“I’m Professor O’Loughlin.”
It takes a moment for my name to register. The cogs slip into place. The doctor has a birthmark down one side of his neck and keeps the collar of his white coat turned up.
A few minutes later I follow this coat down empty corridors, past linen carts and parked stretchers.
“Is he OK?”
“Mainly cuts and bruises. He may have fallen from a car or a bike.”
“Has he been admitted?”
“No, but he won’t leave until he sees you. He keeps talking about washing blood from his hands. That’s why I put him in the observation room. I didn’t want him upsetting the other patients.”
“Concussion?”
“No. He’s very agitated. The police thought he might be a suicide risk.” The doctor turns to look over his shoulder. “Is your father a surgeon?”
“Retired.”
“I once heard him speak. He’s very impressive.”
“Yes. As a lecturer.”
The observation room has a small viewing window at head height. I see Bobby sitting on a chair, his back straight and both feet on the floor. He’s wearing muddy jeans, a flannel shirt and an army greatcoat.
He tugs at the sleeves of the coat, picking at a loose thread. His eyes are bloodshot and fixed. They are focused on the far wall, as if watching some invisible drama being played out on a stage that no one else can see.
He doesn’t turn as I enter. “Bobby. It’s me, Professor O’Loughlin. Do you know where you are?”
He nods.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“I don’t remember.”
“How are you feeling?”
He shrugs, still not looking at me. The wall is more interesting. I can smell his sweat and the mustiness of his clothes. There is another odor—something familiar but I can’t quite place it. A medical smell.
“What were you doing on Hammersmith Bridge?”
“I don’t know.” His voice is shaking. “I fell over.”
“What can you remember?”
“Going to bed with Arky and then . . . Sometimes I can’t bear to be by myself. Do you ever feel like that? It happens all the time to me. I pace around the house after Arky. I follow her, talking about myself constantly. I tell her what I’m thinking . . .”
At last his eyes focus on me. Haunted. Hollow. I have seen the look before. One of my other patients, a fireman, is condemned to keep hearing the screams of a five-year-old girl who died in a blazing car. He rescued her mother and baby brother but couldn’t go back into the flames.
Bobby asks, “Do you ever hear the windmills?”
“What sound do they make?”
“It’s a clanking metal noise, but when the wind is really strong the blades blur and the air starts screaming in pain.” He shudders.
“What are the windmills for?”
“They keep everything running. If you put your ear to the ground you can hear them.”
“What do you mean by everything?”
“The lights, the factories, the railways. Without the windmills it all stops.”
“Are these windmills God?”
“You know nothing,” he says dismissively.
“Have you ever seen the windmills?”
“No. Like I said, I hear them.”
“Where do you think they are?”
“In the middle of the oceans; on huge platforms like oil rigs. They pull energy from the center of the Earth—from the core. We’re using too much energy. We’re wasting it. That’s why we have to turn off the lights and save power. Otherwise we’ll upset the balance. Take too much out from the center and you have a vacuum. The world will implode.”
“Why are we taking too much energy?”
“Turn off the lights, left right, left right. Do the right thing.” He salutes. “I used to be right-handed but I taught myself to use my left . . . The pressure is building. I can feel it.”
“Where?”
He taps the side of his head. “I’ve tapped the core. The apple core. Iron ore. Did you know the Earth’s atmosphere is proportionately thinner than the skin of an apple?”
He is playing with rhymes—a characteristic of psychotic language. Simple puns and wordplay help connect random ideas.
“Sometimes I have dreams about being trapped inside a windmill,” he says. “It’s full of spinning cogs, flashing blades and hammers striking anvils. That’s the music they play in hell.”
“Is that one of your nightmares?”
His voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. “Some of us know what’s happening.”
“And what is that?”
He rears back, glaring at me. His eyes are alight. Then a peculiar half smile passes over his face.
“Do you know it took a manned spacecraft less time to reach the moon than it did for a stagecoach to travel the length of England?”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
He sighs triumphantly.
“What were you doing on Hammersmith Bridge?”
“I was lying down, listening to the windmills.”
“When you came into the hospital you kept saying that you wanted to wash the blood off your hands.”
He remembers, but says nothing.
“How did you get blood on your hands?”
“It’s normal enough to hate. We just don’t talk about it. It’s normal enough to want to hurt people who hurt us . . .”
He’s not making any sense.
“Did you hurt someone?”
“You take all those drops of hate and you put them in a bottle. Drop, drop, drop . . . Hate doesn’t evaporate like other liquids. It’s like oil. Then one day the bottle is full.”
“What happens then?”
“It has to be emptied.”
“Bobby, did you hurt someone?”
“How else do you get rid of the hate?” He tugs at the cuffs of his flannel shirt, which are stained with something dark.
“Is that blood, Bobby?”
“No, it’s oil. Haven’t you been listening to me? It’s all about the oil.”
He stands and takes two steps toward the door. “Can I go home now?”
