Death on the Table Page 5

  ‘Because Cantrell used it for the second patient—Quayle. When he came to take over from Elliot, the other machine had been borrowed by private maternity for an urgent high forceps delivery—so he used the machine Elliot had used, without any trouble. Quayle didn’t die under his anaesthetic.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Sir James sat and brooded for a moment. ‘Of course. You’re quite right. He didn’t. And that brings us to this second fiasco. Quayle. There was nothing wrong with that man but a gastric ulcer and a little anaemia. Now, what happened to him? We’ll come back to the question of the anaesthetic room and what relevance it may have had to the sailor’s death in a moment——’

  ‘Just a minute, sir,’ Colin Jackson said again. ‘I think we can demolish the anaesthetic room idea right now. The theatres are locked overnight as a routine, aren’t they?’ He turned to Nurse Cooper, now mopping her blotched and swollen face with a scrap of handkerchief. ‘Were the theatres locked this morning when you came on duty?’

  ‘Yes sir.’ She spoke eagerly. ‘Oh, yes sir. I got the keys as usual from the porter’s lodge in the main hall as I came on—they were locked all right.’

  ‘So the fact that the anaesthetic room was unlocked doesn’t signify anything,’ Colin said crisply. ‘I can only suppose that Nurse Cooper did not lock it last night as she assures us she did. She is mistaken, and forgot. Either way, the machine was safely out of reach of any unauthorised meddling—and as I’ve pointed out, Cantrell used it safely after the death.’

  Nurse Cooper opened her mouth to argue, but at the sight of Sister Osgood’s sharp glance subsided, and Sir James nodded.

  ‘You have a point there. Now, Heath—about this man Quayle. I know the cause of his death, even before any damned post mortem proves it. He had an incompatible transfusion. Now, what have you got to say to that?’ and he glared at the heavy sulky face of the man in the window seat.

  ‘Nothing,’ Jeff said, in as strong a voice as Sir James’s own. ‘All I know is that I got a specimen of blood yesterday from the Private Wing with a request for crossmatching of a pint of blood. I crossmatched two pints, one for a reserve, and put them in the haematology lab refrigerator. The blood was collected this morning by a ward nurse, and the transfusion set up in theatre—by Cantrell, I believe. I can swear to you the blood was Group A, the same as the specimen I was sent—a specimen labelled Quayle. Of course, if I was given the wrong sample, I can’t be blamed——’

  ‘You certainly received the right sample, Dr. Heath,’ Sister Palmer said in her soft lilting Welsh voice. ‘I can guarantee that. I took the blood myself, because both Mr. Jackson and Mr. Caspar were busy yesterday when the patient came in, and I labelled it myself, and brought it over to the lab on my way off duty at teatime. I put it into your own hand, Dr. Heath, as you’ll perhaps remember.’

  Jeff rubbed his face wearily. ‘Yes I remember. Well, I don’t understand it. I know I checked the right blood and labelled it properly before putting it in the fridge. I can’t say more than that.’

  ‘Jeff—could one of the technicians have meddled in some way?’ Barney said gently. ‘You aren’t the only person who uses the lab, after all, pathology registrar though you are.’

  Jeff shook his head heavily. ‘No. I told you—they’re all off sick with this damned gastro-enteritis infection that’s been causing so much trouble. I even had to unlock the labs and set them up myself yesterday and today. There’s only me.’

  There was a silence again, as they all realised just how black things looked for Jeff—even blacker than for Barney, equivocal as Barney’s position clearly was. Then Mr. Stroud spoke again.

  ‘So what has all this shown us, Sir James? That two patients have died who shouldn’t have—and we all knew that. But we’re no nearer to knowing why apart from a lot of conjecture about locked doors, and unlocked doors, and incompatible blood being given. Where do we go from here?’

  Sir James stood up, and began to prowl heavily about the room.

  ‘I’m damned if I know. I’m damned if I do. I thought we’d find out more—elucidate matters a little—and all we’ve done is cloud the question even more. I just don’t understand it.’

  He came and stood in front of Stroud, then, leaning on his desk on clenched fists.

