Death on the Table Page 6

  And his body, as square and heavy as his face. He can’t be more than about five foot eight or so, she thought, but that’s fine with me, seeing I’m only five foot three. Maybe I like the squareness of him because I’m undoubtedly on the round side myself? Does he make me feel comfortable for that reason? But that can’t be enough to make me fall head over ears as I have——

  And then he looked up and saw her, and she knew that if there was one physical feature he had that could make her melt it was his eyes. Wide, heavily fringed with lashes much darker than his hair, tipped up at the corners, and with blue lights in their translucent grey depths. A baby who inherited those eyes would be a very beautiful baby, she thought—and blushed at the idea.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said, and smiled, and she smiled back, not caring whether or not her pleasure in seeing him showed all over her face.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said, and came and stood beside him. ‘Feeling better? Or just plain lousy?’

  ‘Just plain lousy. Or I was. It’s nice seeing you. Have a drink.’

  Lucy, brought up by the many impecunious medical students she had known to consider their shallow pockets, nodded and said simply ‘Cider,’ and he went away to the bar, to return a few minutes later with a half of mild and bitter for himself and her cider tinkling with ice in a tall glass. A Dockland pub it might be that Chalky ran, but he knew better than to serve cider any way other than well iced, on a warm June night.

  They drank silently for a moment, and then Lucy said, ‘You shouldn’t feel quite as bad as you did. Not since this afternoon’s business.’

  ‘You’ve heard?’

  She raised expressive eyebrows. ‘Of course! Sister Palmer told the world at supper tonight. The place is sizzling with it. But at least it means you and Jeff Heath are in the same boat now.’

  He looked up at her. ‘Perspicacious girl! The same thought had occurred to me, and then I felt a right bastard, because Jeff’s in a much worse mess than I am. I mean, no one has accused me of making any mistakes as such—I’m just suspected of some sort of negligence. But Jeff—well, it looks as though he crossmatched the wrong blood, and who can prove he didn’t?’

  He brooded silently for a moment, and then spoke with conviction. ‘I’ll never believe Jeff did any such damnfool thing. Not Jeff. He’s the most pernicketty careful sort of feller! If it had been John Hickson, now, I’d have believed it. For all his fussing he’s a useless chap—makes more stupid errors than the whole staff put together. But Jeff? Never.’

  He offered Lucy a cigarette from a battered pack, and she leaned forwards, hoping he wouldn’t see the way her lips trembled as she held her face up to meet the flame of his lighter. But he just said, ‘I like your perfume——’ and smiled at her again.

  There was a silence between them for a while, as they sat side by side on the old piano stool, staring at the people filling the bar. For Lucy, it was a silence filled with feeling, with an awareness of the warmth of his body beside her, an awareness of the return of that absurd desire to hold his weary head in her arms and soothe him.

  And for Barney, it was a silence that was also filled, with mixed inconsequential thoughts about this girl beside him. He looked at her, turning his head slightly, and he liked what he saw. Her round face with the high fresh complexion that even eight years in London hadn’t taken from her, the dark curly hair, the pointed chin above the roll neck of the white cotton pullover she was wearing under the camel coat.

  She became aware of his gaze, and turned and looked at him, and reddened in a way he thought delightful.

  ‘Thank you for coming here tonight,’ he said simply.

  ‘Thank you for asking me, kind sir,’ she said promptly, with an air of flippancy she wasn’t feeling.

  ‘I should have asked you out long ago, you know. I’ve wanted to.’

  She bent her head to look with apparently absorbed interest at her hands, with their sensibly square cut nails and the faint redness her work gave them.

  ‘Really? I—would have come then, too.’

  ‘I was a bit scared of you.’

  She stared at him then, and laughed. ‘Scared? Of me? Oh, come on! No one’s scared of me! Not even my most junior nurses! Why should you be?’

  He looked a little sheepish. ‘I don’t know. Maybe because—oh, you looked so nice. Do look nice, I mean. Not like that Gold girl. I’ve taken her out, but then, who hasn’t? You know where you are with Gold, but with you—well, I wouldn’t have known, so I—I was nervous.’

