Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf Read Free Page A

survive unaided.
    ‘No, don’t say anything yet. Listen to me. I know you love what you do. I know you realise what you possess, a voice in a million. You couldn’t use it as you do, if you didn’t know its value. I’m your surgeon, it’s in my own interests to ensure that what I do isn’t erased by some other force, whether outside or inside my own province. But I’m a man, too, dependent upon music to a degree you maybe don’t suspect. Would you be surprised to hear that I have every recording Maggie Tressider has ever made? You live by my grace, I live by yours. And I need you, I need you whole and effective, I need you because you excel, and your excellence belongs to me, as it does to everyone who feels and understands it. If you can use me, use me. I’m here to be used. It may not be surgery, but it comes somewhere within the bounds of healing, and that’s my business. And this is a kind of confessional, too. I’m here to forget and be forgotten, afterwards.’
    She lay silent and motionless for a long time, her blue, unblinking stare wide and wary upon his face.
    ‘You’d have to have faith in me, too,’ she said warningly, ‘or you’ll take the easy way out and think I’m a mental case.’ Her voice, used now like a weapon, had recovered much of its resplendent viola tone; he had never heard anyone sound saner.
    ‘
I’m being haunted
,’ she said, ‘
by somebody I’ve killed
. A higher priority… that’s what you said, isn’t it? That’s exactly my case. I’m possessed. I owe you and everyone here a return on your investment, I owe the world whatever it is I contribute. But I owe this ghost of mine a life. You can’t get ahead of that, can you? I’m very much afraid my debts to you are going to be difficult to pay. By the time he’s paid I shall be bankrupt.’
    The dark-blue gaze speared him suddenly, and found him appalled and pitying, exactly as she had suspected.
    ‘I told you you’d think I was mad. It’s all right, I quite understand. Sometimes I think so, too. That’s when I lose ground. But if you really want me,’ she said, ‘you’d better believe me sane and go on listening. You did say this was a confessional, remember?’
    ‘I remember. What you say now remains unsaid. Absolutely and eternally. And I believe it.’
    ‘I’ve done something terrible,’ said Maggie. ‘I don’t even know what it is, or when it happened, but I drove somebody to his death. I knew it when I came round in the night, after the accident. He was there breathing down my neck, whispering to me that I’d killed him. Not at all vague or distant, absolutely real and present, but when I turn round to look for the details there’s nothing to be found. Just this sense of guilt. What I feel is that somewhere, at some time, I failed somebody, or betrayed somebody… something unforgivable… Criminal? I don’t know, I think it may have been, if only in keeping silent about something I knew. Somebody relied on me, and I turned my back and let him fall. What matters,’ she said, her eyes straining upwards into the quivering blue and white radiance of reflected light on the ceiling over her head, ‘is that he’s dead, and I killed him.’
    She waited, almost disdainfully prepared for the soft, humouring tones that medical men keep for the mentally unstable.
    ‘And have you managed,’ he asked, very soberly and thoughtfully,‘ to find anything in your memory that lends colour to this belief?’
    ‘No. I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t trace any such incident. But it’s still there. He never stops treading on my heels.’
    ‘But there’s no known ground for this obsession. Don’t forget, you’ve been through fairly drastic surgery, and a considerable degree of shock. It isn’t at all unusual for the kind of experience you’ve lived through to leave a nightmare residue, that may surface at the least expected moment. Details submerge, and a sense of horror remains, something you can’t