  ‘But I’ll tell you this much, Stroud. I’m not satisfied, d’you hear me? Not satisfied. And if this matter isn’t cleared up, and cleared up very soon, I’ll raise such hell for you and for the staff of this hospital that’ll shake you rigid. I’m not ruining my practice by letting people think my patients die like flies for no reason! You get the answer to this, and see to it that the people at fault are dealt with, or you’ll have more trouble on your hands than you can imagine. Understand? Right. So you decide what to do. I agree with Elliot there—this is a police matter, I want to know why those men died, and how, and I want to know fast. So make up your mind to it—either you find out what happened here today, or I send the police in.’

  And he turned on his heel and marched out of the room, leaving the people behind him in a stunned sick silence.

  ‘Erhrrm! Yes. Well,’ Stroud said eventually, and rearranged the papers on his desk again. And then jumped to his feet and began to prowl up and down the room, in an unconscious and rather funny parody of Sir James.

  ‘What does he want me to do? I can’t go calling in police, not without something tangible to tell them!’

  ‘Aren’t two dead bodies tangible enough for you?’ Colin Jackson said, and turned on his heel, making for the door. ‘I’ve got some work to do, if no one else has. But I’ll tell you this much before I go, Mr. Stroud. If you do call the police in, you needn’t look to me to co-operate with them. No damned great bumbling policeman is going to set foot in any ward in which I have patients, understand? And no one can make me let them in, because you know damned well that in such matters I’m in charge. No one goes near any surgical patient in this place without my consent and that’s flat. Caspar, I’m going to do a round on Male Surgical. You’d better come too.’

  Obediently, Harry followed him, shrugging his shoulders at Barney and Jeff in an attempt to indicate his sympathy. Stroud’s voice pulled them both back.

  ‘My God!’ Stroud said explosively. ‘My God! Haven’t I got enough to put up with without a bunch of surgeons behaving like bloody prima donnas!’ And then he saw the frozen look on Sister Osgood’s face and coughed and turned to Barney and Jeff.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about all this, and sympathise with the way you must be feeling. And I daresay you would like the police in to sort it all out, and make things look—well, better for you. But you must see that my hands are tied. I can’t report anything until I know what I’m reporting—and I won’t know that till the post mortems are done. I hope they’ll be done tomorrow some time——’

  ‘Not here they won’t be,’ Jeff said in a surly voice.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m the pathologist here, remember? And I do the P.Ms. I hardly imagine I’d be allowed to do those, under the circumstances.’

  The expression of dismay on Stroud’s face was ludicrous.

  ‘Oh, no! That means I’ll have to get the pathologist from Queen’s to come over—and the chances are we’ll have to wait until he can fit in a visit here. Oh, damn, damn, damn——’

  The door opened, and the rather scrawny middle aged woman who was Stroud’s secretary came in, her eyes darting from face to face eagerly as she sought a scrap of gossip—any scrap—to spread among the rest of the hospital’s clerical staff.

  ‘What do you want?’ Stroud snapped.

  ‘It’s Mr. Bruce, sir. He wants to talk to you very urgently. Says it really is very important.’

  ‘Bruce? Bruce?’

  ‘Chief Pharmacist. You’re in a bad way this afternoon, Mr. Stroud!’ Derek Foster said. ‘You can’t even remember the names of your own people!’

  Stroud ignored him. ‘Tell Mr. Bruce I can’t possibly see him now. I’m very disturbed—very—a
nd late into the bargain. I should have been out of here half an hour ago—and I’m serving no good purpose by staying any later. Tell him to come over in the morning—half past nine.’ And the secretary nodded and, unwillingly, went away.

  He turned and looked at the people standing around him, and again a look of helplessness swept over his jowly face. ‘I really must call this—er—conference to an end. I’ll think about what to do in the morning. In the meantime, good afternoon.’

  And Mr. Stroud went over to the window and stood staring down at the ambulance-busy courtyard below as they filed silently out of the room.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘YOU’RE being remarkably foolish,’ Lucy told her mirrored reflection sternly, and then childishly stuck out her tongue, the way she had been used to when she was a child and feeling rather bothered. And then she dropped her hairbrush, and went and sat on her bed to stare unseeingly out of the window at the garden gleaming dully in the deep blue of an early summer night.

