1990

by Wilfred Greatorex

  Dave Brett was stunned by their luck. After a lifetime of cut-throat deals, it always shook him to discover one person after another for whom bucking the authoritarian system meant more than money.

  A white streak of saliva gathered in a corner of the Controller's mouth as he stormed round his office, berating his staff yet again. '...And less than a fortnight after his appeal's turned down, this Doctor Vickers turns up in California. And we have this load of sentimental trash!' His hands splayed down on the spread of the world's press laid across his desk. 'All these international do-gooders threatening to go to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva unless we let out Vickers' wife and child immediately!'

  Gone indeed were the days when Herbert Skardon had enjoyed assuming a posture of controlled dignity. Delly Lomas thought she could detect the unmistakable beginnings of a tic by his left nostril.

  'The Yanks are on at us. The French. The Germans.' He was fuming. 'But when even the Russians join in the damn chorus - with their record!' He thought of sitting down, but could not bring himself to and galloped to the far end of the room instead, twirling round when he reached the wall. 'It has to stop! This Vickers reckons five others got out with him.' He strode up to tower over Jack Nichols. 'This country's like a sieve and the Home Secretary won't put up with much more of it, I can tell you.'

  'Then he should approve a big increase in our establishment.' Delly had watched the whole display with calculating eyes.

  Skardon spun round, his voice reedy with frustration. 'He reckons we're overmanned now. And you know it, Delly. That's mischievous. You know he's already accused me of empire-building.'

  The woman contemplated him, coolly. 'Then we should improve the quality. A lot of our surveillance inspectors are just boy scouts. Too many second-raters.' Allowing her colleagues little time to work out just which of them was being smeared, she added, 'Anyway, I intend to check on the Vickers case myself. It might lead us to smash the major ring...'

  Henry Tasker's sly glance slid after her as she went out. Not long afterwards, he left for lunch early and hurried to Charing Cross Station on foot, stepped into one of the shatterproof plastic bubbles in the forecourt and picked up a telephone, covering the mouthpiece with his handkerchief and dialling out. Kyle asked his name.

  'Never mind,' Tasker distorted his voice. 'But if you want some interesting copy, I should be at the Benson Comprehensive School playground around two thirty.'

  'Can you tell me why?' the newsman probed.

  'Have you got the place and time?' queried Tasker.

  'Yes.'

  The deputy hung up immediately. At the other end of the line, the columnist looked at his receiver for a moment before replacing it. A lot of his tip-offs came this way and so he was interested, but not surprised.

  'Friend or foe?' questioned Greaves.

  'I'll not know till around two-thirty at the earliest.'

  He dropped into the small bistro on the corner of Bouverie Street for a quick lunch. The owner had cleverly adapted to the restraints of the siege economy and now specialised in skilfully prepared peasant dishes, which made the most of simple ingredients. Kyle savoured the cassoulet with pleasure and set out for the school in a mood of rare wellbeing, slightly seasoned by the anticipation which always accompanied a mystery lead.

  The school building had only recently been completed. It was several storeys high. Its factory unit concrete walls were sparsely punctuated by very small slits. Glass-dominated constructions, such as the PCD headquarters, were no longer fashionable, having lost their popularity since it had been agreed that they were too cold in winter and too hot in summer. Architectural design had therefore swung away from the idea of windows and the children in the new school worked perpetually in artificial light.

  In the playground, a netball game was in progress and, as Kyle parked in front of the railings, he saw Delly Lomas on the touchline talking to a schoolgirl. Avoiding the nearest gate, he made his way through the main entrance and, as he came up behind them, he saw that the schoolgirl was Alan Vickers' daughter, Mary.

  'Delly,' he said, loudly.

  She turned quickly and was obviously startled, blushing as he gazed first at her and then at the child. Then she looked down and said, 'I'll not be long, Mary.'

  The small girl raised a feeble smile and Delly moved off some distance with the newspaperman. 'You do realise you're trespassing, Kyle? This is public property,' she blustered.

  'And public's very private for some,' he retorted, acidly.

  She attempted to laugh it off. 'Men who fancy schoolgirls are liable to arrest.'

