Dangerous Minds Read online

  But eventually she arrived.

  She found an empty space in the car park and headed towards the quadrangle.

  Greatbach had been built in the late Victorian era, when mental institutions slammed the doors on their inmates, often for ever; this was their punishment for even minor deviations from what was deemed to be socially acceptable behaviour. Claire had glanced through its archives and unearthed illegitimacy, homosexuality, sometimes nothing more than high spirits, or what today would be classed as excitable or hysterical behaviour. At times even simply glancing through the archives she could make a diagnosis:

  Sitting in the corner not speaking nor was the patient eating. At times a tear would roll down her cheek but when asked she said nothing.

  Depression.

  Or:

  Following childbirth the patient appears unable to function, crying out that the child cannot be hers as it has odd ears. Refusing to feed it as she says her milk is sour.

  Puerperal psychosis.

  The list was endless, and Claire cried out for these lost souls so misunderstood, so poorly treated.

  In the 1980s, Greatbach had been modernized and a couple of wings added, but most of these were for office staff or outpatients’ clinics. Since then the move had been a steady swing from inpatients to outpatients. But the heavy Victorian entrance was still the only way in and the only way out, leading to a quadrangle overlooked by most of the ward windows and into a spacious entrance hall with a Minton tiled floor. A nice touch from the Potteries. She rarely stepped over it without an appreciation for its beauty.

  This door was watched over by a porter who sat in an office behind a small window; he greeted her with a cheery, ‘Good morning, Doc,’ which relieved the gloom a bit. She wished him a good morning back and stepped inside, going straight upstairs to her office.

  She spent a fruitful twenty minutes with Rita, her secretary, dealing with messages and fitting in appointments. Then she locked her bag in her office and headed for the wards.

  Her first port of call was on the ground floor to see an inpatient, David Gad. He sat heavily on her conscience because he had the most profound case of depression she had ever known. Gad had attempted suicide more than sixty times. Each time he’d been admitted to the local general hospital, had some counselling and been discharged. But the repeated attempts had finally brought him to her attention and she had delved into his past.

  He was eighty-five years old and had had a successful jewellery business in Hanley until he had retired aged seventy-five. It had been then that his suicide attempts had begun, increasingly determined, and although Claire knew something was at the bottom of it, she had never found out what.

  David was sitting, perfectly still, staring out of the window. He turned around when she entered and his face was so bleak it touched her heart. He was a tall, slim man with an upright bearing and thick silver hair. He had hollow dark eyes and a hooked nose. His physical health was good but his face, in repose, was haunted and sad. It was a sadness that reached out to touch her, to swamp her even. It wrapped him in an impenetrable fog.

  Sometimes there is no cause for depression. The sufferers simply experience profound unhappiness. If a cause can be found, it is much easier to treat with CBT. The new buzz word. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. In other words, you talk it through and see if you can find a way through the human maze of an unhappy mind, encourage the sufferer to work things out for themselves. But CBT had not helped David Gad so far.

  He had a family – she had seen him talking to his grandson, an earnest, dark-haired teenager wearing a kippah. There were numerous cards on his bedside table. One sported a dark red rose, its name underneath. Someone loved him. So why, she wondered, was this elegant, highly intelligent and courteous man so determined to destroy himself?

  She sat down opposite him and he met her eyes. His were dark as ditchwater, quite unfathomable. He looked through her and beyond her, back into the past. They were tortured.

  Then he spoke. ‘Your job, I understand,’ he said, smiling, ‘is to prevent me from killing myself. Yes?’

  ‘If it’s possible,’ she said cautiously. ‘I’m only human, David.’

  He gave a little smile at that. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Only human – not God himself.’

  She watched him curiously. He was adept at keeping something back.

  ‘David,’ she urged gently. ‘Confide in me.’

  He gave a great sigh. ‘Is that the answer, I wonder? Would that give me peace of mind?’

