Rosie (43 page)

Rosie shook with anger and nausea as he continued. To be forced to watch that poor deformed little woman, bravely trying to gulp it down, her hands fluttering uselessly in a vain protest, was one of the most distressing sights she’d ever seen. Rosie had an overwhelming desire to pick up the entire porridge pot from the trolley, tip it over his head, then kick him in the genitals.

She could do so little to make amends afterwards. She wiped Mabel’s mouth and nose and gently helped her back down on to the bed board, but Saunders was waiting to lock Mabel in and move on to the next patient.

Fortunately Saunders obviously found feeding patients beneath him, and after Mabel he ordered Rosie to see to all the ones who couldn’t do it themselves, as he stood by the door with his arms crossed, tutting at how long she took. Monica hadn’t eaten more than a couple of mouthfuls yesterday when the spoon was in one of Aylwood’s hands, while the other gripped the back of Monica’s neck. Rosie didn’t copy this cruel method; she held Monica firmly; but gently around the shoulders, at times encouraging her by stroking her, and talking softly as she would have done to a child. To her delight Monica’s mouth opened of its own volition, the food wasn’t spat back and she didn’t fight her.

Later on in the morning, as Coates was cleaning the corridor floor and Saunders sitting reading in the rest room, Rosie went into the office and stole a look at the patients’ notes lying in a heap on the desk. She had hoped to discover if there was a good reason why some of the patients like Mabel were given so little to eat. A bowl of runny porridge didn’t seem enough; even though she had no teeth she could have managed scrambled egg. But she was disappointed, there was nothing in the notes that she understood aside from a temperature chart. Dr Freed’s handwriting was illegible and Aylwood hadn’t added anything further. She came to the conclusion that the only ones who got a decent meal were those still able to feed themselves.

There was a filing cabinet tucked into a corner and a quick try of the drawers proved it unlocked. She didn’t dare investigate it now, not until she’d discovered what Saunders was doing and his plans for the rest of the morning. So she decided to go and find him and see what she could find out. He was still in the rest room, reading the newspaper. Rosie plonked herself down beside him.

‘Have you seen this about Edmund Hillary conquering Everest?’ he asked, waving the paper excitedly at her. ‘The first man to reach the summit,’ he said as if she didn’t know, and began to read her some extracts.

Under any other circumstances Rosie would have been anxious to read all this herself and discuss it with almost anyone as she thought it was a wonderful, brave achievement. But she had much more important things on her mind today than mountaineering, and too much disgust for this man to hold an unnecessary conversation with him.

‘What’s up?’ he asked as she began fidgeting.

‘Bored,’ she said. ‘What on earth do you do up here all day to pass the time?’

‘This,’ he said, rustling the paper. ‘I read them all, every word.’

Rosie looked sideways at him. He was such an awful-looking man, and now she knew how sadistic he was she could hardly bear to breathe the same air as him. She wondered what prompted him to work with the mentally handicapped. Was it because he was always a bully, or had the job brought that out in him?

‘Are you married?’ she asked.

He grinned wolfishly. ‘Was once, but I dumped her while I was in the army. I saw no sense in paying for a woman back home while I could get them for free anywhere.’

Rosie winced. It was very odd that she had likened him to Seth the first time she saw him, as physically there wasn’t even the faintest resemblance. But that brutish remark was exactly the kind Seth would have made. Linda’s warning that she should keep her distance from him rang in the back of her head, but she needed to stay beside him a little longer to try and build up some kind of trust.

‘Could I clean the office?’ she asked. ‘I’m bored with nothing to do. I’m not used to it.’

‘Aylwood doesn’t like anyone poking around in there,’ he said, giving her a sideways glance. ‘I can find something to stop you being bored if you like!’ he added with a leer.

Rosie shuddered. She was sure that was a sexual innuendo. ‘I’m not that bored,’ she said quickly and got up and walked away to go and check on the patients.

