Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  “Wouldn’t the projectionist notice?”

  “Woods is a good man,” said Bellingham. “Dedicated to the cinema. But he’s not always the most observant. Bit of a dreamer. And he has to take breaks like everyone else.”

  I cast about for other clues. “What about the music? Did they give you sheet music to go with it?”

  “No,” he said, dismissing my layman’s ignorance. “For shorts like this, Bobby—the organist—he makes it up. He has a book of standard tunes, for chases and love scenes and whatnot, and for anything else he improvises around the action.”

  “Your organist has an uncanny knack,” I said. The music had seemed to be intended to carry half the effect. Even as I spoke, though, I wondered whether the music was somehow implicit in the images, and the organist was merely more sensitive to it.

  “Somebody is playing a joke on us,” said the manager grimly, hefting the film can in his hand. “The sort of joke that could lose me my job. Or else…”

  I knew then, as I think Bellingham did, that this was more than a joke. Somebody had gone too far and to too much trouble, and the effect on the patrons had been far too serious. He was probably thinking about the Germans, and how and why a strange German film could have arrived there. Might it be a peculiar new variety of sabotage?

  If I had been able to contact Miss De Vere, I would have asked her if it meant anything and if I should get involved, but I was left to my own initiative. What I was investigating left a trail of madness, and this film reel reeked of it. Better safe than sorry.

  “As luck would have it, I’m an investigator of sorts,” I said, passing Bellingham my Lantern business card. “Insurance, usually, but I can carry out an extracurricular investigation on your behalf.”

  He eyed me warily, perhaps suspecting a prelude to blackmail. “I can’t pay you commercial rates,” he said. “I’m working on a shoestring in this place.”

  “This would be strictly, as we say in the business, pro bono,” I said. “I’d be interested in getting to the bottom of this, myself. As a matter of fact, I believe it might have some connection with another investigation I’m involved with.”

  “Oh well, in that case, carry on. ‘Another investigation,’ you say—do you mean to say that something like this has happened to someone else?”

  “Not exactly, but there are, shall we say, echoes.”

  Bellingham searched my face, but it would not have been prudent for me to say more. For once, I was the one in the know, and somebody else was left wondering. “If we can say we’ve a man investigating the matter, it would take some of the heat off,” he said. “If it goes to the papers or anyone. In the meantime, please accept this as a token of my appreciation.” He pressed a book of ticket vouchers on me and took my hand. “I look forward to hearing from you, Mr Stubbs.”

  I left him contemplating the film reel. Maybe it could have been dusted for fingerprints if he had not touched it so much.

  “There,” said Sally, once the two of us were back in the lobby. “Could you find anything out?”

  There was nobody else around, except the cigarette girl in one corner, counting piles of pennies and ha’pennies. I was deeply reluctant to involve Sally in anything further, but I was here at her instigation. She had a share in it, and it would not be fair to shut her out.

  “He thinks it might be German,” I said.

  Chapter Six: Hydrotherapy

  “So, Mr Jenkins, today you begin your hydrotherapy treatment,” said Dr Beltov.

  Jenkins looked at the bathtub and its canvas apparatus doubtfully, scratching his head.

  “I have explained this clearly to you,” said Beltov.

  “I’m not quite sure…”

  “Please, Mr Jenkins, there is nothing to be apprehensive about.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s not cold water.”

  While there is nothing more invigorating than a cold bath taken in the right spirit, I quite understand why some people view it as a form of torture.

  “The warm water will calm your nerves,” said Beltov. “We find this is a very effective therapy. It is medically proven.”

  If Beltov was the patient, that would be all that was needed; he would set himself on fire if some paper said it was medically proven. Jenkins was not so easily persuaded.

  “But I don’t need a bath,” he said. “It’s not my bath night.”

  “Mr Jenkins—” Beltov began, and I could see he was going to start repeating himself. He might have been highly thought of in psychological circles, but he lacked patience in his relations with inmates.