  ‘I think that’s a compliment,’ she said, a little breathlessly. ‘Anyway, I’m going to treat it like one. So thank you.’

  The silence that then descended on them could have been embarrassing, but just then Jeff Heath came pushing through the crowd towards them, and they both greeted him with a sort of relief.

  ‘Jeff!’ Barney jumped up, and dragged towards them a chair that another man was purposefully making for. ‘Come and join us, and we can moan on each other’s shoulders.’

  Jeff glowered at the discomfited man whose chair had been taken from him, and sat down firmly, and the three of them sat and looked at each other.

  ‘Hello, Lucy.’ Jeff said. ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Not so bad,’ Lucy said, and grinned at him. She was quite fond of old Jeff, had always been so. He had originally trained at the Royal, so she had known him for years, unlike Barney, who had only come to his present job fairly recently, from Queen’s, the hospital five miles away in a slightly more salubrious part of London.

  ‘How’s with you? Or is that a stupid question?’

  ‘Bloody stupid,’ Jeff said without rancour. ‘Seeing I’ve been accused today of polishing off one of Sir James’s pet patients. Apart from that small thing, life couldn’t be sweeter.’

  ‘Well, we share the running for the top of the old so-and-so’s hate stakes,’ Barney said. ‘I’m just as much in trouble as you are, and with less evidence.’

  Jeff went a brick red, and opened his mouth, but Barney jumped in quickly.

  ‘Christ! I didn’t mean that—I’m in such a state, I don’t know what I’m saying. I just mean that someone obviously meddled with the blood you crossmatched, while at the moment all that seems to be against me is vague suspicion—and I swear that’s harder to bear.’

  Jeff subsided, and looked consideringly at Barney for a moment before speaking.

  ‘You really think someone meddled with the blood?’

  ‘What else? If you say you crossmatched, you did. If the blood in the bottle wasn’t Group A, and you said it was, then obviously someone meddled. It’s clear as day——’

  ‘But they don’t believe me!’ Jeff said. ‘You heard that old bastard this afternoon! He obviously doesn’t believe me!’

  ‘Has anyone checked the label?’ Lucy said practically.

  They turned and looked at her.

  ‘What did you say?’ Jeff said after a moment.

  ‘She said, “has anyone checked the label?”’ Barney was staring at Lucy. ‘Oh, my God. The most obvious thing in the world, and none of us thought of it. Has anyone checked the label?’

  He turned back to Jeff, excitedly. ‘Look, the label will carry the grouping, won’t it? It always does.’

  Jeff nodded.

  ‘Right. There’ll still be some blood left in the bottle, won’t there? They’re sent back to the haematology lab unwashed?’

  Again Jeff nodded.

  ‘So, if we check the blood that’s left in the bottle with another bottle of known Group A blood, we’ll be able to prove that somehow the contents were changed. And that you weren’t at fault—that you had crossmatched the original contents properly——’

  Jeff shook his head. ‘It sounds logical, Barney, but it isn’t. I mean, for God’s sake, who in his right mind would go and change the blood in a bottle? Not that you can, anyway. Those bottles are well sealed, you know. Any tampering would stick out like the traditional sore thumb.’

  ‘I don’
t know who, or why, or even how! I’m just saying it could have happened. If we can prove it did, by checking, then we can go and tell Stroud he’s bloody well got to call in the police, no matter what he wants, and no matter what Colin Jackson says——’

  ‘Colin Jackson!’ Jeff said bitterly. ‘I swear he thinks of nothing but his status, and his importance, and his superiority to everyone else. The way he’s behaving it’s obvious he thinks we’re both in cahoots with each other to kill off patients just to make life difficult for him. He makes me sick!’

  ‘You talkin’ about Colin Jackson?’

  Jeff whirled and looked up as Chalky reached over to collect their empty glasses.

  ‘He’s a right moaner, he is. Always been the same, ’e ’as, long as I’ve known him. Can’t help it though. Comes of goin’ into medicine late in life. He was gone thirty, you know, when ’e started medical school. Must be—oh, well past forty-five by now. And never got no further than RSO, neither. Nor will he, bad tempered old devil. You gotta ’ave more than talent to get on in hospital, and well I know it.’

