On the thirteenth of May, 1568, a Scots army under Mary Queen of Scots was defeated by another Scots army commanded by the regent, James Stewart, Earl of Moray. Battle was joined in a field south of the Clyde, close to the River Cart near the small town of Glasgow. The site of the battle was later appropriately named Battlefield. Glasgow expanded in the Nineteenth Century — “exploded” may be the better word — and the site of the battle was built over. Closely packed tenements for the new middle classes spread over the scene of the earlier carnage, and the new district of the city retained the name of Battlefield. In the center of the new housing on the hill called Battlefield Road, and adjoining Battle Place with the monument, a hospital was built. It was named the Victoria Infirmary in honor of the reigning monarch, who by then was Queen of both Scots and English.
Ray Sussock turned off Battlefield Road and parked his car on Langside Road. He left the window of his car slightly open to allow the interior to ventilate in the heat and then walked, enjoying the day, to the administrative block of “the Vicky.”
“Detective Sergeant Sussock,” he said to the receptionist, and showed his I.D. The receptionist was a handsome man, and a little smug because of it, thought Sussock. He nodded to Sussock a grudging acknowledgment of rank and Sussock enjoyed the young man’s confusion — respect for a cop, contempt for an old man of shabby, untidy appearance. “Yes, sir?” he said.
“I have an appointment with Dr. Paxton.”
The receptionist turned to the phone and dialed an internal number. It was an old telephone system of heavy black bakelite and Sussock distinctly heard the solid burr, burr as the phone rang at the other end of the line. He fancied that even at this distance he would be able to hear both sides of the conversation. He wasn’t disappointed.
“Porter’s lodge,” said the receptionist. “There’s a Detective Sergeant Sussock here to see Dr. Paxton.”
“Wait a minute. — Yes, he’s expected. Ask him to come up, please, and someone will meet him.”
“Okay.” The receptionist turned to Sussock. “If you’d like to take the lift to the fourth floor, sir—”
“Someone will meet me,” said Sussock. “Thank you.”
The lift, like the telephone system, was the original, the first to be installed and still providing sterling service, with brass telescoping doors and solid wood paneling smelling strongly of polish. Sussock pressed the button marked 4. The lift hesitated for a moment and then began a slow, uneven ascent. It slowed to a stop, then jerked up another six inches, and only then did the light behind the figure 4 above the door shine on. Sussock wrenched open the lift door, then the shaft door, and shut both behind him.
A nurse in a starched white smock stood in the corridor, which smelled of disinfectant. The tall windows allowed the interior of the hospital to flood with light and permitted an impressive view of the rooftops of Battlefield and Langside. Sussock saw an orange bus go down Battlefield Road, and away in the far, far distance the sun caught a window of a house, causing it to gleam penetratingly, like a diamond in a sea of granite and concrete.
“Mr. Sussock?” said the nurse. Sussock found her demure and genuinely respectful, not just of him as a cop but of him as a human being. She immediately brought out his sense of protectiveness. He nailed felons to protect citizens like this nurse.
“Yes.” He smiled.
“If you’d like to step this way, sir. Dr. Paxton is expecting you.”
Sussock followed her down the corridor, at her side, half a step behind. She didn’t talk, and Sussock felt that, like the children who were brought up in the era that the Victorian Infirmary was built, she would speak only if spoken to. The walk down the corridor was long, and silent save for his footfall. Like all nurses, she wore soft-soled shoes and made no sound as she walked.
They came to a ward. In an anteroom near the entrance, a middle-aged man sat at a desk. The nurse stopped at the door and said, “Mr. Sussock, sir.”
The man stood and extended a hand to Sussock. He had a warm, beaming face behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. Sussock, after his brief bad first impression at the porter’s lodge, was beginning to like the staff at the Vicky. “Paxton, Mr. Sussock,” said the man, shaking Sussock’s hand. “Please take a seat.”
Sussock sat. He thought Paxton was about as old as himself — sixty this year — but he looked to be fitter than Sussock — with his bad chest, a legacy of years of cigarette smoking — felt himself to be. But police work had helped Sussock to remain slim. Paxton was swelling noticeably about his middle and his face, though by his cheery manner it was clear that he wasn’t at all embarrassed by it. They had, Sussock thought, probably led a parallel existence in the city, though they were now meeting for the first time. How often in the last sixty years, he wondered, had they shared the same bus, passed each other in the town, shivered on the same cold days?
“What can I do for you, Mr. Sussock?” Paxton asked. “I gather you have called about the dreadful incident yesterday?”
“In respect to Mr. Skillicorn, sir? Yes, that’s why I’m here.”
“He’ll be a sad loss to the hospital. He was a good doctor, a good obstetrician.”
“He was a colleague of yours?”
“Well, he was a colleague of all of us. A hospital is like a ship — it doesn’t work unless we all play our part, from the captain on the bridge down to the chap who stokes the boiler. But I know what you mean. I daresay I worked more closely with him than anyone else.”
“He was murdered,” said Sussock. “His house wasn’t ransacked, there was no robbery, no forced entry. The murder took place when Mrs. Skillicorn was out of the house, which indicates that the murderer may have been watching the house, waiting for the moment to strike.”
“That’s chilling,” Paxton murmured. He sat back in his chair and slipped his spectacles off and laid them on the desk. “We knew he had been murdered, but I confess we know no details.”
“He seems to have been murdered for a personal reason.”
“Well, I can assure you he had no enemies in the hospital.”
“What about outside?”
“I know little of his personal affairs.”
“I see.” Sussock took out his pad and began to take notes. “What about his relationship with his patients?”
Paxton shuffled uncomfortably. “Well—” he put on his spectacles “—he was recently subject to a complaint.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Not what I would call serious in nature. It was a question of alleged misconduct rather than negligence. He put up a defense and the British Medical Authority upheld his defense. In a nutshell, he terminated a pregnancy. The woman in question was psychiatrically ill. She suffered bouts of depression — not by any means acute enough to warrant her admission to hospital, but it was a significant illness. She asked her G.P. for a termination and the G.P. considered her to be sound enough of mind to know what she was asking. Hugo also spoke to her, and on the strength of the G.P.’s view and on his own discussion with her agreed to perform the termination. Weeks later, the husband — she was a married woman — the husband came storming in here, rowed with Hugo, and stormed out again. Then he made the complaint and, as I said, the B.M.A. upheld Hugo’s defense. That was the last we heard of it.”