Disturbing Ground Read online

  “It’s the doctor. Come to see her.”

  Alun Williams was watching her expectantly. So - pointless as she knew the action to be - she knelt beside Bianca in the damp grass and unbuttoned the dress. A familiar one. Tangerine flowered crimplene missing a belt and a couple of buttons, now streaked with coal-water, sticking to the thin body, a vague aroma of sweat still clinging to it. Immersion in the Slaggy Pool had hardly diminished the scent of cigarettes and body odour. Megan put her stethoscope over the spot which should echo a heart beat. Not for at least a day it hadn’t. She knew the signs. Washer-woman hands, the beginnings of putrefaction, bloating and discoloration. And she made other observations too, broken fingernails solid with black dirt. Having fallen in, had she tried to escape the Slaggy Pool?

  Someone stepped forward. The other policeman. Not Alun. It was difficult to hear what he said with the earpieces of the stethoscope both in. She removed them and he repeated his question.

  “I said, doctor,” a stagey, carefully mouthed shout, “can you pronounce life extinct?”

  Megan nodded and stood up.

  “We’d better get the police surgeon over then and the SOCOs to take a couple of pictures.” She knew Nigel Jenkins less well. He had been a couple of years behind her at school. A slow ponderous character with pale, freckled skin, sandy hair and eyelashes. “We can move her then, you see, once you’ve done that.”

  Megan faced him. “Yes. She’s dead. For at least twelve hours I’d say.”

  Surely they should at least cover the body from curious eyes? Megan glanced downwards. Hers were open. Sightless.

  She closed the lids and they stayed shut.

  Alun Williams stepped forward. “Megan?” She swivelled round. Tall herself, she only reached his shoulder. It was a good, reassuring feeling, this solid Welsh manliness, as typical of a race as Guido had been typically Italian short, snake-hipped, olive skinned with white, white teeth. Alun’s face was more red than olive. He stood more than six feet four. And she knew he’d lost his front teeth in a rugby scrum while still at school. The two incisors must be implants or on a plate.

  “Megan,” he said again and she studied him properly. He must have helped drag Bianca from the water and slide her onto the bank. His uniform was wet, the trouser legs dripping, a dark tide mark just below the knee.

  “When possible …” He spoke woodenly, “we like to get them pronounced dead at the scene. Then they can be taken straight to the morgue. Saves a lot of trouble later. Red tape. Easier on the relatives.”

  She nodded, knowing Bianca had only the one relative. A daughter. And she would be relieved that the embarrassment that had been her mother was removed so expediently from the scene.

  Megan glanced around, trying to ignore the audience of gossiping people.

  “Well, there’s a thing.”

  “Always said that pool should be fenced off.”

  Gwendoline Owen in full and hearty voice. “I always thought she’d come to a peculiar end.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “She must have slipped and fallen in.”

  But the grass was dry except the spot where the body lay. The only mud had been created by the water streaming from Bianca’s clothes. There had been only a little light rain in the last couple of weeks. And she had seen Bianca herself on Friday when the grass surrounding the pool would also have been damp but not slippery. Megan was already trying to piece together the facts.

  But what was the alternative to an accidental slip?

  “So what then?’” she asked Alun. “After the police surgeon’s done his work?”

  “We’ll get her taken down to the mortuary, inform the Coroner. There’ll have to be a post mortem, of course, but I daresay it’ll only find out what we already know.”

  They both looked down at the figure. Small, dark rivulets still trickled back towards the pool like the delta of an Indian river, meandering and slow.

  Take her up tenderly. Lift her with care. Phrases of a poem her grandfather used to read to her drifted unbidden but appropriately through her mind.

  “You know who it is, of course, Megan?”

  She smiled at him. “The minute I saw her hair.”

  It had been yet another strange aspect of Bianca. The pink hair. She must have been seduced by the picture of chestnut locks on the front of a box of hair dye. Forgetting, of course, that hair prematurely whitened, would turn pink rather than chestnut - or plum - or any of the other descriptions on the side of the box. And she wouldn’t have either read or understood the caveats. So Bianca Rhys had further drawn attention to her strangeness by topping that odd head with even odder pink hair.

