Disturbing Ground (6 page)

She suddenly realised how much she would miss her, leaning against the door of the video shop, falling in every time it was opened, smoking revolting-looking rollups made from a kit housed in a tobacco tin which she replenished not only with Rizlas and shop-bought tobacco but dog ends rescued from the gutter and gifts from the generous valleys folk, or wandering around the Spar or the Co-op with a huge trolley empty except for a battered red leather purse. Megan felt a wave of sadness. Bianca had gone and behind her she had left people memories they could smile at. She would be remembered. She took her bag from the desk drawer. It was time to go home. She
stood up, preparing to leave the surgery. But her eyes were caught - and held.

The walls of her surgery were washed in pale pink with only one picture - a print of a portrait by Gericault. Megan crossed the room and stood in front of it. She knew the title but today, now, it seemed subtly pertinent.

Madwoman
afflicted
with
envy.

She had always loved the painting because it intrigued her. Was it really envy that peered out from the woman’s eyes? Not blunt envy as we would understand it but a distortion of the emotion.

“She
thought
the
world
of
you.”

As she stared at the print her eyes lost focus so it was not Gericault’s inhabitant of a French lunatic asylum but Bianca who stared down at her from the pink walls. Wall merged into hair and she stared down at her as though she hated her. Megan was transfixed - as though she had never seen either the painting or her ex-patient properly before. And deep behind the brushwork she seemed to find a frightening dimension of insanity. The expression in the old woman’s eyes was a distortion of human emotion. And distorted who knew what it really meant?
“She
thought
the
world
of
you …”

Megan stared at the painting for a further minute or two. Then she moved, snapped the light off and left the room behind her empty - apart from the mad woman, still staring down from the pale pink walls.

She hurried out of the surgery. It was late. Almost seven thirty. A balmy, golden evening. Time to go home. The receptionists were waiting to lock up. The cleaners had finished. But Megan was pulled back, suddenly aware that she was letting Bianca down. How little she had really known about her patient. She had understood her illness but there were glaring gaps in her life that
Megan knew nothing about. And again the Hood poem was supplying the words.

Who
was
her
father?
Who
was
her
mother?

Had
she
a
sister?
Had
she
a
brother?

Resolutely she turned back, startling the receptionist shuffling the last of the notes back onto the shelves.

“Have we still got Bianca Rhys’s notes, Hazel?”

“They were just about to be sent back to the Health Authority, Megan. Did you want to have a look at them before they go? I’ll put them in your room ready for tomorrow, if you like.”

But Megan shook her head. “No, tonight. Don’t worry. I’ll lock up.”

Hazel looked surprised but she shrugged and seconds later was handing Megan the notes and a cup of tea. “If you’re going to read the latest bestseller,” she said, “you’d better have something to whet your whistle”.

Megan took the tea, waited for Hazel to close the door behind her and shook the notes out onto the desk. They were a thick set, two beige, Lloyd George envelopes sellotaped together. And apart from the GPs cryptic consultations they were full of letters from family doctor to psychiatrist, psychiatrist back to family doctor, community psychiatric nurse to family doctor and to psychiatrist.

Bianca had beem christened plain Bianca Owen. Born 1945 at the Brynhafod Maternity Hospital to one Catherine Owen and her husband Gethin - a normal daughter. There were early documentations of the “usual childhood ailments”: mumps, German measles and whooping cough. There was a greenstick fracture of the left radius aged fourteen and an admission to hospital aged fifteen with abdominal pain which had resolved spontaneously leading to her discharge two days later without treatment. Then, when she was sixteen years old, strange things began to happen
to Bianca Owen. She began to imagine the girls at school were calling her names. Nothing strange in that - except that she claimed they also got into her bedroom at night, still calling her names, shouting in her ear and preventing her from sleeping. At first her parents had believed that her victimisation at school was giving her nightmares and had complained to the teachers. When all the accusations had been hotly denied and not before the police had been hauled in to talk to her schoolmates’ parents, her frantic parents had brought her to the family doctor, Megan’s predecessor’s predecessor, a Doctor Parry-Jones. He had talked to Bianca and reassured her parents.

But events had become more and more bizarre. Bianca had stopped washing. She had attacked her mother causing a penetrating eye injury. Two months later she had accused her father of sexual abuse and Doctor Parry-Jones had referred her to the psychiatrist at Bridgend. Numerous letters had been exchanged between GP and consultant psychiatrist. The case against her father had been dropped. Bianca had been admitted to the local mental hospital under section 29 of the mental health act for a long term stay and when she had finally been allowed out her lifelong medication had been started. From now until her death she must have an injection of Modecate once a month “to control symptoms of acute paranoic schizophrenia”.

