Asylum Read online

  A server appeared and the professor ordered for us in atrocious French, and once she’d left we finally looked at each other, as though her presence and the fact of ordering had made the meeting real; it gave us the signal to begin. “I want to know,” I said to him, “what you and Annie Desmarchais were talking about before she was murdered.”

  “Of course you do.” He was unperturbed. “Aren’t we supposed to have some lubricating small-talk conversation first? Talk about the upcoming elections? Do you think the Parti Québécois stands a chance this time around? Or perhaps the weather—it’s been fine, but I hear there are clouds moving in for tomorrow.”

  I stared at him, using my best you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. It worked. He sighed and crossed one leg elegantly over the other. He was wearing a pale gray suit with a white shirt and a red tie: academia meets big business. As, I suspected, he was about to tell me.

  He didn’t disappoint. “We’re both aware of the MK-Ultra experiments at the Allan,” he said finally. I nodded. “I was not directly involved. I was in medical school before I knew anything about them, to be honest, and that was in the seventies. It was all over by then. But my advisor—my mentor in every possible way—worked at the Allan in those years.”

  “So you cut him some slack.” Using the pronoun was a safe enough bet; I hadn’t yet heard a woman’s name associated with the project.

  “Of course I didn’t,” MacDougal snapped. He stopped as the server—a young woman with the best complexion I’ve ever seen anywhere—put our coffees down. “Non, merci, rien d’autre,” I said impatiently when she asked if we wanted anything else. I just wanted her to go away.

  MacDougal stirred sugar into his coffee. “There was no need for me to gloss over any of the project with Dr. Schmidt,” he said. “It was never presented to me as anything but good medicine, and it was a very long time before I was able to think for myself on that score.”

  He sipped his coffee. I ignored mine. “What happened?” I asked.

  “You must understand, the Allan was seen as one of the best places in the country to work,” he said. “A premier placement. I was honored to be taken on there. And of course, by the time I was there, the—excesses—had stopped.”

  “Excesses?” I raised my eyebrows. “That’s a funny way of talking about torture. Or murder.”

  “It wasn’t murder!”

  “No?” I leaned forward, nearly across the small table. “What do you call it then, Professor?”

  He put down his cup with a thump that made me jump. “Why don’t I just tell you what you need to know?” he asked. “I don’t appreciate the third degree, or the attitude. If you want information, then by God have the courtesy to ask for it without a layer of contempt.”

  I leaned back, took a sip of coffee, and nodded. “You’re right,” I said, gesturing. “Go ahead.”

  He drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Very well. I first saw the Allan in 1982. You have to understand, back then, it was legendary in the psychiatric community. I felt I was lucky to be there, and lucky to have the mentor I had. There were rumors, even then—but there are always rumors in hospitals. One even had Dr. Mengele himself escaping from Germany at the end of World War Two and continuing Nazi experimentation at the Allan. It was laughable.” He glanced at me. “I still don’t believe that particular bit of the story.” He paused. “But the rest … well, it’s credible.”

  He dampened his lips before continuing. “Drugs were being used in a big way in the eighties,” he said. “ECT—electroshock therapy—had gone out of vogue, but the drugs were very cutting-edge.” There was some bitterness in his voice, now. “And Lansbury Pharmaceuticals was the major supplier. Whatever we wanted, they seemed to be able to get, sometimes at great rates, sometimes for free. And when you’re prescribing … well, you have to understand, and I don’t say this easily, but the truth is that doctors don’t know as much as the general populace gives them credit for knowing. Doing medicine is always a little hit-or-miss, some times more than others. What people don’t get is that the brain is a very complicated organ, and there’s a lot to be understood about it, even today. A lot that no one knows yet. So we learn by experimentation.”

  Somehow I’d finished my coffee without being aware of drinking it. I brought the empty cup to my mouth and then set it down again. Still I didn’t say anything.

  “The experimentation,” said Dr. MacDougal, “must, however, be rigorous, ethical, and conducted always with the patient’s permission and with their best interests in mind. A formula that I began to discover had not always been the Allan’s practice. It had particularly been lacking when there was American funding coming in. Consent was not always required. No: I lie—consent was never required. The Americans saw that sort of thing differently than we did.”

  “The CIA,” I said.

  He nodded. “The CIA. They gave us everything: money, expertise, they kept the government off our backs, no inspections … just left the doctors free to do whatever medicine they thought would be best. As long as the CIA got the results they wanted.” He sighed, rubbing his wrist, his eyes going past me, past the park, into some darkness I was only skirting the edge of. “And then the plug got pulled. When the Americans ended MK-Ultra, the psychiatry department started hurting for funding. There was panic. The Allan needed a knight in shining armor to rescue it and—lo and behold, as if by magic, one appeared. That was when Lansbury upped its part of the ante.” He glanced at me. “Don’t misunderstand: Lansbury was part of the Allan before the CIA ever was. But since the seventies, it’s been the major funding source. And I was grateful. So grateful, in fact, that I agreed to help them with PR campaigns.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know about the videos you did.”