  The window was open, and she could smell the heavy sweetness of late lilac and a few early roses, and the faint haze of newcut grass left by the efforts of the gardener that afternoon. He was a hardworking gardener, who had created a small gem of greenery and shrubbery and flowers from an unpromising patch of sooty London earth tucked away behind the hospital, within spitting distance of the oily noisy smelling docks. But Lucy was, for once, un-appreciative of his efforts.

  She could hear, from the main door of the Nurses’ Home a few yards away—for her room was on the ground floor, a privilege granted only to Sisters—the voices of the young students waiting for their dates, the giggles and silly inconsequential chatter of the young. And suddenly felt stirred up and miserable, yet happy too. It was an extraordinary mixture of sensations.

  ‘You are being foolish,’ she told herself again. ‘Aren’t you? It’s because it’s summer, and the short warm nights bring all your hormones out in a rush. That’s all. You can’t possibly be in love with the man—can you? Those silly girls, they go falling in love with housemen——’ and a sudden burst of laughter from the students outside made her grimace wryly, ‘but they’re moppets of eighteen or so, while you, you’re a grown woman of twenty-six. There’s more than a quarter of a century behind you, yet you go and get wobbly kneed about a houseman, and an ugly houseman at that, for all the world like a first year lamb. Where’s your pride? Where’s your sense?’

  But it made no difference. She still felt a surge of frightened elation when she thought of her meeting with Barney, the meeting for which she was right now supposed to be dressing.

  But still she lingered. In an odd way it made her feel more adult, more in control of her emotions, not to rush through dressing and doing her face and hair. So she went over to the window, and perched on the sill, and looked out.

  The smell of the garden filled her nostrils, made her breathe deeply with an intense sensuous pleasure, and she let her gaze wander, taking in the warm red brick of the walls of the private block beyond, the golden squares of uncurtained windows through which the tops of bed curtains could be seen, and the deep sighing shadows under the great copper beech that had somehow survived the years of growth in the unhealthy air of Dockland.

  ‘The thing is,’ the insistent little voice in her mind started again, ‘the thing is, you’re feeling bothered not because he asked you out for a drink, but because of the reason he did. If he’d asked you last week, even yesterday, you’d just have been pleased, and hopeful—admit it, hopeful—but not as you are now, with depression mixed up with the pleasure. It’s because he asked you out of a sort of gratitude. Because you helped him cope with a crisis of his own.’

  Irritably she kicked the wall beneath the sill, and ran her fingers through her short curly hair.

  ‘Yes, but,’ she argued back. ‘He did come to you for help, didn’t he? He might have gone anywhere in the hospital, gone to anyone else. He could have gone to see Avril Gold, up on Orthopaedics—she’s such a glamour pants, everyone makes a bee line for her. And I don’t blame them.’ She brooded for a while on Sister Gold’s superior charms. ‘But he didn’t. He came to you. Doesn’t that help?’

  There was a movement in the garden, and more to still the silent argument in her head than because of genuine interest she leaned out to see who it was. There was a faint gleam of white moving along the path that ran from the Private Wing to the covered way that led to the Pharmacy and Path lab block, but she couldn’t see who it was. Odd. Who could be going to those departments at this time of night? They’d been locked and deserted for hours now.

  And then, above the distant rumble of the traffic in the main road beyond the hospital, she heard a faint chiming, heard the clock melodiously announce each quarter and then the hour, and jumped up, and in a sudden fever of activity brushed her hair again, and grabbed her coat, and ran from the room. Whatever the reason, whatever it meant, Barney had asked her to have a drink with him and she did want to, very much. And now she was late.

  She stood inside the door of the saloon bar, blinking a little in the blaze of light, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her camel hair jacket, her legs in their striped brown trousers spread wide, a little defiantly.

  She always felt rather awkward, meeting people in pubs. With her rather rigid Calvinistic upbringing—her mother had been a daughter of a Scots parson—pubs had for her a raffish air of wickedness that they would never lose.

