Quicksand Page 3

  "I'll phone up right away," the landlord muttered in embarrassment, and pushed his way to the back of the bar.

  Dazed, the hurt man didn't seem to have heard Paul's last words. He complained obstinately, "But if there's a hospital just down the road . . . You come from there?"

  "Yes."

  "What's wrong with it, then? A hospital's a hospital!"

  "Mine isn't equipped to handle emergencies like yours," Paul said, his patience stretching to the limit. "You'll need that head X-rayed, for one thing, and your arm splinted, and you may have other injuries for all I can tell. We don't have the facilities."

  "So why in hell do you call the place a hospital?"

  "It's a mental hospital!"

  "Then that explains it," the man said, opening his eyes as wide as the bruising would permit.

  "What?"

  "How the hell do you think I got in this mess? I was attacked, damn it, I was beaten up! One of your blasted loonies must have escaped!"

  *4*

  "The ambulance will be here in a few minutes," the landlord panted, returning from the phone.

  "Better get the police as well," said a sour-faced man from Paul's left. "There's an escaped lunatic about."

  -- Enter rumour, painted full of . . .

  "Nonsense!" Paul snapped. "I came from the hospital directly I finished work. Certainly none of our patients is missing!"

  "Ah, but you'd say that anyhow, wouldn't you?" the sour man grunted. "Besides which you've been in here two hours. Saw you come in. That's plenty of time for a bloodthirsty maniac to break out." He rounded the words with a horrid relish, and Paul's patience ended.

  "You married? Got a family to look after you when you get old?"

  -- Safe ground. Happy family men don't spend whole evenings in dreary pubs like this one.

  "What's it to you?" the man countered belligerently.

  "Only that most of my patients aren't maniacs -- just lonely old people who don't want to get out because nobody on the outside ever treated them better than they get treated inside. Understood? Now shut up and let me find out the truth behind all this!"

  -- I should be ashamed. But people like him make me sick.

  Working on the layers of cloth, coat, jacket, shirt, slashing each and laying bare the broken arm, he questioned the hurt man and received answers punctuated with gasps.

  "I was driving back towards Blickham -- go easy there, damn it! Name's Faberdown. I'm a rep, see? Fertilisers and cattle cake. Firm transferred me here last month and I don't know my way about very well yet -- Christ, I said go easy! Got behind schedule taking a wrong turning. And when I came to those woods up there, half a mile back, I had to stop and get out, follow me? It was dark, nobody to take offence. And while I was stretching my legs a bit . . ."

  He broke off, not from a pang of pain this time.

  -- Curious.

  Paul was lightly palpating the injured arm. As far as he could tell it was a perfectly clean break and ought to heal without complications, but it needed splinting before he was put in an ambulance. Separating the three sleeves from the rest of the garments at the shoulder, he prompted: "Yes, what happened?"

  The man swallowed hard. "Someone rushed towards me. Just went for me, like that. I didn't do anything, didn't say anything, no reason. Clawed my face like you see, punched me in the eye, and when I tried to fight back picked me up the way you see on telly and chucked me at a tree!"

  The bystanders were hanging on every word.

  -- Lapping it up, aren't they? If they saw the sort of things I see every day of my life . . .

  Paul stilled that reaction. He looked Faberdown over, trying to sum him up. Thirties, a bit of a phony -- Irish thornproof suit for the "country gentleman" air, a not-quite-genuine old school tie in case the gentleman bit needed reinforcement. Running to fat. A load for anyone short of a professional wrestler to "chuck" at a tree.

  "Would you recognise your attacker again?"

  "It was all over so quickly . . ." Once more the salesman swallowed convulsively. Then the reason for his previous hesitation emerged with the reluctant admission: "About all I could tell was that it was a woman."

  "A woman? Did this ?"

  "I couldn't be bloody well mistaken, could I? Not when she didn't have a stitch of clothes on her!"

  -- Oh my God. Tomorrow's headline: Naked Woman Maniac at Large.

  The door of the bar opened. "Ambulance!" said a cheerful man in a peaked cap.

  "Over here," Paul called, and added with a surge of gratitude, "You made damned good time getting here."

  While they were loading the salesman on his stretcher -- he wanted to object, but by now shock had so weakened him he complied even as he was insisting he didn't need to be carried -- the first of the later wave of customers came in and the story had to be recounted to them, and then again for the next arrivals. Paul drew aside wearily, lit a cigarette and ignored the babble as he tried to decide whether there might be a grain of truth in Faberdown's assumption.

  -- Have we any violent females?

