Quicksand Read online

  -- No matter how carefully I phrase it, anybody is going to get the impression she's really dangerous. What was the bit in the paper about the Beast in Man breaking loose?

  He shuddered gently at the narrowness of the margin by which he had escaped real trouble. If Urchin had taken to her heels and got lost in the crowded town, there would have been no end to it: police, a search, a major local scandal and demands for an official inquiry. . . .

  She'd let him off lightly, by going no further than the hospital yard and waiting passively until he staggered out after her. She had resisted being taken indoors, again, but she'd climbed peaceably back into the ambulance and ridden alongside him with no more trouble.

  Nonetheless, the matter couldn't be allowed to slide. The nurse she had attacked was very ill; the blow had ruptured the vein on the inside of her elbow, resulting in a horrible-looking haemorrhage, and the poor girl had fainted from pain. So Urchin was in her cell with the door locked, and he had taken advantage of the trust she still reposed in him to pour a heroic dose of tranquilliser down her. At last report she was asleep.

  -- God's name, what did her mind conjure up from an innocent X-ray machine? A mad scientist's gadgetry out of a horror picture?

  But the moral was clear. He'd seen and felt for himself what she was capable of. Faberdown couldn't have stood a chance agaimt her; with her skills she could have broken not just his arm, but his neck.

  -- Which, I suppose, is evidence for a fundamental personality disturbance. Even if she is a little shrimp, the average girl isn't so scared of her fellow human beings that she trains as a killing fighter.

  The idea was still a trifle frightening. It was one thing to see the hero of a TV thriller or a movie bashing the villains in a struggle choreographed as formally as a ballet. It was something else entirely to find himself face to face with a lethal weapon in the shape of a slender, attractive girl.

  -- And there's half the trouble, if you'd only confess it. Hasn't living with Iris taught me not to judge by appearances? If Urchin had come in with a typical slack face, slopped around careless of how she looked instead of trying to be clean and neat, and shown apathy instead of lively interest in what goes on around her, I'd have shoved her to the back of my mind and got on with my work.

  Determinedly be picked up the pen and poised it to continue his report. The phrase on which he had paused, however -- "her violent reaction" -- seized his imagination by the scruff and dragged it off down one of the familiar, fearful alternative world lines which so often haunted him.

  -- Demanding of the ambulance driver which way she went: "I didn't see her, Doc, I was lighting a cigarette." Wandering crazily around the streets and mistaking other people for Urchin, a child in a similar coat, a woman with a similar head of hair. Informing the police, having to face Hofford, having to face Holinshed: "This is an unforgivable breach of your professional responsibility which I shall be compelled to report to higher authority." Explaining to Iris when she gets back why I'm facing probable dismissal . . .

  The pen he was holding cracked with a noise like a dry stick. He stared at it stupidly. The vision obsessing him had been so agonising that he had closed both hands into fists; his palms and face were moist with sweat. Angrily, he hurled the broken pen into the wastebasket and took up another.

  -- But it was almost more real than this desk, this office with its windows darkening towards sunset! As if I, this consciousness looking out of my eyes at such innocuous surroundings, were not the real Paul Fidler; as if, at some inconceivable angle to this actual world, the real "I" were trapped in some disastrous chain of events and crying out so fiercely that this brain which till so recently we shared thinks with his thoughts instead of mine!

  Hand shaking, be drove himself to complete the report: " . . . proved that she had been trained in unarmed combat. She did not resist being brought back to Chent; however, I judged it advisable to sedate her, and . . ."

  -- Bloody hell. Now I've used "advisable" twice in three lines.

  He hated the atmosphere of the hospital at weekends. The sense of purpose which the daily activity of the staff normally lent to the place was exchanged for one of vacuous futility. The coming and going at Saturday lunchtime -- mostly going -- awakened in the patients a fresh awareness of being confined, and resentment stank in his nostrils. Living out, he escaped the worst impact, but on a duty day it struck him all the harder for not being accustomed to it. To compound his depression, the food provided for the staff was worse than ever at weekends, because the real cooking was done beforehand and the meals were a succession of warmed-up leftovers.

  -- At least I can study for a few hours before I turn in.

  He pushed open the door of the sitting-room, not expecting to find anyone else here. Given the chance, the resident staff quit the premises and stayed away till the last permissible moment. To his surprise, Natalie was sipping a cup of tea in a chair facing the door. She looked tired.

  "Hullo!" he said. "Of course, you're looking after the dance tonight, aren't you?"

  "Bloody farce," she said morosely. "Like the worst village hops plus one extra horror -- canned music instead of a proper band, which can at least be relied on to liven the proceedings by getting drunk. Well, I let myself in for the job, so I can't complain."

