A Dead Liberty (4 page)

Had Lucy Durmast permitted herself the luxury of speech this would have been the point at which she would have positively exploded that chance. She wasn't going to—and anyway never would be able to—forget the sickening sequence of events of that day last January.

“You can't always choose,” he explained, “what you want to remember and what you want to forget.”

She blinked. There was a poem, wasn't there, about that. Where you could remember if you wanted to. Or forget. Lucy Durmast fixed her gaze on the wall behind the psychiatrist's head and concentrated her mind on Christina Rossetti's Song: “When I am Dead.”

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

For all the sentiment in her verse Lucy Durmast suspected that Christina Rossetti had been a tougher personality than the casual reader might have thought.

“If you could just cough for me,” the psychiatrist was saying almost apologetically, “it would save us from having to examine your mouth and throat and so forth.”

One of the many things Lucy Durmast had learnt at her grandfather's knee had been that the first duty of every psychiatrist had been to exclude real physical illness: organic disease that wasn't the opposite of inorganic but of mental or psychosomatic disorder. This school of thought was reflected rather neatly in Army Regulations. A soldier who reported sick was deemed to be on a charge until he had been demonstrated to have a physical illness. She coughed without shifting her gaze from him and continued to think about Christina Rossetti. There had been more lines in the poem about choosing. She concentrated on the poem with a frown.

Haply I may remember

And haply may forget.

Those alternatives certainly did not apply in this case. She could neither haply forget nor haply remember the last time she had seen Kenneth Carline.

No, that wasn't true.

To be absolutely precise there had been nothing actually memorable about his last visit. It had been what had come after that last visit that had been so shattering. So shattering that she had come to think of it in her mind as Black Monday: the day that Kenneth Carline had come to the Old Rectory at Braffle Episcopi for a quick luncheon …

The psychiatrist had only registered the frown. In spite of all his training and expertise, thought Lucy Durmast, he wasn't really a mind reader. “Coughing didn't hurt, did it?” he asked quickly.

He very nearly caught her off guard then. She had begun to shake her head almost automatically before she remembered that a state of non-communication was supposed to exist between Lucy Durmast and the rest of the world.

“That's good,” said the psychiatrist matter-of-factly. “If you had had any pain or couldn't cough we might be thinking of a clinical condition.”

What had provoked Lucy Durmast's frown had been her recollection of the meal that she had given Kenneth Carline on that Black Monday. Even “meal” was really too grand a word for the few ingredients that she had put together at short notice after he had telephoned her to say he was coming over to Braffle Episcopi to collect some of her father's architectural drawings to do with the Palshaw to Edsway Tunnel from his study at the Old Rectory. It was very difficult to believe that there had been something in that meal that had killed him. But everyone insisted that there had. It hadn't helped, of course, that she had so meticulously cleared everything away afterwards.

At the time, naturally, she had known of no reason why she shouldn't …

“If you haven't got anything in the way of physical reasons to account for your—er—speechlessness,” said the psychiatrist, choosing his words with care, “there is a possibility that you are experiencing what we call conversion symptoms …”

Why, she wondered, didn't he call her silence hysterical aphonia and have done with it? Her grandfather had never trifled with lay expressions when he talked to her. Dr. Durmast had always used the grand Latin names for the diseases that described the thousand shocks the flesh is heir to—usually in words borrowed from the Greeks who had spotted them first.

“These conversion symptoms can make speech difficult,” the doctor opposite her now explained, searching in his own mind for some suitable
point d'appui
at which to begin. “To put it very simply …”

Lucy Durmast listened with detachment while he set out in words something she already knew.

“Occasionally,” he pontificated, “the mind converts some shock or other that it has received into a physical symptom rather than a mental one.”

Some shock, thought Lucy, summed up very nicely her sudden arrest on a charge of murdering Kenneth Carline—poor hardworking Kenneth Carline, his feet barely on the bottom rung of the civil-engineering ladder but very keen to climb it.

