lawyers. Then he said, ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘I’d like better than your best, doctor. I’d like a guarantee,’ said the barrister.

  ‘I can’t be in the ward twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘The answer, I would have thought, would be to have people here upon whom you can rely, when you’re elsewhere,’ said Perry.

  ‘All I can do is my best,’ insisted the man.

  By the time they re-entered the private ward, which was actually bigger than the one in St Thomas’s, all Jennifer’s things were put away and the two suitcases stowed in a locker above the closet.

  Perry said, ‘Here’s the inventory of her things. I’d like you to sign receipt.’

  ‘That should have been done at admission, with her jewellery and money,’ insisted the matron. Her identification plate read, Beryl Harrison.

  ‘It was,’ said the solicitor. ‘I’d like you to counter-sign it. Her valuable personal items remain in reception. Her clothes are here.’

  ‘There’s no regulation,’ persisted the woman.

  ‘Is there a reason not to?’ demanded Perry, mildly.

  ‘There’s no regulation,’ said the woman, doggedly.

  To the doctor Perry said, ‘Perhaps you could take us past the governor, on our way out. We’ll get it counter-signed there.’

  The matron snatched the inventory from Perry and scrawled her name below that of the admissions clerk. ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘Perfectly. Thank you,’ smiled Perry.

  The wardress who had brought them to the hospital escorted the lawyers back to the entrance, leaving Emerson and the woman with Jennifer.

  ‘ What happened to your nose? Get it smashed by some dyke?

  Emerson looked up, startled, from the St Thomas’s case notes when Jennifer repeated the questions, then gestured to the dossier for the benefit of the equally startled matron. ‘Voices in her head.’

  ‘Jane,’ offered Jennifer, forcing herself to talk. ‘It’s Jane.’

  ‘This isn’t going to be easy,’ predicted the matron.

  ‘ I’m not going to make it easy.’

  ‘She says she isn’t going to make it easy.’

  ‘Maybe I won’t bother with my own admission examination today,’ said Emerson, indicating the dossier again. ‘It’s all comprehensively listed here. Tomorrow will be soon enough.’

  ‘ Frightened I might attack you, fat nose! ’

  ‘She thinks you’re frightened.’

  Emerson ignored Jennifer. ‘There’s a lot of medical notes,’ he said, reading from the papers. ‘Sedatives, mostly.’

  ‘I always think medication’s the best way to handle the difficult ones, if they’re mad,’ said the matron.

  Jennifer stirred, to protest the madness, but then sat back in the chair, disinterested. Why bother?

  ‘I got a warning from her lawyers.’

  ‘The younger one looked pretty new to me.’

  ‘The solicitor started it,’ qualified the doctor. ‘The young one came in at the end.’

  ‘Been around the block,’ dismissed the woman.

  ‘I said we’d do our best.’

  ‘Why don’t they come and babysit if they’re so worried?’

  Jennifer was only distantly aware of the discussion, indifferent to whatever they were saying: if she just slightly closed her eyes she could picture Emily’s face when she’d grabbed out for her throat, as if it was projected on to the blank wall opposite. Beautiful Emily, pretty Emily, terrified Emily. About-to-die Emily.

  ‘There’s a lot of money involved here,’ cautioned Emerson, not looking up from the case notes in front of him. ‘Expensive lawyers with big mouths. Could make trouble. We will do our best, won’t we?’

  ‘You treat the aches and pains, David. I’ll run the ward.’

  Emerson, who regretted allowing the domination in the first nervous months of his arrival but was resigned to the fact that it was too late to do anything about it now, said, ‘I’ll leave you to give the medication then?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s been given intravenously at St Thomas’s.’

  ‘Let me have the case notes. I’ll look after everything.’ She walked from Jennifer’s room with the doctor, releasing in their necessarily correct order the three locks securing the reinforced door of the dispensary with the three separate keys attached to her waist belt. Jennifer hadn’t moved when she returned.

  ‘Just a little prick in your arm,’ the woman said. ‘And a little more than you’ve been getting at the other hospital, so you can properly relax after the upheaval of coming in here. You’d like that, dear, wouldn’t you?’

  As the needle bit into her arm Jennifer was curious that Jane hadn’t made her arm move, to try to prevent being closed out, but it was the fleetest of passing thoughts, which didn’t matter, like nothing mattered any more.

  In the car taking them back towards the centre of London Hall said, ‘You really think Jennifer is threatened?’

  ‘The absolute archetype,’ said Perry. ‘Young, beautiful, wonderful body and rich: one way or another, with hardly an exception, everything that’s been denied all the rest of them in there. There’ll be a queue.’

  Hall shuddered, ‘To do what?’

  ‘Everything you can imagine. Quite a lot you can’t.’

  ‘We’ve got to stop it!’ said Hall, furiously.

  ‘We can’t: prisoners run prisons, not the staff,’ said Perry
, flatly. ‘What we did was all we can do.’

  ‘What about the governor?’

  ‘I made it very clear to the governor Jennifer is a remand prisoner,’ reminded Perry. ‘He knew what I meant, just as the doctor knew.’

  ‘Let’s do it again, in a letter or something.’

  ‘It would make her even more of a target,’ insisted Perry.

  ‘How much more?’

  ‘Getting her face cut into more pieces than she cut her husband’s.’

  ‘When will it start?’ asked Hall, dully.

  ‘They won’t wait,’ predicted Perry.

  They didn’t.

  The first trustee was a bottle-yellow blonde and slight, with no bust. Her fingernails were badly bitten. The one who came in behind her had mousey hair in a pony tail and a black and red confusion of tattoos on both arms. They were crude prison drawings, jabbed with a pin for ink to be rubbed into the wounds. FUCK was spelled out across the fingers of her left hand, HATE across the right, and high on her left cheek there was a drooped-wing bird.

  ‘I’m Frances,’ said the blonde. ‘Fran.’

  ‘Emma,’ said the second one.

  ‘ Hello. Say hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Are you frightened, in a place like this?’ asked Emma.

  ‘ A little. I’d like some friends. Say it! ’

  ‘A little. I’d like some friends.’

  ‘We’ll be your friends. Look after you,’ said Fran. ‘You need looking after here.’

  ‘ I’d like that. Say it! ’

  ‘I’d like that.’ Jennifer felt very relaxed: warm.

  ‘That’s why we’ve come,’ said Fran. ‘People helped you to dress and undress at the other hospital, when you couldn’t be bothered, didn’t they?’

  Jennifer shook her head, not bothering. Very warm: warm and comfortable. Better than the other hospital.

  ‘Can you be bothered now?’ asked Emma.