It gave her a pang in the heart to see them. Monica was sitting on the floor hunched up in the corner, her shorn head on her knees with her wasted arms protectively round it. She was calm today, and her face had lost that bestial look she’d had yesterday. Rosie wondered if she was still under the effects of the powerful sedative she’d been given then, or whether she fluctuated between rages and silence all the time. She wished she knew the patients’ case histories. She thought it would help to understand them, but she guessed that both Saunders and Aylwood would scoff at that.

There was a puddle on the floor, so Rosie went back and asked Saunders if he could let her have the keys to go in and mop it up.

‘You’re kidding!’ he said looking at her scornfully. ‘We don’t open the door again until dinner time.’

‘But she’s almost sitting in it,’ Rosie protested.

‘Serves her right,’ he said, and picked up his paper again.

‘Why can’t they have a chamber pot in there?’ Rosie said, trying very hard to keep her anger under control.

Saunders glared at her over his newspaper. ‘Are you an idiot or what?’ He sounded exasperated now. ‘Would you like a pot of shit thrown at you when you opened the door?’

Rosie turned away. He could be speaking from experience of course, but that still did not excuse his not allowing her to go in and clean the floor. She wondered how he’d feel if he had to sit in his own pee all morning.

At each viewing panel her heart sunk lower. Bertha was pacing up and down muttering, pounding on the door now and then. Angela was sitting on the floor twisting and untwisting a lock of hair in her fingers and cackling to herself. One of the old men was standing facing the corner, making strange faces; another was playing with himself for comfort. Mabel was now lying on the floor wailing, rocking herself to and fro, her shift soaked with urine. Rosie fixed all these scenes in her head so she could write them down later. She wished she could get into the office and search that filing cabinet. She doubted she’d ever get in there once Aylwood was back.

At around three that afternoon Rosie was almost falling asleep in her chair in the corridor when Saunders prodded her. It was very hot and airless and for the first time that day it was quiet everywhere. She thought perhaps the patients were affected by the heat too.

‘Go on in the office and get your head down,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll sit out here for a while.’

Suddenly she was wide awake, seeing a golden opportunity which was unlikely to present itself again. Even when Saunders went downstairs for his dinner, Gladys Thorpe had come to relieve him. She’d always thought Gladys to be a caring person, even if she was a bit slow, but when Rosie attempted to draw out her opinions about this ward, the nurse’s face tightened and she said, ‘It’s not for me to discuss it.’ Rosie was more shocked by Thorpe’s attitude than she was by the chargehands’; she was after all a trained nurse. If Rosie hadn’t been afraid it might get back to Matron, she would have torn her off a strip.

‘It’s so hot up here,’ Rosie said, waving her hand like a fan. She had a strong feeling Saunders was offering a favour which he’d expect to be returned. ‘Is it always like this?’

He shrugged and his small pale eyes looked vacant. ‘I suppose so. You get used to it. I could try and get some windows open. It’s turned much warmer outside. I think the summer’s come at last.’

Rosie went into the office, took the easy chair in the corner by the filing cabinet and put her head back. She could hear Saunders walking up and down the corridor, his shoes had steel ‘Blakeys’ and the keys on his belt jingled. Each time he paused she could mentally picture which one of the rooms he was looking into.

She knew when he sat down right at the far end of the corridor by the scraping noise the chair made on the floor, and quickly she opened the filing cabinet. The top drawer appeared to be just a place to put old reading matter, everything from back copies of the
Nursing Times
to a couple of battered paperback thrillers. She silently closed that and opened the lower drawer. To her delight it held the patients’ files. Two sections clearly marked, one as ex-patients and the other current.

Taking out the one marked Monica Endlebury, she began to skim through it, one ear cocked for Saunders. Right at the back was a typed case history.

It seemed Monica had been a normal child, though a little highly strung. In 1938 when she was fifteen she was sent to Paris to live with an aunt because her parents thought it would broaden her horizons. A year later when the war started her parents wrote and asked her aunt to send her home. Monica disappeared.

