The Mind of Mr Soames (29 page)

‘So he’s still there, so far as you know.’

The farmer nodded.

Turning to Takaito, Bryce said: ‘What do you think? He’s in the barn armed with a pitchfork. It will be daylight in about two and a half hours. If we want to avoid unnecessary trouble it might be better to wait until then.’

‘Is there any electric light in the barn?’ Takaito asked.

‘No,’ said the farmer.

‘What have you got in there?’

‘Tools, a tractor, a packing bench and about a gross of wooden boxes—and sacks, of course—about a thousand sacks.’

‘So Mr Soames might be a little difficult to find with the aid of torches.’

‘He might indeed. He’d be sitting pretty, him and his pitchfork.’

Conway said: ‘I think we ought to recognise that Mr Soames is probably thinking in exactly the same terms. During the hours of darkness he will feel hunted and demoralised—but there is this difference. Daylight means the end of the fine for him. He can be seen and pursued.’

He paused to stroke his nose thoughtfully with one finger. ‘My own feeling is that he is currently undergoing a process of mental breakdown, triggered largely by desperation. The longer it lasts the more intractable he will become. By daylight he may well be prepared to fight to the death to avoid recapture.’

‘Dr Conway is right,’ Takaito said, sipping his whisky-coffee combination. ‘Mr Soames has just killed a dog, and he is afraid of dogs. At the present moment he is probably shivering in the barn, holding on to the pitchfork and wondering how he can escape from the trap before daylight. He will become more desperate and single-minded as time goes on.’

‘So?’ Bryce asked.

‘We must tackle him now, while he is still uncertain and undecided. We must confront him with Mrs Dewison.’

Jennifer Dewison, looking pale and fatigued, sat quietly in the background biting her nails.

‘I can’t really see what that will accomplish,’ Bryce said. ‘I don’t like the risk involved. If it comes to the point we can always send for tear gas and drive the man out.’

‘You are not dealing with a professional gangster,’ Takaito pointed out. ‘I think it would be a grave mistake to overdramatise this final stage. Let Mrs Dewison talk with him alone for a few minutes, then Dr Conway and I will talk with him. By now he has had enough of freedom. He is like the budgerigar that escapes from its cage into the freedom of the outside world, only to die of starvation, exposure and hostile attacks from sparrows. He will welcome captivity, but he must be talked into it.’

‘All right, but does Mrs Dewison know what to say—how to deal with him?’

Takaito smiled in his inscrutable oriental way. ‘That is something we can best leave to Mrs Dewison herself.’

Bryce nodded resignedly, and a few minutes later they went out to the south barn. The rain had eased slightly, but it was still descending in a fine mist, urged on by a cold wind from beyond the hills. Near the barn two soldiers and a policeman were stationed, with an Alsatian dog crouching as blackly and silently as the night itself.

They advanced to the closed door of the barn—Bryce, Takaito, Conway and Mrs Dewison. For a few moments they held a brief whispered conference, and then the three men retired to the shadows, leaving the woman to deal with Mr Soames in her own way.

She picked up a piece of wood from the ground and rapped on the door of the barn with it.

‘John Soames,’ she called. ‘John Soames—it’s Jennifer.’

Two minutes went by in silence. She knocked again.

‘John Soames. This is Jennifer.’

Presently the door of the barn moved fractionally. She could see nothing, but imagined him peering through the crack, surveying her suspiciously.

When he spoke his voice was husky and hesitant. ‘Are... are you alone?’

‘Yes—quite alone.’

The door opened wider. ‘Come in—quickly,’ he invited.

Apprehensively she went into the cold darkness of the barn. The door clattered shut behind her. Something heavy was dragged across the concrete of the floor. Mr Soames was barricading the door.

‘Where are they?’ he asked.

A certain breathless quality in his voice impinged oddly on her senses. She fumbled in her pocket for a cigarette and then lit it. Mr Soames’s face sprang into gaunt, hollow reality about four feet from her. His skin was white and his eyes seemed to burn with some inner fever. Suddenly it occurred to her that he was ill, irrationally ill, perhaps dangerously ill.