Megan read on, moving through the years. There had been admissions at regular intervals, various claims of witnessing events, people talking to her. Plenty of callouts to her predecessors for plugs that ticked, wires that hummed, a rat that hid under the sink. The imagination of a schizophrenic was boundless. Unshackled to reality, they were capable of reading threats into the most banal,
everyday occurences. Each admission to the institute was followed by quiescent periods and it was during one of these in 1968 that Bianca had changed her name to Rhys by marrying a Thomas Rhys. A few quiet years had followed until 1973 when she had started throwing accusations at her husband. He was a killer, she had claimed, a serial killer who “interfered with little children”. Despite a diagnosis which put any of her statements into doubt, the police had again been called in. After months of investigations during which the psychiatrist firmly lobbed his opinions into the field of battle, the case against Thomas Rhys was finally dropped. A brief stay at the Parc mental hospital followed. And now the psychologist’s letters read like a modern day thriller. Bianca had filled in plenty of details. Children tortured, old people left to starve, chained against walls, a boy, buried in a graveyard, still alive. A serial killer who buried his victims beneath the old mine workings, trains that ran into rusting sidings, driven by a screaming skeleton. The stories were horrific, endless, and graphic. Even the psychologist had professed shock at the horror of it all.

Bianca’s medication had been increased. There were letters between GP and hospital about drowsiness, side effects, confusion. Somehow in the middle of all this Carole had been born and swiftly made a ward of court. “For her own protection”. Thomas Rhys seemed to have vanished into thin air. There was no mention made of a father in any of the case conferences. And no further accusations were made against him. Whenever Bianca had been admitted to hospital Carole had been cared for by the Social Services. And when Bianca was in charge the supervision had been close and daily. No one had apparently quite trusted Bianca to care for her own daughter. For Carole it hadn’t been much of an upbringing. There
was mention of her being teased and bullied at school and requests made to the Social Services that she be admitted to a residential children’s home - permanently. But against all odds Bianca Rhys had largely brought her own daughter up. Megan cupped her chin in her hand and stared out of her window, towards the Slaggy Pool. No wonder there was this dichotomy of emotion between mother and daughter. Love and hate.

One thing did strike Megan as she scanned through the notes. Not once was there mention of a suicide attempt. There were plenty of references to her habit of self mutilation but no one had equated this with anything but a desire for attention. None of the razor slashes which striped her arms were more than skin deep. She had burned herself more than once with cigarettes. But not even a disturbed schizophrenic could believe she could destroy herself by this means. There were references too of her aversion to water. Even a possible explanation, dug up by an unusually thorough counsellor. At three years old the young Bianca had fallen into an ornamental pond belonging to a stately home at the bottom of the valley, Triagwn House. Megan knew the place well. It had once belonged to the owner of Llancloudy mine, a huge, grand place with now neglected gardens. Today it was an old people’s home. And Megan, Andy and Phil were responsible for the inhabitants as the attendant medical officers. Megan even knew the pond. Right at the front, with a cherub doing an ungainly arabesque across its width, water spouting from its mouth. Bianca’s parents must have been looking round the gardens while the child had run off. Minutes later Bianca had been dragged from the water, unconscious, to be resuscitated by one of the gardeners there. Perhaps the memory of drowning had been implanted deep in the child’s brain and led to her
pathological phobia. Perhaps even the water spewing from the cherub’s mouth had planted some seed inside an already vulnerable mind. Certainly long before schizophrenia had manifested itself the little girl was displaying an aversion to water, disliking the seaside, hiding when a trip to Porthcawl had been organised by the Sunday School of the Bethesda chapel. By the time Bianca was in her early teens she had begun to manifest one of the signs which later characterised her illness: not bathing. More than once her despairing mother had brought her to the doctor. “To see if anything can be done”. He had documented his hygiene talks to the child but to no avail.

Megan leafed through the notes, absorbed by a life long history of mental illness culminating in a untimely death. She knew as well as Phil Walsh that statistically it was not entirely unexpected. People with mental illness rarely saw out their expected lifespan. She put the sheets of notes together with the letters back in the beige envelope, pushed her chair away from her desk and sat very still, her eyes again fixed by the Gericault. To her relief the woman looked less like Bianca now. Phrases from the psychiatrist’s letters crawled through her brain. Not a danger to herself. Her grip on reality is tenuous. Bianca will never be capable of independent living. She will always need close supervision. Above all one phrase stuck out in her mind as having some deep, hidden significance.
It
is
not
unusual
for
people
who
have
delusions
to
retain
a
good
deal
of
perception
and
keep
in
touch
with
reality.
She wondered how much of Bianca’s thoughts had stuck to reality. And who, if anyone, would know which was which.

