A Plea of Insanity (20 page)

He was wondering whether he could trust her
.

‘We were working on a thesis – a way to treat psychopathy.’

‘But it isn’t amenable to treatment.’ It was one of the basic laws of psychiatry.

‘She believed it was.’

‘How? Cognitive therapy?’

Rolf Fairweather hesitated. ‘No,’ he said bluntly.

‘How then?’

He still didn’t speak but flushed dull crimson. ‘It was – unethical.’

She drew extra air into her lungs. ‘What do you mean unethical? Where are her records? Her notes? What did you do?’

‘We treated them as they treated us. We stopped being reliable.’

She thought, working this one out step by slow step. The psychiatrist letting down her patients, becoming inconstant. They who should have been the rocks of their existence. Letting their patients down would unleash only anger. Hatred and fury which had been the hallmarks of Heidi’s murder. Finally she looked up. ‘You’re talking about a motive, aren’t you?’

Fairweather nodded miserably.

‘You let Gulio stew because…’

He put a hand out in a stop sign. ‘The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. The police didn’t even look for anyone else. We all wanted to think … There was blood on his hands, Claire.’

‘There’s blood on a surgeon’s hands, Rolf,’ she said quietly. ‘It doesn’t make him a murderer.’

She didn’t need to point out the implications – that had the right person been charged with Heidi’s murder Kristyna would still be alive. And Nancy Gold. And Nancy’s baby too – whatever his subsequent fate might have been. But looking at his face she knew he was already miserably aware of all this. It hung around his neck like the Ancient Mariner’s dead bird.

‘Where are your notes for this trial?’

He handed her a small buff folder he’d been nursing. ‘We could never have published it, Claire,’ he said. ‘It was too unethical. We never could have got permission from the patients.’

Curiosity got the better of her. ‘And did you think it worked?’

‘Too soon to say but …’ He stood up, agitated now. ‘It’s better than letting them walk all over us,’ he said angrily. ‘They make such monkeys of us, Claire. They are always in
the right. We in the wrong. They can default on appointments, then turn up when they don’t have one, demand to see us anytime, refuse to take their medication, lie, cheat –’ He stopped dead just as she was about to soothe him with a, ‘Hey. It’s just a job. Cool it. Chill out,’ sort of comment. But she stopped short and instead observed crisply. ‘But we can set parameters, Rolf. If they don’t stick to them …’

‘Yes? What then? What really, Claire? If they don’t stick to them and then commit a crime we’re to blame. We can’t win.’

She was silent. Unhappy.

She could not believe that Heidi, her heroine, would have been a party to this, to reverting to a reflection of her patients’ animal behaviour.
It was not so – surely?

The question hung in the air between them.

Rolf Fairweather stared back. The energy had drained out of him. He was pale, his breathing shallow, his chest wall heaving.

‘Give me the file,’ she said very quietly. ‘I’ll run through it and then discuss it with you after the weekend.’

He bowed his head and left, leaving the file on her desk.

What happens when you awaken the dragon?

You risk being burned by his breath.

As Claire leafed through the file Heidi’s murder was falling into place.

Barclay would not have liked being crossed and yes, he was intelligent enough to understand what Heidi had been up to. So he would have smouldered. Planned his revenge with detail and malice. This, then, was his motive.

Claire read on.

There had been seven patients on the trial but Barclay had been by far the most dangerous with an impressive list of offences. Major cheque fraud, rape, assaults on his girlfriend, manipulation of his mother, physical violence, threats, a complete disregard for the law. The others had been less intelligent with fewer criminal convictions. Interestingly it would seem that Heidi’s treatment had worked on six out of the seven. The others had stopped defaulting on their appointments within a couple of months. There was documentation of jobs begun and stuck at, even relationships lasting. Four out of the six had been discharged. Their behaviour had improved. Only Barclay’s behaviour had not. He had remained resistant to Heidi’s ideas.

His behaviour had remained unpredictable, his attendances at clinic erratic. Heidi had not achieved superiority over him. They had struggled until the end. Her end.

On March the 14th 2003 Barclay had stormed out of her office, banging the door behind him hard enough to knock some plaster off the ceiling and into her cup of coffee. Impossible to stage-manage but unfortunate. It had finally provoked Heidi into threatening Jerome Barclay with a
Section Order for antisocial behaviour.

Unwise.

Had he then festered over the weekend, planning her punishment and sneaking back on the Monday evening?

Unseen?

She settled down and studied the document more carefully, word for word.

The first page was justification for what she was about to do:

‘People who are diagnosed as having a severe personality disorder pose a very real problem to police and psychiatrists and can be a threat to the general public. There is no known treatment. It is not amenable to cognitive therapy – the patient simply agreees to the conditions, making promises which he (or more rarely she) has no intention of keeping. To deny them treatment is unethical from all points of view, ours, theirs and the public at large
.’

