A Whisper to the Living

by Ruth Hamilton

  David Pritchard was a man of strong instincts. He drove the needle viciously into the patient’s skin, not caring whether or not he hit another vein, not worrying about the pain he might be inflicting. The lacerations were not really deep anyway and there seemed to be no damage to muscle tissue. Whoever had done this had been defending rather than attacking. Anne, poor Anne. That fine healthy girl could have finished him off if she’d wanted to. For a few minutes he felt heartily weary of being a doctor, sick of the way he was forced to heal the injured no matter what the situation. For David understood this particular situation only too well at this moment. Somehow, he knew what had happened – the girl splattered in blood, the man lying naked at the top of the stairs.

  When he was finished, he went down to attend to his real patient, the one who truly needed him. She was sitting by the fireplace as still as a statue, her face frozen with shock.

  He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve put him to bed.’

  Without moving, she whispered, ‘He isn’t dead then?’

  ‘No.’ There followed a long silence.

  ‘I planned it, you know. Just like Ruth Ellis, I planned it. That knife was under my bed . . . he will be dead next time. There’s no way I can stop it happening.’ She was staring at the floor as she spoke, obviously to herself, as if she were alone in the room.

  He knelt beside her and reached for her hands, trying to rub some life into the icy fingers, but she recoiled from his touch.

  ‘It’s alright, Anne – it’s me – David. David Pritchard. I’m your friend. Do you understand?’

  She nodded mutely.

  ‘Did he . . . hurt you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes he did.’ She was talking like someone in a hypnotic trance.

  ‘How long has it been happening – this sort of thing?’

  She looked at him now with great sadness, returning from wherever she had been in her nightmare. ‘All my life, Doctor. All my life . . .’

  Hot anger surged through his veins as he looked at this poor child, because she was a child, in spite of her womanly shape and her adult way of talking. He had never liked the man, had not cared for the shiftless, mean-looking creature. But he would never have believed that something of this magnitude had been going on right under his nose without him, the family doctor, being aware of it. Yet he had known in a sense, known that something terrible was troubling this girl. Why, dear God, oh why had he not forced it out of her?

  ‘Anne. Look at me – that’s it. Now. Did he push himself inside you? Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘I haven’t been raped.’

  ‘Has he ever raped you?’

  ‘No.’ She folded her hands in her lap and began to twist them about as if wringing out a dishcloth. ‘The last time – a few years ago – I hit him with the poker. He had to go in hospital.’

  David began to pace about the room, striding back and forth as he tried to organize his thoughts. ‘Have you told anyone else about this?’

  ‘Just a priest. He tried to help me, but he couldn’t. Nobody can help me. Nobody.’

  He brought a chair and set it down beside hers. ‘We have to tell the police about this, Anne.’

  She stared at him. ‘Because I’m nearly a murderer? It was premeditated, wasn’t it? I read that in the paper about the woman they hanged . . .’

  ‘It’s not that!’ he cried. ‘We have to tell the police because he’s a child-molester. He’s the one in trouble, not you!’

  ‘No!’ The ferocity of this response startled him. ‘If I’ve done nothing wrong, then there’s no need for the police – don’t you see? We can’t tell anyone.’

  ‘But he must be punished – he can’t carry on – you can’t carry on . . .’

  ‘Doctor, for years I’ve been told what I can and can’t do. People think we’ve no sense because we’re young, but I can make decisions . . .’

  ‘This is the wrong decision, Anne.’

  ‘Will you listen to me please? I have to protect my mother . . .’

  ‘No. Your mother must protect you, my dear.’

  ‘Please, Doctor?’

  ‘Alright, I’m listening.’

  She leaned back in the chair before continuing and he watched the small beads of sweat pouring down her face as she struggled against shock, fought to find the words with which she might explain herself.

  ‘Dr Pritchard, if people knew – the police, the newspapers and all that – then my mother would suffer unbearably.’

  ‘These cases are not reported and anyway, that’s hardly the point . . .’

