Operation Nassau

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘Speaking. Who is calling?’

  ‘Dr MacRannoch,’ the voice said again lovingly. I can use no other word. ‘Today you saved a man’s life. Just don’t do it again, will you? Just don’t do it again.’ And there was a tap followed by the pneumatic-drill noise of a broken connection, which I believe to be a serious insult to the inner ear. I therefore quickly put the phone down.

  At that moment, someone banged on my door.

  I sat still. The Trueman is a respectable business hotel just off Times Square with perhaps twenty-five storeys of bedrooms, mostly occupied by travellers who mind their own business and seldom stay more than one night. The staff are adequate but quite uninvolved, their main concern being to make the beds if possible by 8 a.m. each morning. At night, the guest may do as he pleases.

  One of the guests, it seemed, was pleased to knock on my door in a city where I knew no one. On the other hand, the telephone was by my side, and I had put the chain on the door, receiving my customary electric shock as I did so. Since both the ringing of my telephone and my voice had undoubtedly also been heard, I filled my lungs and said, ‘Yes? Who is it?’ just as the knock was repeated. At the same time I lifted and opened my medical bag, which stood on the chair by my bed, and began to locate and fill a standard plastic syringe with 10 c.c. of a seven-per-cent solution of pentothal sodium.

  The knocking stopped. ‘Dr MacRannoch? I beg your pardon,” said another American voice through the door: a voice I had recently heard. ‘I do beg your pardon if you were asleep, but this is Wallace Brady, remember? I’ve just been to the hospital and seen Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe. I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I finished filling the syringe, wiped it, repacked my bag and reached across for my dressing-gown. ‘I’ve just had a call from Dr Radinski. I hear he has made a good recovery. Thank you for coming to tell me.’

  ‘He has, but it isn’t that. Dr MacRannoch’ - it was an educated voice, in so far as such a thing may be said of a transatlantic inflection: and socially fluent - ‘Dr MacRannoch, I know it’s late and our acquaintanceship is of very short standing, but I have a message for you from Sir Bartholomew which I promised to give you tonight. I’ll tell you through the door if you wish, or I’ll telephone you, but I’d appreciate it if you felt able to see me?’

  ‘Just now?’ I said. I tied the dressing-gown, put the syringe in one pocket, and rang the bell for room service.

  ‘Two minutes?’ he said, instilling appeal into his voice. All the same, it was not quite sufficiently flexible, I judged, to be the murmuring voice on the telephone.

  ‘Very well,’ I said, and unhooking the chain, drew open the door. ‘I’ve just rung for some coffee. Perhaps you will join me.’

  Mr Wallace Brady entered, fully dressed I was happy to see, crossed the room and sat in a distant armchair. He made no attempt whatever to molest me. In fact he seemed, if anything, to find the situation amusing. I put my hands in my dressing-gown pockets and remained standing. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do sit down,’ he said. ‘You must be tired, and I’ve interrupted your sleep. And the coffee’s on me. Unless you’d prefer something stronger?’

  ‘The refreshment, so far as I know,’ I said, ‘is on British Overseas Airways; but please order whatever you wish. I do not take alcohol.’

  ‘Now that,’ he said regretfully, ‘I should have guessed.’

  ‘And the message?’ I said. The floor waiter appeared at the open door: I gave him the order and he disappeared.

  ‘It’s an appeal, really, from patient to doctor,’ Wallace Brady said. He had light brown hair and the type of thick skin which browns without burning: his eyes were light grey, almost white, the lids well opened. He was in my view too thin, but not otherwise ill formed. When I refrained from speaking his hand moved for the first time to his jacket pocket and then he removed it. ‘You don’t like smoke in your bedroom, I guess.’

  ‘The air conditioning will remove it,’ I said, ‘if you cannot endure a conversation without it.’

  He looked at me thoughtfully, then smiling, leaned to one side and took a cigarette-case from his pocket. ‘You’re a woman who knows her own mind,’ he said. ‘Bart Edgecombe was right.’

  I waited.

  ‘The problem is,’ said Brady, ‘that Bart wants to get back to Nassau. His wife’s there, Denise. I gather he doesn’t like to leave her for long. But the hospital aren’t keen.’

