Читать книгу No Love Lost - Margery Allingham - Страница 4

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‘I never did think her eyes were a patch on yours, Miss Ann. Take a good look. You can see them. They’re as plain as anything. Now let me get you a hand mirror.’

Rhoda planted the folded newspaper with the photograph in it squarely in front of me, supporting it against my after-lunch coffee cup. She was forthright and innocently excited in every one of her two hundred pounds, and she tore open an old wound as surely as if, with her plump, well-meaning fingers, she had found the cicatrix and ripped it from my flesh.

It was so unexpected. I had had such a busy morning and was so full of other people’s troubles that my own life was utterly forgotten. She took me completely off guard and got right through at a stroke, without my being aware.

‘No, thank you,’ I said politely, hoping I had not turned white from the sudden frightening pain, for I knew her so well that my armour slips into place by reflex action, and I knew she would be watching me anxiously to see if my recovery was complete. (Rhoda is the kind of woman who digs up the mint outside her kitchen door two days after she has planted it, to find out if it has started to grow.) ‘I’ve seen my eyes this morning, bloodshot again. What do you think it is? Alcohol?’

She was nearly sidetracked. The buttons on her white overall strained as she took a breath and peered at me.

‘Nonsense, they’re lovely, just like your poor mother’s, only a different blue and not so round.’

‘How true,’ I agreed. ‘Like her, I’ve got two of them.’

‘Now you’re trying to be funny like your father. I never laughed when he wanted me to and I shan’t at you. You have got nice eyes and you’re getting quite good-looking altogether now you’ve finished working yourself to death at the hospital and settled down as half a country doctor. You’ve lost that puggy look you had. I was mentioning it to Mr Dawson when he came with the veg.’

‘That was interesting for him,’ I murmured, remembering that gaunt, asthmatic greengrocer. ‘I’m not half a doctor, by the way. I’ve been qualified for some years.’

‘Four and a half,’ she said. ‘But you’re an assistant to Dr Ludlow, poor old gentleman, aren’t you? You don’t do it all yourself.’ Her kind unlovely face wore its most characteristic expression, part suspicion, part belligerence, and nearly all affection. ‘Aren’t you going to read the bit about her? Or perhaps you don’t want to?’

I ignored the emphasis. Rhoda did not mean it, or at least not much. She was sixteen when she came to work for my mother three weeks after I was born, and now that there is only myself of the family left, and I have my own little cottage at the far end of Dr Ludlow’s estate, she has continued to work for me. She does it just as faithfully and a good deal more chattily than ever she did in that busy doctor’s home in Southersham.

My father, who delighted in her and called her ‘Rhododendron’, used to say that she was the only woman in the world who knew everything about him and understood absolutely nothing, but I think he did her less than justice. She understands, a little, not quite enough.

It was very pleasant in my room—or it had been before she brought the newspaper. The cottage has only one downstairs room other than the kitchen and it is a big one. It is furnished with the nicest bits from home and is long and low, with french windows giving on to a small mossy yard, and it looks on to the broad tree-islanded meadow which marks the end of the built-up area on this side of the little town of Mapleford.

I love it, and I was happy and peaceful and content before she spoke. Now, since she was watching me, I had to read the paragraph about Francia Forde.

I did not linger over the photograph. Let me be honest and say at once that I have never really studied any of the reproductions of that lovely Botticelli face with its halo of pale hair. I never saw any of the four films she starred in and I never let myself envisage her as a real woman, lest I should fall into that most self-punishing sin of all and hate her till I burned myself to ash. I had no idea if she was tall or short, shrill or husky, witty or a fool. As far as I was concerned, Francia Forde had never existed, nor John Linnett either.

Anyhow, that was my story and I was sticking to it, pretty well. I had my own way to make and I was enjoying it. At twenty-eight I was the chief assistant to an old man who had a practice twice too big for him. My experience was growing every hour. I liked my patients and their troubles were mine. I could still rejoice when they were born and feel a genuine pang when, despite my best efforts, they died. Love was now just another natural malady suffered or enjoyed by other people. I had experienced it, I knew about it, it was over.

At the moment my real passion was whooping-cough. The paragraph could hardly, therefore, be expected to hold much interest for me, and I was surprised to find how difficult it was to read. I have no intention of reproducing it. I couldn’t if I tried. The words danced before me and their sense didn’t seem worth discovering. But it was something about the ‘beautiful Francia Forde whom everyone had loved so much in Shadow Lady’ having taken leave of the studios for a while to become the ‘Moonlight Girl’ in an enormous press advertising campaign which Moonlight Soap and Beauty Products Ltd were about to launch on a breathless world—and there was a mention of television.

To me it simply meant that I was going to be reminded of her in every magazine or newspaper I opened, and that even the air would not be free of her. Movies I could and did avoid, but now she was going to be everywhere.

Rhoda had stamped off with the plates, so I did not have to watch my face. I put the folded paper down and sat looking across the table at the rock flowers and the meadows beyond.

The past is a terrifying thing. One finds one cheats so. John was four years older than I. We were the children of friends. Our fathers were doctors in the same town, and from our babyhood they had set their hearts first on our taking up medicine and then on our marrying. At that moment I could have sworn that it had all been a silly mistake of the old people’s and that we never could have loved each other, and yet in the next instant I was remembering the night I first noticed John had grown so breath-takingly good-looking. It was the night before he was off to war as a fully fledged major in the RAMC and I was still in my first year at hospital. We had walked in the Linnetts’ walled garden, and the ilex trees had whispered above us and the sweet earth had breathed on us with a new tenderness.

Without wanting to in the least, as I sat there with Francia Forde’s smile flashing up at me from the page, I remembered the feel of his fingers on my shoulder and the hard, unexpectedly importunate touch of his mouth on mine. I could understand still and even recapture all the crazy magic of that moment when we realized that the one really important thing in all the world was that we were ourselves and no one else, and that together we were complete and invincible.

All that was quite vivid. I could remember the plans we made and how none of them seemed at all grandiose or impossible. Even the children’s clinic, which was to grow into a hospital and a research station, was more real to me than—say—the puzzled misery of the last time he came home on leave just after V.E. Day.

By that time terrible things had happened. Old Dr and Mrs Linnett were both gone. They had stepped into a crowded train after a flying visit to London, only to be taken out in the screaming darkness in the midst of a raid two stations down the line. They were both dead, killed by machine-gun bullets, the surprised expression still on their kind old faces. My own father, too, was fuming in a bed in his own hospital as the cruelty of his last illness slowly consumed him.

I don’t think John and I quarrelled on that last leave. We knew each other too well. We were still friends, still in love. We made plans for our wedding, which was to take place as soon as I had finished at St James’s. But there was a change in him. He had become nervy and preoccupied, as if the strain of war had begun to tell. At least, I think I put it down to the war. Women were just beginning to suspect that the experience might have had some sort of strange effect upon their menfolk about that time.

I know his looks had become remarkable. He had always been considered handsome in Southersham, but now there was something outstanding about him. He had his father’s dark red hair and wide-shouldered height, his good head and wide smile, and he had Mrs Linnett’s short straight nose, thick creamy skin, and the narrow dancing eyes that were more attractive in a man even than in her. There was no doubt about it. Old friends, let alone strangers, looked hard at him twice and, if they happened to be young and female, were inclined to blush for no good reason at all. To do him justice—and it was terribly hard for me to do him justice at that distance—he had not seemed to be aware of any change.

I could remember all that, but later, that long lonely period in the winter of ’45 when I had no letters, the time which seemed to go on for years—as I sat thinking that afternoon it had no reality for me. I had forgotten it. The psycho people have a theory that one only remembers the things one desires to, secretly. I cannot believe that, for every line of the Southersham Observer’s bombshell that spring was as clear to me as if I had had the fuzzy small-town print before me, and if there was ever anything I should want to forget it must have been that. The owner and editor of that paper was my father’s only local enemy. Daddy always said he had a ‘corseted soul’, and certainly the way he presented that extract from the film company’s publicity sheet was typical of him. He conveyed he did not approve of it but he got every word of it in.

Miss Phillimore sent the paper to me in London and I got it on a day that was pure poetry, green and gold, and blue skies. No one but she could have written, ‘This may surprise you dear,’ in that spidery 1890 hand. The editor had quoted a few paragraphs written in the out-of-this-world style some of those writers achieve. I could recite them still, though I had only read them once.

FAIRYLIKE FRANCIA FORDE

CAPTURES GLAMOUR HERO FROM ARMY

Medicine Relinquishes Its Handsomest Man. Runaway Wedding Ere Film Goes on Floor. Francia Forde, Bullion’s new and scintillating starlet, who is to portray the daughter (Yetta) in the new Dolores Duse epic Chains, has married John Linnett, Director Waldo’s latest discovery. Linnett, who has been granted indefinite leave from the army to play opposite his bride, will take the part of Yetta’s tempestuous lover.

And so on and so on. There was a final line or so written in the same vein:

The Rumour Bird whispers to us that there is a certain little lady doctor in Linnett’s home town who is going to feel badly over this development, but cheer up, Miss Medico, you can’t keep a star on the ground—not when it’s hitched to Francia’s wagon.

The Southersham Observer finished the piece with a reference to ‘an engagement notice printed in these columns not long ago’, and a snappy hark-back to the tragedy of Dr and Mrs Linnett’s death in the raid.

I remembered that all right. Although I was heart-free and cured and wedded to whooping-cough, I remembered every paralysing word of it. Incredibly enough, that was all there was to remember. That was all I ever heard. I had no letter, no message, not even gossip through friends. It was as though John had died. He had turned his back on his home, his ideals, and everything he had ever lived for. It was so unlike him that for months I could not believe it.

