In Matto's Realm: A Sergeant Studer Mystery (6 page)

No, no, Sergeant Studer wouldn't dream of such a
thing. He shook his head vigorously.

"You see," said Dr Laduner, walking up and down
the long corridor, his hands clasped behind his back,
"we do not regard the bath as a punishment, but as a
means of accelerating the patient's adjustment to reality and its demands. We have few ways of maintaining a
basic level of discipline as far as work is concerned. We
are not in a prison, we are in a sanatorium. But we can
only heal the sick mind by activating the healthy
aspects of the psyche, the desire to work, the willingness to adapt to a community. Even the most confused
minds have a part that- Anyway, Studer, you must
know about Schmocker? I'm not revealing any professional secrets in telling you, it was in all the papers at
the time."

"Schmocker?" Studer vaguely recalled something
about an assassination attempt, but could not remember the details, so he asked what the story was. Since he
had shared a room with Pieterlen, it would certainly be
of interest to know how he should view the said
Schmocker's attitude to truth.

"Sure-ly." Dr Laduner took Studer by the arm, drawing him with him on his perambulation. He strode up
and down the corridor, the four white coats following
him in a line, quietly fooling around, like schoolchildren when the teacher's out. Right at the back the
chubby senior nurse waddled along.

"Herr Schmocker's crime was as follows: he stopped
one of the revered members of the Federal Council
and stuck an unloaded revolver in his face, at the same
time saying, in a quavering voice, `I'm going to kill
you.' The said council member immediately started
leaping around in the middle of the street. He wasn't
to know the revolver wasn't loaded, and he feared for
his precious life - perfectly understandable, given that
he was both a human being and a politician. Our good
Herr Schmocker watched the Council member jump
up and down for a while, then put the revolver away,
went home to his wife and tucked into a large plateful
of cold sausage. Please, Studer, don't laugh. It's all
there in the files. The Bern city police are very particular in these matters. They're quick off the mark, too.
They interrupted Herr Schmocker in the middle of his
cold sausage, took him down to the station and locked
him up. He could prove the revolver was unloaded,
true, but he had made a federal dignitary jump about -
and in the middle of the street at that - a heinous
crime in a peaceable democracy such as ours. Making a
member of the Federal Council jump up and down!
Since, however, there were doubts as to whether Herr
Schmocker was responsible for his actions, he was sent
to us for psychological assessment. Actually, he's
rather a bore, otherwise I'd find his way of going about
things amusing. He used to deal in grain, you see,
before the state monopoly was introduced. It was the
monopoly that ruined him. The gentlemen of the Federal Council, in their wisdom, were kind enough -
no, stupid enough - to pay him compensation. For
three years Herr Schmocker received 500 francs a
month without having to do a stroke of work. Just
because he had the gift of the gab and was good at
making threats. He was offered posts - he rejected
them. He refused to take a subordinate position, he
said. Eventually our lords and masters lost patience
with him. So Herr Schmocker was filled with rage and
went and bought a gun in a junk shop. But he didn't
buy any ammunition. There you have it, the story of a
grain dealer who saw himself as William Tell and a
member of the Federal Council as Gessler."

Laduner fell silent. He was still gripping Studer's
arm, just below the elbow. The two of them stopped by
the open window.

"That two-storey building over there, that's Dl,"
Laduner said, "and the lower building behind it contains the isolation units for D2. Things are worse there
than here in O ... Weyrauch," he shouted.

`What is it, Herr Dokt'r?"

"Is Bohnenblust waiting in the dormitory?"

"Yes, Herr Dokt'r. I ordered Bohnenblust to wait till
you'd seen him, sir ... Herr Dokt'r, sir."

Dr Laduner let go of Studer's arm and went over to a
door.

Laduner went out to the stairs.

Studer estimated the dormitory at about fifty feet long,
twenty-five feet wide. The room was painted white.
Twenty-two beds in two rows. At one end a raised
cubicle with two bathtubs. The window behind them
was open. It had narrow iron bars and it, too, provided
a view of the two storeys of D1.

Beside the cubicle with the bathtubs was a door, with
glass in the upper half, leading into a side room. A wall
with a small table fixed to it projected out from the
middle of the dormitory, forming a cubby-hole. And in
front of it the nightwatchman, Bohnenblust, was
sitting. He was in late middle age, with a bushy moustache, and wore a grey pullover full of darns. There
was a bruise on his forehead. Standing beside him,
ramrod straight, was Staff Nurse Jutzeler in a white
apron and a white coat with a white cross on a red
background sewn onto the lapel.

Dr Laduner went over to him and asked if everything was all right, which Jutzeler assured him it was.
Jutzeler spoke with the lilting accent of the Bernese
Oberland. He had brown eyes, large and gentle as a
deer's.

Bohnenblust stood up with the ungainliness of a
man who spent too much time sitting down. When he
took a deep breath a wheezing noise came from his
chest.

"Stay in your seat," Laduner snapped. The nightwatchman stared, gasped and sat down again. Laduner sat down at a larger table, waved Studer over to sit on
the bench beside him, then leant his elbows on the
table. Bohnenblust was sitting to the right, the small
table behind him.

"Right, then, Bohnenblust, tell us all about it."

The two women doctors were leaning against the
wall, Neuville was practising his tap-dancing and Dr
Blumenstein was standing on one leg. In his white
coat he looked like a stork. A bumblebee buzzed in the
silence, came closer and hovered for a few seconds
right in front of Studer's nose, its belly a shimmering
velvety brown.

