‘I wouldn’t have put a note through—we keep ourselves to ourselves,’ explained Mrs Mamoulian, ‘but he was loitering in the corridor with the lights out, and frightened the life out of Beaumont’—the dog yipped at the sound of his name—’so I called my husband. Maurice spoke to him, but the man refused to give a name or explain what he was doing outside your door.’
‘What did he look like?’ asked May, carefully unsnagging himself from a china okapi.
‘Creepy, with these awful glaring eyes and huge fangs, like a werewolf.’
‘Oh, really?’ May’s assessment of his neighbour expanded to include the option that she might be insane.
‘My eyesight’s not that good but I’m sure he was trying to force open the latch. I wanted to call the police but, well,’ she eyed the neat arrangements of china ornaments as if they contained secret mysteries, ‘you don’t want everyone to know your business, do you?’
May opened up his flat, leaving his wet bags in the hall, and seated himself in the lounge to make some calls. Ringing the Wetherby clinic, he managed to locate the doctor Bryant had seen the day before he had been blown up, and explained the situation.
‘Of course I remember him, he walked straight through into the private ward without stopping to get permission from our duty officer.’ Dr Leigh sounded distracted. He was trying to talk to someone else in his office while fielding the police call. ‘At first I thought he was one of the patients.’
That sounds like Arthur, thought May. ‘Did he tell you what he was looking for?’
‘Yes, eventually. He seemed to be in a great hurry. He wanted to check our files for long-term residents, but he wanted records going back sixty years. I told him we didn’t keep them for such a length of time, and anyway, they were incomplete because we’d had a fire here a few years ago, so he left.’
‘Did he give you the name of the person he was looking for?’
‘You’ll have to hold on.’ The receiver was dropped, to be picked up half a minute later. ‘That was the odd thing. He told me the patient was male, probably suffering from deep trauma, and would have been admitted without a name. I tried to help him but didn’t know where to begin looking. What could I say? Those who enter the clinic as residents usually have a history of treatment. Their cases are heavily documented. Mr Bryant seemed to think that we might have taken in war victims who’d lost their memories, or at least their identification documents. I told him if we had, they’d be deceased by now. I’m afraid he became rather abusive.’
‘Yes, he does that,’ May sympathized. ‘But were you able to help him?’
‘Look, I’m really not sure. We’re very busy here.’ Dr Leigh was not prepared to admit that one of their patients had set fire to the ladies’ toilets and was now locked in a cubicle, threatening to swallow his tongue if his demands weren’t met, and as these demands included the reinstatement of the Great Hedge of India and a meeting with the late singer Freddie Mercury to discuss the hidden meanings in his lyrics, they were all in for a long day.
‘He was going around questioning the nurses,’ said the doctor impatiently. ‘Wanted to know when various patients had arrived, how long they were staying, that sort of thing. But I don’t think we were able to help him.’
‘Why not?’ asked May.
‘Well, when my staff tried to answer his questions, he ignored them and went off to talk to someone in the day room.’
‘Do you know who?’
‘I have no idea. But he was making notes on some kind of a list.’
Alma Sorrowbridge put down her squeegee and gave him an odd look. She was the only woman in the Battersea street who still washed her front step, and was proud of the fact. ‘What sort of a list?’ she asked.
‘Names of people—patients. Something from the Wetherby clinic. In his room, perhaps.’
‘I’ve disinfected his floor but I left everything where it was,’ she said dolefully. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to throw nothing away. There’s a lot of boxes.’
‘Fine, then that’s where I’ll look,’ said May.
Alma folded her arms across her chest. ‘There is seventy-two of them.’
‘Good God, where have you put them all?’
‘I’m an old woman, Mr May, I got no strength left to start moving stuff about. They’re where he kept them, in the basement. Besides, I been Mr Bryant’s landlady on and off since the war. I’m not going to start touching his things now, just ‘cos he’s with God.’