Disturbing Ground (2 page)

And she saw in his honest face that he remembered something of their old relationship as he smiled down at her. “Doctor,” he began again. Awkwardly. And again, “Megan. Someone’s … You wouldn’t come and have a look, would you?”

“Of course.”

He might still make her blush but he had lost the power to make her heart miss beats.

She returned to her surgery just long enough to pick her stethoscope from the desk, apologise in the corridor to Gwendoline Owen and invite her to wait or make another appointment even though she knew the old gossip would be unable to resist following her out. Despite the arthritis she was already snapping at her heels like an impatient terrier, her bright, inquisitive little eyes anxious to miss nothing. Calmly Megan Banesto followed Alun Williams out into the sunshine of that imperfect day.

Moments later she was staring down at the dripping, sodden mess that had been one of her patients and forming incongruous thoughts. It had been a strange name, Bianca, for a woman who had probably never left Wales. Almost certainly neither she nor her parents had ever visited Italy. But then so much more than simply her name had been odd about Bianca Rhys.

And it had ended in this.

Megan took in the rim of people, nosily watching. Always a few to explain as though the others were blind - or stupid.

“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?”