“Don’t talk bloody daft.”
He heard, without surprise, that she was crying. She made no attempt to suppress or check her sobbing and it didn’t impede their progress. Perhaps, to Morag, crying was almost as natural as walking. He made no effort to comfort her except to press on her shoulders. She took that as a plea for more support and tightened her arm around his hips, leaning against him, helping him on his way. And thus incongruously entwined they passed under the shadows of the trees.
VII
The light in the demonstration room was bright, too bright It pierced even his gummed eyelids and he moved his head restlessly from side to side to escape the shaft of pain. Then his head was being steadied by cool hands. Mary Taylor’s hands. He heard her speaking to him, telling him that Courtney-Briggs was in the hospital. She had sent for Courtney-Briggs. Then the same hands were taking off his tie, undoing the buttons of his shirt, slipping his arms out of his jacket with practiced skill.
“What happened?”
It was Courtney-Briggs’s voice, harsh and masculine. So the surgeon had arrived. What had he been doing in the hospital? Another emergency operation? Courtney-Briggs’s patients seemed curiously prone to relapse. What alibi had he for the last half-hour? Dalgliesh said:
“Someone was lying in wait for me. I’ve got to check who’s in Nightingale House.”
A firm grip was on his arm. Courtney-Briggs was pressing him back into his chair. Two swinging blobs of gray hovered over him. Her voice again.
“Not now. You can hardly stand. One of us will go.”
“Go now.”
“In a minute. We’ve locked all the doors. We shall know if anyone returns. Rely on us. Just relax.”
So reasonable. Rely on us. Relax. He gripped metal arms on the chair, taking hold on reality.
“I want to check for myself.”
Half blinded by blood, he sensed rather than saw their mutual glance of concern. He knew that he sounded like a petulant child, beating his insistence against the implacable calm of the grown-ups. Maddened with frustration, he tried to rise from the chair. But the floor tipped sickeningly, then rose up to meet him through whorls of screaming color. It was no good. He couldn’t stand.
“My eyes,” he said. Courtney-Briggs’s voice, annoyingly reasonable:
“In one moment I must look first at your head.”
“But I want to see!” His blindness infuriated him. Were they doing this to him deliberately? He put up a hand and began to pick at the caked eyelids. He could hear them talking together, low voiced, in the muttered idiom of their craft from which he, the patient, was excluded. He was conscious of new sounds, the hiss of a sterilizer, a jingle of instruments, the closing of a metal lid. Then the smell of disinfectant sharpened. Now she was cleaning his eyes. A pad, deliciously cool, was wiped across each lid, and he opened them blinking to see more clearly the sheen of her dressing-gown and the long plait of hair falling over her left shoulder. He spoke to her directly.
“I must know who’s in Nightingale House. Could you check now, please?”
Without another word or a further glance at Courtney-Briggs, she slipped out of the room. As soon as the door was closed, Dalgliesh said:
“You didn’t tell me that your brother was once engaged to Josephine Fallon.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
The surgeon’s voice was deliberate, uninterested, the response of a man with his mind on his job. There was a snip of scissors, a momentary chill of steel against the skull. The surgeon was clipping Dalgliesh’s hair around the wound.
“You must have known that I should be interested.”
“Oh, interested! You’d be interested all right Your kind have an infinite capacity for taking an interest in other people’s affairs. But I confined myself to satisfying your curiosity only so far as the deaths of these two girls were concerned. You can’t complain that I’ve held anything relevant back. Peter’s death isn’t relevant-merely a private tragedy.”
Not so much a private tragedy thought Dalgliesh as a public embarrassment Peter Courtney had violated his brother’s first principle, the necessity of being successful. Dalgliesh said:
“He hanged himself.”
“As you say, he hanged himself. Not a very dignified or pleasant way to go, but the poor boy hadn’t my resources. The day when they make the final diagnosis I shall have more appropriate measures available than doing myself to death on the end of a rope.”
His egotism, thought Dalgliesh, was astounding. Even his brother’s death had to be seen in relationship to himself. He stood complacently secure at the hub of his private universe while other people-brother, mistress, patient-revolved round that central sun existing by virtue of its warmth and light, obedient to its centripetal force. But wasn’t that how most people saw themselves? Was Mary Taylor less self-absorbed? Was he himself? Wasn’t it merely that she and he pandered more subtly to their essential egotism?
The surgeon moved over to his black instrument case and took out a mirror mounted on a metal band which he clipped around his head. He came back to Dalgliesh, ophthalmoscope in hand and settled himself into a chair opposite his patient They sat confronting each other, foreheads almost touching. Dalgliesh could sense the metal of the instrument against his right eye. Courtney-Briggs commanded:
“Look straight ahead.”
Dalgliesh stared obediently at the pinpoint of light He said:
“You left the main hospital building at about midnight. You spoke to the porter at the main gate at twelve thirty-eight a.m. Where were you between those times?”
“I told you. There was a fallen elm blocking the back path, I spent some minutes examining the scene and making sure that other people didn’t injure themselves on it”
“One person did precisely that That was at twelve seventeen a.m. There was no warning scarf tied on the branches at that time.”
The ophthalmoscope moved to the other eye. The surgeon’s breathing was perfectly regular.
“He was mistaken.”
“He doesn’t think so.”
“So you deduce that I arrived at the fallen tree later than twelve seventeen a.m. It may have been so. As I wasn’t concocting an alibi, I didn’t check the time every two minutes.”‘
“But you’re not suggesting that it took you over seventeen minutes to drive from the main hospital to that particular place.”
“Oh, I think I could make out quite a case for the delay, don’t you know. I could claim that I needed, in your deplorable police jargon, to obey a call of nature and left my car to meditate among the trees.”
“And did you?”
“I may have done. When I’ve dealt with your head, which incidentally is going to need about a dozen stitches, I’ll give some thought to the matter. You’ll forgive me if I concentrate now on my own job.”
The matron had quietly returned. She took up her stance next to Courtney-Briggs like an acolyte waiting for orders. Her face was very white. Without waiting for her to speak the surgeon handed her the ophthalmoscope. She said:
“Everyone who should be in Nightingale House is in her room.”
Courtney-Briggs was running his hands over Dalgliesh’s left shoulder causing pain with every thrust of the strong probing fingers. He said:
“The collar-bone seems all right. Badly bruised but not fractured. Your attacker must have been a tall woman. You’re over six feet yourself.”
“If it were a woman. Or she may have had a long weapon, a golf club perhaps.”
“A golf club. Matron, what about your clubs? Where do yon keep them?”
She answered dully: “In the hall at the bottom of my staircase. The bag is usually left just inside the