  She leaned forward, touched his hand. ‘I can’t see any other way I can help you. But if we don’t find some solution, one day …’ She didn’t need to complete the sentence. He understood.

  She left him thoughtful, but the card had evoked an uncomfortable memory for her.

  Deep Secret.

  The phrase tugged at her. We all have them, don’t we? Grant must have done to have gone without a word.

  The phrase held further resonance. Claire recalled her own deep secret, sneaking up to her half-brother’s cot, hatred in her heart and a pillow in her hand, and prayed Adam would never know.

  THREE

  The day passed with a long ward round, interviews with patients’ relatives and an even longer outpatient clinic, which took all afternoon. By the time Claire was heading home, the worst of the rush hour was over. It was the moment of brief lull between going home from work or school and going out again. It was the time when everyone is having their tea.

  Except her.

  As she drove Claire reflected on her work. The psychiatrist’s job was full of pitfalls: the attempted suicides who were finally successful, the anorexics who tested their body beyond the limit. There were the schizophrenics who caused public disturbance and not infrequently committed headline-grabbing crimes, the bipolar patients who caused mayhem whether up or down. And then there were the alcoholics and the druggies.

  The problems of mental health compounded and spilled over into vague symptoms that involved other specialists, who all complained in their turn: the gastroenterologists, renal specialists, neurologists, general physicians, and so on. And everyone in the general hospitals shovelled them as fast as they could right back to her.

  She wasn’t short of inpatient problems. Just beds. But at least while they were admitted she knew what her patients were thinking.

  Not so with the outpatients, psychopaths like Jerome Barclay and another outpatient who was more overtly dangerous: Dexter Harding, who made her so twitchy she made sure he was never between her and an escape route. She had her finger hovering over the panic button during his consultations.

  Dexter was an out-and-out thug who had torched a house, believing it was revenge on the girlfriend who had dumped him. But, in typically stupid Dexter fashion, he’d got the wrong house; as a result four members of the same family had died.

  Inexplicably, in Claire’s opinion, Dexter was walking the streets again, having been released, deemed no longer to be a danger to the general public. Now he was simply under a Community Treatment Order. He had to attend clinic every fortnight. He was not allowed to leave the country. If he even left Staffordshire, he had to inform his community psychiatric nurse, Felicity Gooch; and he had to report to her three times a week anyway. If he defaulted on any of these conditions, she had the power to detain him; but Dexter, stupid as he was, wasn’t that stupid. He obeyed the CTO to the letter, turned up three times a week to speak to Felicity, and was as regular as clockwork for her fortnightly appointments. He was prompt and punctual, surprisingly polite, usually arriving with ten minutes to spare and accepting the proffered cup of tea with a thank you. But behind the façades of normality and politeness, Claire sensed something dark deep within him.

  Not quite evil. That would take intelligence – planning. No. It was something else that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something like hatred, which beamed out of him.

  And she knew that she was on edge throughout his appointment when they shared the sma
ll space of a consultation room, which seemed to shrink even further in his presence.

  She wasn’t happy about Dexter being out on the streets at all, but she had no jurisdiction to keep him in. And even if she had had, the pressure on mental health beds was huge – they could have filled Greatbach four times over, and then some. Many patients attended the day centre – mostly those with severe learning difficulties or chronic conditions who needed support rather than close supervision. Others lived in sheltered housing, with resident staff covering the twenty-four hours in three eight-hour shifts. It wasn’t a perfect system but, the way things were in the National Health Service, it was the best of a bad job. An affordable alternative. And there was a whole host of others who attended Claire’s huge outpatient clinics.

  Inevitably there were incidents.

