"Oh, it certainly won't hurt," Adam said with a fleeting smile. ' 'On the contrary, I have high hopes that it might very well be of some help. Have you any questions you want to ask me before we begin?"
Balfour gave a shrug, not meeting Adam's eyes. "I guess not," he said in a flat voice. "If you want to play Svengali, it's up to you."
"We'll proceed as planned, then," Adam said calmly, coming around to sit on the front edge of his desk. "Why don't you put your feet up and make yourself comfortable? But if you're expecting me to don a long black cloak and make mystic passes in the air before your eyes, I'm afraid you're going to be in for a disappointment. Clinical hypnotherapists are a notoriously unimaginative bunch when it comes to stage properties."
Balfour gave him an odd, faintly skittish look, but did as he was told.
"Just don't touch me; I don't like to be touched," he murmured.
"I know that, and I know why," Adam said. "So I'll just ask you to lay your head back and have a look at that spot on the ceiling, just above your head. Do you see it?"
"Yes."
"Good. I'd like you to fix your gaze on that spot and just let yourself listen to the sound of my voice. The first part of this exercise has to do with distracting your conscious mind, so that your unconscious can come to the fore - because your unconscious is very clever and very observant, and if we can establish communication with your unconscious, it can give us valuable information that will help your understanding of what's been bothering you."
Balfour's gaze had flicked only reluctantly to the spot, but as the low voice droned on, he began visibly to relax.
"That's right," Adam murmured. "Let your conscious attention stay focused on that spot, while your body relaxes and another part of your mind just begins drifting with the sound of my voice. If your eyes get tired after a while, you can close them. There's really nothing to see with your eyes anyway, because we're far more interested in seeing what your unconscious memory might show you, as you relax more and more, drifting, floating… very comfortable and relaxed…."
Speaking softly and calmly as a father to a frightened child, Adam soon was able to lull the younger man into a state of relaxation bordering on sleep, and from there to guide him toward those deeper levels of awareness which could open up the long-locked doors to the past.
Balfour proved a ready subject, and the next half hour yielded far more fruitful results than Adam had dared to hope. When he brought his patient back to full consciousness, it was immediately apparent that Balfour had achieved some fresh insights into his situation, both past and present. After brief discussion, Adam left him with instructions to reflect on what he had learned until their next session, later in the week. But when he went back to his office to telephone McLeod, it was not McLeod who answered, but his assistant, Sergeant Donald Cochrane.
"Sorry, Sir Adam, but the inspector's gone off to the Royal Infirmary," Cochrane said. "I was to tell you that he'd appreciate it very much if you could arrange to meet him there, the sooner the better. Are you ringing from home?"
"No, from Jordanburn," Adam said, giving the psychiatric facility the name by which it was known locally. "Did the inspector happen to mention what this is all about?''
"Aye." Cochrane's voice sounded a little pinched. "He did tell you, didn't he, about that stretch of road they're starting to call Carnage Corridor?"
"Yes."
"Well, it's claimed another victim, maybe two. A man was killed there earlier this morning, and another's undergoing emergency surgery. The inspector's standing by, in case he regains consciousness, but it doesn't look good."
"I see."
"Here's the part you're going to love," Cochrane went on. "The man who's in surgery was still conscious when the police arrived. He claimed he'd veered off the road to avoid hitting a man and a pregnant woman - kept asking, 'Did I hit them? Did I hit them?"
"The problem is, none of the witnesses the police interviewed can recall seeing any pedestrians on the scene. Given the fact that the crash occurred in broad daylight, you'd've thought somebody would have seen the couple in question, but so far nobody's come forward with any descriptions. If I were a superstitious man, I'd be starting to wonder if maybe the driver of the crashed car might have seen a ghost."
As Master of the Hunting Lodge, Adam had known far stranger things to happen, but he forebore from saying so aloud. Though Donald Cochrane had received some peripheral esoteric instruction through his training as a Freemason, and McLeod had pegged him as a potential future recruit for the Hunting Lodge, his direct experience with the supernatural thus far had been solely in a support capacity. Adam himself was rapidly becoming convinced that there was more involved in the present case than malignant coincidence, but if things were about to shift into a more overt brush with the unknown, best to keep Cochrane at arm's length until they knew more.
"Well, it's reassuring to know that you aren't a superstitious man, Donald," he allowed. "I shouldn't think we'll find a ghost involved, but the situation does seem to go beyond mere coincidence. Do you happen to know the name of the surviving victim?"
"Aye, the inspector left it right here on his desk pad," Cochrane said. "The name's Malcolm Stuart Grant, with an address in Lanark. That's all I've got, though."
"That's enough for now," Adam replied, jotting the name on a notepad. "I just need to know who to ask for when I get to the Royal Infirmary."
"You'll go, then."
"Aye. Whatever the cause of these accidents, the effects would seem to be getting out of hand. I'll see what I can do to reshuffle my appointments for the rest of the morning. In the meantime, if Inspector McLeod should happen to check in, tell him I've received his message and will rendezvous with him at the hospital as soon as possible."
Uncertain how long he might find himself detained once he and McLeod met up, Adam rescheduled his two remaining patients for appointments the next day and postponed his usual morning rounds for later on in the afternoon, after which he signed out and headed for the car park.
He decided to risk the traffic on Morningside Road, and was relieved to find the route relatively uncluttered. Carrying on north and east along Bruntsfield Place, he bore right at the Toll Crossing onto Lauriston Place, whence a string of signs pointed the way toward the casualty department of Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary. He parked the Range Rover in a physicians' car park and headed toward the entrance.
It was not a hospital he normally frequented in his psychiatric practice, but its casualty department was reputed to be one of the two best in Scotland; Glasgow had the other. It was here that injured police officers and firefighters were most apt to be brought; he had watched with McLeod through several lonely nights when men's lives hung in the balance. He had been here once as a casualty himself - and Dr. Ximena Lockhart had been the on-call surgeon who had patched him up.
Shaking off the memory, he eased aside to let an ambulance crew wheel an empty gurney out of the building, then slipped inside and headed for the registrar's desk. He was reaching for his credentials when a breezy voice hailed him from farther along the corridor.
"Dr. Sinclair?"
Turning, he saw the familiar white-uniformed figure of Reggie Sykes, the orderly Ximena had been training in emergency-room procedures. Sykes's coffee-colored face split in a broad grin as he approached.
"I thought that was you, sir!" he exclaimed, the musical lilt in his voice proclaiming his Jamaican origins. "It's been a long time. Say, what you hear from that pretty lady of yours? How's her daddy gettin' on?"
The subject was one Adam would have preferred to avoid, but he knew Sykes had doted on the attractive American "Dr. X."