Quicksand (4 page)

"I couldn't be bloody well mistaken, could I? Not when she didn't have
a stitch of clothes on her!"

 

 

-- Oh my God. Tomorrow's headline: Naked Woman Maniac at Large.

 

 

The door of the bar opened. "Ambulance!" said a cheerful man in a
peaked cap.

 

 

"Over here," Paul called, and added with a surge of gratitude, "You made
damned good time getting here."

 

 

While they were loading the salesman on his stretcher -- he wanted to
object, but by now shock had so weakened him he complied even as he
was insisting he didn't need to be carried -- the first of the later
wave of customers came in and the story had to be recounted to them,
and then again for the next arrivals. Paul drew aside wearily, lit a
cigarette and ignored the babble as he tried to decide whether there
might be a grain of truth in Faberdown's assumption.

 

 

-- Have we any violent females?

 

 

Like it or not, the answer was yes, though a person as badly disturbed
as the victim's description, wandering naked through the woods on a wet
February night and assaulting innocent strangers, would logically be
in one of the horsebox-like isolation cells behind steel bars and three
locked doors.

 

 

-- Lieberman?

 

 

It was unlikely. But another homemade key had been found under his pillow
this morning, and the locksmith made no secret of his ambition to pick
every lock in the hospital.

 

 

-- It could be, I suppose. . . .

 

 

It was not, however, logical reasoning which decided him on action. It was
the chance that brought Mrs Weddenhall into the pub.

 

 

He knew her only slightly, but she wasn't easily forgotten once she'd been
identified. A masculine woman of fifty, tonight wearing a trench-coat
over her invariable tweed suit, woollen stockings and brogue shoes, she
supplemented private means by breeding dogs at a kennels just outside
Yemble, but regrettably that didn't occupy her time so fully she couldn't
spare some to interfere in other people's lives. She was a justice of
the peace and at the last election had stood for the local council;
the electorate had shown sufficient sense to frustrate her.

 

 

She came briskly in, demanded in her booming baritone what the blazes
was going on, was told, and nodded vigorously. Armed with the bare bones
of third-hand information, she approached Paul and addressed him in the
patronising tone appropriate to a mere grammar-school product of only
twenty-eight.

 

 

"I hear one of your . . . ah . . . charges has gone over the hill. If you
can tell me exactly where she attacked this unfortunate chap, I'll bring a
couple of my hounds along. Soon root her out of cover, I can promise you."

 

 

Paul looked at her, not believing his ears. He saw the incipient dewlaps
along her jaw, the bulky chest which it was impossible to visualise as
bearing feminine breasts, the straight legs four-square planted on the
floor in their armour of laced shoes.

 

 

"Are you honestly suggesting hunting her? With dogs?"

 

 

"Damn' sight quicker than traipsing through the woods around here on foot!
Ask anyone who's been fool enough to volunteer as beater for a shoot!"

 

 

"Did you see the injured man?" Paul inquired sweetly.

 

 

"The ambulance drove off just as I arrived."

 

 

"Quite a big man," Paul said. "The woman who went for him must have been
powerfully built. Brawny. Muscular."

 

 

"All the more reason for doing as I suggest!"

 

 

"In short," Paul concluded, ignoring the comment, "I picture her as
being rather like you."

 

 

He didn't stay to see the effect of the words.

 

 

 

 

His hand shook as he pushed the key into the lock of his car. The wind
had dropped, but that hadn't made the air any warmer -- only ensured
that the drizzle would stay in this vicinity instead of moving on.

 

 

-- That woman! I'd like to do to her what Mirza suggested doing to Holinshed!

 

 

He let the car roll to the edge of the pub's carpark. There he paused,
struck by a minor problem. Faberdown was a stranger hereabouts, on his
own admission; he'd said no more than "woods half a mile away." And the
pub was sited at a crossroads.

 

 

-- Must be the Cornminster road. Coming into Yemble by any other route,
he'd have passed a house with a phone long before he reached the Needle
in Haystack. In which case . . .

 

 

The woods Faberdown meant must be a neglected copse which he passed daily
going to and from the hospital, with a gateway adjacent into which a car
could conveniently be run while the driver relieved himself. It was part
of the grounds of what had once been a fine private house, burned to
the foundations in the depression years and never rebuilt. Speculation
was still rife locally as to whether the owner had fired it to collect
the insurance money.

 

 

-- I wonder if the attack was really unprovoked!

 

 

The idea sprang from nowhere, but seemed like such a dazzling access of
insight he was about to drive in the direction of Cornminster without
further ado, convinced he would find some harmless imbecile wandering in
search of kindly treatment. That was ridiculous. The salesman's arm had
really been broken and his eye had been blacked with a heavyweight punch.

 

 

He swung the wheel the other way, towards the hospital.

 

 

-- Thank goodness Iris left me the car. Otherwise long horrible walks in
rain like this, endless standing at bus-stops with the feet squelching . . .

 

 

She would have been entitled to take it, of course. It had been bought with
her money, not his.

 

 

He swung past the big blank-and-white sign identifying "Chent Hospital for
Nervous Disorders"; the gatekeeper peered out with a startled expression
meaning what's Dr Fidler doing coming back at this time of night.

 

 

The building itself loomed sinister with its mock battlements. Relic of a
Victorian miser's dreams of grandeur, it was about as unsuitable for use
as an asylum as any in Britain, half make-believe castle, half ill-conceived
afterthoughts such as the high-security Disturbed wing in red brick and
the inevitable tall chimney crowned with its spiky lightning conductor.

 

 

But it had been left for a mental hospital by heirs grateful that the
owner had finally been certified insane after making their lives hell
well into his eighties, and with the shortage of facilities one had to
be satisfied with what one could get.

