Deadly Errand

by Christine Green

  I felt better when I woke up. The vice around my head had been replaced by a band and another nurse brought me in a place of sandwiches and more tea.

  ‘You've got a visitor,’ she said.

  ‘Could I eat first?’ I asked, feeling like a real pig, but I was unused to the sensation of being hungry. I always eat before the pangs begin.

  ‘I'll send him in in about fifteen minutes,’ she said.

  Five minutes would have been enough, they were very small sandwiches, and once I'd eaten them, I watched the clock until the time was up and the door opened. But it wasn't Hubert, and I felt childish disappointment well inside me. It was Dr Hiding.

  As he strode towards me I fluttered my eyelids as I believed this would make me look sweetly vulnerable. It didn't work.

  ‘My dear,’ he said as he took my hand, ‘you're looking remarkably well. I expected you to be at the very gates. I'm so glad you are on the mend.’

  I smiled weakly, trying to suggest I was being brave and grateful. Dr Hiding sat down and adjusted the crease in his cavalry twill trousers and pulled down his toning brown cardigan. I gazed past him to the door, desperately hoping Hubert would come in to rescue me. Dr Hiding still held my hand and I tried hard not to squirm.

  ‘I had hoped to come yesterday but you were still semiconscious. I prayed for you very intensely, Miss Kinsella. And my prayers were answered. Here you are, fully restored.’

  ‘Praise be,’ I muttered.

  ‘Amen to that.’

  He let go of my hand then and his face assumed the look of a headmaster about to deliver a beginning-of-term pep talk. ‘I do hope that this has been a lesson to you. You should be leaving this investigation to the police. The fact is, I don't think you're quite cut out to be a private detective. I'm sure you'd be much happier if you simply found a permanent job nursing.’

  ‘Dr Hiding,’ I said, trying to keep icy cool, ‘thank you for your concern, but I happen to think I've been making headway in this case …’ I paused, trying not to laugh. ‘Well, perhaps “headway” is the wrong word but I am making progress and I'm confident my future lies not in nursing but with medical and nursing investigations. I may not be Sherlock Holmes but—’

  ‘Quite. Quite. Please don't upset yourself,’ interrupted Hiding. ‘I do understand. I'm sure God will help you if needs be. He works in mysterious ways and I'm sure if you are righting wrongs, prayer will be the only inspiration you need. Now be a good girl and get some rest and you'll be out of here in no time.’

  As he left I cursed him under my breath in a variety of expletives. ‘Good girl' indeed!

  I'd barely had time to recover from his visit when Linda rushed in, bearing a bottle of wine and a sad-looking spider plant. ‘Sorry I haven't got any flowers,’ she said. ‘No time. Anyway this will perk up with a drop of water.’

  She slipped off her coat and laid it on the bed. She wore a pink mini-skirt with a tight, tucked-in matching shirt and several gold chains. She looked cheerfully tarty and after Dr Hiding she was as welcome as sunshine after rain. Linda covered the usual patient/visitor questions; my state of health, the food, the nurses, were the doctors dishy?

  I asked her if she had found me in the porter's lodge.

  ‘I couldn't really miss you,’ she said. ‘You were sprawled all over the floor and the blood! It was flowing in rivers. I did the right thing, though, got you into the recovery position and applied pressure to your head. Mind you, it was bleeding so much I couldn't see where it was coming from. But I did my best.’

  ‘You saved my life, Linda. There aren't any words that can quite cover the thanks I owe you.’

  Linda shrugged and laughed in nervous embarrassment. ‘I didn't help poor Mick much, did I? He was on his last legs when I got there. I knew there wasn't anything I could do.’

  ‘Did you know he was a diabetic?’

  Linda shook her head. ‘He never let on. Never seemed fussy about his food either. You'd think he'd have taken a bit more care with his dose, wouldn't you?’

  ‘I think someone gave him that injection. Someone he trusted.’

  ‘You can't mean? Not Margaret … I don't believe it. She wouldn't … would she?’

