The Devil's Caress

by June Wright

  When he reached the road Michael pocketed his torch and strode along briskly. The moon was up, displaying the landscape in half-tones of blue and grey, and the air was faintly balmy as the land breeze blew gently over the undulating countryside.

  An ideal night for a walk, Marsh thought grimly, as she strained to keep Michael’s figure in view. She dared not approach too close for fear he might turn round and see her in the moonlight.

  They had gone some distance from Reliance when the boy left the metal road and struck inland away from sight. She ran along the road and found the turning. It was a narrow lane, its surface of hardened mud bearing the imprint of car tyres. Michael was visible for a moment as he topped the rise ahead. Then he disappeared the other side.

  She hurried after him. But even before she reached the high point of the lane she knew where they were heading.

  Chapter Seven

  I

  The white headstones of the cemetery gleamed in the moonlight. There was a terrible beauty about the peaceful scene which sprang from a sense of loneliness rather than from actuality. Marsh, who prided herself on her realistic attitude in her dealings with death, could not prevent an involuntary shudder. Some age-old part of her, linked with an era of superstition, almost caused her to run away. It was the whinny of a horse that brought her back sharply to the existing conditions.

  From the shadow of the pine trees in the corner of the cemetery where he had stood that morning, Shane emerged. In either hand he carried a spade.

  “He wouldn’t dare!” Marsh whispered, aghast. “It’s just not possible.”

  Michael had vaulted the low rocky wall of the graveyard. She saw the two meet and exchange a few words and then clamber across the graves to the newly turned piles of earth covered with their limp flowers.

  Trying to quell a deranged idea that it was all a nightmare, that it could not possibly be happening, Marsh slid down into the ditch which bordered the road. The moonlight was so bright now that she bent double and worked her way along to the wall of the cemetery like an animal.

  It was a ghoulish scene under the hard cold light of the moon with the breeze soughing through the pine trees. The two men were working without a word, digging at one of the graves. The earth broke easily under the steady labour. Once Michael paused and took off his coat, but the older man beside him kept up his rhythmical movements without a break. Only when the horse whinnied again and came stamping out of the shadows did Shane turn his head. He whistled once and the animal quietened and began to crop the weeds on the nearby graves.

  Cramped and cold and nervous, Marsh waited behind the wall. She was both fascinated and repelled as she watched the preparations for an illegal exhumation. Her mind was too shocked to form any idea of what she should do or why she should even stay, but she could not move.

  Presently Shane threw down his spade and went over to his horse, while Michael knelt beside the grave flashing his torch into its depths. When the older man came back there was a murmur of voices. Then Shane lowered himself into the hole.

  Marsh bent her head on her arms, nauseated. When she looked up again the two men were straining at ropes on opposite sides of the grave. Slowly and painfully a coffin streaming soil came out of the ground.

  It slipped back a few inches and Shane gave a sharp order. Both men were breathing heavily but they continued to work rapidly. The coffin was placed alongside the trench. Michael spread out a large ground-sheet while Shane prised open the lid of the coffin. Together they lifted the body out and laid it on the sheet, which was wrapped around it and tied with the ropes. The coffin was thrown back and the grave filled in. Michael was working feverishly now, and Marsh heard Shane say curtly, “Steady!”

  He worked the grave over carefully and replaced the wilted wreaths. The horse was led across, jerking its head nervously and bringing up its forelegs a little as the clumsy bundle was slung across the saddle. Shane gripped the bridle above the bit as he adjusted the weight of the body.

  “Put the spades over there,” he ordered Michael, pointing to the hut near the pine trees. He started to lead the animal in and out the graves, muttering to it under his breath.

  Marsh sank down behind the wall again. She waited until the others were some distance ahead before she crept back to the road. They made their way along the rough country roads, across country. Michael was talking excitedly but Shane was scarcely replying. Once Marsh heard the boy laugh raucously and as the horse shied the man turned on him savagely.

