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Having reviewed my limited supply of clothes and other items, I gave serious consideration to making an attempt at finding my own way back to New Cumnock. In my favour, I was by this time fully recovered from my experiences of the previous day, my headache having long since cleared up and the various knocks and bruises I suffered being only minor in nature. I also considered that even if the journey entailed covering as many as ten miles, it was hardly a route march and I was, as previously mentioned, carrying only the smallest of suitcases.
Against me was my very limited knowledge of the surrounding area, an apparent lack of any signposts that might help me and an awareness that my journey from the railway station had been a somewhat convoluted one. Of most concern, however, was the continuing fog, the denseness of which had not abated one bit since my arrival at the Doctor’s residence.
On balance, I decided, a solo attempt would be foolhardy and almost certainly doomed to failure. At worst, I could become entirely lost on the hillsides, there to perish from exposure. I wasn’t brave enough to take such a risk, especially when it was not absolutely necessary, so I decided, with some reluctance, to stay put.
Within an hour of returning to my room, I had grown bored of the book I’d taken with me from the sitting room, as well as my contemplating possible means of finding my way to my godparents’ house. I was quite at a loose end and becoming restless, so I made my way back down the stairs and tried a turn around the gardens. But that was not a pleasant experience in the chill and damp of the fog. I followed that up by making my way back inside the house, to the sitting room, where I had a stab at the crossword in the previous day’s newspaper. Unfortunately, I have never been one for such cryptic challenges and, in some degree of frustration, slapped the newspaper down on to the coffee table, jumped to my feet and began, for the umpteenth time, to peruse the books in the Doctor’s small collection.
“They are not exactly thrilling, are they?”
The voice was that of a man and not one I’d heard before. I swung around and found myself looking into the puffy face of a bulbous, almost entirely bald man whom I judged to be in his late fifties. He was looking closely at me, as if his eyesight was very poor, and standing a little too close for comfort. I would have taken half a step back, but the bookcase blocked my retreat.
“James Scurry,” he announced, in a stiff, formal voice as he thrust his right hand out towards me.
“Alexander Templeman,” I replied. His grip was overly firm and I was glad when he released it.
“Ah, you’re the chap, are you? Doctor Sneijder mentioned you were somewhere on the premises. Surprised I’d not met you sooner. I hear you had a bit of an accident on the road somewhere hereabouts.” He spoke with a distinct though soft Scottish accent that had me wondering if he might be part of Sneijder’s staff.
“I did, indeed. The fog spooked our horse and the driver lost control. I made it as far as this house purely by chance and collapsed at the end of the driveway. It seems I couldn’t have stumbled upon a better place, what with it being the premises of a Doctor.”
“You certainly did that. Fortune smiles on the brave, or so they say. Take a seat, Mr Templeman, so I can interrogate you properly.” He produced a handkerchief from a pocket and blew his large, fat nose. It was to be something he did with exceeding frequency.
As we sat down, I sought to clarify his status in the household. “Are you part of Doctor Sneijder’s staff?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Ah, that would be a fine thing, but I don’t suppose the Doctor would be too happy about that, what with me being a patient and all that. I’ve been here three days now. Quite a pleasant little spot. I’ve stayed in worse places, that’s for sure.”
It was a wonder that, following three days of treatment, he still seemed inclined to engage in proper conversation with me, given my prior experience with Sneijder’s patients. My boredom and frustrations began to lift a little.
“How have you been getting along with the Doctor’s methods? They seem to be a little unusual, from what I can gather.”
“Quite so. They are certainly new to me. But he comes with a high recommendation. I’m personal secretary to Lord Egremont and it was he who sent me here after I collapsed one afternoon last month. I told his lordship it was just indigestion, but he insisted he’d seen the symptoms before. Overwork and stress, he said. Then, when he heard about Doctor Sneijder, he insisted on paying for me to receive treatment here. A very generous man, wouldn’t you say?”
Lord Egremont was a name I’d seen often in the newspapers, since he owned the Blue Kite Shipping Line, a considerable enterprise with routes between the mother country and most of our largest overseas territories. My parents had travelled on one of his liners several years ago.
“Yes, I’d say that is most generous. I don’t know what Doctor Sneijder charges by way of fees, but I should imagine they are considerably more than I could afford, should the need ever arise.”