  ‘I think she might, Linda, or Dr Duston. Mick would have trusted a nurse or a doctor.’

  Linda frowned but she didn't seem particularly surprised. ‘You're just guessing, though. What about evidence?’

  ‘Good point. I haven't got any real evidence, it's all circumstantial. I'll have to rely on a confession.’

  Laughing, Linda patted the bed with her hand and then tried to inspect the counterpane as if that would stop her laughing.

  ‘Why are you laughing, Linda?’ I asked.

  She stopped after a moment and composed her face into a thoughtful expression. ‘I can imagine Robert Duston in a jealous rage but … over Mick?’

  ‘You were the one who said Dr Duston could be bisexual – perhaps it wasn't him but Mick who was bi?’

  ‘But he seems – seemed, so macho,’ said Linda, bewildered.

  ‘So does Robert Duston. Appearances can be deceptive. Perhaps Jacky was blackmailing one or both of them.’

  ‘And do the police suspect him? Couldn't you just tell them your suspicions and let them get him to confess?’

  ‘I could,’ I said. ‘But I'm not going to. I've done a lot of work on this case, why should they get the credit? Anyway, they seem to think if there isn't a knife sticking out between the shoulderblades or a bullet lodged in the brain, it can't be murder.’

  Linda put her head on one side and gave me a long warning glance. ‘You just be careful. The murderer might be panicking now. He could be planning his next one.’

  I nodded. ‘I'll take care. I don't want to be snuffed out on my first case, do I?’

  As she left Linda handed me her phone number. ‘Give me a ring,’ she said. ‘We could go out on the razzle sometime.’

  ‘Thanks for coming, and thanks for the first aid.’

  ‘No need. It was the most exciting moment I've had since my cat fell down an uncovered drain. See you.’

  And she was gone. Night was falling and Hubert still hadn't visited and I didn't want to sleep; I hoped a police person would stay all night, just in case Robert Duston decided to visit me and finish me off by tinkering with my treatment or just bashing me again.

  At just after ten, another policewoman arrived, chatted for a while and then sat outside the door. I found that very reassuring; it appeared the police were taking the threat to my life seriously. But as Mick and Kennie, their prime suspects, were dead, I wondered who they suspected now. If he was a strong suspect, I didn't want to be wasting valuable investigating time in hospital and find when I came out it was all over. Could I do a runner? Tomorrow, I resolved, if I wasn't discharged I would take my own discharge. It was simply a question of signing a form.

  Two nurses came to give me a hot drink and settle me down for the night and just as they had finished, a young houseman turned up. Thin and tall with the sallowness of someone who rarely sees the sun, he said, ‘Glad to see you're awake. No fractures, just cuts and contusions. Your head will be sore for a while.’

  ‘When may I go home?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably tomorrow after the Big Chief – Mr Hadley-Royes – does his round. Usually about twelve.’

  ‘Midday?’ I asked, smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ he said solemnly. A sense of humour wasn't his strong point but I supposed working a hundred hours a week would knock the smile off anyone's face.

  ‘About Mick O'Dowd?’ I ventured as he was about to leave. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  He shook his head. ‘Hardly likely, I'm the surgical houseman.’ I felt stupid not realising that. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘It's okay,’ he said and left.

  I tried to sleep then but I kept watching the door, still half expecting Hubert. Did he even know I was in hospital? Did Robert Duston know I was still alive? More to the point, I thought,
does anybody even care?

  I padded in bare feet to the door and opened it to check the policewoman was still there. The chair outside the door was in place. The policewoman wasn't. The corridor was empty.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I stood in the silent corridor moving from one foot to another in an agony of indecision. Should I go back to bed or search out a nurse? And where the hell was the policewoman? I had two choices, of course: go back to bed and try to sleep, or find a nurse and ask what had become of the policewoman. At that moment, in the distance, I caught a glimpse of a white coat disappearing into one of the rooms leading from the corridor. Just a flash of white, but it registered high on my fear score: spiders rated nine out of ten, homicidal doctors a mere eight. I'd just decided to make a cowardly return to my room when the policewoman appeared. She walked towards me, tall and elegant with an eye-catching way of swinging her hips. She would have looked at home on any catwalk.