  It was a slow procession but at last the distant murmur of the ocean became stronger and they were back near the coast. The road was now little more than a narrow path as it entered the scrub, and Marsh lagged a few steps as Michael began to flash his torch again. She had no idea of their whereabouts so she had perforce to follow. The sea seemed right under their feet now.

  Presently the scrub became sparser, to give way to bare land, sloping in folds and dents down the cliffs. From one of these folds rose a windmill, which twisted and whined lazily in the gentle air. The girl sank on the ground again and remained immobile as the men paused. She could see the dark bulk of a cottage below the windmill.

  The horse, still carrying its burden, was tethered to the rail of the verandah and Shane went inside the cottage. Lights appeared at the unshaded windows. Then he came out again to help Michael carry the bundle inside. Crouched in the wiry grass, Marsh waited until Shane put the horse away in a shack near the creaking windmill. Then she crept forward to the cottage.

  She tiptoed up the steps of the verandah and along to the windows. Her heart gave a sickening jump as Shane came towards them and she pressed herself against the wall. He drew the curtains, leaving but a slit for her to peer through. She could see the body wrapped in the groundsheet on a table, but both men were out of her line of vision.

  There was a chink of glasses. “Drink?” Shane asked, in his harsh curt voice.

  “Yes,” Michael answered. “I mean no. Can’t we start right away? It is getting late.” The other man laughed shortly. “You’d better have something. Ever watched a post-mortem before?”

  Marsh’s eyes widened at the word. On the other side of the table was a bookcase. She could not read the titles of the books but some looked familiar. At the same time she remembered what Todd Bannister had said, “If you call everyone Doctor in Matthews you won’t go far wrong,” and then Simon Morrow’s remark: “There is something vaguely familiar about him.” It all added up to a fact that she was a fool not to have guessed much earlier.

  Then they moved into her view. Shane commenced casually to undo the knots of the shrouded figure on the table. A cigarette was in his mouth and his eyes were half-closed against the smoke as he laid bare the body. It was Sam.

  With a word to Michael he left the room for an interval and came back clad in a rubber apron and gloves and carrying a case of instruments.

  “You can go if you’re queasy,” he suggested. “I’ll let you know later what I find.”

  Michael was very pale as he watched Shane handling the shining knives. There were beads of sweat on his forehead and he put up one hand to his mouth. Shane began to whistle softly and Marsh, watching the scene tensely, recognized the tune.

  “Stop that!” Michael cried. Then he ran his hand over his face. “I think I will push off now. There is no point in my staying. I’ll come back in the morning.”

  Marsh moved swiftly to the shadows at the end of the verandah as the door opened, letting out a path of light. Michael stumbled going down the steps as the light was shut off. He began to run across the moonlit slope, but at the ridge he stopped and, bending double, started to retch. She waited until he had recovered himself and had gone out of sight.

  II

  The body lay still untouched on the table and Shane was again out of vision, whistling softly to himself. With a hard-beating heart Marsh went along the verandah to the door and kn
ocked. The whistling broke off at once.

  “Is that you, Waring?” Marsh opened the door. Shane stood quite still, staring at her incredulously.

  “May I come in?” she asked, as coolly as her thudding heart would allow. “Your first assistant is vomiting his way home. I offer my services instead.”

  “How the devil did you get here?” Shane asked angrily. “Did young Waring tell you?”

  “I followed him from the house. This is all very illegal, colleague. If I told what I had seen tonight you would go to gaol.”

  The case of instruments between them winked evilly under the lamplight.

  The man said softly: “If I thought you intended to do that, I’d cut your throat. What do you want?”

  “I want to know what you are going to do with this body,” Marsh replied, advancing towards the table. Shane watched her every movement.

  “What are post-mortems usually conducted for?”

  “Dr. Waring signed the death certificate,” the girl said. “She examined the body herself. She would not make a mistake.”

