The Tryst Read Online Free PDF Page B

without ever understanding what had caused them.
    The local authority Observation and Assessment Centre for Disturbed Adolescents was situated in Fulham, not far from Putney Bridge. Pamela Haynes had been strictly accurate in saying that it was not far, but in the rush-hour traffic every mile took the best part of ten minutes. Aileen spent the time reviewing what she knew about the case. Pamela Haynes had originally referred Gary to the Unit back in July, claiming that he ‘exhibited symptoms of confusion, disorientation and oral hallucinations of a schizophrenic kind’. Doctors value the rare and exotic as much as anyone else, and the prospect of a patient suffering from hallucinations of taste caused a brief flutter of interest, which promptly collapsed when further inquiry revealed that Mrs Haynes had confused ‘oral’ and ‘aural’. What she meant, as she put it in the course of a conversation with the consultant psychiatrist, was that Gary was ‘screwed up and hearing things’.
    The boy’s social history made it clear that there was no shortage of reasons for his problems, whatever they might be. Quite apart from his involvement in the murder, the exact extent of which was still unclear, the seventeen-year-old seemed to be all alone in the world, without a home or a history, friends or family. Bureaucratically he didn’t exist. The various agencies concerned with housing and feeding the homeless had no record of a Gary Dunn, and the instances of the name thrown up by official databases all proved to be dead ends. The police lost interest once it became apparent that he wasn’t going to tell them anything they didn’t already know about the murder. He was taken into care by the local authority’s social services department, who assigned him to Pamela Haynes’s supervision. After a few weeks she contacted the Adolescent Psychiatric Unit. No one there took the social worker’s diagnosis of schizophrenia seriously, but there was no question that the boy did need care and treatment. The consultant’s psychiatric assistant, who conducted the initial interview, prescribed a course of anti-depressant drugs and arranged for out-patient treatment consisting of group and occupational therapy.
    Aileen’s first contact with the boy had been when one of the nurses brought him into the ward sitting room in the middle of her morning open group, a low-key affair providing general supportive counselling. The moment Aileen caught sight of him, she felt as though someone had laid a velvet-gloved hand on her heart: a touch that was soft, gentle, warm, yet almost unbearably intrusive and intimate. There were at least a dozen people in the room, yet she felt utterly isolated. The surroundings seemed to shimmer and tremble as though she were about to faint. Nor would that have been very surprising, given the strength of her conviction that the boy standing in front of her was her dead child.
    It lasted only a few moments. Then, as with déjà vu , reality closed ranks and blandly asserted that nothing of the sort had happened, that she must have imagined the whole thing. Aileen’s new patient was an unremarkable adolescent with the puffy unfinished look of his age, like partially baked dough. His reddish hair was cropped close to the skull in one of the currently fashionable styles that Aileen, who struggled to keep up with these things like someone running after a bus, still associated with conscription or lice. He and the nurse were still only midway across the room, which was how Aileen knew that no more than a few moments had passed.
    In the course of this and subsequent encounters, Aileen noted her observations for the boy’s file. Apart from a predominantly blank or wary expression, his appearance was fairly normal. His level of education was evidently low to non-existent, although he was intelligent enough. He tended to be shy and withdrawn, never speaking unless spoken to, and then usually only a word or two at a time.