The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Read online

  ‘As, say, round the aureole of the nipple.’

  Hagen nodded keenly. ‘Fascinating. And can you tell me anything of this object here?’ He gestured to the mask.

  I sighed. ‘That is— an invention of Robert’s. A piece of product design he took to market. None too successfully, alas.’

  ‘What’s the gist of it then?’

  ‘They call it cold therapy. A cold-compress mask, for patients recovering from a procedure on the face – facelift, eyelift.’

  Hagen had stood and plucked the mask off the table; now he was fumbling to separate and sort the varied flaps of PVC. Finally he raised it to his face and stood there, mutely black-visaged, for so many silent beats that I was made a touch queasy by the off-key jocularity. At length I realised he was studying his reflection in a mirror behind me. Finally he lowered the mask, bemused.

  ‘Produces something of a sinister aspect, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Quite. A touch of the fetish. I’d guess that’s partly why the trade failed to embrace it. I told Robert it’d look better on Halloween night than in a recovery suite. But that only tickled him. He wouldn’t be told. Not on matters of taste.’

  ‘Dear me. An entrepreneurial stroke, though, by Dr Forrest?’

  I nodded. ‘Like most of us Robert looked forward to working less. Finding his pot of gold. On this, though, he wound up losing money. As he’d been losing it left, right and centre. As I’ve told you already.’

  Hagen smiled, thrust his fists into his pockets. In his suit of black corduroy, quite worn, pockets slack, he could have been a Norwegian cattle farmer come to market for the day. But his eyes had something very patiently quizzical going on in there. ‘You’ll know this place of his well then, this pad?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yup. Robert would entertain here on occasion, he was a fine cook. Not in recent months, though. Not after Malena moved out. After that I came here less too. I was never mad keen on the environs, to be honest.’

  ‘Of course, it was the old psychiatric hospital, this, wasn’t it?’ Hagen had resumed his seat, resting his chin in his hands.

  ‘Aye. The county asylum before that, back when we had lunatics. Dedicated to the paupers. I daresay a fair few of them are still buried out under the bloody tennis courts. You’ve talked to my friend Steven Hartford? He was a consultant here in the last years of the hospital.’

  ‘Really? He never said. Why was it shut down?’

  ‘The old story. “Essential cuts”.’

  ‘Shame, that.’

  ‘Yes. A big blow to Steven. It was the kind of hospital he was committed to – what it embodied, that tradition of poor man’s medicine. To see it all boxed up into prime estate was hard to bear.’

  Hagen rose, paced to the window, surveyed the view of the grounds before turning back to me. ‘Presumably, then, another sort of a blow when his old pal Robert went and bought the showpiece apartment?’

  ‘That’ – I weighed my words – ‘was a little insensitive on Robert’s part. But something about the whole Gothic Revival madness of the place just appealed to his … temper. Rather a nineteenth-century boy, our Robert.’

  Hagen smiled in the style of a wince, as if to say he’d not a clue what I was talking about. Then he gestured for us to move through into the living room, led the way, and I followed. It was with a pang that I saw – on the low marqueterie table between the two facing chaises longues – that lovely oak-and-silver spirit case to which Robert never failed to refer as ‘the tantalus’, with its crystal decanters of malt and cognac, beside it on a tray his vintage teal-green soda siphon and quartet of heavy crystal tumblers. Hagen and I settled on the chaises longues – less comfortably, perhaps, than he had hoped. I took advantage of that discomfort.

  ‘I assume you or your colleague spoke to Killian MacCabe. The sculptor? Malena’s current partner.’

  Hagen pursed his lips, as if mildly intrigued. ‘We did that. If you’re interested, he has an alibi for the night of August fourteen. He met with a private art collector, off of Harley Street, then he went home to the missus.’

  ‘I’ve heard that, yes. But you’ve checked it out?’

  He nodded, looking at me most intently. ‘Interesting mind you have, doctor. I’d like to have a look at Doctor Forrest’s bedroom. Could you show me?’

  I was taken aback. ‘You need me for that?’

  ‘Bear with me. I’d like your view on something.’

  As he stood again, patting his pockets meditatively, I wandered idly to the main bay window – and there my eye was caught by something extraordinary. Down below in the car park I saw, I would swear it, Killian MacCabe’s quite unmistakable green Alfa Romeo tearing out through the Artemis gates at speed. And yet, when Hagen asked me ‘if anything was the matter’, I considered how I might word it, admitted defeat, shrugged and moved past him.