  “You think that woman’s opinion is infallible, Mowbray. It will give me immense pleasure to report the results of my examination to the right authorities.”

  His hands moved over the body deliberately.

  “One moment,” said Marsh quickly. “What has Dr. Kate done to you to earn this interference? And why did you bring her son into your low schemes? He was causing her enough trouble and pain before.”

  The man looked up. “Your reproaches leave me unmoved. I am beyond the age where my sympathy can be enlisted easily. I learned my lesson twelve years ago. I needed assistance in tonight’s business, and young Waring served my purpose.”

  Marsh leaned over the table. “Why are you so bitter about Dr. Waring?”

  “I detest all female doctors,” he replied savagely. “They ask to be treated as colleagues but display all the weaknesses of their sex when it comes to a showdown. I am going to make up for my past chivalry now.”

  “You cannot urge the exhumation of a body already exhumed, if that is your intention.”

  “The body will be returned tomorrow night. Care to come and help?”

  “But the post-mortem you say you are going to conduct! It will be obvious.”

  Shane put out a hand and pushed aside the case of instruments. “There will be no post-mortem. It is not necessary, but I wanted to be rid of that young whelp. Come round here and look at this.”

  Marsh edged round the table. Exerting pressure, he twisted the head of the corpse, and pinched the grey skin at the base of the skull.

  “A vulnerable spot, my dear colleague. Inspect closely. That mark was no accident. A long thin instrument was inserted there deliberately. The unfortunate Sam was pithed like a frog.”

  “I can’t believe it,” the girl whispered. “Dr. Kate—”

  “Either Katherine Waring is not the doctor you thought she was or else she ignored it on purpose. Well?”

  She gazed at the mark between his fingers. “She wouldn’t have missed it. She—I have seen her at work. She is thorough—painstakingly so.”

  “Then—” said Shane, with a sardonic tilt in his voice.

  “No,” she said fiercely, looking up at him. “I will not believe it.”

  He shrugged and replaced the head to its normal position.

  Marsh clenched her hands together and walked to the window to stare out on the brightly lighted scene. “What will you tell Michael Waring? What are you going to do?”

  “Young Waring? I will tell him nothing. The revenge is mine because I took the risk in exhuming the body. Had I been notified of the hurried inquest—clever woman, your precious Dr. Kate—it wouldn’t have been necessary. As matters stand now I am going to photograph the area at the base of the boy’s skull and send it to the police. The photograph having been taken prior to today’s burial, of course,” he added casually.

  She swung round. “Supposing,” she said in a hard voice, “supposing I got in first? You exhumed the body illegally in order to conduct experiments. That wound is just one of your experiments. That is the story I could tell. I think you have been in trouble before. Will your career stand it again?”

  Shane eyed her for a moment. Then he threw back his head and laughed.

  “Stop laughing,” Marsh said. “I mean what I say.”

  “No one would believe you,” he said, turning away to get another drink. “Will you join me?”

  “I mean what I say,” she repeated desperately. The instruments flashed in the lamplight as she moved nearer. “I mean it,” she said, her voice rising. She snatched at the scalpel lying loose on top of the rest, but Shane was too quick for her.

  There was a crash as he let fall the glass he was holding to grasp her wrist. The low hanging lamp was set in motion, knocked by his shoulder in his swift movement. Marsh’s fingers splayed and twitched under the brutal grip. Her vision became clouded as the shadows stretched and shortened under the swinging lamp. Her brain felt clogged and irrational.

  Shane’s eyes held her bemused gaze until the knife dropped back on to the table. “You little fool, Mowbray! Get away from that woman before you lose your head completely.”

  At once his words reminded her of similar advice she had given Betty Donne and the thought of the nurse’s mental state helped her to gain her self-control.

  I must have been mad, she thought, looking down at the scalpel.

