‘Your mother mentioned that you enjoyed boating?’
Florence nodded.
‘Then how would you like to join two other ladies on a boating excursion tomorrow? The weather will be nice, and the lake is very pleasant at this time of year.’
Florence kept her nose buried in her handkerchief. ‘Thank you, Doctor.’
The interview ended with Fogarty agreeing with Lamb’s diagnosis of hysteria.
‘If you put the preposterous notions of the Pankhursts out of your mind, Miss McCleland,’ he concluded, ‘I am confident that I can cure you. It is all just a matter of restoring the natural femininity you seem to have lost somewhere along life’s path. I also think it is probably best that you do not see so much of your sister. We’ll talk again when you have had time to settle in. Dinner will be served soon, and we have a marvellous cook — so that’s something to cheer you up, eh?’
Florence thanked him and approached the door. Fogarty leapt to his feet to open it for her. ‘There is just one more thing I have to ask you. Your answer will remain in my strictest confidence, of course.’
‘Yes, Doctor?’ said Florence, wondering what on earth he wanted now.
‘Tell me …’ He cleared his throat. ‘Does Doctor McCleland have a problem with facial hair?’
Outside, one of the peacocks on the lawn began to shriek.
The evening meal was delicious — vegetable soup and fish followed by summer pudding, one of Florence’s favourites. She made sure Doctor Fogarty saw her enjoying her food and listening attentively to the other ladies at her table, collectively called her ‘ward’ because their rooms were situated down the same corridor. When there were no attendants in hearing distance Florence contributed to the conversation with lively enthusiasm.
She sat next to a charming lady who was introduced to her as Mrs Eva Blackman.
‘Call me Eva,’ the lady said as they shook hands over their meal. In turn Eva introduced Florence to a young girl of about sixteen with a flat face and a broad smile called Aggie; Bet-Bet, a woman with blonde hair all awry and a basket of knitting resting on the floor by her side; and Priscilla, a deaf mute with whom Eva conversed in sign language.
Eva explained that they were the smallest ward on the establishment, and even more so now that two of their members were missing: Miss Laurentia O’Brien and Mrs Cynthia Hislop.
‘Were they discharged?’ Florence asked.
‘No, I’m afraid they both absconded. Laurentia’s disappeared into thin air. She was a severe epileptic and Fogarty is worried she might have run off somewhere and then died of a fit. They even dragged the lake for her.’
‘How sad,’ Florence said.
‘Yes, it’s awful,’ Eva agreed. ‘We miss her, don’t we girls?’
Nods all around.
‘But I saw Cynthia in London,’ said an old lady at the end of the table. Florence knew who this was without being introduced. She was Lady Mary, the witness to her crime.
‘So we think Cynthia’s all right,’ Lady Mary added.
‘Praise God,’ Bet-Bet chimed in.
Florence had no wish to destroy their illusion by telling them that Cynthia Hislop had taken her own life. The ladies seemed like a close-knit bunch, and she did not want to add to their grief. But as Cynthia’s shocking medical history was one of the reasons Florence had opted to be admitted to this place, she knew she would have to start asking questions sooner or later.
‘But wait, Florence, you haven’t been introduced to Lady Mary, have you?’ Eva said. ‘How remiss of me.’
After being formally introduced to the old lady, Florence lowered her eyes and concentrated on her pudding. When she dared a glance upward, the woman’s leathery old face almost cracked with her smile.
‘I know you!’ Lady Mary exclaimed, pointing with a knobbly finger. ‘You blew up the station. How lovely to see you again!’
An attendant passed within earshot. Florence put a finger to her lips and lowered her head. Eva nudged Lady Mary with a sharp elbow, making the table wobble.
‘You’re one of the suffragettes who blew up the Necropolis Station?’ Eva whispered once the attendant had wandered off to another table to help an invalid cut up her food – the cutlery was wooden, which made it hard for some of the patients to manage. ‘That was a splendid job! I was a suffragette too before I landed in here, the Hampshire Division. Fogarty says that is the root of all my troubles.’