“Will you be staying with us long? Only, I don’t get much in the way of conversation out of that Duncan fellow and the ladies aren’t interested in sports and politics.”
“I would like to be on my way right now,” I replied, glancing again out of the window, “but the damned fog just won’t let up. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Ah, it’s always worst here on the west coast. In Edinburgh, the fogs are nowhere near so frequent, though they can sometimes be pretty thick. But I thought the fogs in London were the worst of all. Is that not so?”
“They can be pretty bad, to be fair, but I’ve not yet experienced one as bad as this.”
“You’d better look out, or the Doctor will have you in his room at the end of the corridor there, swinging his watch in front of your face, and before you know it you’ll be under his spell.”
Scurry laughed, his eyes almost disappearing in the folds of his face as his cheeks rose to meet his drooping eyelids. A swinging watch, was it? So hypnosis was part of Sneijder’s treatment. I wanted to know more, but before I could follow up with a question, Scurry noticed the newspaper I’d dropped.
“Good God, are they talking again about the Balkans and war? We should leave them to it, I say. Let them come to blows, if that’s what they want to do, and keep the British Empire well out of things. Lord Salisbury got it right with Splendid Isolation, is what I say. How about you, Templeman? Think we should keep our noses out of things that don’t concern us?”
He looked at me in much the same way as he had done by the bookcase, his eyes all but daring me to disagree.
“I think the best possible outcome would be for no one to go to war,” I proposed. “I’m sure we could offer to mediate. Let sense prevail.”
I would have preferred not to have engaged in talk of war, for it was hardly an uplifting subject. Death and destruction never is. I had lost an uncle in the fighting in South Africa during the 1890s and had no desire to see any more of my relatives succumb to death or injury in further armed conflict. However, I could not deny it was often the subject of conversation at social gatherings and it occupied more than its fair share of space in the newspapers.
Scurry and I would, no doubt, have continued our conversation had not Sneijder appeared in the doorway to remind his patient that he had a consultation booked for ten-fifteen and it was, by then, ten-eighteen. Scurry made his apologies for having to bring our first meeting to an end and expressed a whole-hearted desire to pick up the thread of our conversation just as soon as the Doctor had finished with him. He then followed Sneijder along the corridor and disappeared into the room at its end.
*
I REMAINED IN THE SITTING room, composing a letter to Caroline, so that I would have something to send to her just as soon as I was able to reach a post office. I was certain she would be anxious to hear from me and was no doubt already wondering why I had not sent word of my safe arrival with my godparents. I wasn’t at all keen on causing her alarm by explaining the precise cause of my delay, beyond the fog, which made it something of a challenge to justify my tardiness in sending her word of my arrival.
As I began to close the letter, the door to Sneijder’s surgery opened and Scurry reappeared, listening intently to something the Doctor was saying to him, before turning and heading back towards the sitting room. I folded the letter in two and slipped it into a pocket in my jacket, before standing ready to welcome back my new acquaintance.
As far as transformations go, Scurry’s was quite astonishing. He seemed nothing like the man I had been speaking to not much more than half an hour earlier. The free conversation was gone, replaced by the same short utterances I had received from Camilla Downing and Harold Duncan over dinner. Scurry too had that same vacant look in his eyes and seemed unable now to hold eye contact with me. I was taken aback at the change and that same sense of unease I experienced over dinner returned to worry away at me again.
After not more than ten minutes seated in the same armchair as before, Scurry closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep, snoring quietly as he did so. I yawned and stretched my arms out in front of me. Perhaps he had the right idea. A short nap would while away half an hour or so. As I considered the possibility, Sneijder stepped out of his office, disappeared into one of the other rooms, then emerged with the housekeeper; the two of them proceeding to make their way upstairs.
I stared at the closed door to Sneijder’s surgery, all at once engulfed by a strong desire, no, a compelling need, to see beyond it. I checked that Scurry was still asleep before climbing quietly to my feet and making my way stealthily along the hallway, casting a furtive glance up the stairs as I arrived outside the surgery door. There was no sign of either Sneijder or the housekeeper. My hand was warmed and moistened by a thin film of sweat as I took hold of the door handle and tested it to see if it was locked. The handle turned without resistance and I felt the click of the bolt as it slid back from the frame.