  Megan kept her eyes trained on Bianca’s face and felt a bleak cloud of sadness. So Bianca’s eccentric life was over in this dark, village setting. There would be no more requests for late night visits to check some manifestation of paranoia, plugs that ticked, radios that listened, water tanks that whispered threats. Or stories that sounded more like science fiction than clinical emergencies. No more paranoid accusations against neighbours or tales of poisoned food. No more injections of Largactil or Haloperidol in an attempt to quieten the voices that ordered, threatened, whispered or confided.

  Megan smiled. For her it meant no more hanging around for the duty social worker to sign the Section 29 form of the Mental Health Act to commit her patient, always against her will, to a psychiatric institution for her own and the public’s safety. Megan should have felt relief. Instead she felt only sadness. Because, like her ex-husband, Bianca would never exasperate her again. And even irritation can be preferable to a void.

  Alun Williams ventured an opinion. “Looks like she’s drowned herself.”

  Megan smiled at him too. His character always had been advertised by his appearance. Stolid, solid. Predictable, sensible. Unimaginative, obvious.

  She wished she had less imagination. That her mind didn’t constantly ask questions. How could it have happened? How exactly? An accidental trip? Arms flung out. Choking surprise.

  “I would have thought it unlikely,” she said. “She had a horror of falling into water. Hated trips to the seaside and that sort of thing.”

  Had it been deliberate? Had Bianca been a suicide risk? Maybe the questions were already flitting through her mind like flies up and down a sunny window because due to her dual role - patient’s GP and first medic on the scene - she would be asked this particular question by the Coroner.

  “Was Bianca Rhys a suicide risk?”

  And her answer?

  She had never thought so. Not suicide. Not something so planned and structured because Bianca’s mind was incapable of being either. But who could really know? She never had been able to assess Bianca’s mental state with any degree of confidence. Partly because the workings of her mind had been so tortuous, so different and unpredictable and partly because her mental state had made her emotionally labile, shifting through anger, curiosity, terror and ecstasy all within the whirlwind space of a fleeting moment. And, once discarded, the old emotion was not only dropped but forgotten. Completely. Bianca would have moved on to another state of mind. Like the lands at the top of Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree, once abandoned they were out of reach.

  Even standing on the edge of the Slaggy Pool on that warm August morning, Megan acknowledged that this was the first time she had ever felt quite comfortable in Bianca’s presence. The schizophrenic’s unpredictability had made even her own doctor wary of her, during each consultation preparing for the paranoia that would one day, invevitably, turn patient against the doctor who had tried her hardest to help her. And now, for the first time able to ignore Bianca’s threatening mental state, she was able to observe her physical condition without distraction. She hadn’t realised how thin and wasted her patient had become. Little more than a collection of sticks in a bag of skin. Fashioned so slenderly. Again Hood’s poem put her thoughts into words, the motionless form of Bianca providing only one movement, the water still streaming
back into the pond from her clothes, her hair and her skin, as though her very body had been saturated with the filthy water. Megan pulled away a frond of pondweed from between her lips and tidied back a strand of hair, at the same time recalling one of many peculiar conversations she had had with her patient. “I dye it chestnut,” she had confided to her doctor, “so that people will realise.”

  “Realise what?” But Bianca’s answer had been no answer but the usual mixture of half truth and half fantasy. “I only hope the birds won’t think of nesting in it,” she had said with a broad wink. “Chestnuts is a such a big tree.”

  Megan looked down again at the huddled body and wondered whether it had been delusion that had finally pushed Bianca over the brink. Or whether despite the supervision of her medication she had somehow managed to hoard it and overdose on the tranquilisers before tumbling into the pool.