When Chains appeared, Francia was in it but not John. She made her first hit in that film in which Dolores Duse, the veteran French actress, was so moving, and in her next film she was a star. Since then she had gone from strength to strength. But John had vanished. If he was still married to her, he kept in the background. He never wrote and he never came back to Southersham.

Well, there it was, that was my story, and if I had not forgotten quite as completely as I had thought, I had at least got over it. That afternoon I honestly believe that the only thing I still felt I could not forgive John for was the waste, the wicked betrayal of his career. That was something a million times more important than I could ever be, and yet ...

Old Dr Percy Ludlow saved me from myself just then. I glanced up to see him trotting across the meadow and I got up to open the glass doors to meet him. Anyone less like the popular conception of a doctor I have yet to see. He is a tough, slightly horsy little man with a face like red sandstone and a gay, colourful style of dress he can’t have changed since he was a boy. Local people whisper to me that he is eighty, which is absurd. He looks sixty and still rides to hounds whenever he gets a chance.

Percy has not been quite the same since he was ‘nationalized’, as he is pleased to refer to his position under the new National Health scheme, and of course the change has been a sensational one from his point of view. After a lifetime of behaving like some benevolent and beloved Robin Hood, soaking his rich patients to pay for his poor ones, and preserving a religious impartiality in his treatment of disease wherever he found it, he awoke one July morning to discover himself a paid government clerk as well as an unpaid general practitioner. In fact, instead of having the one master in his sacred calling, he found he had two, and the second (who held the purse strings) was a vast, impersonal, remarkably uninformed machine with a predilection for having its million and one queries answered in triplicate. He says he’s going to die of writer’s cramp, but I think it is more likely to be apoplexy!

I suppose, in my more serious moments, I ought not to approve of him. He is obstinate and old-fashioned, hopelessly conventional and a snob. And yet, when science has let me down and a diagnosis is beyond me, when I’ve thought of everything and worked out everything and am still in the dark, he will shuffle up to the bedside, pull down an eyelid, sniff, and fish up out of some experience-taught subconscious an answer which is pure guesswork but which happens to be right.

Just then, as he came dancing in, I saw to my surprise that he was angry. His rather light brown suit was buttoned tightly round his compact body, and his vivid blue eye glared at me belligerently from his red face. He paused just inside the room and began to play with the coins in his trousers pockets.

‘I suppose you’re very pleased with yourself, Dr Fowler.’

That ‘Doctor’ was a danger signal, and I spoke cautiously.

‘Not more than usual. What have I done now?’

He thrust his chin out at me. ‘Overconscientious, that’s what’s wrong with women in the professions. No thought of consequences. Lose a packet of aspirin and rush off to the police.’

‘Oh,’ I murmured, enlightened. ‘The Dormital.’

‘Dormital!’ He repeated the word as though he had never heard of it, as perhaps he hadn’t. ‘What is it? One of these rubbishy phenobarbituric derivatives, I suppose. Where did you get it? Some darned silly firm send it to you as a sample?’

Since he had clearly been talking to Brush, our local Inspector, to whom I had reported everything, this was not too clever of him. Had he been a little less angry I might have pointed that out. As it was, I nodded.

‘It’s new. They’ve increased the solubility and—’

‘Have they?’ He could not have been more disgusted. ‘Never dream of using that sort of filth myself.’

I knew he was reputed never to prescribe anything save senna or old port and I nearly laughed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured, ‘but it is a poison, and I think someone must really have taken it out of my bag when I was on my round, so I reported it.’

At first I thought he was going to explode, but he thought better of it, and I could see him making up his mind how he was going to manage me. Presently he disarmed me with a smile.

‘I like a girl who stands up for herself,’ he announced. ‘You get that from your mother, no doubt.’

This time a grin did escape me. I had always suspected it was my mother’s rather famous country family who had got me the job when Percy was checking my background. He shook his head at me then and asked me for the list of calls I had made on the day of the loss, and when I fetched it he went over each entry, calling everyone by his first name, which wasn’t really surprising, perhaps, since he’d brought most of them into the world.

‘Lizzie Luffkin,’ he read aloud, putting a square forefinger on the page. ‘Yes, I heard you’d been there. She’s a strange old lady, Ann, rather a dangerous old lady. Makes up what she can’t learn. Pity you called. Left the car in the road, I suppose? Unlocked?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Don’t blame you. Never locked a car in my life. Told Brush so. No, there’s no one doubtful on this list, Ann. You couldn’t have taken it with you.’ He eyed me with a curious expression which was half shrewd and half obstinate. ‘Make up your mind to that. You don’t know Mapleford as I do. We’re old-fashioned down here. Maybe we’re even a little bit narrow. Am I making myself clear?’

‘Not frightfully,’ I said helplessly, and he sighed.

‘You’re young, my dear. The people down here are not, and I’m not speaking of years. Brush and I have been discussing the matter, and he agrees with me it would be very unwise to broadcast the loss. We don’t want a lot of chatter in Mapleford about—well, to put it bluntly, about drugs.’

I gaped at him. To me all drugs are drugs, so to speak, dangerous or otherwise. I thought he was going to shake me.

‘Veronal!’ he exclaimed, making it sound like an improper word. ‘Veronal, Ann. All your fancy barbituric fiddle-me-faddles are only veronal, and we’ve heard quite enough about that in our time.’ He lowered his voice, although we were alone. ‘The old Duke’s sister died of it, poor wretched woman. She was an addict.’

Perhaps I was not as impressed as I ought to have been. I knew the Dukes of St Pancras, whose gothic towers overshadowed the little town, still dominated Mapleford minds, but the ‘young Duke’, as he was called, had seemed on the elderly side to me.

‘But when was all this?’ I demanded.

Percy Ludlow met my eyes solemnly. ‘Only thirty years ago,’ he said without a tremor. ‘No time at all in a place like this. I remember it as if it was last week. So do most other people. So you see, once we start muttering about lost or stolen veronal there’ll be no end of talk. I know the people down here. Half of them have got nothing to do except chatter about their neighbours. You take my word for it, young woman, you’ll have every maiden lady on your register suspected of taking narcotics if you’re not very careful.’

It was a jolt to me. Although my intelligence told me he must be crazy, I knew in my heart that he was right. It was his famous trick of correct diagnosis all over again. I might be right in theory, but he knew the people of his funny little town.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I began, and he grinned at me.

‘I hate scandal,’ he remarked. ‘In fact I’m terrified of it. I’ll get you out of anything in Mapleford except scandal. Then I wouldn’t lift a finger.’ He shot one of his bright birdlike stares at me. ‘What’s your new friend at Peacocks like?’

That took me by surprise. It showed me, too, what I ought to have known about the size and efficiency of Mapleford’s espionage system. I had been down to Peacocks Hall exactly five times since old Mrs Montgomery had let the house to Peter Gastineau in February. This man was one of my very few private patients—that is to say, one of those who, although they paid the compulsory weekly premium under the new scheme, elected to pay their doctor as well. That alone made him something of a rarity. I explained at once.

‘Well, he’s arthritic,’ I said, ‘and he had quite a “heart”. He spent some time in a prison camp, and not one of the better ones either, by the look of him. He has a man and his wife looking after him.’

Ludlow grunted. ‘All foreigners, I suppose?’

‘Gastineau is naturalized, but I imagine he’s French or Belgian born. The servants aren’t English either.’

‘I see.’ He seemed gloomy. ‘I don’t like foreigners. Pure prejudice, of course, but they all seem sly to me ... all except the Americans and the Scots, and they’ve got other faults no doubt. What did Alice Montgomery want to let her house for?’

‘She’s gone to London for the spring.’

‘Oh.’ That cheered him. ‘I didn’t realize he hadn’t come to stay.’ He paused in his meanderings up and down the room and raised his eyebrows. ‘Very lucky to let that old house for such a short time this weather. Why does a foreigner want to come down here in the cold? Darned damp hole to take his arthritis to, I should have thought. Well, I shouldn’t see any more of him than you need, you know.’

He went off to the french windows, but before he left glanced round.

‘You’re a bit too pretty with that black hair and blue eyes, and your figure’s too good,’ he said seriously. ‘These old gals round here, they suspect that.’

(So it was Miss Luffkin, was it? Her little house was very near Peacocks. I might have known.)

‘Those are faults I’ll recover from with the years,’ I said aloud.

‘Eh? Oh yes, I suppose you will.’ The notion did not appear to comfort him particularly. ‘Goo’bye, my dear. Not another word about that other matter, mind. Leave that entirely to me.’

He went dancing off across the meadow like a gnome, and as I watched him Rhoda came up behind me.

‘I couldn’t help hearing and it reminded me,’ she said brazenly. ‘This cottage is too small for secrets. That Mr Gastineau rang up twice this morning. He’s quite well but he wants to see you very urgently. Wouldn’t leave a message.’

I could feel her curiosity bristling like a hedgehog.

‘He’s well over forty and he’s one of the ugliest men I’ve ever set eyes on,’ I observed.

‘Is he?’ To my surprise she sounded quite relieved. As a rule any faint promise of romance sets her up for a week. I deduced that an arthritic foreigner was not acceptable, but as if she had been reading my mind she said suddenly: ‘I’ve been remembering Mr John, you see.’

So had I, of course. There are times when I find old Rhoda very nearly unbearable.

It was ten past five when I left the Cottage Hospital on the other side of town and surgery was at six, but as I neared the lane which leads past Miss Luffkin’s cottage to Peacocks Hall I thought I could just fit in a call on Mr Gastineau. I was not going there because he attracted me irresistibly. He didn’t. To my mind there was little that was entrancing about that battered and racked shell of a human being, but there was something there that I recognized and thought I could sympathize with, and the interesting thing about it was that I couldn’t give it a name. He and I shared a frame of mind, or I thought we did. There was something about his attitude towards life which struck a responsive chord in me. I could not define it. I had no idea what it was. It was an undercurrent, emotional and rather frightening, and it made me curious. I did not even like him, but I certainly wanted to know more about him.