  Like it or not, the answer was yes, though a person as badly disturbed as the victim's description, wandering naked through the woods on a wet February night and assaulting innocent strangers, would logically be in one of the horsebox-like isolation cells behind steel bars and three locked doors.

  -- Lieberman?

  It was unlikely. But another homemade key had been found under his pillow this morning, and the locksmith made no secret of his ambition to pick every lock in the hospital.

  -- It could be, I suppose. . . .

  It was not, however, logical reasoning which decided him on action. It was the chance that brought Mrs Weddenhall into the pub.

  He knew her only slightly, but she wasn't easily forgotten once she'd been identified. A masculine woman of fifty, tonight wearing a trench-coat over her invariable tweed suit, woollen stockings and brogue shoes, she supplemented private means by breeding dogs at a kennels just outside Yemble, but regrettably that didn't occupy her time so fully she couldn't spare some to interfere in other people's lives. She was a justice of the peace and at the last election had stood for the local council; the electorate had shown sufficient sense to frustrate her.

  She came briskly in, demanded in her booming baritone what the blazes was going on, was told, and nodded vigorously. Armed with the bare bones of third-hand information, she approached Paul and addressed him in the patronising tone appropriate to a mere grammar-school product of only twenty-eight.

  "I hear one of your . . . ah . . . charges has gone over the hill. If you can tell me exactly where she attacked this unfortunate chap, I'll bring a couple of my hounds along. Soon root her out of cover, I can promise you."

  Paul looked at her, not believing his ears. He saw the incipient dewlaps along her jaw, the bulky chest which it was impossible to visualise as bearing feminine breasts, the straight legs four-square planted on the floor in their armour of laced shoes.

  "Are you honestly suggesting hunting her? With dogs?"

  "Damn' sight quicker than traipsing through the woods around here on foot! Ask anyone who's been fool enough to volunteer as beater for a shoot!"

  "Did you see the injured man?" Paul inquired sweetly.

  "The ambulance drove off just as I arrived."

  "Quite a big man," Paul said. "The woman who went for him must have been powerfully built. Brawny. Muscular."

  "All the more reason for doing as I suggest!"

  "In short," Paul concluded, ignoring the comment, "I picture her as being rather like you."

  He didn't stay to see the effect of the words.

  His hand shook as he pushed the key into the lock of his car. The wind had dropped, but that hadn't made the air any warmer -- only ensured that the drizzle would stay in this vicinity instead of moving on.

  -- That woman! I'd like to do to her what Mirza suggested doing to Holinshed!

  He let the car roll to the edge of the pub's carpark. There he paused, s
truck by a minor problem. Faberdown was a stranger hereabouts, on his own admission; he'd said no more than "woods half a mile away." And the pub was sited at a crossroads.

  -- Must be the Cornminster road. Coming into Yemble by any other route, he'd have passed a house with a phone long before he reached the Needle in Haystack. In which case . . .

  The woods Faberdown meant must be a neglected copse which he passed daily going to and from the hospital, with a gateway adjacent into which a car could conveniently be run while the driver relieved himself. It was part of the grounds of what had once been a fine private house, burned to the foundations in the depression years and never rebuilt. Speculation was still rife locally as to whether the owner had fired it to collect the insurance money.

  -- I wonder if the attack was really unprovoked!

  The idea sprang from nowhere, but seemed like such a dazzling access of insight he was about to drive in the direction of Cornminster without further ado, convinced he would find some harmless imbecile wandering in search of kindly treatment. That was ridiculous. The salesman's arm had really been broken and his eye had been blacked with a heavyweight punch.

  He swung the wheel the other way, towards the hospital.

  -- Thank goodness Iris left me the car. Otherwise long horrible walks in rain like this, endless standing at bus-stops with the feet squelching . . .

  She would have been entitled to take it, of course. It had been bought with her money, not his.

  He swung past the big blank-and-white sign identifying "Chent Hospital for Nervous Disorders"; the gatekeeper peered out with a startled expression meaning what's Dr Fidler doing coming back at this time of night.

  The building itself loomed sinister with its mock battlements. Relic of a Victorian miser's dreams of grandeur, it was about as unsuitable for use as an asylum as any in Britain, half make-believe castle, half ill-conceived afterthoughts such as the high-security Disturbed wing in red brick and the inevitable tall chimney crowned with its spiky lightning conductor.

  But it had been left for a mental hospital by heirs grateful that the owner had finally been certified insane after making their lives hell well into his eighties, and with the shortage of facilities one had to be satisfied with what one could get.

