Green for Danger (14 page)

Major Moon smelt the alcohol on her breath. “Well, now, don't bother too much about it to-night,” he said, soothingly. “You go to bed and sleep on it and to-morrow if you still think you have something to tell, you can go and see Cockie and talk it over with him. Meanwhile, I don't think you need worry; there's nobody about to-night, except the military police, and perhaps an occasional Jerry overheard … but we don't let
them
upset us, do we? I dare say you just heard Sergeant Edwards making his rounds, or Corporal Bevan or someone.… I'll walk over to your Mess with you.”

“No, no,” she said, frantically. “I must go into the hospital.”

“Well, all right, I'll see you to the hospital. But you aren't going to spend the night there?”

“No, but—I expect I'll have a cup of tea with Night Sister on St. Cat's, or something. I don't want you to come with me.”

“Well, I'll just see you to the side door,” he said, pacifically.

Patients from the ground-floor and upstairs wards, who were not actually bedridden, slept on stretchers in the long corridor that ran through the hospital basement; so as to be fairly safe from bombs. She parted from Major Moon at the door, and made her determined way down this corridor to the central staircase, leading up to the hall. The men slept uneasily on their improvised beds, humped under rough brown army blankets, their arms, outflung in sleep, lying supine across the dusty floor. Here and there a pair of bright eyes gleamed, open and aware; here and there a face was coloured vividly green or purple, where the skin specialists were trying out some new treatment; once she almost collided with a blue-clad figure, its eyes dark hollows in a huge, white bandaged face. She began to panic again, picking her way among the stretchers, stepping over sprawling arms and legs, starting at the sound of a man muttering the name of his wife or his sweetheart in his sleep. The stairs to the ground floor seemed endless in their dim, carefully shielded light. She took them two at a time, and was glad of the brightness and warmth of the reception room, where Sergeant McCoy sat drowsily over a paper.

She took down the key of the main theatre from its hook. “I won't be long, Sergeant; just going in to get something.”

There was no reason why the Orderly Sergeant should question the theatre sister's right to enter her own domain. “O.K., Sister,” he said, raising himself about three inches off his chair as a happy medium between sitting still and standing to attention when speaking to an officer. “Don't get yourself murdered!” He laughed briefly and went back to the
Kentish Mercury.

Sister Bates pushed open the swing doors of the outer lobby of the operating theatre, felt for familiar switches, and unlocked the inner door. After the terrifying dark, the glaring light of the great central lamp, brought comfort and security. She went straight across to the poison cupboard and, unlocking it, took from a little-used lower shelf the proof of—murder; took it and thrust it into the front of her apron, and locked the cupboard door, quietly and carefully and without haste, and turned back, thankfully, into the calm and sanity of that bright, white overhead light.

A figure, gowned and masked in green, stood in the doorway, watching her; with something gleaming evilly in its gloved right hand.

4

Sergeant McCoy continued listlessly to turn over the abbreviated pages of the
Mercury.
‘Death of Heronsford Man' said a small headline, and added that Joseph Higgins had Given his Life for Others, in a recent air-raid. The sergeant shook his head over this (strictly inaccurate) sub-title, for he was a sentimentalist; he turned lugubriously to the In Memoriam column.

Nurse Woods put her head quietly round the door. “Oh, hallo, McCoy; I thought you were asleep. I—I just want the key of the theatre for half a second.” She went over, all careless, to the board, but added sharply: “Good lord—it's not here.”

“Sister Bates took it twenty minutes ago,” said McCoy, rousing himself dismally from the post-mortem encomiums of Higgins' heartbroken wife, Gert, and of George, Arthur, brothers- and sisters-in-law, and little Ruby.

Woods dithered indecisively. She said at last: “Oh, well, don't bother. Don't mention that I asked you,” and went out, but returned a minute later to say, a little anxiously: “There's no light in the theatre, Sergeant. I wonder what she's done with the key.”

“She ought to have brought it back here,” said McCoy angrily. “She's got no business to lock up the theatre and keep the key. As if there 'asn't been enough fuss over all this other business; I wish I'd never 'ave mentioned it now, the Sergeant Major 'aving me on the mat and seeming to think I ought to have seen more what was going on the other night and who took the key and all, as if I wasn't rushed off me legs, thirty-one admissions in the middle of the night, and the whole place upside down.… I wish people would be a bit more considerate, that's what I wish. I suppose I'd better go and see what she's done with the key; probably gorn off and never locked up at all.…” He got up, still grumbling, and went out into the corridor.

There was not a sound in the theatre; and when he turned on the lights in the lobby, still there was no movement or sound. The key was in the door to the theatre itself; and he gave an angry exclamation and turned it and took it out of the lock. “Going off and leaving it like that! I'll report this to-morrow, nurse, you see if I don't! Getting me into more trouble.… I'll report it.”

“Perhaps she hasn't finished,” said Woods, uncertainly. “She may be coming back or something. Ought you just to take the key away? She may be still there.”

“What, sitting in the dark!” said McCoy derisively.