Miss Luffkin was pruning the ramblers which grow over her hedge. As far as I know she never does anything else. Whenever I pass, be it winter or summer or merely the right time of year for pruning, there she is, secateurs in hand, snipping and brushing and tying and bending, while her quick eyes turn this way and that and her green gardening bonnet is never still.

I waved nonchalantly and sped by. I guessed she would stare after me and probably glance at her watch, so that later, when I came back, she could look at it again. It couldn’t be helped.

Peacocks is one of those sprawling Elizabethan houses that seem to be nestling into the earth for warmth. As I pulled up, the front door creaked open and Gastineau himself appeared. He was delighted but also embarrassed to see me, I thought, and he came stiffly forward to open the car door.

‘This is so kind that I am ashamed,’ he said in his clipped, over-precise English as he led me into the house. ‘I did not mean to drag you all the way out here. I merely have a little favour to ask, and I seem to be making all the trouble in the world.’

He glanced at me out of the corners of his dull black eyes and I thought again how extraordinarily ugly he was. He was a tall man who was bent into a short one and his skin was sallow and stretched over his bones. Worst of all, he gave one the impression that there had once been something vital and attractive about his looks, but that he was a ghost of himself and his deepset eyes were without light.

I did not sit down. ‘What can I do?’ I inquired briefly. ‘Surgery at six, and I’ve got to get back.’

He grimaced. ‘Children with spots and old ladies with pains. An extraordinary life for such a pretty woman. But you like it, don’t you?’

‘I love it,’ I admitted, ‘and I’m afraid I never find it even distasteful.’

‘I see you don’t. You are more than clever, you are kind. That is more rare,’ he said gravely. ‘That is why I have turned to you. Doctor, I have to have an ambulance.’

It was so unexpected that I laughed and was sorry for it at once, he looked so worried.

‘I realize I am being ridiculous,’ he said slowly. ‘I am—as they say—in a flat spin. A most awkward and difficult thing has happened and I have to do something about it. It is the widow of a very old friend and compatriot of mine. I have just heard that she is alone and ill in London. I fear she may be’—he hesitated and watched my face as he chose a word—‘difficult, also.’

‘Nerves?’ I suggested. That was the usual story.

‘It may be more than that.’

‘Alcoholism?’

He threw out his stiff hands. ‘I do not know. It is possible, anything is possible. All I can tell you is that I have to go to fetch her with an ambulance and to bring her here.’

I felt my eyebrows go up. I was beginning to learn that there is absolutely no depth of human folly to which the most unlikely patient will suddenly descend, but I was still green enough to venture a protest.

‘It sounds a very tall order,’ I began cautiously.

‘Does it? It is all I can do.’ He spoke with a queer obstinacy. ‘I promised Maurice as he died that if there was ever anything I could do for Louise, I would. Now the moment has come and I must have her here.’

‘It’s a great responsibility.’

He turned on me. ‘Please don’t think I do not know. I have thought it out from every angle. For a week I have been deciding, but I know in my heart that I must bring her home. Radek and Grethe will look after her, and you, if you please, will come to see her and advise me. Then I shall know I have done what I could.’

He watched me to see if I was impressed, and I was, of course. I was glad to see him taking so much interest in a fellow human being. I had not thought there was so much kindness or duty left in him. I only hoped he knew what he was in for.

‘I can order an ambulance for you,’ I said gently. ‘It only seems odd that her present doctor does not arrange it.’

‘Ah, I was afraid you would notice that.’ He smiled at me awkwardly. ‘She has quarrelled with him, of course. There is nobody to look after her except the landlady, who says I must arrive with the ambulance. You will come with me, won’t you, Doctor? You go to London on Saturdays.’

There I put my foot down. I was gentle, I hope, but firm. I could just see Percy’s face if the ‘foreigner’ and I went gallivanting off to London in the local bone-wagon. Besides, he was asking too much. My Saturday trips to the capital were the week’s one escape from Mapleford, and I felt my sanity depended on them. I was mildly surprised that he knew so much about my habits.

I could not dissuade him. ‘But you could see her in London before she leaves.’ He pleaded as though his life depended upon it, urgent as a child, his eyes two dusky holes in his head.

I weakened. I knew it was silly, but I did, and I turned to the open bureau in the corner to find a scrap of paper to write the address on. He nearly wept with gratitude as he dictated it to me.

I am certain I should never have noticed the scrap of blue tissue protruding from one of the tiny drawers which lined the desk if I had not heard his sudden intake of breath and looked up just as he leaned past me to thrust the thing out of sight. As it was, I hardly saw it at all. I caught a glimpse of something which looked vaguely familiar and then there was nothing there save his twisted and stiffened hand, which was shaking violently.

When I glanced up at him in astonishment he was trying to laugh, but his eyes were anxious, I thought.

‘It is a pigsty of a desk. That is what you are thinking, aren’t you? Let me see what you have written. Yes, that’s right. The name is Louise Maurice, the address 14 Barton Square, West 2.’

I was still rather surprised. I had plenty of patients who might have thrown a fit if I had lighted on an unpaid gas bill or an overdue demand for rates. Mapleford was full of them. But I did not think Gastineau was quite the type. I was fairly certain he had been genuinely alarmed, and I wished I had seen the blue slip more closely. It had suggested something so familiar that I just could not place it.

My puzzled expression seemed to delight Peter Gastineau. He became quite lighthearted, suddenly, and insisted on seeing me to the car.

‘I think I am a most brilliant judge of character,’ he remarked unexpectedly as we shook hands in the drive. ‘You are kind but you are also very practical, aren’t you, and you have a great sense of what is expedient.’

‘I should be a menace as a doctor if I hadn’t,’ I said lightly and climbed into the car.

‘And you are not forgiving?’ He had to raise his voice, since my foot was on the starter, and the effect was to make the question sound anxious and important. At the same moment I saw the clock on my dashboard and let in the clutch.

‘I have a heart of flint,’ I shouted over my shoulder as I shot away. It was only as I was waving to Miss Luffkin, who, as I had expected, was waiting in the dusk to see me go by, that it occurred to me that it was a most extraordinary remark for him to have made.

Percy was not on duty that night, and when I got back there was a crowd at the surgery. The waiting-room was packed and I cursed socialized medicine. To my mind its weakness was elementary, and I felt somebody might have foreseen it. Since everyone was forced to pay a whacking great weekly premium for medical insurance, nearly everybody, not unexpectedly, thought they might as well get something out of it, and, as far as Mapleford was concerned, the three who stood between nearly everybody and the said something-out-of-it were Percy and his two assistants, who had not been exactly idle before.

Percy hired us a secretary, paying her out of the private fortune his wife left him, but she, poor girl, could not sign our names for us or weigh up the merits of a claim, so the stream of importunates demanding free chits to the dentist, free wigs, postal votes, corsets, milk, orange juice, vitamin tablets, pensions, invalid chairs, beds, water-cushions, taxi rides to hospital, crutches, bandages, artificial limbs, and a thousand and one likely or unlikely requirements dogged us wherever we went. As Percy said, it was almost a relief to find someone who just had a pain.

To make matters more difficult, the more ignorant (and less sick) among the crowds had lost their old respect for our calling, and treated us as if we were officials trying to cheat them out of their rights. However, I was not so dead against it all—except at surgery time—as was Percy. I thought I should probably learn some way of coping with it in the end, and meanwhile I strove to keep my mind clear and to remember at all costs that I was a doctor first and a form-filler second.

That night I worked until I was in a lather. The secretary was close on angry by the time I had finished, and was taking a couple of minutes to listen to poor old Mr Grigson’s interminable tale of the strange noises his chest made in the night. He is a retired sea captain, full of years and dignity, and he had walked up to the surgery with his bronchitis because ‘since he was not paying’ me any more he did not like to drag me out to his cottage. I wished everyone was as thoughtful, but hoped it had not killed him. In my gratitude and guilt I listened far too long until the recital was ended abruptly by the telephone.

I fully expected the call to be from Rhoda, fuming over a spoiled meal, but I had been too sanguine. The message, uttered in a child’s squeaky voice, was brief but explicit. Mrs McFall had ‘begun’. I took down my coat. Once Mrs McFall ‘began’ it was time for all men of good will to get out the boats, man the defences, batten down the hatches, and call out the fire brigade, and the fault was not hers, poor fecund lady, but her husband’s. Mrs McFall had a fine baby every year, and had been doing so with the beautiful regularity of sunrise or the autumnal equinox for as far back as anyone remembered. But Mike McFall, her lorry-driving husband, had never got himself used to the phenomenon. Each essay into fatherhood came upon him as a new and terrible experience only to be endured with the help of alcohol in such vast quantities that the man was a raving lunatic throughout the whole affair.

Nurse Tooley ministered to the people in that area. She was a woman after my own heart. Her courage made me ashamed of my own and her endurance had to be observed to be credited. But even she felt Mrs McFall’s ever recurrent crises were two-woman jobs. I had promised her that if I was above ground the next time Mrs McFall ‘began’ I would be there.

‘You deliver the child, Doctor,’ she said, ‘and I’ll control himself.’

So I had to go.

It was dawn by the time we had finished. As the first cock crew the youngest McFall let out his first furious bellow at the world he had hardly inherited, poor chicken, and soon after a stalwart neighbour and her son agreed to take over the parents.

Nurse and I crept out into the grey light, and because she was if anything more weary than I we loaded her bicycle on to the car and I drove her home. Despite the hour, nothing would content her save that I step in for a cup of tea. Her round red face was full of anxiety.

