A Plea of Insanity (19 page)

Afterwards she acknowledged to herself that if she had seen the ‘A’ for arrived opposite his name, followed by a knock on the door and then it starting to open she would, finally, have started to scream and maybe never ever stopped.

She was aware that Barclay was assuming folklore proportions, the massive size of the child’s nightmare bogeyman. His shadow was everywhere, an embodiment of all the evil in the world. He was more frightening than anyone could possibly be because he was invisible, always hidden and possessed of the trio of supernatural powers of being everywhere, knowing everything, all powerful, the three attributes we normally give only to a deity
.

Looking around the morning meetings she could see she was not the only one feeling the strain. They all looked
years older than that short eleven months ago when she had first walked in to Heidi’s room.

Gradually she retreated into herself, shutting herself off from Rolf and Siôna and the others, unable to confide in them because she knew, from bitter experience, that it is too easy to label your colleagues and watch them askance for signs of caving in, or mental disorder. Similarly they will watch you.

Psychiatrist, she thought, make yourself sane.

In 1986 Stoke on Trent had a Garden Festival. It was a conjuring trick. An ugly patch of waste ground was turned into a place of fun. For months the people of England – and further afield – stared at a waterfall made of Twyford’s bathroom sinks and toilets, a Welsh garden with slates and model sheep, displays of china and a willow pattern bridge copied from Biddulph Grange. One of the clever aspects about the Garden Festival is that after it was closed the site did not revert to waste ground. The beneficial effects continued. Today it houses a retail park, Toys’R’Us, Comet, Morrisons and the others and a Festival park consisting of a multiplex cinema, a ski slope and Water World together with numerous restaurants, pubs and hotels.

Along the Western edge of the Garden Festival runs the Trent and Mersey Canal, once a thriving industry of transportation, now another place of leisure with a picturesque marina lined with narrow boats, a towpath walk and a canal-side pub. Trips, complete with bar, are run for tourists, to see the sights of the Potteries from the water – Etruria’s stumpy bottle kilns, Barlaston’s Wedgwood and beyond – South towards Stone.

The Garden Festival of ’86 fulfilled its remit. It turned an ailing city into a tourist centre.

The people of Stoke loved Festival Park. The queues on a Saturday and during school holidays testified to this, particularly when a new Disney film was showing, or some special promotion, a gala premiere performance, the seasonal sales, Dad Goes Free into Waterworld and so on.

But it had not succeeded everywhere. The area which immediately borders the canal, a stone’s throw from
Etruria – the fanciful birthplace of Wedgwood’s classical Etruscan Ware – is where the car park is less busy. The police recognise these places as dark zones. Corners of the car park least used, farthest away from the cinema’s lights, nearest to the black, oily canal, the area where people instinctively avoid leaving their cars, choosing instead to park them across the verge. The floodlights frequently get broken so it remains dark and unlit and dangerous.

Even prettied-up cities have their dark zones. The illusion of perfect England is only veneer thick. Beneath the surface, as in other cities, Stoke on Trent is in every way, a city of the post-millennium.

There is a dark zone in our minds too, areas we dare not visit because they frighten or intimidate us with their capabilities.

In this dark part of the canal the body of a young woman floats slowly down stream. As small as a child, face down, blonde hair floating like a sweet weed. She is tiny in the water except for her abdomen which is the swollen size of a full term pregnancy and dips down like the belly of a whale.

Nancy will have her wish. She will keep this baby with her for ever. They will never be parted now
.

She floats through the dark zone, passed the underage kids experimenting with cheap cider and drugs, practising rolling joints. They glance across, see the woman and do nothing. They do not use their mobile phones to call the police. So Nancy’s body bobs a little further down stream, towards the warehouses which once filled the narrow boats with their pottery but now are small businesses sponsored by the Prince’s Trust. They make diverse objects, furry
photograph frames, hand potted ashtrays, fridge magnets. It is here, opposite the A500, the so-called ‘D’ road which links the M6 Stoke South and Stoke North exits, that a young man is unloading his van, taking boxes of goods into the warehouse, ready for collection in the morning. Sensing without seeing that something is breaking up the surface of the water he glances over the top of his box and almost drops it. Over-carefully he sets the box down on the tarmac and tugs his mobile phone from his breast pocket. ‘Police,’ he says hoarsely.