“I think you should stay here for a while,” I say, trying to sound matter-of-fact.
He eyes me suspiciously. “Why?”
“Last night you suffered some sort of breakdown, or memory lapse. You might have been in an accident or had a fall. I think we should run some tests and keep you under observation.”
“In a hospital?”
“Yes.”
“In a general ward?”
“A psych ward.”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “No fucking way! You’re trying to lock me up.”
“You’ll be a voluntary patient. You can leave anytime you want to.”
“This is a trick! You think I’m crazy!” He’s yelling at me. He wants to storm out, but something is keeping him here. Maybe he has too much invested in me.
I can’t legally hold him. Even if I had the evidence I don’t have the power to section or detain Bobby. Psychiatrists, medical doctors and the courts have such a prerogative, but not a humble psychologist. Bobby’s free to go.
“And you’ll still see me?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He buttons his coat and nods his approval. I walk with him down the corridor and we share a lift. “Have you ever had absences like this before?” I ask.
“What do you mean, ‘absences’?”
“Gaps in your memory where time seems to disappear.”
“It happened about a month ago.”
“Do you remember which day?”
He nods. “That hate had to be emptied.”
The main doors of the hospital are open. On the front steps Bobby turns and thanks me. There is that smell again. I know what it is now. Chloroform.
14
Chloroform is a colorless liquid, half again as dense as water, with an etherlike odor and a taste forty times sweeter than
sugarcane. It is an important organic solvent mainly used in industry.
The Scottish physician Sir James Simpson of Edinburgh was the first to use it as an anesthetic in 1847. Six years later the English physician John Snow gave it to Queen Victoria during the birth of Prince Leopold, her eighth child.
A few drops on a mask or a cloth are usually enough to produce surgical anesthesia within a few minutes. The patient awakens in 10–15 minutes, groggy but with very little nausea or vomiting. It is highly dangerous and causes fatal cardiac paralysis in about one in 3,000 cases . . .
Closing the encyclopedia, I slip it back onto a shelf and scribble a note to myself. Why would Bobby Moran have chloroform on his clothes? What possible use would he have for an industrial solvent or an anesthetic? I seem to remember that chloroform is sometimes used in cough medicines and anti-itching creams, but the quantities aren’t enough to create the unique odor.
Bobby said he worked as a courier. Maybe he delivers industrial solvents. I will ask him at our next session, if Major Tom is in touch with ground control by then.
I can hear banging coming from downstairs in the basement. D.J. and his apprentice are still working on the boiler. Apparently our entire internal plumbing system was put together by a maniac with a fetish for bending pipes. The inside of our walls looks like a modern sculpture. God knows how much it’s going to cost.
In the kitchen, having poured a coffee, I sit next to Charlie at the breakfast bar. She props her library book against a box of cereal. My morning paper is resting against the orange juice.
Charlie is playing a game—mimicking everything I do. When I take a bite of toast, she does the same. When I sip my coffee, she sips her tea. She even cocks her head the same way I do when I’m trying to read newsprint that has disappeared into the fold of the paper.
“Are you finished with the marmalade?” she asks waving her hand in front of my face.
“Yes. Sorry.”
“You were away with the pixies.”
“They send their regards.”
Julianne emerges from the laundry, brushing a stray strand of hair from her forehead. The tumble dryer is rumbling in the background. We used to have breakfast together—drinking plunger coffee and swapping sections of the morning paper. Now she doesn’t stop for long enough.
She packs the dishwasher and puts my pill in front of me.
“What happened at the hospital?”
“One of my patients had a fall. He’s OK.”
She frowns. “You were going to do fewer emergency calls.”
“I know. Just this once.”
She takes a bite from a quarter of toast and starts packing Charlie’s lunch box. I smell her perfume and notice that she’s wearing new jeans and her best jacket.
“Where are you off to?”
“I have my seminar on ‘Understanding Islam.’ You promised to be home by four o’clock for Charlie.”
“I can’t. I have an appointment.”
She’s annoyed at me. “Someone has to be here.”
“I can be home by five.”
“OK, I’ll see if I can find a sitter.”
I call Ruiz from the office. In the background I can hear the dredging equipment and the sound of running water. The moment I announce myself I also hear a telltale electronic click. I contemplate whether he’s recording our conversation.
“I wanted to ask you something about Catherine McBride.”
“Yeah?”
“How many stab wounds were there?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Did the pathologist find any traces of chloroform?”
“You read the report.”
“There wasn’t any mention of it.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“It’s probably not important.”
He sighs. “Say, let’s do a deal. Stop ringing me up asking bullshit questions and I’ll waive that unpaid parking fine of yours.”
Before I can apologize for troubling him, I hear someone calling his name. He grunts a thanks-for-nothing and hangs up. The man has the communication skills of a mortician.