  ‘That’s just a part of the point, Doctor. I would suffer too. I would be removed to a place of safety and the few rights I have as a mere child would be taken from me. I’d probably have to leave St Mary’s in order to avoid explanations as to why I had been moved to a council home . . . don’t you see? I’d be living in a home with orphans?’

  ‘But that would not happen if he were imprisoned, Anne.’

  She half-smiled patiently and with the air of one trying to explain a complicated fact to an infant. ‘If he were imprisoned, then my mother would lose the chief breadwinner. She might even lose her home. Do you think I could live with her, look at her every day, knowing I’ve put her income in jail? And there’s another thing too. He swore to tell her that I’ve encouraged him. What if she believed him?’

  David sat very still as he took in the implications of what she had just said. By God, this one had a head on her alright. To think that she’d worked all this out and so accurately too. It was true enough, what she’d said. He wondered how many other intelligent and abused children had reached the same conclusion. How many such children were there, children who endured rape and molestation because they had not the courage or the strength to protect themselves as this one had?

  She cut into his thoughts. ‘I can’t stop you doing what you think is right, Doctor. But please, I beg you – don’t ruin what’s left of my life.’

  He took both her hands in his. ‘I’ll talk to him upstairs first. Look – I haven’t decided what to do yet. Just try to keep calm and I’ll bear in mind all that you’ve said.’

  He rose and began to pace about once more. He should report this, he knew he should. But could he really go out now and destroy this child’s future? On the other hand, did he dare to leave her to the mercies of a potential rapist?

  They heard the front door opening and Annie shot a worried look in David’s direction. ‘Don’t tell her . . . please don’t tell her . . .’

  Nancy Higson stopped in the doorway, her husband’s note in her hand. ‘What’s going on? Is she ill – is she hurt?’

  ‘Sit down, Mrs Higson.’ He looked quickly at Annie, noticing the pleading in her eyes. ‘There’s been an accident,’ he went on. ‘Your husband fell over and cut himself . . .’

  ‘But he left a note to say he was at his brother’s . . .’

  ‘Yes . . . well.’ He coughed to give himself time. ‘Before going out he . . . er . . . went up into the roof-space and did a lot of damage to his arm on a rough beam.’

  ‘Whatever was he doing up there?’ asked Nancy.

  ‘Looking for somewhere to put an indoor aerial for a television,’ said Annie quietly.

  ‘My God!’ Nancy sank into a chair. ‘Talk about accident-prone. How bad is he? Does he need the hospital again?’

  ‘No, I’ve seen to him,’ said David quickly. The man probably did need hospitalization – possibly even a transfusion. But no. A hospital would recognize knife wounds, would ask questions, too many questions. He glanced at Annie. There, it was done. Rightly or wrongly, Dr David Pritchard was now part of the conspiracy. And he knew only too well that Eddie Higson would be glad to go along with the story.

  ‘I’d better go up to him.’ Nancy rose and took a step towards the door.

  ‘No! No, you stay here with Anne. Make her some sweet tea – she’s had a terrible shock. There’s a lot of blood in her room and on the stairs – Mr Higson used one of Anne’s
sheets to stop the bleeding, you see. It hasn’t been a pleasant experience for her. I’ve given him the treatment he needed, but I must go up and check on his progress before I go. You put the kettle on, Nancy. I’ll be down in a few minutes.’

  In the bedroom, David Pritchard shook the patient roughly until he woke, swearing because of the agony in his arm and shoulder.

  ‘Right. You listen to me, you no-good skunk. Stay away from Anne – do you hear me?’

  Higson nodded, his face contorted with pain.

  ‘I know all about it, Higson. I know that you almost raped a minor tonight and that this is not the first time you’ve tried it. But it will be the last, you can be sure of that. If the poor child was not in such a bad state, I’d examine her just to make sure you haven’t damaged her. Now.’ He took from his pocket an empty envelope which he waved under Higson’s nose. ‘See this? Anne has made and signed a statement which I have witnessed, so it is now a legal document. Tomorrow, my solicitor will take a fuller account of what has happened and that will be lodged in his safe. If anything, anything at all happens to that child, my lawyer and I will bear witness against you. I’ll see you go down if you so much as breathe on her again.’