‘Sure I’ve got a little word I’d like to be saying to you, Doctor.’

I am easy, of course. Sometimes I hope it is not just weakness of character. I staggered in. The cottage was tiny and neat as a doll’s house, and as Nurse Tooley scurried about putting out china I sat in the best chair and felt my eyelids grow sticky with sleep. There was something rather special about this woman, I thought idly as I watched her square energetic form, solid and strong as a cob pony. She was deft and shrewd and loyal, and the idea shot into my mind that when John and I got our children’s clinic we should need her. In an instant I had remembered and the furious colour rushed into my face. It was the kind of idiotic trick my subconscious was always liable to play on me whenever I got over-tired.

Nurse handed me a steaming cup and sat down beside me.

‘You’re done up. You look flushed,’ she observed with concern. ‘I ought not to have kept you out of your bed but I did want to speak to you. You’re in trouble with the police, I hear.’

I blinked at her. ‘I sent Sergeant Archer home with a chip on his shoulder after that accident on Castle Hill last week, if that’s what you mean,’ I said. ‘He infuriated me. Fancy trying to get me to estimate if the dead driver had been drunk, there and then in the roadway! Especially as his hip flask had burst all over him.’

She shook her kind old head at my indignation.

‘It’s excited he was,’ she said. ‘But he’s a bad enemy, Doctor, and you don’t want enemies in the force, though God knows it’s not my place to be mentioning it to you. No, I was wanting to inquire about this dangerous drug.’

That woke me up. I could just see what was happening now that Percy had decided to shut the stable door well after the horses had been stolen. I did my best to explain whilst keeping the irritation in my voice to a minimum.

‘Dormital. Yes, I wrote it in my book as soon as Inspector Brush mentioned it to me.’ Her Irish brogue was warm and deeply apologetic. ‘He told me to keep it under my hat but to keep my eyes open for it just the same. You’ll not have had it stolen, Doctor, not in Mapleford, for it’s not at all useful. If it had been a nice sizeable packet of cascara, now, I wouldn’t have trusted some of them. No, you’ve let it slip out of the car and someone has upped and slung it over the hedge. Could you tell me what it was like at all, for if it’s found the chances are I shall be having it brought to me?’

I had described my loss carefully to the Inspector and I had no need to visualize it again.

‘Why, yes, I can,’ I said. ‘It was a white carton with some blue round the edges—a narrow band, I think. There was printing on the outside, just the usual details and guarantees. The carton had been opened and it held a two-ounce capsule bottle with the seal unbroken. Oh yes, and there was the ordinary literature inside, a flimsy, tightly printed blue paper ...’

My voice dried suddenly as I heard my own words. A blue paper, tightly printed!

‘What’s the matter, Doctor?’

‘Oh, nothing. Nothing of importance.’ I managed to sound normal and to say good-bye and to get myself back into the car, but as I sped home through the half-awake streets it went through my mind like a little warning bell that perhaps I was making a silly mistake in being so sorry for Gastineau and so ready to oblige him. The dreadful thing was that I could not be sure, yet it could have happened. I had not called at Peacocks Hall on the day I missed the Dormital, but I had seen Peter Gastineau. It was just after I had been to call on Miss Luffkin. I had left her safely in the house, for once, gargling her sore throat in the bathroom, and I came out to the car to find Gastineau standing beside it. I assumed he had just arrived after one of his little saunters down the road which were all the exercise he was able to take, but of course he might have been there much longer....

I was thinking about it as I reached my bed and fell asleep, and it was still in my mind when I woke a few hours later. The more I thought about it the more awkward it became, but at the same time my conviction that the blue paper was the same blue paper grew alarmingly. I half considered going to old Percy, and I think I would have done in the end had I not been so impossibly busy. As it was, the only immediate effect of the whole incident was that I forgot to order the ambulance until I was in the midst of a strenuous afternoon at the Friday Welfare Clinic. I had to make the call from the phone on the desk, and I remember thinking at the time that it was the most public telephone conversation I had ever had. Every mother and half the babies listened to me as if I was ordering a charabanc for an outing. There is not a lot of free entertainment in Mapleford, and people certainly make the best of what there is. By nightfall everyone in the place would know of Gastineau’s visitor, her name, and where she came from and the exciting fact that I would see her in London, that fabulous city.

I don’t know why it was, but I felt it was dangerous then.

Altogether it was a heavy week, and on Saturday morning it was a thrill to put away my solid tweeds and climb into a silk suit and a squirrel cape, to put on a silly hat which made me look twenty again, and to drive off to the metropolis fifty miles away.

I had lunch at the Mirabelle with Edith Gower, an old buddy of mine. We had heavenly food and one of those gossips which are good for the soul. Afterwards we went to an exhibition of modern art and met two of her friends who had pictures there, so just for a little while I wallowed in a world as far away from Mapleford as it was possible to imagine. It did me no end of good.

It was a quarter before four before I realized it and I had to make a Cinderella exit and fly for Barton Square. It is no good pretending that I did not regret my promise to Peter Gastineau just then. I wished him and his poor Madame Maurice, if not at the bottom of the sea, at least in the middle of next week. They would wait for me, I had no doubt, but even so there was none too much time as I had promised to have tea with Matron at St James’s at five.

I found Barton Square without much difficulty, and the narrow, slightly tattered grey houses rose up like a cliff above me as I crept round it looking for the number. To my astonishment there was no sign of the ambulance. I hoped they had not run into trouble on the road.

Number 14 was a surprise, too. For one thing, it was shut up like a Bedouin lady in walking-out costume. Drab curtains covered the windows and there appeared to be no lights behind them. It was one of those narrow slices of building with steps to the front door, and an area with a lion’s cage of a railing round it. I went up and rang the doorbell. I could hear its hollow clanging echoing through the hallway within, but there were no answering footsteps.

For some time I stood waiting, the cold wind whipping round me. Presently I rang again, and again I heard the bell, but still no one came. I was beginning to wonder if there could be two Barton Squares in the west of London when I thought I heard a movement in the basement below me. I suppose I had grown so used to admitting myself into patients’ houses in Mapleford that I did not hesitate. I scrambled down the worn stone steps of the area and, skirting the ash-can, entered the tiny porch which I found there. The inner door was closed and, after knocking without results, I tried it.

My hand was on the knob when a most disconcerting thing happened. It turned in my fingers as someone grasped it on the other side, and the door jerked open, pulling me in with it so that I finished up with my nose less than six inches from another face immediately above me.

‘Oh,’ I said inadequately.

To do him justice, the stranger seemed just as startled as I was. He was a tall, middle-aged man with a gentle, vague expression. His good brown suit was loose for him, and he clutched a well-brushed hat and a carefully rolled umbrella. Just now he was hesitating, waiting for me to speak first.

I must have been rattled, I suppose, for I said the first thing that came into my head. I said: ‘Have you seen the ambulance?’

The question shocked him. I saw his eyes flicker and he said in a quiet, pleasant voice which yet matched his vague expression: ‘Oh, there was an ambulance, was there? Oh dear.’

I am afraid I am one of those people who can’t help going to the assistance of the socially put out. Although I was half-way into someone else’s house, and in the wrong if anyone was, I felt I ought to help him, he looked so worried.

‘I’m Dr Fowler,’ I explained. ‘I’ve come to see a patient who, I understand, is to be taken into the country by ambulance. Her name is Maurice. Is this the right house?’

He peered at me in what seemed to be distress, and it occurred to me that I must make a rather odd sort of doctor in my all too feminine clothes, but apparently he did not doubt me.

‘Do you know, I really can’t tell you,’ he said at last, adding sincerely, ‘I’m so sorry. No one seems to be in the house at all except—well, perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming to see for yourself?’

He turned and, highly mystified, I followed him into a labyrinth of those gloomy dungeons and subdungeons which our ancestors were pleased to call ‘domestic quarters’.

The first, which was unfurnished as well as deserted, led to a second, smaller room fitted up snugly enough as a kitchen. There, stolidly eating her tea and toast, as if no one had been ringing a bell or standing on a doorstep, was a large clean elderly woman with the eyes and jaw movement of a cow in a field. She looked up as we appeared, smiled pleasantly, and just went on eating. It was, I think, the most unnerving welcome I have ever received.

As soon as I attempted to speak to her the mystery was solved. Still smiling, but with the complete indifference of one who knows something is hopelessly beyond her, she shook her head and with a forefinger pointed first to one ear and then the other. She was stone deaf, poor soul.

I opened my bag and was ferreting round in it for a pencil when a voice murmured in my ear.

‘Well, you know, I fear that’s no good,’ muttered the man with the umbrella. ‘She doesn’t read English. I tried that.’

‘What nationality is she?’

‘That’s it, I can’t find out.’ He sounded as helpless as I felt, and added as if he thought I ought to have an explanation, ‘I just happened to call, you see.’

I didn’t quite, as it happened, but it was the woman I was interested in. At that moment she broke the silence. After taking a draught from her cup, which looked as if it contained something boiling, she wiped her mouth and, leaning back in her chair, spoke in the very loud toneless voice of one who cannot hope to hear.

‘All gone.’ Her accent was unrecognizable and I could only just understand her. ‘All gone.’ She smiled again. ‘No one.’ She was trying hard and her hands illustrated the emptiness of the house above us.

‘Where?’ I was trying her with lip language and she watched me carefully but shook her head. It was frightful. We were two intelligences with no hope of communication.

‘Who?’ I tried again and she laughed.

I smiled back and shrugged my shoulders. There was nothing to do but go away and I had turned when her unnatural bellow filled the room again.

‘Sick woman,’ she shouted.

I swung round eagerly and nodded to show we were on the right track.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Yes. Where?’

