Lesley arose very early, to catch the night sister before she handed over duty. She was allowed to ring through to the ward instead of merely making routine enquiries through the office, the case being new and this the first and crucial call.
‘Mr Paviour is still unconscious,’ said the ward sister, in the carefully bracing voice of one trying to make dismal news sound better than it is, ‘but I wouldn’t say he’s lost ground at all. His breathing is very slightly easier, perhaps, but of course he’s very weak. I’m afraid his condition must have been developing for some time without producing warning symptoms. The degeneration is marked. But there’s no need to be too discouraged.’
‘You mean he isn’t really any better?’ said Lesley, irritated and demanding. Why must nurses say so much and mean so little?
‘Well… his condition is much the same. I wouldn’t say he’s
That did convey something, more than it said.
‘Do you think…’ Lesley hesitated. ‘Should I visit this afternoon? If he’s unconscious, it can’t help him…’
‘Well, I don’t think he’s going to
‘Thank you,’ said Lesley, in a small, thoughtful voice, and put down the receiver in its rest.
There was no point now in going back to bed. The morning was bright, clear and still. From the window she could see the river glittering in the first slanting light, like frost-fire. She went down and made coffee, and sat over it for a long time, staring out at the dawn, and going over the telephone conversation word by word, sorting out the grain from the chaff. ‘In the circumstances…’ Visiting hours at the General were generous but fixed; the circumstances that permitted visiting at any time did not need spelling out. But the sister could be wrong, even doctors can be wrong. People confidently expected to die did sometimes turn their backs on probability and decide to come back again, against all the odds. Still… ward sisters are very experienced in the prognostication of death. Especially night sisters.
She heard one of her guests stirring overhead in the bathroom, and got up to make fresh coffee and prepare the breakfast. She was busy laying the table, here in the bright, cheerful kitchen instead of the sombre dining-room, when Charlotte came in.
‘I’m sorry, I meant to be up before you and start the breakfast, and now you’ve done everything. I hope you managed to get some sleep?’
‘I slept extraordinarily well,’ said Lesley, and meant it. ‘I don’t know how it is. Trust in providence, or what? But I did.’
‘You haven’t called the hospital yet?’
‘I have. I wanted the sister who really knew something, rather than one who’d just come on. She was the one I saw last night, she promised me she’d be standing by for a call from me. His condition is unchanged,’ she said, answering Charlotte’s unasked question. ‘No better. And she insists, no worse. But I’m not sure the lady doesn’t protest too much.’
‘I’m sorry!’ said Charlotte, reading the look more attentively than the words.
‘Darling, I married a man nearly forty years older than I am. I’ve lived all the while with the obvious knowledge that I certainly was going to survive him, probably by many years. All I hope is that I haven’t always been awful to him, and he really did get something out of it. While it lasted. It could hardly last all that long, could it? I was grateful, I was contented and happy, and I hope I made all that clear. In love,’ she said firmly, ‘I never was. Not with him. I don’t feel that that was any failure on my part, I never promised it.’
‘I don’t feel it was, either,’ agreed Charlotte, reassured. ‘Where do you keep the marmalade?’
They finished the cooking together, just in time for Bill Lawrence’s entrance. He was used to breakfasting in pyjamas, unshaven, on the corner of his desk; it did him good to have to face two young women over the breakfast-table. He was scrubbed and immaculate this morning, like the sky, almost arrogantly clean and pure. We must, thought Charlotte, be one of the oddest trios sitting down to coffee in England this morning. How did any of us get here, in Stephen Paviour’s house, in this tragic palimpsest of a city without people? And yet everything felt improbably normal and ordinary, like the extraordinary encountered in a dream.
‘You didn’t look in on Gus?’ asked Lesley, looking up at Bill.
‘I did, as a matter of fact. I thought maybe I should check. He’s still asleep. I’d even say he’s snoring now. I hope that’s a good sign. I went up to the bed, but he never stirred, so I left him to it. He’ll probably sleep until noon.’
It was at that exact moment that the sound exploded above them, somewhere upstairs, remote at the back of the house. A distant, peremptory, wordless bellow of alarm and conflict, curiously like an antique battle-cry. And then a confused thudding and heaving of bodies braced in mute struggle, frightening out of all proportion to its loudness.
They rose as one, strained upright and motionless for the fraction of a second. Then they raced for the doorway, Charlotte first because she had been quivering on the receptive for just such a signal, not only here in the kitchen, but half the night before. They streamed out into the hall and up the stairs in frantic silence.
It was almost over by the time they burst into the rear bedroom where Gus Hambro had been sleeping. Charlotte flung open the door and stood transfixed, a mere witness, with the others brought up short against her braced shoulders.
The sash window stood wide open, the lower half hoisted to its full extent. The top of a ladder projected above the sill; one man was in the act of leaping into the room, a second head loomed just within view behind him. On the bed a large body crouched froglike, leaning with thrusting forearms over an incongruous orange-coloured cushion, which had missed planting itself squarely over Gus Hambro’s sleeping face only because, in fact, he had not been sleeping for an hour or more previously, and had hoisted a sharp knee into his aggressor’s groin and rolled violently to the right at the moment of impact. He heaved and strained still at this moment, but he was too light a weight to shift that crushing incubus, though nose and mouth were safe from suffocation. It was Detective-Constable Barnes, circling behind him for the right hold, who hooked a steely forearm under the murderer’s chin, and hoisted him backwards off his prey with a heave that could well have broken even that bull neck.
The assailant crashed heavily against the wall, and gathered himself as vehemently to battle again; and Barnes and George Felse, one on either side, pinned his arms and wrestled the lunging wrists into handcuffs behind him. He