  ‘Do you?’ Lucy tried to sound interested, as the other two leaned back in their seats again, feeling somehow that it was necessary to behave as normally as possible. It wouldn’t do, she felt obscurely, to let Chalky know too much about what happened over at the hospital, least of all that the three of them suspected that a deliberate attempt had been made to kill Quayle via his blood transfusion—an attempt that had succeeded. Dockers and hospital people weren’t the only ones whose regular custom Chalky enjoyed. Plenty of Fleet Street men came down to the ‘Ship in Bottle’, and would soon winkle such a story out of the garrulous Chalky. And Lucy shared with most hospital people a horror of newspaper publicity about their beloved Royal.

  ‘Not ’arf!’ Chalky said with relish. He leaned comfortably against the piano, obviously settling himself for a long session, and Lucy’s heart sank. She felt, rather than saw, equal chagrin on Barney’s part, but she smiled up at the big old man and said encouragingly, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, take the old basket himself—Sir James Custerson Weller,’ and he rolled the syllables round his tongue as though they were edible. ‘I’ve known him since he was common or garden Jimmy Weller. And he was no great shakes as a student, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Just scraped his first MB, he did, and drove ’em mad with his daft ways when ’e was a dresser. Anyway, he’s got that somethin’ more. A sort of talent for people, you could call it. Don’t matter how good you is at your job, if you haven’t got this talent for people, you’ll get nowhere. Like Colin Jackson won’t, only don’t tell ’im I said so. But Jimmy Weller—he’s got it. He talked ’imself right to the top in no time, talked himself into his knight’ood—Custerson-Weller! ‘N’t it ridiculous? Talked himself out of trouble when that there woman died under the knife——’

  Lucy looked up, sharply. She hadn’t been paying much attention, letting her thoughts pleat themselves busily round the matter of the transfusion bottle. ‘What was that?’

  ‘The woman that died on the table!’ Chalky said, with a vast and macabre satisfaction. ‘Wife of a doctor she was’n all, but he got ’imself out of it—blamed the poor ruddy theatre sister, as I remember——’

  ‘Chalky! Chalky!’ The rugger playing students were bawling again and Chalky sighed, and said without anger, ‘Noisy little baskets. I’ll ’ave their guts for garters if they don’t bloody belt up. I’ll bring yer some sausage rolls when the next lot’s ready. They’re right good tonight——’ and he went away with the swift litheness so many heavy men seem to have.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Barney said, and took hold of Jeff’s elbow. ‘Did you know that story? I never heard it! The old boy had a death on the table once, and blamed someone else for it! Maybe this time he——’

  Jeff shook his head. ‘Sorry, old boy. That’s not on. That story’s been going around for donkey’s years—there’s always tales of that sort about senior men, you know that. I don’t think there’s anything in it from your point of view. He did have a death on the table—but it was theatre sister’s fault. She hadn’t supplied the right gear or something, and there was a big bleed, and he hadn’t the right stuff to stop it in time. That was all there was to that tale. I’d forget it if I were you——’

  Barney subsided again, and Lucy put out a hand, impulsively. He took it, and held on to it, almost absentmindedly.

  ‘Look, both of you,’ she said, sounding rather braver than she felt. ‘Can’t we be practical about this? Think it through properly? There’s been two deaths—unnecessary ones. You think they weren’t accidents—Barney?’

  ‘It sounds so melodramatic.’ He spoke awkwardly. ‘But I can’t help it. The more I think about it, the more sure I am there’s been—something wrong about it all. I think someone’s been deliberately up to something—but I don’t know what, or how, or why,’ he finished helplessly.

  ‘We don’t know why, but we know a bit about what and how,’ Lucy said. ‘Don’t we? I’ve been thinking too. And as I see it, someone wanted to get at Quayle. And succeeded.’

  ‘But where does the sailor come in?’ Barney objected.

  She smiled at him, a little shyly.

  ‘You’ve been so upset, you haven’t been thinking properly. Isn’t it possible that whoever wanted to get at Quayle first thought it could be done through the anaesthetic? Only, the list got changed unexpectedly, and that poor chap got what was meant for Quayle. And next time, whoever it was got at Quayle through the blood.’