  Two months ago a mental health patient, not detained under a Section, had gone on the rampage in Cardiff. He had, from somewhere, found an axe; two people had lost fingers and another almost his arm before he had been restrained by the general public and the police. And only then (talk about shutting the stable door) had he been detained under a Section 3. Initially for six months, which would almost certainly be extended to years. He wouldn’t be going anywhere soon. Reading the patient’s history, in Claire’s opinion he should have been detained under a Section 3 in the first place. He had had a history of extreme and unprovoked violence. But she felt some sympathy for the psychiatrist in charge of his case, who had been given a very hard time by the Press and the general public, who had firmly placed full responsibility at his door. The hospital had had to pay substantial compensation, which further robbed the struggling NHS.

  Ah well – for once not her problem; it was time to go home.

  The evening sun was golden through the car windows, so the city looked blessed with sunshine, even the streets of terraced houses looking almost festive against the backdrop of a couple of bottle kilns, their stumpy shapes unmistakable against the sky. Maybe it had been a golden September evening, just like this, that had given rise to the fable that the pavements in London were paved with gold, tempting people away from Staffordshire. And perhaps, enjoying the evening’s beauty, even here, people walked the streets with a bounce in their steps. A few cyclists weaved energetically in and out of the traffic, their jaunty actions mirroring the optimism of the evening.

  There was another reason why she felt good. She had resisted the temptation to text or phone Grant for almost a month. That felt like a feather in her cap, a gold star pinned to her breast. She was really pleased with herself for this one small achievement.

  Grant had been her live-in partner for almost five years, and had been colourfully and energetically renovating and decorating their home until six months ago. Halfway through his project, he had abruptly and without warning abandoned both it and her. Inexplicably and out of the blue, he had jettisoned her and vanished, and she didn’t know why. She still found it strange to return to the echoing floors and empty rooms after a day’s work and be greeted by no smell of paint, no swatches of material to look at, no shade cards to study. No ideas for furnishings and colour schemes. Nothing. She had been left with a tidy, empty place, some of the rooms still undecorated and unfurnished, paint splodges on the floor that awaited sanding or a carpet to hide them. One room still had the ladders and paint pots ready for a final coat she did not have the heart to apply. And although she was a psychiatrist, a forensic psychiatrist at that, she had not been able to work out why he had gone. What the trigger had been. On that last morning Grant himself had offered no explanation. He had simply mumbled something almost shamefacedly about having to go – as though he was someone who was a native of a country at the top of the Faraway Tree. His land was swinging away and he had to just go with it. She was still perplexed and it had been that puzzlement which had left the wound so raw.

  They hadn’t argued. In the months preceding his departure they had reached an agreement, a bargain – she would go to work and earn the money and he would renovate their house. When children came he would be the house-husband. He had seemed happy with that. She didn’t know why he’d gone. It didn’t make any sense.

  That had been a little over six months ago, in mid-February. And now it was September. The weather was cooling, the nights drawing in, as her mother would say, tight-lipped in disapproval of the approaching winter. Almost as though he was ashamed of his decision, Grant had sneaked round and collected his stuff when he would have known she was at work. She’d come home to miss it: his slippers, his clothes, one or two ornaments she’d given him. She’d gone from room to room, missing the few articles one by one. His teddy bear from childhood, a dreadful picture she’d always hated of an E-Type Jaguar. She would have given anything to see it back on the wall.

  None of their joint belongings had gone, she’d noticed. Just his personal things: clothes, pictures, kitchen utensils. He was keen on cooking and she missed that too, though sometimes his dishes had proved a little too adventurous. Octopus biryani being one of them. Yuk. Even now she wasn’t sure whether she would smile or retch at the recollection. She didn’t know where he was living now and she’d never known his family, who lived in isolation somewhere in Cornwall. Apart from that unsatisfactory mumbled non-explanation, he had not been in touch. Not ringing. Not writing. Not even a bloody text message, for goodness’ sake.