Nancy has been found.

No more women are hidden.

Strangely enough Claire felt relieved when Paul Frank rang her and told her they had found Nancy. To know – whatever it is – is usually better than uncertainty. But the image of the child woman Nancy had been, with her sweet face and gold hair, humming lullabies, clutching on to an empty blanket, would haunt her for ever. Also she felt partly to blame. Nancy had been in
her
care. Her responsibility. She had looked the other way and Nancy had died.

She had let her patient down and she knew it.

‘Drowned,’ Paul Frank said. ‘It’s possible she simply found her way down there, lost her footing and ended up in the canal then couldn’t swim. The banks were slippery. One of our officers almost lost his footing on the towpath. There’s nothing to show it wasn’t a simple accident.’

Claire flexed her toes in her shoes, wishing she could make a pretence of believing in this simple, neat explanation but alternative versions tugged away at her conscience. She wanted to believe Nancy’s death was an accident but it stretched her powers of credulity too taut.

‘They’re doing some tests,’ Paul Frank said, tucking the phone beneath his chin to leaf through his notebook, ‘looking for things called …’ He squinted at his writing. ‘Diatoms?’

He obviously assumed it would mean something to her.

And it did. Claire felt a quickening. Diatoms were microscopic organisms found in water dispersed through the body by circulation. Diatoms are different in different waters – tap, river, pond, sea – a fingerprint, a means of identifying the water Nancy had drowned in as well as telling them whether she had been alive on entry or dead. If proof of the circumstances surrounding Nancy’s death were possible, diatoms were it.

‘When will the results of the tests be back?’

‘A week or two,’ Frank said cheerfully. ‘And we’re going to bank the DNA of the infant. It would be nice to know who the father was.’

‘Yes.’

Claire put the phone down, not sure where this new discovery fitted into her ideas of events. One by one her theories needed to be tried and tested.

Kristyna and Heidi Faro had been killed by the same person.

Not Gulio – Barclay.

Nancy Gold had been sweetened, seduced and impregnated. But nothing in her had read Barclay as a Romeo in spite of Sadie Whittaker’s view. And she found it hard to picture him as the father of Nancy’s child. He simply didn’t fit the profile. When would he have first met her? How and where had he seduced her? How had he kept her sweet throughout her pregnancy, refusing to leak his name? Finally, how had he persuaded her to return to him?

Barclay’s murders were brutal, in your face obvious,
bloody, sadistic killings. Not a woman dropped into the canal, nine months pregnant.

Barclay liked his murders to look like murders – not accidents
.

For the first time since she had met Barclay doubts crept in. He was a psychopath. He liked to play people, tease them, encourage them to fear him. He wasn’t really about sex. Except violent sex and Nancy had not been intimidated by her lover. Rather she had been wooed by him. She had seen it in her eyes, those doll-like china-blues.

She tugged one of her textbooks from the shelf and flicked to the chapter on sexual behaviour in psychopaths. Promiscuity was there, short-lived relationships, sex so violent it bordered on rape. Manipulation of the partner. Her eyes roamed the room. Barclay had had a couple of
ex-girlfriends
whom he had strung along but there had been no pregnancy. Jerome Barclay was intelligent. He would know that a baby’s father could be traced through DNA and blood grouping. Babies leave traces which can lead straight back to the father. Why would Barclay have taken the risk? He wouldn’t want to have paid out for a baby for the next twenty-odd years. He liked his money too much for that – or rather – his mother’s money. And it must have been obvious from the start that Nancy wasn’t going to give up this baby.

Something about this latest happening disturbed Claire even more. She was used to feeling she understood Barclay’s behaviour well enough to almost anticipate it. Certainly follow it through from conception to the act. But she had not anticipated this. Her instinct told her the motives were different. She frowned, sat, agitated at her desk, her fingers drumming out a gallop.

It was a difficult day, having to tell the others that Nancy had been found, knowing they were all forming the same picture, seeing the wide eyes, the tiny face, the blonde hair that formed a bright halo, Nancy crooning to the pillow, pretending it was her baby.

It was a long day. But it passed and more – and still there was no sign of him.

A week after Nancy Gold’s body had been found in the canal Claire was summoned to appear in the coroner’s court for the inquest on Kristyna.

