The Red Hand of Fury Read online

  He quickened his step, as if hurrying to meet an old friend. But as he reached the top of the stairs, he stopped dead. The screams were suddenly much louder here as they reverberated up the stairwell. And yes, there was something half-familiar about them. The pitch, the timbre, the peculiar ferocity coupled with a brittle fragility, the sharp broken edge of them. It was a long time ago. But he was beginning to be convinced he had heard these sounds before.

  The young man he had thought of earlier now came to mind again. Could it really be?

  His hand drifted towards the key fob in his pocket, as if for comfort. It was his protective talisman. And, of course, it had a more practical function. The youth had been the first to feel the brunt of it across his cheek.

  Not a youth any more, Stanley had to remind himself. More than twenty years had passed. He would be middle-aged now. Stanley couldn’t be sure he would recognize the man, not from a distance. Time had a habit of ravaging lunatics more viciously than the sane.

  It never failed to impress him how much chaos a single lunatic can generate, how quickly he can fill a room with it. Any room, of any size: the chaos expands around him. Put a single lunatic in the Albert Hall and he will fill it.

  This one was all flailing arms and incoherent screaming. Frantic bursts of pacing, going nowhere, as if he was trying to break free from imaginary restraints. Coming to a sudden halt, as if fresh restraints now bound him.

  The policeman who had brought him in stood nearby. His work was done, but he couldn’t quite tear himself away from the spectacle. For most people, a maniac in full, florid flow was not something you saw every day. There were two other men with him. One had the air of being some kind of official. A plain-clothes police detective, Stanley guessed. His expression was strangely anguished, almost as if he had some kind of connection with the individual at the centre of it all. The other man carried a physician’s leather bag.

  The doctor was impatient to be gone. ‘It is out of our hands now, Macadam. We must leave him to those who are experts in this field.’

  The man called Macadam shook his head disconsolately. He was evidently a policeman after all, for he commanded the uniform: ‘Come then, Constable. We’ve done our duty by him.’

  For a moment it seemed that he would address the raging maelstrom directly. But he simply shook his head once more and followed the doctor out of the waiting room, calling out ‘Constable!’ for the lingering copper.

  Two young, inexperienced attendants – useless fuckers – were tiptoeing around the new admission, trying to reason with him. You cannot reason with a lunatic! Rush him, ground him, hold him down, pin his four limbs with a solid man squatting on each. Sit on his head if you have to. That was the only kind of reasoning your average lunatic could understand.

  But still they persisted with their: ‘Now, sir, if you will just calm down.’

  The lunatic alternated between rushing at them and running from them. This was some kind of acknowledgement of their existence at least. Otherwise, the man’s ravings bore no relation to what they were saying to him.

  ‘A bubble! A bubble! He was a bubble! And I have popped him!’

  It was him, all right.

  His hair was matted, and plastered to his head in wet clumps. It could have been sweat or some other liquid. Wiry grey tufts now grew at the temples, which were not there the last time Stanley had seen him. A growth of about five days shadowed his jowls. The rest of his face was smeared with grime and filth. There was a fresh wound on his forehead. His hands were covered in scabs and scratches, and possible bites. A nasty cut on his knee showed through a flapping hole in one trouser leg. His feet were bare and black and bleeding.

  But the truth was, if you could look past all the superficial squalor of his appearance, he had aged comparatively well – well, that is, for a lunatic. His hair may have been matted and greying, but at least he still had hair. His face was dirty, but he did not have the emaciated features of the long-term destitute. Whatever crisis had propelled him into Colney Hatch had happened relatively recently.

  Though they were soiled and torn now, his clothes were well tailored and essentially of good quality. The dubiously stained herringbone ulster was of a distinguished cut, bespoke by the looks of it. Beneath that he wore a three-piece suit, although his shirt had lost its collar and necktie. In one hand he clutched a battered bowler hat defensively.

  The two wet-around-the-ears attendants coaxed him as if it were a knife. ‘Put down the hat now. There’s a good fellow.’