  ‘She knifed me! You’ve seen my arm,’ mumbled the cowering figure on the bed.

  ‘Yes, but she didn’t do a good enough job, did she? She should have stuck you through your filthy black heart – vermin like you should be put down. I’ll be back tomorrow to give you an injection and if you’re very lucky, I may leave out the strychnine. And don’t forget, Higson, you sustained your injuries in the loft while looking for a suitable location for a television aerial. That lie is for Anne’s sake, not yours. Understand?’

  Higson nodded, then groaned as he rolled to face the wall.

  The doctor turned on his heel and left the room, a cold sweat breaking out on his brow. He felt as if he had been in the presence of something truly unnatural, something evil almost. Before going downstairs, he ran as quickly and as quietly as he could up to Anne’s bedroom, picked up the bloody knife and shut it in his bag. He shivered as he passed Higson’s closed door on his way back to the ground floor. Nancy met him on the bottom step. ‘Is he alright, Doctor?’

  ‘He’ll survive. Give him rest and plenty of fluid.’

  Annie had not moved from her seat by the fire. He walked over to her. ‘Remember – he did it in the loft, Anne. Fell over, cut himself, then came into your room for help.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor. I owe you a lot.’

  ‘Yes, you do. And to pay me back, you will come to see me tomorrow. We have to make certain legal arrangements – take out an insurance if you like, to make sure that this never happens again.’

  ‘My mother won’t know?’

  ‘No. No, she won’t.’

  He gave her a sleeping draught then stayed with her until she slipped into unconsciousness on the sofa. Gently, he brushed the hair from her face and sighed as he noticed dark shadows under her eyes.

  On his way out, he stopped at the bottom of the stairs and called, ‘Nancy? Fetch a blanket, will you? She’s on the couch and I shouldn’t move her if I were you – just let her sleep it off.’

  He picked up his bag and left the house, noticing for the first time that he was still wearing carpet slippers. Oh dear, whatever would Edna say about that, he wondered irrelevantly as he entered his house. Suddenly exhausted, he leaned against the front door feeling as if he had aged ten years in this one night. He shook his head wearily. Had he done the right thing?

  He sat up well into the night, his mind in turmoil. By two o’clock in the morning he had reached no conclusion. But he knew, as he had always known, that right and wrong were hard to define, sometimes impossible to separate. The child would be protected and that was all that mattered.

  4

  Tensions

  On a cold February afternoon in 1956, Nancy Higson sat in the doctor’s waiting room, hands clasped tightly on her lap. The last few months had been hard and no mistake, what with Eddie coming off work for a while over his arm and Annie mithering off and on to leave school and get a job to help out. Now this. She let out a deep shuddering sigh. It couldn’t be true, dear God no, not lung cancer. She’d watched her Dad die of that a couple of years back and it wasn’t an easy death, not by a long chalk. And it had started the same way too, with a bad cough and then, later on, the spitting of blood into handkerchiefs and towels. Her fingers began to tremble again and she gripped her hands together more tightly until knuckles showed white through work-worn flesh. If only the doctor would hurry up. She had to get it over with now, while Annie was at school, she didn’t want Annie worrying over illness in the house, not with her exams coming up this year.

  Anyroad, it might not be cancer. Surely you could spit up a bit of blood without it being cancer? She tried to look on the bright side, but no, it had been going on for too long – it must be something serious.

  The bell rang for her to go through and for a moment she remained riveted to the spot. This might be her last minute of near-sanity. If it was cancer or something like that, she felt she’d go straight out of her mind, they’d have to lock her up in a loony ward.

  She dragged herself to her feet and knocked timidly on the surgery door before entering.

  ‘Hello, Nancy – how are you?’ Christ, he was so bloody cheerful she could have hit him. She sank into the chair at the side of his desk.

  ‘It’s him,’ she finally managed.

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He tapped a pencil on the desk. ‘Come on, Nancy. Out with it.’

  ‘He’s . . . not right.’