There was another small clue. All her life Bianca had been the focus of trained psychiatric personnel - nurses,
psychiatrists, psychologists. They had shone the brightest of interrogation lights on her psyche with the result that her attitude to suicide had on more than one occasion been explored by asking her questions specifically structured to expose such a risk. And each time they had come up with the same answer. Bianca Rhys had been assessed a negative risk. Not a danger to herself.

Megan scooped in a long, deep breath. So was her doctor now to believe she had either deliberately or accidentally approached a body of water which would have filled her with the same amount of horror as a pit of spiders to someone with arachnophobia, having abandoned the safety of her fortress house for no apparent reason and … Again words from the poem seemed to spear her brain.
In
she
plunged
boldly.

Or was it as her daughter had suggested that the voices had finally driven her
Mad
from
life’s
history.

Glad
to
death’s
mystery?
Swift
to
be
hurl’d
-
Anywhere,
anywhere
Out
of
the
world.

That truly must be the answer, rather than the unimaginative police suggestion that Bianca had wandered, her voices driving her forward, and she had slipped.

She folded Doctor Wainwright’s letters together and slotted them back in the Lloyd George envelope. Make no deep scrutiny into her mutiny? The Hood poem seemed to be telling her something else.

Her eyes flicked across to the wall. The mad woman was still watching her, her expression suspicious, untrusting. The sun had dropped far below the mountain so only the very tips of the hills were still glowing.

It was time she left.

She locked the surgery door behind her, setting the burglar alarm against the marauding youngsters whose greatest wish was to raid the cupboard for syringes, drugs - or simply fun. It livened up a quiet evening, setting off burglar alarms, waiting for the flashing blue lights to sweep up the valley. The noise, the shouting. It staved off boredom.

Sitting inside her own car it was that very same boredom which compelled her to dial the police station on her mobile phone and ask for Alun. At least the hot, guilty embarrassment was better than the void which filled her life the moment she stepped outside her doctor’s role. At the same time she lectured herself sternly that Alun was married now, with a child. She’d read both the announcements without emotion in the local paper a couple of years ago. A wife would naturally be suspicious of the motives of an old girlfriend, recently divorced, suddenly turned pally, who followed up a chance meeting with a phone call.

The answering voice was uncurious. “I’m sorry, Police Constable
Alun Williams is not on duty today. Who is it speaking please? Perhaps I can take a message.”

Megan’s eyes drifted across the road at the dark slick which marked the Slaggy Pool. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Will you please tell him Megan Banesto rang. I’d like to talk to him.” She was anxious to explain that this was a professional call. “It’s about a case.”

“He’s got your number, has he, Doctor Banesto?”

Anonymity was impossible in these valleys. She gave the officer both her home, mobile and surgery number and he asked her to hold on for a minute.

Put the ball into Alun’s court. If he rang back, fine. She could pursue her line of reasoning to him. If not. Well. Nothing ventured … A swift flash of Alun, streaming off the rugby pitch, muddy and grinning, straight into her outstretched arms, made her blink with pain. Why hadn’t she settled for him instead of committing virtual social suicide by hitching up with the Italian Stallion? Life would have been so simple. Predictable. Comfortable. She would have been happy. Only now she knew it. More than ten years too late. But she had left for Cardiff Medical School, leaving him behind in the valleys without so much as a backward glance. The world was out there. Waiting for her. She had felt a desperate need to escape. Escape had seemed more important than anything. And by the time she had finally returned to Llancloudy to take up a General Practice post it had seemed inappropriate to pick up the strands of an old relationship.

The police officer came back to her with his calm, reassuring voice, breaking into her thoughts before she could continue this awful, pointless agonising. “Right. Well. I can’t tell you when PC Williams is due back, Doctor Banesto, but I promise I will give him your message. All right now?”

“Thank you.”

Relief swamped her. She had taken some action. Now she could go home.

Home was one of the terraced houses that had its back rammed against the mountain. Number 37, Heol Caradoc. A well built, two bedroomed, ex miner’s cottage with the luxury of a bathroom. Downstairs the living room and the dining room had been knocked into one and a kitchen built on at the back. It was small, basic and secure. She could lie in bed and hear movements in the
houses either side of her. And downstairs she could hear neighbours’ televisions, hi fis, the ping of a microwave and occasionally noisy, family rows. The tiny front garden which overlooked the road meant that sunning yourself was a public affair and the back was little more than a yard and a tiny tool shed. Privacy was at a premium in Llancloudy.