  Roderick Pottinger, the chief psychiatrist and superintendent of Colney Hatch, stood by, watchful and detached as ever. Pottinger was a neat and somewhat dapper man in his early fifties. His grey imperial beard was impeccably trimmed. A white doctor’s coat protected his suit from the stains of madness. There was something of the priest about him. He held a clipboard in front of him as if it were a holy tablet received directly from the deity. He put all his faith in clipboards, did Dr Pottinger.

  Next to Pottinger was Charles Leaming. Pink-cheeked and eager, the younger man had been at Colney Hatch for only a year or two. His look was avid, hungry almost.

  It was said that Leaming had studied in Vienna with the celebrated Dr Freud and had brought some of Freud’s ideas with him to Colney Hatch. However, Stanley doubted that Leaming had understood those ideas correctly. His methods, such as they were, were utterly beyond Stanley’s comprehension.

  Two male nurses were also in loose, ineffectual attendance. Flapping around like panicked chickens.

  ‘Fuck’s sake!’ muttered Stanley. He strode decisively towards the eye of the storm. He knew that he could change the dynamic of the situation merely by his presence. Lunatics were like dogs, he often thought. They can smell your fear.

  ‘Leave him to me,’ shouted Stanley. All heads turned towards him. Including the lunatic’s. The flicker of recognition was unmistakable. So, he was not that far gone, after all. Recognition followed quickly by cowering fear. Some bobbing flotsam of memory surfaced long enough for him to grasp it.

  Stanley took out the fob and jangled it. Then swung it on its chain.

  The lunatic’s eyes were locked on the keys.

  ‘You remember me, don’t you?’ Stanley’s cold smile gave his voice a steely edge. ‘Because I remember you. Yes, I remember you very well, Silas Quinn.’

  They got the straitjacket on easily enough now. Quinn was subdued by Stanley’s presence, utterly compliant. The key fob seemed to mesmerize him.

  ‘Re-mark-able!’ said Dr Leaming. He spoke with an enthusiastic emphasis. A slight accent could be detected too, which seemed to betray Yorkshire origins, muted by education.

  ‘Oh, me and Silas go back a long way,’ Stanley explained, not taking his eyes off Quinn’s face. ‘You never forget your first loony, do you?’

  ‘Like your first love,’ observed Leaming.

  ‘Hardly,’ said Stanley. The idea of it!

  ‘There is a special place in your heart for him, though?’

  ‘I’m not sure Mr Ince possesses such a thing as a heart!’ That was Pottinger’s idea of a joke.

  Stanley let it go. He even rewarded it with a burst of his strange, near-silent nasal laughter. ‘Lord, but he stinks though! To high heaven! As rank as a sack of dead rats.’

  One of the young attendants, a spotty Herbert with bad teeth, started to explain. ‘I think he’s …’

  ‘Shat himself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course. The filthy bastard. That’s an old trick of his. Let’s get him cleaned up.’

  Stanley pocketed the fob and gave a shooing gesture in the direction of the bathroom.

  The bathroom had the air of resenting their intrusion. It seemed to want to be left alone to its frigid dampness. A tap with a worn washer dripped incessantly, with a rich variation of tone, from quizzical, to condescending, to startled, to blasé. A row of bathtubs jutted out along one wall, like bystanders at an atrocity. Every one of them was cracked and stained,
enamel worn away to a coarse, abrasive texture. They were as neglected as the people who bathed in them.

  The neglect spread out from the baths, infecting the walls with a web of cracks. The tiles were the kind of white that reacts badly with electric light to create a sour glare.

  At Stanley’s direction, the spotty attendant peeled Quinn’s layers away, starting with the straitjacket. Quinn put up no resistance. The fight seemed to have gone out of him.

  The other young attendant, a lanky, red-haired individual, gingerly took each article of clothing and dropped it in a laundry basket.

  ‘What are you doing that for?’ demanded Stanley.

  ‘Shan’t we take them to the laundry?’

  ‘Burn them! Burn the whole fucking lot. He won’t ever need them again, I shouldn’t think.’

  ‘The hat as well?’