  Not that the ‘Ship in Bottle’ was an ordinary pub. Built with a wealth of gilt, plum-coloured paint, engraved glass, and glaring-bright lights in Victorian times to satisfy the thirsts of burly dockers, it had long ago become an extension of the hospital’s staff common rooms, set as it was right opposite the hospital gates.

  The landlord—and the present one had been in charge for the best part of thirty years, right through the flaming roaring horror of the blitz—was almost one of the hospital staff himself. He knew everyone, from the most junior porter to the most senior consultant, had known most of those senior consultants since their distant student days when they had been ribald beer-drinking rugby-playing Dressers walking the wards behind black coated medical men of the really old school.

  At this moment he was hurrying past the door with a tray load of thick mustard be-daubed sandwiches and a pot of his own make of pickled onions, and he stopped and peered at Lucy as she stood hesitantly looking through the crowded bar for Barney.

  ‘Well, now, it’s—Nurse Beaumont, isn’t it? Long time since you were in here, my dear. Let me see, you used to go about with that feller that went into general practice over to the Isle of Dogs. Er—Piggot, wasn’t that his name? Yes, Piggot. Best scrum-half the hospital rugger team ever ‘ad——’

  Lucy went pink at being reminded so unexpectedly of that old if rather torrid love affair that had fizzled out so suddenly when Victor Piggot had qualified and she had become a Staff Nurse—so long ago, now.

  ‘Hello, Chalky,’ she said. ‘It has been a long time, I suppose. I hadn’t realised how long. It’s Sister Beaumont, now, you know. I got Female Medical a year ago.’

  ‘Did you now!’ the landlord said admiringly, and then mopped his shining bald head with one large hairy fist. ‘Well, you deserve it—always was a smart girl, wasn’t you? Look, I’ve got a bunch of starving medical students over there bawling for this nosh—so I’d better ‘and it over before they wreck the place.’

  His serene expansive grin made it very plain he did not really entertain any such fears, and indeed, there was no reason why he should. He was a huge man, six foot three and with the build of one of the great ships on the docks he had kept fed and supplied with liquor all these years.

  ‘Who was you looking for, lovey?’

  ‘Dr. Elliot. Do you know him?’

  ‘I knows ‘em all, my dear. Over by the joanna—there ’e is. And I’m glad you’re ’ere if it’s you he’s been waiting for. In a right miserable mood he is, not a bit like himself. Not that I blame ’im, mind. Not after
what happened over there today,’ and he jerked his head in the general direction of the hospital.

  ‘You know then?’ Lucy said sharply.

  He laughed as he moved away towards the group of noisy young men in the far corner of the crowded bar, who were now banging heavily on the tables with tankards.

  ‘Bless yer, lovey, there’s nothin’ happens over there as I don’t know about sooner or later—mostly sooner. They all come and tell Chalky White the news, they do. Go on, my dear—go and look after poor ol’ Barney, before he ruins his beer with cryin’ in it——’

  She pushed through the crowds to the corner where the large and battered old upright piano held pride of place, its red silk linings behind the fretted fronts worn and stained with age.

  The men standing about with pint tankards in their hands moved politely out of her way, and she smiled gratefully up at them. There had been a time, early in her training, when she had been afraid of these big rough-tongued men, but that was before a period of night duty on casualty had taught her how essentially gentle and courteous dockers could be.

  Barney indeed looked miserable. He was sitting sideways on the old piano stool, a cigarette in one hand, the other counting the yellowing keys on the instrument, and she felt her heart twist with love and pity as she looked at him.

  She stood still for a moment, in the shadow of a couple of men who were arguing with friendly acrimony about the rival merits of a pair of greyhounds, and looked at him as dispassionately as she could. Why did she find him so damnably attractive?

  No one could call him good looking, with his rough hair in its vague sort of mouse colour. Sometimes, when he first came on duty, it looked tidy, brushed down with a wetted brush, but mostly it looked as it did now, a rather unkempt broomhead, standing up in rough spikes. And his face—square and heavy, with a deep lower lip below an absurdly narrow upper one. A curious mouth, both sensuous and ascetic at the same time, a mouth to make one shiver most agreeably when one looked at it.