The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories by Reggie Oliver Page A

I was happy to be able to put her mind at rest. A book and a play were not going to compete; they might even complement one another.
    I called her number several times without getting a reply. Eventually the telephone was picked up by ‘Monica’s assistant’, as she described herself. She sounded suspicious and asked for my name and business. Giving her my name and number I said: ‘Tell Dr Freede that it’s about Eleanor Marchant.’
    Within ten minutes the phone rang and I was speaking to Monica Freede. The voice, breathy and with no definable accent, sounded anxious, almost accusing.
    ‘You said it was about Eleanor.’ Anyone listening in might have thought she was talking about a close friend who had been involved in a road accident.
    I explained about the books from the London Library and when she spoke again, I was conscious of increased tension.
    ‘I’m writing a book about her, you know. I’ve got a publisher. My work’s nearly finished.’
    I reassured her that I was only writing a play on the subject not a book.
    ‘Ah.’ The tension slacked but did not disappear altogether. She asked how I had come to be interested in the case and I told her that I had been at school near Grove House, though not about my adventure there. She was intrigued.
    ‘My God! So you actually saw it! That’s absolutely incredible. You know it was destroyed in 1969. Some bloody developer bought the land and just flattened it. It’s a housing estate now. Planning permission granted just like that. Local council got a kickback, I shouldn’t wonder. Nobody made any effort to preserve the building; it was an absolute disgrace.’
    ‘It wasn’t exactly a thing of beauty.’
    ‘That’s a matter of opinion, but, my God, it was a historic building! I mean, Eleanor was a pioneer in the treatment of mental illness. Read her book On the Care and Cure of the Insane . It’s incredible. She was so far ahead of her time.’
    ‘Yes...’
    ‘Of course, you do realise that she was completely innocent of those deaths.’
    ‘Do you think so?’
    ‘Oh, yes. It’s so obvious. She was shielding Dr Bradley out of misplaced loyalty. He was a complete psychopath. And of course the male establishment had been out to get her for a long time, and they saw their chance. They were quite canny about it. They knew that if she was hanged there’d be an outcry, so they had her committed to Broadmoor. So ironic.’
    ‘Why were they out to get her?’
    ‘Because she was a pioneer. Because she had made them all look incredibly out of date. A woman too! My God!’
    ‘Is there evidence for her innocence?’
    ‘Oh, yes! My God. I mean it’s obvious!’ But she offered no proof more concrete than that. I was in no position to argue with her, and I felt that even the mildest scepticism would be taken as an affront. So, with exchanged wishes of good luck, we ended our telephone conversation on amicable terms.
    As I continued with my research, which, admittedly, consisted simply in reading the books from the London Library, I could find nothing to support Dr Freede’s belief in Eleanor Marchant’s innocence. On the contrary, a clear pattern of events emerged: the increase in petty regulations, outbursts of temper with patients and staff, followed in the early stages by abject remorse; then the occasional assault on a patient—nothing serious to begin with, just a ‘box on the ear’; then the institution of severe punishments for the recalcitrant, the appearance of mysterious injuries on the inmates, and finally the unexpected deaths. Everything pointed to a slow loss of internal control in Miss Marchant which manifested itself in a growing obsession with imposing external control on those around her.
    Perhaps the most valuable book as far as I was concerned was one produced in the 1920s as part of the Notable British Trials series. There, without the adornment of external interpretation, the words and actions of the principal characters were laid bare.