  “Yes,” he said bleakly. “I expect that you do. And I don’t know about you, Mrs. LeDuc, but I need something a little stronger than coffee just now.” He signaled for the server. “Will you share a bottle of cider with me?”

  I nodded. I didn’t trust my voice.

  He ordered the cider and then took in another deep breath. This couldn’t have been easy for him, and despite my anger, I found myself feeling sorry for him, too.

  But not too much.

  We didn’t say much of anything for a few moments. The server brought the cider and poured us each a glass before leaving again; MacDougal drank thirstily and then put his glass down; it made an odd sound on the zinc tabletop. “So there we were,” he said. “The Allan humming along, Lansbury money matching funds with the McGill money coming in, and everything was perfect. Then last year I happened to be attending a fundraiser and found that I was sitting beside Annie Desmarchais.”

  Aha. I was wondering when we’d get to her.

  “I didn’t know that much about MK-Ultra, to be perfectly honest,” MacDougal said. “But she did—and she told me. She told me about her own past, before she was adopted by the Desmarchais family, and how orphans had been reclassified by the Church so that the asylums could get the federal mental-health money.”

  I hated to interrupt him, but I had to. “Was it really that much more money? I’ve never seen any figures. Were there enough children to justify it?”

  He smiled bleakly. “It was,” he said softly, “a perfect storm of possibilities for abuse. You had a governmental system trying to save money, and turning orphans into psychiatric patients saved on education. You had nuns working ten- to twelve-hour days, day after day, without any kind of preparation for the task, each one of them responsible for between ten and twenty children. Boys were cared for by men hired out of the community—and we’re not talking urban Montréal here, the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu was out in a village back then, it didn’t become part of Montréal proper until later—so whomever they hired was also undereducated and underprepared.”

  He took a swallow of cider. Thus reminded, I took a quick sip too, feeling the tartness on my tongue. He cleared his throat. “And, yes, to answer your question … Québec at the beginning
of the last century was the cradle of the Western world, quite literally the cradle, with more births for a period of about thirty years than anywhere else in the western hemisphere. There was no birth control, and unwed mothers were shamed into giving their children to the Church; they were told that their own bad traits would rub off on their children otherwise. They thought they were saving the children.” He shook his head. “Like I said, a perfect storm for abuse. And abuse there was, tremendous abuse. All of that would have been terrible enough, all by itself.”

  “And then there was MK-Ultra,” I said.

  He nodded. “And then there was MK-Ultra.”

  We both drank in silence for a moment. He wasn’t finished. “Annie told me she was one of the Duplessis orphans. She told me that she felt guilt, immense guilt, for not being able to go back and help every other child in that hellhole. And then she told me about the basement—that was where they did the experiments. Only on children with no family. Only on children no one would miss. I’d like to think that they believed they were working toward the greater good, trying to discover what might and might not help a patient.”

  “It doesn’t matter what they believed,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any case, the point is that both the Allan and Lansbury were deeply involved in what happened in that basement for all those years. So you can imagine how deeply affected I was, how desperate to do something to make right what had happened, not that anyone ever could. Annie and I became, well, friends, of a sort. She was determined that it all should come to light, that McGill and Lansbury should both not only acknowledge the part they played in the situation, but that they should also provide financial compensation to the remaining living victims. I agreed to help. We needed a researcher, someone impartial, and so I enlisted the assistance of—”

  “Danielle Leroux,” I said. I knew this part already, but seeing it fit so neatly into the jigsaw puzzle of information was powerful.

  “Yes,” he said, and his gaze went unhappily around the immediate area, looking at the family seated next to us, the little boy blowing bubbles in his soda with his straw.

  He knew, I thought. He knew that asking Danielle for help was ultimately the reason she died. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said suddenly. “You didn’t kill her.”

  “I may as well have.”

  I waved that away. He’d have to come to terms with it on his own. “What about the others?”

  He didn’t pretend to misunderstand me. “I only know about Caroline Richards,” he said. “Annie had contacted her, asked her to help with her investigation, help get the word out. Who better than an investigative journalist? The CBC had done a series some time ago on the Duplessis orphans. Annie thought that Caroline could do something similar. Put it on public display, put pressure on the university and Lansbury to ante up. Caroline was excited about it—if she could’ve carried it off, it would have been a major coup for her. Awards. Who knows what.”

  “Did you meet her?”

  “Caroline? No, never. She met with Annie, and they were careful. Never at the foundation or the newspaper, always a different place, always careful.”

  “Not careful enough.”

  He looked at me. “I suppose not.”

  I sighed and finished my cider, watched him refill my glass. I really didn’t need any more. “You know where this is all leading,” I said. “Someone, probably either at McGill or Lansbury—and my money’s on McGill—found out. They realized these women were the driving force behind the investigation. They wanted them dead and they were willing to do it in such a sensational way that no one would look beyond the how as to the why.”

  “That’s my understanding of it as well.” He was staring into his glass.

  “And you have no idea how Isabelle Hubert fits in?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t. She seems to have moved in some powerful circles, however, and it’s possible…” His voice trailed off delicately.