‘He said something similar to me too,’ Florence replied. ‘But the station bombing is our secret — please don’t let anyone else you know about it. I’m faking my illness to escape from the authorities. I beg you, try to curb your friend’s tongue.’
‘That’s all right, no one ever believes a word poor Mary says.’
‘But you do, dear Eva, don’t you?’ Mary interjected.
Eva patted Mary’s hand, veins bulging and blue. ‘Of course, darling, I too know what it is like not to be believed.’ Her beautiful face took on a brief air of sadness that quickly dissolved with her next eager question.
‘They want to send you back to prison?’
Florence nodded, popping the last of her pudding into her mouth.
‘Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.’
‘Thank you.’ There doesn’t seem anything wrong with this woman’s mind, Florence thought, wondering if she had been diagnosed with hysteria also.
‘I have a secret too,’ Eva said, looking around as if to make sure she was not being overheard. ‘It’s about this place. I’ll tell you all about it when there aren’t so many of them around.’
Florence whispered so only Eva could hear. ‘You mean how your friends absconded from this place?’
‘No, there’s something else. Anyway, it’s easy to abscond from this place and it’s no secret. Cynthia had some home clothes under the floorboards of her room. She hid them under her uniform apron and wandered off from the croquet lawn once the attendant had fallen asleep. I expect that’s what Laurentia did too.’
‘How did she get hold of the home clothes?’
‘Stole them off the nurses’ washing line.’
Florence clapped her hands. Brilliant! she thought. With such spirited women around her, perhaps this place would not be such a bore after all.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was less than an hour’s walk from the village hotel to the rest home, and Dody set off while it was still light, arriving at the entrance when darkness had only just begun to descend. She wore a purple woollen walking outfit of skirt and matching jacket, sensible shoes and a small cloche hat. The clothes were too warm for the season, but were the darkest practical things she had thought to pack.
It was a mild summer’s night, effused with the scent of newly mown grass and night-blooming flowers. Dody was perspiring by the time she arrived at her destination.
She concealed herself behind a bramble bush at the start of the driveway, removed her jacket, dabbed at her brow with her handkerchief, and lit a soothing pipe. No vehicles entered the driveway for the hour or so she remained hidden.
A mosquito buzzed like a dental drill in her ear. She slapped it away.
The moon sank lower in the sky and one by one the rest home’s winking lights were extinguished, till just a few remained in some of the upstairs rooms. Where were Fogarty’s quarters, she wondered, wishing she had thought to enquire during the tour. Not downstairs near the office, she hoped, for that was where she was expecting to find the key to the treatment house. She needed to find out what kind of treatments or operations were carried out in that place, as much to ensure her sister’s safety as to investigate poor Mrs Hislop’s death.
Pike would not approve of this daring mission, but desperate times required desperate measures — and it wasn’t as if she was planning to take on the whole investigation by herself. All she would do was get into the office, ‘borrow’ the key and have a quick look inside the treatment building. If she could confirm with her own eyes that nothing untoward seemed
to be happening in the place — an absence of surgical instruments and anaesthetics used for major operations, for example — there would be no need to tell Pike about her little excursion.
She wasn’t being entirely reckless … just a bit.
The darkness grew. Dody packed her smoking paraphernalia into the bag, which also contained a lantern. She unfolded her cramped legs and eased herself back into her jacket. Fortunately there was plenty of cover behind the woodland on either side of the driveway. Should a vehicle pass she would hide behind a stand of trees, impossible to detect, she hoped, in her dark clothing.
She made it to the croquet lawn without incident, her eyes now adjusted as much as they ever would be to the darkness. In Fogarty’s office earlier, she’d made a careful observation of the view. While the office overlooked the croquet lawn, the trunk of the cedar of Lebanon was invisible from where she had been sitting, blocked by the wall space between the two sash windows. She visualised its flat branches now, cantilevering into the sky, the roses bobbing about beneath. With this picture in her mind, she viewed the front of the building from her vantage point beneath the tree, and identified the two office windows from among a line of about ten.