  ‘I thought you'd gone,’ I said feebly.

  ‘I went to the loo. Policewomen have to occasionally. Did you want something?’

  ‘No. Thanks,’ I said, feeling like some scruffy mongrel caught sniffing in the wrong place. ‘I'll try to get some sleep now.’

  I left the door of my room open, got into bed and tried to sleep. But it wasn't easy. The corridor that had seemed deserted minutes before suddenly became a thoroughfare, with nurses passing my door as if they were managing a full-scale evacuation. I'd never been a patient before and the amount of noise came as a surprise. The scraping of beds being moved, the dull thud of rubber-soled shoes, the swish of plastic aprons, the insistent call bells, the running taps and flushing water. There was no way I could sleep. I put on the bedside light and then remembered I had nothing to read. I stared at the spider plant, for something to do; it was still drooping, its leaves, brown at the tips, spilling out like entrails on to the bedside locker. Plants and flowers are all very well but you can't read them.

  The policewoman came in to investigate why my light was on. ‘You feeling okay?’

  ‘Fine. I can't sleep, though. I've got nothing to read.’

  Her expression seemed to say ‘that's the least of your worries,’ but she offered pleasantly enough to fetch one of the nurses.

  I felt strangely guilty then. I'd quickly acquired the ‘I don't want to be a nuisance' patient mentality and when a student nurse did arrive I made an effort to strike the right note of humble gratefulness.

  ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘We've got a big stack of mags in the day room.’

  When she came back she had her cloak over one arm, the magazines on top and in her other hand she had a packet of sandwiches and a banana.

  ‘I'm off to my break,’ she said, handing me the magazines. Then she put the food under her arm and threw the cloak around her shoulders, pulling it tight.

  ‘You could do with a pocket in your cloak,’ I said.

  ‘Don't read too long,’ she warned me with a smile.

  I tried to concentrate on some of the triumph over tragedy articles or ‘Mustn't Grumbles' as I called them. Titles like ‘My baby was no bigger than a bag of sugar', ‘I gave my kidney to my best friend' and ‘I lost half my brain but can still enjoy life'. What would a murderer have written, I wondered?

  Eventually I began to drift off but instead of counting sheep I went over the details of murder. Choosing the method, the timing, the weapon, disposal of the evidence, the alibi, feigning surprise, mixing truth with lies to be extra convincing. Duston's article could well have been ‘I murdered for ???’ I had no answer yet, but with pre-sleep optimism I had no doubts that by morning all would be revealed.

  Morning comes early in hospital. It was still dark when a thermometer was thrust under my tongue, my wrist held for seconds and a cup of anaemic tea thrust in my hand.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ said a weary-looking student nurse I'd never seen before, ‘a Mr Humberstone rang yesterday evening. We've just found a message from the day staff. He'll be visiting this morning. He wished you well.’

  By seven thirty I had bathed and, without bothering to ask, washed my hair. The first rinse was the colour of iron filings but gradually the water ran clear. I wandered around for a while, wearing a towel turban, until a nurse found the ward's ancient hair-drier and I managed to dry my hair properly. I'd had my makeup with me the night of the attack so I made myself up. Once I had a face on, I felt quite glamorous, although the effect was spoilt by the thousand-times-washed, once blue hospital nightie that hung voluminously on my body like some discarded parachute. My uniform and duty shoes and underwear had been removed, probably because they were covered in blood.

  And then I waited and waited. Between breakfast and lunch, time seemed suspended. An announcement could have been made about it: THE TIME NOW STANDING AT THE GENERAL WILL STAND UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  Lunch was fried fish with soggy, tasteless chips and tinned peas. Even so, eating was something to do. I was debating with myself whether to finish the chips or not when Mr Hadley-Royes arrived. He was not alone, of course; several people crowded into my room and stood with expectant deference by his side. Being in such a crowd made it less likely that Mr Hadley-Royes would ever experience rudeness or ingratitude. There was definitely safety in numbers.