She listened to Rolf talk about his last contact with her, watched Roxy deny that her partner had been preoccupied, say vehemently that she had no clue as to where she had gone, why and with whom.

Then it was her turn.

She was asked to describe Kristyna’s state of mind on the last occasion she had seen her.

It forced her to relive their last encounter, to conjure her up in front of her and she knew that whatever had happened to Kristyna had come out of the blue, unexpected, a tap on the shoulder, from an unconscious state through surprise straight to terror. And it had all happened quickly.

Only one fact emerged that she had not been aware of. The blood found on the coat was not human but rabbit’s blood. The body found in the car had had both ears. Claire hugged this one small fact to her and found it of some comfort but again she wondered whether this had been yet another instance of Barclay’s idea of a joke. He would have known the little touch about the ears would remind them of his past story.

At the same time another thought flashed through Claire’s mind. There had been no independent verification of Barclay’s stories. It could all have been made up.

Except Sadie Whittaker’s tale. That had been no fable
.

This was the trouble with Barclay – it was too hard to be sure what was fact and what was fiction.

The pathologist held back on the cause of death. He gave a sickening list of damage to the body, said flatly that it was not possible to say which had been done pre mortem and which post mortem because of the great heat and the tendency of bones to splinter and skin to split.

The only fact he could be sure of was that she had not been alive when the fire had started but had died sometime previously, probably more than a month before.

Claire rolled this fact around in her head. Dead – for around a month? Barclay had held on to her
corpse
for all that time.

Why wait? Only to set fire to it.

The answer banged back at her. Because he wanted to gain access to her car.

It was to be her funeral pyre.

Again – why? A formality?

She looked around her. Rolf was staring straight ahead and she knew he had switched all his emotion off. Siôna had his head in his hands, bent low, rubbing his temples as though he had a bad headache. Behind her, she knew, was the row of nurses, Kristyna’s colleagues, sitting still as statues.

The coroner was a plump lady with straggly blonde hair and a dark brown cashmere sweater which strained across large, rounded breasts. She looked in her middle-fifties, and tired.

She finally adjourned the inquest pending police enquiries. And back at Greatbach they continued with their work mechanically, waiting for something else to happen as though it was inevitable and they had no influence
over events but were being blown here and there. Puppets on loose strings.

The atmosphere settled slowly and uneasily. The morning meetings had resumed but they were different. Claire found it hard to concentrate. She would look at each staff member in turn and wonder what they were thinking. Once she found herself visualising a Daliesque image of a can opener cranking open their crania and herself peering into the matter, sifting through all that
they
knew, adding it to all that
she
knew or
thought
she knew.

But what was real and what simple paranoia or imagination?

Grant was no help. His mind was stapled to swags of material, colour charts, and the like. The moment she tried to discuss the situation with him his eyes would glaze and his face assume an abstracted look.

So time ticked forwards.

Then a week after the inquest Rolf stuck his head round her door with a friendly, ‘Mind if I come in, Claire?’

She shook her head, knowing that the atmosphere in the hospital must be broken soon, like heavy, hot weather before an electric storm. The strain was too great. It was too hard not to confide in colleagues or trust them. So she looked with pleasure at Rolf’s face, now almost gaunt. He looked ill and tired. She suddenly realised just how much they wanted this to be all over, like a painful course of treatment. For there to be an explanation, a conviction, safety. It brought it home to her how very tempting it must have been to acquiesce to Gulio’s conviction. Had she been here then she would have terribly wanted it to be him and see him locked away in Broadmoor or somewhere else – for ever.

In law they call it settlement. It seemed a very complete
word.

‘Sit down,’ she said, the warmth in her voice even surprising her. ‘Come on in. How are you?’

He hesitated, surprised at her friendliness. They had all grown too used to keeping things back. ‘Not good,’ he admitted, sinking into the chair. ‘I’ve been thinking about Heidi a lot lately.’

She was surprised. She had thought it would have been Kristyna he would have wanted to talk about. But she suppressed her surprise, put her head on one side and willed him to talk – and keep talking. She knew it would be an aimless meander which would probably get them nowhere. All it would achieve would be a release of the pressure inside his head.

‘She was a powerful force here, you know, Claire. Her methods were innovative but they were clever too.’ A pause during which his eyes flickered over her.