  “You’re a lucky man, Jenkins,” I interjected. “People go to Baden-Baden and pay a lot of money for this exact sort of thing. Spa treatment, they call it there. Very luxurious.”

  “Don’t they have special waters there?” asked Jenkins.

  “Unproven,” said Beltov, before I could reply. “There is no scientific evidence that the mineral content of the water makes the slightest difference. The critical factor is the temperature of the water.”

  He tapped the big brass thermometer for emphasis. Yellow and orange bands fanning out around the needle delineated the exact temperature ranges to be applied for different effects.

  “There’s nothing wrong with English water,” I said. “We had Beulah Spa up the road, and that was as good as anywhere in Europe.”

  “So, it’s a spa treatment,” said Jenkins thoughtfully, reaching out to touch one of the brass taps. He was already half-won over, perhaps imagining himself as some affluent gentleman in a Swiss resort, reclining among the vapours. We waited expectantly.

  “Well, I suppose I’ll try it out,” he said. “It’s just like a warm bath, after all, isn’t it?”

  “Exactly so,” said Beltov.

  As Jenkins undressed and I ran the bath, Beltov explained the procedure to me again. I had assisted in hydrotherapy before, but this was the first time I had sole charge.

  “I’ve got the instructions all written down,” I said. “Though I can’t pretend to know how it works.”

  It was not even a rhetorical question, but I had touched on a subject close to Beltov’s heart, and he felt the need to educate me. “The human brain operates on several levels, each supporting the other, like a house of cards,” he said. “There is the physical level, the electro-chemical level, and the behavioural or psychological level. Herr Freud and his disciples think we can do everything on the psychological level, with words and symbols. But this talking cure is useless with psychosis.” He emphasised the word useless with a gesture of rejecting Freud and all his works.

  “The clever German chemists want to cure madness by better regulation of our brain chemicals—with artificial hormones and other substances. And they are very clever.” He pulled an enamelled pill box from his jacket pocket and rattled it under my nose. “Acid sodium phosphate. It reduces fatigue and increases concentration by twenty per cent, with no side effects. One day the clever German chemists will find the right formula to regulate our brains as easily as changing a clock. If they don’t kill us all with clever poison gas first.”

  Beltov looked forward to a grand future where every degree of mania or melancholy could be treated with the correctly calibrated doses of pills or injections, where hallucinations could be remedied like headaches. Like his unreliable glass clock, the mind could be corrected as soon as it went wrong. For the meantime, though, all we could do was dose the inmates’ evening cocoa with bromide to help calm them and pacify their animal urges.

  “But for now, we have crude physical methods. Water changes the temperature of the body. It calms or stimulates the brain—we know this from fevers and hyperthermias, but we are groping in the dark.” He looked disapprovingly at the bath, which was almost full. “Now we try this new regime with clocks and tides… This is not science. But if we gather enough data, if we observe carefully—one day. Keep your notes exact. Record the times.”

  “Can I get in now?” asked Jenkins, shivering
in his underwear.

  “Yes, yes, Mr Jenkins. Please do so. I will leave you in the management of Mr Stubbs.”

  I showed Jenkins how to get into the hydrotherapy apparatus. He lay in a kind of canvas hammock in the tub, with another sheet of canvas over him and a wooden lid on top of that to keep the heat in, with only his head sticking out.

  The thermometer displayed the temperature to the nearest half degree, but I told him to let me know the minute it became uncomfortable.

  “Just lie back and relax,” I said, adjusting the taps. Unlike a normal bath, it had a continual slow leak, so it could be continually topped up to maintain the right level of warmth. “Go to sleep if you feel like it.”

  The pipes swooshed and gurgled pleasantly.

  “How long do I stay in for?”

  “Half an hour, like Dr Beltov said.” I held up the big alarm clock. “I’m timing it on my watch as well.”

  “What was that he said about tides?”

