“Ugh! Yer all over blood!”
Again he tried to talk. She bent her head nearer. He could see the dark strands of hair and the white face hovering in front of him. He straggled to rise and this time managed to get to his knees.
“Did you see him?”
“Not really-‘e ’eard me coming through. Made off towards Nightingale ‘ouse. Blimey, you don’t ’alf look a bloody mess, ”ere, lean on me.“
“No. Leave me and get help. He may be back.”
“Not ‘im. Anyway, we’re better together. I don’t fancy going it alone. Ghosts is one thing, bloody murderers is another. Come on, I’ll give yer a ’and.”
He could feel the sharp bones in her thin shoulders, but the fragile body was remarkably wiry and she stood his weight well He forced himself to his feet and stood there swaying. He asked:
“Man or woman?”
“Didn’t see. Could’ve been either. Never mind about that now. Think yer can make it to Nightingale ‘ouse? That’d be the nearest.”
Dalgliesh felt remarkably better now that he was on his legs. He could scarcely see the path but he took a few tentative steps forward, his hand supported by her shoulder.
“I think so. The back door would be the nearest It cant be more than fifty yards. Ring the bell of Matron’s flat I know she’s there.”
Together they shuffled slowly along the path obliterating, as Dalgliesh realized bitterly, any footprints as he might have otherwise have hoped to find next morning. Not that these sodden leaves would yield many clues. He wondered what had happened to the weapon. But this was pointless speculation. He could do nothing until it was light He felt a wave of gratitude and affection for the tough little person whose brittle arm lay weightless as a child’s around his hip. We must look an odd pair, he thought He said:
“You probably saved my life, Morag. He only ran off because he heard you coming.”
He, or was it she? If only Morag had been in time to glimpse whether it were a man or a woman. He could scarcely catch her reply.
“Don’t talk bloody daft.”
He heard, without surprise, that she was crying. She made no attempt to suppress or check her sobbing and it didn’t impede their progress. Perhaps, to Morag, crying was almost as natural as walking. He made no effort to comfort her except to press on her shoulders. She took that as a plea for more support and tightened her arm around his hips, leaning against him, helping him on his way. And thus incongruously entwined they passed under the shadows of the trees.
VII
The light in the demonstration room was bright, too bright It pierced even his gummed eyelids and he moved his head restlessly from side to side to escape the shaft of pain. Then his head was being steadied by cool hands. Mary Taylor’s hands. He heard her speaking to him, telling him that Courtney-Briggs was in the hospital. She had sent for Courtney-Briggs. Then the same hands were taking off his tie, undoing the buttons of his shirt, slipping his arms out of his jacket with practiced skill.
“What happened?”
It was Courtney-Briggs’s voice, harsh and masculine. So the surgeon had arrived. What had he been doing in the hospital? Another emergency operation? Courtney-Briggs’s patients seemed curiously prone to relapse. What alibi had he for the last half-hour? Dalgliesh said:
“Someone was lying in wait for me. I’ve got to check who’s in Nightingale House.”
A firm grip was on his arm. Courtney-Briggs was pressing him back into his chair. Two swinging blobs of gray hovered over him. Her voice again.
“Not now. You can hardly stand. One of us will go.”
“Go now.”
“In a minute. We’ve locked all the doors. We shall know if anyone returns. Rely on us. Just relax.”
So reasonable. Rely on us. Relax. He gripped metal arms on the chair, taking hold on reality.
“I want to check for myself.”
Half blinded by blood, he sensed rather than saw their mutual glance of concern. He knew that he sounded like a petulant child, beating his insistence against the implacable calm of the grown-ups. Maddened with frustration, he tried to rise from the chair. But the floor tipped sickeningly, then rose up to meet him through whorls of screaming color. It was no good. He couldn’t stand.
“My eyes,” he said. Courtney-Briggs’s voice, annoyingly reasonable:
“In one moment I must look first at your head.”
“But I want to see!” His blindness infuriated him. Were they doing this to him deliberately? He put up a hand and began to pick at the caked eyelids. He could hear them talking together, low voiced, in the muttered idiom of their craft from which he, the patient, was excluded. He was conscious of new sounds, the hiss of a sterilizer, a jingle of instruments, the closing of a metal lid. Then the smell of disinfectant sharpened. Now she was cleaning his eyes. A pad, deliciously cool, was wiped across each lid, and he opened them blinking to see more clearly the sheen of her dressing-gown and the long plait of hair falling over her left shoulder. He spoke to her directly.
“I must know who’s in Nightingale House. Could you check now, please?”
Without another word or a further glance at Courtney-Briggs, she slipped out of the room. As soon as the door was closed, Dalgliesh said:
“You didn’t tell me that your brother was once engaged to Josephine Fallon.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
The surgeon’s voice was deliberate, uninterested, the response of a man with his mind on his job. There was a snip of scissors, a momentary chill of steel against the skull. The surgeon was clipping Dalgliesh’s hair around the wound.
“You must have known that I should be interested.”
“Oh, interested! You’d be interested all right Your kind have an infinite capacity for taking an interest in other people’s affairs. But I confined myself to satisfying your curiosity only so far as the deaths of these two girls were concerned. You can’t complain that I’ve held anything relevant back. Peter’s death isn’t relevant-merely a private tragedy.”
Not so much a private tragedy thought Dalgliesh as a public embarrassment Peter Courtney had violated his brother’s first principle, the necessity of being successful. Dalgliesh said:
“He hanged himself.”
“As you say, he hanged himself. Not a very dignified or pleasant way to go, but the poor boy hadn’t my resources. The day when they make the final diagnosis I shall have more appropriate measures available than doing myself to death on the end of a rope.”
His egotism, thought Dalgliesh, was astounding. Even his brother’s death had to be seen in relationship to himself. He stood complacently secure at the hub of his private universe while other people-brother, mistress, patient-revolved round that central sun existing by virtue of its warmth and light, obedient to its centripetal force. But wasn’t that how most people saw themselves? Was Mary Taylor less self-absorbed? Was he himself? Wasn’t it merely that she and he pandered more subtly to their essential egotism?
The surgeon moved over to his black instrument case and took out a mirror mounted on a metal band which he clipped around his head. He came back to Dalgliesh, ophthalmoscope in hand and settled himself into a chair opposite his patient They sat confronting each other, foreheads almost touching. Dalgliesh could sense the metal of the instrument against his right eye. Courtney-Briggs commanded:
“Look straight ahead.”
Dalgliesh stared obediently at the pinpoint of light He said:
“You left the main hospital building at about midnight. You spoke to the porter at the main gate at twelve thirty-eight a.m. Where were you between those times?”
“I told you. There was a fallen elm blocking the back path, I spent some minutes examining the scene and making sure that other people didn’t injure themselves on it”