Pulling open this drawer I lifted the only syringe it contained and found it to be the broken one. Maida must be using the other, I reflected, and after waiting a few moments for her to return it I started out to find her.
She was in the kitchen, preparing a malted milk.
“May I have the hypo?” I asked hurriedly.
“The hypodermic syringe?”
“Of course. I need it at once.”
“Isn’t it in the drug room?” She was measuring the cream-coloured powder carefully.
“No. I thought you had it.”
“I haven’t used it tonight.” She did not look at me.
“I’ll see if Miss Flynn has it.” I turned quickly away. But Miss Flynn did not have it, and had not had it. She hinted that I must have overlooked it and even walked back to the drug room with me, pulling out the drawer with her own hand.
“Why, there it is!” she exclaimed triumphantly.
And to be sure, there it was!
I was considerably chagrined, especially as Miss Flynn laughed and said something not at all witty about my eyesight.
And in the very act of filling the thing I caught sight of something that almost made me drop it. It was only a scratch across the bit of nickel where the manufacturer’s name is engraved but it was a scratch I myself had made in order to identify it. In a hospital it is easy to get such things confused, so I had simply taken a pair of surgical scissors and scratched across the letter “K” which appeared in the manufacturer’s name, Kesselbach.
My own hypodermic syringe! How had it got there? Like a flash my mind reverted to the memory of Maida, sitting on the edge of the window sill, looking at my tool kit and taking this same tool in her pink-tipped fingers.
I administered the hypodermic automatically, sterilized the needle and replaced it, and returned to Eleven.
But in that darkened room, listening to the gradually less rapid breathing of the sick man, and the still gusty wind and rain through which a slow gray dawn was beginning to make itself felt, I found myself possessed of new problems.
V
A Lapis Cuff Link
From that morning on I took an active interest in the case—I mean, in solving the problem. Indeed, Mr. O’Leary has had the kindness to say, since, that I helped—well, I need not repeat his words. However, it is true that I did everything in my power, which was little enough, to solve the mystery that confronted us. While I am not at all inquisitive, nevertheless I do have an inquiring mind, due doubtless to the fact that I have lived in a hospital for a number of years and hospitals are hotbeds of gossip. Not malicious gossip, you understand, for nurses are one class of women in the world who can keep the faith which the ethics of the profession as well as individual integrity demand.
But anything that happens in our small world is of interest; the patient in the charity ward who almost swallowed a thermometer and had to be upended and shaken, the precipitate arrival of a new baby in a roadster out in front of the hospital, or the alcoholic whose language shocked—or diverted as the case might be—a whole wing.
Besides the fact that the murders had occurred in the south wing, for which I feel a responsibility—the wing, I mean, not the murders!—there were other and as serious considerations. Chief among these was the affair of the hypodermic syringe and Maida’s inexplicable behaviour the night of the seventh, and the presence of Jim Gainsay as testified by that gold cigarette case.
A hospital ought to be sanctuary and it seemed to me an offense against all the laws of humanity that this hideous thing should have happened within our walls of mercy. I deliberately tried to put myself in the frame of mind to be suspicious about anything and everything—and I trust it is no reflection on my character to say that I succeeded without much effort.
I found plenty to be suspicious about, and without going out of the way to do so. The only trouble was that, though I pride myself on being a keen and clear-minded woman and have more than the usual amount of determination, I could not arrive at any conclusion.
I worried all day about Maida, however, and when Lance O’Leary turned up about four o’clock, with a polite request for an interview, I did not know whether to be glad or sorry.
We went into the general waiting room to talk. It was a chilly place, with slippery leather-covered furniture and on the wall a none too cheerful picture of the burning of Joan of Arc. The weather had settled into a steady, dripping rain by that time, the clouds were still heavy, and the very concrete steps of the main entrance, just below the windows, oozed moisture. It was an added distress that not once during those strange days did we see the sun. Everything we touched was damp and cold and sweaty.
O’Leary was as meticulously groomed as he had been the day before, but there was about him a sort of quiet but intense concentration that seemed to detach him from ordinary affairs of the world. I have seen the same thing in the face of an artist I used to know—and in the face of a dear and saintly old nun under whom I trained.
There was nothing, however, of the poseur about him. He was ordinarily rather silent, was occasionally