  'I don't fancy schoolgirls. I fancy grown-up, ambitious lady civil servants in the anti-freedom business,' he studied her, covetously. 'And these days I reckon even that leaves me liable to arrest.'

  She smiled, encouragingly, 'Not if you keep your hands off me.'

  'I'll not touch you without asking first...' She still smiled, thinking she had the advantage because he wanted her so much, but he had not finished yet. '...what were you asking her?'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'Doctor Vickers' kid.'

  She sidetracked, nervously, 'I am with the Home Office, Kyle. We are responsible for child welfare.'

  His eyes were now icy. 'Especially when the father's gone abroad.'

  'She...she could be vulnerable,' Delly Loinas stumbled.

  'To civil servants?'

  They walked on in silence and then he challenged, sharply, 'You're not with the Child Welfare Inspectorate, Delly. You're with the Public Control Department. And high up in that.'

  But she had regained her control, 'Mary and her mother will be allowed out in a month.'

  'Too right they will! Or the world will want to know why not.' He looked at her with a kind of scorn and it jolted her. 'Though I'd not put it past your lot to change the rules.'

  'We don't make the laws,' she appealed. 'We only carry them out.'

  'That's what the first intake of concentration camp warders will be taught to say. I mean, who are you recruiting for the Adult Rehabilitation Centres?' She was stung and flushed again. 'What were you asking Mary?' he pressed.

  'What I discussed with the child is no matter for the media.' She attempted to fend him off, but he twisted round and started back across the playground.

  'I'll ask her then.'

  'Kyle!' He slowed down. 'Don't you think she's gone through enough?'

  He stole a glance at the child, standing forlornly on the touchline, unable to join in the game and hunched, as though chilled, even on this mild spring afternoon.

  'Whoever tipped you off to come here was out to damage me,' Delly Lomas was saying. 'I suppose it's no use asking who it was? Was it Faceless?'

  The journalist shook his head. 'Too trivial for him. Too personal...I know what you asked her, anyway. You asked her, "When did you last see your father?" '

  'Not quite like that,' the woman was embarrassed.

  'How much like that?' His face was full of longing and contempt, and her mouth tightened.

  'Do you plan to run a story on this?' She was half pleading.

  He weighed her up, morosely. 'Not yet. Not just yet. I'm like your lot. I'm building up dossiers.'

  In the background, the ball was netted and a cheer went up from the girls. Kyle and Delly Lomas had reached the playground gate. He walked through it, climbed into his car and drove off without looking at her again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The official permit to visit Mayfield arrived on his desk the following morning; delivered by special messenger from Delly Lomas.

  After a quick call in at the cuttings library, Kyle headed out of London and, within a couple of hours, was turning into the long drive leading to a large country house deep in West Sussex.

  Mayfield, the first Adult Rehabilitation Centre, turned out to be a semi-stately home to which a modern wing had been added. Manicured lawns stretched between bright beds of flowers and bird-song accentuated the atmosphere of peace and tranquillity
.

  The journalist slowed down to pass a group of patients, or inmates, wearing non-uniform dressing gowns over pyjamas. They looked at ease and were talking amiably among themselves as they strolled from a shrubbery onto the grass.

  Seconds later, he drew up before the columned entrance and was shown into a large, first floor office by a soft-faced man, with a very short haircut, who was dressed in a pale blue linen jacket and light trousers.

  Doctor Mark Gelbert stepped forward with a boyish grin and outstretched hand. Introducing himself, he waved the newsman towards a pair of deep armchairs set by a coffee table on one side of the room.

  After minimal formalities, the doctor mentioned, disarmingly, that although he felt his work deserved publicity, he was a little surprised that a journalist from a non-government newspaper should have been given first access to an ARC.

  'You must have well-placed friends,' he concluded.

  'Any friend of mine is usually running in the opposite direction,' Kyle responded. 'If he's got any sense!'

  'So I've heard,' said the other, with a smile.