Claire turned the page.
‘We selected only patients diagnosed as having a personality disorder here, at Greatbach, using the criteria based on the World Health Organisation classification of mental and behavioural disorders, code F60 which describes “specific personality disorders not directly resulting from disease, damage or other insult to the brain, or other psychiatric disorder
.”’

‘Our proposed treatment is based on the premise that the only emotion you can rely on from this group of people is grudging respect for an equal or a superior – someone who plays the game equally well – or better than they – using their own (lack of) rules. Therefore Rolf Fairweather, Kristyna Gale and I have agreed to select our most severely affected patients and treat them disconnectedly for a given period of time – in this
case three months. We shall then review them and assess whether there is any improvement in their behaviour using the following criteria: an acceptance of responsibility, expressions of remorse for previous adverse actions, acknowledgment of blame and an acquisition of reliability
.’

Claire cupped her chin in her hand and stared into space. With this clinical proposal Heidi must have known she was signing her own death warrant. Or had she awakened the beast, without understanding just how dangerous that beast could be? Was this, then, the reason why Barclay had finally flipped and murdered her?

Barclay must have had a reason for committing such an action. Heidi’s murder had not been committed on impulse. It must have been planned.

Claire read on.

‘
To put it in the simplest layman’s terms, we messed them around. Made appointments we were not here to keep, kept them waiting, denied them medication etc. Our rationale behind this treatment is the bootcamp of the United States. They prevent their villains from having the upper hand by dehumanising them, brutalising and robbing them of their preening identity and confusing them by breaking their own rules. The US now has lower crime figures per capita than the UK
.’

Claire nodded in agreement.

‘But in this country our police, government and left wing agitators have a loud and articulate voice. We tend to spend a great deal of time arguing our decisions from all angles. This prevents us from carrying out difficult or potentially unpopular courses of action – even when the benefits are unarguable. Were this treatment of even potentially dangerous future offenders to be made public outcry would follow. Our passionate desire is to anticipate crime and prevent it where
possible. But our work has to remain subversive because we would be banned from testing our theories on the grounds of improbity with the result that science, yet again, would be robbed of an opportunity for advancement. Personality disorder would remain an untreatable condition. The only option open to us is to prove retrospectively that this treatment can work by monitoring the cohort of patients and proving that their anti-social behaviour is reduced.

Thus also justfying the need for secrecy
.’

Claire’s eyes opened wide. This was danger-country for any psychiatrist both professionally and personally. Simply reading through the file she had a sense of doom. Heidi had not been authorised to treat any patients in this way. She tried to visualise Heidi, her heroine, as she had last seen her, lecturing from the stage in the Medical Institute, writing this and failed completely. Instead, leaning back in her seat, for some odd reason of association, a vision of Cynthia Barclay’s pleading face swam into view, blue eyelids blinking rapidly like morse code, beseeching someone to sympathise with her son.

She heard that gravelly voice taking his side. ‘They’re not being fair on him.’

Claire had interpreted this as maternal indulgence, sticking up for her offspring against the cruel world. Now she was not so sure. She closed her eyes almost shut. Why had she thought of Cynthia Barclay at that very moment? Because, surprisingly, she did sympathise with her. They had not played fair with him. And this was an odd turn of events. The last thing she had expected was to find herself taking sides with Jerome Barclay against Heidi Faro, Rolf and Kristyna.

More – riding on the back of this was another, more uncomfortable idea. If Barclay had struck out at Heidi in
frustration, because of the way his treatment was being handled, was it possible he had killed his mother through the same motivation? Even when the two crime scenes were so vastly different? Her next thought was blame. Did the responsibility for Cynthia Barclay’s death lie ultimately at the door of this ill-judged clinical trial dreamed up by Heidi and her colleagues?

Had frustration at his situation driven Jerome Barclay to murder both his psychiatrist and his own mother and finally his psychiatric nurse? Was this the reason he had let her go?

Because he had no reason to kill her?

Barclay did not need a reason.

She screwed up her face, concentrating hard, and replaced Cynthia Barclay’s pleadings with pictures of her own.

Heidi’s murder had the hallmarks of a typical,
helter-skelter
psycho-killer whereas Cynthia’s had been subtle with a controlled and orderly crime scene – if crime scene it was. It was still possible that Barclay’s mother had taken her own life either accidentally or deliberately.

And Kristyna? Who knew? It was all so shrouded in mystery. She had vanished. No one really knew what had happened next. Act Two had been the planting of the coat which was so typical of the way Barclay would behave – the cruel tease, the blood dripped theatrically over the collar. And then the final act, the dramatic torching of the car.

Three deaths – each one different.

