Exploring further along the landing, Love discovered another corridor, running parallel to the first. In this case, however, its four doors were on the right. The card at the corner announced ‘Treatment cubicles (Female Patients)’. Love turned back and re-entered the male corridor, feeling that at this stage the proprieties ought to be observed.
He put his ear to the door marked ‘1’. There was silence inside. Slowly he turned the handle and pressed against the panels. The door would not move. Then he pulled and found the door had been made to open outwards. The space within was little bigger than a cupboard. It was fitted with a mirror and clothing hooks and seemed intended to serve as a small dressing-room. There was another door immediately opposite. Love tried it, but it had been locked or bolted from the other side. No sound came from whatever lay beyond.
Love stood wondering how much longer he would be able to poke his way around the private house of a doctor against whom he had no evidence or even what a magistrate would deem reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, and how he would explain his presence there if challenged. Both questions defeated him, so he put them resolutely from his mind and puzzled instead over a noise that reached him faintly from a direction he could not fix.
He went back into the corridor and tried the door numbered ‘2’. As he opened it, the sound he wanted to identify grew louder. He listened. There was no doubt about it. Leadbitter had been run to earth.
The noises that came through the inner door of the closet were those of the alderman repressing his normal boom to a confidential growl, interspersed with asinine chuckles. The general effect was curious. Love thought it suggested mild delirium under anaesthetic.
Was Leadbitter undergoing a minor operation of some kind? It was possible. The clothing he had been wearing during the day was hung untidily on the hooks at the side of the cupboard-like compartment and tossed on the narrow bench below them. Love checked them over. Only socks and shirt appeared to be missing.
He pressed his ear to the inner door. The alderman’s noises were now faint and intermittent. A sigh...a groan...a contented gasp...The anesthetic must have taken effect. Very gently, Love tried the door. It would not yield.
As he stood looking at it, he heard footsteps approaching fairly rapidly along the corridor. He turned to close the cubicle door but realized that this would entail reaching out of his present comparatively secure shelter.
Before he could make up his mind what to do, a shadow fell across the entrance. He did his best to defend his position by staring boldly straight into the face of the large man who now peered in at him.
Surprisingly enough, the new arrival did no more than pause, deliver a friendly wink, and pass on along the corridor. A door opened and closed—Love judged it to be the last in the row—and there was silence once more. Not even an aldermanic grunt broke the stillness.
Going out into the corridor again, Love reflected on the stranger’s amiability. He supposed the wink to have been a natural gesture for one patient to make to another. The
He eased open the door of the third cubicle. There was no clothing in this one. Automatically, he tried the farther door. To his surprise, it moved freely, and he was just in time to tighten his grip on the handle to prevent the door swinging open away from him. With his free hand he pulled the outer door closed at his back and stood for some seconds in the resultant darkness before beginning to edge his way slowly into the space ahead.
The room, if that was what it was, was comfortably warm, but absolutely dark. Love took tiny, silent steps forward, feeling tensely for obstacles with feet and outstretched hands. It was not his sense of touch, though, but his ears that warned him to pause.
Somewhere in front of him, quite near, was being made a soft rhythmical sound. It was, he thought, a sort of gentle brushing, regular and mechanical. Brushing—or dragging, perhaps. As he listened, an earlier speculation returned to mind and was instantly mated to the new problem. Of course—anaesthesia. It was a pump or respirator of some kind that he now could hear. He recalled an operation scene in a film, where bladders softly inflated and deflated as the surgeons bent over their task.
But why no lights?
Slowly and with infinite caution, Love slithered first one foot, then the other, over the carpet. Carpet? He frowned. Hospitals never had carpets. But that wasn’t to say private clinics did not. Never mind, he was nearing whatever was making the soft exhalations. He felt in his overcoat pocket for the torch he carried. The time had come for a showdown, whatever the consequences. He could always plead lost directions. He levelled the torch and slid his thumb to its button...
For years afterwards, Love was to question his ridiculous, his lunatic failure to identify the simple sound that had guided him across the floor that night. As the light beam leaped alarmingly ahead, Love jumped as if he held a recoiling cannon in his hand.
From a couch five feet distant was rearing up in fright and indignation the lady whose measured breathing in a contemplative doze he had so fantastically misinterpreted.
In the fraction of time before he turned and rushed with mumbled apologies in the direction whence he had come, the policeman noticed two things.
One was the identity of the outraged female.
The second was the lady’s bizarre choice of costume: a heavy glass necklace and a pair of stockings, one slightly laddered.
It was not until later that a third, no less curious, circumstance registered. He recalled that she had flung after his retreating figure the epithet ‘bloody old devil!’, together with several kinds of threat of what would happen if he ‘tried a trick like that again’.
What did she mean by ‘old’, Love asked himself with some annoyance as he tramped back to where he had left the car.
Chapter Thirteen
Purbright was still in his office when Love drove the car into the police garage and walked past the night sergeant, who had begun his mysterious routine of entering things laboriously in books and juggling with plugs and cords on the switch-board.
