It was difficult to forget the irritations of the ECT session. The clinic building had been put up when men built to last, but even the sturdy oak door of the consulting room could not muffle the comings and goings of a Friday night. The front door was closed at six p.m. and patients at the evening clinics were booked in and out since the time, over five years ago, when a patient had entered unobserved, secreted herself in the basement lavatory and chosen that insalubrious place in which to kill herself. Dr. Steiner’s psychotherapy sessions were punctuated by the ringing of the front-door bell, the passing of feet as patients came and went, the hearty voices of relatives and escorts exhorting the patient or calling goodbyes to Sister Ambrose. Dr. Steiner wondered why relatives found it necessary to shout at the patients as if they were deaf as well as psychotic. But possibly after a session with Baguley and his diabolic machine, they were. Worst of all was the clinic domestic assistant, Mrs. Shorthouse. One might imagine that Amy Shorthouse could do the cleaning early in the mornings as was surely the normal arrangement. That way there would be the minimum of disturbance to the clinic staff. But Mrs. Shorthouse maintained that she couldn’t get through the work without an extra two hours in the evenings and Miss Bolam had agreed. Naturally, she would. It appeared to Dr. Steiner that very little domestic work was done on Friday evenings. Mrs. Shorthouse had a predilection for the ECT patients—indeed, her own husband had once been treated by Dr. Baguley—and she was usually to be seen hanging around the hall and the ground-floor general office while the session was being held. Dr. Steiner had mentioned it at the Medical Committee more than once and had been irritated by his colleagues’ general uninterest in the problem. Mrs. Shorthouse should be kept out of sight and encouraged to get on with her work, not permitted to stand around gossiping with the patients. Miss Bolam, so unnecessarily strict with other members of the staff, showed no inclination to discipline Mrs. Shorthouse. Everyone knew that good domestic workers were hard to get but an administrative officer who knew her job would recruit them somehow. Weakness solved nothing. But Baguley could not be persuaded to complain about Mrs. Shorthouse and Bolam would never criticize Baguley. The poor woman was probably in love with him. It was up to Baguley to take a firm line instead of sloping around the clinic in that ridiculously long white coat which made him look like a second-rate dentist. Really, the man had no idea of the dignity with which a consultant clinic should be conducted.
Clump, clump went someone’s boots along the passage. It was probably old Tippett, a chronic schizophrenic patient of Baguley’s who for the past nine years had regularly spent Friday evenings carving wood in the art therapy department. The thought of Tippett increased Dr. Steiner’s petulance. The man was totally unsuitable for the Steen. If he were well enough to be out of hospital, which Dr. Steiner doubted, he ought to attend a day hospital or one of the County Council’s sheltered workshops. It was patients like Tippett who gave the clinic a dubious reputation and obscured its real function as an analytically orientated centre of psychotherapy. Dr. Steiner felt positively embarrassed when one of his own carefully selected patients encountered Tippett creeping about the clinic on a Friday evening. Tippett wasn’t even safe to be out. One day there would be an incident and Baguley would find himself in trouble.
Dr. Steiner’s happy contemplation of his own colleague in trouble was punctured by the ring of the front-door bell. Really, it was impossible! This time it was apparently a hospital-car-service driver calling for a patient. Mrs. Shorthouse went to the door to speed them away. Her eldritch screech echoed through the hall. “Cheerio, ducks. See you next week. If you can’t be good, be careful.”
Dr. Steiner winced and shut his eyes. But his patient, happily engaged in his favourite hobby of talking about himself, seemed not to have heard. Mr. Burge’s high whine had not, in fact, faltered for the past twenty minutes.
“I don’t pretend I’m an easy person. I’m not, I’m a complicated devil. That’s something which Theda and Sylvia have never understood. The roots of it go deep of course. You remember that session we had in June? Some pretty basic stuff came out then, I thought.”
His therapist did not recall the session in question but was unconcerned. With Mr. Burge pretty basic stuff was invariably near the surface and could be trusted to emerge. An unaccountable peace fell. Dr. Steiner doodled on his notepad, regarded his doodle with interest and concern, looked at it again with the pad held upside down and became for a moment more preoccupied with his own subconscious than with that of his patient. Suddenly he became aware of another sound from outside, faint at first and then becoming louder. Somewhere, a woman was screaming. It was a horrible noise, high, continuous and completely animal. Its effect on Dr. Steiner was peculiarly unpleasant. He was naturally timid and highly strung. Although his job involved him in the occasional emotional crises, he was more adept at circumventing than coping with an emergency.
Fear gave vent to irritation and he sprang from his chair exclaiming: “No! Really, this is too bad! What’s Miss Bolam doing? Isn’t anyone supposed to be in charge here?”
“What’s up?” inquired Mr. Burge, sitting up like a jack-in-the-box and dropping his voice half an octave to its more normal tone.
“Nothing. Nothing. Some woman having an attack of hysteria, that’s all. Stay where you are. I’ll be back,” commanded Dr. Steiner.
Mr. Burge collapsed again but with eye and ear cocked for the door. Dr. Steiner found himself in the hall.
Immediately a little group swung round to face him. Jennifer Priddy, the junior typist, was clinging to one of the porters, Peter Nagle, who was patting her shoulder in embarrassed pity and looking puzzled. Mrs. Shorthouse was with them. The girl’s screams were subsiding into whimpers but her whole body was shaking and she was deathly pale.
“What’s the matter?” asked Dr. Steiner sharply. “What’s wrong with her?”
Before anyone had a chance to reply, the door of the ECT room opened and Dr. Baguley came out followed by Sister Ambrose and his anaesthetist, Dr. Mary Ingram. The hall seemed suddenly full of people. “Calm down, that’s a good girl,” said Dr. Baguley mildly. “We’re trying to run a clinic.” He turned to Peter Nagle and asked in a low voice: “What’s the matter anyway?”
Nagle seemed about to speak when, suddenly, Miss Priddy gained control. Breaking free she turned to Dr. Baguley and said with absolute clearness: “It’s Miss Bolam. She’s dead. Someone’s killed her. She’s in the basement record room and she’s murdered. I found her. Enid’s been murdered!”
She clung to Nagle and began to cry again but more quietly. The dreadful shaking had ceased. Dr. Baguley said to the porter: “Take her into the treatment room. Make her lie down. Better give her something to drink. Here’s the key. I’ll be back.”
He made for the basement stairs and the rest, abandoning the girl to Nagle’s ministrations, followed in a jostling bunch. The basement at the Steen was well lit; all its rooms were used by the clinic which, like most psychiatric units, was chronically short of space. Here, below stairs, in addition to the boiler room, the telephone equipment room and the porters’ quarters, was the art therapy department, a medical-records storeroom and, at the front of the building, a treatment room for the lysergic-acid patients.
As the little group reached the bottom of the stairs, the door of this room opened and Nurse Bolam, Miss Bolam’s cousin, looked out briefly—a shadowy wraith in her white uniform against the darkness of the room behind. Her gentle, puzzled voice floated to them down the corridor. “Is there anything wrong? I thought I heard a scream a few minutes ago.”