The Rees house swarmed with uniformed officers. The corpse was gone, but the carpet in the late doctor’s office was now crisp with dried blood, and the air hung with a coppery odour. Flint and Spector—who was kitted out with his cloak and silver cane—studied the room by daylight. But of course, there was only one conclusion to be reached. The door was locked when the doctor died. So were the windows. And once locked, they were impermeable. Spector even studied the empty wooden trunk. But there was nothing to see.
“Where’s the doctor’s daughter?” he asked.
“In the lounge.”
“May I speak with her?”
“By all means.”
Flint led the way out of the study and into the adjacent lounge. Lidia Rees was subdued and statuesque, silhouetted in the rain-spattered bay window.
“And who is this?” she said.
“I’m Joseph Spector,” the old man answered. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you for your concern. I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? At the theatre two nights ago?”
Distinctly dry-eyed and almost clinical in her dissection of the evening’s events, she answered Spector’s questions openly.
“If I understand the situation correctly,” Lidia said, her voice threaded with ice, “then my father was killed under circumstances which couldn’t possibly be. A victim of something very sinister indeed. Killed by a ghost, you might say.”
“Well,” answered Spector, his voice crisp and urbane, “that’s what we are here to determine.”
“Marcus and I were together all evening. We went out to dinner, and then drinks at the Palmyra.”
“I see. So. Dinner. Where was this?”
“The Savoy. We arrived at eight—the reservation will be on their books and I don’t believe you’ll find a shortage of witnesses. We were there till around ten; the maître d’hôtel will be able to give you a more concrete idea of time. From the Savoy, we hopped straight into a cab. I don’t have the number, I’m afraid, but perhaps the doormen will be able to advise.”
“And from there—straight to the Palmyra?”
“Correct. A ten-minute journey, and the doormen at the Palmyra can no doubt attest to our arrival.”
“Until midnight at least. I’m afraid I can’t be sure. But Marcus will provide my alibi, as I will provide his. We came back to the house together. The rest you know.”
“I see. What can you tell us about your father’s patients?”
“There were three—only three. My father frequently discusses—” she corrected herself “—discussed their cases with me. I also had access to his notes. This was purely a professional concern, you understand. I knew none of them personally.”
“But you met them, surely?”
“I was never present during consultations.”
“So—who was the first?”
“Patient A (as my father refers to him in the notes) is Floyd Stenhouse, the concert musician. He was the first to seek out my father when we arrived in this country. Patient B is Della Cookson, whom you know. Patient C is the novelist Claude Weaver. He was referred to us by his wife, who was concerned for his mental state.”
“And can you give me any details on the treatments your father offered?”
“My father kept fastidious notes. It’s all there. There is not much beyond that which I can tell you.”
“Nothing personal, no minor observations?”
“Forgive me,” Lidia said. “My mind is not working properly.”
“Nothing at all? No enmity or aggravation or capacity for violence?”
She fixed Spector with a steady gaze. “Look to the notes. If the answer is anywhere, it will be there.”
“You’ll forgive me for saying this,” Spector persisted, “but you’re very calm and collected under the circumstances.”
She studied him, unblinking. “The sad truth of the matter is that my father died a long time ago. The part of him that can think and feel dropped down dead many years before we even left Vienna. His bodily death was just the inevitable aftermath.”
“What do you mean by that?”
She sighed and steeled herself to broach what was evidently a troubling subject. “The papers in Vienna called him Der Schlangenmann. ‘The Snakeman.’”
“Who?”
“He was one of my father’s patients. A very troubling case. This was many years ago, of course. I was only ten.”
“I’m sorry,” Flint cut in, “but is this relevant to your father’s murder?”
“I’m certain of it. The Snakeman was obsessed by a recurring dream in which he was terrorised by an immense snake. My father diagnosed him—correctly—as suffering from filial paranoia. The snake was his child, a daughter. And the dream indicated an unhealthy, insidious bond between the two. All of this is a matter of public record—my father published extensive notes on the case.”
“And you think the Snakeman was the cause of last night’s murder?”
Lidia blinked at him and chewed her lip. “For several months the Snakeman was a live-in patient at my father’s clinic just outside Vienna. The treatment was intensive. But it failed. It was my father’s only failure.”
“So . . . he couldn’t cure the Snakeman?”
“One morning my father paid a visit to the Snakeman in his quarters and found him in bed with his throat slit. A razor blade hung limply from his right hand. The horror of this incident stayed with my father for the rest of his life. It was not so much the death of the Snakeman as it was the sense of having failed in his diagnosis. A better clinician, he sometimes said, would have been able to prevent the man’s death. He could not bear that he was unable to see the treatment through to its conclusion.”
“And what can you tell me about the Snakeman himself?”
“The treatment took place over eleven weeks in the autumn of 1921 at his clinic in the Wachau Valley, but the case study was not published until 1925. And then only grudgingly. Like all of my father’s writings, it caused a sensation. But the question of the Snakeman’s identity was never answered.”
“Do you know who it was?” Spector asked.