  Humiliatingly, after three weeks of insomnia, she had texted him, asking him to come round and explain what and why, but he had not responded and she recalled someone telling her that boys didn’t ‘do’ explanations. Clarity, she’d asked? It was a girl thing, her friend had said. But she was left unfulfilled. She wanted – needed – an explanation. Settlement. She needed to know why he had left so she didn’t make the same mistake next time. If there was to be a next time. Was it because she wasn’t pretty enough, she asked herself? Or was too short tempered? Or had halitosis? She breathed into her hands and smelt nothing but toothpaste. But she double-flossed all the same, booked in with the dentist for an extra scale and polish, and rinsed noisily and energetically with a mouthwash that guaranteed fresh breath.

  Was it something more inherent in her personality? Was she boring? Too predictable? Too wrapped up in her work? Not sexy enough? She went through everything: the physical, the mental, the social; found no answers, texted Grant again. Please – at least tell me why?

  She watched her phone obsessively for an answer.

  Nothing.

  She flicked the memories from her mind, turned into her drive and climbed out of her car, glancing around her superstitiously, as though by allowing her thoughts to dwell on two of her most concerning patients they would, by black magic, appear as suddenly and dramatically as Houdini bursting out of a sealed casket.

  But there was no one, simply a few loiterers.

  The empty house greeted her sullenly as she let herself in. Maybe she should get a cat, Claire reflected, hanging her bag on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, bare until a carpet was laid. Something or someone to welcome her home, at least. Not this echoing, hollow emptiness. Perhaps a cat or a dog would relieve this feeling of oppressive solitude which she hated. She felt like kicking the bottom step. Even a bloody budgie to at least tweet a welcome home. She entered the sitting room, one of the few rooms completely decorated and furnished. Even the curtains were hung. Ivory silk with large red flowers, blending in with pale carpet and a three-piece suite. Large black television, silently sulking in the corner. She and Grant had splashed out on a huge screen for the nights they snuggled up on the big soft sofa and watched a thriller chiller or a romance or … anything really.

  She missed him most of all at this point in the day, the moment when she let herself in to a house that felt dead. Like entering a tomb, shutting out the living world outside, the front door a stone sealing up the mouth.

  She moved towards the faux-log gas fire, meaning to light it to bring some warmth and movement into the room, but she was distracted. The wedding invi
tation glared at her from the mantelpiece, demanding a response. She picked it up. She had to make a decision. Should she go to Jerome’s wedding, suss the situation out for herself, or do the wise thing – leave well alone and decline. He was not her responsibility any more. She had discharged him and he had kept out of trouble since then or she would have been informed. Whatever her private misgivings and suspicions about Barclay, his police record held only minor misdemeanours. She read the invitation through again, more carefully this time, noting the names: Mr and Mrs Trigg, Roxanne, their daughter, the bride. It was silly to infer anything from a name and an address in the Westlands, the smart area of the city, where the houses were detached and the gardens large, but somehow she perceived Roxanne and her parents as being vulnerable.

  The ceremony was to be held at The Moat House, Acton Trussell, a venue near Stafford, at Junction 13 of the clogged-up artery which was the M6. She’d been there to a wedding once before and a couple of times for dinner, but since then it had been upgraded. She sat down and looked it up on her iPad. It looked beautiful, boasting a Norman moated house, a modern, well-organized interior and an award-winning chef.

  Great combination.

  She fingered the card again, went through the picture gallery of the hotel, now visualizing Barclay in each shot, trying to picture him as the blushing groom and failing completely. Barclay would smirk and mock. He would meet her eyes, knowing she would understand. This was all a play to him. She only hoped it would prove to be a comedy, not a tragedy. She couldn’t help herself. She was afraid for these three people whose lives were about to be wrapped up in Barclay’s.

  She stared into the distance, trying to bore into Barclay’s mind.

  Getting married? Why? He hated women, despised them, belittled them and tried to run them over when he was tired of them. He had been violent towards the two women in his life – his mother and Sadie Whittaker, the ex he had almost murdered. Barclay didn’t form relationships, particularly with the opposite sex. He used them. So how was he planning to use Roxanne?