  I tried to gather what Beltov had told me earlier. It was not easy, as there were so many different therapies, but my notebook was in my hand. “You get bathed at a different time of the day, corresponding to the tides,” I said. “It’s supposed to be more natural that way.”

  “Huh,” said Jenkins. “And what’s that over there?”

  It was something like an enormous coffin on legs, all carved from teak. The interior, padded with red velvet, was shaped to follow the outlines of a human body. A series of joined metal boxes was positioned around the end which was shaped to fit a patient’s head, forming a sort of outsized helmet.

  Staff and patients alike—apart from Dr Beltov, who said the word had negative associations—called it the sarcophagus, because of the elaborate carvings, which made it resemble Egyptian funerary furniture. Beltov was right. I looked it up, and sarcophagus literally means “eater of flesh,” which is one worse than a mere coffin.

  “This is the apparatus for magnetotherapy,” I told him. Beltov had explained it to me rather offhandedly. Like the hydrotherapy, it was an old treatment which had been given a new scientific gloss, like putting a lick of paint on an old wardrobe to conceal its poor condition. Magnets did not impress him. “The helmet section contains a series of revolving magnets on springs and wires.”

  “What does that do?”

  Nothing very much, according to Beltov. He thought magnetism was a species of quackery that ought to have been abandoned after Dr Mesmer was exposed a century or two ago. But apparently, he had re-emerged.

  “Well, they say the brain is magnetic,” I said. “And where there’s a disorder, when the brain gets out of kilter, the electro-magnets sort of smooth it back into place. It’s perfectly harmless.”

  It was certainly complicated enough, with an electric motor and mysterious mechanisms in a cabinet underneath. A pen moved on a paper strip, and magnetic wires recorded the machine’s actions, presumably as an indication that it had actually done something, as the effects were otherwise entirely intangible. There were several dials and switches; I could not imagine what they were all for, though I resolved to have a closer look sometime. The entire thing was unnecessarily ornate, either to impress patients or the doctors who paid for it. It could have been a stage prop for a Gothic melodrama. I could understand why it provoked Beltov’s scepticism more than the unpretentious apparatus for hydrotherapy did.

  “I like this better,” said Jenkins from his bath. “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, the call of the tide and the oceans wide… and that which rises, by and by.”

  He carried on reciting until the words became slurred and nonsensical. Then, a waft of steam momentarily veiled his face, and for some reason I was convinced that something had happened to him—but as I gawped, the alarm clock came clangourously to life, the steam parted, and Jenkins looked up, startled, wide-awake and quite his normal self.

  “It feels a bit strange and dreamy,” was Jenkins’s verdict as he towelled himself down. “You sort of lose yourself in the water.” He looked at his hand as if seeing it for the first time.

  That evening, I was to have my first experience of that unusual condition which is known by the French name of folie a deux, which in English means “madness shared by two persons.”

  FitzRoy was one of the more harmless residents. The exact reasons for his being there were lost to history, but he was a portly, middle-aged man with the fixed delusion that he was the rightful king of England. It all started with his name. FitzRoy was the surname they used to give children born to royalty and out of wedlock, but whose parentage was officially recognised. They ended up as dukes and earls and whatnot, hundreds of years ago. This particular FitzRoy had convinced himself that he was something special and, by some genealogy known only to himself, had precedence over our actual royals.

  Some years ago, they told me, he considered himself merely the rightful heir to the throne. When the old king died in 1910, FitzRoy elevated himself and crowned himself with tinfoil, declaring himself to be sovereign. His royal ways earned him a certain amount of derision and not infrequent abuse, but his position was immovable. I will always treasure the occasion when another inmate, on being jostled aside, asked FitzRoy who he thought he was. FitzRoy turned around and reeled off his complete list of titles from Defender of the Faith and Emperor of India all the way up to ruler of the British Dominions beyond the Seas. He may have been mad, but FitzRoy was well-rehearsed.

