I remembered that IQ was measured by fear.
“I thought he had to have been making most of it up,” continued William. “Or at least embellishing it a hell of a lot. I mean, if his research really was that glittering, why on earth leave it to go into humdrum hospital medicine? But he must have become a hospital doctor deliberately, waiting all this time for the opportunity to test out his gene in humans.”
I went into the garden as if I needed more literal space to accommodate the hugeness of these facts. I didn’t want to be alone with them and was glad when William joined me.
“He must have destroyed Tess’s notes,” William said. “And then fabricated the real reason why the babies died, so that their deaths couldn’t be connected to the trial. And somehow he managed to get away with it. Christ, it makes you talk like, I don’t know, somebody else, somebody off the telly or something. This is Hugo I’m talking about for God’s sake. A man I thought I knew. Liked.”
I’d been talking in that alien language since your body was found. I understood the realization that your previous vocabulary can’t describe what is happening to you now.
I looked at the little patch of earth where Mum and I had decided to plant the winter-flowering clematis for you.
“But someone else must have been part of this?” I said. “He can’t have been with Tess when she had her baby.”
“All doctors do six months obstetrics as part of their training. Hugo would know how to deliver a baby.”
“But surely someone would have noticed? A psychiatrist delivering a baby, surely someone …?”
“The labor ward is heaving with people and we’re desperately understaffed. If you see a white coat in a room, you’re just grateful and move on to the next potential calamity. Many of the doctors are temps and sixty percent of our midwives are too, so they don’t know who’s who.” He turned to me, his expression harsh with anxiety. “And he was wearing a mask, Bee, remember?”
“But surely someone …”
William took my hand. “We’re all so bloody busy. And we trust one another because it’s just too exhausting and too much hassle to do anything else, and we’re naive enough to think our colleagues are there for the same purpose as we are—to be treating people and trying to make them well.”
His body was taut and his hands were clenched tightly around mine. “He had me fooled too. I thought he was a friend.”
“I realized that he’d been perfectly positioned all along,” I say. “Who better than a psychiatrist to drive someone mad? To force someone into suicide? And I had only his word about what really happened at their session.”
“You thought he actually tried to force Tess into taking her life?”
“Yes. And then when she didn’t—even though she was being mentally tortured to a sadistic degree—then he murdered her.”
I thought it no wonder that Dr. Nichols had been so adamant about his failure to diagnose puerperal psychosis—loss of professional face was a small price to pay next to murder.
Mr. Wright glances at a note I remember him making much earlier. “You said that Dr. Nichols wasn’t among the people you suspected of playing Tess the lullabies?”
“No. As I said, I didn’t think he had a motive.” I pause a moment. “And because I’d thought he was a hopeless but decent man who had owned up to a terrible mistake.”
I am still shivering. Mr. Wright takes off his jacket and puts it around my shoulders.
“I thought Tess must have found out about his hijacking the CF trial and that’s why he murdered her. Everything fitted into place.”
“Fitted into place” sounds so neat, a piece completing the jigsaw picture and proving satisfying rather than metal grinding into metal, blood spilling rust colored onto the ground.
“We’d better phone the police,” said William. “Shall I do it or you?”
“You’re probably more credible. No history of crying wolf or getting hysterical.”
“Okay. What’s the policeman’s name?”
“Detective Inspector Haines. If you can’t get him, ask for Detective Sergeant Finborough.”
He picked up his mobile. “This is going to be bloody hard.” Then he dialed the number as I gave it to him, and asked for DI Haines.
As William spoke to DI Haines, telling him everything he had told me, I wanted to yell at Dr. Nichols. I wanted to hit him, blow after blow; I wanted to kill him, actually, and the sensation was oddly liberating. At last my rage had a target and it was a release to give way to it—finally throwing the grenade you’ve been holding for so long, pin out, that’s been threatening to destroy you, and you’re freed of the burden and tension as you hurl it.
William hung up. “He’s asked us to go down to the police station but wants us to give him an hour to get the top brass in.”
“You mean he’s asked you to go.”
