“I am a police officer and I wish to report at once to my station,” declared Love. His voice sounded terribly loud in his own ears, and truculent, too. “Sorry,” he added,“but some person attacked me.”
The woman smiled patiently. She was wearing small steel-rimmed glasses. Her hair, which was ash-blonde, hung to the same length all the way round her head. Like a dust cover, thought Love.
“I’ll have to ring my inspector,” he said.
“Name?” the woman asked again, in exactly the same tone.
“Purbright is his name. Mine’s Love. Detective Sergeant Sidney...”—he paused—“...Montgomery Love.”
The hospital porter who had piloted Love from the ground floor leaned and spoke in his ear. “It’s all right, Harry, they’ve put a call through from reception downstairs. To the police station. They know you’re here.”
The woman asked the sergeant his address and he told her. “Religion?”
“Congregational,” Love said. “Well, more or less.”
He supposed it was his indecisiveness that made the woman frown, but the real reason was the narrowness of the ledger column.
“C of E—that’ll do, won’t it?” she suggested.
“It isn’t the same.”
She put down Cong.
Love asked the porter anxiously: “Are they telling my people that somebody had a go at me? I mean, I don’t want them thinking that it was just an accident. There should be someone there at that saleroom.”
“Has he given a urine specimen?” The woman had switched into that special third person form of address whereby hospital patients are given a sense of suspended existence.
“He’ll be on Nine B,” she said finally,“if they decide on admission. He’d better go along to X-Ray for the moment.” And she handed the porter a card.
“You’ll be there in two ticks, Jack,” confided the porter in Love’s ear. The wheelchair lurched out into mid-corridor and began to gather speed.
Chapter Two
The message from the general hospital was to the effect that a Constable Lovell had been admitted with suspected appendicitis.
Detective Inspector Purbright, accustomed to the ever-increasing uncertainty of communications, was only momentarily disconcerted by the errors in rank and name. What did puzzle him, though, was the tentative diagnosis. Love’s appendix had been removed long ago. He decided to visit the invalid in person.
Love had had his X-ray and was lying, gloomily resigned, upon a trolley in the corridor of the casualty ward.
“I haven’t to move my head for a bit,” he explained to Purbright.
The inspector had been searching for him for some minutes. He peered down now at the blanket enshrouded sergeant with a hesitant smile, as upon a well-meant but useless birthday present.
“What does the doctor say?”
“The radiologist,” Love amended, “says there’s nothing broken. I think they want to keep me in overnight, though. You can’t play about with concussion,” he added.
“Indeed, you cannot, Sid.” Purbright, having made the fairly easy deductive transfer from appendicitis to a knock on the head, realized with a touch of shame that he was prepared to humour his unfortunate sergeant and to discount his replies as probable delirium.
Love frowned with unwonted severity and raised himself a little upon one elbow. “The trouble is, I can’t even give a description.”
“You can’t?” The inspector made a don’t-worry face, then looked about him. A man in a white coat was issuing from a nearby door. Purbright waylaid him. They held brief conversation.
Purbright returned to Love. “Apparently somebody took a crack at you.” He sounded surprised and slightly apologetic.
They tell me you’re quite lucid, actually,” Purbright added. “It’s thanks to the thickness of the bone structure. So now we can get on with things.” He gave Love’s trolley a business-like tap, as if it were a shop counter.
The sergeant shrugged beneath his blanket. There was a pause. Purbright supposed him to be sorting out the medical compliments.
“What on earth were you doing at an antique sale, Sid?” tried Purbright for a start.
Another shrug. “There was something I might have put a bid in for,” said Love with a certain airiness. “A cottage for my young lady.”
“A cottage?” The inspector’s doubts returned.
“Yes. In miniature. Very cleverly done. And a soap dish sort of made out of roses. There are,” explained the sergeant with the assurance of the novitiate, “some rather nice things to be snapped up at these sales—if you keep your eyes open.”
“It’s rather a pity you didn’t do just that when...” the inspector was beginning, meanly, when a pair of white-clad orderlies presented themselves at head and foot of Love’s trolley and launched it into one of those speed trials that seemed to be the accepted means of transporting the sick.
By the time it was possible to continue the interview, the sergeant had been weighed, measured, induced to pass urine, encased in a pair of hospital-issue pyjamas of the kind more usually associated with chain-gang wear, and put into a bed. In this interval, Purbright had made a couple of telephone calls. He told the sergeant that three men from Fen Street were on their way to the saleroom and that Mr Hector Durham, the auctioneer, had agreed to postpone the sale a while if that should seem helpful.
“I’ll go straight over, Sid. Now are you certain you saw nothing at all of the gentleman who put you in here?”
Love said he had given the question much thought but was convinced that no part of the attacker had come within his range of vision. “I’ll bet he wore soft shoes, though,” he added. “The floor in that hall is wood; you can hear the slightest footstep or scuffle.”
“But you didn’t.”
Love stared in silence at the ceiling for a moment, then looked at the inspector: “I tell you what I did hear though. When I was being hit—you know, just a fraction of a second before whatever it was arrived on the back of my neck—there was a sound that I’d have thought queer if only I’d had time to think about it.”
A nurse entered. She hung a chart-board on the bottom bedrail and, almost in the same movement, stuck a thermometer in Love’s mouth. She hooked a couple of plump, very white fingers around his wrist. For the next half-minute she gazed alternately at her watch and at Purbright’s face. The watch, Purbright felt, was an easy winner.
The girl read the thermometer with grave concentration. Love, watchful for intimations of mortality, jumped when she gave it two violent shakes and bolstered it in a little tube at the back of the locker.
“This noise, Sid,” prompted Purbright when the nurse had departed.
Love stopped wondering if the taste of the disinfectant on the thermometer meant that he had suffered brain damage.