Quicksand Read online

  "You heard me. He was threatening one of the nurses. That's why I had to run away from the phone, and why I'm damned if I'm going to apologise for not coming to fetch you from the station."

  "Are you serious?" she said in a thin voice.

  "Of course not. I'm tremendously amused. It positively made the evening for me and I don't know why I'm not shrieking with laughter!"

  "Darling, how was I to know?" Iris said after a pause. She advanced on him uncertainly, eyes scanning his averted face. "Goodness, it must have been awful. . . . Look . . . ah . . . Bertie Parsons gave me a bottle of vodka. Would you like some?"

  -- I don't know what I'd like. Except out. Stop the world I want to get off.

  Exhausted, he sat without stirring except to light a cigarette, while she scampered up to the bedroom for a robe, then produced the vodka and mixed drinks for them both.

  "Who was it?"

  "A young fellow called Riley. I thought he was on the mend because he hadn't given any trouble lately. I was wrong."

  "What started it?" She came over and put the glass into his hand, then fetched a cushion from the settle opposite and squatted down at his feet, turning to poke the fire; she must have lit it on coming in.

  "He tried to kiss one of the nurses. Woodside. You met her at the Christmas dance -- pretty, but very big, as tall as I am."

  She set down the poker and rested her arm on his knee. Her blue eyes turned up to his face, large and liquid. "It would have been nasty, wouldn't it?"

  "Nasty!" He gave a short laugh. "Ever seen a man who's had a bottle ground in his face?"

  "Tell me exactly what happened," she insisted, and began to caress the inside of his leg.

  -- Where's the affection come from all of a sudden? You haven't behaved like this in nearly a year!

  Mechanically, as he recounted the story, he pieced together the reason, and damned the training which gave him insight for that.

  -- It excites you, doesn't it? Starts the little juices running! Thinking about Riley threatening Nurse Woodside to make her kiss him: that gets the breath rasping in your throat. I can hear it.

  He gulped the last of his drink and roughly thrust his hand down the neck of her robe, groping for her nipple with the tips of his fingers. The contact made her stiffen and shiver. He flicked the butt of his cigarette into the fire and slid forward off the chair.

  "Paul . . ." she said, the words muffled by a tress of hair that his movement had drawn across her mouth.

  "Shut up," he said, his lips against her neck. "You've been away for over two weeks, and I came within inches of never seeing you again and I want to celebrate."

  "But I . . ."

  Yet, even as her mouth breathed reluctance, her hands were tearing at his clothes.

  -- Christ. Married four years, nearly five, and I find this out the night I'm bloody nearly killed.

  That was the last thought before he gave himself up to the plunging and churning of her body under his.

  *21*

  On Sunday Paul drove Iris to Ludlow in chilly spring sunshine, and they had a good dinner in Cornminster before going home. The other Paul Fidler kept his distance; thoughts of death and blindness had no place in a countryside hesitantly emerging from winter lethargy, showing new green on the trees and shy flowers under the hedgerows.

  But once Paul was at work again on Monday, his alter ego crept back at the edge of awareness. By force of will he reduced his accumulated work to manageable proportions, and only then did he allow himself to consider the problem weighing on his conscience: what he might do for Urchin to balance the debt he now owed.

  He reached for a notepad and began to map out what he was already thinking of under the somewhat grandiose title of "Project Urchin." Instantly the telephone rang.

  With a mutter of annoyance he picked it up.

  "Barrie Tumbelow here," said the distant voice. "I gather you've been trying to reach me. I did call up on Saturday morning, but apparently you'd just gone out."

  -- Of course. When I dashed off to Blickham I completely forgot about the message I left asking him to contact me.

  "I need some advice," Paul said. "We have a patient here who speaks absolutely no English, and I want to measure her IQ."

  There was a moment of silence. "You do realise," Tumbelow said at last, "that this isn't my speciality? I can claim to know a good deal about measuring infantile intelligence because that's part of my . . . ah . . . basic armoury, but . . . You do mean an adult patient?"

  "Yes."

  Tumbelow click-clicked his tongue against his teeth. "Well . . . Ah-hah! I think you may have come to the right shop after all. I picked up a preprint at a congress I went to recently about IQ testing of deaf-and-dumb adults. That ought to include some suitable non-verbal material for you. Hang on. . . . Yes, here we are. This was a project to correlate the g coefficient of several different testing methods wholly exclusive of any verbal content. Does that sound like what you're after?"

  "Absolutely ideal," Paul agreed.

  "I'll let you have the loan of it, then," Tumbelow promised, and rang off.

  Pleased, Paul reverted to what he had been doing when he was interrupted.

