The Nursing Home Murder

CHAPTER XVI Reconstruction Begun

Thursday, the eighteenth. Afternoon.

Alleyn found he still had over an hour to wait before the reconstruction. He had tea and then rang up Dr. Roberts, found he was at home, and made his way once more to the little house in Wigmore Street. He wanted, if possible, to surprise Roberts with an unexpected reference to the Lenin Hall meeting. The diminutive manservant admitted him and showed him into the pleasant sitting-room, where he found Roberts awaiting him.

“I hope I’m not a great nuisance,” said Alleyn. “You did ask me to come back some time, you know.”

“Certainly,” said Roberts, shaking hands. “I am delighted to see you. Have you read my book?” He swept a sheaf of papers off a chair and pulled it forward. Alleyn sat down.

“I’ve dipped into it — no time really to tackle it yet, but I’m enormously interested. At Lord knows what hour this morning I read the chapter in which you refer to the Sterilization Bill. You put the case for sterilization better than any other sponsor I have heard.”

“You think so?” said Roberts acidly. “Then you will be surprised to hear that although I have urged that matter with all the force and determination I could command, I have made not one inch of headway — not an inch! I am forced to the conclusion that most of the people who attempt to administer the government of this country are themselves certifiable.” He gave a short falsetto laugh and glared indignantly at Alleyn, who contented himself with making an incredulous and sympathetic noise.

“I have done everything — everything,” continued Roberts. “I joined a group of people professing enlightened views on the matter. They assured me they would stick at nothing to force this Bill through Parliament. They, professed the greatest enthusiasm. Have they done anything?” He paused oratorically and then in a voice of indescribable disgust he said: “They merely asked me to wait in patience till the Dawn of the Proletariat Day in Britain.”

Chief Inspector Alleyn felt himself to be in the foolish position of one who sets a match to the dead stick of a rocket. Dr. Roberts had most effectively stolen his fireworks. He had a private laugh at himself. Roberts continued angrily:

“They call themselves Communists. They have no interest in the welfare of the community — none. Last night I attended one of their meetings and I was disgusted. All they did was to rejoice for no constructive or intelligent reason over the death of the late Home Secretary.”

He stopped abruptly, glanced at Alleyn, and then with that curious return to nervousness which the inspector had noticed before he said: “But, of course, I had forgotten. That is very much your business. Thoms rang me up just now to ask me if I could attend at the hospital this afternoon.”

“Thoms rang you up?”

“Yes. Sir John had asked him to, I believe. I don’t know why,” said Dr. Roberts, suddenly looking surprised and rather bewildered, “but I sometimes find Thoms’s manner rather aggravating.”

“Do you?” murmured Alleyn, smiling. “He is rather facetious.”

“Facetious! Exactly. And this afternoon I found his facetiousness in bad taste.”

“What did he say?”

“He said something to the effect that if I wished to make my get-away he would be pleased to lend me a pair of ginger-coloured whiskers and a false nose. I thought it in bad taste.”

“Certainly,” said Alleyn, hurriedly blowing his own nose.

“Of course,” continued Dr. Roberts, “Mr. Thoms knows himself to be in an impregnable position, since he could not have given any injection without being observed, and had no hand in preparing the injection which he did give. I felt inclined to point out to him that I myself am somewhat similarly situated, but do not feel, on that account, free to indulge in buffoonery.”

“I suppose Mr. Thoms was in the anteroom all the time until you went into the theatre?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Roberts stiffly. “I myself merely went to the anteroom with Sir John, said what was necessary, and joined my patient in the anæsthetic-room.”

“Ah, well — we shall get a better idea of all your movements from the reconstruction.”

“I suppose so,” agreed Roberts, looking perturbed. “It will be a distressing experience for all of us. Except, no doubt, Mr. Thoms.”

He waited a moment and then said nervously: “Perhaps this is a question that I should not ask, Inspector Alleyn, but I cannot help wondering if the police have a definite theory as regards this crime?”

Alleyn was used to this question.

“We’ve got several theories, Dr. Roberts, and all of them more or less fit. That’s the devil of it.”

“Have you explored the possibility of suicide?” asked Roberts wistfully.

“I have considered it.”

“Remember his heredity.”

“I have remembered it. After he had the attack in the House his physical condition would have rendered suicide impossible, and he could hardly have taken hyoscine while making his speech.”

“Again remember his heredity. He might have carried hyoscine tablets with him for some time and under the emotional stimulus of the occasion suffered a sudden ungovernable impulse. In the study of suicidal psychology one comes across many such cases. Did his hand go to his mouth while he was speaking? I see you look incredulous, Inspector Alleyn. Perhaps you even think it suspicious that I should urge the point. I — I — have a reason for hoping you find that O’Callaghan killed himself, but it does not spring from a sense of guilt.”