  ‘Yes! The fucking hat as well!’ Stanley shook his head in exasperation.

  They stood Quinn in the showers, stripped and shivering. The skin of his body was as grey as newsprint, except where sores broke out in angry clusters.

  ‘So. Silas Quinn, as I live and breathe. I’ve been following your career, Silas. You’ve been doing well for yourself since the last time you was in here. Quite the celebrity. What’s that they call you in the Clarion? Quick-fire Quinn? Marvellous, the way you managed to make something of your life. Who would have thunk it? Not me, I confess. I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t think you’d last five minutes on the outside. Thought you would go the same way as your old man. Topped himself, dinnee, if I remember rightly? But look at the state you’re in. It’s all turned to shit, by the looks of it. Never mind. You’ve come back to us now. Back where you belong. Back home, you are, Silas. We’re your family.’

  Quinn let out a small whimper. A bubble of snot formed over one nostril.

  Stanley curled his lip with distaste. ‘Get the clippers. He’s crawling with lice. The fucking dirty bastard.’

  He assumed the privilege of shaving Quinn himself. He held the clippers at arm’s length and allowed the shorn clumps of hair to fall over Quinn’s naked body and on to the stone floor. If a strand found its way on to his apron, he would deliberately nick Quinn’s scalp. Whenever this happened, Quinn would tense and wince and let out a brief yelp of pain. For that he was punished with a sharp tap of the clipper head. He quickly learnt to stand immobile, his whole body cowed in a pose of submission.

  When he was completely shaven, Stanley turned the shower on and stepped back.

  The water was cold. Quinn began to scream. He sank down to his haunches and tried to cover his head with his arms.

  ‘Now, now, Silas. I know you don’t like getting clean, but we can’t have you going around like that. We got standards in here, you know. The inspectors come round and see you like that, they ain’t gonna be very pleased now, are they? They’re going to give us a right bollocking.’

  Stanley held to the notion that the shock of the dousing had the capacity to rouse the lunatics from their mental disarrangement. It hadn’t happened yet but there was a first time for everything.

  ‘Stop making such a fuss, will ya! A bit of cold water never did no one no harm!’

  Stanley killed the shower. Quinn huddled himself into a ball. A kind of braying came from him, half shrieks, half sobs. His trembling was more than shivering now. It was the final quaking of a system before it breaks apart.

  Stanley gave a nod in the direction of the baths. The two attendants signalled their uselessness with confused frowns.

  ‘Run a fucking bath for him! Hot! Make it hot. Can’t you see the poor fucker’s freezing his bollocks off there?’

  The two useless articles almost tripped over each other in their haste to placate him. The problem was that the first bath lacked a plug. As did the second and the third. Eventually, they tracked down a plug and, between them, got a bath running. Steaming water thundered into the tub.

  Stanley pursed his lips as he looked at Quinn. ‘Some of those sores look very nasty to me. We’re going to have to wash him with carbolic soap, we are. And we’ll have to give him a good scrubbing to make sure we get all the fleas off him. It would be negligent of us not to.’

  ‘Shall I get the things, Mr Ince?’

  Stanley deigned to give the briefest of nods. ‘And get him a suit while you’re at it.’

  The spotty attendant scuttled off.

  ‘Stand up now, Silas. You’re going to have a nice hot bath. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  But Quinn only kept up his braying. If anything, it became more distressed.

  ‘Stand up, I said. You don’t want to make me cross, do you? You remember what happens when I get cross.’ Stanley’s hand went to the pocket where he kept the key fob.

  Although Quinn didn’t see the gesture – his head was turned to the wall – he must have known what Stanley’s words portended. He rose, quaking, to his feet. His posture, however, was bent over and cringing. His perseverated braying resolved into half-articulate sounds: ‘Ubble, ubble, ubble!’

  Quinn kept his eyes closed, and Stanley was thankful for that. The sight before him provoked only disgust, which he could handle. With Quinn’s eyes open, and the challenge of confronting them, it would have been different. It would have meant the resurfacing of that first visceral fear that had lodged in Stanley’s soul like a cancer all those years ago.