  Obviously, the first step was to list everything he knew about Urchin in the order in which the facts occurred to him, like an amateur detective in a mystery novel collecting clues. Ultimately, perhaps, a pattern would emerge, but at this stage he felt baffled.

  -- She took the tape-recorder in her stride, but she was scared of the photographer's cameras. And what in the world frightened her so badly about the X-ray machine?

  He ploughed on until be had filled three sheets of the notepad, then went back to the beginning and entered against each item action he might take to answer the implied questions. The phone rang a second time while he was busy with this, and he picked it up, sighing.

  "Dr Fidler? Oh, my name's Shoemaker. You sent us a tape and a sample of writing by one of your patients."

  "Oh, yes!" Paul sat up straight. "Have you identified the language for me?"

  "I . . . uh . . . I'm afraid not. But I judged from the tone of your covering letter that you were in a hurry for the information, so I thought I'd better let you have a progress report. The matter sort of fell into my lap, you see, because I happened to be here on Saturday morning when it arrived. I took the sample of writing home with me -- easier to deal with than the tape, naturally, because there are so many thousands of different spoken languages -- and I went all the way through Diringer's book The Alphabet , which is pretty much the standard work, and I drew a complete blank."

  "Are you certain?"

  "Well, I suppose it might be something that Diringer missed, but that seems most unlikely to me. There's a slight resemblance to runic in the form of the letters, but the vowel-determinants given alongside certainly don't belong to a runic system."

  "How extraordinary!" Paul said.

  "Yes -- yes, it is." Shoemaker hesitated. "Don't take my word for gospel, though. There are still a lot of other lines I can try: I'll play the tape over to everyone I can corner during the next few days, and I'm making a transcription of it in Bell Phonetic which I'll send down to London. But while I was doing that it suddenly struck me: if this is material from a mental patient, could it possibly be an invented language?"

  "That occurred to me too," Paul said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the door open, and waved impatiently at the intruder to wait. "But I thought it was next to impossible to devise an imaginary language."

  "Quite right. It's almost bound to bear traces of the inventor's . . . uh . . . linguistic preconceptions. There was the case of a girl in France at the end of last century who claimed to be in telepathic communication with Martians, and hoaxed people right and left until a philologist showed that she was talking not 'Martian' but a crude variant of her native French. Nonetheless, I'd be grateful if you could make absolutely certain we're not wasting time on something she's made up from whole cloth."

  Pau
l promised to do his best and cradled the phone. Turning, he saw that the visitor he had so casually made to wait was Dr Alsop.

  "I'm dreadfully sorry!" he exclaimed.

  Alsop waved the apology aside. "It sounded important -- but what was it all about, anyway?"

  Paul explained his plan for "Project Urchin" and handed Alsop the notepad on which he had made his preliminary list.

  "Very thorough," the consultant approved in a cordial tone. "There are some things here, of course, which puzzle me, but I assume that's because I haven't been told about them yet. What have X-ray machines got to do with the case?"

  "Thanks for reminding me. I missed one thing." Paul reclaimed the notepad and wrote in: Knowledge of anatomy, karate or other unarmed combat. Meantime, he described the near-disaster at Blickham General and the events of Saturday night.

  "Sounds like a useful person to have on your side," Alsop murmured. "Question is, how do you persuade her to stay there without being able to talk to her?"

  "She seems to be trying to learn English."

  "Seriously, or as a way of gaining attention for herself?"

  "Seriously, as far as I can tell."

  "Now that is interesting. . . . May I just see that list again? Thanks." Alsop ran his eye down all three pages of it. "You've certainly gone into great detail. What do you expect to get out of it -- a paper, a series?"

  -- A healed girl.

  But Paul didn't voice that. He said merely, "It's too early to guess, isn't it?"

  "Very wise. Well, you can rely on me for any advice I can give. I've been hoping you'd settle to something ambitious instead of loafing along with your routine work, and I'm very pleased."

  Paul chose his next words carefully. "What I really would appreciate is some backing. If there's any difficulty about my asking for special facilities, for instance. Dr Holinshed and I -- "

  "Don't say another word," Alsop smiled. "It wouldn't be good for inter-staff relations. But you can count on me."

  He slapped both thighs with his open palms. "Well, we'd better get on, hadn't we? There's a full roster of patients at the clinic today, and I daren't be late. Which reminds me: I have to go up to London next weekend, and I'd rather like to stop over on Monday and see my publisher about this book I'm doing. Would you mind taking next week's clinic for me?"

  -- Breakthrough!