Carefully, she picked her way through the rose bushes in the bed below the windows. Neither window had been latched earlier and she was relieved to find this still to be the case. After blowing on her gloves to provide extra grip, she placed her palms flat against the glass and eased the window up on its sash. When the gap was large enough she slipped through, over the sill and onto the polished wooden floor of the office, closing the window behind her.
Before commencing her search of Fogarty’s desk for the key, she needed to satisfy her curiosity. Pulling a box of matches from her smoking pouch she lit the shuttered lantern and held it up to the shrouded object she had seen on the filing cabinet earlier. Removal of the sheet revealed a sturdy wooden box, with a crank protruding from its side very much like that of a motorcar’s.
Fascinating.
She was about to open the lid of the box to see if she could make out what the contraption was, when noises from the passage outside alerted her to someone’s approach. The footsteps were heavy, the voices male. It sounded as if there were two of them.
Dody spun around, directing her beam to the door between the bookcases. To her great relief, the knob turned under her hand. She darted through the opening and blew out her lantern a heartbeat before the main office door swung open.
Wherever she was, it was very dark. A switch was flicked in the office and a slash of light appeared beneath the door Dody hid behind.
She held her breath and listened.
The voices were clear. One of the men was Fogarty, the other had the voice of a younger man.
‘What’s that smell?’ Fogarty said.
‘What smell?’ the younger man asked.
‘Kerosene, I’m sure of it.’
The lingering fumes of her lantern, Dody thought. Blast it!
‘Probably just from that thing.’
Dody could not see where the young man pointed, but assumed it was the wooden box, which she had hastily re-shrouded. She dropped to her knees and peered through the keyhole. It was Fogarty all right. She couldn’t see his face but she recognised the pattern of his Harris Tweed Jacket. The other man wore a short white coat, probably one of the attendants she’d seen during the visit with her mother. The men stood next to the shrouded contraption with what Dody guessed to be a trolley of some kind between them — she was only able to see the top of its iron handle.
‘The windows are unlatched, Beamish. Better lock them,’ Fogarty said.
The floor under Dody’s feet vibrated as the younger man moved to latch the windows. At least she hoped to God they were being latched and not locked with a key. If the latter, her egress from the office might prove rather more complicated than her ingress had been.
Beamish rejoined Fogarty at the contraption. ‘Did the man at the garage manage to fix it, sir? he asked.
. ‘I’m not sure. I’ll tinker with it myself in the treatment room, conduct some basic tests.’
‘Watch your fingers this time, sir.’
Fogarty laughed. ‘Will do.’ Dody heard the sound of a crank being turned. ‘They’ve fixed that part, anyway. Come on, Beamish, let’s get this thing over to the treatment room.’
Dody caught movement through the keyhole, heard grunts of exertion as they moved the box, then the sound of rolling wheels across the floor.
‘I thought this thing was supposed to be portable,’ the younger man complained.
‘It’s lighter than most,’ Fogarty said during a pause to catch their breath. ‘And not a drop of kerosene in it either,’ he added as if suddenly remembering Beamish’s earlier comment.
‘No? Then perhaps there’s been a leak in the storeroom. I’ll check once we’ve got this thing into the treatment house.’
‘Jolly good. Thank you, Beamish,’ Fogarty said as the door clicked behind them.
The storeroom — that must be where she was hiding. When she was confident the men had gone, Dody groped about on the wall, found a light switch and turned it on. The light illuminated a generous cupboard about the size of her townhouse pantry and, like the pantry, lined with shelving on three sides. Instead of food though, the storeroom was stacked with all sorts of bottles, boxes of equipment and medical supplies.
On the shelves at the far end, light reflected off an assortment of what, at first glance, appeared to be lines of variously sized pickle jars. Dody stepped towards them for a closer inspection.