  ‘I should think not,’ I said. I could see what was coming. I said. ‘I thought he lived in one of the out-islands.’

  ‘He does. Great Harbour Cay. I’m working there myself at the moment - that’s how I know him. He came to New York for a couple of days and Denise took off for some shopping in Nassau and expected him back there tonight. The point is, he wants to get the 11.30 flight tomorrow morning, and if he does, would you look after him? He’ll go straight into the United Commonwealth if need be the moment he arrives.’

  The coffee came. I allowed Mr Brady to tip the waiter, since its presence was entirely his responsibility, and poured. Since I had hopes of being allowed to sleep at least part of the night, I made my own mostly hot milk. I said, ‘The hospital is perfectly right in not wishing Sir Bartholomew to travel. My advice would be to send for Lady Edgecombe instead.’

  The man Brady sipped his coffee and then sat and looked into it. ‘She’s highly strung,’ he said. ‘He’s dead set on getting back with no fuss, and he has a great opinion of your abilities. When he heard what you did at the airport -’ He broke off. ‘He’s met you, you know. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I have no clear recollection,’ I said.

  ‘He came to the hospital in connection with the New Year parade, and you dealt with him then most efficiently, he says. That’s why he thought you might help him. Of course,’ Mr Brady said quickly. ‘I shall be on the plane, and Sergeant Trotter, who lent us a hand. But it would really set his mind at rest to have you, I can see that. And . . . I hope it won’t embarrass you, but I have to say that of course he will make up any difference between your fare and his own. I don’t suppose the hospital let you travel in luxury.’

  They don’t. I only travel in luxury when I am travelling with my father, who used this method among many to promote me into a wealthy and suitable marriage. Since I broke the news to him that I do not intend to marry at all, he has travelled in luxury still more frequently, in an insane ambition to spend all the family wealth before it falls into the hands of his successor, the forty-sixth titular chieftain, one T. K. MacRannoch, a native of Tokyo.

  I felt that my broken night’s sleep entitled me at least to a first-class flight to the Bahamas. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘If you will kindly arrange to transfer my ticket. Tell Sir Bartholomew I shall call at the hospital at 10.15 a.m. The airport should be warned that he is a sick man, and they must waive all formalities.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Mr Brady. He looked a trifle unsettled. ‘I should say,’ he said, ‘that I don’t know Bart Edgecombe all that well myself. You know, we play golf occasionally. But I didn’t even know he was in New York until we ran into each other this morning.’

  The world is full of people who regard medicine as a public charity. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘And is Sergeant Trotter a friend?’

  Instead of looking irritated, his expression became merely rueful. ‘Sergeant Trotter,’ he said, ‘is everyone’s friend, as you will find out. He’s regular army and going to Nassau on business, that’s all I know. But he was the only other man to jump to it when Bart honked out and fell, and he stayed with me till you came. In fact, he’s in the next room to mine now, waiting to hear what you say. Just one of Nature’s Samaritans.’

  I know that type too. I almost changed my mind; but it was a two-hour flight, that was all, and a first-class passenger lunch would save me buying a supper. I stood up and said, ‘Since we have an early start, perhaps we should have some sleep then. Good-night, Mr Brady.’

  He put down his coffee-cup and got
up. For a moment I thought he was going to reduce the conversation to personalities; then he shut his mouth and held out his hand. ‘Good-night, Doctor,’ he said.

  I put the chain back on the lock and emptied the syringe before getting into bed. It was 11.40 p.m. I do not like unorthodox days.

  There is nothing to sap the moral fibre quite like a first-class flight on a Super VC 10, from the nuts and taped music to the champagne and hot cologne-scented towels which quickly succeed them.

  The journey to the airport with Sir Bartholomew, who was quite sensible, although unsteady on his feet, had passed off without incident, and after installing him in comfort on a double seat on the other side of the gangway, I was able to put my walking-shoes on the scarlet plush foot-rest and receive the menu with pleasure. Hot prawns in batter were passed round. ‘Looks a bit better than he did yesterday, doesn’t he?’ said a London voice in my ear, and I perceived that I was sitting next to Mr Brady’s helper of the airport lounge, and that Mr Brady himself was nodding good morning from the seat just behind. ‘Rodney Trotter,’ the Cockney voice further volunteered, with accents of boundless goodwill. ‘Sergeant Trotter of the Royal Scots. Your part of the world, eh, Miss MacRannoch?’