  Barney was sitting very straight now, looking at her with eyes brighter than they had been all day.

  ‘You’re suggesting murder,’ he said bluntly.

  ‘That’s right,’ Lucy said. ‘Why be mealy mouthed about it? Murder. It happens, doesn’t it? Someone in the hospital wanted to kill Quayle, and made sure of it.’

  ‘But why?’ Jeff too was looking more animated. ‘It sounds melodramatic to me too—unless you can say why.’

  Lucy shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We’re trying to find out, aren’t we? I suppose if we check up on Quayle, who he was, and all, we’ll find out why. And find out why and——’ ‘—we’ll find out who,’ Barney finished.

  ‘Yes,’ Lucy said, and then, suddenly aware of the way Barney was holding on to her hand with both of his, extricated it, and sat back, a little pink again at her own rather surprising temerity. It wasn’t like her to hold the floor as she had been doing.

  ‘Lucy, I think you’re right!’ Barney spoke excitedly, raising his voice a little. He had to, because the insistent sickening squeal of an ambulance outside was filling the air with its raucous clamour. ‘Look, let’s go over now to records and check on this bloke—oh, and find that blood bottle too, and have a look at the way it matches up with another bottle of Group A, and then we can go to Stroud and insist he calls the police——’

  Another squealing siren joined the first, and then another, and Jeff looked round. People were going over to the door, staring out across the road to the hospital.

  ‘There must have been one hell of a smash-up somewhere to bring that many ambulances in,’ he shouted above the noise. ‘What do you suppose——’

  Barney was on his feet, and hurrying across to the door, pushing through the crowd. And then he looked back over his shoulder, his face suddenly white.

  ‘They’re not ambulances—they’re fire engines!’ he shouted. ‘Over at the hospital—come on!’

  And grabbing Lucy’s hand as she hurried over to him, he plunged through the crowd, pulling her after him, into the lurid light in the street beyond as yet another engine came shrieking hysterically round the corner.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THEY became aware of it as soon as they were out of the ‘Ship and Bottle’, the thick throat-tearing acrid smell of smoke. Lucy, running behind Barney through the crowd of gawping watchers who seemed to have appeared from nowhere, who might almost have crawled out of the cracks of the pavements where they had been
waiting for some disaster like this to enjoy, thought confusedly of Mrs. Chester, and Miss Symington in the next bed, and the others of her patients who were heavy and helpless. Would the night nurses on duty be able to cope with fire drill, be able to get all the patients out safely? Fire. She was filled with sick terror. The one disaster that every hospital fears above all others, and now it was happening at the Royal, her own Royal.

  Barney pushed people aside with scant regard for politeness, leaving a wake of ‘’Ere! Watch it, mate!’ and ‘stop yer shoving!’ and similar comments behind them, and Lucy willy-nilly followed him, held as she was by the wrist.

  They dodged yet another fire engine that came rattling and roaring and squealing past them through the Casualty entrance, ran round the corner and into the main courtyard and stopped. And breathed, almost in unison, a deep sigh of relief.

  The main ward block stood serene and solid, as uncompromisingly black as ever, with the dim squares of its windows showing the silhouettes of heads where nurses and patients peered curiously out to see what was happening. But there was no sign of fire anywhere on its seven floors.

  Lucy turned, trying to tell from whence the noise and smell of smoke was coming, and then saw the glow high above the roof of the Nurses’ Home. At least none of the patients were in danger then, for the Private Block too was quiet, and stood well clear of the area in which the fire seemed to be.

  But nurses might be in danger. There were two hundred girls living in that building, and it was reasonable to suppose that at least a hundred of them were in it right now, for it was past ten o’clock, and junior nurses weren’t allowed out after half past ten anyway.

  Lucy felt sick as she thought of the building, of the way it was hemmed in by the administrative office block and the Path lab and Pharmacy, of the narrow iron fire escapes that twisted round the face of the building and the way it alarmed one to use them even for a practice. And now it was the real thing.

  It was her turn now to grab Barney’s hand and pull him after her as she ran headlong across the broad courtyard towards the garden and the Nurses’ Home. She didn’t know why she did it, but she had to keep him with her, couldn’t possibly have made her way there alone.