  But I remained distracted as I led Hagen up the main stairway, into Robert’s master boudoir, the big octagonal chamber, cool and dark with the heavy drapes closed in front of the three tall bay windows. The epic bed was un-slept in, creamy sheets smooth as glass. Hagen stood by its foot awhile, by the antique cassone carved in Florentine walnut that I had shipped for Robert from Siena. The detective was staring hard ahead, as if by such means he might peer through the fog into the past.

  Finally he gestured to the archway leading into what had been Malena’s walk-in closet, and we stepped through together. The two long walls of mirrored closets were familiar, but the space had a new inhabitant – typical Robert in its antique splendour – a big, fancy free-standing mirror (‘cheval glass’, I suppose, is the term), all of eight feet tall, scraping the ceiling, as if scaled for the Palace of Versailles. It was set in a good dark wood surround, fixed by swivel screws to a frame on legs, crested by a garlanded cartouche with a low relief of entwined snakes.

  Hagen sauntered up to it, rapped a knuckle on the mirror’s lightly mottled surface. ‘Peculiar thing to have about, isn’t it?’

  I shrugged. ‘A mirror’s a mirror. This one, I grant you, is a baroque specimen. But Robert was a collector.’

  ‘Hardly short of mirrors, but, is it? This little room.’ Of course he was right, not that I was any the wiser. ‘Would you say Doctor Forrest’s an uncommonly vain sort of a fellow?’

  I had to smile. ‘Always a handsome lad. Of course, by the time you’ve hit your middle years even the golden lads have sustained some wear and tear. Robert liked to cite that line of Orwell’s. How after 40 a man’s got the face he deserves.’

  ‘Oh, I’d agree. But the trend these days is otherwise, isn’t it? Which is how Dr Forrest earns his keep. So, a little perverse of an attitude on his part perhaps?’

  ‘Well, we never discussed it, but I’m fairly certain his pride would have stopped him from ever going under another man’s knife. Anyhow, he remains a fine-looking fellow …’

  ‘Yet his fine-looking young wife left him for a fine-looking younger fellow …’

  ‘They weren’t married. She was his girlfriend.’

  ‘But these past weeks, months – to your knowledge – he was living alone, sleeping alone? No one had taken the place of Ms Absalonsen?’

  This was the moment, the prompt I had waited for. And still I couldn’t understand why I had forestalled it, what even now – however obscurely – I seemed to be afraid of. Hagen saw as much.

  ‘Please, Doctor Lochran, say what’s on your mind. We’ve not got any time for secrets.’

  So I sat down on the foot of Robert’s bed, and said what I had long intended. ‘Recently – maybe a month ago? – Robert met a woman. From whom I think he became quite inseparable, all of a sudden, though he told me later it had just been a … rush of blood. Her name is Dijana Vukovara.’ I phrased it carefully – Vu-KO-va-ra – just as I had heard it, and for the record, since, for the first time in our interview, Hagen had taken out a notebook and a stubby pencil. ‘I don’t suppose anyone else has mentioned her?’

  ‘No. Ms Absalonsen said nothing.’


  ‘Malena wouldn’t have known about her. Nor anyone else Robert knew, because their relationship was, I think, conducted entirely covertly – nocturnally, even. I only met her once myself. But Robert confided in me about her, one night he came to mine, we drank a fair bit of whiskey. He said they’d taken up, got very close. I was glad, I tried to invite them both to dinner, but that wasn’t on, I was told.’

  ‘How had he met this Ms – Vu-KO-va-ra?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ve a notion it might have been at some cultural evening. She seemed that type.’

  ‘And how do we contact this lady?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Not a clue. I don’t know where she lives, what she does, where she comes from …’

  Hagen closed his little book, bothered. At long last I had intrigued him. ‘Well, now. Can you at least describe her?’

  ‘She rather defies description.’

  A gruff half-chuckle. ‘How bloody convenient. Quite a skill, that. Would you have a go for us, doctor?’

  I winced. ‘She was foreign, for sure, but what extraction … First I thought Slavic, the name sounded that. But her accent was more Italian. Maybe she’d been to school there. In a certain light she looked rather French, though. Maybe it was just that she smoked and drank the way their women do. But her looks, too, I thought there was something French there … Slightly imperfect good looks.’