  He was a tall, handsome man of about thirty-five, with the professional bedside polish cultivated by the old-time private practitioners in Belgravia. He suited the spacious office, with its panelled walls and gleaming mahogany desk. From the cuttings that morning, Kyle had learnt that his speciality was psychiatric neuro-surgery, on which he had written the standard work, and his enthusiasm for the subject was immediately apparent and initially attractive.

  'Well, Doctor Gelbert, here I am...' Kyle looked at him, expectantly, indicating a wish to get down to business.

  Mark Gelbert beckoned him to one of the windows overlooking the main lawn on which patients walked, or played croquet in orderly and controlled leisure.

  'No barbed-wire, no strait jackets, no padded cells,' he stressed, with smooth self-satisfaction. 'After all, this is 1990.'

  The journalist registered the uniform placidity on the faces below and turned to the man. 'So. Tell me how the brain-washing business got this way.'

  Gelbert burst out laughing and the laughter was genuine, 'What a strangely old-fashioned word. Shakespearean, almost.'

  'Prisoners of war in Korea didn't think so,' the newsman pointed out.

  'Forty years ago. And now as obsolete as the leech,' the other declared, as they returned to the armchairs. 'Coffee?'

  'Thanks.'

  The doctor pushed a button set into the table and, as they waited, the columnist had time to examine the office more closely. It was comfortably efficient, luxuriously carpeted and sound-proofed. The library of old medical books looked right in the setting, but the section for cassettes and microfilm seemed incongruous and the low-slung electronic retrieval system for case histories was out of place along one wall. Above it hung a numbered chart of encephalograms and, next to that, a large and coloured cross-section of the human skull with motor, limbic and other brain areas defined and annotated.

  Another man in a blue linen jacket entered quietly, with a tray on which were porcelain cups and saucers, a Georgian silver cream jug and sugar bowl, and a vacuum jug. His eyes had a slight thyroidic bulge and he was about forty-five, with the same short haircut as the man who had first met Kyle at the door. His manner was polite, almost obsequious, as he laid the tray on the table with a deferential bob of his head.

  Kyle stared after him in shock, as he departed silently.

  'Recognise him?' asked Gelbert.

  'Yes, indeed. McKechnie. The New Forest murders.' The journalist gave an involuntary shudder. 'An animal.'

  'He was once,' the doctor agreed. 'Hacked an old couple to pieces, was committed to Broadmoor - as, it then was - paroled twice.'

  'And used the same butcher's cleaver to kill five more people. Two of them children,' put in Kyle. No newspaper man could have forgotten the cases. McKechnie's brutality had made the efforts of Heath and the Moors murderers seem mild.

  'And now his door's unlocked, his windows are unbarred and he grows roses,' Gelbert said, proudly.

  'All done by kindness,' Kyle was cynical. 'I still think I'll skip the coffee. I saw police photographs of the victims - the bits McKechnie didn't eat.'

  'He makes excellent coffee. And not kindness, Mr Kyle. Mind re-orientation, developed here at Mayfield; a mix of aversion therapy and suitable drugs, and simple electricity.' He was leaning forward earnestly, regarding Kyle with an evangelical sincerity which the journalist was beginning to find irritating.

  'No tapping holes in the skull to cauterise the undesirable bits?' he challenged.

  Mark Gelbert was amused again. 'None at all. Lobotomies enjoyed a brief vogue in the sixties, but it was mainly bored neuro-surgeons tinkering around with heads when it was too wet to play golf. No, Mr Kyle. We've developed no new techniques at all.'

  He paused to let the effect of this statement sink in and the columnist frowned, puzzled.

  'But we have found, to an accuracy of one hundred per cent, how all the methods discovered over the years really work.' The man's eyes were actually glowing. He was unfolding his creed, his obsession, and the clinical fanaticism normally obscured by youthful charm was suddenly apparent. Kyle absorbed it, glanced at the coffee tray and again was unable to suppress an inward shudder. But Doctor Gelbert was unaware of it as he crossed to speak into his desk intercom.