  The spotty attendant returned, carrying a three-piece suit made from brown corduroy, together with a grey calico shirt, undergarments and a threadbare towel. He placed these items on a wooden shelf and held a block of red carbolic soap and a scrubbing brush out to Stanley, which he ignored.

  ‘Come on, Silas. It’s time to get in the bath.’

  Quinn screwed up his eyes, as if refusing to look at the bath would make it go away.

  There was no way round it. Stanley would have to touch him.

  His distaste hardened into hatred. The only way he could bear to lay hands on any of them was violently. He put a hand at the back of Quinn’s neck and squeezed, guiding him forwards with his arm held rigidly straight. In some part of him he had always believed that madness was catching.

  One of the other attendants grasped him under the arms from behind while the other lifted his legs and hoisted them over the rim of the tub. All the while, Quinn’s body writhed as if an electrical current was being passed through him. His arms flailed. His head shook violently from side to side in desperate refusal.

  Water splashed over the side as the attendants let go. Quinn’s eyes snapped open in shock and his body became rigid. He began to scream.

  ‘Ub-buuuullllll!’

  ‘Did you check the temperature, you moron?’

  ‘I thought you meant it to be hot, Mr Ince?’

  ‘Don’t you know the regulations? This is on you if he’s burnt.’

  In panic, the red-headed attendant opened the cold tap as far as it would go, stirring the water to spread the coolness.

  As the water cooled, Quinn became physically agitated again. His legs pumped like he was riding a bike and his arms swirled and thrashed about him. Water went everywhere. Quinn’s cries of ‘Ubble! Ubble!’ grew high-pitched and frantic.

  ‘Keep his head out of the water, for Christ’s sake. We don’t want him drowning.’

  Stanley leant over the bath. ‘You see how I’m looking after you, Silas?’

  He had done it. The thing he feared most of all. He had looked directly into the lunatic’s eyes. He had opened himself to the madness.

  It was important not to flinch.

  To escape the fear himself, he must make the other afraid. That was how it worked. Stanley held out a hand behind his back. ‘Gimme the carbolic soap. And the scrubbing brush.’

  ‘Bubble! Bubble! Bubble!’ screamed Quinn.

  It was not always necessary to inflict pain. Sometimes the idea of pain, their fear of it, was enough to render them compliant.

  ‘You’re safe now. Nothing can hurt you here. As long as you’re a go
od boy and do as you’re told. We’ll keep you safe here. For the rest of your life.’

  He dipped the block of carbolic soap into the water, then vigorously lathered the bristles of the brush.

  Stanley left it to the others to dry Quinn. He did not respond to their commands, but he suffered them to manhandle him in such a way that they could get the job done efficiently enough. When they wrenched up one of his arms to dry his flank, he held it at right angles without demur until they manually pushed it down again.

  The same went for dressing him. He was turned about, his feet lifted into the well-worn but essentially clean linen underpants, which were pulled sharply up to his waist. His passivity was total as he was dressed in the rest of the asylum uniform.

  The scrubbing had not just killed any vermin on his skin. It had broken his will.

  Quinn’s expression communicated nothing meaningful. His lips moved constantly as he muttered his endless nonsensical monologue, about the man who was a bubble, and how he had popped the bubble. His unfocused gaze skittered about. From time to time it seemed to snag on something, a point that no one else could see.

  At last they had him in his uniform. Shaven headed, carbolic scented, cowed and cleansed.

  Whatever had happened to Quinn in the intervening years – whatever heights he had scaled, fame he had achieved, triumphs won, enemies overcome – he was returned now to the helpless, vulnerable, unreasoning wretch that he had been the first time Stanley had seen him.

  Stanley Ince stepped back, like an artist admiring his creation.

  TWO

  Six weeks earlier.

  Harold didn’t like the way the bear was looking at him.

  Sitting there in its grubby white coat. Stuffing its drooling snout with cold, dead fish, the blood staining its chops as it relentlessly crunched down on its disgusting meal.