A strangely exalted look came into the little doctor’s eyes as he spoke. Alleyn regarded him intently.

“Dr. Roberts,” he said as last, “why not tell me what is in vour mind?”

“No,” said Roberts emphatically, “no — not unless — unless the worst happens.”

“Well,” said Alleyn, “as you know, I can’t force you to give me your theory, but it’s a dangerous business, withholding information in a capital charge.”

“It may not be a capital charge,” cried Roberts in a hurry.

“Even suppose your suicide theory is possible, it seems to me that a man of Sir Derek’s stamp would not have done it in such a way as to cast suspicion upon other people.”

“No,” agreed Roberts. “No. That is undoubtedly a strong argument — and yet inherited suicidal mania sometimes manifests itself very abruptly and strangely. I have known instances…”

He went to his bookcase and took down several volumes, from which he read in a rapid, dry and didactic manner, rather as though Alleyn was a collection of students. This went on for some time. The servant brought in tea, and with an air of patient benevolence, poured it out himself. He placed Roberts’s cup on a table under his nose, waited until the doctor closed the book with which he was at the moment engaged, took it firmly from him and directed his attention to the tea. He then moved the table between the two men and left the room.

“Thank you,” said Roberts vaguely some time after he had gone.

Roberts, still delivering himself of his learning, completely forgot to drink his tea or to offer some to Alleyn, but occasionally stretched out a hand towards the toast. The time passed rapidly. Alleyn looked at his watch.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, “it’s half-past four. We’ll have to collect ourselves, I’m afraid.”

“Teh!” said Roberts crossly.

“I’ll call a taxi.”

“No, no. I’ll drive you there, inspector. Wait a moment.” He darted out into the hall and gave flurried orders to the little servant, who silently insinuated him into his coat and gave him his hat. Roberts shot back into the sitting-room and fetched his stethoscope.

“What about your anæsthetising apparatus?” ventured Alleyn.

“Eh?” asked Roberts, squinting round at him.

“Your anæsthetising apparatus.”

“D’you want that?”

“Please — if it’s not a great bore. Didn’t Sir John tell you?”

“I’ll get it,” said Roberts. He darted off across the little hall.

“Can I assist you, sir?” asked the servant.

“No, no. Bring out the car.”

He reappeared presently, wheeling the cruet-like apparatus with its enormous cylinders.

“You can’t carry that down the steps by yourself,” said Alleyn. “Let me help.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Roberts. He bent down and examined the nuts that fastened the frame at the bottom. “Wouldn’t do for these nuts to come loose,” he said. “You take the top, will you? Gently. Ease it down the steps.”

With a good deal of bother they got the thing into Roberts’s car and drove off to Brook Street, the little doctor talking most of the time.

As they drew near the hospital, however, he grew quieter, seemed to get nervous, and kept catching Alleyn’s eye and hurriedly looking away again. After this had happened some three or four times Roberts laughed uncomfortably.

“I–I’m not looking forward to this experiment,” he said. “One gets moderately case-hardened in our profession, I suppose, but there’s something about this affair” — he blinked hard twice —“something profoundly disquieting. Perhaps it is the element of uncertainty.”

“But you have got a theory, Dr. Roberts?”

“I? No. No. I did hope it might be suicide. No — I’ve no specific theory.”

“Oh, well. If you won’t tell me, you won’t,” rejoined Alleyn.

Roberts looked at him in alarm, but said no more.

At Brook Street they found Fox placidly contemplating the marble woman in the waiting-room. He was accompanied by Inspector Boys, a large red-faced officer with a fruity voice and hands like hams. Boys kept a benevolent but shrewd eye on the activities of communistic societies, on near-treasonable propagandists, and on Soviet-minded booksellers. He was in the habit of alluding to such persons who came into these categories as though they were tiresome but harmless children.

“Hullo,” said Alleyn. “Where are the star turns?”

“The nurses are getting the operating theatre ready,” Fox told him. “Sir John Phillips asked me to let him know when we are ready. The other ladies are upstairs.”

“Right. Mr. Thoms here?”

“Is that the funny gentleman, sir?” asked Boys.

“It is.”

“He’s here.”

“Then in that case we’re complete. Dr. Roberts has gone up to the theatre. Let us follow him. Fox, let Sir John know, will you?”

Fox went away and Alleyn and Boys took the lift up to the theatre landing, where they found the rest of the dramatis personæ awaited them. Mr. Thoms broke off in the middle of some anecdote with which he was apparently regaling the company.

“Hullo, ’ullo, ’ullo!” he shouted. “Here’s the Big Noise itself. Now we shan’t be long.”

“Good evening, Mr. Thoms,” said Alleyn. “Good evening, matron. I hope I haven’t kept you all waiting.”