  Yes. It was possible. But I had something even better: I had the motive. “Her mother was at the asylum,” I said. “At the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu. She went over the wall, ran away, managed to escape. She was just a teenager. Isabelle was doing genealogical research, she was finding out about her mother’s story. I expect that’s the connection you didn’t know about.” I blew out a sigh and stood up. “Thank you, Professor.”

  He politely stood up with me. “You will continue to—er—pursue the matter?”

  “In conjunction with the police,” I said smoothly. Yeah, right.

  You never know.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “It’s all well and good to know what,” said Ivan on Saturday morning. “And even why. That doesn’t do much to tell you the who, though, does it?”

  “I know,” I said, frustrated. Upstairs, the kids were quarreling over the use of the computer they shared when they were at our house; they didn’t have to share, apparently, at their mom’s. I didn’t have the energy to go play referee, and Ivan had his hands full making sandwiches for lunch. Creative sandwiches; Claudia had just informed us that she’d turned vegetarian and that anyone who ate meat was, ipso facto, contributing to murder.

  Reason number four hundred why I’d never really wanted children: I just didn’t have the patience. I was dealing with enough mayhem already: it was annoying, on top of everything else, to be told—and in the most patronizing voice imaginable—that I should be worrying about where my ham came from.

  I slumped down in my chair at the kitchen table. “Julian’s off the case,” I said miserably. “Monsieur le directeur having concluded that they were all sex killings and that the perpetrator is locked up.”

  “Won’t he change his mind if there’s another?” asked Ivan.

  I stared at him. “What did you say?”

  He shrugged; somehow he always looks more Russian when he’s shrugging, making hand gestures. His body in movement is different from his body at rest. I don’t know what that’s about. Genetics? DNA?

  It’s not like he’s ever spent time in the cafés of St. Petersburg.

  “Martine, just because you’ve found these connections between the victims doesn’t mean that there’s not somebody else out there who’s still in danger from this guy, whoever he is,” he said, and immediately got distracted. “Oh, damn. Vegetarians eat eggs, don’t they?”

  “You mean that someone else—”

  “Look,” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting across from me. “Whoever this is, he’s going around eliminating women who he feels are putting him in some sort of danger because of their investigations into the Allan and the asylum, right? So who’s to say that these are the only four? Maybe there’s someone else, someone who’s not even on your radar. Maybe even a man.”

  A man. That was a thought. How would they pass off a man’s murder as the work of a psychotic rapist? Then I had a thought. “Dr. MacDougal?”

  Ivan shook his head. “If they wanted to keep him from talking, wouldn’t they have done it by now?”

  “I don’t know.” The professor did seem to have all the facts, I thought, and maybe a dawning willingness to share them; yet the killer hadn’t even considered eliminating him. What was the difference? Or was he the killer? He could have, after all, just been been putting on some act in front of me. I stared into space, biting my bottom lip. There was still too much that we didn’t know.

  Ivan got up again and bustled around the counter. “Lunch is ready!” he called out, then turned to me. “Let’s not talk about it now,” he said. “There’s no reason for the kids to hear this.”

  I nodded, still thinking, dazed by the revelation. We had to narrow all this down to a person, I thought; not the Allan, or the asylum, or even McGill or Lansbury Pharmaceuticals. A person had raped and killed these women, not a corporation, not an institution. Who was it?

  Claudia was not happy with the egg salad that Ivan had determined was the only nutritious non-meat we had in the refrigerator, and sulke
d. Lukas, happily tearing into his ham-and-brie on baguette, made piggy noises at her. “Stop it!” I said, rather more sharply than I’d meant to. “Claudia, eat the egg salad. We’ll go out for crêpes tonight. And Lukas, stop teasing your sister.”

  “I’ll be hungry all afternoon!” she wailed.

  “Not if you eat the egg salad.”

  “Eat it, Claudia,” Ivan intervened, his voice brooking no nonsense. “We’re going to be walking a lot this afternoon, you need to have something in your stomach.”

  “Why are we walking a lot this afternoon?”

  “Because we’re going to Notre-Dame-des-Neiges to see your belle-maman’s mother.”

  “Oh, yuck,” said Claudia. “I hate going to the stupid cemetery.”

  “You make it sound like we’re going to have tea with her or something,” said Lukas to Ivan, watching his sister, enjoying the show. “She’s dead,” he added loudly, for Claudia’s benefit.

  Every month Ivan and I visit my mother’s grave in the cemetery high up on the hill—the “mont” or “mount” part of Montréal. If the kids are spending that particular weekend with us, they come along. We trim the grass and weeds that seem to always be springing up, we plant bulbs if it’s fall, we whisk the snow away if it’s winter, we add fresh flowers in the summer.

  I’d had a fairly—okay, very—problematic relationship with my mother when she was alive, but I’m nothing if not dutiful now that she’s dead. It’s guilt, no doubt. But it has to be said that interactions with her now are certainly a lot easier than they were before.

  “Well, we’re going, anyway,” said Ivan.

  “I vote that we don’t,” said Claudia.

  “Me, too,” added Lukas, for once with his sister.