Night recording — final hour

Transcript

REEVE: Half three. Camera eight has come back on its own.

[pause]

The ward is empty and the beds are made. I have the tape from twenty to eleven and the beds were not made. Twelve beds, stripped, I watched the picture go. Now there are twelve beds made up like a hotel.

Nobody has been through that door. The reader says nobody has been through that door since five to ten.

[long pause, tape hiss]

Four o'clock. Nothing.

Ruth is still here. I told her to go at one and she is still in records with the light on and I am glad, I will say that on a tape, I am glad she is still here.

[a telephone rings, four times, distant, below]

That is the plant extension. There is no plant extension. There is no plant.

[pause]

Ten past four. The vestibule turnstile has just registered an entry.

I am looking at camera one. The vestibule is empty. The turnstile is turning. It has turned once, properly, all the way round, the way it does when a person walks through it, and there is nobody in the picture.

[pause]

I am going to go down.

I want it on the tape that I am going down and that everything up to here is exactly what I saw, and if somebody plays this back and it does not agree with whatever they write in the report, this is the one that is true.

Alton Reeve. Four sixteen in the morning.

[footsteps. a chair. a door.]

[the recording continues for three minutes and nine seconds with no further speech]

[at four nineteen the tape records a single sound: the ward fixture striking, which on this machine is a sharp rise and then a steady tone at mains frequency]

[the tone continues to the end of the reel]