“Not at all,” said Sister Marigold.

Fox appeared with Sir John Phillips. Alleyn spoke a word to him and then turned and surveyed the group. They eyed him uneasily and perhaps inimically. It was a little as though they drew together, moved by a common impulse of self-preservation. He thought they looked rather like sheep, bunched together, their heads turned watchfully towards their protective enemy, the sheep-dog.

“I’d better give a warning bark or two,” thought Alleyn and addressed them collectively.

“I’m quite sure,” he began, “that you all realise why we have asked you to meet us here. It is, of course, in order to enlist your help. We are faced with a difficult problem in this case and feel that a reconstruction of the operation may go far towards clearing any suspicion of guilt from innocent individuals. As you know, Sir Derek O’Callaghan died from hyoscine poisoning. He was a man with many political enemies, and from the outset the affair has been a complicated and bewildering problem. The fact that he, in the course of the operation, was given a legitimate injection of hyoscine has added to the complications. I am sure you are all as anxious as we are to clear up this aspect of the case. I ask you to look upon the reconstruction as an opportunity to free yourselves of any imputation of guilt. As a medium in detection the reconstruction has much to commend it. The chief argument against it is that sometimes innocent persons are moved, through nervousness or other motives, to defeat the whole object of the thing by changing the original circumstances. Under the shadow of tragedy it is not unusual for innocent individuals to imagine that the police suspect them. I am sure that you are not likely to do anything so foolish as this. I am sure you realise that this is an opportunity, not a trap. Let me beg you to repeat as closely as you can your actions during the operation on the deceased. If you do this, there is not the faintest cause for alarm.” He looked at his watch.

“Now then,” he said. “You are to imagine that time has gone back seven days. It is twenty-five minutes to four on the afternoon of Thursday, February 4th. Sir Derek O’Callaghan is upstairs in his room, awaiting his operation. Matron, when you get word will you and the nurses who are to help you begin your preparations in the anteroom and the theatre? Any dialogue you remember you will please repeat. Inspector Fox will be in the anteroom and Inspector Boys in the theatre. Please treat them as pieces of sterile machinery.” He allowed himself a faint smile and turned to Phillips and Nurse Graham, the special.

“We’ll go upstairs.”

They went up to the next landing. Outside the door of the first room Alleyn turned to the others. Phillips was very white, but quite composed. Little Nurse Graham looked unhappy, but sensibly determined.

“Now, nurse, we’ll go in. If you’ll just wait a moment, sir. Actually you are just coming upstairs.”

“I see,” said Phillips.

Alleyn swung open the door and followed Nurse Graham into the bedroom.

Cicely and Ruth O’Callaghan were at the window. He got the impression that Ruth had been sitting there, perhaps crouched in that arm-chair, and had sprung up when the door opened. Cicely O’Callaghan stood erect, very grande dame and statuesque, a gloved hand resting lightly on the window-sill.

“Good evening, Inspector Alleyn,” she said. Ruth gave a loud sob and gasped “Good evening.”

Alleyn felt that his only hope of avoiding a scene was to hurry things along at a business-like canter.

“It was extremely kind of you both to come,” he said briskly. “I shan’t keep you more than a few minutes. As you know, we are to go over the events of the operation, and I thought it better to start from here.” He glanced cheerfully at Ruth.

“Certainly,” said Lady O’Callaghan.

“Now.” Alleyn turned towards the bed, immaculate with his smooth linen and tower of rounded pillows. “Now, Nurse Graham has brought you here. When you come in you sit — where? On each side of the bed? Is that how it was, nurse?”

“Yes. Lady O’Callaghan was here,” answered the special quietly.

“Then if you wouldn’t mind taking up those positions— ”

With an air of stooping to the level of a rather vulgar farce, Lady O’Callaghan sat in the chair on the right-hand side of the bed.

“Come along, Ruth,” she said tranquilly.

“But why? Inspector Alleyn — it’s so dreadful — so horribly cold-blooded — unnecessary. I don’t understand… You were so kind…” She boggled over her words, turned her head towards him with a gesture of complete wretchedness. Alleyn walked quickly towards her.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I know it’s beastly. Take courage — your brother would understand, I think.”

She gazed miserably at him. With her large unlovely face blotched with tears, and her pale eyes staring doubtfully up into his, she seemed dreadfully vulnerable. Something in his manner may have given her a little help. Like an obedient and unwieldly animal she got up and blundered across to the other chair.

“What now, nurse?”

“The patient half regained consciousness soon after we came in. I heard Sir John and went out.”

“Will you do that, please?”

She went away quietly.

“And now,” Alleyn went on, “what happened? Did the patient speak?”

“I believe he said the pain was severe. Nothing else,” murmured Lady O’Callaghan.

