Free Asylum by Patrick McGrath Page B

they went into the living room and each had a large gin. Stella couldn’t keep still. Her anxiety was of course explicable in terms of sympathetic concern for her husband.
    “Max will cope, my dear,” said Brenda.
    “Of course he will. But one does worry.”
    They’d both had another large drink by the time Max came home from the hospital. Brenda was still in the living room andStella was in the kitchen making dinner. She heard the front door open and came out into the hall. His face was closed and angry. She went down the hall to him.
    “What is it?”
    He didn’t look at her properly his eyes merely flickered to hers, then slid away. In the living room he stood in front of the empty fireplace and delivered his news.
    “Edgar Stark has absconded.”
    And at that moment the siren began its awful singsong wail.

This is what we think must have happened: Edgar told John Archer after lunch that they wanted him in the chaplain’s garden, and went off by himself. He retrieved Max’s clothes from where he’d hidden them in the woods at the end of the Raphaels’ garden. Wearing Max’s clothes he had then made his escape, keeping well away from the road until he was clear of the estate, and then, by thumb or bus or train, he found his way to London. I was not at all happy to hear how lax security was on the outside work parties, but the question that most disturbed me—and Jack too—was what Max had been doing in the hours between the discovery of the missing clothes and the discovery of Edgar’s absence, close to five?
    This was an interval of almost three hours . The search of Edgar’s room and a subsequent search of the entire ward had yielded nothing, but Max hadn’t told Jack what was going on. If he had looked for Edgar in the chaplain’s garden immediately,and discovered his absence, the alarm would have been raised very much sooner and we’d have quickly picked him up.
    But Max was apparently so determined to get to the bottom of it all before he saw Jack that he made mistakes, and the most significant was this failure to establish Edgar’s whereabouts during the afternoon. After returning to the hospital and checking with the staff in Block 3 that nothing had turned up in his absence, he went to his office. He then, apparently for no good reason, waited another half hour before calling Jack. By that time the working parties were due back in, and John Archer had already discovered that his patient was missing. I was told at once, and without delay I went to Jack’s office. When Max telephoned, I was with Jack, and he already knew that Edgar had gone. What Jack did not know, and what it must have galled and humiliated Max to have to tell him—and this of course accounts for much of Max’s behavior that afternoon—was that the escaped patient was wearing his, Max’s, clothes. I certainly had no sympathy for him; he had allowed my patient to escape. And Edgar, for all his sexual bravado, still needed me. He was a sick man.
    Jack and I decided not to use the siren immediately, reluctant to arouse the countryside to the escape of a patient until we had to. Better to organize a search party and mount a quick sweep of the estate, try and pick him up, before he got too far. We were both aware there were two things a patient needed to abscond successfully, clothing and money, and one of those at least he had secured. For two hours attendants fanned out across the estate. They searched the farm and the marsh, and they penetrated some way into the forest. Dusk was coming on. They didn’t know how much of a lead Edgar had. No more than three hours, they believed, but three hours was enough for a resourceful man with clothes and money. Nobody knew whether he had money; nobody but Stella, of course, who had more than once given him cash, enough certainly to get him to London. In the meantime we could only hope that he was still out there somewhere, stumbling blindly cross-country, and as such an easyquarry for the