‘You’ll be looked after there. Safe.’
‘ He’s lying again. Full of dykes. Tongues in your pussy. Dildo rape. You’ll be popular. Fresh meat. Your pussy will be red raw. Bleed maybe. They won’t care.’
With the exception of the bars it did appear exactly like the hospital she’d left, even to the small separate room into which she was settled, at the far end of the general, ground-floor ward in which lay two women, one with both wrists heavily bandaged. The other called out something to Hall and Perry as they escorted Jennifer through the long room. Neither man reacted and Jennifer didn’t hear but there was laughter from everyone else, two uniformed nurses and two trustees in prison drab. David Emerson, the white-coated prison doctor who was walking with them, called out, ‘That’s enough, girls.’
The woman who’d made the unheard remark said, ‘There’s never enough. That’s how I stopped being an innocent virgin,’ and there was fresh laughter.
A big-busted, broad-shouldered matron who hadn’t been in her office at the ward entrance abruptly bustled into the private room after them and said, ‘Right now, let’s get you settled in, shall we, my love?’ and at once began hanging Jennifer’s belongings in the closet from a suitcase she opened without asking.
‘Lovely clothes,’ she said, admiringly.
‘ Didn’t take long, did it? ’
‘No.’
‘What?’ frowned the matron.
‘It’s a psychiatric situation,’ Emerson explained to her.
At Perry’s gesture the doctor followed him out into the corridor, with Hall trailing uncertainly behind. The more experienced solicitor, to whom the remark about the clothes had registered, like the suitcase opening, said, ‘You won’t forget that Mrs Lomax is a remand prisoner, will you?’
‘Mrs Lomax will get as good care here as she got in St Thomas’s.’
‘It’s the particular type of that care to which I was referring,’ said the solicitor, pointedly.
Hall looked quickly back into the ward, understanding. Jennifer was sitting docilely in the chair, oblivious to what the other woman was doing. The larger case was unpacked and she’d started on the smaller one, examining each article as she took it out, fingering the material and looking at the labels.
‘I don’t understand that remark,’ Emerson was saying. He was a dark-skinned man with wiry hair and a rugby-flattened nose.
‘Mrs Lomax’s psychiatric symptoms are still being assessed but she’s obviously traumatized,’ said Hall. ‘I don’t want anything to occur that might worsen her condition.’
‘I don’t…’ the doctor began to repeat and then stopped. For several moments he looked between the two lawyers. Then he said, ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘I’d like better than your best, doctor. I’d like a guarantee,’ said the barrister.
‘I can’t be in the ward twenty-four hours a day.’
‘The answer, I would have thought, would be to have people here upon whom you can rely, when you’re elsewhere,’ said Perry.
‘All I can do is my best,’ insisted the man.
By the time they re-entered the private ward, which was actually bigger than the one in St Thomas’s, all Jennifer’s things were put away and the two suitcases stowed in a locker above the closet.
Perry said, ‘Here’s the inventory of her things. I’d like you to sign receipt.’
‘That should have been done at admission, with her jewellery and money,’ insisted the matron. Her identification plate read, Beryl Harrison.
‘It was,’ said the solicitor. ‘I’d like you to counter-sign it. Her valuable personal items remain in reception. Her clothes are here.’
‘There’s no regulation,’ persisted the woman.
‘Is there a reason not to?’ demanded Perry, mildly.
‘There’s no regulation,’ said the woman, doggedly.
To the doctor Perry said, ‘Perhaps you could take us past the governor, on our way out. We’ll get it counter-signed there.’
The matron snatched the inventory from Perry and scrawled her name below that of the admissions clerk. ‘Satisfied?’
‘Perfectly. Thank you,’ smiled Perry.
The wardress who had brought them to the hospital escorted the lawyers back to the entrance, leaving Emerson and the woman with Jennifer.
‘ What happened to your nose? Get it smashed by some dyke?
Emerson looked up, startled, from the St Thomas’s case notes when Jennifer repeated the questions, then gestured to the dossier for the benefit of the equally startled matron. ‘Voices in her head.’
‘Jane,’ offered Jennifer, forcing herself to talk. ‘It’s Jane.’
‘This isn’t going to be easy,’ predicted the matron.
‘ I’m not going to make it easy.’
‘She says she isn’t going to make it easy.’
‘Maybe I won’t bother with my own admission examination today,’ said Emerson, indicating the dossier again. ‘It’s all comprehensively listed here. Tomorrow will be soon enough.’
‘ Frightened I might attack you, fat nose! ’
‘She thinks you’re frightened.’
Emerson ignored Jennifer. ‘There’s a lot of medical notes,’ he said, reading from the papers. ‘Sedatives, mostly.’
‘I always think medication’s the best way to handle the difficult ones, if they’re mad,’ said the matron.
Jennifer stirred, to protest the madness, but then sat back in the chair, disinterested. Why bother?
‘I got a warning from her lawyers.’
‘The younger one looked pretty new to me.’
‘The solicitor started it,’ qualified the doctor. ‘The young one came in at the end.’
‘Been around the block,’ dismissed the woman.
‘I said we’d do our best.’
‘Why don’t they come and babysit if they’re so worried?’
Jennifer was only distantly aware of the discussion, indifferent to whatever they were saying: if she just slightly closed her eyes she could picture Emily’s face when she’d grabbed out for her throat, as if it was projected on to the blank wall opposite. Beautiful Emily, pretty Emily, terrified Emily. About-to-die Emily.
‘There’s a lot of money involved here,’ cautioned Emerson, not looking up from the case notes in front of him. ‘Expensive lawyers with big mouths. Could make trouble. We will do our best, won’t we?’
‘You treat the aches and pains, David. I’ll run the ward.’
Emerson, who regretted allowing the domination in the first nervous months of his arrival but was resigned to the fact that it was too late to do anything about it now, said, ‘I’ll leave you to give the medication then?’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s been given intravenously at St Thomas’s.’
‘Let me have the case notes. I’ll look after everything.’ She walked from Jennifer’s room with the doctor, releasing in their necessarily correct order the three locks securing the reinforced door of the dispensary with the three separate keys attached to her waist belt. Jennifer hadn’t moved when she returned.
‘Just a little prick in your arm,’ the woman said. ‘And a little more than you’ve been getting at the other hospital, so you can properly relax after the upheaval of coming in here. You’d like that, dear, wouldn’t you?’
As the needle bit into her arm Jennifer was curious that Jane hadn’t made her arm move, to try to prevent being closed out, but it was the fleetest of passing thoughts, which didn’t matter, like nothing mattered any more.
In the car taking them back towards the centre of London Hall said, ‘You really think Jennifer is threatened?’
‘The absolute archetype,’ said Perry. ‘Young, beautiful, wonderful body and rich: one way or another, with hardly an exception, everything that’s been denied all the rest of them in there. There’ll be a queue.’
Hall shuddered, ‘To do what?’
‘Everything you can imagine. Quite a lot you can’t.’
‘We’ve got to stop it!’ said Hall, furiously.