She had bought number 37 when she and Guido had finally split and sold the detached modern estate house at the bottom of the valley which had briefly been their marital home. From her 50% share she had bought this house outright. It was a solid practical place which she had largely decorated herself but it was basically sound, warm, cosy and she felt safe hemmed in and guarded by her neighbours. The only real drawback was having to leave her car out in the street, tightly parked and clamped against the gangs of out-of-control streetboys led by Joel Parker, a twelve-year-old psychopath who was capable of joyriding in the Calibra and smashing it up together with his band of law breaking mates. One day, she had promised herself, she would move. Only not yet.

Megan let herself into the narrow hall, picking up a couple of bills from the floor. She went straight into the sitting room and flopped down onto the cream sofa, flicked the TV on, channel hopped for half an hour, found nothing of interest then padded upstairs to run a bath. Her big toe was poised to dip in when downstairs the telephone rang. “Bugger,” she cursed. “Bugger.”

One of the nice things about living alone was that running downstairs starkers she was unlikely to encounter anyone. But she still felt embarrassed when Alun’s deep voice spoke from the other end.

“They told me you’d rang the station, Megan. What is it?” He sounded very slightly irritated. Almost a stranger. Not glad to hear from her at all.

She could hardly ask him to wait while she put some clothes on so she perched on the bottom step, grateful for the retained warmth in the house. She began tentatively. “I-I wanted to ask you about Bianca Rhys.”

“What did you want to know?”

“What the official line is, Alun.”

He gave a non committal “Mmm”.

“And the pathologist said she had some stone in her pocket.”

He gave a loud burst of laughter. “Well she was always nickin’ something. Gave us no end of trouble. She must have pinched it from someone’s garden.”

“Well what was it? Was it heavy enough to have weighted her down in the water? And why did she go up there in the first place?”

“I think … Hang on a minute.” There was a pause. He was shutting a door. “I think I should buy you a drink and we can talk about this face to face, in a civilised fashion.”

Relief enveloped her. He had no idea how much she would like that. “Yes. OK. When?”

“What are you doing now?”

She glanced downwards. “Right now?”

“Right now.”

“Just about to have a bath.”

He chuckled again and she knew he knew she was wearing nothing.

“Are you free then for the rest of the evening? After your bath?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll pick you up in an hour then, Megan.”

“OK. I live -”

“I know where you live.”

She washed quickly, shampooing her hair, blowdrying it, straight and sleek, around her face and pulling on some cream cotton jeans and a black silk shirt with black, leather mules. One of the rewards of being five feet eight inches tall and weighing eight stone was that she could wear most clothes without worrying whether her “bottom looked big” in them. She left her face bare apart from a touch of mascara. The Alun she had known had disliked makeup. She finished her toilet with a spray of Chanel then perched on the window seat and peered out into the street, waiting for him. He would not be able to find a parking spot. She would need to meet him on the road.

Long ago on dates she had always made the men park their car, knock on her door - formally - while she counted to ten - slowly - before opening it. She had dropped such affectation years ago.

He turned up a few minutes after half past eight, pulling up adjacent to her car, throwing open the passenger door of the Peugot estate as she locked her front door behind her. A swift glance over her shoulder told her this was a family vehicle - there was a Britex child seat in the back.

Megan could swear right along the road curtains were twitching. A few kids across the street stopped passing their rugby ball to each other while they stared.

Alun waited until she had closed the car door behind her before he spoke. “It’s good to see you again, Megan.”

She looked long and hard at his blunt featured face and felt as though she had come home. “You too.”

“Thought we’d go to one of
the quieter pubs. Some of them here you can’t hear yourself think - let alone have a
civilised conversation. All right if you’ve got nothing to say. But …”

“Fine. Whatever.”

He accelerated down the road, drove swiftly to the head of the valley and climbed towards Llangefni, a small collection of scattered houses and an ancient pub. Once there he parked the car neatly in Y
Ddraig
Goch
and they entered the lounge bar.

As pubs go it was OK. Not posh but not fake either. Round oak tables, a faded red carpet, the cloying scent of stale cigarettes, a fruit machine sparkling in the corner. Two girls beside it, a mobile phone silent on the table between them.

“He
said
he
would
phone.
That’s
if
he
can
get
away.
Bloody
wife
of
his.
”

Megan turned her eyes on Alun. He was blushing.

