Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf Read Online Free PDF

He wasn’t here to have any personal relationship with her, she mustn’t be touched. All that he must inevitably discover about her she would countenance and assist as case-notes necessary to the job, but never as the impalpable web of a man’s understanding. This would have to be strictly clinical. So much the better; that suited Francis.
    ‘It seemed advisable to be as convincing a visitor as possible,’ he said dryly, ‘and you’ll have observed that they never come empty-handed. The women in the ward might not notice. The staff certainly would. I take it I’m right in thinking that
only
Mr. Rice is in your confidence?’
    ‘Oh,’ she said, flushing, ‘I see! Yes of course, that was thoughtful of you. I thought… I was rather afraid that you might be too well known to pass unnoticed, in any case.’
    ‘I’m hardly the celebrity type of detective,’ he assured her, amused and disarmed. ‘Few of us are, if the truth be told. Nobody here is likely to know who I am or what I do, and your privacy needn’t be compromised.’
    ‘That’s what I should prefer, if it’s possible. But of course you must include the books and everything in your expenses.’
    The tone was perhaps a little arrogant, but so, in all probability, had his been.
    ‘We can come to an agreement about all that later,’ he said. ‘Since our time’s limited, what I think you should be doing now is lying back and relaxing, while you tell me yourself about this experience that made you send for me. By this time I take it you’ve found a way of surrendering yourself into the hands of doctors when you have to? Consider me one more in the same category. Close your eyes and shut me out if it makes it any easier. Most of us do that with doctors, when the handling begins.’
    ‘And dentists,’ said Maggie unexpectedly, and smiled.
    ‘And dentists.’ It might, he conceded ruefully, be a better analogy. ‘I shall have to take notes. You won’t mind that? They’ll all be destroyed, afterwards.’
    ‘Yes, I understand.’ She let her head fall back on the pillow. ‘I want to do everything that may help you to find out… what it is that’s haunting me. You understand, I must know. There’ll be no peace for me, no possibility of living normally, unless I know.
He
wanted me to put it out of my mind, but I can’t do that. If I’ve done somebody a terrible wrong, and now for the first time I
feel
what I’ve done, how can I just push it away and pretend I know nothing about it? Then he wanted me to put myself in the hands of a psychiatrist. Why should I do that? I don’t want it rationalised out of existence, if it really does exist,
I want it put right
! I’m sorry,’ she said, suddenly fixing those disturbing eyes upon his attentive face, ‘if you find all this a little unbalanced. All that got through to me was the fact of my guilt. It’s because I can’t give a rational account of the thing that I need you. Do
you
think I’m out of my wits?’
    ‘No,’ he said, ‘I think you are very much in command of them. Tell me!’
    She told him, slowly, carefully, picking her words with concentration and precision, like a party to a case in court who must make the right impression now or never. And after a few moments she closed her eyes and put him out of her recognition except as a disembodied confessor, the better to feel her way towards objectivity. It seemed that her passion for truth and justice was large enough to compel absolute candour, as if she felt herself to be addressing God. In his experience women could be devious even in their prayers, but he would have staked his reputation that this one was not.
    Maggie talked and Francis listened, made notes, and watched her face, a pure oval, its irregularities hardly discoverable here in the flesh. Photographs always exaggerate any disproportion in the features; but her photographs were almost caricatures, so far were they from doing her justice. It was largely a matter of colouring.