incarcerated. I was shown only an empty room on the second floor, made up ready for a new arrival. Nice enough.'
'Why not keep them downstairs if they think they're going to leap out?'
'I suppose downstairs they could escape more easily?'
'Did they say anything about suicide to you?' Charles asked.
'Wel, only in a general way. I mean, for God's sake, Charles, I could hardly interrogate them on their failures. Young Chilvers said that it had happened, though very rarely, in the twenty years that Dr Chilvers had been running the place. It seemed rude to ask what 'very rarely' meant in numbers.'
He had been quite pleased with how he'd raised the question of his fictional brother's threats of suicide. George Chilvers hadn't looked particularly surprised.
'Six,' said Charles.
'Six?'
'Suicides. Four since the war. One other was actualy just discharged, and one was before the war, but, listen to this: that one was a girl of twenty. She got out somehow, lay down on the tracks just outside Fairford Station and waited for some hapless train driver to chop her in three. Her family asked for a post-mortem, which the coroner granted, and, as it turned out, she was five months pregnant.'
'Was that why she was depressed?'
'It might be why she kiled herself but it wasn't why she was melancholic in the first place. She'd been admitted eight months earlier. Nearly a scandal, certainly there were nasty rumours. Staff reckoned she was sweet on young Chilvers; a single man then, of course. One female nurse—now dismissed—had said Chilvers had been found with the naked patient in a bathroom. He was using a high-pressure hose on her: she was soaked and squealing. Chilvers insisted it was treatment for hysteria. A different attendant, who went up to check her room when the alarm was first raised, says he saw a letter addressed to Chilvers in an envelope on her desk.
At that point, naturaly, nobody knew she was dead, but when he went back to check later, no letter.'
As there had been no letter after John's death, Laurence thought, though the incidents must have been years apart.
'My man said that 'these sort of letters' seldom helped anybody anyway,' Charles went on. 'They were just self-pity. 'The same old stuff they were on about every day,' he said.'
'Did people realy think George Chilvers was the father of the dead woman's child?' said Laurence. 'Or is that just a sacked man's bitterness?'
'I think they did. Though apparently some said Chilvers Senior could have drugged her to have his way with her. But probably that was black humour. He's a widower, has been for years. Married to the job. Al the same, it had to be someone from inside; she never left the place, and George Chilvers already had a bit of reputation as a lady's man. Mad ladies. Sad ladies. I got the impression that his eventual marriage to another patient was not so much for the money but forced upon him by his old man to prevent a further scandal.' He paused. 'Wel-made chap, from al accounts—wel, the account I got'
'I suppose he's handsome enough in his way,' said Laurence. 'But patients? Surely he could find someone who wouldn't put his reputation at so much risk?'
'Wel, he's not a doctor like Papa, so I suppose he could get away with it. Perhaps he's attracted to highly strung girls. Young ones. Lonely. Rich. Can't have been difficult.'
'Yet he is a solicitor, and you said Cyril Trusty seemed to think they'd done wel out of a couple of bequests, but then I suppose doctors do, don't they? Quite often?'
'Except the clientele must be rather younger than the run-of-the-mil spinsters of a practice in Bognor Regis. The Holmwood patients wouldn't be expected to die in the normal run of things,' Charles said, 'though one of my Bognor great-aunts was quite mad. Great-Aunt Caroline. She should have been locked away, without any question. Would have saved a mass of trouble.'
He absent-mindedly tore off a piece of bread and soaked it in his beer.
'Al this talk of George Chilvers' love life diverted me,' Charles went on. 'We were on suicides: John, most recently. Before him, there was some flying ace who hanged himself, apparently at the prospect of going home, though he had pretty hideous burns so it's a bit more understandable. A major in the Glosters who seemed better but turned out not to be, and after him a chap who certainly made his mark on the establishment. Apparently they've got some kind of atrium, with a glass roof, several storeys up?'
Laurence nodded. It was a slightly grandiose description of the entrance hal.
'He got out on the roof through the attics and threw himself head-first, not off the roof into the garden as you might expect, but in through the skylight, and dashed his brains out on the flagstones in the middle of the house.'
'Good God,' Laurence said. 'How appaling. The poor people who found him.'
'Poor chap himself, I'd say,' Charles observed. 'Not poor George Chilvers, as he'd recently made up a wil for him. Mind you, no personal bequests, so scandal kept at bay with this one, but a tidy little chunk to Holmwood itself. In gratitude. So my man says.'
Chapter Sixteen
Laurence was looking forward to regaining the peace of his own territory, though it was only when they stopped for a light lunch that he and Charles had any further discussion.
'So. What's your next step, old chap?'
'Hard to know. I didn't like young Chilvers, although Dr Chilvers seemed professional yet sympathetic. The place itself gave me the wilies, but then the condition of the men who end up in places like that doesn't exactly bring peace of mind. I didn't feel as strongly as Mary, or Eleanor apparently, that something was rotten.'
He wondered, but didn't say, whether this was simply because, unlike them, he knew about war and what it could do to men's minds as wel as bodies. Though Eleanor must have seen much of it too. He also had the first