  Throughout the morning's series of interviews with patients Alsop continued to eye Paul with curiosity. However, it was not until the door had closed behind the last of those on the stand-up-and-yell list that he leaned over confidentially and spoke what was on his mind.

  "You haven't said anything about it, young fellow, but I've reached a conclusion. Your wife's back. Am I right?"

  For a moment Paul was taken aback. Then he managed a sickly grin, while Alsop chortled appreciation of his own insight.

  Alsop had another appointment before proceeding to the clinic, and asked Paul to drive into Blickham and join him later. Pleased with the good impression he'd made today, Paul returned to his office and continued with his routine tasks, free from thoughts of the disasters that might have been.

  Until the phone rang, and Holinshed's voice ground in his ear like icebergs crashing in a stormy sea.

  "Fidler? Come down to my office right away!"

  *22*

  Paul closed the door briskly behind him and sat down without being asked. Holinshed scowled disapproval of the act and adopted his familiar headmasterly pose with elbows on chair-arms, fingertips together.

  "I am informed, Fidler, that you have been guilty of what one can only term a number of gross errors of professional judgment during the past few days. It's very seldom that I have cause twice within a week to rebuke a member of my staff, particularly one who holds a position of responsibility. One is prepared or this kind of mistake among the very junior staff who are as yet lacking in experience, but in people such as yourself one looks for a degree of caution and foresight."

  Paul stared at him incredulously.

  -- Maybe Iris was right after all. Maybe I don't belong in this line of business. Not when the psychiatrists sometimes seem madder than their patients!

  He said, completely forgetting the technique for dealing with Holinshed which he had been so pleased to master at their last interview, "What are you talking about?"

  "I don't like your manner, Fidler," Holinshed snapped.

  "And I don't like your accusations. Substantiate them or apologise."

  The words hung in the air like smoke. Paul felt anger turn slowly sour in his belly until it was transmuted into alarm at his own outburst.

  "Are you denying" -- Holinshed was practically whispering -- "that you gave instructions for the transfer of Riley from the Disturbed wing, thus directly setting in motion the train of events that climaxed in one of my nurses nearly being killed?"

  -- Oh my God. How am I going to get out of this one? Hang on: "Your wife's back." Therapeutic value of orgasm. Mostly double-talk but it'll sound convincing.

  "Are you familiar with the background of Riley's case?"

  "What? Fidler, I make it my business to acquaint myself with the history of every patient committed to Chent!"

  "Then you can't have overlooked the element of extreme homosexual tension which contributes so much to his condition. He's making valiant efforts to achieve normality, but at his age he's still a virgin, simply because his inability to establish a stable relationship with a girl is resulting in impotence. Keeping him under maximum security is going to compound his problems by preventing even casual contact with women. I stand by my decision to transfer him, I'd do it again tomorrow if the occasion arose, and what is more I risked my own life on Saturday night in support of this belief. Were you not told about that?"

  "What would you have had the nurse do -- stand necking with him in the middle of the dance-floor?"

  "Do you think I want to make things worse for him by encouraging him to imagine that one of the nurses finds him irresistible? But she rebuffed him as fiercely as if he was liable to rape her. He's incapable of that, as far as we can tell. What he needs is acknowledgment of his masculinity from other people to reassure him that he's not queer. Dr Alsop has brought to my attention some work by a man in Sweden on the relationship between sexuality and delinquency, and there appears to be some relevant material there."

  Gradually Paul had been working back towards self-control. He wound up the last statement in exactly the stuffy tone calculated to impress Holinshed, and knew he had recouped most of the lost ground. Everything now depended on what the other "professional errors" might be.

  -- He's never going to like me. But by God I think I might make him scared of me before I leave this disgusting hole!

  "The fact remains," Holinshed said, with marginally less conviction than before, "a patients' dance is hardly a proper proving ground for your theories about Riley, and more than Blickham General is for your theories about the girl you've decided to call Urchin. A nurse there was actually injured!"

  "It was on Dr Alsop's recommendation that I took her for the X-ray. I took every precaution I could think of, including having the photographs made which Inspector Hofford asked for, since it occurred to me that to undergo a strange but innocuous experience would predispose her to submit quietly to the X-ray."

  "Instead of which she proved not merely uncooperative but downright dangerous!"

  "On the other hand, on Saturday evening she was both cooperative and courageous." Paul glanced at his watch, but kept talking to stop Holinshed breaking in. "I have to join Dr Alsop at his clinic this afternoon, but I can spare a few minutes to outline the project which we've been mapping out this morning. We propose to conduct an exhaustive analysis of Urchin's behaviour, with a view to reconciling the obvious inconsistencies into . . ."