Some chicken, some neck, in fact.

The psychiatrist had steepled his fingers. “Especially when the patient is trying to solve a conflict by repression,” he said.

At least, she thought, he called her a patient rather than a prisoner. That was something she had begun to value.

“And the physical symptom only goes away when the repression has been dealt with and the conflict settled,” said the psychiatrist. “I am sure as an intelligent young woman you can understand all this.”

She managed not to nod. She gave him all her attention though. And tried hard to remember all the tales her grandfather had told her. Like Sir Walter Scott's grandfather, her own grandfather had been great on tales. During the last war old Dr. Durmast had conducted hundreds of medical examinations of conscripts called up for military duty and she had been reared on the tricks practised by both sides.

Not all the conscripts had been equally anxious to serve King and Country. Some feigned blindness and others deafness. The pseudo-blind were usually easily caught out by the simple device of letting the doctor's pen roll towards the edge of the desk in their direction. Few had enough time in which to steel themselves to resist the impulse to put out a hand to catch it. The voluntarily deaf could be unexpectedly startled without difficulty. She couldn't now remember the methods resorted to that had lured unwilling soldiers into betraying that they could speak …

Which was a pity.

The psychiatrist continued in the same vein about her not wanting to remember the past. “We are only talking about a symptom, of course,” he said fairly, “and not the cause of that symptom. Only when that cause has been dealt with could you be considered cured.”

She fixed him with her eye at that.

“As long as anxiety and fear persist which derive from completely repressed or dissociated memories which cannot be faced,” he pronounced, “then the risk of the symptoms returning will exist.”

At least, decided Lucy, he was being honest with her.

“I don't think I can tell you any more than this.” He gave her a tiny smile. “Only that the mind is a very, very complicated organ but”—he blinked—“I'm sure that you know that already.”

The psychiatrist was projecting every indication he could of a man honestly trying to be helpful, but Lucy Durmast still did not relax.

“Is there anything you would like to ask me?” he continued, pushing a note pad and pen in her direction. “You could write it down if you would rather do that.”

She made no move at all.

“Or perhaps draw how you feel?” he suggested. “Some people find that easier. No? Very well, then.” He rose to his feet. “If you should change your mind and want to see me at any time I will arrange to be told.”

In the end he caught her out with one of the oldest tricks in the trade.

He took her coat off the hook by the door and courteously held it out behind her for her to slip on.

“Thank you,” said Lucy Durmast aloud quite without thinking.

A good sauce might well be described as gravy raised to a higher power: the same could almost be said about judges and magistrates.

Judge Eddington sat in Calleford Crown Court without the need to consult the Clerk on points of law, and without having to secure the agreement of his fellow members of the Bench to his judgements. The jury made up its own mind with such assistance as he deemed it appropriate for him to give it. There was no retiring to go into conclave about the fine detail, so to speak, with the other magistrates: only an appeal to a higher court where both his judgements and sentence awarded could be overturned.

The process was called certiorari and it served to keep a man on his mettle.

The judge remembered Lucy Mirabel Durmast's first appearance before him. Now she was back again, this time with reports of one kind and another. Judge Eddington read them with care. There was one from the psychiatrist written upon his soul and conscience—an interesting batting order, that—stating that in his professional view the accused was not deaf and was not suffering from nervous aphonia, hysterical mutism or congenital dumbness. There was another report from the Prison Governor confirming that in her own best interests Lucy Durmast had again been offered the services of a duty solicitor but had remained mute.

The Clerk went into his set piece again.

As before Lucy Durmast kept her silence.

Judge Eddington crackled the reports before him as he spoke to the prisoner. “You have been found sane and fit to plead,” he said in tones of measured solemnity. “If there is any reason why you do not wish to do so I would be willing to know what it is.”

In the words of the time-honoured music-hall joke, no answer was the stern reply.

