grey hair and pointed beard at the other. The face wasn’t covered, so he wasn’t dead, after all. Just in process of dying. Or pretty near to it, anyhow, touch and go. Orrie looked up at Lesley, and the case in her hand, and understood.
‘How you going to get back, then? I tell you what, I’ll bring the Morris along to the General after you, and drive you home.’
‘Oh, would you, Orrie? It would be a help.’ She groped in her handbag and fished out the car keys for him. ‘I was going to get a taxi back, but I should be grateful. I’m sorry to spoil your Sunday evening like this.’ For ordinarily Orrie would have been in ‘The Crown’ by this time, or on a fishing day probably in ‘The Salmon’s Return’. She smiled at him, rather wanly, and went on quickly into the ambulance after her husband; and Orrie went off with the keys in his hand to get the Morris out of the garage.
‘Now where’s the other one?’ Braby demanded briskly, as soon as the ambulance had driven away.
He looked down with astonishment at the slight body in the bath, newly emerged from its indescribable grime. Gus was covered from head to foot with bruises and abrasions, his knees were rubbed raw, and his hands were a mess, but that appeared to be the sum of what ailed him. His state was something between unconsciousness and sleep, but steadily relaxing into simple sleep. He breathed deeply and evenly.
‘Now what in the world,’ demanded the doctor, ‘has been happening to this one?’
‘That,’ said George, ‘is a long and interesting story, and one I intend to tell you, if you can hang around for a while. Because I think you may very well be useful in more ways than one.’
‘Tell me now, it might help. And you may as well finish the job you’ve started, while you’re about it. By the look of him, he won’t mind waiting for my services.’
George told him, while they lifted Gus out and wrapped him in a bath-sheet, and patted him dry with gingerly care, for there was hardly a square inch of him without minor lesions. They were still busy when Charlotte tapped at the door.
‘I’ve made up a bed for him,’ she reported, when George opened the door to her. ‘He’s going to be fit to stay here, surely? And Bill’s brought him pyjamas, and some clothes of his own. They won’t fit too well, but they’ll be better than Mr Paviour’s. Bill’s sleeping here overnight, too. I think Lesley’ll feel better with a man in the house. It seemed the best thing to do.’
‘You’re a treasure,’ said George warmly, and came out of the room to her, shutting the others in. ‘Which bedroom have you chosen for him? Show me!’
She showed him, saying nothing about the fact that it was next to her own, but it seemed that he had divined as much. He looked at her with a small, approving, almost affectionate smile, and she gazed back at him stubbornly and refused to blush. There were more important considerations.
‘I understand your choice,’ he said respectfully. ‘But for my purposes it might not be a good idea. Would you mind changing to another one? Let’s have a look at what’s on offer.’
He chose a room as remote from the regularly used ones as the large house permitted, its door solitary on a small cross-landing above the back stairs, which were well carpeted. The window looked out on the shrubberies and orchard at the rear, and was out of sight from the sunny front living rooms where all the activity of the household centred. The room had a large, walk-in wardrobe which had almost certainly been a powder-closet in Queen Anne’s day, when the house was built.
‘This,’ said George, ‘will do fine. You make up the bed, and we’ll get him into it.’
‘It’s too remote,’ she said accusingly. ‘You can’t keep an eye constantly on this room. And supposing he came round and called out? No one would hear him.’
‘No,’ said George, ‘they wouldn’t, would they?’ He met her eyes and smiled. ‘Bring the sheets, and I’ll help you make the bed.’
She didn’t know why she did what he told her, when she distrusted, or felt she ought to distrust, his proceedings. But she went for the sheets, all the same.
Doctor Braby’s report on Gus Hambro was made twice over, once informally upstairs, while he examined the patient, and dressed the abrasions on his hands and knees; and once, with more ceremony, downstairs to the assembled company before he left the house. Gus continued oblivious of both the care lavished on him and the indignities to which he was subjected. The only motion he made was when the doctor, with thumb and finger, delicately parted his eyelids, and then his brows contracted protestingly, and his eyes screwed tight against even this invasion of light.
‘Perfectly natural reaction,’ said Braby, ‘after twenty-odd hours of digging his way out like a mole. As soon as he’s released from the necessity of struggle he collapses. There’s nothing wrong with him but pure exhaustion, a combination of tension—and that’s relaxed now-—wear and tear—and that can move into the stage of reparation— and sheer want of sleep. I suppose he hasn’t eaten anything all that time, either, but that’s a comparatively low priority. After about ten hours’ sleep he may wake up enough to want something, but don’t worry if he stays out even longer. Pulse is like a rock. He’ll do all right.’
The second time—it was considerably later—he phrased it rather differently. He came down the stairs with George just after the Morris had drawn up outside. Lesley was coming in at the door, her face set and pale, with Orrie hesitating half-anxiously and half-truculently on the doorstep behind her. But for the master of the household, the cast was complete, for Charlotte and Bill Lawrence were just coming through from the kitchen with coffee and sandwiches, specially prepared against Lesley’s return.
‘They say,’ said Lesley tiredly, in response to enquiries, ‘I can telephone early tomorrow, and they’ll be able to tell me more then. They said whatever it was you gave him was only just beginning to take effect. I left him looking just the same.’ She looked round with slightly dazed tranquillity, seemed faintly surprised to see so many of them, and fixed upon George. ‘How is Mr Hambro?’
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said George. ‘We’ve made free with your house and your bed-linen, and put him into the back bedroom over the shrubbery, where he’ll be quiet. He isn’t fit to be moved. But we think—we hope—he’s going to be all right.’
‘Then he’s still unconscious?’ she said, her eyes widening. ‘He hasn’t been able to tell you
