‘What makes you afraid he means mischief?’
‘We think he may be from the unlucky family of those patients who died when our father was still alive. It’s left some nasty feeling in the village and there was a bit of a demonstration at father’s funeral.’
‘I certainly think that for you to go to the police is the answer.’
‘And have my father’s bad luck — because that is all it was — discussed all over again in open court? We’d rather die. Then, as though that wasn’t enough, this madman comes along and insists that we are doctors and must treat him. I’ll say again how terribly sorry we are to have burdened you with him, but he frightened us so much that Bryony said he must be mad and that Dame Beatrice was our only hope. I know we ought to have rung up and asked before Bryony brought him over to you, but — is she willing to treat him? He seemed very ready to go to her.’
‘I should have thought there was somebody nearer to you. Anyway, he didn’t stay long. I saw that Bryony had one of the hounds in the back of the car. Was that a precautionary measure?’
‘Yes, of course. We didn’t trust the man, but nobody would touch either of us while we were under the protection of Osiris.’
Laura rightly took it that Osiris was the guardian hound and not the god in person, although, as she said to Dame Beatrice later, with Morpeth you never knew.
‘Very wise to take him along, ’ she said over the telephone, ‘I suppose this man couldn’t also be your prowler?’
‘Oh, good gracious, no! At least, I do hope not. I’m sure the prowler is a villager who bears us a grudge because of father.’
‘Doctors make mistakes at times, but nobody thinks they intend to harm a patient.’
‘We’re not liked by the villagers. They don’t like the hounds, either.’
‘Well, if your prowler does any more window-tapping, you take my advice and call the police.’
‘What news from the hills?’ asked Dame Beatrice when Laura went back to her. Laura reported the conversation and it turned on to the subject of doctors as murderers. The names of Crippen, Buck Ruxton, Palmer, Pritchard and Lamson came up. Laura also spoke of a French physician born in Lyons, who, later, practised in Paris and was suspected of murdering wealthy women patients for their money or to cash in on life assurances he had taken out in their names.
The evergreen mystery of Charles Bravo’s death in 1877 at The Priory, a house in Balham, came into the conversation, although, as Dame Beatrice pointed out, if Charles Bravo was murdered by the administering of poison — tartar emetic among other things was mentioned — it was unlikely, on the evidence provided, to have been Dr Gully who was the criminal.
‘And, of course, Thomas Neill Cream studied medicine,’ said Laura, ‘and gave unfortunate girls drinks with “white stuff” in them. Then there was the Polish barber-surgeon Klosowski, who called himself George Chapman after he had parted from a young woman of that name. You don’t suppose somebody in the village got a bit fanciful and imaginative and spread it about that the Rants’ father knocked off a patient or two for gain, do you?’
‘I do not think much gain could accrue to him from cottagers. These morbid speculations do not become you and are extremely far-fetched.’
‘Their father seems to have been anything but a poor man when he died, and that doesn’t sound much like a village GP,’ argued Laura.
‘Perhaps the mother left money.’
‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘We never hear anything about the mother, do we?’
‘She may have died when the girls were very young.’
Laura agreed and the conversation drifted into other channels, but, after supper, as they were settling down to the business of working on Dame Beatrice’s memoirs — a project masterminded in a sense by Laura, since she had suggested it and had insisted that it would be an interesting and valuable addition to the already published volumes of Dame Beatrice’s case notes — Laura asked whether Dame Beatrice had come to any further conclusions with regard to Goodfellow’s visit.
‘Morpeth said on the phone that he made no bones about coming all this way. However, you don’t think he is a case in need of psychiatry, do you? He is playing some game, you think.’
‘Most people are in need of psychiatry of one sort or another. Some people find what they need by attending church, others by confiding in sympathetic friends. Some find it in their work, others in strenuous sport. These things all minister to minds diseased and that means most minds.’
‘Good heavens! Is
‘To return to a subject from which we appear to have deviated, I think the reason Mr Goodfellow called is that he was anxious to have a good look at us,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘and possibly, as you would say, to size us up.’
‘But why?’
‘That is the question.’
‘It’s one to which you think you know the answer, isn’t it, though?’
‘No, I do not know the answer. I do know, however, that he is not mentally disturbed in the sense that he would have us believe. What he really has on his mind I cannot say.’
‘You don’t think — I know it’s a very long shot — that the Rants had any reason of their own, except that he scared them, for bringing him here? Bryony, in particular, could be a bit cagey, I think.’
‘What makes you suggest that?’
‘Morpeth admitted that they know you don’t see people — patients, I mean — without an appointment. If he had come on his own and if we had not recognised the car and Bryony in it, you wouldn’t have given him an interview, would you?’