‘They are not far away, but they are not going to come any nearer,’ she said calmly. ‘They want you to go to them. They want to help you.’

‘They want to send me back to the Institute.’

‘No. They just want to help you. That is why they allowed me to come here and talk to you. You can come away with me, if you like.’

‘What do you mean, come away?’

‘They don’t want any trouble. They don’t want you to keep on killing dogs and hurting people. They think that if you were with me you... you would be all right.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any trouble, too. With you there would be no trouble.’

‘Then, why not come with me, back to my house.’

‘No. I stay here. They have dogs, and they are waiting for me.’

‘They will let us pass.’

‘No.’

The flame of the cigarette lighter shortened and dwindled then sputtered out. The blackness descended like a solid impenetrable fog. She sensed his movement and was not surprised when she felt his body close to hers, his arms encircling her—but she was suddenly conscious of the heat of his flesh, the raging temperature, the brittleness of his energy.

‘You are ill,’ she said quietly. ‘Your body is like a burning flame.’

‘I am cold,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, if there is a sun, I shall be warm.’

‘Come back with me now. You will be even warmer in bed, and Richard is away, so there will be no trouble. They will let you pass.’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think they will let me pass.’

‘They will—I promise you—if we go together.’

The stubbornness in him seemed to dissolve. The fact that she was here with him, alone, in the barn seemed miraculous enough—the last thing he could ever have imagined.

‘I know,’ he said abruptly. ‘We stay here, you and me, and they bring us food. That way we cause no trouble.’

‘We can’t do that. Tomorrow the farmer will want to use his barn and we shall be in the way.’

‘We can stay in a corner where he will not see us.’

‘No,’ she insisted, ‘you must come with me now.’

‘You talk like them,’ he accused. ‘You say what I must do. And when I go out they will be there with dogs and they will take me back to the Institute.’

‘You’re wrong,’ she lied. ‘Quite wrong. They will not interfere—not if you are quiet and calm.’

‘Well,’ he said dubiously. ‘You have your car here?’

‘Yes—it is not far away.’

He reached out for her in the darkness and his hot hands fumbled over her clothes. ‘Perhaps I come with you. I am very tired and cold.’

She led him towards the door of the barn, and in a moment they passed out into the rain. Four or five steps they took, and then a dog growled nearby. He stiffened, thrust her away from him and half turned. In the same instant a brilliant beam of light leaped in a solid shaft through the night, illuminating his head and shoulders and half blinding him. He sensed the sound of advancing footsteps and whispered voices, and the restraining fingers of the woman clung to his arm.

Frantically he flung her aside and threw himself in the direction of the barn. Takaito and Conway following were a few feet behind him. The light swung, then focused itself starkly on the blank gap of the half-open doorway.

Takaito was the first to reach it. He hesitated at the entrance, peering into the darkness of the barn.

‘Mr Soames,’ he said, quietly and urgently, ‘we are your friends. I am Dr Takaito and Dr Conway is with me. We are your friends and we want to help you...’

A terrified animal grunt came from beyond the door. Conway saw something gleam and flash in the torchlight, something with long sharp teeth that lunged with incredible speed towards the slight shape of Dr Takaito. Almost before he realised what was happening the long pointed tines of the pitchfork had stabbed through the Japanese surgeon’s stomach, hurling him backwards so that he fell flat on the wet ground, the pitchfork swaying at an angle from his body. The terrified face of Mr Soames stared pallidly from the deeper shadows of the barn.

A second later Detective-Inspector Bryce and the policeman, followed by the two soldiers and the guard dog, were inside the barn while Conway knelt beside the body of Dr Takaito. In the background Mrs Dewison sobbed and gasped hysterically. The rain continued to fall.