  I smiled, slightly, without I trust showing my irritation. Behind, the man Brady’s voice said, ‘Doctor MacRannoch, Trotter. Name, rank and number, you know?’

  The Sergeant was a small muscular man, aged perhaps forty- seven, with the lined face of one much given to bawling commands. His voice was rich and unexpectedly carrying. He took Brady’s intervention in good humour. ‘I thought she was travelling in civvies like myself,’ he said. ‘Don’t want all the world to know you’re a doctor, eh, Doctor? The arguments I’ve got into about the Army, so soon as I mentioned me rank. Besides, a girl wants to be chatted up as a girl, not a bloody meat-butcher, don’t she?’

  I am aware that I lose colour when angry, but I am perfectly capable of keeping my temper under provocation. ‘If you address me as “Doctor”,’ I said, ‘I shall be perfectly satisfied.’

  His eyes became round, and for a moment I thought he was going to add to his impertinence. However, he merely said, after a moment, ‘Well, my name’s Rodney, and you can call me that any time you like, Doctor. You did a great job on that chap, anyhow. You can quote me for reference.’ Then the drinks trolley came round, followed by lunch, and he was snoring before the brandy was finished.

  I had caviare, clear turtle soup with sherry, lamb noisettes with truffles, cherry meringue gateau with coffee, and two petits fours. Sir Bartholomew, to whom I had given a mild sedative slumbered peacefully through lunch, and had a little warm milk on awakening. Shortly after this, he expressed a wish to retire, and since both Brady and Trotter were slumbering, he was aided to do so by the steward, assisted by a Turkish youth sitting behind him. I thought when he returned he looked pallid; his pulse rate had risen and his breathing had become rapid and more shallow. He showed no wish to speak. I moved over beside him, and had just fastened his seat-belt for the descent when he became rigid and I saw that another attack was imminent, on at least the same scale as the one he had suffered the previous day. I pressed the button for the steward and opened my bag with one hand, supporting him with the other.

  The details of what followed are not particularly attractive or even clinically abnormal, given the proper diagnosis, and I shall not dwell on them. Enough to say that the worst was over by the time the ambulance got us from the New Providence airport through Nassau and up the incline to the United Commonwealth Hospital, and that by the time he was settled in the private ward with the entire staff hanging about chattering, Bahamian-style outside his open door, he was conscious and weakly recovering. Indeed he smiled up at me as I bent over him, changed into my white coat. ‘What was it?’ he said.

  ‘Something you ate. Sir Bartholomew, did you have anything to eat or drink on the plane, apart from the warm milk?’

  ‘You know I didn’t,’ he said. He had a slow, mannered voice: a remnant perhaps of official days in Britain. I would guess at public school and Cambridge, perhaps. His face changed. ‘At least - I had an aspirin in the lavatory, from the pack in my pocket. Had a crashing headache.’

  ‘In water?’

  ‘Steward gave me a glass.’

  ‘Do you mind, Sir Bartholomew,’ I said, ‘if I remove the aspirins and subject them to some tests? If food poisoning is at the root of your trouble, we must for everyone’s sake discover the source of bacteria. Contaminated tablets, for example, might have caused both attacks. There is another thing I wish to ask you. Sir Bartholomew, do you know of anyone in New York with a personal grudge against you?’ And I informed him of the telephone call I had received at the Trueman.

  ‘A joke, perhaps,’ I said. ‘On the other hand, there was a degree of menace in the words. They implied, quite clearly, that the caller did not wish your life to be saved.’

  He laughed. It was a laugh I had heard many times before when questioning patients. It is important to show no disbelief. He said. ‘When you said joke, I got it. It’s all right. I haven’t got an enemy, but I have a very funny brother-in-law called George. His idea of humour. I’m sorry, Doctor. Did it keep you awake?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I was hardly to know a second occasion would involve me so quickly. Your wife has been sent for. I shall be in to see you again, but I suggest you allow at least two days in bed before you attempt to go home to Great Harbour Cay. Is there anything further you wish done for you?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said slowly. ‘At least -’

  ‘Yes?’ I had a round of the wards to do in five minutes.