“I am advised,” continued Judge Eddington, “that you are neither deaf nor dumb. If you insist that this is the case I must ask you to make some sign to this effect.”

Detective Inspector Sloan, who was also in Court, hoped that the judge wasn't tempting Providence. A gamut of riotous possibilities ran through his mind—from Hitler salutes through Masonic signs to the more arcane signals of the Scout Movement.

Lucy Durmast remained both silent and still.

The judge collected his thoughts and, as was his wont, marshalled his words with care before he spoke. He took his time about it: celerity had no part in the due processes of the Law. Haste, in his mind, was synonymous with lynch law and there would be none of that in any court in which he, Cedric Eddington, sat. He was as impervious to the pressure of time as to any other pressure that Defence or Prosecution or Press cared to try to apply to him. His freedom from attack upon his person in taking this view stretched a long way back into England's history. His freedom from anxiety in dispensing justice belonged to a more personal cast of mind. And if his day's work meant that some of those standing in the dock before him went that night to prison, then so be it. He would lose no sleep about it. That, after all, was what he was there for.

He cleared his throat. “I must therefore reluctantly conclude that you are being mute of malice.”

Lucy Durmast very nearly shouted from the dock that she wasn't. Malice didn't come into it. At least, she corrected herself in her own mind, not on her part. Malice there must have been on somebody's part, because Kenneth Carline had been poisoned. The police pathologist had said so. Hyoscine hydrobromide had been found in Kenneth's body in a quantity sufficient to kill. Presumably somebody somewhere had raised the possibility of its being there by accident—and discounted that alternative. Otherwise she, Lucy Durmast, wouldn't be standing where she was today.

“And furthermore”—Judge Eddington was still talking—“I must warn you that you are in grave danger of being in contempt of court.”

How like a man, thought Lucy, to put an institution like the Court upon such a pedestal. If you didn't agree to play by their rules, then they took their bat home. In the case of poor Kenneth Carline it would have been a ball rather than a bat, of course. Rugby had been his game. He had been very keen on Rugby. In fact he had been so mauled and bruised when he had turned up at Braffle Episcopi that Black Monday by the previous Saturday afternoon's game that she would have been less surprised to learn that it was that that had killed him rather than poison.

But it had been poison.

The police had said so.

And kept on saying so.

“And if I do find you in contempt of court,” Judge Eddington's voice broke into her reverie, “then I must advise you that I have the power to commit you to prison until such time as you have purged your contempt.”

Whether it worried him at all to send a person to prison was the question the Judge was asked most often in the outside world. (It was a sad but true reflection on that same world that few dinner partners enquired if he ever worried about sentencing the innocent.) He always replied that it never troubled him to send the guilty to prison—but the point was usually lost upon them. Judge Eddington never explained why it was that he didn't mind and he was seldom asked. By then anyway his fellow guests had usually got past the soup course and onto the weather or the Government …

In the dim and distant past when Cedric Eddington had been up at Cambridge he had read neither Classics nor Law but Archeology and Anthropology. It had proved a surprisingly good grounding for the judiciary: the proper study of mankind being man. Or in his case, Man. A working knowledge of the territorial imperative, for instance, went a long way towards making the Laws relating to the Ownership of Property intelligible … And when he had come down from Cambridge—at a time when his fellow undergraduates were hiking across the Sahara or back-packing in the Carpathian Mountains—he had gone, on his father's advice, to Italy.

“Surely Roman Law can wait,” the young Cedric Eddington had protested when the Italian visit had first been bruited.

Eddington
père
, it transpired, had not had Roman Law in mind as education. It had been Florence he had been thinking of, not Rome, and to Florence a jejune but open-minded Cedric Eddington had duly gone. He had come back with a greater understanding of the ways of the world. In Florence he had seen pictures of just and unjust Judges, of Vice and Virtue, of Heaven and Hell, of Calumny and the Naked Truth, of Paradise and Purgatory. Good and evil had been polarised in Cedric Eddington's mind forever.