She doesn’t want to feel I bought information from her, thought Dalgliesh, not even a shilling’s worth. He resisted the temptation to say that the coffee could come from expenses, wondering a little at this impulse to sarcasm which she aroused in him. He liked her but there was something about her certainty, her self-sufficiency, which he found irritating. Perhaps what he felt was envy.
As they left the café, he asked her whether she was on her way to the Steen.
“Not today. I don’t have a session on Monday mornings. But I shall be there tomorrow.”
She thanked him formally for the coffee and they parted. He turned eastwards towards the Steen and she disappeared in the direction of the Strand. As he watched her slim, dark figure swinging out of sight, he pictured Cully creeping through the night with his pathetic bundle, half petrified with fright. He was not surprised that the old porter had confided so fully in Fredrica Saxon; in Cully’s place, he would probably have done the same. She had, thought Dalgliesh, given him a great deal of interesting information. But what she hadn’t been able to give him was an alibi for Dr. Baguley or for herself.
Mrs. Bostock, shorthand notebook at the ready, sat beside Dr. Etherege’s chair, her elegant legs crossed at the knees and her flamingo head lifted to receive, with becoming gravity, the medical director’s instructions.
“Superintendent Dalgliesh has telephoned to say that he will be here shortly. He wants to see certain members of the staff again and has asked for an interview with me before lunch.”
“I don’t see how you can fit him in before lunch, Doctor,” said Mrs. Bostock repressively. “There’s the Professional Staff Committee at two-thirty and you haven’t had time to look at the agenda. Dr. Talmage from the States is booked for twelve-thirty and I was hoping for an hour’s dictation from eleven a.m.”
“That will have to wait. The superintendent will be taking up a great deal of your own time, I’m afraid. He has some questions about the working of the clinic.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, Doctor. Do you mean he’s interested in the general administrative arrangements?” Mrs. Bostock’s tone was a nice blend of surprise and disapproval.
“Apparently so,” replied Dr. Etherege. “He mentioned the appointments diary, the diagnostic index, the arrangements for registering incoming and outgoing post and the medical-record system. You had better deal with him personally. If I want to dictate, I’ll send for Miss Priddy.”
“I’ll do what I can to help, naturally,” said Mrs. Bostock. “It’s unfortunate that he should have picked one of our busiest mornings. It would be simpler to arrange a programme for him if I knew what he had in mind.”
“We should all like to know that, I imagine,” replied the medical director. “I should just answer his questions as fully as you can. And please get Cully to ring me as soon as he wants to come up.”
“Yes, Doctor,” said Mrs. Bostock, recognizing defeat. And took her leave.
Downstairs, in the ECT room, Dr. Baguley twitched himself into his white coat, helped by Nurse Bolam.
“Mrs. King will be here for her LSD treatment on Wednesday as usual. I think it will be best if we give it in one of the PSW rooms on the third floor. Miss Kettle isn’t in on Wednesday evenings, is she? Have a word with her. Alternatively we could use Miss Kallinski’s room or one of the small interviewing rooms at the back.”
Nurse Bolam said: “It won’t be so convenient for you, Doctor. It means coming up two flights when I phone.”
“That isn’t going to kill me. I may look in my dotage but I still have the use of my legs.”
“There’s the question of a bed, Doctor. I suppose we could put up one of the recovery stretchers from the ECT clinic.”
“Get Nagle to see to it. I don’t want you alone in that basement.”
“I’m not in the least frightened, really, Dr. Baguley.”
Dr. Baguley lost his temper.
“For God’s sake, use your brain, Nurse. Of course you’re frightened! There’s a murderer loose somewhere in this clinic and no one—except one person—is going to be happy about staying alone for any length of time in the basement. If you really aren’t frightened, then have the good sense to conceal the fact, especially from the police. Where’s Sister? In the general office?”
He picked up the receiver and dialled jerkily. “Sister? Baguley here. I’ve just told Nurse Bolam that I don’t feel happy about using the basement room for LSD this week.”
Sister Ambrose’s voice came back clearly: “Just as you like, Doctor, of course. But if the basement is more convenient and we could get a relief nurse from one of the general hospitals in the group for the ECT clinic, I should be quite happy to stay downstairs with Nurse Bolam. We could special Mrs. King together.”
Dr. Baguley said shortly: “I want you in the ECT clinic as usual, Sister, and the LSD patient will go upstairs. I hope that’s finally understood.”
In the medical director’s room two hours later, Dalgliesh placed three black metal boxes on Dr. Etherege’s desk. The boxes, which had small round holes punched in each of the shorter sides, were packed with buff-coloured cards. It was the clinic diagnostic index. Dalgliesh said: “Mrs. Bostock has explained this to me. If I’ve understood her correctly, each of these cards represents a patient. The information on the case record is coded and the patient’s code punched on the card. The cards are punched with even rows of small holes and the space between each hole is numbered. By punching any number with the hand machine I cut out the card between the two adjacent holes to form an oblong slit. If this metal rod is then inserted through, say, hole number 20 on the outside of the box, and pushed right through the cards and the box is rotated, any card which has been punched through that number will stand out. It is, in fact, one of the simplest of the many punch-card systems on the market.”
“Yes. We use it principally as a diagnostic index and for research.” If the medical director was surprised at Dalgliesh’s interest, he made no sign.
The superintendent went on: “Mrs. Bostock tells me that you don’t code from the case record until the patient has completed treatment and that the system was started in 1952. That means that patients at present attending won’t yet have a card—unless, of course, they were treated here earlier—and that patients who completed treatments before 1952 aren’t included.”
“Yes. We should like to include the earlier cases, but it’s a question of staff time. The coding and punching are time-consuming and it’s the kind of job that gets put on one side. At present we’re coding the February 1962 discharges, so we’re quite a bit behind.”
“But once the patient’s card is punched, you can select any diagnosis or category of patient at will?”
“Yes, indeed.” The medical director gave his slow, sweet smile. “I won’t say that we can pick out immediately all the indigenous depressives with blue-eyed grandmothers who were born in wedlock because we haven’t coded information about grandparents. But anything coded can be extracted without trouble.”
Dalgliesh laid a slim manilla file on the desk. “Mrs. Bostock has lent me the coding instructions. I see that you code sex, age, marital status, address by local authority area, diagnosis, consultant who treated the patient, dates of first and subsequent attendances and a considerable amount of detail about symptoms, treatment and progress. You also code social class. I find that interesting.”
“It’s unusual, certainly,” replied Dr. Etherege. “Chiefly, I suppose, because it can be a purely subjective assessment. But we wanted it because it’s sometimes useful in research. As you see we use the Registrar-General’s classes. They’re accurate enough for our purposes.”