"Gill, B M - Tom Maybridge 03 - The Fifth Rapunzel 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gill B M)

Steven Donaldson had started having reservations about Sally Loreto a few weeks after employing her. She had done nothing wrong. On the contrary, she had done everything right. Her domestic duties weren't performed to perfection, but were performed well enough. The domestic staff liked her. The professional staff liked her, too. And so did the patients. Especially Creggan. Possibly it was Creggan's warmth towards her that had made Donaldson uneasy. "An attractive young woman," Creggan had said, "but where did she get her surname from - a convent or a saint?" Donaldson had replied brusquely that as far as he knew she wasn't a Catholic. An illogical response to a silly question There were times when he felt as irrational as his patients. Creggan had smiled at him with a degree of sympathy.
Sally was twenty-two years old and looked younger. She was small, narrow hipped, but with well rounded breasts which were bra-less. Her hair, albino fair, almost white, crisply curled at the nape of her neck, and her eyes by contrast were a deep turquoise blue. She jogged around the grounds every morning before the day's chores and then sat for a few minutes on the bench in the hall, her arms crossed over her chest and her head bowed. Not a yoga position, just a rather graceful slump that probably eased her pectoral muscles. Later, rested, she changed out of her green and white jogging suit into a floral overall and brought the patients their morning cups of tea.
Creggan's morning cup of tea, taken off the premises in his tepee, took rather longer to deliver. Just how much longer was reasonable was difficult for Donaldson to assess. Sex before breakfast might be good therapy for Creggan but it wasn't part of The Mount's therapy and he had a duty to protect Sally. He had been a fool to employ anyone so young, but there hadn't been anyone else. Domestic work in a psychiatric hospital - or nursing home as he had described it in the advertisement -doesn't attract applicants. He had believed he'd been lucky to get her. He wished he could still believe it. A growing anxiety neurosis was an occupational hazard and external events of the last few months hadn't helped. Physicians might heal themselves if they suffered from organic disease, psychiatrists had a harder time trying. Here, where the lush came to be dried, it was folly to be seen seeking solace in neat whisky. Vodka and tonic, however, was almost as good and didn't linger on the breath. To seem to practise what he preached was vital. He owed that much to his patients.
And he owed Simon a courteous reception when Sally showed him into his consulting room. Which she shouldn't have done. An open invitation to his patients to come and chat any time wasn't open to visitors. They first encountered his secretary, Miss Bailey, who informed him they were there, or told them he wasn't there, or otherwise engaged.
"Miss Bailey has gone to the dentist's," Sally told him and smiled her little girl smile at him, "so I brought him straight.along." She eyed bis glass of vodka and tonic on the desk, not fleetingly but for several seconds. "Is there anything I can get you, Doctor? Would your guest like some coffee?"
Simon said quickly that he wouldn't.
The air zinged with irritation.
Donaldson knew that Brenda Bailey had gone to the dentist's, but Sally should have left Simon in the outer office. And she shouldn't look at his drink like that or act the gracious hostess, offering coffee to his guest. She was a domestic, damn it. He thanked her crisply and waited for her to close the door after her before offering Simon a chair.
"I'm sorry you were out when I called on you, Simon. I should have called again. I'm really delighted you've come to see me."
Delighted - no. Disconcerted - yes. He bore more than just a fleeting resemblance to his mother. It was impossible to look at him and not see her. He felt very tired, suddenly. Why had he come? What did he want?
He remembered asking Lisa the same questions just a few months ago. She had walked in unannounced on a rainy afternoon, seated herself in the same tub chair in the window recess and gazed out across the garden, silently. Her face had been in profile and her brown and cream headscarf, very damp, was slowly working loose from its knot and slipping on to the collar of her mack. She'd seemed withdrawn, hardly aware of her surroundings. He'd thought she might be close to tears and had asked the questions gently and with concern, but when she had turned and looked at him, her eyes had been very bright and clear. "Soon," she said, "Peter and I celebrate our silver wedding anniversary. Marvellous, isn't it? He wants me to go to the Istrian Peninsula with him - where we went for our honeymoon. Who is he running from, do you suppose? The latest lady love getting too close - like that other bitch, Trudy Morrison? Or is it the male menopause? A change of heart?"
Questions that couldn't be answered were better ignored. Bradshaw's lady love, as she had so quaintly put it, had been the girl in the red hat who had turned up at the opening ceremony of the new library extension looking as if she were attending Ascot. There had been rumours that she had something to do with the art world and had come as a guest of Lisa's. Other rumours
had, correctly, linked her with Peter. His attitude towards her had been carefully cool, his face a stiff expressionless mask as if he'd had a night of heavy boozing and was nursing a hangover. Peter had the knack of putting his emotions on ice, according to Lisa, but could be lethally charming when warmed up. A sardonic appraisal of a husband she had never stopped
loving.