  "How's the tea today?" Paul asked, tinkling the hand-bell.

  "Above average. Probably they didn't tell the girl that they use stale leaves on Saturdays. . . . I hear Urchin was in trouble today, incidentally."

  "I'm afraid so," he acknowledged; then, when she continued to regard him with a speculative expression but did not speak, he added, "What do you want me to do -- show you my bruise?"

  "Sorry. I didn't mean to stare." She drained her cup and set it aside. "It's just that you looked somehow . . . annoyed?"

  "Should I not be?"

  "But who with?" she countered. "Getting annoyed with mental patients is a waste of time, and in any case I don't think it's Urchin you're upset about."

  Who, then?" Paul snapped.

  "Yourself. You've been going a bit by appearances in her case, haven't you? The episode this morning must have been a considerable let-down."

  "Is this meant to be advice or sympathy?"

  "Sympathy," Natalie said, unruffled by Paul's obvious irritation. "But there's advice coming, if you don't mind. Gossip positively pours in while we're getting ready for a patients' dance, you know, and this had better come from me rather than from Holinshed. Is it true you were seen in Blickham with your arm around Urchin?"

  "God's name!"

  "Paul, simmer down. This is a segregated institution and like every other of its kind it's positively obsessed with sex. I know without being told that it was a bit of fatherly reassurance for this girl who seems totally disoriented But if there's going to be any more of it you'd better leave it to -- well, to me."

  "Who told you this?"

  "Like I said, gossip goes the rounds while we're making ready for a dance."

  "Well, it might be better if you didn't listen to so much of it!" Paul barked, and strode out of the room.

  He was half inclined to skip dinner, since it meant sharing the otherwise empty dining-room with Natalie, but he came to the conclusion that that was ridiculous. There had been no call to shout at her, and he ought to apologise.

  As it turned out, she had ordered dinner early to get back and supervise the start of the dance. She was on the point of leaving when he arrived and he had to compress the planned apology into a few hasty words. She accepted it anyhow, pleasantly enough.

  Eating his solitary meal, he thought about Natalie's comment that the hospital was obsessed by sex. It was no exaggeration; the mere fact that expression of physical love was impossible because there was nowhere that patients could find privacy made sexuality not just the greatest single root cause of the inmates' disorders apart from senility, but far and away the richest source of rumour and scandal.

  Gloomily he wondered, as he had done the o
ther evening at the Needle in Haystack, whether any other of the hospital gossip concerned himself and if so what it said.

  -- Dance. Christmas dance, the only time Iris has ever been further into this building than Holinshed's office. Did they see deeply enough into her personality to guess or half-guess my problems? The zest seemed to go out of it when I realised she was going to go on refusing to have children, and that seemed to suit her okay, so . . . But a psychiatrist of all people should know that out of sight doesn't mean out of mind. Do something about that, maybe . . .?

  He toyed with the idea, remembering Mirza's suggestion which had so disturbed him. Then he tried to push it aside, but everything conspired to prevent him: in particular, the spectacle of the female patients assembled for this ghastly parody of merrymaking.

  Most of the time, shut away from men, they neglected their appearance, but a dance was always preceded by a flurry of titivating, of changing into a dress set aside for "best" and so seldom worn it had survived the disintegration of the rest of what they had when they arrived and the issue of ugly standard replacements, and of making up. Even the most withdrawn cases dabbed on a bit of powder and smeared lipstick inaccurately across their mouths.

  The result was ghoulish, especially in the case of someone like Mrs Chancery, who at sixty-five was still convinced she was a flapper capable of laying men low in swathes with one deadly flash of her kohl-rimmed eyes.

  The dances were held in the large female sitting-roam, decorated for the occasion with a few paper streamers and some jars of early flowers. The idea was to make the women feel they were the "hostesses" at the party. A table covered in white cloth served as a bar for tea, coffee and soft drinks.

  When Paul arrived, the male patients had barely started to trickle in, but the tape-recorder was already blasting out music and two or three couples were on the floor. Young Riley was showing off, partnered by Nurse Woodside, whose smile was glassy and self-conscious. At present the music was recent pop; later, to placate the older patients, it would go over to sentimental ballads with lots of strings, and at the end they would probably abandon dancing, as usual, for a singsong accompanied at the piano by Lieberman the overambitious locksmith.

  -- How seriously do they take it all?

  The question crossed his mind as he exchanged greetings with patients on his way to collect an orange squash at the bar. The lordly patronising of Holinshed, who would drop in later and "show the flag"; the fact that the nurses were in mufti instead of starched aprons; the presence of a handful of visitors from outside, either friends of the staff, relatives of patients, or dogooders undertaking a charitable act -- none of this added up to festivity!

