Brian Freemantle - A Mind to Kill

Jennifer’s lassitude was absolute. She wouldn’t have washed unless she’d been washed or brushed her hair if it hadn’t been brushed for her or dressed if she hadn’t been dressed or undressed. Make-up wasn’t considered. She made the very slightest effort with Mason, because he’d saved Emily, but didn’t bother with the other psychiatrists or psychologists or neurologists who followed intermittently, with their questions and their tests, but not any more trying to prove her sanity because she wasn’t sane: she’d known for every second what she was doing when she’d tried to get her hands around Emily’s throat but hadn’t been able to stop herself. Only a mad woman would have behaved like that. Sometimes mad, sometimes sane. But mad when Jane made her so. Couldn’t win. Jane had won. So why bother? Lost, like Jane said. All gone. Everything gone.

Jennifer didn’t try to stop herself, to stop Jane, during the examinations – several more hypnosis sessions and more brain scans and having her head connected to electrical sensors and three times being injected with a drug they’d identified by name but which she couldn’t remember, any more than she could remember the names of all the experts who’d conducted all the tests. Or in front of the rigid-haired magistrate whom Jane called a menstrual cow and a menopausal mare and asked if she fucked pigs, to the woman’s fury and who, at the second hearing, moved the remand to a women’s prison. The hospital pressed for the transfer, citing the attack on Dr Lloyd as well as that upon the child and arguing their concern for other patients. Jennifer had heard the hospital lawyer’s argument and agreed with it: Jane had told her to agree with it, shouting out.

Jennifer was only vaguely aware but totally disinterested that Jeremy Hall or Humphrey Perry didn’t any longer come so regularly, although both attended the magistrate’s hearings, as unconcerned as she was by their travelling with her in the ambulance to the prison. On the way Hall said she was going into the ward there, not the general prison, so it was nothing more than a change of hospitals.

‘You’ll be looked after there. Safe.’

‘ He’s lying again. Full of dykes. Tongues in your pussy. Dildo rape. You’ll be popular. Fresh meat. Your pussy will be red raw. Bleed maybe. They won’t care.’

With the exception of the bars it did appear exactly like the hospital she’d left, even to the small separate room into which she was settled, at the far end of the general, ground-floor ward in which lay two women, one with both wrists heavily bandaged. The other called out something to Hall and Perry as they escorted Jennifer through the long room. Neither man reacted and Jennifer didn’t hear but there was laughter from everyone else, two uniformed nurses and two trustees in prison drab. David Emerson, the white-coated prison doctor who was walking with them, called out, ‘That’s enough, girls.’

The woman who’d made the unheard remark said, ‘There’s never enough. That’s how I stopped being an innocent virgin,’ and there was fresh laughter.

A big-busted, broad-shouldered matron who hadn’t been in her office at the ward entrance abruptly bustled into the private room after them and said, ‘Right now, let’s get you settled in, shall we, my love?’ and at once began hanging Jennifer’s belongings in the closet from a suitcase she opened without asking.

‘Lovely clothes,’ she said, admiringly.

‘ Didn’t take long, did it? ’

‘No.’

‘What?’ frowned the matron.

‘It’s a psychiatric situation,’ Emerson explained to her.

At Perry’s gesture the doctor followed him out into the corridor, with Hall trailing uncertainly behind. The more experienced solicitor, to whom the remark about the clothes had registered, like the suitcase opening, said, ‘You won’t forget that Mrs Lomax is a remand prisoner, will you?’

‘Mrs Lomax will get as good care here as she got in St Thomas’s.’

‘It’s the particular type of that care to which I was referring,’ said the solicitor, pointedly.

Hall looked quickly back into the ward, understanding. Jennifer was sitting docilely in the chair, oblivious to what the other woman was doing. The larger case was unpacked and she’d started on the smaller one, examining each article as she took it out, fingering the material and looking at the labels.

‘I don’t understand that remark,’ Emerson was saying. He was a dark-skinned man with wiry hair and a rugby-flattened nose.

‘Mrs Lomax’s psychiatric symptoms are still being assessed but she’s obviously traumatized,’ said Hall. ‘I don’t want anything to occur that might worsen her condition.’

‘I don’t…’ the doctor began to repeat and then stopped. For several moments he looked between the two lawyers. Then he said, ‘I’ll do my best.’

‘I’d like better than your best, doctor. I’d like a guarantee,’ said the barrister.

‘I can’t be in the ward twenty-four hours a day.’

‘The answer, I would have thought, would be to have people here upon whom you can rely, when you’re elsewhere,’ said Perry.

‘All I can do is my best,’ insisted the man.

By the time they re-entered the private ward, which was actually bigger than the one in St Thomas’s, all Jennifer’s things were put away and the two suitcases stowed in a locker above the closet.

Perry said, ‘Here’s the inventory of her things. I’d like you to sign receipt.’

‘That should have been done at admission, with her jewellery and money,’ insisted the matron. Her identification plate read, Beryl Harrison.

‘It was,’ said the solicitor. ‘I’d like you to counter-sign it. Her valuable personal items remain in reception. Her clothes are here.’

‘There’s no regulation,’ persisted the woman.

‘Is there a reason not to?’ demanded Perry, mildly.

‘There’s no regulation,’ said the woman, doggedly.

To the doctor Perry said, ‘Perhaps you could take us past the governor, on our way out. We’ll get it counter-signed there.’

The matron snatched the inventory from Perry and scrawled her name below that of the admissions clerk. ‘Satisfied?’

‘Perfectly. Thank you,’ smiled Perry.

The wardress who had brought them to the hospital escorted the lawyers back to the entrance, leaving Emerson and the woman with Jennifer.

‘ What happened to your nose? Get it smashed by some dyke?

Emerson looked up, startled, from the St Thomas’s case notes when Jennifer repeated the questions, then gestured to the dossier for the benefit of the equally startled matron. ‘Voices in her head.’

‘Jane,’ offered Jennifer, forcing herself to talk. ‘It’s Jane.’

‘This isn’t going to be easy,’ predicted the matron.

‘ I’m not going to make it easy.’

‘She says she isn’t going to make it easy.’

‘Maybe I won’t bother with my own admission examination today,’ said Emerson, indicating the dossier again. ‘It’s all comprehensively listed here. Tomorrow will be soon enough.’

‘ Frightened I might attack you, fat nose! ’

‘She thinks you’re frightened.’

Emerson ignored Jennifer. ‘There’s a lot of medical notes,’ he said, reading from the papers. ‘Sedatives, mostly.’

‘I always think medication’s the best way to handle the difficult ones, if they’re mad,’ said the matron.

Jennifer stirred, to protest the madness, but then sat back in the chair, disinterested. Why bother?

‘I got a warning from her lawyers.’

‘The younger one looked pretty new to me.’

‘The solicitor started it,’ qualified the doctor. ‘The young one came in at the end.’

‘Been around the block,’ dismissed the woman.