She stopped.
Dody was more than used to the sight of detached body parts, nevertheless, the sight of so many female organs floating around like trophies in the jars caused the bile to rise in her throat. How members of her profession could get away with performing such heinous, experimental acts, under the guise of a cure for insanity, beggared belief.
She thought of the wretched women like Cynthia, the pain they must have gone through, of all the lives ruined or lost due to unsubstantiated hypothesising. She closed her eyes for a moment and ran her fingers across the jars, feeling the cool smoothness of the glass, speaking to the contents as she did to the dead before a post mortem. You will not be forgotten, she reassured them.
Dody reached for a small jar with the intention of taking it with her as proof of Fogarty’s unethical practices. But she had nothing with which to secure the loose-fitting lid. Even the smallest of jars would impede her escape and might leak. With reluctance, she put it back on the shelf.
There would be no avoiding telling Pike about her midnight excursion now, no skirting the matter. He would have to take her word about the specimen collection and somehow convince a magistrate to provide him with a search warrant for the premises.
Dody was running out of time. Beamish might be back any minute to seek out the source of the kerosene smell and she needed to hurry. Quickly, she scanned the other shelves until she found a sealed tin of kerosene next to some brown paper packages labelled cotton wool.
She picked up her lamp, opened the tin and tipped some of the kerosene onto the shelf, positioning the can on top of the greasy puddle. With any luck Beamish would think the new can had sprung a leak and put the smell from her lamp down to that. Fortunately, the men had not seemed at all suspicious; they were men who worked without any sense of a guilty conscience. They had not even seemed concerned about the unlocked windows. Well, Dody would soon be showing them the error of their complacency.
Now she must find the spare key to that treatment building. She could not investigate it now obviously, with Fogarty using it. She’d had the foresight, however, to add a lump of builder’s putty to her bag, meaning she could take an imprint of the key and get it cut in the village. When the next opportunity presented itself, she could use the new key to gain access.
Dody relit her lamp, turned off the storeroom light and closed the door behind her. The key had to be in one of the desk drawers
. She reached for the top drawer and pulled it open. The first thing she saw was a file with Florence’s name written upon it in small, cramped handwriting. Under this she found another file marked with Cynthia Hislop’s name. This file she folded in half and slipped into her bag. She continued rummaging through the drawer looking for the key, then froze at the sound of footsteps in the passageway.
That was quick. Beamish must be returning already.
She eased the drawer shut. For a moment she moved like a frightened rabbit, looking this way and that for an escape route. After noting the position of one of the window latches, she fumbled to unfasten it then blew out her lamp. The footsteps were getting closer; any minute now the door would swing open.
She heaved the window up, stuffed the lantern in her bag and dived with it through the gap, landing directly onto the roses below. Her legs were speared from all directions. Fabric tore and skin ripped. Then more pain as she attempted to right herself in the garden bed. She took a deep breath, heaved herself upright and pushed the office window down.
Seconds later, the office flooded with light.
Dody staggered through the hotel yard and pounded on the back door. After some minutes, a sleepy scullery maid in dressing gown and nightcap admitted her into the kitchen. The surly expression on the maid’s face turned to alarm when she noticed Dody’s shredded appearance.
‘I’m all right, don’t worry,’ Dody said as she dropped onto one of the hard kitchen chairs. ‘If you could just make me a cup of tea and get some hot water and clean rags, I can tend to myself and you can return to your bed.’
The maid put the kettle on the hob and prepared tea while Dody hitched up her skirts and set to work pulling rose thorns from her stockings. When she was sure she had got them all, she gingerly peeled the stockings from her legs and cleaned the myriad scratches and cuts with the hot water and rags.
The maid looked on in horror as she observed the procedure. She was too subservient to question the cause of Dody’s injuries, but that didn’t count for much. By morning every staff member in the hotel from the manager down would know something about their peculiar female guest and her night-time ramblings.
The Insanity of Murder Page 16