Was it possible that the difference in the crime scenes did little more than reflect Barclay’s state of mind over the killings? Hatred and resentment towards his psychiatrist and his nurse but little more than weary disdain towards his mother.

She closed the file, stood up and shook herself as though to rid herself of the taint. It was up to the police now to pick Barclay up and question him. This was not within a psychiatrist’s powers. She moved towards the windows, gripped the wooden sill.

She badly wanted him found
.

She stared towards the door, visualising events as they must have happened, wondering now whether she should pass the known facts on to the police.

In her hand she held a clear motive for a brutal killing. She was sure now that Barclay had killed Heidi. Something held her back – the Medical Defence Union’s warning,
Don’t play at policeman
.

She decided not to and put the file in the bottom drawer of her desk.

So Kristyna and Nancy had both been found but Jerome Barclay remained invisible. Claire sensed he was near but cleverly concealed.

He would, at some unexpected time, reappear, popping up like a Jack in the Box, with the same silly grin on his face and stupid wobbling head.

In the meantime she had a breather, time to work with other patients. She had given Paul Frank a clue. He should work on it.

Kap Oseo had failed to make his second outpatient appointment. Claire filled the screen in, dictated a letter to Oseo’s GP and kept her fingers crossed that all was well. When stable there had been a gentle side to the Jamaican that she had liked.

Two days later Detective Inspector Paul Frank arrived in her office unannounced and without an appointment.

‘I have the result of the diatom tests,’ he said, ‘that we performed on Nancy. I thought you’d want to know the results as soon as possible.’

She watched his face, slightly plump, pale and sweating, already tending towards lines, an aging fifty-year-old. His hair was thinning but he had good, strong teeth. Frequently lately he’d worn an air of tiredness, bordering on exhaustion but today he looked better. Eyes bright with energy. Something must be going well.

‘The results show that your patient drowned,’ he said. ‘But not in canal water.’

Her first reaction was one of disappointment. If Nancy Gold had merely slipped into the canal it would have been an answer of sorts. She waited for the policeman to elucidate. It had been a difficult enough case. Let him savour the moment.

He did, with a rueful smile in her direction. ‘There are no, or very few, diatoms. The forensic lab is of the opinion she was probably drowned in a bath. Her heels are quite bruised as though she kicked against something hard. There is damage inside her mouth and nose which the pathologist is convinced was caused by someone pressing hard on her face as he or she held her under the water. Her body was then dumped in the canal.’

‘As far as the pathologist could tell the baby was alive until the moment of Nancy’s death. It was a little girl,’ he added. ‘Practically full term.’

Claire gritted her teeth. One word repeated constantly in her mind like the
ratatat
of a gun. Evil. Evil. Evil.

‘Find him,’ she begged. ‘Get him in before he …’ But her mind could supply nothing nightmarish enough for Barclay except,
finds me again
.

March arrived. The evenings were lightening, spring beckoned. Daffodils waved with joy, purple crocuses celebrated. There was a lightness in people’s step. Everywhere people talked more quickly of optimistic subjects – holidays and families, Easter and the approaching summer. As she drove to work Claire saw signs of home decoration, scaffolding up, windows being knocked out, gardens being dug over. The celebration of the end of winter was almost primordial, probably because it had been so very dull and grey and wet.

But the change of season did not extend inside Greatbach. It was approaching the first anniversary of Heidi Faro’s death and Claire had convinced herself that Barclay would want to mark the occasion. The feeling of inevitability persisted.

He would find her
.

March the 17th this year fell on a Wednesday, a warm day with low lying cloud which returned Stoke to its native air of drabness. She was late finishing. It had been a busy clinic with two extra patients needing assessment urgently. So although she had planned to be safely at home by eight o’clock, eight fifteen found her crossing an empty car park alone and unlocking the door.

Familiarity
. Actions we perform many times in a week, done unconsciously.

She climbed in, started the engine. And immediately sensed he was right behind her. There was an odd smell in the car, something clinical yet not quite clean. She saw his face in her rear view mirror and felt the taste of pure terror in her mouth as he pressed down the central locking device.

‘Barclay,’ she squeaked.

‘I’m not the one,’ he said urgently. ‘I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. You’ve been wrong all along. It isn’t me.’ He laughed lazily. ‘It never was. I didn’t care what
you thought while it didn’t do me any harm but now it is and I want you to call off your dogs. The police want me. I’ve seen posters. It’s been on the TV. It isn’t me, I’m telling you.’

Two voices argued inside her head.
Evil evil evil
and the rational psychiatrist’s sentences,
We should talk. Give yourself up. Confession is good – not for the soul – but for peace of mind
.

When will psychiatrists begin to realise they have no open access to the mind, no control over it? They are permitted to peer inside – that is all. The first voice screamed again in her ear.
Killer. Torturer. Murderer
. And she realised she had screamed out loud.