Lidia shook her head. “It’s a secret my father kept all his life. I only found out the circumstances of the Snakeman’s death a few years ago, when I was commencing my own doctoral studies. I think my father considered it a rite of passage for me. A dire warning too.”
“What sort of warning?”
“About the dangers of playing God. Of trying to force your will onto another. A warning about the nature of a psychiatrist’s power.”
“But why do you think your father’s death has anything to do with this Snakeman?”
“As far as I can tell, I am the only living person to whom my father confided the circumstances of the poor fellow’s death. Apart from the authorities, of course. And for those circumstances to repeat themselves here . . .”
“It’s too much of a coincidence,” Spector supplied.
“As I said, it’s all a matter of public record. I have a copy of the notes somewhere.” She skimmed the shelves and eventually retrieved a leather-bound volume. She handed it to Spector, who flipped it open and studied the title page: The Case Studies of Anselm Rees.
“May I borrow this?”
“Of course. Maybe when you’ve read it you’ll see why I can’t escape the idea that my father’s death might in fact be a suicide.”
Flint and Spector looked at each other. Then Flint said carefully: “I have to tell you, suicide does seem particularly unlikely. To begin with, no weapon was found in the study. Nothing at all which your father could have used to inflict that wound on himself. And of course, it doesn’t help us identify the man who visited him that night.”
A faint smile flickered round the corners of Lidia’s lips. “I think perhaps you’ve underestimated quite how clever my father was.”
“Oh really?”
“Well . . . did you consider the possibility that the visitor may have been . . . my father himself?”
Flint snorted involuntarily. “What gives you that idea, Miss?”
“His reasons may be tricky to discern. But I think my father used poor Olive as an unwilling stooge for some sort of devilment.”
“But why should he do that?” Spector demanded. “Why convince her that he received a visitor when in fact the visitor was himself?”
“There’s a profound sense of shame which he attached to the notion of suicide. The indignity of it. It would be difficult for a man like my father to countenance. Perhaps he was orchestrating a vanishing murderer so that the truth of his sad death would not be public knowledge.”
“Was he capable of something like that?”
She sighed. “This is a problem of psychology as much as pathology. What you have to consider is that my father was a virtuoso of the mind. And that every thought coursing through your head as we speak now has probably already been considered by him. You are following the exact path that he laid out for you.”
Flint sat back in his seat. “A sort of double-double bluff, you mean? He created an impossible crime to conceal the fact it was no crime at all?”
She shrugged. “You’re the detective. All I can tell you is that my father is dead. But the case of the Snakeman has a certain bilateral symmetry with the present circumstances, don’t you think? Der Schlangenmann cut his throat, Inspector. A single gash crossways with a razor blade, but the violence, the sheer savagery of that stroke was enough to almost decapitate him. Can you imagine the torment that would induce someone to commit such an abomination upon themselves?”
“No,” said Flint with strident solemnity. “I’m afraid I can’t.”
“My father could,” Lidia added. “Perhaps you should think about that.”
They left Lidia alone soon after. Clearly she had nothing more to tell them.
“I want to see the housekeeper,” Spector said to Flint in hushed tones as they departed from the study.
They found her in the kitchen. She was doing her level best to pretend the previous night’s events were merely a nightmare. She bustled about, dusting things and boiling kettles, and generally doing a decent job of looking busy.
Olive Turner had a face that might be called gentle, with dark, deep-set eyes and a faintly curled upper lip, giving her an aspect of almost biblical serenity. She was in her early fifties, a childless widow, and wore bulky dresses and woollen cardigans, with her hair in tight-set curls. There was in her appearance and her bearing a modesty that was belied by her strident East London accent, known affectionately among her friends as her “fish-hawker’s squawk.”
When he had finally convinced her to sit down at the kitchen table, Spector began his questioning gently. “Do you like your mistress?”
“Miss Rees? Certainly, she’s a sweet and clever young lady.”
“She tells us she went out last night with her young man, is that right?”
“Yes. He called earlier in the day.”
“On the telephone?”
“Yes.”
“And did you speak to him?”
“I did. Miss Rees didn’t want to talk to him, so I took the message.”
Spector frowned. “Didn’t you think that was rather strange?”
“Well yes, now you mention it. But then, she is a funny girl. Hard to work out, you know what I mean?”
“Did she seem angry at all?”
“A little. But then, she always seems fairly irate. It’s just her nature. You know these European types, God love ’em.”
“But she gave no indication of it when he arrived to pick her up?”
“I wasn’t around to see, sir. I was in the kitchen doing the doctor’s dinner.”
“What did he have?”
“Beef, sir. And potatoes.”
“Ate it up, did he?”
“Yes, sir. And the cheese I brought him for afters.”
“Now, Mrs. Turner, I’m going to ask you a question—and I don’t want to alarm you. But I need you to be honest and answer in as much detail as you can.”
Mrs. Turner swallowed. “Whatever I can do to help.”
“I need you to tell me about the man who visited the house last night.”
Mrs. Turner’s eyes darkened like rolling thunderheads. “All I can tell you, sir, is that I hope I never lay eyes on him again as long as I live.”