She sat thinking. I could see her doing it, her broad forehead wrinkled and her eyes moving. Once or twice she began to frame a word, but it was not an English one, I thought, and she always rejected it. Presently she rose and pushed back her chair.

‘A-a-ah,’ she began cautiously. ‘Sick woman. Morter. Morter ...’

‘Motor,’ muttered the man at my side. ‘I think she means motor car.’

I nodded at the woman, who smiled, well pleased.

‘Morter ... whoosh ... gone. Sick woman gone.’ She sank down once more and pulled her plate towards her. We might not have been there.

The man with the umbrella accompanied me to the door, getting there first to hold it open for me.

‘Dr Fowler,’ he began, giving me a tremendous start because I had forgotten that I had introduced myself, ‘there was a cream ambulance coming out of the square just as I came in.’

‘Really? When was this?’

He considered. ‘Now let me see. Yes. Yes, it must be just over an hour ago.’ He was not at all happy, and his discomfort was nearly as evident to me as my own. ‘It was caught up in the traffic,’ he continued casually, ‘and I happened to notice that it came from a place called Mapleford. Would that be the one, Doctor?’

‘Yes,’ I said absently. ‘Yes, that’s it. I wonder ...’

I don’t know what made me glance squarely at him at that particular moment, but I did, and what I saw set me back squarely on my heels. All the vagueness had vanished from his pale eyes and for a split second they were shrewd and hard and frighteningly intelligent. The next moment he was his old, apologetic helpless self again, but I was frightened and I bade him good afternoon and hurried off up the area steps, feeling almost panicky.

Before I drove off to see Matron at St James’s I spoke to the officer on point duty, and he confirmed that an ambulance had called on that side of the square at about three o’clock.

I was furious. By that time I was disgusted with the whole business, and there is one unalterable rule for a doctor who begins somewhat belatedly to scent mystery: that is for him to wash his hands of the affair as quickly and thoroughly as possible. I put the whole business firmly out of my mind and did not think of it again until nearly half past eleven that evening when I was driving home. By that time I was better-tempered. The night was glorious and I had time to think. I decided to give Gastineau and his lady friend a rest for a bit. It would be quite easy for me to plead overwork and get young Dr Wells, Percy’s other assistant, to take them over for a while.

By the time I turned into the familiar road I had almost forgotten Gastineau, and I saw the light on in the cottage with dismay. Rhoda never stays up for me when I go to town. She goes to the cinema first and then to bed. She leaves me a jug of milk and a biscuit on the table, and sometimes a few enlightening remarks scribbled on the pad. If she was still up, something very unusual must be afoot.

I left the car just outside the garage and sneaked in by the back door. Rhoda was in her basket chair, knitting furiously to keep herself awake. As I appeared she glanced up and put a finger to her lips.

‘Who?’ I whispered.

‘He won’t go.’ She nodded at the inner door and, taking up a final stitch, rolled up the vest she was making. ‘It’s that foreigner,’ she murmured. ‘He came creeping in just as I was going to bed. Said he’d been trying to telephone here all the evening and just had to come and see you to satisfy himself.’ She paused, her bright eyes meeting mine. ‘I can’t say I think much of him now I’ve seen him.’

‘Nor do I,’ I agreed, keeping my voice down. ‘Why didn’t he go to Dr Wells?’

‘Oh, he wouldn’t. He said it was personal.’ She was watching me with the suspicion of a mother, ready to defend but prepared for the worst.

‘Rubbish,’ I declared wholeheartedly. ‘I’ll go and send him home. I’ve never heard such nonsense.’

Her pink face cleared. ‘That is a weight off my mind,’ she said unnecessarily. ‘I couldn’t see what you saw in him. Besides, I’ve had a letter today from Southersham. It came by the second post and there’s real news in it. Something you’ll never guess.’

I am afraid I interrupted her. Rhoda would pause for a good gossip if the house was on fire. Just then my mind was occupied. This development was more than I had bargained for.

‘I suppose you do mean Mr Gastineau?’

‘That’s what he called himself.’ She conveyed it was probably a pseudonym. ‘If you can get rid of him it’s more than I could without taking my strength to him. Go and try. I’ll pop the kettle on, and when you come back I’ll tell you my bit of news if you’re in a better temper.’

Peter Gastineau was sitting by the fire, his elbows on his knees and his long hands drooping between them. He got up stiffly when he saw me and took a step forward. He was struggling with nervous excitement and his black eyes had a light in them I had not seen before.

‘I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world,’ he began. ‘Doctor, you must be so angry.’

‘Not at all.’ I was not so inexperienced that I was going to let the party become in any way emotional. ‘I am very tired, I am afraid, but is there anything I can do?’

‘I hope so.’ He spoke fervently. ‘I am in a dreadful predicament. I am so frightened that I have made a most serious mistake.’ He sat down again without being asked and I noticed a blue line round his mouth. ‘I tried to catch you this morning, when I heard from London of the change of plan. You’d gone, of course.’ He was not apologizing so much as stating the case, and I had the wind taken out of my sails.

‘I gathered that the patient was removed earlier in the afternoon,’ I observed acidly, and at once he was interested and even excited.

‘Oh, you did see someone, did you? That is good. Who did you find there?’

‘A deaf woman and a man who was visiting her. What happened exactly?’

He did not reply directly. The discovery that I had not merely found the door shut in my face seemed to engross him.

‘If you saw somebody, made yourself known to them, that’s something.’ He spoke with relief and I found myself peering at him. He had changed somehow. There was something new about him, and to my annoyance I could not decide what it was. I wondered if he was stewing up for a nerve crisis. He caught my expression and pulled himself together. ‘I am almost beside myself,’ he explained awkwardly. ‘As you know, since ... since the war I have become such a lover of comfort and order and peace. Any change of plan makes me jitter. This morning the good woman who has been looking after Madame Maurice telephoned to say that the hour of departure must be changed. I was in despair, you were in London and out of reach. Finally I got hold of the ambulance people and with some difficulty got them to go earlier.’

He took a deep breath and leaned back. The idea, apparently, was that I should sympathize with him.

‘Well, if you got her here, that’s all right,’ I said soothingly. ‘There was no need for you to come up here tonight.’

He opened his eyes wide. ‘But I came to fetch you. You must see her.’

‘Not tonight,’ I said firmly. ‘That’s out of the question. It’s very late. Far better let her sleep now and I’ll come round in the morning.’

He seemed astounded. I saw a glimpse of something in his face which startled me. I thought he was going to rave at me. It was a queer expression, very fleeting and familiar. I have seen it on the faces of tiny boys when they are suddenly deprived of something they want very much. It is elemental rage, I suppose. Anyhow he controlled it and said meekly enough:

‘She is so strange. Neither Grethe nor I know what is wrong. It is a great responsibility.’

‘Have you taken her temperature?’

‘Grethe tried. It was impossible.’

‘Is she delirious?’

‘I am not sure.’

I put my temper under hatches. Here was a fine household to undertake the care of an invalid.

‘Then you should have gone to Dr Wells, but it’s too late now, I’m afraid. Look here, would you like to ring your housekeeper and see how she is?’

He shook his head. ‘You must come back with me.’ He paused and added devastatingly, ‘Without you I cannot very well get home. I made certain you would come and so I sent my man back with the car. We could try to telephone for a taxi, I suppose.’

Now that was a trump card, had he known it. I could just see myself waking up old Chatterbox at the local garage and getting him to turn out to take Gastineau away from my house at midnight on my day off duty. I began to feel very angry indeed.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Put on your coat and I’ll run you back and take a look at her.’ There was nothing else I could trust myself to say.

I got my own heavy tweed from the lobby and took him out through the kitchen to the yard. Rhoda gaped at me and I let them both see that I was not exactly pleased.

On the journey I said nothing at all, as far as I remember. After one or two ineffectual attempts to interest me in my new patient, he gave up and we raced on in silence.

There was a light in Miss Luffkin’s front room which went out as we sped past, and I was unreasonably glad that the night had become so dark. All the lights were on at Peacocks. The old house looked as though it were celebrating something. Grethe, the housekeeper, a swart eastern European with the most eager eyes I have ever seen in a woman, met us in the hall. She spoke to Gastineau in a language I didn’t even recognize and he turned to me.

‘Madame Maurice is in the guest room. Will you come up?’

‘Yes, I’ll see her since I’m here,’ I agreed ungraciously, but I did not take my coat off.

I followed him up the polished staircase, which was black with age and very wide, on to a large landing where Radek was waiting. I got the impression that this solid wedge of a man, with the heavy face and coarse yellow hair, had been sitting outside one of the doors, but I could not be sure. He too said something to his employer and Gastineau nodded and signalled him to leave us.

‘She’s here,’ he said, and without knocking opened a door on the extreme right of the landing, facing the back of the house.

I went in first. It was one of those tremendous rooms which were designed to house a family. There was a coal fire in the grate and not much other light, and at the end of the plane of carpet I could see a big old-fashioned bed with a canopy and chintz hangings.

Two things impressed me the moment I entered. One was that the patient, whatever was wrong with her, was snoring more or less normally, and the other that there was a violent smell of alcohol in the room. I think I was saved from turning to box Gastineau’s ears by the recollection of the story which little Mr Featherstone, the vet, had told me the week before. He said his Christmas evenings were always spoiled by dowagers who sent for him to see their apparently dying pets, and were furious when he had to tell them that if they fed a dog on plum pudding and brandy sauce they must not be surprised if they became tipsy.

I went over to the bed and looked down. It was so dark that I could only make out a little face and a cloud of hair on the pillow. I spoke without looking up.

‘May I have some more light, please?’

‘Of course.’ His voice sounded odd, husky with intense excitement. I was concentrating on the patient at the time and although I noticed it I did not pay much attention to it until afterwards. He had gone round to the other side of the bed and now turned an unusually powerful reading lamp on the two of us. It almost blinded me. I waved it down a bit.

