In Matto's Realm: A Sergeant Studer Mystery (17 page)

"Silence," commanded Studer.

The man had not the slightest intention of obeying
the order. His bare hairy legs, sticking out underneath
his nightshirt, were performing a veritable war dance
and - yes! - he really was lifting up his right leg to kick
Studer in the stomach!

That was going too far! What came next happened
too quickly for Bohnenblust, who was standing in the
doorway watching, to follow. There was a smack. And
another. The modern William Tell was face down on
the bed and Studer's hand came down two, three, four
times, the smacking sound slightly muffled by the
material of Schmocker's nightshirt.

"There we are. That's a good boy." Studer picked up
the blanket that had fallen to the floor and tucked
Schmocker in. "And now I want an answer. Was it you
who took the key?"

The reply came in a whimper, as though from a defiant child. "Ye-e-es."

"Why?"

This time there were sobs of rage. "Because I didn't
want to share the room with a murderer!"

"You must be out of your mind," said the astonished
Studer, back with his native Swiss. Turning round he
saw a smile beneath Bohnenblust's moustache. Then
he remembered. Of course! He was in a lunatic asylum! And was surprised that one of the inmates was out of his mind! He had to smile too. Then he went to the
door. As he closed it, he heard Schmocker still ranting.
"I'm going to take this to the Federal Appeal Court."

"You do that," said Studer, reconciled.

Bohnenblust told him that while the harvest festival
had been going on he had sat on Schmocker's bed; it
was possible the key had slipped out of his pocket then.
It had never happened to him before, but there was no
other explanation he could think of.

Studer nodded. So that had been sorted out -
though there still remained the question of the triangular key. If he found out where that had come from
he would have established that Pieterlen could
have left the ward without outside help - and that he
would have been able to open the door to the heating
plant.

Studer looked up in surprise. Bohnenblust was
whispering to him. "We nurses are strictly forbidden to
use physical violence on the patients."

Studer nodded reflectively. "I know," he said. And to
show that he was an fait with the rules in the clinic, he
added that he knew that Dr Laduner kept a sharp
lookout for bruises.

In the dormitory the morning light was struggling
against the blue gleam of the ceiling bulb. Studer went
to the window. There were two lofty firs with pennants
of delicate yellow floating out from their tops: scraps of
mist aglow with the rays of the rising sun.

It was a quarter to six. Just as Studer was about to ask
when the day shift started, Bohnenblust said softly that
he was surprised how many deaths there had been
again that night.

"Deaths? Deaths where?" the sergeant wanted to
know.

"In the two wards for disturbed patients. There were no deaths the previous two nights, as far as I know, but
last week! At least two each night!"

"What did they die of?" Studer asked, at the same
time recalling the coffin he had seen on his first
morning.

"Well, there is talk of a new treatment Dr Laduner's
trying out," said Bohnenblust. "But you never know if
there's any truth in that kind of rumour. The staff
nurse on D1, Schwertfeger's his name, is very discreet.
But it's certainly true that many of the patients are
bedridden. And word got round that the Director
wasn't happy with the new treatment. He had an
argument with Dr Laduner about it."

Just when you thought you'd managed to pin the
murder on Pieterlen (the only thing that needed
explaining was the male voice on the other end of the
telephone), something else cropped up to throw a
spanner in the works. It was like a cheap novel. Was he
expected to believe some cock-and-bull story about Dr
Laduner carrying out treatments that left the patients
dead? What nonsense.

But he found he could not just put it out of his mind.
After all, it was only the previous evening that he had
heard a lecture about a sleep treatment, and he could
still hear the doctor's strange remark: "I thought he
was going to die on me."

"The day shift comes on at six?" Studer asked.

"Yes." Bohnenblust took his leave. He fetched a
bucket, filled it with water, wrung out a cloth, groaning
all the time, scrubbed the floor round the bathtubs
with a brush, mopped up the water ...

Then there was the screech of keys in the locks, the
slamming of doors, the echo of heavy footsteps. The
nursing staff were arriving.

The middle door of the dormitory opened, and a
squeaky, up-and-down voice said in friendly tones,
"Mornin' one and all."

It was the senior nurse, Weyrauch. With uncombed
hair and no spectacles, he looked like an obese parrot.

"Ev'rythin' OK, Bohnenblust?" he asked, then,
without waiting for an answer, went on, "Hey, it's Sergeant Studer. You up already too? A very good mornin'
to you."

Studer mumbled something.

"Let's have the report book, Bohnenblust." With
that the senior nurse waddled out of the door.

The scene in the awakening dormitory remained
stuck in Studer's mind for a long time: men crawling
out of their beds, traipsing over to the wash-basins
against the long wall, passing a damp cloth over their
faces, yawning as they peered at the windows because
they simply could not understand that here was
another day, time they had to kill, when they could just
as well have lived it ... At least that was how it seemed
to the sergeant.

Following an impulse, Studer went to the dormitory
kitchen to see Schiil, the grand blesse de guerre with his
Legion d'honneur, his Medaille Militaire and pension. He
went quietly along the narrow corridor and stopped at
the door to the blue-painted room.

Schiil was opening a window. There was no bolt on
it. Like the door into the corridor, it could only be
opened with a triangular key. And Schiil had just such
a key in his hand, though it was definitely not an
official key and in no way resembled the instrument
Studer had in his pocket.

"Show me that, Schiil," said Studer in a gentle voice.

Schul turned round. Making no objection, he said,
"Good morning, Inspector," in a friendly tone, and held out his key to the sergeant with a smile. It was a
metal case that had been hammered into shape.

"Did you make a triangular key like that for
Pieterlen?"