Woody thought it not impossible that Sister Bates might be sitting in the dark, even in the operating theatre; she might have lured Gervase there on one pretext or another, and be having a little petting party with him. She could not help grinning to herself at the thought of the happy couple being locked in to the theatre all night, and of the explanations next morning; but she said, loyally: “I do think you ought to just open the door again, Sergeant, and—make sure there's no one there.”

“Well, if there is, why don't they say so?” said McCoy, crossly. He opened the door, however, and switched on the light and poked his head inside. “Nope—no one here.…”

But the words froze on his lips; for there was someone in the theatre, after all. Laid out ceremonially on the operating table, rigged up elaborately in a surgical gown and mask and gloves, with huge white rubber boots on her feet, Marion Bates lay very silent and still. There was a jagged tear in the front of the gown, its torn edges wet and sticky with drying blood: and thrust into her breast and deep down into her foolish heart, was the quivering, delicate blade of a surgeon's knife.

CHAPTER VI

1

C
ockrill, hastily summoned from his unrestful sleep on an army bed, scrambled into his trousers and a shirt, thrust the mackintosh over these and, issuing a string of instructions, rushed off to the operating theatre. Half an hour later, six cold, shocked and bewildered people sat uneasily round the little office, awaiting his return. Esther was white, with big circles under her eyes, Woody looked ten years older, Barney's grey eyes were desperately troubled, and Gervase sat with his hands between his knees, staring down unseeingly at his shoes. Major Moon was an old, old man, and his fingers trembled as he put his cigarette to his lips. Only Frederica was cool and serene as ever, neat and exquisite, every golden hair in place under her starchy white cap. Her placid little voice grated on their nerves as she said for the hundredth time that she wished the detective would come and get it over with, and let her go back to her ward.

“For God's sake, Freddi—the hospital won't fall
down
because you're not on duty!”

“But I'm worried about my drip saline, Woody,” said Frederica plaintively. “He's awfully ill, and the orderlies are so ham-handed.…”

Barney put out his hand to her, wordlessly, and she took it and sat close against him, and he could feel her body tremble. “Only
I
know her,” he thought; “only
I
know how much goes on under the offhand little air of hers.…”

“Give me another cigarette, Gervase, will you?” said Woods.

Eden raised his head and his ugly face was grey with worry and remorse, more purely emotional than anything he had felt for many years. He took a cigarette from his case and handed it to her in his fingers, hardly knowing what he did; she said, pityingly: “Don't take it to heart so much, Gervase. It wasn't your fault.”

“Supposing it was suicide,” he said.

“My dear, it wasn't suicide. Suicides don't dress themselves up in theatre gear and lay themselves out on the table!”

“You can't say what they do or don't do, Woody,” said Barnes. “They do some very odd things sometimes.”

“They don't stab themselves twice,” said Woods.

“What do you mean—twice?” said Major Moon, looking at her sharply.

“She'd been stabbed twice; I saw it. McCoy left me there with her; I knew she was dead, actually, but I couldn't be certain, could I? I didn't know if I ought to try to get the knife out. I—I sort of bent over and looked at it. There was a big, jagged hole in the gown and you could see two holes under it, through her dress. She couldn't have done it herself, that's flat.”

“But who—I mean, Woody, if she didn't do it herself, somebody else must have done it; it means that she was
mur
dered!”

“Well, what do you think, Freddi?” said Woods, impatiently.

“But Woody—but
Bar
ney—I mean,
mur
dered! Here in the hospital! It can't be; she can't have been!”

“You talk as if you'd never heard the word before, Freddi. What do you think the Inspector's been investigating all this time?”

“But
Woody
—you don't mean you think Higgins was murdered too?”

“Freddi, darling, don't go on and
on
,” said Esther from her quiet corner.

“What I want to know is, what has it got to do with us?” said Barney. “Why should Cockrill get us all out of bed this time of night? I mean, why us six? Why not Perkins, and Jones and—well, I don't know: Matron or whoever you like?”

“But that's just the point, darling,” insisted Frederica. “That's why it's so frightful if it really was murder. Because it would mean that one of us had done it!”

Major Moon paused, lighting his third cigarette. “Oh, nonsense, child; you don't know what you're saying.”

“But it's true, Major Moon. Inspector told me so, himself. At least I suppose if Sister Bates was murdered—and I honestly can't.… Well, all right, Woody, say she
was
murdered then! Anyway, if she was, then I suppose Higgins was too, and the same person must have done them both; and the Inspector told me this evening that if Higgins had been murdered it would have meant that one of us six had done it!”

“How the hell could he work that out?” said Eden.

“No, my dear, really, it's absolutely true; one of us must have. Nobody else knew that night that Higgins was in the hospital.”

“Well, if that's all you're going on, you can leave me out,” said Woods cheerfully; “I didn't know a thing about him until the next morning.”

“But you saw him, Woody. You were talking to Sister Bates and Gervase in the hall when Higgins was carried past on the stretcher, being brought into the ward.”

“Good lord, my dear, I saw a sort of bundle of filthy rags; and afterwards Esther told me you'd had a fractured femur in.”

“Well, that's what you say, darling; but you
could
have seen who it was, and so could Gervase and Bates. The point is that nobody else even
could
have seen him except Esther and me, and Major Moon who took him in.”