“It’s Hannah Barrow,” said Macdonald. “She got talking and worked herself up into a screaming fit and she’s flat out. I carried her up to her bedroom. D’you know your way?”
“No. I’ve never been inside this house before. She’s not my patient, you know.”
“So you’ve told me. I called you because I judged you’d be better primed to cope with the occasion,” said Macdonald as he led the way upstairs. “Having studied the contents of the medicine cupboard here, I thought another opinion was indicated.”
Ferens stopped dead. “You don’t mean . . .”
“No, I don’t,” retorted Macdonald. “She screamed herself to exhaustion, that’s all. Give her a bromide, or whatever suits the occasion, and let the poor little cuss go to sleep. I’ll tell you about it when you’re through.”
Hannah Barrow was now covered up in grey blankets (good “government surplus”), her cap was over one ear, and her hands clawed feebly at the blankets as she sobbed and hiccoughed. Cook was standing beside the bed.
“I’d be glad if you’d take my notice. Me nerves won’t stand any more of this,” she said as she saw Macdonald.
“Have you filled those hot-water bottles?” he snapped as Ferens came into the room.
Cook gaped at him. “’Tis Dr. Brown should come to see to her,” she proclaimed. “Her’s registered with Dr. Brown.”
“I’m doing locum for Dr. Brown this time,” said Ferens cheerfully. “You go and do what the Chief Inspector tells you and fill some hot-water bottles. Pie’s got more sense than you have.”
Cook sniffed noisily and followed Macdonald to the door. “Us haven’t got no hot-water bottles. Sister didn’t hold with they. A warm brick, now——”
“Then go across to Mrs. Ferens and borrow two hot-water bottles,” retorted the doctor, “and hurry up about it.”
2
“Well, that’s Hannah Barrow’s life story,” said Macdonald.
He and Raymond Ferens were sitting in the office at Gramarye. The casement windows were open wide now, and the warmth and sensuous fragrance of midsummer floated in, merging with blue cigarette smoke to make the cold bare little room seem alive and lived in.
“Poor little wretch,” said Ferens softly.
Macdonald nodded. “Yes. I shan’t forget that story in a hurry. I wonder if it’s possible that the memory of her mother’s death was blotted out by the hideous shock of witnessing it. I believe it does happen in some cases. The memory is suppressed, clamped down, as though a scar grows over damaged tissue and hides it.”
“Of course it happens,” said Ferens. “It’s that sort of memory, shut down in the subconscious, that can wreak havoc in people’s lives. But I thought you weren’t interested in psychology?”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested. I said I refused to be obsessed by it. I still do,” said Macdonald, “but I did believe that when Hannah was telling me about it, her mind went back to that horror which some circumstance had routed out, and she was no longer Nurse Barrow of Gramarye, but a Bristol slum child. It was that word she used—in pity and horror. ‘Poor besom.’ It’s an old word and an ugly one. It’s certainly not a word the respectable Hannah Barrow would have used.”
Ferens nodded. “You’re probably right. It was the telling of it which broke her up. That uncontrolled weeping was quite characteristic of the whole case.” He broke off and looked out of the window, and the silence which followed in the room was broken by a thrush singing its heart out on the top of a beech tree.
“I suppose you realise you’ve got a complete explanation of the Warden’s death?” asked Ferens abruptly.
Macdonald nodded. “Yes. The psychologist’s explanation. That’s what I meant when I said I refused to be obsessed by it. But if you would like to put forward your own idea of what may have happened, I shall give full consideration to it.”
“It’s the story of the missing brandy bottle which clinches it, to my mind,” said Ferens slowly. “Let us trace the case history. A slum child in a dockland district, undernourished, ill treated: the father drank, and eventually killed the mother with a poker. The child was taken to an orphanage. They probably looked after her, according to the lights of fifty years ago, and they would certainly not have let her talk that memory out of her system. It was, as you say, clamped down. I gather from what you say that the job she was put to was in what would pass for a respectable household. The mistress of it beat the girl and ill-treated her and half starved her, but I gather there was no mention of alcoholism. Orphanages may make mistakes in the characters of employers, but they’re careful not to send into houses where drunkenness occurs.”
“Perfectly true,” said Macdonald. “The mistress of the house was a teetotaller.”
“Very well. Hannah tripped up her tormentor on the stairs and the woman broke her neck. Result, a prison sentence. Then a period in an institution. Rehabilitation, as we say nowadays. Then Gramarye, and over twenty years of drudgery, and uplift which brought contentment of a sort. Hannah was now respected. She was Nurse Barrow. Life went according to pattern. She was taught to do the same thing in the same way, day after day, year after year. She was educable to that point—she could do just those things the Warden had trained her to do, and I think she was probably happy doing them. Do you agree to all that?”
“Yes. To all of it,” said Macdonald.
“Very well. Note that since the day the child had seen her drunken father kill her mother she had never experienced drunken violence again—until she saw Sister Monica drunk. Saw it, smelled the cause of it—and it turned her brain. She remembered the last time. Alter that she wasn’t responsible for her own actions any more. Her lather hit her mother. Hannah repaid that hit.”
Ferens broke