The woman lying before me was scarcely thirty and must, I reflected, be quite beautiful when her face was less flushed and mouth less slack. Her fair hair was bleached but very lovely and it spread round her head on the pillow like a halo. I don’t know if I am particularly stupid or unobservant, but I do know that my training has taught me to concentrate only on certain details of a patient’s face. It has happened that I have not recognized a woman whom I have been treating for weeks when I have met her some time later in the street. Anyhow, I know that on that night, up in the vast guest room at Peacocks, it was fully five minutes before the message which was hammering on the back of my mind suddenly got through my professional concentration and I looked at the woman and realized who she was.

Francia Forde.

I had never studied her photographs consciously and I had never seen her films, but now that I was confronted by her I knew it was she as surely as if I had lived with her half my life. In one way I suppose I had. It was one of those revelations which are at once terrifying and shaming. I saw just how much and minutely I must have thought about her, and just how avidly my subconscious mind must have seized on every little trick and detail of her face.

I found I knew the moulding of her cheek and the faint hollow beside her temples as well as I knew the lines round Rhoda’s mouth. There were differences I hadn’t expected, tiny blemishes the camera had not shown. This woman had not been doing herself much good just recently. There was a network of tiny lines, finer than a spider’s web, on her eyelids. But she was still lovely. So lovely that the old helpless feeling settled down over my heart without my daring to question why or whence it came.

It was some seconds before I realized that I was being watched from the other side of the bed and I wondered if I could have given myself away. Gastineau couldn’t have known anything about my private life, whatever the explanation of Francia Forde’s appearance in his house might be. That was one thing I was certain of.

Fortunately I have a poker face by nature and my training has strengthened the gift. If I am scared or even very interested I am mercifully merely liable to appear preoccupied, and when he said at last, ‘Well, Doctor?’ I felt sure he had noticed nothing.

I returned to my job with relief, remembering that it was nothing to do with me who the woman was or why she was there. All I had to decide was what was wrong with her. That was not very difficult. She showed no inclination to awake, but she was by no means unconscious and when I shook her gently she flung away from me with an incoherent word.

‘Was she like this when you collected her this afternoon?’ I inquired.

‘Not so sleepy.’ He sounded doubtful and I wondered whether he could be really so stupid as he appeared to be.

‘Yes, well,’ I said, ‘she’s been taking a considerable amount of some sort of sedative, which you will probably find among her luggage if you look, and to put it bluntly she has also had a great deal of alcohol. You will doubtless find the source of that too if you use your eyes.’

I was falling back on an excessive formality because I was both annoyed and shaken.

‘I should look under the bed valance, behind the curtains, and of course in her suitcases.’

He nodded. He was not going to pretend complete ignorance, I was glad to see.

‘I can hardly believe it,’ he said, coming round the bed, and walking down the wide room with me. ‘It doesn’t seem possible. She’s a very fine actress, you know.’ He shot a little quizzing glance at me on the last word or two, but I was in an odd emotional state just then and I didn’t want to discuss her, or even to find out if I was right about her identity. I just wanted to get out of that dreadful room.

‘Really?’ I sounded uninterested. ‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t help her any more. Take away any alcohol or any drugs you may find. Give her bismuth or something of the sort in the morning, and if she is very excitable, one ounce and no more of whisky at eleven. By tomorrow night you should know whether the trouble is—er, chronic or not.’

To my discomfort I heard him laugh very softly.

‘You’re very businesslike.’

‘I’m also very tired. Perhaps you’ll forgive me if I get away now.’

I moved towards the door and he came after me.

‘When will you come again?’

‘You may not need me any more,’ I said cheerfully. ‘There’s nothing very wrong with her. This may not be a regular thing. But if it is, you’ll need rather different advice from any I could give you. Good night, Mr Gastineau. No, don’t come down. I can find my way out.’

He hobbled to the stairhead with me and looked down as I descended. I heard his murmur just above me and the words were so extraordinary that I thought I must have mistaken them.

‘Courage,’ I thought I heard him say half to himself and half to me. ‘That was the only thing I doubted.’

I glanced up sharply but he was simply smiling and nodding.

‘Good night, Doctor. It was very good of you. Thank you. Good night.’

I did not realize I was so shaken by the whole business until I got out into the air. As my hands gripped the steering wheel I found they were trembling. This alarmed me as much as anything, for my life is based on the premise that I am a sensible, unshockable sort of person. I am one of those who have never thought mystery, doubt, or drama in any way exciting. I hate the lot of them. My instinct is to scramble stolidly to my feet whatever happens to me, like one of those toys which are weighted at the bottom, and the result is that I seldom get rattled and am made twice as bad by noticing it when I do.

As soon as I got the car going it occurred to me very forcibly that if Gastineau’s Madame Maurice was really Francia Forde (I admitted there was a strong chance I had made a crazy mistake here) there was something very odd indeed about her arrival in Mapleford, and the sooner I made a graceful escape from the affair the better.

I was reflecting on the most practical way of arranging this, and was thinking that Wells would be a more sympathetic ally than Ludlow, when I was pulled up by someone who walked out into the road and waved a torch at me. I trod hard on the brakes before I realized that I was just outside Miss Luffkin’s house.

There she was, wrapped up like a bundle of laundry, her thin excited face peering out at me from under a sou’wester tied on with a Liberty scarf.

‘Oh, Doctor it is you.’ I was aware of her eyes noting that I was hatless and had a silk suit on under my ulster. ‘I’ve been so worried about those poor people down at Peacocks. I saw the ambulance go by. Is someone very bad, Doctor?’

I have sometimes thought that Lizzie Luffkin’s curiosity is quite as pathological as her popeyes, an overactive thyroid gland. I don’t believe she can help it. Even she must have known that the solicitude in her voice was unconvincing. The sight of the ambulance must have acted like a red rag to a bull on her, and not knowing the explanation for five or six hours must have been pure agony.

‘Nothing serious,’ I said with forced heartiness. ‘Just an old friend of Mr Gastineau’s come to convalesce.’

‘Oh, I see, a friend.’ Her disappointment was so obvious that it was funny. She clung to the door of the car, eager for just a scrap more gossip. ‘You are out very late, Doctor.’

‘Yes, I am, aren’t I?’ I shouted above the engine I was revving. ‘But so are you. Good night.’

I shot away into the darkness, hoping I had not been too abrupt and should pay for it. In ten minutes I was home and I put up the car and walked into the kitchen. If Rhoda was sometimes a thorn in my flesh, there was nothing like that about her now. She was the one person in the whole world whom I knew to be unshakably on my side. As always, whenever I needed a really sober-minded confidante, she was there.

I told her who I thought was at Peacocks Hall. I can see her now turning away from the stove, the kettle in one firm red hand. There was no smart comeback, no undue surprise.

‘Are you sure?’

‘No, and I can’t believe it. It’s too ridiculous. Have you got that photograph you were showing me the other day?’

She got it for me at once out of her own private drawer, the middle one of the dresser, and spread it on the table for me to see.

I stood looking at it carefully for some time. I could see where it had been touched up, where the line of the jaw had been sharpened and the eyelashes drawn in. But the other facts were all there. It was not a usual face, not even one of a type. The contours were definite and convincing, the features line for line the same.

‘Is it?’ Rhoda came to stand beside me and put a heavy hand on my shoulder, a possessive gesture she seldom permits herself.

‘I think it is,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s either her or a double. It’s not sense, though, Rhoda. How could she be here calling herself Maurice?’

‘He’s calling her Maurice,’ she corrected me with typical reasonableness. ‘Besides, it’s not quite so funny as you seem to think. You’ve not seen the paper today, have you?’ She was ferreting under the radio table, where she keeps current reading matter, as she spoke, and soon came back with a copy of her favourite daily. ‘I noticed this when I was reading at lunch-time.’

It was a small news item, one of those five-line affairs tucked into the foot of the column.

Star To Rest. Friends of Miss Francia Forde, the screen actress, say that the star is to take a few days’ complete rest in the country after the ardours of making still pictures for the ‘Moonlight Girl’, a new advertising campaign due to begin in the Press on Monday.

I read it through two or three times before it made any sense to me.

‘That’s all very well,’ I said at last. ‘But I don’t see why she should come down here in an ambulance. I don’t see why Gastineau should tell me this Maurice story or why she should be staying with them.’

‘Perhaps she’s hiding.’

‘Who from? She’s very well known but she’s not one of the American top-liners. There aren’t armies of fans hounding her.’

Rhoda had become very thoughtful. If I had been more myself I should have noticed that tightening of the lips and the lowering of the thick determined brows, and might have been on guard.

‘You’re not satisfied, are you?’ she inquired, and the slightly hopeful note in her tone irritated me instead of warning me.

‘Well, of course I’m not,’ I burst out angrily. ‘How can I be? I’m persuaded to send an ambulance to London to fetch a woman who appears to be no more than very tipsy, and when I see her I recognize her as ... well, as somebody other than the person she is represented to me to be.’

‘Ah,’ said Rhoda, taking a beaker from the dresser with the idea of pouring us a hot drink to take to bed, ‘you are like your father when you talk like that. I can hear him this minute. My word, he’d be wild!’

‘The extraordinary thing is that she should come here,’ I went on, ignoring the reference to Father, although it had its comforting side.

She paused, jug in hand, and turned a pink face to me.

‘Coincidences do happen. That’s life. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Some people call it fate and some people call it religion, but whatever it is there’s no denying it happens.’

I always find Rhoda rather difficult to bear when she gets on this theme. It is one of her favourites and there is no stopping her. I took up my beaker and edged for the door.