❖

The trial lasted for three days, during which counsels and expert witnesses argued the question of Mr Soames’s sanity. Technically the charge was murder, but the fact of murder took second place to the medical and psychiatric evidence. The killing had been deliberate, but it could be argued that the accused had not known that the defensive act he had performed would result in death; his experience of life was too limited. There was also the question of diminished responsibility. Mr Soames might be sane enough in his own sullen way, but he could not be said to possess the full sense of responsibility that is normally characteristic of a sane adult person. He was intelligent enough in terms of his actual mental age from the date of Takaito’s successful operation, but intelligence alone did not confer the qualities of judgement and wisdom.

The judge in summing up had said: ‘The accused, who is mentally the equivalent of a child, is the product not of a home, of a secure affectionate domestic background, but of a psychiatric clinic, so that it is not surprising, perhaps, if one finds that he tends to behave like a psychiatric patient. The product of a hospital may well be, as it were, hospitalised in outlook.

‘Fundamentally, of course, we must acknowledge that education is more than a scientific programme of habit forming and indoctrination, and it involves more than mere tuition and discipline. A disciplined and indoctrinated man is not necessarily a well-educated man. Education in its wider sense concerns the individual as a social organism, and it sets out to fit an individual, according to his innate intelligence and abilities, into the complex pattern of human relationships that is the basis of modern society.’

After dwelling for a time on the details of Mr Soames’s education, the judge had continued:

‘You may feel, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that too little attention was paid to what one might term the human side of the accused’s education and training, and indeed, in that connection, numerous criticisms have already been given considerable publicity in the popular press. But you must also bear in mind that the educational programme had hardly begun. The executive staff of the Institute had taken, not without justification, a long term view, and they were not unreasonable in assuming that it would require some five years, or possibly more, to turn the accused into a normal responsible adult. The failure of the accused to respond to the educational programme in the short term does not necessarily signify failure in the long term.

‘Here we have a man, born in effect at the age of thirty, who learns quickly, and rapidly acquires a sense of independence so that after a few months he becomes dissatisfied with the unchanging and perhaps rather austere environment of his hospital surroundings and begins to resent the day-to-day routine of education, exercise and training.

‘And it is shortly after this phase commences that he is subjected to certain disturbing influences, slight enough in themselves from an outside point of view, but to the patient perhaps quite enormous in his restricted world. I refer to the arrival of his mother and half-sister, under newspaper sponsorship of a questionable nature, followed by the brief period of liberty granted to him by the late Dr Takaito, which ended, unhappily, in a night hunt through the grounds of the Institute with, you may think, disastrous results to the accused’s balance of mind.

‘Indeed, you may feel that the factors which prompted the final rebellion and escape were of an accidental or intrusive nature, so that they tended to undermine and sabotage the work of the Institute, and so magnify and perhaps distort any slight feelings of discontentment that the accused had previously experienced.

‘Much has been made in evidence of the unnatural and enforced segregation of the accused from the opposite sex, but, in fact, there is nothing to show that this in itself was conducive to disobedience and violence, or that any violence was committed for sexual motives. On the contrary, Mrs Dewison has told us, with commendable frankness, that on the occasion of the accused’s alleged assault his only offence was insistence—albeit with ignorance—and what followed was simply the result of insistence rather than the use of force.

‘I feel it is my duty to advise you, members of the jury, that there is no question of insanity. The claim made on behalf of the accused by his counsel is simply one of diminished responsibility. One might suppose for a moment that the accused were an uneducated native from Africa or Asia who had killed a man under similar circumstances—while being pursued by police and troops and under mortal fear of recapture—moreover, had killed by using a weapon, namely a pitchfork, not realising, it has been suggested, that the use of such a weapon might result in death.

‘You must ask yourselves whether such circumstances point to, and are indeed evidence of, diminished responsibility. And you must consider in what way responsibility is alleged to be diminished. If by ignorance, certainly, ignorance of the law, then there is no valid defence therein. It is not a defence for the accused to plead that he did not know it was wrong to kill. On the other hand, if, due to lack of experience of life and living, it can reasonably be assumed that the accused could not have known that the act of violence might result in death, then that is a defence against a charge of murder, though not manslaughter. At the same time you must bear in mind that the accused had already used the same pitchfork to kill a dog, and must therefore have been well aware of its potentially lethal properties.