A Great Deliverance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,65
and flung it open. "I can deal with it, sir," she said abruptly and got out into the brisk autumn air.
"We've kept her confined," Dr. Samuels was saying to Lynley as they walked down the transverse passage that ran straight through the building from east to west.
Barbara followed behind them, relieved to find that Barnstingham was not exactly what she had pictured when she first heard the words mental asylum. It was really not very hospital-like at all, an English baroque building laid out on cross-axes. They had entered through a front hall that rose two storeys, with fluted pilasters standing on plinths against the walls.
Light and colour were the operative words here, for the room was painted a calming shade of peach, the decorative plasterwork was white, the ankle-thick carpeting was merely a shade off rust, and while the portraits were dark and moody, of the Flemish school, their subjects managed to look suitably apologetic about the fact.
All this was a relief, for when Lynley had first mentioned the need to see Roberta, to come to this place, Barbara had become quite faint, that old insidious panic setting in. Lynley had seen it, of course. Damn the man. He didn't miss a trick.
Now that she was inside the building, she felt steadier, a feeling that improved once they left the great central hall and began their journey down the passage. Here conviviality expressed itself in soothing Constable landscapes and vases of fresh flowers and quiet voices in the air. The sound of music and singing came from a distance.
"The choir," Dr. Samuels explained. "Here, it's just this way."
Samuels himself had been a secondary source of both surprise and relief. Outside the walls of the hospital, Barbara wouldn't have known he was a psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist somehow conjured up images of Freud: a bearded Victorian face, a cigar, and those speculative eyes. But Samuels had the look of a man who was more at home on horseback or hiking across the moors than probing disturbed psyches. He was well-built, loose limbed, and clean shaven, with a tendency, Barbara guessed, to be less than patient with anyone whose intelligence did not match his own. He was probably the devil on a tennis court as well.
She'd begun to feel quite at ease with the hospital when Dr. Samuels opened a narrow door - funny how it had been concealed by some panelling - and led them into the new wing of the building. This was the locked ward, looking and smelling exactly as Barbara had supposed a locked ward would. The carpeting was a very dark, serviceable brown. The walls were the colour of sunbaked sand, unadorned and broken only by doors into which small windows were set at eye level. The air was filled with that medicinal smell of antiseptics and detergents and drugs.
And it was cut by a low moaning that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. It could have been the wind. It could have been anything.
Here it is, she told herself. The place for psychos, for girls who decapitate daddies, for girls who murder. Lots of things are murder, Barb.
"There's been absolutely nothing since her original statement," Dr. Samuels was saying to Lynley. "She's not catatonic. She's merely said what she intends to say, I think." He glanced at the clipboard he was carrying. "I did it. I'm sorry.' On the day the body was found. She's not spoken since."
"There's no medical cause? She's been examined?"
Dr. Samuel's lips tightened in offence. It was clear that this Scotland Yard intrusion bordered on insult, and if he had to impart information, it would be minimal at best.
"She's been examined," he said. "No seizure, no stroke. She can speak. She chooses not to."
If he was bothered by the clipped nature of the doctor's response, Lynley didn't let it show. He was used to encountering attitudes like the psychiatrist's, attitudes proclaiming that the police were antagonists to be thwarted rather than allies to be helped. He slowed his steps and told Dr. Samuel about Roberta's cache of food. This, at least, caught the man's attention. When he next spoke, his words walked the line between frustration and deeper thought.
"I don't know what to tell you, Inspector. The food could, as you guess, be a compulsion.
It could be a stimulus or a response. It could be a source of gratification or a form of sublimation.
Until Roberta's willing to give us something to go on, it could be damn well anything."