Green for Danger (24 page)

“I'm not giving him any,” said Barnes in a sick voice. “He
must
have oxygen.”

Cockrill wiped damp hands on the sides of his gown, fighting down his panic, fighting to regain his ordinary grim composure, and glanced down, unthinking, at the roughness inside the palm. A little black speck.

A little black speck.

The room reeled about him in a swirl of green and silver, with a small black speck growing larger and larger and larger; blotting it out, blotting out his sight and sound and sense and reason, muffling his brain in soft dark velvet, hammering at his memory with a drumming, thudding, throbbing insistence … a sliver of steel pierced the blackness for a moment, thrust quivering into a bloodstained, torn green gown; his own hands loomed at him out of the mist, pink and clean from the surgeon's washbasin; Woody came staggering towards him, a heavy iron cylinder clasped like a child to her breast … and he was on his knees at Barney's side, clawing like a madman at taps and reducing valves. “Cut it off! Cut the oxygen off! Use the spare cylinder … the spare cylinder of oxygen … give it to him from that …”As Barnes took over, brushing his hands aside, he caught up a pair of scissors from the trolley and ran the blunt outside edge down the black and white oxygen tube. A curl of soft black paint peeled away under the steel. Beneath the black was a layer of shiny green.

2

Carbon dioxide. A cylinder identical, but for its colour, with an oxygen cylinder. A colourless, odourless gas. A cylinder of carbon dioxide with a coat of black paint over its green, placed where an oxygen cylinder should be. Nothing to show, no way of telling; nothing but a speck of sticky black paint on a pair of clean hands; on the front of a surgical gown.

Ten minutes later Barney was saying shakily: “All the time I thought I was pouring oxygen into him, it was CO
₂
!”

“I remember you told me,” said Cockrill, mopping his brow, his brown hands very shaky but his eyes bright again and his brain quite cold and clear, “that if it could have been possible for Higgins to have been getting gas and carbon dioxide instead of gas and oxygen, he would have died in very much the same way.”

“Of course; asphyxia. He was getting no air.”

The terrible colour was fading from William's cheekbones; the jactitations had ceased, the bulging neck muscles relaxed and he began to breathe more normally. They stood motionless gazing down at him; gazing at the livid green scar on the black cylinder. “This doesn't concern you, Sister,” said Cockrill going over to the staring woman behind the instrument trolley; “perhaps you'd leave us, would you? And not a word about this outside. Do you hear?” Nobody else moved or spoke. Barnes continued to sit with his right hand heavy on the mask over William's face.

And suddenly Esther was standing in the doorway, with Frederica at her elbow. She looked at their ashen faces, at the quiet form on the table, at the unused instruments and the trolleys pushed aside, and cried in a voice of dreadful despair: “He's dead!”

Woods ran across to her. “No, darling. It's all right. He's safe.”

“He's dead,” repeated Esther, not even seeing or hearing her, staring straight past her into some private inferno of her own.

Barney looked up for a moment from his work. “No, no, he's perfectly all right, Esther; really he is, he's perfectly all right.”

“There has been a little—accident, my dear,” said Moon, gently, going over to her and taking her by the arm. “But it's all over now; he's quite all right now.”

“An accident?” she said faintly.

“Someone accidentally painted a carbon dioxide cylinder black and white to make it look like oxygen,” explained Cockie sweetly.

“Painted.… Carbon dioxide.…” She looked at him, trembling, but suddenly burst out, turning on him violently: “Inspector Cockrill—
you
did this! You let him in for this! You knew it was going to happen.…”

“No, I didn't, Esther,” said Cockrill coolly. “I was quite sure it wasn't going to happen. He had to have the operation—that was out of my hands, and I thought an attack might be contemplated; but I'd taken every possible precaution.… I didn't think it could be attempted.”

“The Inspector saved William's life, Esther,” said Major Moon gravely. He moved over and stood beside Cockrill, a little, plump, pink and white old man, looking earnestly into the face of a little, thin, brown one. “You did a marvellous job, Cockie; thank God we had you here.”