  A pretty girl arrived shortly afterwards and was instructed to show Kyle round. She took him along airy corridors decorated in muted colours, their occasional alcoves furnished like small, cosy ante-rooms, where patients could sit and smoke and talk. The public rooms were practical and pleasant, avoiding the usual pitfalls of institution fittings. There were no long communal tables in the dining room. It was more like a restaurant with numerous small tables, covered by matching cloths, and each seating a maximum of four.

  Large chintz-covered sofas and armchairs furnished the common rooms, giving them the same air of comfortable elegance that had permeated Mayfield, when it was still an Earl's country seat.

  A few patients sat around reading, or playing cards, and Kyle spoke briefly to them, explaining who he was. The pretty girl made no attempt to intervene and the patients appeared to have no complaints, all professed to be quite happy. He was baffled and frustrated by the time they met up with Doctor Gelbert again at the door to the operation ward.

  This was a wide room divided into cubicles, in one of which a patient was lying on an unsterilised operating bench, with the face mask of a general anaesthetic covering his lower facial features. An anaesthetist fussed with valves and tubes and a burly man in a white hospital coat was breaking the point of a disposable syringe and throwing it into a waste basket. Kyle had noticed him earlier, in the garden, sitting reading a copy of the government newspaper and looking up from time to time. Now, he placed a thick gag of black rubber, like a grotesque shoehorn, over the tongue in the patient's mouth.

  Gelbert washed his hands, automatically, then attached two round electrodes, joined by an inverted 'U' of insulated metal, to the patient's shaven temples. The electrodes were connected to a cabinet faced with dials and buttons. As Kyle backed somewhat squeamishly against the wall, the doctor began to explain the procedure.

  'The equipment looks a bit old-fashioned, I'm afraid. But it's been effective for donkeys' years.'

  'Donkeys' years,' the journalist echoed, weakly.

  'Electro-convulsive therapy,' Gelbert expounded. 'The patient's been given a muscle relaxant and a general anaesthetic and his tongue is rubber-gagged to stop him swallowing it. Now we'll pass an electric charge through his brain.'

  'And his nose will light up,' Kyle interrupted, with defensive flippancy. 'Sorry, doctor. All hospitals spook me.'

  Mark Gelbert regarded him in mild reproof. 'This is not a hospital, but your layman's reaction is understandable. What you'll see now is the equivalent of a mild epileptic fit.'

  'I can't wait.'

  The other pressed buttons to generate the charge to pass through the
patient's brain, then watched the dials carefully. The unconscious man's hands and feet jerked and twitched, but not violently. It was quite unlike the first twenty years of ECT, when four people were required to hold the patient down and there were deaths from self-induced dislocation of spines and necks.

  Kyle felt himself enveloped in a heavy depression. 'Brave new world,' he murmured, watching.

  Gelbert was brisk. 'Not really. Not new. Some Italian discovered it, oh, about fifty years ago. Tried it out on pigs at first.' He paused to check his dials again. 'Very widely used in British mental homes in the 60s and 70s - mainly because of staff shortage - but there wasn't any research you could call clinically objective until '76, '77, I think. We've refined it from there.'

  'I have done some homework, Doc,' the columnist remarked. 'They reckon ECT destroys brain cells.'

  'Many things do, Mr Kyle,' the other observed, philosophically. 'Alcohol, some tranquillizers, old age. We've merely managed to identify, calibrate, and apply the extent of the destruction.'

  He turned away to note the dial readings on a clipboard and Kyle, filled with instinctive revulsion, raised his hand, unseen, in a wave of benediction and sympathy to the patient.

  The Controller had received the information about five minutes previously and was now gazing over steepled fingers in icy reproach at Delly Lomas. In contrast, she was leaning confidently on his desk, unperturbed by the prospect of the rebuke she knew was coming.

  'I would be most interested to know, Miss Lomas, why you - on behalf of my Public Control Department - gave Kyle credentials to poke around something as politically sensitive as an Adult Rehabilitation Centre,' her boss began, coldly.

  She shrugged, completely relaxed. 'Simple. Rope - for Kyle to hang himself. Sugar lumps - to give him toothache. Quid pro quo - costing us nothing. Now he can stop squawking publicly that we never give him facilities and he owes us a favour.'