‘You can run,’ she said warningly, ‘you can run, but it’ll catch you. This is a coincidence, and it’s more of a one than you know. You get some sleep.’

In my ignorance I felt this remark of hers was the only one that contained any reason at all, and I went off to bed feeling that at least there was some solace there.

Despite my worries, I felt the slow anaesthesia of sleep creeping over me the moment I pulled up the blankets. Just before I slipped away into unconsciousness I remembered two things. The first was that I had not asked Rhoda what news the letter from our old home had brought her, and the second that in my preoccupation with the patient I had not tackled Gastineau about the scrap of blue paper I thought I had seen on his desk. Even in my drowsing state this last seemed a formidable proposition, and I sailed away into oblivion without making up my mind how to tackle it.

The next day began quite normally for a Sunday. That is, I was up very late and only partially by mistake. I fear I leave the worst of my paperwork—and there is no end to it in these days—to Sunday morning, and I settled down to a mountain of hospital reports on patients I had sent there, about a quarter to eleven. I had not forgotten Francia Forde by any means, but I was trying to get her out of my mind. It was not just Francia. She brought back too many unbearable memories altogether. I was still stunned by the knowledge that she had got so close to me.

The only unusual element that morning was provided by Rhoda. Once or twice I wondered if she was ill. She bustled about as if she was thinking of spring cleaning, and for ten minutes we had a wrangle because she objected to my clothes. I was very comfortable in slacks and a twin set, and her remarks on my ‘slovenliness’ and my ‘nice new red wool upstairs’ completely bewildered me. In the end I got the better of her by insisting on taking her temperature. It was normal but her pulse was slightly quick, and I recommended a sedative. She left me alone after that but I heard her go out to the back gate several times, which was puzzling, for no one goes calling in Mapleford on a Sunday.

The sound of the car pulling up in the road outside filled me with sudden apprehension that Gastineau had come for me again. He seemed to have no idea that a doctor might have any hours. Also I guessed that his patient, if not in any danger, might well be feeling pretty sick by this time.

I got up and tiptoed across the room to peer out of the small window overlooking my minute front garden, so that I should get fair warning.

I pulled the curtain back half an inch and the next moment stood petrified, every nerve in my face tingling as if I had pressed it to a network of live wires.

John Linnett was standing at the small iron gate.

For a long time I simply did not believe it. I watched him hesitate, glance nervously at the cottage, and then fumble with the latch through his heavy driving glove.

He looked much older, and there was a touch of apprehension in his expression which I had never seen there before. It may sound absurd to say so, but I knew it really was John because of the changes in him.

The car he had come in, a low roadster covered with dust, stood in the lane behind him, empty, so he was alone. Of course. The sudden explanation of his sudden arrival broke over me like a wave. He had come to find me because Francia was at Peacocks, and I was supposed to be attending her. My scattered wits came together with a jerk. I felt my expression setting and becoming hard and brittle and very bright. If I had had any sense at all, I suppose, I should have expected him to appear on the scene sooner or later.

I threw open the window at once. ‘Hallo, John.’

‘Ann.’ He came stamping over the garden, his coat skirts flying and his hands outstretched. I saw how thin he was, suddenly, and how the bones of his face stood out. ‘My dear girl, thank God you’re all right.’

It was the most unlikely and most unexpected approach, and it floored me as nothing else would have done. He took my hands through the window and looked anxiously into my face.

‘What’s happened? What’s the matter? I came at once, of course.’

The whole thing was beyond me. My new hard cheerfulness cracked completely. I was only aware that he was there, trying to get into the house, and, apparently, through the window.

Rhoda opened the front door. I heard her say something to him and the next moment he was in the room, filling it. The nervous energy which I remembered in him so well had become intensified. His narrow eyes were eager and still terribly anxious.

‘You look all right,’ he said with relief. ‘You haven’t altered at all. In fact you’re better. Lost your puppy fat. What is it, Ann? What’s happened? I got the telegram early this morning and I’ve been driving ever since.’

There was a passage of stupefied silence from me, and a movement from Rhoda lurking in the doorway.

‘I sent it.’ Her tone was flat and her face expressionless, save for a faint gleam of belligerence in her eye. ‘I put your name, Miss Ann, because I thought that Mr John might not remember mine. As soon as you came in last night and said you weren’t satisfied I knew it was my duty.’

The barefaced wickedness of it took my breath away, but the thing that foxed me utterly was how she’d known where to send. She answered that one as if I’d asked the question.

‘I got a letter yesterday from my niece in Southersham. I was going to tell you about it but you were too busy to listen. She told me that she’d heard down there that Mr John was attached to the hospital at Grundesberg in Northamptonshire, so last night, when you’d gone to bed, I got on the telephone and sent a telegram to him there.’

I said nothing. There was nothing to say. She gave me a defiant stare and opened the door.

‘I’ve got the lunch to see to,’ she said as if I was thinking of disputing it. ‘I’m doing something special because I expected Mr John. You still care for pancakes, I expect, sir?’

‘I do,’ he said without thinking and returned to me. His expression was not only anxious now, but somehow frightened. ‘I thought you sent,’ he said. ‘I thought you wanted me for something. The telegram just said, “I think you had better come at once, Ann Fowler.” and gave the address.’

It was his dismay that got me. The utter disappointment came out so clearly that if I had been only half as sensitive where he was concerned it would have reached me. I found I knew him as if he had never been away.

‘If you’ve driven from Grundesberg this morning you must be exhausted.’ I said hastily. ‘Sit down and I’ll get you a drink. We’ll thrash this out in a minute.’

He laughed and it was a laugh I had known from childhood.

‘I haven’t even shaved. The thing got me out of bed at dawn. What’s the mystery? What aren’t you satisfied about?’

I had my back to him, since I was fixing a highball on the sideboard.

‘Rhoda got scared by something I said last night,’ I began with a casualness which was not convincing even to me. ‘I was called out to a new patient and she turned out to be ... Francia Forde.’

‘Oh.’ His disinterest was startling. ‘Is she down here? I thought I read somewhere that she was setting up as an advertising model.’

I swung round to look at him blankly and he took the glass from my hand.

‘I’ve not seen her in four years,’ he said slowly. ‘I shouldn’t get involved in any of her machinations if I were you, Ann. She’s a dangerous piece of work.’

I don’t drink whisky as a rule, but I had poured a highball for myself and now, in sheer absent-mindedness, I swallowed it almost whole, nearly choking myself. I had tears in my eyes and was gasping for breath and I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘John, what happened to you?’

He met my eyes steadily but he was ashamed, even frightened, and desperately miserable.

‘God knows, Ann.’

That was all, but I knew about it suddenly, or I knew a very great deal.

Rhoda came in to set lunch at that juncture. She was very busy being the model housekeeper, keeping her eyes downcast and wearing the wooden expression of one who has withdrawn completely from any awkward situation she may have precipitated.

Because I wanted to talk to him so badly and found it so easy I asked John about Grundesberg.

‘Understaffed and overcrowded. The usual story in that kind of district,’ he said easily. ‘Just the place to catch up on one’s general work. I’ve been there nearly eighteen months, ever since I was demobbed.’

‘But I thought ...’ I began before I could stop myself, ‘I mean I thought you came out in ’45.’

‘No,’ he said coolly. ‘I got some extended leave then and set about making a goddam fool of myself in a pretty big way, but after that I sneaked back into the army and went to the Far East.’

‘Hence the—silence,’ I murmured.

He said nothing at all. He did not even look at me. Rhoda saved us by a remarkable entrance, the silver soup tureen which we never use held high.

That meal was a revelation to me. I knew she had her secret store cupboard stocked against Christmas (or another war, perhaps) but I had no idea that it could produce anything like that. She waited on us, too, putting on a remarkable act which was part Maître of the Ritz and part Nanny at the party.

John began to enjoy himself. I had seen it happen to him so often in our childhood. The prickles drew in and the silences grew fewer. He began to laugh and to tease us both indiscriminately. No one mentioned the telegram, I think we forgot it deliberately. This was a dispensation, a time of sanctuary, something that might never come again.

After the meal we sat by the fire while the shadows grew long outside. There was so much to tell about the present that there was no need to speak of anything else, and we were chattering, and eating some filberts which Rhoda produced, as contentedly as if we were back in my schoolroom at Southersham.

I spoiled it. We were talking of his life in Grundesberg and he was giving me a highly comic if horrific description of the lodgings he shared with the other house surgeon when I said suddenly and without any excuse at all:

‘Are you still married to that woman, John?’

It was like breaking a gaily coloured bubble. The light went out in our little make-believe Sunday afternoon of a world.

‘Yes,’ he said, and added flatly, ‘I suppose so.’

I said nothing more, and after a long time he began to talk. At first I hardly heard what he was saying because I had made the panic-stricken discovery that his being here made the kind of difference to my life that colour makes to a landscape. It made sense. I had never before dared let myself believe that that could happen.

‘If I stop telling you I shall stop making excuses for myself,’ he was saying, ‘and there aren’t any. When I realized exactly what I had done, I decided that I was mental and I went right away. I meant to stay away, and I did ...’ He turned on me with sudden anger. ‘Damn you, Ann. I was all right until I got that telegram.’

‘So was I.’ It slipped out before I could stop it.

I could hear the words breaking like a little crystal dish on stone.

He lunged clumsily out of his chair and caught me as I sat, pushing his rough cheek into my neck and holding my shoulder blades with heavy, well-remembered hands. There was no helping it, no stopping it. I put my hands into his hair and held him close while my heart healed.

Percy Ludlow had to tap at the french windows twice before we heard him at all. The room was fairly dark, but he is not exactly blind and he was pink and apologetic when at last I got over there to admit him.

He had walked across the meadow with a packet of the endless papers which dogged our existence, and at first he was disposed to thrust them at me and depart, but I forced him to come in and be introduced.