  -- Who do we think we're kidding?

  Abruptly the thought evaporated. Through a gap in a group of women patients around the far door of the room he had suddenly caught sight of an all-too-familiar figure peering at the dancers.

  -- God damn, has Lieberman been up to his tricks again? Urchin's supposed to be shut in her cell!

  *19*

  The tune blaring from the recorder ended. Nurse Woodside, casting around for a way of avoiding another dance with Riley, scanned the assembly and at once spotted Urchin. A hard expression deformed her attractive face, and she made to march in the girl's direction.

  "Nurse!" Paul hissed. He caught up with her in a few long strides.

  "What . . .? Oh, it's you, Doctor." Nurse Woodside shook back her nape-long blonde hair; she was certainly very pretty tonight, in a black dress with fine red stripes which minimised her Junoesque bulk. "I thought that girl Urchin was supposed to be locked in!"

  "She is. But we mustn't kick up a public fuss. Ask around, will you, and see if anybody admits having let her out?"

  He was uncomfortably aware of Riley's gaze fixed on him as he spoke. When the nurse moved to comply, Riley called out, demanding another dance; the sharpness of her refusal annoyed him, and he stamped ostentatiously towards the bar.

  -- I hope he's not building up to a scene later. Paul had considerable sympathy for young Riley. He came from the sort of background calculated to act as a forcing-bed for homosexuality, being the only child of an overprotective slut of a mother who regarded her son's girl-friends as a threat to her hold over him. The strain, against which he had fought with tenacity Paul rather admired, had ultimately driven him to beat his mother up and wreck her flat, whereupon he had been committed to Chent -- quite correctly, because by then he was really deranged. But he was improving now his mother was out of his way, and Paul had high hopes for his early release.

  Nonetheless, he did have a terrible temper.

  A fresh influx of male patients followed, under the discreet supervision of Oliphant in a blue suit and red tie. Several of them, to cover their nervousness -- they were much shyer than teenagers when it came to asking for a partner -- made a production of greeting Paul, and it was with difficulty that he extricated himself to hear Nurse Woodside's report.

  "Doctor, she must have got out by herself. No one admits to unlocking her door, and I don't see how one of the other patients could have done it."

  "Better go and inspect the cell, then," sighed Paul.

  The empty female dormitory had a peculiarly awful air tonight, like a ship which the passengers had abandoned in a panic: on the beds a confusion of clothing, on the lockers makeup kits, vanity mirrors, hair-brushes, all as if their owners had dematerialised in the act of using them.

  Like the doors of all the other cells, Urchin's was fitted with a somewhat old-fashioned lock, but it was sunk in the wood, not screwed to the surface, and the keyhole on the inner side was blanked off with a solid metal plate. The paint was so chipped by the battering of desperate patients it was impossible to tell if it had been tampered with. Paul shrugged.

  "Well, however she got out we can hardly drag her back. After her performance in Blickham this morning I wouldn't care to try it, anyway. We'll just have to keep a careful eye on her until the dance breaks up. She's heavily tranquillised, so she's unlikely to cause trouble."

  That was true; nonetheless he returned to the dance with a tremor of apprehension. Urchin was in the same place as before. By now, however, Riley had spotted her too, and -- sensibly enough, since she was more attractive than any of the women around her -- was vainly trying to get her to dance with him. The bystanders were sniggering at his lack of success, and this was making him irritated.

  -- Poor devil. Apart from the nurses, who is there of his own age to partner him? Most of the young girls here are congenitals, too stupid to manage their own feet.

  With a final scowl Riley gave up the attempt, caught sight of Nurse Woodside and approached her again. She would rather have declined, but a pleading glance from Paul persuaded her and she took Riley's hand, sighing.

  Some while later Paul concluded that Urchin was only interested in watching and could safely be left to her own devices. He wandered around the floor to the tape-recorder table, and there, after a dismal shuffle in company with one of the older male patients, Natalie joined him.

  "Thanks for sticking it out, Paul," she murmured. "Give it another half-hour and I think it'll be okay. Twenty couples dancing seems to be the break-even point; after that they unwind and actually enjoy it."

  "Anyone else coming? Mirza, maybe?"

  "Not after the Christmas dance, and I'm glad."

  "How do you mean?"

  "There was almost a free fight over who should have the next dance with him. Weren't you there?"

  "Er . . . no. Iris talked me into leaving early."

  Natalie nodded. "Mirza's too damned handsome, that's the trouble. And a wonderful dancer into the bargain. . . . But Holinshed's promised to drop in. Should be here any minute."