Thorn by Sarah Rayne Page B

Rackham had been one of his tutors and he had made it a personal request, and in the end Leo had agreed.
    â€˜You’ll counterbalance the bureaucrats,’ Rackham had said. ‘Two of us will have more impact than one.’
    â€˜Psychiatry isn’t about committees and reports and Government White Papers.’
    â€˜No, but it’s about stamping out cruelty and mismanagement and greed. If you won’t do it for any other reason, do it for my sake, Leo. I’m too old to fight them on my own.’
    â€˜That’s unanswerable,’ said Leo. ‘You cunning old devil.’
    â€˜That’s disrespectful,’ said Professor Rackham. ‘Well? Will you do it?’
    â€˜I’ll have to after that,’ said Leo. ‘But don’t expect me to be respectful to the mediocrats.’
    â€˜I don’t want you to be respectful. I want you to be effective.’
    He had done it, of course, and he thought that so far he had indeed been effective. There had been grim satisfaction in bringing to light some of the cases of abuse they had found, and there had been mischievous delight in some of the quarrels waged as a result. But the grimmest of all the places they had investigated had been the nightmare mansion they had found in Northumberland. Thornacre.
    It had been built by a well-heeled mill-owner for his new young wife, around the time of the Regency. He had reportedly a roving eye, the wealthy industrialist, but also an ambitious disposition and he had married the lady for her society connections. The lady, for her part, had married for love and her disposition was wildly jealous, so that when she discovered the mill-owner
in flagrante delicto
with the between-maid, she attacked her hapless spouse with the nearest thing to hand. The nearest thing to hand had happened to be a meat cleaver and the mill-owner had died messily in the master bedroom, thus providing food for the local gossip for several generations. The lady spent the rest of her days shut away inside Thornacre’s east wing with a keeper, eaten up by grief and helplessly insane. According to the local GP, she had died alone and mad, having spent the last thirty years of her life prowling the vast echoing corridors of Thornacre howling frenziedly at creatures who were not there.
    There had been no children; if there had been, it was possible that Thornacre would eventually have passed to a normal family, and there would have been no haunted mansion silently growing into the dark legend in England’s north-east corner.
    â€˜Considering the place’s history, I suppose we should have expected a few ghosts,’ Leo had said, facing Professor Rackham over the latter’s desk.
    â€˜Oh yes. Yes, we should have guessed that the legend of that poor insane creature would have lived on.’
    They looked at one another, and then Rackham said, ‘But it isn’t the ghosts, is it, Leo? It’s what you – what we – found there. How much are we going to make public?’
    â€˜Not everything,’ said Leo at once. ‘The public would never believe it.’
    â€˜Dear God, no. There’ll have to be a full report, of course,’ said Rackham, after a moment. ‘And probably a White Paper.’
    â€˜Oh, fuck reports and White Papers,’ said Leo, who hardly ever swore and very rarely used obscenities. ‘The place was like something out of Dickens. You saw that. We all saw it. We need to focus on the immediate problems – getting some of the staff thrown into windowless prisons for starters, and preferably leaving them to rot.’ He sat back in his chair, frowning, and despite himself Professor Rackham smiled.
    â€˜That’s got a very Biblical ring, Leo.’
    â€˜I feel Biblical. I’d like to invoke plagues of boils and curses of pestilence. I’d like to burn Thornacre down and sow the ground with salt.’ Oh no, you wouldn’t, said a treacherous