I hesitated, conscious that I was about to intrude on the Doctor’s privacy, which seemed a poor way to repay the man for the assistance he had so freely given me. Indeed, if it had been simple curiosity alone that pushed me forward then I hope I would have come to my senses and left things well alone. But it wasn’t mere curiosity that had taken me to that door. The peculiar behaviour of Sneijder’s patients had left me feeling perplexed, even a little concerned, but the remarkable alteration I had just witnessed in Scurry, I found deeply disturbing. And on top of all that, there was the odd way in which Elizabeth Fitzsimon had responded during our conversation over breakfast, when I mentioned how fortunate I was to have found myself in the good Doctor’s hands after my misfortunes.
Perhaps my concerns were exaggerated, but I felt as if what lay beyond that door would settle the matter for me, one way or the other. Another glance up the stairs, also straining my ears in an effort to pick out any sounds that might hint at either the Doctor’s or the housekeeper’s imminent return, then I pushed the door open and, without any further hesitation, stepped inside the room and closed the door to behind me.
Now my heart was thumping and my breathing short and more rapid than normal. It reminded me of times as a boy when I’d been scrumping for apples with my two best friends, none of us wanting to admit that we were frightened to death, all the while struggling to keep control of nerves that left us almost incapable of movement. I decided that if I, at least initially, remained with my back to the surgery door then I would have the best possible opportunity of hearing footsteps on the stairs. What evasive action I might be able to take in order to avoid detection, I had not the slightest idea.
The room was large; larger than I had been expecting. It was of roughly the same proportions as the dining room, though nowhere near as heavily furnished. My eye was caught almost at once by the sight of a sizeable leather chair, a reclining one, of the sort you expect to see in such a surgery. It looked almost new, the fine, dark leather hardly marked or scored, except for a number of creases in the middle of the lower section where a person would sit. Alongside that was a plain leather armchair, again one that looked almost new. It was clear that one would be occupied by Sneijder.
To my right was a substantial dark wooden sideboard, on the top of which sat a vase of dried flowers, the somewhat spice-like smell of which permeated the room. To my left was an enormous oak desk and a fireplace. I had an almost overwhelming urge to explore the desk, but fear of being caught where I should not be held me back. In truth, I struggled to properly understand my presence in the room and certainly would not have been able to justify it. The concerns that I felt were real to me but, as for evidence to support them, that would be difficult to present in my defence, should the need arise.
From my vantage point by the door, the room seemed perfectly normal for a Doctor’s surgery and I chided myself for such stupid behaviour. All the same, something within me continued to nag away and I looked again at the desk. No longer able to resist and my heart now thumping in my chest, I walked straight across the room, around to the far side of the Doctor’s desk and set about testing each drawer in turn. None would give. Sneijder kept them all locked.
Now I was loose in the room, there seemed to be no stopping me. I sprung back across the surgery and set about the sideboard, only to find it contained nothing more interesting than an eye mask, of the sort you use when having trouble sleeping, a pair of small towels and a stock of unused notepads. I felt wholly disappointed, though why, I could not say. It seemed that a part of me wanted or, perhaps, expected to find something more unusual or alarming.
But it was not the time to dwell on such disappointments. I had already tested my luck in the extreme and so made my way back to the door without further delay. It is difficult to listen properly for faint, distant sounds when your heart is thumping and your breathing is irregular and I was by no means certain the coast was clear as I eased the door ajar, but I found no one there and slipped away as quietly and carefully as I had arrived.
It was as I sat back down in the sitting room chair I had occupied before my little excursion that I noticed Scurry was no longer there. A dreadful thought that he might have seen me sneaking into the Doctor’s surgery swept over me, but there was nothing to be done. No doubt if he had seen me and had something to say on the matter then he would do so in good time. Annoyed at myself for such carelessness, I picked up the book I had been reading previously and made out I was engrossed once more as I replayed in my mind’s eye my visit to Sneijder’s surgery, wondering above all else why I felt quite such an overwhelming sense of unease. Was I being overcome by paranoia, perhaps brought on by boredom, or was there really something terribly wrong going on here?
