Free A Plea of Insanity by Priscilla Masters

liked it. It helped her to concentrate. It was the inkblot of psychology.
    She leaned back in her chair. So – it was now up to her to decide what to do next with Barclay.
    She had the same interest in sociopaths but unlike Heidi she felt she needed to achieve results. She couldn’t afford to clog up her clinics with manipulates. Maybe it was time to let Barclay go – back out into the community, unsupervised – and see what happened. She sat for a while, tapping the notes with her fingernail, hearing Heidi’s arguments for close supervision but inserting her own. She re-opened the file and read the most recent letters, almost changing her mind. Objectively it wasn’t strictly true that Heidi’s efforts had been wasted. Barclay hadn’t re-offended. He’d been clean for more than a year. He might have skipped around the periphery of re-offending but there were no documented cheque frauds, no petty thefts, no cruelty. Nothing since the attacks on his mother and girlfriend.
    Had they both been so afraid?
    Maybe a good way to find out the truth would be to speak to Mrs Barclay. Alone. If she would.
    She picked up the phone and dialled the number in the notes.
    It rang and rang and she began to wonder whether anyone was in until he picked it up.
    Claire introduced herself. ‘Jerome,’ she said, hardly giving him a chance to wonder why she was ringing him. ‘I’m considering reducing your supervision order but I thoughtyou should keep your appointment next month. Also I could do with talking to your mother.’
    Barclay laughed. ‘My mother,’ he drawled, ‘is almost seventy years old and not in the best of health. She would find it a trial and an embarrassment to come up to the hospital.’
    ‘Your future depends on it,’ Claire said coolly. ‘It’s up to you, really.’
    ‘You don’t have the same … interests as Doctor Faro?’
    ‘I do but you know in the Health Service these days we are measured by outcomes. I can’t see what Doctor Faro really achieved by her intense interest in you.’
    ‘I’ve kept out of trouble.’
    He was sparring.
    She couldn’t voice her theory that maybe the lack of complaint from Barclay’s mother was due to another reason – fear.
    But Barclay was smart. And quick. ‘Oh I get it,’ he drawled. ‘You think my old mum doesn’t complain because she’s frightened of me.’
    How easy is it to stand over an old lady and get her to sign the cheques?
    ‘Well,’ she said again quite coolly. ‘It’s up to you, really.’
    ‘So it is. Well. I shall talk to Mummy and let you know. Is that all right, Doctor Roget?’
    ‘Fine.’
    She put the phone down with a smug feeling. She had anticipated his responses correctly.
    It was up to her now. Not Heidi. For unlike the Health Service the police did not have the time to show ongoing interest in a non-case. No prosecution. No case. No witnesses (prepared to testify). No case. No certainty of conviction (according to the Crown Prosecution Service). No case.
    Unlike her.
She
could work through the shadowy realms. The Land of Possibility. Not for her this black and white certainty. What Barclay
might
do was not necessarily what Barclay
would
do.
    Criminal law depends on both evil mind and evil act.
    Mens rea; actus reus
. One without the other collapses the case.
    Psychiatry is so different. So much more subtle and clever. An evil mind is recognised as potential. The question that interested her was what was Barclay capable of? Ultimately?
     
    Claire cupped her chin in her hand and drifted off into a dream of Heidi, remembering her many encounters with her, the animated way she had talked, hands tensely to her side, voice enthuiastically high, the way she had flicked her shining hair away from her face. Clever, with an Honours degree in medicine, swiftly gaining her MRC Psych before she was thirty. Unmarried, with a succession of partners of both sexes, no children. All this had been in the newspapers both at the time of the murder