  Shane pushed her into a chair and threw some twigs on to the dying fire. Then he mixed a drink and put the glass into her hand. She swallowed it in one gulp and coughed as it burned her throat.

  “I don’t know what came over me,” she said, but Shane was silent as he watched her.

  “I was tired—terribly tired when I came down to Matthews,” she went on inconsequently. “And then everything happened. Such a lot of things have happened. Someone attacked me last night in the laboratory. I wanted to go away then. But Dr. Kate . . . Was it you?” She rubbed her wrist. The marks of his fingers were still there. “It could have been you.”

  “No,” said Shane gently. “It was not I. Why don’t you leave Matthews?”

  Marsh was quiet for a moment. The whisky was circulating warmly through her body. The lamp had stopped swaying and the fire crackled comfortingly.

  “I can’t leave yet,” she answered stubbornly. “Please give me time. Wait for a little while before you do anything about—” and she gestured towards Sam’s body. The man rose and covered it up.

  “Please, Shane.”

  He turned back to her, frowning heavily. “You are either a brave woman or a very foolish one. What do you hope to achieve by time?”

  “There is some explanation. I know Dr. Kate too well. I must stay by her until I discover that explanation.”

  He shrugged again. “Very well. I’ll stave off Michael and give you three days.”

  “Three days! That is not long.”

  “I have waited twelve years,” Shane said, his eyes and mouth hard. “Twelve years to repay Katherine Waring.”

  “Why do you hate her? Help me, Shane. Why am I talking like this to you? You are a stranger. There is something mysterious and furtive about you. I don’t trust you.”

  His eyes gleamed for a moment. “I think you are a little drunk, my dear. Drunk from relief after an ordeal. Tonight’s show was enough for the strongest stomach, even a hard-boiled woman doctor like yourself. Naturally you want to talk now. It doesn’t matter to whom as long as it is a man, not a woman, and least of all Katherine Waring. You have been under a constraint of thought and word, and now you want to talk. Go on.”

  “Quite a psychiatrist!” Marsh said, her spirit reviving.

  “I know women,” he replied, his eyes running over her lazily.

  “Tell me what happened twelve years ago,” she asked abruptly,
sitting up straight.

  The man laughed. “Don’t be scared, Mowbray. I am not going to insult you. Like all women, the thought was your own. Relax while I tell you my story. I’d like you to hear it, as it may make you see the light.”

  “I won’t believe a word you say if it is detrimental to Dr. Kate,” the girl declared, but her words sounded pettish in her own ears.

  With that disconcerting and humiliating habit of suddenly ignoring her, he did not reply. He leant his arm along the edge of the mantelpiece and stared down at the fire.

  III

  “Twelve years ago I was a resident at a Base Hospital in the country. Your sainted Katherine Waring and her late-lamented spouse were then partners in the town. They were mounting the ladder together in those days.”

  “Go on, please,” Marsh ordered urgently, as he paused to reflect.

  “One day there came into the wards under my supervision a woman who was a patient of theirs. She was ill but not seriously so, and we did all we could be called upon to do while waiting for information and instructions from the Warings. That information did not come. Then the patient died very suddenly. It was a complete surprise and shock, and the medical superintendent of the hospital, after the post-mortem, refused to allow the death certificate to be signed without an inquiry being made. The patient had received no treatment at all at the hospital and I was called in to be asked why.

  “I told the superintendent I had received no information and instruction for treatment from the Warings. I was dismissed as Kingsley was shown in. The following day I learned that an inquest had been ordered which I was to attend as a witness.

  “On the morning of the inquest I had an invitation from Waring to lunch. Being young and enthusiastic I jumped at the opportunity to form an acquaintance with the up-and-coming Kingsley. He was affable, very affable over lunch; clapped me on the back and called me ‘my boy’. I was impressed but not suspicious. Over the table we discussed my career and he dropped out hints as to how he could help me. I was positively hero-worshipping by this time. Then with the coffee came the real motive for his affability.