Love - a trick of nature to procreate.
But Lisa hadn't wanted a child.
Donaldson started talking to her son. Inconsequential talk. A spider's web of words to stem the bleeding of an old wound. The wound, he knew, couldn't fail to be there. The ills of most of his patients went back to childhood days, to sexual abuse in some cases, neglect in others. There were more problem parents than problem children. The former, unfortunately, produced the latter, but it didn't always show until adolescence. Sometimes a lot later.
He asked Simon if he was looking forward to a career in medicine.
"No."
"You'd rather do something else?"
"Yes."
"Any idea what?"
"No."
Donaldson hesitated before asking the next question. A leading one. "Are you troubled about anything?"
Troubled' is a down-beat word. He used it frequently, along with 'a little concerned', 'rather bothered', 'somewhat worried'. A soothing approach followed by a period of silence, carefully calculated. If properly timed the patient opened up. If he'd got it wrong, he clammed up. In this case, getting it wrong might be getting it right. Simon wasn't the type to make a social call so he had come for information of some kind and was finding it almost impossible to voice his question. He was rigid with tension. It might be better not voiced. Donaldson sat back in his chair. Waited. Had Simon been anyone else, his professional instinct would have nudged him to grab the moment before it was too late; instead he stayed silent, glanced at the diary on his desk, pushed it to one side. When he looked at Simon again, he saw he'd calculated it perfectly. The boy's hands were no longer clenched into fists and he wasn't breathing so rapidly. His resolve to speak had ebbed. Whatever it was he'd come to say, he'd thought better of it. A possible indiscretion had been averted. What would Simon have asked him? he wondered. "Was my mother paranoid?" "Can paranoia be inherited?" Or would he have come out with the less traumatic worries of adolescence, more easily assuaged by a calming speech about the human condition being a mixture of moods and reactions suffered by everyone in different degrees and at different times, all perfectly normal? A glib, meaningless word, normal. But soothing.
Simon said he wasn't troubled about anything. He had realised in the last few minutes that a request to look at his mother's medical file would have been refused. Donaldson would have said that it was private. Or destroyed. It probably had been, and it was better so. Why keep records of the dead? It was difficult to imagine his mother having anything to do with this elderly goat-like man with his long bony head crammed with psychiatric jargon. Had he let his defences down, asked him anything, told him anything, he would have spouted Freud at him. Or ferreted away until he had dug up his sexual fantasies and - worse - his making love to Rhoda's nightdress. It had been pointless coming here. He got up to leave.
Donaldson, slightly guilty about the way he'd opted out professionally, felt he should make more effort socially and suggested that Simon might like to have a look over the premises. It would ease the boy, he thought, if he had preconceived disturbing notions of the place.
The Mount externally was a sombre mish-mash of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a twentieth-century extension at the back which would have induced neurosis in an architectural purist, though a thick coat of ivy helped to disguise the worst of it. Inside were craft areas and a heated swimming pool where scantily clad patients, or staff, they all looked the same to Simon, seemed to be enjoying themselves, some in the water, others seated in loungers. In the main building there was a music room, a billiard room, a library and several small sitting-rooms, all cheerfully furnished like a middle quality hotel. Patients - staff? - sat in groups mostly, though a few loners roamed around, or sat alone reading, or just sat.
Simon, expecting something more clinical, asked about ECT. Most visitors did. Donaldson said he didn't believe in it. Simon warmed to him a little. It couldn't have been all that bad for his mother. Perhaps not bad at all. Just a place to rest, as he had told Rhoda. He asked if he could see her room.
Donaldson told him smoothly that no particular room had been set aside for her, she had visited very rarely, just now and again when domestic pressures, that sort of thing, got her down briefly, but he would show him the room she'd had last time she was here. And then he remembered that Corinne Sinclair, a sixty-year-old manic depressive, had gouged out chunks of plaster from the wall with the metal-tipped heel of her shoe the previous night and was now deeply sedated in the 'quiet wing', the only part of The Mount that remotely resembled a hospital. Instead, he showed Simon one of the other bedrooms and said it had been Lisa's. It had a wide window facing the lawn and the shrubby area beyond, where Creggan's tent was. The crazy, cheerful little tepee, viewed from up here, didn't look sinister enough to worry anybody. Simon tried to imagine his mother standing by the window, looking out. She probably wouldn't have liked the yellow chintz curtains, they would have been too flowery for her, not modern enough. Apart from that it was a nice enough room. He wouldn't have minded sleeping here himself.