  ‘An attractive woman, then?’

  ‘Oh I’d have to say so. Anyone would say so.’

  ‘No need to qualify it, doctor. I won’t tell your wife. “Imperfect” how, but?’

  ‘Well, I’m one to talk. What I’d say is, she made quite a stunning impression – very dark hair, dark eyes, red lips. Good bones, good figure, all fragrant, dressed with flair. I wouldn’t have said older than late twenties. But … the longer I spent in her company, the more I felt – she seemed over-made up, over-perfumed. A little older too, maybe. Close up, you saw her skin and teeth weren’t the best. At first I’d took her for a woman of some means, but then I started to wonder – was she for sale? You understand me? Like when you see a girl in the street all fine and presentable, heels and bag and make-up and hair … but, really, she could be either. Heiress or prostitute …’ Hagen was studying me curiously, and I was suddenly conscious of having babbled, as if in reaction to the long silence I’d kept over this cursed woman. ‘It sounds odd, maybe, but I’m sure anyone else would say the same if they’d met her.’

  ‘And, hang on, you met her where exactly?’

  ‘Here. I paid a call on Robert. Purposely. He’d become so … elusive. And I knew it was because he was slipping around with her. So I felt I needed to meet this woman – just to understand for myself, what my pal was getting into. I don’t know that Robert was overjoyed to see me at his door. But I came into the living room and she was sat there. Drinks got poured, Robert poured one for me. But there was an atmosphere.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Because of her. She struck me as disagreeable. Demure on the surface but there was something— provocative, in her. She had this tinkling laugh that sounded rather pitying. Even her smile was like … as if she had some great and awful secret about you. You weren’t quite sure you were worthy of her company.’

  ‘But Dr Forrest seemed enamoured of her?’

  I shook my head. ‘That night? It felt more like he was wary of her. What he’d described to me before was what I suppose you call “romantic love”. There’d been something dreamy in his eyes. But that night – I wasn’t sure he wanted her there any more than me.’

  Hagen was inscrutable now. He had me on his hook. ‘Well, doctor. That’s quite a nugget of information you’ve been sitting on.’

  ‘I’m sorry. My own mind hasn’t been clear. Clouded, somehow, I don’t know why. I’ve not been sure I wasn’t— seeing a death’s head in an ink-blot. About her. She was only a woman. You get me?’

  ‘Oh, I think I do. No, for sure, we’ll just have to find her. Ms Vu-KO-va-ra.’ He chuckled. ‘And then we’ll see for ourselves.’

  September 4th

  This morning Livy and I made love for the first time in, I daresay, four months. It’s only time and the quotidian round that get in the way, making the merest intimacy take on that burdensome aspect – so it starts to seem a problem. And yet how easily that’s all dispelled, in the lightest reminder of familiar and best-loved things – the fragrance of her hair in my hands, the feel in my fingers of that nightdress with the lacy neck, inched off – then pulling her close, the currents flowing again, her into me as I into her, rolling all over the sea of our bed.

  Later, as we shared some larky push-and-shove at the bathroom sink, Livy told me I’d been like a schoolboy – not in the tautness of my physique, alas, rather in my (to her) comical hot-bloodedness. Well, she may laugh … Precious things, these are, intolerable the loneliness without them – the sense of communion with another, one’s share of the elemental, the dearest, warmest feeling. Whatever the state of our fortunes in life we all need this peerless intimacy to keep living. Olivia – so much my comfort, my better half, my strength and solace. The first time I met her I sat up that night and wrote her name in my notebook a hundred times. ‘Schoolboy’, indeed. Thank God she felt the same for me – or rather, not ‘the same’, but similar – complementary.

  I have never looked at another woman since, not really. That is the plain fact of the matter. Because I love her and love her and love her, ad infinitum. I am a lucky man – I only need look at my poor friends to know as much.

  * * *

  Today I tried my intent to play sleuth, making it my business to test Killian MacCabe’s alibi for that night before Robert vanished. First, the ticklish business of calling Malena and asking, on Livy’s behalf, if she had kept a note of the address Killian had visited to meet with his prospective patron. Not the subtlest effort, yet I could hear her taking down the diary from the kitchen dresser. When she came back on line, though, it was to tell me that the page for that week had been torn out, most likely Killian took it with him as an aide-memoire. Did I want her to ask Killian? No, I fucking did not. Rather, ‘not wanting to bother him’, I wanted her to try to remember for me. On reflection she did seem to recall his mentioning an Italian name, Ragnari, and a mansion block of apartments, on the corner of Harley Street and— Car-refort? No, Cavendish. I assured her that was all I needed.