  Dapper and thin, he wore those half-glasses that I think always manage to look more like an accessory. He made a promising start. ‘Ah,’ he said. And then there was a pause while the ward sister, who had so far managed to avoid me completely, handed him my notes.

  ‘Ah, yes. Miss Kinsella. Head injury.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Feeling dizzy? Sick? Headache? Double vision?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Good, good.’ Turning to Sister he said, ‘Any temperature? Loss of memory?’

  She decided I hadn't.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ he said. ‘Home today then. Come back to have the sutures removed. Nice to have met you, Miss Kinsella.’ He nodded at me, and as if on cue the entourage followed the turn of his heel.

  It seemed I'd been pronounced well, discharged, and I hadn't been examined nor had I managed to say a single word.

  I turned to my dessert then, congealed custard covering some sort of sponge pudding. No one is that hungry, I thought, well, no one who is already a size fourteen. I paced up and down for a while, then watched from the window, not that I could see much, mostly just a brick wall and a huge chimney that sent grey smoke into watery sunshine. It could have been either the crematorium or the laundry. Then I lay back on the bed and watched the door for Hubert.

  He came just after two o'clock. He walked in clutching two plastic carrier bags and smiling.

  ‘I thought you weren't coming,’ I said, feeling like a whingy child.

  ‘You look better.’

  ‘Better than what?’

  ‘Better than when you came in. I thought you were a goner.’

  ‘You were here before?’

  ‘Of course.’

  That surprised me but I didn't want to hang round chatting so I said, ‘Have you brought my clothes?’

  ‘A nice selection,’ said Hubert.

  I wondered vaguely how long he had spent over choosing my shoes.

  ‘I'll wait in the corridor,’ he said.

  He'd forgotten to pack a bra and tights but he'd remembered everything else, including a pair of stockings, which were no use at all without the suspender belt, and the only pair of high heels I had at the office. It felt strange being dressed again; the shoes felt like stilts and pinched without tights. The dress he had selected was one I save for that special occasion which rarely comes. The only reason it was in the office was that it had been dry-cleaned. In shades of creased purple, black and gold, sans bra, I looked like someone who had been to a party and had to leave in a hurry.

  I emerged from the room with my black jacket over my shoulders, trying to appear nonchalant.

  Hubert stood outside in the corridor. ‘You look nice,’ he said, glancing at me fro
m the shoes upwards.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I snapped tersely.

  Outside in the car park more embarrassment lurked, in the form of a smart shiny black hearse.

  ‘Had to bring the Daimler, my car's being serviced,’ explained Hubert. ‘It's a lovely smooth ride.’

  I didn't say a word. The fresh air had made me feel dizzy and my brain had turned to foam. I held my chin in cupped hands and stayed silent. If I talked I was sure my head would fall off. I hoped it was only a passing phase.

  The cottage looked different. The living-room seemed smaller and the colours brighter. I sank down on the sofa and Hubert kept muttering that I didn't look as well as I had done in hospital.

  ‘I'll be fine,’ I said. ‘It's just that fresh air came as a shock.’

  He didn't seem convinced but he made tea and after a while my head began to feel more normal.

  ‘You get some sleep and I'll stay here for a while,’ suggested Hubert.

  I was about to protest, when I realised that I didn't want to be alone. Someone might come calling.

  ‘I'd prefer you to stay,’ I said to Hubert, who stood awkwardly in front of me like a man whose wife has just brought their baby home and is waiting for instructions.

  I didn't have any instructions and there was a long pause before Hubert said, ‘Some reflexology would fix you up a treat.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  He nodded eagerly and I didn't feel up to arguing, and I didn't have to bother to take tights off, so it couldn't do me any harm, could it?

  Hubert took the process very seriously, raising my feet on to a cushion covered with a towel and then sitting at the end of the sofa and beginning to massage my feet with heavy concentration. He was right, it was a treat. It was more than that, it was heaven.