  ‘I have another favour to ask you,’ he said. ‘I’d ask my wife, but she’s. . . well, she gets easily upset. I’d rather Denise thought it was a bad case of air-sickness . . . something small, something like that. If I’m going to get bills from New York, and maybe inquiries and correspondence, I’d rather a family friend looked after it all. I still have some small business interests, and–’

  ‘You won’t feel like business for a day or two,’ I said. ‘You want me to telephone a friend? Where can I reach him?’ I opened my notebook.

  He lay scanning my face, and I concealed my impatience. This meant, presumably, a mistress in another part of the island. However, no patient will recover unless his mind is at rest. I waited.

  ‘I want you to take a letter,’ he said. ‘To Coral Harbour. That’s where he is. Or so the papers all said three days ago. He’s Johnson Johnson, the portrait painter, maybe you know the name? And you’ll find him on his yacht, a biggish ketch called the Dolly.’

  I said I would think about it, and left him to write his letter while I did a tour of my cases. My two stomachs were doing quite well, the perforation having dispensed with his Levine already. We had lost the cervical spine dislocation. An amoebic abscess had come in, and two new tubercular cases: I read the notes on my desk. After a thorough afternoon’s work I walked through the private wing and across the path into the laboratory. There I found a room to myself, and set to analysing four samples I had taken from my bag in the hospital. One was of warm milk and the other of aspirin. The remaining two were from the contents of Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe’s stomach after each of his attacks.

  The warm milk was innocent, and so was the aspirin. But both the samples from Edgecombe confirmed my own clinical diagnosis.

  Neither attack had been caused by B. botulinus, or B. enteritidis or anything resembling an infected crab sandwich.

  Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe had been poisoned by arsenic.

  TWO

  James Ulric MacRannoch was at home when I called in, on my way to the Coral Harbour marina.

  My father, in his efforts to deny to Japanese hands the substance of the MacRannochs, had rented for his sojourn in Nassau a delightful and expensive villa with a white pillared porch and a swimming-pool. Hummingbirds, species Calliphlox evelynae, lurked in the butterfly flowers, and the coconut palms were placed as nice
ly as sutures.

  Inside, he had pink bamboo furniture on pink mohair carpeting, offsetting the large coloured staff who stood about smiling, because of the amount he was paying them. This had all been settled by his friend the Begum long before we arrived, and I took nothing to do with it. I stayed with my father because he needed to be under medical supervision, but I was financially independent of him and intended to remain so, although the cost of living in the Bahamas was reducing my bank account to eunuchoidism.

  However, since I had finally made a clean incision in the chain of worthy and well-connected young suitors prepared by my father, I felt that this unfilial action should at least discharge the MacRannoch from the duty of paying for me as a daughter. What he chose to do with his money was therefore his affair, although he made it, such was his excitable nature, all the world’s.

  There was in fact a crowd of people on the terrace when I made my way through the house. They had not changed for dinner and from their costume I guessed that there had been a tennis party on our excellent hard court. One couple from Government House, I recognized, and there was a titled lady from the retired British colony, a banking family and one or two of the younger moneyed set from Lyford Cay. There was also a tall hair-lacquered blonde lady in a bikini a little too smart for her, for whom my father, in flowered Bermuda shorts and green shirt, was pouring a large Bloody Mary. F noticed that it was more blood than Mary, and after a second hard glance at the lady, diagnosed why. Then he turned round.

  ‘Beltanno! Did you kill ‘em off early? Come and get a nice strong tomato juice under the whalebone. You know my daughter Beltanno, Denise, everyone?’

  I call myself, as I have said, Dr B. Douglas MacRannoch, Douglas being my middle name and the surname of my mother. It is unimportant, but perhaps simpler to explain now that I was christened Beltanno, which was the name of Cairbre’s wife, the daughter-in-law of Cormac. Since it conveys nothing but a sense of ridicule to members of an Anglo-Germanic culture, I never use it and dislike hearing it used, as my father well knows. The woman called Denise smiled graciously, and someone said, ‘Good evening’; then they all returned to their drinks. The MacRannoch said, ‘Denise here has been deserted by her dear husband. The hotel wouldn’t let her hang on to her room. I’ve said she can stay here till he comes.’