Broken Dolls by James Carol Page B

building in Queen Square that was surrounded by other imposing buildings and lots of concrete. According to Blake’s secretary, the professor wasn’t just busy, he was hideously busy. Fortunately, he had a fifteen-minute window just before lunch. The emphasis she put on fifteen left me in no doubt that if we overran we would not live to see another sunrise.
    Templeton used the blue lights to carve a course through the traffic and we got there with five minutes to spare. According to Wikipedia, four of the twelve most highly cited authors in neuroscience were based at the institute. Professor Blake was number two on that list. He’d been pipped to the post by a Professor Xi Yeung, who was based at Johns Hopkins in Maryland.
    Professor Blake’s office on the top floor was dusty and well lived in. It was the polar opposite to Greg Flight’s office. There was no ego wall, partly because the professor’s credentials spoke for themselves and he didn’t need to shout about his achievements, but mostly because there was no space for one.
    Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined the walls and every single inch of space was taken up with books, hundreds of them, thousands. Paperwork was strewn across the desk and a tall stack of folders tottered precariously on the edge. Professor Blake greeted us at the door with handshakes and hellos. He had a pot belly, a wide, friendly face, grey hair and a neat beard. Delicate, precise hands. He cleared books and paperwork from a couple of chairs and waved us into them.
    ‘So, you’re working on that case where those girls were lobotomised.’ Blake’s Scottish accent had been softened by years of living in England.
    I nodded. ‘That’s right.’
    Blake shook his head. ‘A terrible business. I’ve been following the story in the news.’
    ‘What can you tell me about lobotomies?’
    ‘What do you want to know?’
    I glanced at my watch. ‘Give me the thirteen-minute crash course.’
    ‘Don’t worry about Glenda, her bark really is worse than her bite.’ Blake paused to compose himself. His face turned serious and his voice went into lecture mode. ‘Okay, a lobotomy involves cutting the connections that lead to and from the prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain that deals with personality and decision-making. The prefrontal cortex is crucial in that it enables us, amongst other things, to differentiate between conflicting thoughts, to determine what is good or bad, better or best, what is same and what is different. It’s responsible for our ability to determine the consequences of our actions, and it enables us to envisage our expectations. It also deals with our social control, that is, our ability to suppress urges that, if not controlled, could lead to socially unacceptable behaviour. When you perform a lobotomy you are basically destroying someone’s personality. Stealing their soul, if you like.’
    I thought about Sarah Flight staring blankly out the window at Dunscombe House, seeing but not seeing. That was exactly what had happened. She’d had her soul stolen.
    ‘By present-day standards, the procedure is butchery rather than surgery,’ Blake went on. ‘It’s on a par with using leeches. That said, the first thing you need to understand is that the technique was born out of desperation. Go back in time to the turn of the last century and you had asylums that were filled to bursting point with patients, and no real way of treating them. Along comes this miracle procedure which, on the surface, appears to help the patients. Of course, it’s going to be welcomed with open arms. It’s estimated that a total of forty thousand lobotomies were performed in America and seventeen thousand were performed here. Most were carried out between the early forties and the mid-fifties.’
    ‘That many,’ I said.
    ‘That’s the problem with so-called miracle cures. People get carried away, and by the time sanity prevails, the damage has been done. The Russians were the