 

 

-- Though the impact of it on a patient arriving for the first time
must be disastrous! Imagine being delivered here in a state of acute
anxiety, for instance, and seeing those turrets and crenellations, and
then hearing that iron-studded oaken door go thud behind you! Christ,
the effect on the staff is bad enough!

 

 

He braked the car with a grinding of gravel and marched up to the forbidding
entrance. It was locked after six, but a key for it was among the many
which constituted his burden of office. In the ball he found himself
face to face with Natalie.

 

 

"Paul! What are you doing here? Never mind, I'm glad to see you."

 

 

Blank, he stared at her. "You won't be when I tell you why I've come."

 

 

"This alleged escaped lunatic?"

 

 

" Is it one of our patients? I didn't think It could possibly -- "

 

 

She made an impatient gesture. "Of course not! I've been double-checking
because the police insisted, but everybody's safe and sound."

 

 

"That's how you heard about it -- from the police?"

 

 

"They rang up about ten minutes ago. I must say I didn't get a very clear
idea of what's supposed to have happened. Something about a man in a car
being attacked by a naked madwoman, as far as I could make out. Is that
right?"

 

 

Paul let his shoulders sag. "Yes, I'm afraid it's true. He came staggering
into the Needle with a broken arm."

 

 

"Then we can look forward to a month or two of the leper treatment from
our neighbors, I suppose," Natalie commented without humour. "Did you
only come back to make sure it wasn't somebody from here?"

 

 

"That's right. And since it isn't, I suppose I'd better go down to the
woods where it happened so that somebody's on hand to stop Mrs Weddenhall
turning loose her hounds."

 

 

 

 

 

 

*5*

 

 

-- I'm sure Natalie thought I was joking about Mrs Weddenhall.
I only wish I was.

 

 

He clicked his lights up to full beam and accelerated down the winding
Cornminster road. The village stopped dead at this point, though on
the other roads leading from the junction it straggled a few hundred
yards further. In seconds a curve had taken him out of sight of human
habitation and he was driving between steep black banks crowned with
wet thorny hedges.

 

 

-- Abstract of insanity: aloneness in a private world. Oh, there is some
excuse for a reaction like Mrs Weddenhall's. A cripple can still be a
person, but in what sense is a lunatic human? Humanity's in the mind,
in the tangle of thoughts spun by the brain, and once that's gone what
remains is human only in outward shape. But sometimes one can win back
what's been lost. You can't create a person, only let him grow, but you
can occasionally, with care and planning and foresight, help shattered
fragments bind together, whole.

 

 

He felt the car's rear wheels slide on mud and slowed down; better to
get there in one piece than not at all.

 

 

-- All the king's horses and all the king's men . . . They put me back
together. I owe them that.

 

 

The doom / the dome of the black night leaned on his skull with a
crushing weight. For an instant he had, with terrifying vividness,
the old familiar illusion: that when he ended this interval alone and
once again came on his fellow men, they would stare at him strangely
and speak incomprehensible new tongues.

 

 

-- I built myself a blank black trap like this empty road. I should have
had the sense to tell Iris the truth even if it meant her not marrying
me. They don't talk about it in my family because it's a shameful thing,
and I banked on their silence. By shifts and devious expedients I eluded
the admission and uttered those diversionary half-truths: psychiatry is
the coming thing, that's the field where the great new discoveries will be
made from now on, this is the right branch of medicine for an ambitious
newcomer to select. . . . And the worst sophistry of all: passing off
my analysis with that ready phrase "Physician heal thyself." What good
are cliches in ordering your life? Stick to the stale and sooner or
later you wear down into the standard mould. Goodbye individual, hello
matchstick man!

 

 

He braked abruptly. There was his goal, and he hadn't been joking about
Mrs Weddenhall.

 

 

In the glare of his lights stood three vehicles, partly blocking the road.
Under branches dripping rainwater, a Ford Anglia station wagon, which
must be Faberdown's, a police Wolseley with its blue light shining,
and Mrs Weddenhall's elderly Bentley with its wired rear compartment
used for transporting dogs.

 

 

He pulled as far on the verge of the road as he dared, cut his engine,
and at once heard a low bark: the sound between a cough and a roar which
he'd noticed many times as he drove around Yemble. He jumped out.

 

 

And there she was, standing with her dogs on short leashes -- two
wolf-hounds, rangy, rough-coated, excited at being brought out into the
country at night. She was talking to a police constable in a waterproof
cape, and Paul caught the tail of her latest statement as he approached.

 

 

"But we can't have maniacs terrorising people in the isolated farms
between here and Cornminster!"

 

 

-- Christ, she must be eager to have dashed home and fetched the dogs so
quickly!

 

 

"Officer!" he called. "What's going on?"

 

 

A little relieved at the interruption, the policeman turned. "I shouldn't
hang around here, sir," he warned. "We've had a report about -- "

 

 

"I know all that, thanks. My name's Fidler, Dr Fidler. I'm a psychiatrist
from Chent Hospital."

 

 

The policeman grunted. "Not one of your patients on the loose, is it?"

 

 

"No, of course not. I checked at the hospital to make sure. What are you
proposing to do?"

 

 

"Well, we're going to search the area, sir. I've sent for extra men and
a dog-handling team." A sidelong glance at Mrs Weddenhall. "As I've been
trying to explain to this lady here, though it's kind of her to offer
assistance we prefer to rely on our own experts."

 

 

"And where are they?" Mrs Weddenhall rasped. "Anyhow, like it or not
you're going to have as much help as you can use. I told my kennel boy to
ring around the neighbourhood and turn out everyone he could reach. With
guns." She set her chin aggressively.

 

 

-- I'm dreaming. I must be dreaming.

 

 

Paul swayed a little, very conscious of having drunk a lot of beer and
whisky without stopping for his evening meal.