“What do you want to drink, Meggie?”

The
name
had
been
his
pet
one
for
her,
the
one
that
could
turn
her
knees
weak.
Trust
him
to
use
it
now,
turn
the
clock
back.

“A white wine, please.” Long ago Bacardi and cokes were ignored in a swamp of sophistication.

Alun returned from the bar with a pint pot for himself and a glass of wine for her. As he put it carefully on the table he spilt a drop and she had the satisfaction of watching him turn red again. She smiled to herself. He always had had this tendency to blush. Useful to know when he was lying. It had come to her aid before - on more than one occasion. She wondered whether he would blush when his wife asked him where he had been tonight. And with whom?

He took a deep draft then set his beer back down on the table. “And how are you managing now, on your own?”

She shrugged.

“Must be a bit lonely after -”

She sidestepped the personal interest. “What’s the official version of Bianca’s death? Are the police making any investigation?”

“Why do you ask? What’s your involvement in it? She was just a patient of yours, wasn’t she?”

“Her daughter …” she began.

“Oh - Carole.” Alun made a face. “She’s been makin’ all sorts of allegations. Police neglect - not caring. You name it. Actually we have been takin’ statements as well as making a proper inspection of the area around the pool.”

“And?”

“We think Bianca slipped in sometime on Sunday night. She can’t possibly have fallen in during daylight. Someone would surely have seen her. So that would mean after nine o’ clock on Sunday night. We’ve taken statements from a few people who saw what they thought was some old clothes in the pool. It was her all right. There was light rain on Sunday night. That would have made the ground a little bit slippy.”

She remembered the rain, a soft, summer rain that had seemed to moisten the atmosphere without falling as raindrops. And the cloud of damp had lain heavy in the valley as a cloying, grey mist blotting out the mountains. She had escaped by spending the evening with a friend in Cardiff and had returned late - well after nine. By then Bianca must have been a floating corpse.

She looked enquiringly at Alun for further explanation.

“The pathologist thought she might have saved up a couple of her pills and taken them all together, got a bit confused and knocked off, wandered up there, slipped on
the grass, knocked her head and fell in. And the police surgeon agreed with this version. Apparently once she’d fallen in the water she never really drew breath. But she would have found it hard to scramble out of the pool anyway because her clothes had got tangled up in an old pram someone had dumped there. That’s the official verdict.”

It was a logical explanation. But something didn’t fit. Megan fumbled around trying to understand what it was. “And the stone in her pocket? Would it have been enough to weigh her down?”

“No - not really. Goodness knows. It was something broken off an old statue or something. A piece of carved stone. Not very big.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. Like a claw or something.”

“And where had she got it from?”

“I don’t know, Megan.”

She picked up on his exasperation. “And you don’t think it’s important.”

He shook his head, leaned forward, touched her hand. “Meggie,” he said bluntly, “all the police are concerned about is that no one else was involved. It wasn’t murder. It might have been suicide. It probably was an accident.”

“But what was she doing up there in the first place? Bianca was frightened to leave her house after dark.”

Alun looked amused. “You’re not trying to be a detective, are you? You should stick to being a doctor, Meggie. From what I’ve heard you’re good at that. All I can say is we’ve finished our enquiries. We’ve handed our notes to the coroner and he’s happy.”

She regarded him for a moment before asking, “Have you seen anyone who actually saw her heading up the Pool? Did anyone see her any time on Saturday or all day Sunday?”

Alun reddened. “What are you suggesting?”

“And how do you explain the head injury?”

“She hit it as she fell into the pool.”

“What on? Have you sent frogmen down?”

“The pool’s a few feet deep, Megan. The bottom is full of rubbish. There’s plenty of stuff there she could have hurt herself on. I don’t get where you’re comin’ from.”

“I’ll tell you where I’m coming from, Alun,” she said quietly. “Bianca was “three streets short of a city”. If she had been a normal woman your investigation would have been more intense, more detailed. Because she was a schizophrenic you’re hardly bothering.”

“No - it isn’t because of that. It’s because if Bianca had been any normal woman we could probably have worked out what she was up to. But with her anything is possible. Her voices might have told her to throw herself in - or go up there late at night. It was always the voices she blamed for shoplifting. All we care is that she wasn’t deliberately pushed in or drowned. And think about it, Meggie. There wouldn’t be any point to it besides it being a useless way to try and murder someone. She might have climbed out. You couldn’t predict the fact that she would die of shock the minute she hit the water. If new evidence came to light we’d
look at her case again. But as it is there’s no justification for further investigation.”