“What did you say to each other?”

“I–I told him it was his appendix and that the doctor would soon be here — something of that sort. He seemed to lose consciousness again, I thought.”

“Did you speak to each other?”

“I don’t remember.”

Alleyn made a shot in the dark.

“Did you discuss his pain?”

“I do not think so,” she said composedly.

Ruth turned her head and gazed with a sort of damp surprise at her sister-in-law.

“You remember doing so, do you, Miss O’Callaghan?” said Alleyn.

“I think — yes — oh, Cicely!”

“What is it?” asked Alleyn gently.

“I said something — about— how I wished— oh, Cicely!”

The door opened and Nurse Graham came in again.

“I think I came back about now to say Sir John would like to see Lady O’Callaghan,” she said with a troubled glance at Ruth.

“Very well. Will you go out with her, please, Lady O’Callaghan?” They went out and Ruth and the inspector looked at each other across the smug little bed. Suddenly Ruth uttered a veritable howl and flung herself face-down among the appliqué-work on the counterpane.

“Listen,” said Alleyn, “and tell me if I’m wrong. Mr. Sage had given you a little box of powders that he said would relieve the pain. Now the others have left the room, you feel you must give your brother one of these powders. There is the water and the glass on that table by your side. You unwrap the box, drop the paper on the floor, shake out one of the powders and give it to him in a glass of water. It seems to relieve the pain and when they return he’s easier? Am I right?”

“Oh,” wailed Ruth, raising her head. “Oh, how did you know? Cicely said I’d better not say. I told her. Oh, what shall I do?”

“Have you kept the box with the other powders?”

“Yes. He — they told me not to, but — but I thought if they were poison and I’d killed him— ” Her voice rose with a shrill note of horror. “I thought I’d take them — myself. Kill myself. Lots of us do, you know. Great-Uncle Eustace did, and Cousin Olive Casbeck, and— ”

“You’re not going to do anything so cowardly. What would he have thought of you? You’re going to do the brave thing and help us to find the truth. Come along,” said Alleyn, for all the world as if she were a child, “come along. Where are these terrible powders? In that bag still, I don’t mind betting.”

“Yes,” whispered Ruth, opening her eyes very wide. “They are in that bag. You’re quite right. You’re very clever to think of that. I thought if you arrested me— ” She made a very strange gesture with her clenched hand, jerking it up across her mouth.

“Give them to me,” said Alleyn. She began obediently to scuffle in the vast bag. All sorts of things came shooting out. He was in a fever of impatience lest the others should return, and moved to the door. At last the round cardboard box appeared. He gathered up the rest of Ruth’s junk and bundled it back as the door opened. Nurse Graham stood aside to let Phillips in.

“I think it was about now,” she said.

“Right,” said Alleyn. “Now, Sir John, I believe Miss O’Callaghan left the room while you examined the patient, diagnosed the trouble, and decided on an immediate operation.”

“Yes. When Lady O’Callaghan returned I suggested that Somerset Black should operate.”

“Quite so. Lady O’Callaghan urged you to do it yourself. Everyone agree to that?”

“Yes,” said Nurse Graham quietly. Ruth merely sat and gaped. Lady O’Callaghan turned with an unusual abruptness and walked to the window.

“Then you, Sir John, went away to prepare for the operation?”

“Yes.”

“That finishes this part of the business, then.”

“No!”

Cicely O’Callaghan’s voice rang out so fiercely that they all jumped. She had faced round and stood with her eyes fixed on Phillips. She looked magnificent. It was as if a colourless façade had been flood-lit.

“No! Why do you deliberately ignore what we all heard, what I myself have told you? Ask Sir John what my husband said when he saw who it was we had brought here to help him.” She turned deliberately to Phillips. “What did Derek say to you — what did he say?”

Phillips looked at her as though he saw her for the first time. His face expressed nothing but a profound astonishment. When he answered it was with a kind of reasonableness and with no suggestion of heroics. “He was frightened,” he said.

“He cried out to us: ‘Don’t let— ’ You remember” — she appealed with assurance to Nurse Graham—“you remember what he looked like — you understood what he meant?”

“I said then,” said Nurse Graham with spirit, “and I say now, that Sir Derek did not know what he was saying.”

“Well,” remarked Alleyn mildly, “as we all know about it, I think you and I, Sir John, will go downstairs.” He turned to the O’Callaghans.

“Actually, I believe, you both stayed on in the hospital during the operation, but, of course, there is no need for you to do so now. Lady O’Callaghan, shall I ask for your car to take you back to Catherine Street? If you will forgive me, I must go to the theatre.”

Suddenly he realised that she was in such a fury that she could not answer. He took Phillips by the elbow and propelled him through the door.

“We will leave Nurse Graham,” he said, “alone with her patient.”