By the Time You Read This

42

PATIENTS TURNING UP DEAD and Frederick completely unconcerned. It’s Manchester all over again, Dorothy Bell thought, as her mind tumbled back to their life in England. In England, Frederick had been unconcerned when three patients killed themselves in little more than a week. He had been unconcerned when the mother of one young suicide stood outside the hospital with a sign that read: Dr. Bell Murdered My Son. And he had been unconcerned when his colleagues pointed out the high rate of death among his patients.

He developed some stock responses. You try to help people and this is the thanks you get, he would say, with a heavy sigh and a world-weary shrug. Nobody understands what a lethal killer depression is, he would say. Most doctors won’t even take it on. He painted himself as a swashbuckling surgeon venturing with his knife into hostile territory where others fear to tread.

And yet he had been unconcerned in Swindon when a teenaged girl in his care had blown up her entire house in the course of gassing herself. And unconcerned when a man in his late fifties, about to become a grandfather, had blown his head off in his daughter’s backyard. And unconcerned when nurses at the Manchester hospital, where Dorothy also worked, began referring to him as Dr. Death. She had told him about it, and he had merely shrugged that world-weary shrug and said, “Against stupidity, the gods themselves labour in vain.”

The only time Frederick had seemed at all worried was when colleagues at Manchester had demanded an inquiry from the National Health authorities into his habit of prescribing seven times more sleeping pills than psychiatrists with similar caseloads. “There are no psychiatrists with similar caseloads,” he had fumed, even as they were packing for Canada. “Depression causes sleeplessness. What am I supposed to do, let them go psychotic with insomnia?”

This was around the time Dr. Harold Shipman had been on trial for murdering some 250 patients with massive overdoses of heroin. Shipman had been known as a good, kindly doctor who made house calls. Indeed, many of his patients died even as he was visiting them, or shortly after. His plump wife had stood stolidly by him, attending his lengthy trial every day, never saying a word to the media.

And now here was Frederick with that boy who killed himself a couple of summers ago, and that Mr. Keswick, and that policeman’s wife, and that poor Dorn boy who shot himself in the laundromat. How could her husband be so untroubled by it all? Of course he wasn’t Harold Shipman, he wasn’t going around killing people, but he must be doing something wrong for so many of his patients to be killing themselves.

She remembered saying to herself, when Shipman was convicted, that unlike Mrs. Shipman, she would have known, she would have done something.

I’m doing something now, she told herself as she slipped into Frederick’s office. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing, but she could not—no, would not—sit still again while bodies started piling up. She was not going to be Mrs. Shipman.

She unlocked the closet where Frederick kept his session recordings. So obsessive, the way he watched them. Years ago, back when he had been using videotape, she had worried that they were pornographic movies, but a few listens at his office door had quelled that particular fear. No grunts and groans, no cries of not quite credible ecstasy. The only sounds that issued under and around his heavy door were the murmur of confession, the voice of reassurance, the tears of despair.

The discs were identified by file numbers, not by names; it would be a simple matter to match them up to the files in his cabinets.

Frederick wasn’t due back from hospital rounds for hours. She took the first disc out of its sleeve and popped it into the player. Then she went over to the couch, where so many of her husband’s patients had wept and confided, and sat down to watch.