The Woman in Room Three by Laura Dowers

Author:Laura Dowers [Dowers, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blue Laurel Press

The rest of the day passed in a blur.

The inmates had to be kept in the dining hall for rather longer than I think Dr Wakefield had anticipated, and this did indeed cause some of the patients, the men mostly, to become a little unruly. Dr Wakefield had those men taken to their rooms and sedated to keep them quiet. The women were far more willing to sit at the dining hall tables and listen to Mrs Wakefield reading from the Bible, and this being so, my presence there was not needed. I would have preferred to shut myself away in my office, but I felt I ought to be on hand should Dr Wakefield need me, and so waited in the small sitting room next door to his office.

There was no police presence in Flete, so they had to be sent for from Chelmsford, and this took a little while. When they did arrive, it was a police sergeant who asked to see the body. He made his observations, then left, saying he would arrange for a mortuary vehicle to come out as soon as possible to take Mrs Blake away. This didn’t happen until the early afternoon, and all the patients were by this point growing restless at being confined to the one room. The decision was made to release them into their dayrooms, but Danby was told to stop the vehicle at the gates to give him time to send word to the house so we could get the patients back in the dining hall and out of the way.

It had been a long day by the time the patients were returned to their bedrooms and locked up for the night. There had been so much activity and yet so few answers or information had come my way. Dr Wakefield had barely spoken a word to me since the morning, so before I retired for the night, I knocked on his office door. He shouted a weary, ‘Yes,’ and I entered.

‘What do you want?’ he said, pouring himself a large measure of whisky.

‘I wondered what the police said,’ I replied, ignoring his tone.

He sank back in his chair and gulped down the whisky. ‘The police said nothing. They’ve logged it as a suicide, but there will be an inquest which we shall all have to attend.’

An inquest would make Mrs Blake’s death public, something, I was sure, the Wakefields would rather have avoided. ‘I’m so very sorry, Dr Wakefield. I should have seen this coming.’

He banged his empty glass down on the desk, making me jump. ‘This is what happens when you interfere, Cowdrey. What did I tell you on your very first day here? Don’t try to cure the patients. You ignored me, and this is the result.’

‘With respect, Dr Wakefield,’ I said, my ire up, ‘you knew what I was doing with Mrs Blake. You even congratulated me on my success. Whatever went wrong with her happened when I wasn’t here.’

‘Oh, so it’s my fault, is it?’

‘I’m not saying that.

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