William breathed steadily and quietly, a million miles away in some dim, dreamless land outside the recollection of man; they talked across him as though he had been a log of wood; but Esther moved over to the table and stood very close to him. Woody said eagerly: “You were terribly quick, Inspector. I saw you suddenly glance at your hand; and it seemed only a second before you had snatched up the spanner and were opening the spare oxygen. You realised it was black paint on your hand, and then ..?”

“Well, then, I knew it must be the cylinder,” said Cockie gruffly. “That's all. I hadn't touched anything else since I washed my hands outside; but I did help you carry the cylinder.”

“Still, even so …”

“And then there was Sister Bates.”

“Sister Bates?” they echoed foolishly, gathering round him, all but Barney who continued steadily to tend his patient.

“There were two things that really interested me about the murder of Sister Bates,” said Cockrill. “Two things seemed to hold out some sort of clue to what had happened; and they'd both been done after her death.”

“She was stabbed a second time,” said Woody. This macabre detail seemed always to hold a special fascination for her.

“Exactly,” said Cockrill. “And?”

“And her body was rigged up in the mask and gown and boots.”

“Precisely,” said Cockie.

Frederica had been standing quietly by, making a little Swiss roll of a corner of her starched white apron, and automatically trying to smooth it out again. She said in her rather dense way: “I don't see what anybody could tell from that.”

“Anybody who gave it a moment's thought could tell a great deal from it,” said Cockrill, while appearing to watch them all, he studied one face in particular. “First of all—to dress her up like that! That was either the act of a lunatic, or it was done for some reason—some reason worth all the risk of spending extra dangerous minutes on the scene of the crime.”

“Perhaps this person's a lunatic then,” said Freddi, intent on the little roll.

“No,” said Cockrill. “The murderer is not a lunatic. I think he has what they call an
idée fixe
on just one subject but in everything else he's as sane as—as you or me.” He gave a grim little smile, for in addressing them, he was addressing the murderer. Nobody responded. He continued: “Higgins and Williams were attacked for the same reason; Frederica because the murderer was afraid of being caught; Sister Bates because she held tangible proof of the murder … some proof of the murderer's identity or of how the crime had been committed. There was no secret as to how
she
had died; therefore all the flummery with the mask and gown, and the second stabbing must have been connected, not with her murder, but with this missing proof. That's obvious, isn't it?”

“Clear as daylight,” said Eden ironically.

Cockrill caught him suddenly by the shoulder and pushed him in front of the poison cupboard against the wall of the theatre. “Just stand there a minute, Major Eden. That's where Bates was, taking out her ‘proof'. The murderer stood here.” He went over to the doorway and paused for a moment. “You turn and see me.… I take three paces forward.…” He raised his hand dramatically poising an imaginary knife. “You stand staring at me, terrified and incredulous … and I strike!”

“I think this is horrible,” said Esther in a low voice.

“I dare say it was horrible at the time,” said Cockie briefly. He turned back to his victim who still stood very much alive, in spite of the blow having been struck, with his back to the poison cupboard. “Now—he's dead. What do I do? Do I snatch the proof out of his hand and clear out? No, I don't. I dress the body up first and lay it out on the table. Major Moon—that wound from the knife: it wouldn't have bled very much?”

“Not externally,” said Major Moon.

“And the second wound—it would have had to be made very shortly after death, to have bled at all?”

“Almost immediately.”

“Yet there was blood all round the edges of the tear in the gown; that means that the gown was put on almost immediately the girl was dead. It wasn't a clean gown; it had been used before. Miss Woods—where would a soiled gown be kept?”

“In the laundry basket,” said Woods; “out in the anteroom, waiting to be collected.”

“It would have taken a little time to go and get it then?”

“Yes, a minute or two; and the basket would have been fastened … you couldn't get it open all in a second.”

“So I should think we might say that the murderer didn't go to the basket for the gown.”

“You told us before that the murderer was dressed up in a gown,” put in Eden, coming forward from the cupboard. “Perhaps he had also brought a gown along for Sister Bates.”