"The Herr Doktor will know." Bohnenblust said.

"The Herr Doktor knows nothing. What the Herr
Doktor would like to know is how you came by that
bump on your noddle." The word "noddle" sounded
very odd coming from Laduner's lips.

"Well," said Bohnenblust, standing up, then sitting
down again, shifting backwards and forwards on his
chair, as if he were sitting on the top of a hot stove. "It
was one in the morning, I'd just done the time clock-"

"He has to clock in every hour," Laduner explained
to Studer.

"At one o'clock I heard noises coming from the side
room. Shouts." Bohnenblust pointed to the door with
glass in the upper half. "I went in-"

"Did you switch on the light?"

"No, Herr Doktor. Schmocker always complains if I
do."

Laduner nodded, the two assistant doctors nodded,
the two women doctors nodded, even fat Weyrauch
nodded. There was no doubt about it, a man who
could threaten a member of the Federal Council
would have a natural talent for complaining, and
plenty of practice, too.

"So I went in," Bohnenblust said, blowing a gust of
air through his moustache. "And that's all I can
remember until I woke up again. That was about half
past two. Then I pressed the alarm bell and Jutzeler
and Hofstetter and Gilgen came. Through the middle
door, which was still locked, as were the other two. And
my passkey and my triangular key were still in my
pocket."

Once more Laduner turned to Studer with an
explanation. "To open the doors, our nurses have a
passkey and a triangular key. When they leave they
hand in their keys to the porter - at least they're supposed to. But half the time they just keep them in their
pockets, so they can get in if they happen to come back
late because they've been playing a few too many rubbers of jass down in the village ... Isn't that so,
Jutzeler?"

The litany he has to go through every time!
thought Studer. We'll never get anywhere like this.
Five medics - the two assistants, the two women, Dr
Laduner - were they all blind? Had they never seen
the marks caused by a blow to the head? Without
wanting to boast, he, Sergeant Studer, only had to
glance at the bump on Bohnenblust's head to know
what he was dealing with. He'd bashed his "noddle"
against something, the edge of a table, a door, a cupboard, a projecting wall even. But he had certainly
not been hit.

Should he keep his head down and let the oh-soclever Dr Laduner get on with his game of questionand-answer in peace?

"And the noise didn't wake Schmocker, then?" Dr
Laduner asked. "You lay there unconscious in the next
room for two hours and Herr Schmocker did not wake
up? No one in the dormitory noticed anything? You know there are a few patients there who don't sleep
well - they didn't notice anything?"

Studer decided to intervene. They were never going
to get anywhere like this. "I think we can leave that for
the moment. If you're agreeable, I'd like to try and
form an overall picture of the affair. Could I see the
room Pieterlen shared with Schmocker?"

Studer got up and went into the next room. Two
windows. One looked out into the garden, the other
onto the two storeys of D1. Two beds. A dozen charcoal
sketches on the walls: heads, male, strangely stiff, obviously drawn from photographs; ghostly looking trees; a
large head, like something out of a dream, with a wide
mouth, froglike. And the head of a girl ...

The head of a girl. Chocolate-boxy, like those postcards people like to send to their boy- or girlfriends.
But it was clear that it hadn't been drawn from a
photograph. One by one Studer pulled out the four
drawing pins, folded up the picture and put it in his
pocket. Then he lifted first one mattress, then the
other. Underneath the second he found a square piece
of some tough, grey material. He picked it up, feeling
the texture between his fingers. It was firm. Studer
shook his head and put the piece of cloth in his
pocket. There was nothing else of interest in the room.
One drawer he pulled out contained pencils, sticks of
charcoal, chalk, a bottle of fixative ... He went back
into the dormitory.

The others had not moved an inch, apart from
Neuville, who was practising a difficult tango step,
turning and going forward at the same time. He
couldn't quite master it, his weasel face was screwed up
in an earnest frown.

"This piece of cloth," Studer said, "can anyone say
where it comes from?"

It was Jutzeler, the slim staff nurse, who answered
first. He was surprised, he said, that the sergeant had
found that scrap of cloth. Did he consider it significant? It came from one of the linen sheets they used in
D1 for patients who liked to tear everything up. Pieterlen had been given part of one - quite a large piece, by
the way - to dry his paintbrushes. Why was the sergeant
so interested in it?

No reason, Studer replied, apart from the fact that
he had found it underneath the mattress, in the middle, fairly well hidden. Perhaps there was nothing to it.

"But let's get on. Pieterlen was at the harvest festival
yesterday?"

"Yes."

"How long did it go on for?"

"Until midnight," Jutzeler said, crossing his arms
over his chest as if to say: I'm here to give information.
There was definitely a similarity between him and Dr
Laduner.

"And did Pieterlen dance?"

"No. At first he was looking forward to dancing,
then, suddenly, he refused to. He sat down in a corner
and it was only with great difficulty that we managed to
get him to play the accordion ... for a few dances. He
was in a bad mood - probably because Irma Wasem
hadn't come to the festival."

Wasem? Studer pricked up his ears.

"Who is this Fraulein Wasem?" he asked Dr Laduner,
putting on a guileless look. He saw Dr Neuville suddenly pause in the middle of a dance step, balance on
the ball of his foot, wink and grin, while Dr Blumenstein, still standing on one leg like a stork, blushed.
The two ladies stared at the floor.