  Alun Williams was speaking into his two way radio, leaving her alone for the moment. The other uniformed policeman was trying to shoo the crowd away with friendly banter. “All right now you lot. You’ve had your gawk. Now go home. Leave the doctor do her examination and let the poor lady rest in peace now. Leave her her dignity. There’s a good lot.”

  A few of the crowd did shamefacedly obey but their places at the ringside were soon replaced with others who had been attracted by gossip that spread fast up and down these narrow valleys with their cramped streets of terraced houses.

  Megan hung around, not liking to leave even though her role here was finished. She ran her eyes around the watchers, recognised a few familiar faces and reflected. Bianca had never had so much attention in life. Anticipating embarrassment, people usually gave her a wide berth, tolerating her, even defending her to outsiders, but she’d been difficult. She’d been known to approach folk in the street and accuse them of all sorts of crimes - stealing was the favourite. “Was it you took my dress from off the washing line?” Often tagging on, “Knickers and all. Quite nice white ones. With lace on.” Or, “Money is missing from my bag. And I have the feeling …” Small wonder people were so uncomfortable in the presence of mental illness. We translate their weird ramblings into truth. Then half believe it. Only ever half. We never give them the whole credit.

  Megan glanced across the road at the surgery. She ought to go back. But it would look callous to abandon the scene. Alun was still rapping out messages into his two way radio. And Jenkins had returned to the car for something. There was only her to mount guard and wait for the police surgeon and the scenes of crimes officer to trail up from Bridgend. Her gaze fell again on the pink hair. As she bent to touch it she recalled that although the colour must have been a hairdressers’s nightmare, Bianca’s hair had always been well cut. She must have had the attention of someone else with professional skill besides her medical team, a reasonably competent hairdresser, however hard it was to believe. Strands of it, sopping wet, some of the coal dust speckling the pink in a bizarre, punk pattern. Now Megan was touched with curiosity she had never experienced when Bianca was alive. Who had cut her hair? One of the equally strange people she hung around with? The dispossessed, the mad. The “care in the community” bunch. Someone handy with a pair of scissors? The hairdresser who attended the Parc mental hospital to which Bianca had been consigned during her more psychotic events? Now she may never know. And before she had not asked. Every consultation had been dealt with as quickly as possible; not prolonged by irrelevant chatter about hairdressers.

  Alun was back. He put a friendly hand on her shoulder. “Thanks, Megan,” he said. “I’ve radioed in and told them.” He scanned the pool. “Must have slipped in and drowned herself. It’s a bit muddy round the edge. I’ve often thought it was lucky a child didn’t fall in. Per’aps we should think about having fencing put round.”

  Meggie nodded. “Maybe,” she said indifferently without pointing out that the rim of the Pool would not have been muddy until the dripping body had been pulled from it.

  “It’s terrible how it often takes a tragedy to get things done - especially by the council.” His blue eyes met hers. “Mind you, she was such a funny old stick. Caused us no end of trouble.”

  “Really?”

  “Always callin’ us out she was, sayin’ someone was breakin’ in, stealin’, that the next door neighbour had killed someone and hidden the body down the mine, that she knew things about people tellin’ lies, that the TV aerial on the top of the house was takin’ messages from aliens. It went on and on. Accusations all the time. And I expect she was the same with you?”

  Megan merely smiled. It was no use him fishing around for medical detail. By the laws of confidentiality she could not divulge even what had been the commonest of knowledge. That Bianca Rhys had been a paranoid schizophrenic. In layman’s parlance, nutty as a fruit cake.

  Alun tried again. “Got a daughter, hasn’t she?”

  “That’s right. Carole Symmonds.”

  “Then I’d better send someone up there right away” He looked troubled. “One of the WPCs. I wouldn’t want her to find out about this …” His head jerked back towards the sodden heap of clothing. Strange how we can acknowledge the clothes containing a dead person easier than the corpse itself. “… through one of these people.” He scanned the ring of people constantly shifting around the pool. Thinning now.

  The crowd was, at last, begining to disperse. Short work to travel up to the head of the valley to Carole Symmond’s door.