“No, he was wearing a fresh gown and mask from the linen cupboard; we checked that up afterwards. This one was soiled. Besides, I don't think he knew that he was going to need a gown for Sister Bates.”

“Well, when did he find out?” said Freddi, impatiently.

“When he saw her standing there with one in her hand,” said Cockrill, triumphantly.

There was a startled silence. Woods blurted out at last: “You mean—
that's
what she had hidden away in the poison cupboard? A surgical gown?”

“Your surgical gown, Miss Woods.”

“
Mine
?” said Woody stupidly.

“I only saw Sister Bates once, for a few minutes' interview,” said Cockie, turning it over in his mind. “I thought she was a foolish creature; but that's a different thing from being a stupid creature. She saw something that day, after Higgins died, that gave her the whole clue to what had happened.… I dare say she didn't really believe in it, in her heart; she just played about with the idea, pretending to herself that it meant more than she really believed, pretending it was a story to be stored up, to be trotted out one day when it suited her.…”

“Why should it ever have suited her?” said Eden, half-contemptuous, half on the defensive.

“I wonder,” said Cockrill, lifting a sardonic eyebrow.

Gervase shrugged his shoulders angrily. “The whole suggestion is absurd. How should Bates have noticed anything wrong with the cylinders? She'd have had to see that it had been painted, to understand what had happened. Well, how could she? She wouldn't have been fooling about with it. It isn't the sister's business to deal with the cylinders; the V.A.D. does that.… And anyway, after Higgins died, the cylinders must have been practically full; they wouldn't have needed changing. Why should she have been touching them?”

Esther spoke suddenly, quietly, from her place at William's side. She said: “You're wrong, Gervase. Sister Bates could have noticed the cylinder that day. Don't you remember that Woody took Higgins down to the mortuary and left me to clear up for her? I didn't know the routine of course, and Sister Bates helped me. She may easily have touched the cylinders, or even changed them.”

“In fact she must have,” said Barnes, who had been sitting silent all this time. “Otherwise the next patient would have died too.” He went a little grey again, at this dreadful possibility.

“So you see!” said Cockie.

“I don't see what it had to do with the gown,” insisted Woody, who seemed to take it as a personal affront that her gown should be involved.

“Ah, the gown,” said Cockie, rocking gently backwards and forwards from his toes to his heels. “The gown was the clue to it all; the really substantial clue. Miss Sanson has shown us that Sister Bates
was
fussing around in the theatre that morning, after Higgins died; she may have noticed the gown then, or later; we don't know … but at any event, she hid it away in the poison cupboard on a shelf that wasn't much used; and when the murderer found her she was standing there by the cupboard with the gown in her hands. He killed her to get it, but having killed her, he couldn't take it away; he couldn't go marching about the hospital with a soiled surgical gown under his arm, without somebody noticing it. He had to leave it in the theater; and since he had to do that, he had to leave it in such a way that we should not notice it; or noticing it, shouldn't understand its significance. He dressed the body up in it and he added the mask and boots and he laid the poor girl out on the table, to look as though it were some sort of crazy afterthought … some sort of rite or ceremonial that only a lunatic would have thought of.…”

“Lunatic's the word,” broke in Freddi, impatiently. “Who but a lunatic would have killed Bates to get the gown from her and then gone away and left it. It doesn't make sense. I don't believe a word of it.” She dismissed the whole business and marched over to Barney, leaning over his shoulder to look with professional interest at William's face. Barney moved the mask away for a moment, to let her see the improvement in colour, and lifted with a delicate third finger, one of the eyelids. “He's doing
fine
,” said Frederica, smiling up at Esther reassuringly.

Cockrill entirely ignored this slightly bossy display; but it relieved the tension a little, brought them all down from their high horses of self-defense. Woody smiled indulgently and winked at Gervase; she always adored Freddi when she was showing off. Major Moon pulled off his little, round Chinaman's cap and twiddled it round quite gaily, holding it by its centre. Even Esther faintly smiled. Cockrill brought them all up with a jerk, saying coolly: “And then of course, having laid the body out as we've seen—the murderer stabbed it a second time—through the gown.”