Fenwick is lurking in my waiting room, glancing at his gold Rolex. We’re going to lunch in Mayfair at his favorite restaurant. It is one of those places that gets written up in the Sunday supplements because the chef is temperamental, handsome and dates a supermodel.
I’m never quite sure what these lunches are about. Usually, he’s trying to convince me to invest in a property deal or a start-up biotech company. He has absolutely no concept of money or, more important, of how little most people earn and the size of their mortgages.
Today Fenwick is trying extra hard to be affable. The waiter arrives and Fenwick delivers precise instructions as to how he wants his meal prepared, right down to suggesting oven temperatures and whether the meat should be tenderized in advance. If the waiter has any sense he’ll make sure these instructions never reach the kitchen.
Although he’s probably the last person I would normally ask for advice, Fenwick is here and the conversation reaches a lull.
“I have a hypothetical question for you,” I say, folding and unfolding my napkin. “If you had a patient who you suspected might have committed a serious crime, what would you do?”
Fenwick looks alarmed. He glances over his shoulder as if worried someone might have overheard.
“Do you have any evidence?” he whispers.
“Not really . . . more a gut instinct.”
“How serious a crime?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps the most serious.”
Fenwick leans forward and cups a hand over his mouth. He couldn’t be more conspicuous. “You must tell the police, old boy.”
“What about doctor-patient confidentiality? If patients don’t trust me, I can’t help them. It lies at the heart of everything I do.”
“It doesn’t apply. Remember the Tarasoff precedent.”
Tarasoff was a university student murdered by her ex-boyfriend in California in the late sixties. During a therapy session her boyfriend had told a university psychologist that he planned to kill her. The murdered girl’s parents sued the psychologist for negligence and won the case.
Fenwick is still talking, his nose twitching nervously. “You have a duty to divulge confidential information if a client communicates a plausible intention to do serious harm to a third party.”
“Exactly, but what if he’s made no threat against a specific person.”
“I don’t think that matters.”
“Yes it does. We have a duty to protect intended victims from harm, but only if the patient has communicated the threat of violence and actually identified someone.”
“You’re splitting hairs.”
“No I’m not.”
“So we leave a killer roaming the streets.”
“I don’t know if he’s a killer.”
“Shouldn’t you let the police decide?”
Maybe Fenwick is right, but what if I’m jumping to the wrong conclusion? Confidentiality is an integral part of clinical psychology. If I reveal details of my sessions with Bobby without his consent, I’m breaking about a dozen regulations. I could end up being disciplined by my association or facing a lawsuit.
How confident am I that Bobby is dangerous? He attacked the woman in the cab. His clothes smelled of chloroform. Other than that I have his psychotic ramblings about windmills and a girl in a red dress with scars on her arms.
Our food arrives and the conversation ebbs and flows over familiar territory. Fenwick tells me about his latest investments and holiday plans. I sense that he’s building up to something but can’t find an opening in the conversation that moves us smoothly onto the subject.
Finally over coffee he plunges in.
“There’s something I’d like to ask you, Joe. I’m not the sort of chap who usually asks for favors, but I have one to ask of you.”
My mind is automatically working out how to say no. I can’t think of a solitary reason why Fen
wick might need my help.
Weighed down by the gravity of the request, he starts the same sentence several times. Eventually, he explains that he and Geraldine, his longtime girlfriend, have become engaged.
“Good for you! Congratulations!”
He raises his hand to interrupt me. “Yes, well, we’re getting married in June in West Sussex. Her father has an estate there. I wanted to ask you . . . well . . . what I wanted to say . . . I meant . . . I would be honored if you would acquiesce to being my best man.”
For a brief moment I’m worried I might laugh. I barely know Fenwick. We have worked in adjacent offices for two years, but apart from these occasional lunches we have never socialized or shared a round of golf or a game of tennis. I vaguely remember meeting Geraldine at an office Christmas party. Until then I had harbored suspicions that Fenwick might be a bachelor dandy of the old school.
“Surely there must be someone else . . .”
“Well, yes of course. I just thought . . . well, I just thought . . .” Fenwick is blinking rapidly, a picture of misery.
Then it dawns on me. For all his name-dropping, social climbing and overweening pride, Fenwick hasn’t any friends. Why else would he choose me to be his best man?
“Of course,” I say. “As long as you’re sure . . .”
Fenwick is so excited I think he’s going to embrace me. He reaches across the table and grasps my hand, shaking it furiously. His smile is so pitiful that I want to take him home like I might a stray dog.
On the walk back to the office he suggests all sorts of things we can do together, including arranging a stag night. “We could use some of your vouchers from your lectures,” he says sheepishly.
I am suddenly reminded of a lesson I learned on my first day at boarding school, aged eight. The very first child to introduce himself will be the one with the fewest friends. Fenwick is that boy.
15
Elisa opens the door wearing a Thai silk robe. Light spills from behind her, outlining her body beneath the fabric. I try to concentrate on her face, but my eyes betray me.
“Why are you so late? I thought you were coming hours ago.”
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