Donaldson's private accommodation was a three-roomed flat on the top floor, carefully and appropriately furnished. The first time he had entertained Lisa up there, she had looked around it with amusement and told him it was phoney. "Who are you trying to con, Steven? This isn't you." She had been referring to the book-lined walls, all the books in their pristine jackets and most un-read. Poetry. The classics. History. Modern fiction, but not a lot. The family photographs -his sister's family - hadn't been too prominent, but made a quiet statement. A bachelor needs a little help. The one photograph that had meant anything to him, and had been taken a long time ago when they were undergraduates at Cambridge, had been placed a little behind the others. Lisa had alighted on it. "Hush, hush, whisper who dares," she had teased. Lisa had the ability to annoy. And arouse stronger emotions, too.
He decided not to show his flat to her son.
On the way out they met Sally coming in. "Mr Creggan is back," she told Donaldson, "and he's brought a dog. A pooch. A sort of middle sized mongrel. He said he saw a programme about geriatrics petting dogs and getting better. Dog therapy. He said it should work at any age. If you don't want it, Bob Millington up at the farm will probably take it for a while until Mr Creggan goes again." She smiled. "You do get lumbered with problems, Doctor Donaldson, and you keep so calm."
If Donaldson could have sacked her there and then for her veiled insolence, he would have done. And if he could have booted Creggan out without losing 'his fee he would have done that, too. Creggan was paying well over the odds and money mattered. He excused himself to Simon and strode off in the direction of Creggan's tent.
And left Simon and Sally standing together within touching distance.
Sally duly touched him, her fingers lightly resting on his wrist. It wasn't a Rhoda touch, but it was warm enough to be pleasant. "I knew your mum," she told him. "Last time she was here, I'd only just come. I cleaned her room out for her and she gave me something when she was leaving. I'll give it to you if you'll take me for a run in your car. I have a free afternoon tomorrow."
For the first time for months Simon felt mildly happy. He asked her her name.
"Sally," she told him, giving his wrist a gentle squeeze.
Sally was the sort of name he associated with a milk-shake with a lot of sugar in it. A bit boring. Not like Rhoda. He asked what his mother had given her, but she wouldn't tell him.
"You'll see."
He noticed that when she smiled her eyes were coolly appraising. Her eyes and her lips didn't match. Her boobs, however, were a beautiful pair. His eyes lingered on them and she giggled. "Tomorrow's okay, then? About half past two? I'll come down to your place."
"Yes," he told her, blushing. "Tomorrow's okay."

8.

Max Cormack, a young Irish pathologist, took over Peter Bradshaw's job with some trepidation. He had the right qualifications and sufficient experience not to do anything stupid; even so, he felt like a raw understudy stepping into the leading actor's shoes. How was it that dabbling with the dead fired the imagination of the living? Crime stories sold newspapers. And books. And plays. Othello strangling Desdemona still sent thrills of horror down the spine. Intimations of mortality, other people's mortality, churned the stomach but were exciting, too. The public wanted to know more. And more. Forensic science, as opposed to other sciences, had some readable bits like excerpts from a 'whodunnit'. Genetic fingerprinting, for instance, had featured in quite a few articles in the Press. The Press coverage of Bradshaw had been very high profile, to use the current jargon. Getting himself killed so spectacularly had probably helped.
Easy on there, Cormack chicked himself, cynicism will get you nowhere. Bradshaw was a competent pathologist and, according to his colleagues, a likeable bloke. And his colleagues, the senior policemen he'd met after being appointed, seemed likeable, too. Not the type to go in for practical jokes, though at first he'd thought one of them was taking the mickey.
The pink envelope had been placed on his desk next to a couple of folders full of Bradshaw's unfinished business and a single sheet of paper, typed by his secretary, outlining the general set-up and pointing out what was urgent and what wasn't. A competent girl, Sofia. Pretty, too. Asian, he guessed. Skin the colour of milky coffee and dark brown eyes. She was eyeing him now as he fingered the envelope. It was fully addressed and stamped and had come through the post.
He opened it. The card inside was pink, too. Congratulations on your new job was the printed message. And under it the picture of a Scottie dog wearing a tartan cap and smoking a pipe. Anthropomorphic. Very twee. An Irish leprechaun doing a jig on a mortuary slab would be more in keeping.
He turned the page. And saw closely written in a small cramped hand: Look at Rapunzel Number Five, Doctor Cormack, and look hard. May the good Lord guide you to the truth while Bradshaw rots in hell. It wasn't signed. It took him a few moments to recognise the handwriting and remember where he'd seen it before. Photocopied on the Hixon file. Not a joke. Not even an execrable one.