  FitzRoy had moved an armchair to the middle of the living area to hold court, as he saw it. This was after dinner; there were no scheduled activities, and the rota had assigned me the task of overseeing. It was considered light duty, as it was generally no more than hanging around, seeing that there was no trouble, rebuking anyone trying to damage the furniture, and preventing squabbles from coming to blows. The inmates rubbed along pretty well, and trouble was rare.

  I was standing by the wall, keeping an eye on things. Some of the inmates were watching the glorious orange sunset, with drifts of clouds coloured like an oil painting. Others played dominoes or cards.

  “Excuse me, Mr Stubbs, may I trouble you for permission to collect a cup of water?” Jenkins asked me.

  “Not had enough water for one day, then?” I joked. He did at least smile back at me. “By all means, you can fetch one.”

  A minute later, I saw Jenkins bring the tin cup and kneel beside FitzRoy, holding it up like a goblet. FitzRoy took a few sips and then dismissed Jenkins with a suitably royal wave. Jenkins took the cup, still three-quarters full, back to the scullery.

  “You don’t have to do what he says,” I told Jenkins.

  “It is my honour to serve the king,” he said, with a tone of offended patriotism.

  “Well,” I said, “just because a man claims to be king, we don’t have to believe him.”

  His look was more one of pity than anything else.

  “His majesty is most tolerant with all of his subjects… But really, there’s no need for that sort of talk. Not when you are under his roof.”

  As I followed his gaze, I saw that, to a certain way of looking at it, FitzRoy might appear royal. The institution was certainly palatial. The evening sun had painted gorgeous tapestries on the walls, and even FitzRoy’s hair looked gilded. In that light, the garden was as splendid as Hampton Court.

  Those around him were, to him, his advisers, courtiers and hangers-on. He issued proclamations as if he were the real king. He was not in charge of running the place, but the king did not manage his own household, either, but was as much a slave to the needs of rotas and schedules as any gentleman who gets turned out of his armchair so the floor can be cleaned. Though in the case of royalty, there needs must be more ceremony involved.

  “I have petitioned him, and he is very interested in my case. Next week, I am to be knighted,” Jenkins confided to me. “Perhaps even a position in the Royal Household.”

  He had been imprinted with FitzRoy’s ideas, like a blank sheet which picks up newsprint by
contact. Nature abhors a vacuum, and queer ideas can be catching.

  A man with delusions is like a stick that falls over if you try to stand it up on its own. But two sticks can support each other, and that’s how folie a deux works. Each of the participants supports the other in his delusion, in return for being supported. FitzRoy had his loyal supporter at last, in exchange for recognising Jenkins’s persecution mania. They had found a way of fitting the two together like pieces of a jigsaw, and the two would support and reinforce each other’s delusions.

  I made a note to mention it to Dr Beltov. Both patients seemed harmless enough, but together they might put each other up to worse mischief than either alone would imagine.

  With Gillespy’s death and what had happened to Ryan, matters had progressed to a stage where I had to square things with my patron, Arthur Renville. I set out to do that the next afternoon.

  Arthur was a figure of some consequence in Norwood. He was a consignment man, one who dealt in shipping cargoes which had been written off for insurance purposes, but which still had some material value. It was a lucrative business, and one which required the mobilisation of considerable resources in terms of manpower, transportation, and storage facilities, for many of the items were in something of a legal grey zone. This meant that he was the steersman for all sorts of activity, some of it entirely respectable, some of it a good deal less formal.

  Arthur’s position at the hub of things meant he was a coordinator—never a leader, he was always at pains to stress, but first among equals. When a case of pilfering was brought to his attention, the accused would start grovelling; and if Arthur so much as hinted that someone was out of line, then steps were taken to put them in order. Sometimes quite heavy steps.

  Arthur was my mentor. He got me out of a jam more than once, and I will forever be indebted to him. I would not wish to inconvenience him by thoughtless action, and it seemed only polite to let him know what was going on. His business hours usually occurred in the hours of darkness, but he was sometimes out in daytime, and that day I found him in the barber shop on the High Street having his fortnightly cut.