  -- Though the impact of it on a patient arriving for the first time must be disastrous! Imagine being delivered here in a state of acute anxiety, for instance, and seeing those turrets and crenellations, and then hearing that iron-studded oaken door go thud behind you! Christ, the effect on the staff is bad enough!

  He braked the car with a grinding of gravel and marched up to the forbidding entrance. It was locked after six, but a key for it was among the many which constituted his burden of office. In the ball he found himself face to face with Natalie.

  "Paul! What are you doing here? Never mind, I'm glad to see you."

  Blank, he stared at her. "You won't be when I tell you why I've come."

  "This alleged escaped lunatic?"

  " Is it one of our patients? I didn't think It could possibly -- "

  She made an impatient gesture. "Of course not! I've been double-checking because the police insisted, but everybody's safe and sound."

  "That's how you heard about it -- from the police?"

  "They rang up about ten minutes ago. I must say I didn't get a very clear idea of what's supposed to have happened. Something about a man in a car being attacked by a naked madwoman, as far as I could make out. Is that right?"

  Paul let his shoulders sag. "Yes, I'm afraid it's true. He came staggering into the Needle with a broken arm."

  "Then we can look forward to a month or two of the leper treatment from our neighbors, I suppose," Natalie commented without humour. "Did you only come back to make sure it wasn't somebody from here?"

  "That's right. And since it isn't, I suppose I'd better go down to the woods where it happened so that somebody's on hand to stop Mrs Weddenhall turning loose her hounds."

  *5*

  -- I'm sure Natalie thought I was joking about Mrs Weddenhall. I only wish I was.

  He clicked his lights up to full beam and accelerated down the winding Cornminster road. The village stopped dead at this point, though on the other roads leading from the junction it straggled a few hundred yards further. In seconds a curve had taken him out of sight of human habitation and he was driving between steep black banks crowned with wet thorny hedges.

  -- Abstract of insanity: aloneness in a private world. Oh, there is some excuse for a reaction like Mrs Weddenhall's. A cripple can still be a person, but in what sense is a lunatic human? Humanity's in the mind, in the tangle of thoughts spun by the brain, and once that's gone what remains is human only in outward shape. But sometimes one can win back what's been lost. You can't create a person, only let him grow, but you can occasionally, with care and planning and foresight, help shattered fragments bind together, whole.

  He felt the car's rear wheels slide on mud and slowed down; better to get there in one piece than not at all.

  -- All the king's horses and all the king's men . . . They put me back together. I owe them that.

  The doom / the dome of the black night leaned on his skull with a crushing weight. For an instant he had, with terrifying vividness, the old familiar illusion: that when he ended this interval alone and once again came on his fellow men, they would stare at him strangely and speak incomprehensible new tongues.

  -- I built myself a blank black trap like this empty road. I should have had the sense to tell Iris the truth even if it meant her not marrying me. They don't talk about it in my family because it's a shameful thing, and I banked on their silence. By shifts and devious expedients I eluded the admission and uttered those diversionary half-truths: psychiatry is the coming thing, that's the field where the great new discoveries will be made from now on, this is the right branch of medicine for an ambitious newcomer to select. . . . And the worst sophistry of all: passing off my analysis with that ready phrase "Physician heal thyself." What good are cliches in ordering your life? Stick to the stale and sooner or later you wear down into the standard mould. Goodbye individual, hello matchstick man!

  He braked abruptly. There was his goal, and he hadn't been joking about Mrs Weddenhall.

  In the glare of his lights stood three vehicles, partly blocking the road. Under branches dripping rainwater, a Ford Anglia station wagon, which must be Faberdown's, a police Wolseley with its blue light shining, and Mrs Weddenhall's elderly Bentley with its wired rear compartment used for transporting dogs.

  He pulled as far on the verge of the road as he dared, cut his engine, and at once heard a low bark: the sound between a cough and a roar which he'd noticed many times as he drove around Yemble. He jumped out.

  And there she was, standing with her dogs on short leashes -- two wolf-hounds, rangy, rough-coated, excited at being brought out into the country at night. She was talking to a police constable in a waterproof cape, and Paul caught the tail of her latest statement as he approached.

  "But we can't have maniacs terrorising people in the isolated farms between here and Cornminster!"

  -- Christ, she must be eager to have dashed home and fetched the dogs so quickly!

  "Officer!" he called. "What's going on?"

  A little relieved at the interruption, the policeman turned. "I shouldn't hang around here, sir," he warned. "We've had a report about -- "