  “I’d better get back.” Her feet turned towards the red brick health centre. “There’s nothing more I can do here. Shall I get you a blanket to cover her?”

  Alun nodded. “Thanks.”

  He stared down at his shoes. “You knew her well?”

  Everyone knew her well. Everyone in this claustrophobic village that masqueraded as a town.

  “She was a patient of mine.”

  It was pointless to obey the Medical Defence Union’s directive for confidentiality. She and her two partners were the only GP group serving the valley. Bianca had to be one of their patients.

  It was too obvious a fact to be a secret.

  “Can you think of a reason why she might have …?”

  Knowing Alun’s missing words were, “committed suicide” or more likely “topped herself”, Megan shrugged. Who knew what motives these people could dredge from their aberrant minds to justify a mortal dive into a filthy pond. It could be anything. An escape from an alien invasion; a search for the lost city of Atlantis; swimming with brilliantly coloured fish; hiding from a tiger; a conviction they could dive without oxygen; a lack of recognition that ponds were not paths; a desire to escape the ever-bidding voices of schizophrenia. The list was infinite.

  “I can’t say,” she said simply. “I’m sorry, Alun. I can’t. You might try speaking to Doctor Wainwright, the consultant psychiatrist. She was a patient of his.” And even disclosing that titbit had crossed the hidden line of secrecy.

  “Was she due some … medication?”

  The straight answer was no. Megan had given her her monthly injection only three days ago, Friday. Bianca’s mental state should have been stabilised temporarily. “I’d have to look at my records,” she said, adding regretfully, “you know we can’t divulge.”

  Alun put a hand on her shoulder then. “But she’s dead now, Megan. There isn’t any point in keeping secrets about her. It’ll all have to come out at the inquest.”

  “Even dead she has her rights. As do her family,” she said uncomfortably. “I can’t simply give you all her medical …”

  His hand was on her arm again. “I know that, Meggie. Sorry. I’m sorry for asking.”

  She smiled at his use of her pet name again. He always had been swift to apologise when he believed himself in the wrong. But if he was convinced he was right it was a different story. Not the penitent. Something else. Some steeliness that she had witnessed on more than one occasion. “It’s OK.”

  “And the coroner will probably want you to …”

  “Give a statem
ent? Attend the inquest? It’s OK, Alun,” she said again. “I do understand.”

  Afterwards she felt she should have done more than simply lend a blanket. But it was all she could do - at that time. Lend a blanket, return to her morning surgery. And to her irritation, as she crossed the road Gwendoline Owen detached herself from the crowd and followed her back into the health centre. “I realised our consultation wasn’t quite finished, Doctor,” she said, “but I didn’t mind waiting.” Her bright eyes glistened with curiosity. “I wonder what happened. What do you think, Doctor?”

  “I can’t say.” Megan knew she sounded excessively brisk. She gave her patient a brief smile. “Look, Mrs Owen. I’m sure you can appreciate. Time’s short. I’m very behind in my work. I have to get out on my visits. Why don’t you make another appointment.”

  It was deferring the problem. But for today she had had enough.

  “That’s all right by me,” Gwen Owen said, obviously piqued. “But I still don’t know what to do. Do I take the tablets for the pain and suffer with my stomach? Or do I …?”

  Suddenly Megan felt depressed at the self centred attitude of the chronically sick. “I’ll change your prescription for the pain killers.”

  Chapter 3

  Megan had two partners. And when she arrived for evening surgery on that balmy evening they were both standing in the reception area, talking. Not hard to guess what about.

  At least it wasn’t about her this time.

  Phil Walsh spoke first. “Trouble this morning?”

  “Bianca. They found her drowned in the Slaggy Pool.”

  “Nasty.” He put a friendly hand on her shoulder. “But it’s funny how many of these elderly schizos come to a sudden and violent end. I was reading an article the other day about it. Apparently they fall victim to assaults, accidents. Prevalence much much higher than the general public. Still upsetting for you though.”

  “Yes.”