A look of astonished incredulity. "But of course. He
needed one. I've even got a few more ... er ... old
cartridge cases I found when I was out for a walk."

"Thank you for the poem, Schul. It was very beautiful. So you gave Pieterlen a triangular key? Would you
give one to any of the other patients?"

"The others? No! The others are mad - completement
fous. But Pieterlen was my friend, so ..."

"It's all right, I understand, Schiil-"

But the friend of the spirit of madness refused to be
interrupted. He pointed out of the window. "Over
there," he said, "that's where Pieterlen's girlfriend was,
and he often used to stand at the window. Sometimes
she would come to the window, too, and wave, the
woman over there, I mean. And when no nurse happened to be around, I would open the window, and
then she would open the window over there."

Of course! "Over there" was the women's 0 Ward,
where Irma Wasem was a nurse. There was a good
hundred yards between the two windows, perhaps a bit
more ... An old folk-song came to mind:

No, that wasn't quite right. They weren't two "royal
children", for one thing, they were Pieterlen, the classic case, and Nurse Irma Wasem, and secondly there
was no water, just a courtyard. Still ...

"Tell me, Schiil, what did Pieterlen look like?"

"Short, shorter than me, stocky, strong. The
muscles he had on his arms! He was the only one who
really understood me. The others laugh at me
because of Matto and because of the murder in
Doves' Gorge. But Pieterlen never laughed. Mon
pauvre vieux, he used to say - he always spoke French
to me - I know all about that, I've been in Matto's
realm myself . . . "

Yes, that was true. Indeed, Pieterlen had spent a long
time in that realm. Why did this all suddenly seem so
sad, so hopeless to Studer? Why bring people back
from a realm to which they had fled because they
could no longer cope with the world as it really was?
Why not leave them in peace? If Pieterlen had stayed
ill - schizophrenic, to put it in scientific terms - he
would never have fallen in love with Irma Wasem,
would never have tried to escape, perhaps the Director
would still be alive, even.

"Goodbye, Schiil," said Studer. His voice was hoarse,
he had a large lump in his throat.

"I have to get breakfast ready," said Schiil earnestly.
It was touching, coming from those scarred lips.

Studer met no one on the stairs. As he was crossing
the courtyard in his thin-soled slippers, he caught up
with a man with a time clock on a strap, like the one
Bohnenblust had.

"Are you the nightwatchman who does the rounds?"
Studer asked.

The man nodded eagerly. He was tall, broad and
fat. The night shift seemed to be good for putting on
fat.

"When you were doing your rounds the night before
last, that is Wednesday night, did you notice anything in that corner over there? It would have been around
half past one."

The man cleared his throat, gave Studer an odd look
and hesitated. He had done his rounds a little later
that night, he said eventually; it had been a few minutes after two o'clock when he had passed that corner.
And he had seen something. Two men, in the corridor.
One of them was Dr Laduner and he was running after
the other, at least that was what it had looked like. But
with the best will in the world, he couldn't say who the
other man had been. There was a door in the basement leading directly outside and the second man had
disappeared through it, with Dr Laduner hot on his
heels.

Could he swear that it was Dr Laduner?

Could he swear? No. He hadn't been able to see his
face, but the man had had his build, his gait. Did
the sergeant believe Dr Laduner was guilty of the
Director's death?

If there was one thing Studer hated, it was this kind
of prying familiarity. Consequently he answered rather
sharply, "I believe nothing. Right?" and strode off.

The sky had clouded over. The rays of sunlight on
the tops of the pines and the delicate silk scraps of mist
had been a delusion.

Studer was glad he managed to get back into
Laduner's apartment unseen. It was quiet in the corridor. Everyone was still fast asleep, even the baby, for
whose lungs crying was so healthy.

He slipped quietly into the bathroom, gently
opened the taps and ran a bath. Then he locked the
door, undressed and slid into the hot water.

But if he had hoped the bath would have a stimulating effect, he was sorely mistaken. It took urgent
knocking on the door to wake him, and Laduner's concerned voice asking if there was anything wrong
with the sergeant.

Studer replied in a husky voice that he had fallen
asleep in the bath. Outside he heard Laduner laugh as
he told his wife what had happened.

The same brightly coloured woollen cosy was on the
coffee pot. It was the same table with the same people
sitting round it. Studer, at the head of the table, had
his back to the window; to his left sat Laduner and to
his right the doctor's wife, so that Studer was in a sense
presiding over the meal, as he had the previous
morning. There was just one difference: the mood.
The sunshine was missing.

Outside the large window was a bank of cloud, like a
huge concrete wall. The room was filled with grey light
and the glow had gone from Fran Laduner's red
dressing-gown.

"How did you like the dormitory in its blue, nighttime lighting, Studer?" Laduner asked. He was
reading the Bund and did not look up from his
newspaper.

An excellent intelligence service Herr Dr Laduner
had! Should he counter by asking him what he had
been doing in the basement by the boiler room on the
night of the harvest festival? Better not. Better confine
himself to the simple remark that a dormitory like that
made you think.

"As I looked at all those people locked in, Herr
Doktor, I had this image of the clinic as a huge spider
crouched there in the middle of the country, and the
threads of its web reached even the most out-of-the-way
villages. The patients' families are caught in the web
and can't escape. The threads are the fates of men and women spun by the spider - I mean the clinic - or
Matto, if you prefer ..."

Laduner looked up from his paper. "You're a poet,
Studer, a closet poet. And that might perhaps be a disadvantage in the profession you happen to be engaged
in. If you hadn't been a poet, you would have adapted
to the real world and that business with Colonel
Caplaun would never have happened. But that's the
way you are, a poetical detective sergeant."