Dr Mellinger gestured eloquently, as Normand, Redpath and Booth nodded their agreement. He walked around his desk and took his seat. ‘Perhaps, gentlemen, it is fortunate that I remain aloof from the day-to-day affairs of Green Hill. I take no credit upon myself, that I alone was sufficiently detached to consider the full implications of Hinton’s disappearance and realize the only possible explanation — that Hinton had never existed!’
‘A brilliant deduction,’ Redpath murmured.
‘Without doubt,’ echoed Booth.
‘A profound insight,’ agreed Normand.
There was a sharp knock on the door. With a frown, Dr Mellinger ignored it and resumed his monologue.
‘Thank you, gentlemen. Without your assistance that hypothesis, that Hinton was no more than an accumulation of administrative errors, could never have been confirmed.’
The knock on the door repeated itself. A staff sister appeared breathlessly. ‘Excuse me, sir. I’m sorry to interrupt you, but—’ Dr Mellinger waved away her apologies. ‘Never mind. What is it?’
‘A visitor, Dr Mellinger.’ She paused as the Director waited impatiently. ‘Mrs Hinton, to see her husband.’
For a moment there was consternation. The three men around the fire sat upright, their drinks forgotten, while Dr Mellinger remained stock-still at his desk. A total silence filled the room, only broken by the light tapping of a woman’s heels in the corridor outside.
But Dr Mellinger recovered quickly. Standing up, with a grim smile at his colleagues, he said: ‘To see Mr Hinton? Impossible, Hinton never existed. The woman must be suffering from terrible delusions; she requires immediate treatment. Show her in.’ He turned to his colleagues. ‘Gentlemen, we must do everything we can to help her.’
Minus two.
What surprised Elliott was the suddenness of the attack. Judith and the children had gone down to the coast for the weekend to catch the last of the summer, leaving him alone in the house, and the three days had been a pleasant reverie of silent rooms, meals taken at random hours, and a little mild carpentry in the workshop. He spent Sunday morning reading all the reviews in the newspapers, carefully adding half a dozen titles to the list of books which he knew he would never manage to buy, let alone read. These wistful exercises, like the elaborately prepared martini before lunch, were part of the established ritual of his brief bachelor moments. He decided to take a brisk walk across Hampstead Heath after lunch, returning in time to tidy everything away before Judith arrived that evening.
Instead, a sharp attack of what first appeared to be influenza struck him just before one o’clock. A throbbing headache and a soaring temperature sent him fumbling to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, only to find that Judith had taken the aspirin with her. Sitting on the edge of the bath, forehead in his hands, he nursed the spasm, which seemed to contract the muscles of some inner scalp, compressing his brain like fruit-pulp in a linen bag.
‘Judith!’ he shouted to the empty house. ‘Damn!’
The pain mounted, an intense prickling that drove silver needles through his skull. Helpless for a moment, he propelled himself into the bedroom and climbed fully dressed into the bed, shielding his eyes from the weak sunlight which crossed the Heath.
After a few minutes the attack subsided slightly, leaving him with a nagging migraine and a sense of utter inertia. For the next hour he stared at the reflection of himself in the dressing-table mirror, lying like a trussed steer across the bed. Through the window he watched a small boy playing under the oaks by the edge of the park, patiently trying to catch the spiralling leaves. Twenty yards away a nondescript little man with a dark complexion sat alone on a bench, staring through the trees.
In some way this scene soothed Elliott, and the headache finally dissipated, as if charmed away by the swaying boughs and the leaping figure of the boy.
‘Strange .’ he murmured to himself, still puzzled by the ferocity of the attack. Judith, however, would be sceptical; she had always accused him of being a hypochondriac. It was a pity she hadn’t been there, instead of lying about on the beach at Worthing, but at least the children had been spared the spectacle of their father yelping with agony.
Reluctant to get out of bed and precipitate another attack — perhaps it was due to some virulent but short-lived virus? Elliott lay back, the scent of his wife’s skin on the pillow reminding him of his own childhood and his mother’s perfumed hair. He had been brought up in India, and remembered being rowed across a river by his father, the great placid back of the Ganges turning crimson in the late afternoon light. The burnt-earth colours of the Calcutta waterfront were still vivid after an interval of thirty years.