  Thus come dusk I was striding down the street of dreams, home to medicine’s multi-millionaires, that swathe of rich London in impregnable white stucco, its rows of spiked iron railings warding off the penniless poorly. From street level the terrace seemed a row of haunted houses, vacant or darkened, save for an occasional fire burning in the hearth of a reception room, the odd ornate ceiling lit by flickering chandelier.

  I found what had to be the building. ‘Ragnari’ was not inscribed beside any buzzer, but as I peered through the glass doors I saw a bald, flush-faced old boy in shirt and tie shuffle out from behind a recessed counter, down the hallway runner toward me. I was admitted to a high-ceilinged lobby. At my right a grand winding staircase led the way to upper floors. To the porter, though, I seemed an untrustworthy face.

  ‘Who are you seeking today, sir?’

  ‘Ms … Ragnari?’

  ‘Mrs Ragnari in 6F. Lovely name, isn’t it? Foreign. But sweet. Interesting lady, Mrs Ragnari.’

  ‘Really? How long has she lived here?’

  Rashly I’d underscored my ignorance. His expression turned bankteller-obstructive. ‘Oh, I’m afraid we couldn’t give out information of that sort, sir. It’s against the law. Our residents are entitled to their privacy.’

  His eyes still chastising me, he punched a number on an internal phone, but got no reply. I asked if I might pop a note under Mrs Ragnari’s door, in relation to our private matter?

  ‘Of course you may, sir.’

  Then I heard a clanking noise emanating from behind the frosted glass of a nearby elevator door. I pulled on the handle. It didn�
��t budge.

  ‘Won’t open, sir, until the lift is exactly on the level. For safety, you know.’ He chuckled. ‘It wasn’t built into this place originally and it’s always been a tad faulty. The story goes – one old chap used to live here. Came in with his groceries one day, out of breath, calls the lift, opens the door, steps in without thinking. Lift, of course, comes right down on top of him. Can you imagine?’

  ‘That’, I said, ‘is quite a story.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Accidents, sir – only take a moment, don’t they?’

  ‘I’ll take the stairs, I think.’

  Up I went, an arduous ascent, then down a darkened, plush-carpeted corridor. I knocked the door of 6F but there was no response. So I took a card from my wallet, scribbled a message, ‘Mrs Ragnari, please contact …’, then off I went. There was some haste in my step. I felt a little eeriness in the hush, a prickle of hairs on my neck. (The porter’s grisly tale hadn’t helped.) Back out under the front porch I stopped to check and found RAVENSCOURT the name neatly printed by the 6F buzzer – making nothing one iota less murky.

  * * *

  Hagen is a thoughtful man, a seasoned sort, he’ll have heard a million things in his time. I could tell him this. Steven is the best friend I’ve got, I could tell him anything. And yet still I’m limping on alone with my secret. Why can’t I spill it and be done? Would it really sound as mad as I fear it? What am I afraid of anyway? Some slip of a girl?

  This is it. On that sole evening where I had the dubious pleasure of Dijana Vukovara’s company (that clearly unwelcome call at Robert’s door), the mood was just as I told Hagen. You know when you’ve walked in on something – one party amused, the other not. Ten minutes before I dropped by they could have been fighting or fucking like wolves, I don’t know. But every glance and remark of theirs seemed to bear on whatever was happening in the room before I stumbled into it.

  What did she and I talk about? Nothing that was normal. ‘Grey’ – I remember her saying, as if marvelling, rolling my poor honest name round her mouth like it was Russian for something depraved. ‘Grey by nature?’ she added, gratuitously. Then she sashayed over to the window, surely expecting me to follow, while Robert mixed a drink. There, we discussed …? The moon, I think. How she found it ‘thrilling’. Didn’t I feel the same? (Her eyes, dark moons of their own, knowing otherwise.) Then I believe she was describing how she loved to ‘bathe’ in moonlight, hymning ‘the mystery of the waters’, ‘that most curious con-sanguinity’ between the lunar and menstrual cycles. She beckoned me and I felt her breath in my ear. ‘A woman is wounded,’ she whispered. ‘Periodically, most intimately. But a man is not so different. We all of us carry the wound within …’