  David looked kindly at the poor tired soul beside him. Eddie Higson wasn’t right? That was the understatement of the century. But what had happened now? Did Nancy know, had she found out? And had that bad bugger touched Anne again? He trod carefully. ‘In what way is he not right?’

  Nancy tugged at the top button of her coat and cleared her throat before going on, ‘He’s spitting blood, specially in the morning and sometimes of a night. He’s got a bad cough, you see.’

  Moments passed, the silence broken only by the tapping of his pencil and the rumble of a 45 as it clattered its way towards town.

  ‘How long has he been seeing blood?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Doctor – a good few weeks at least. He’s one as keeps himself to himself, not a great talker. I haven’t asked him. He likely thinks I know nothing about it.’

  David nodded. Oh yes, Eddie Higson kept himself to himself alright. Too much to hide to ever open up to anybody. Perhaps he’d be answering to his Maker soon enough.

  ‘What do you want me to do, Nancy?’

  She shrugged thin shoulders. ‘I don’t know. He’ll not come here to see you. If he thought I’d been across he’d blow his top, tell me off for interfering and mithering again. Oh, I don’t know what we must do.’

  ‘Well, I can’t make a diagnosis without seeing him. Even then, I’d have to refer him to a specialist at the hospital.’

  She suddenly brightened. ‘If he’s got anything serious, then it’s not started overnight, has it? And he was in the Infirmary a couple of years back over his accident – they’d have noticed then, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Things take time to flare up and anyway, they might not find something they weren’t looking for.’ He rose and walked to the window, hands deep in his pockets, brow furrowed as he wondered what the hell to do.

  ‘He was in a prison camp, wasn’t he?’ he asked without turning.

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘About three years, I think. They put him in hospital when he got home.’

  ‘Was he very thin?’ He looked at Nancy now, noticing for the first time that her hair was slightly streaked with silver although she was not yet forty.

  ‘He weighed about seven stone. They couldn’t keep anything down him except milk and suchlike. Even now, he doesn’t
like food with lumps in, rather have soup and rice pudding.’

  Or alcohol, thought David, remembering the times he’d watched Eddie Higson struggling home from the Star using garden walls and lamp posts as guidelines.

  ‘Nancy, I can’t be sure, but I rather think it’s tuberculosis of the lungs.’

  ‘TB?’ She was horrified. Only the poorest and dirtiest of people got TB. ‘There’s none of that in my house, Doctor.’

  He sat down and patted her hand. ‘It’s everywhere – especially in a big town like this,’ he said. ‘And his resistance was probably lowered because of poor diet during the war – it’s no reflection on you if your husband has tuberculosis.’

  Mollified slightly, Nancy relaxed a little. At least there was a chance of it not being cancer. ‘What are we going to do then, Doctor?’

  ‘You’ll have to talk to him, won’t you?’

  ‘Talk to him? He’d go straight through the bloody roof if I mentioned this. He won’t come near you, I do know that. He reckons as you treated him bad over that arm of his, says you’re a butcher – I think he’s terrified of doctors and hospitals.’

  David drew in a sharp breath. Here he was, getting enmeshed in a second conspiracy involving the Higson family. ‘Then you’ll just have to do your best. It’s a notifiable disease, but I can’t inform the Department until I’m sure. And I can’t be sure till we’ve had it confirmed.’ He paused. ‘And we can’t confirm what we can’t examine. Look. Go home and boil the towels – keep yours and Anne’s separate from his. It might be a good idea to give him his own set of crockery and cutlery, though boiling water should keep your utensils sterilized. Meanwhile, I’ll try to work out a way around this, but it will take time and frankly, I don’t know how much time we’ve got. After all, I’m just assuming that it’s TB – but I’ll do my best to find a way of getting him looked at. Alright?’

  A sudden thought struck Nancy and, with her hand to her collar she said, ‘What about my daughter? What if she’s caught it?’

  ‘Even if it is TB, I’m very sure that Anne doesn’t have it. She’s a fine strong girl – a credit to you, Nancy – she’d make a full recovery anyway.’