‘This is Dr Ludlow, John,’ I said. ‘I told you, I’m his assistant. And this is Dr Linnett, Dr Ludlow. We were brought up together in Southersham.’

Percy gave me one of his sidelong glances.

‘I formed the impression that you were old friends,’ he said primly. ‘I can’t think why I haven’t heard of you before, young man. She’s a very close young woman, Dr Fowler, almost secretive.’

I thought that at any moment he was going to inquire how long ‘this’ had been going on, but I got him into a comfortable chair and was on the point of seeing about some tea when Rhoda came in without ceremony.

‘You didn’t hear the phone, did you?’ she said. ‘It’s the gentleman from Peacocks, and that you must go down to see her. He said he’d come for you if he didn’t hear.’

‘Eh, what’s that? Is that the foreigner?’ Percy startled Rhoda, who had not seen him.

‘Mr Gastineau.’ I glanced sharply at John to see if he would recognize the name, but clearly it meant nothing to him. He was standing in front of the fire with his chin up and the most obvious and reckless expression of delight in his eyes.

Percy grunted. ‘A woman down there now?’ he inquired.

‘I understand it’s a Madame Maurice,’ I explained cautiously. ‘He brought her from London yesterday and fetched me up late to look at her. My impression was that she was mainly tipsy.’

‘More than probable.’ He jerked his chin up to show his complete distrust of all the millions in the world who had not got themselves born as close to Mapleford as possible. ‘Perhaps you’d better run down, though, eh?’

This was just like him. He would reproach me for visiting Peacocks at all and then insist that I answer the first telephone call at speed. It irritated me because I had been expecting Gastineau to ring all day, and, since I was convinced that there was no one very ill there, I was going to cajole Wells to take the call for me. Wells is an outspoken young man and I felt he might do everybody a bit of good. Percy made all this impossible. I knew once I started to explain he would infer that Gastineau had been making passes at me, and nothing I could say would convince him otherwise.

Rhoda piled on the agony by remarking that the ‘foreign gentleman’ wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Percy nodded at me. ‘You change into a Christian skirt and pop down and settle the trouble,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Dr Linnett and I will have a smoke until you come back. It won’t take you ten minutes.’

I have given up wondering at Percy’s impudence. I knew he was dying to get the lowdown on what he clearly thought was a new romance of mine. I felt John was going to have quite an experience, and I hoped he was up to that kind of catechism.

With a stab I realized that the chances were that he would say more to Percy, who was another man and a stranger, than he would to me, and that perhaps I would have to hear some of it secondhand. Yet I thought I could guess most of it.

At any rate, I got into my red wool and a coat faster than ever in my life, and was out on the road in less than five minutes.

I drove as if I was flying. The whole world seemed to have suddenly turned inside out and become marvellous. I knew nothing of John’s story except the one thing that I suppose really mattered to me. He was in love with me still. I never doubted it. Whatever had happened was nothing to me. Whatever was coming to me, I did not care. Whatever the difficulties were, I felt certain we’d get over them. There was happiness ahead, real useful lives and happiness. It never occurred to me to remember I had something to forgive.

I was singing to myself, I think, as I drove down the lane. Certainly I waved at Miss Luffkin’s house whether she was at the window to see me or not, and I pulled up outside Peacocks with a screech of brakes and a flurry of gravel.

Radek opened the door to me. His English was more than sketchy but he bowed to make up for it and said: ‘Come, please,’ and led me to the staircase.

I ran up it, I remember, striding across the landing behind him with an eagerness I had not known since my student days.

Grethe opened the bedroom door to me and I noticed that she was very pale. It was not so dark as on the night before. There was still some light from the windows and there was a lamp by the bed, but when Gastineau rose up from the shadows by the fireplace he took me by surprise. I had not expected him to be sitting there in the semi-darkness.

It was as I caught sight of him and was about to speak that I heard something from the bed that sent a chill through me. I turned away from him abruptly, so that he stood with hand still outstretched, and went over to it.

Francia Forde lay flat on her back, the light from the reading lamp full on her face.

She was breathing very slowly, with the deep stertorous respirations of coma, and her face was almost unrecognizable, it was so congested. I took her hand and it was flaccid and limp as a doll’s.

No one came near me as I made my examination. I was quick, but as thorough as I knew how to be, and every new discovery filled me with more and more alarm.

She had no reflexes. I could not believe it. I tested her again and again, motioning to Grethe to come closer and give me the help I needed. It was no good. I tried her eyes and found the pupils semi-dilated, which puzzled me. Her temperature was up a little, not very much.

My bewilderment increased. This was no logical continuation of the condition in which I had seen her eighteen or so hours before. My experience was not vast like Percy’s but I was competent. I should never have made a mistake of that magnitude. At midnight this woman had been suffering from acute alcoholism, not very serious and one of the simplest things in the world to diagnose. Now she was in a deep coma which could have only one end, unless a miracle intervened.

I put some questions to Grethe, who answered them promptly, and my suspicions grew into terrifying certainty.

‘How long has she been breathing like this?’ I inquired.

The woman shrugged her shoulders and looked blank, so I put the vital inquiry into words.

‘What has she taken during the day? What drug?’

This time Grethe decided not to understand me at all. She appealed to Gastineau and he came forward into the circle of light.

‘This morning she was very excitable,’ he began softly, ‘almost demented. No one could do anything with her. Then at last she dropped into a sleep. At first no one worried, but at four o’clock Grethe came up and was frightened, I think.’

She nodded vigorously and turned away. I didn’t realize that she’d gone out of the room until I heard the door close softly.

‘I shall need her,’ I murmured. ‘Will you call her back please? I am afraid Madame Maurice is very ill.’

The news did not surprise him. His quiet dark eyes met mine.

‘I will ring in a moment. Before that, though, there is something I should say to you, Doctor.’ He looked towards the bed. ‘You know who this is, don’t you?’

I was silent a fraction too long and I heard him sigh.

‘Of course you do. You recognized her last night. Francia Forde, one of our leading film stars. A face that is very well known.’

He startled me horribly, not because he had told me anything new but because of a definite change in his attitude towards me. I took refuge in my most professional manner.

‘I hardly think her identity is of any great importance just now.’ I said briskly. ‘What does matter is her condition. I tell you frankly that she has taken something since I saw her last, something—er—something of a strongly narcotic character, and if we are to save her life it is vital that I should know what it is. Do I make myself clear?’

I realized that things were going very wrong as I finished speaking. He showed no sign of any kind of feeling. He was not alarmed or worried or even particularly interested.

‘You may be right,’ he said gently. ‘She was in a very strange mood when I persuaded her with such great difficulty to come with me into that ambulance which you so kindly arranged to send.’

I could hardly credit it, but there was, I was sure of it, a very definite emphasis on that last observation. It shook me. I certainly had hired the ambulance for him and because of one thing and another half the town was aware of the fact. However, there was nothing awkward in that unless ... ?

The idea which had come into my head was so melodramatic that I discounted it at once. People were kidnapped from time to time as I knew from the papers, but when they were, surely they were never brought to ordinary places like Mapleford by ordinary people like Gastineau?

He had been watching me for some little time and presently he said something which set me back on my heels, while the hairs prickled on my scalp.

‘I came to live in Mapleford solely because of you, Doctor. Did you know that?’

‘No,’ I declared, ‘and I can’t think—’

‘Do forgive me for interrupting you.’ His voice was gentle, even pleasant. ‘I know how anxious you are to get on with your work. I just want to tell you that I felt sure you would recognize Francia Forde when you saw her, and I also felt that you would appreciate my introducing her here under a name that was not so well known as her own. There is some sort of etiquette in these matters, I think.’

‘I had never seen Miss Forde before last night,’ I began boldly.

‘No.’ He smiled at me as if he were explaining some small social matter. ‘But you knew of her and you had good cause to—what shall we say—think of her quite a lot?’

There was a long silence. I think I was more terrified in that minute than ever before in my life.

He remained looking as I had always known him, bent and stiff and quietly polite.

‘I think I am right when I guess that had you known who my Madame Maurice was you would have hesitated to associate yourself with any illness she might contract. You do realize how far you are committed, don’t you, Dr Fowler?’

Did I? Francia Forde was dying from a dose of poison, either self-administered or given her by this terrifying man in front of me. If there was ever any inquiry at all, it must emerge at once that it was I of all people who had cause not only to hate her but, since this afternoon, to be anxious to get her out of the way. As I cast around me, every circumstance in the past few days seemed to conspire to point at me.

I got a grip on myself. ‘I think I must ask you to get other advice.’ I heard the well-worn formula creep out in a little thin voice I scarcely knew. ‘Since you’re—you’re so well informed, you’ll understand that in the circumstances I really—really couldn’t take the responsibility.’

‘But of course you could and of course you will.’ He spoke to me as if I were some kind of frightened child, scared of an exam. ‘You’ll do your utmost for my poor friend Madame Maurice, widow of an East European refugee. I fear it may be a long business. Pneumonia may intervene even, and if at last the worst should happen, then we know that a constitution weakened by alcoholism does often succumb to any acute pulmonary infection. Isn’t that so?’

He was talking like a medical book, trying to put a formula into my mouth which could appear on a death certificate.

I gaped at him. Only the dreadful breathing from the bed convinced me that I was awake and facing reality.

It was an invitation to connive at murder. More than that, it was a threat, with my career and even my life as the alternative.

‘This is nonsense.’ I murmured. ‘You’re making an idiotic mistake. I must ask you to go to the telephone and call another doctor. Someone must treat this woman immediately, but it can’t be me.’

‘Don’t you think so?’

As he spoke he stretched out his hand and slipped something into mine.

I looked down at it. It was the Dormital bottle and it was empty.