It was in the autumn of 1944 that people in the rural area around Reims began reporting sightings of a savage-like woman dressed in rags, living in the woods. Two men claimed they’d tried to speak to her but she had sprung at them like a wild dog, then disappeared again. In early January 1945 two young boys out hunting for rabbits heard a moaning sound coming from what looked like a makeshift camp. They investigated and discovered the woman half buried by leaves, on the point of death from cold and starvation.

She was taken to a local hospital, and as she was nursed back to health they realized that she was English from odd words in her demented babblings. They passed on a physical description of her to the British Embassy, who eventually not only got her back to England and into Friern Barnet Mental Asylum, but also contacted her parents.

Rosie was just flitting through a long, detailed report by a psychiatrist who believed that Monica had been kept prisoner for some years and subjected to every kind of sexual perversion, when she heard Saunders’s footsteps. Hastily she stuffed the file back into the drawer and closed it, then slumped back in the chair as if she was fast asleep.

She felt Saunders was standing in the doorway for quite some time watching her, but then just as she felt she must open her eyes and speak, he walked away. She listened for some few minutes before going back to the files. She could hear him unlocking cell doors and a louder babble of noise as he went in. She remembered then how he’d said he was going to try and open the windows a little, and assumed this was what he was doing.

Once his footsteps were back up the other end of the corridor, she opened the drawer again. As much as she wanted to know more about Monica and how she came to end up in Carrington Hall, she didn’t dare waste any more time reading case histories. What she needed were relatives’ addresses.

To her disappointment there were none. She could only assume they were kept downstairs in Mrs Trow’s office. She was desperate to read more about all the patients, but feeling certain her luck couldn’t hold out much longer, she put the files away and closed the drawer.

It was just gone four o’clock when she looked out along the corridor. To her surprise Saunders wasn’t sitting out there, and she was instantly alarmed.

Her first thought was that he’d come back to the office without her hearing him, seen her reading a file and slipped out to tell Matron. But as she stood in the doorway mentally planning excuses for poking her nose into things which didn’t concern her, she noticed that the door of Angela’s room was just slightly open.

The doors didn’t lock from the inside, a precaution against patients grabbing keys and locking themselves inside. She thought that Saunders must be in there opening the window, but bearing in mind what Aylwood had said about Angela being the most dangerous on the ward, she thought she’d better go and see if everything was all right.

She was halfway down the corridor when she suddenly realized that Saunders couldn’t possibly open those small high windows without taking something in with him to stand on. Furthermore, if he was occupied with this, how could he prevent the inmate darting out? She stopped short, thinking back to his unusually solicitous suggestion that she take a nap in the office. Why not the rest room? Unless of course it was because it was almost opposite Angela’s room.

The way he’d looked at Angela in the shower came back to her, and with it came a blinding flash of intuition of exactly what he was doing in her room. She crept forward on tiptoe. She felt queasy, knowing in her heart that she was going to see something appalling, but none the less having to look.

When she peeped through the viewing window it was almost like a flashback to the terrible scene impressed on her mind since childhood. Different characters perhaps, and shot from a different angle, but the same equally brutal act.

Saunders’s large body almost concealed the small woman trapped beneath his bulk. His mottled bare backside was pumping up and down, and Rosie had to stand on her toes in order to peer down to get the whole picture.

His trousers were round his ankles, and he had Angela forced on to her face on the bed board. She was holding her hands awkwardly above her head and her wrists were tied together with a cord. As she wasn’t making a sound, Rosie thought he must have gagged her with something, but she couldn’t see Angela’s face, only the storm of black curly hair.

Saunders’s grunting was so disgusting she retched, and that moment of enforced hesitation as her mouth filled with bile gave her just enough time to think before rushing in to intervene.

It felt like the worst kind of cowardice as she crept back along the passage away from the cell: again another guilty reminder that she hadn’t tried to stop her brothers using Heather either, or told the police what they’d done, but common sense told her that she was no match for Saunders inflamed with animal lust.

Standing in the office doorway she shook from head to toe, not knowing what to do. She had no doubt the man had been using the girl on a regular basis for months, probably ever since she came here. Maybe others too for all she knew.