Purbright half turned, ready to leave. “I’m sorry if I’ve seemed rather stupid about this; I just wanted to make sure there was no misunderstanding.”
Miss Cork breathed with the slow self-control of the determinedly delicate. “But I really don’t see what there can have been to misunderstand. I told you that...that girl”—a twisted mouthing of the one word tumbled Miss Mackenzie into a broth pot of precocious lust—“had been after poor Gordon practically since they were children.”
Purbright fingered the letter in his pocket. “As a point of interest, do you happen to know if Doreen Mackenzie ever had a nickname?”
“I know what they called her at the Sunday school. Probably other people called her it, too. Mackie. Sometimes just Mack.”
Once all the little elements of truth began, as it seemed, to surrender themselves, Purbright found their marshalling together into a whole and obvious exposition of what really had happened at Beatrice Avenue quite exhilarating.
Sensing the inspector’s mood, Sergeant Malley beamed avuncularly as he ushered in his hospital informant, friend of a friend, and as anxious to meet the obligations implied by that compelling relationship as he was, in his own phrase, “to do that supercilious bastard Harton one in the eye”.
Male nurse Peter Tewkes was a curly-haired, florid and robust young man whom impudent good nature had made popular with patients and, in axiomatic consequence, the despair of his superiors. He eyed Purbright approvingly, as if cataloguing him as an ambulent case, no bed pans or blanket baths, maybe beer in locker and good for a fourth at solo after night sister’s round. “Fire away, sir,” he invited.
“It was very good of you, Mr Tewkes, to come along and help us. I need hardly tell you that we are not seeking this information out of idle curiosity.”
Mr Tewkes raised his brow. What better motive, he seemed to ask, could there possibly be?
“You’ll remember a patient being admitted under the name of Trevelyan—Howard Trevelyan, I believe.”
“I remember him,” said Tewkes, “but I don’t think that was his real name.”
“Nor do I, but never mind. He’d had a fall, hadn’t he?”
“So we were told. That fitted his injuries anyway.”
“Ah,” Purbright said, “now those are what we should like to hear about. Can you oblige, Mr Tewkes?”
Tewkes gave a wide, easy shrug. “Why not? He had a ruptured liver, that’s what.”
“I see. And that made an operation necessary?”
“Oh, rather. Straight away. It’s a rather nasty thing, you know.”
“I imagine it is. And the operation itself—is it very drastic?”
“I don’t know that I’d call it that, exactly. The idea is simply to mend the thing, as you would a...well, a torn cushion, say. Sew it up.” Tewkes paused. “Mind you, I don’t mean to suggest the business is particulatly easy or straightforward. The biggest snag...I say, you don’t want a lot of technical stuff, do you?”
“Not if you can avoid it.”
“Right you are. I’m not awfully strong on jargon, anyway. The point is that livers don’t mend themselves like most other bits of insides, so the artificial repairs have to be permanent—that’s why they use non-soluble sutures—and they’ve got to be treated with a good deal of respect ever after.”
“I follow. Now I’ve been told that this man came out of hospital in reasonably frisky condition. Is that likely, in your opinion? Would he have been able to...well, to lift heavy weights, for instance?”
Tewkes grinned. “The only thing he’ll be lifting for a bit will be a glass, and he’d better not make too regular a habit of that, either.”
“I don’t fancy he will,” said Purbright soberly. He remained thinking awhile, then pulled open a drawer of the desk.
“You mentioned just now something you called non-soluble sutures. Would they be made of nylon?”
“I believe they are, as a rule, yes.”
“Have a look at that, will you?” The inspector placed before Tewkes the small glass tube bequeathed by Sergeant Warlock.
Tewkes held the tube to the light and squinted at the fine, yellowish-white strand it contained. “Could be, certainly. Where did you get it?”
Purbright was so pleased with Mr Tewkes that he nearly rewarded him there and then with a true and full answer. Deciding after all that really wouldn’t do, he said simply: “It was stuck in a drainpipe.”
Tewkes wrinkled up one eye. “Stuck in a...”
Purbright nodded.
“But how bloody queer!” Tewkes gazed again at the tube, turning it this way and that in his big hands. He looked up and smiled. “Go on—I’ll buy it.”
Purbright returned his grin, a little apologetically, and reached for the tube. “Sorry. The price is too high, Mr Tewkes. Far too high.”
Chapter Seventeen
“But the lounge, sergeant...the lounge! He can’t be left in the lounge!”
Sergeant Love, who was feeling by no means happy himself, found the distraught manager of the Neptune increasingly hard to bear.
“Now look, Mr Barraclough, I regret this as much as you do—perhaps more, because I feel a bit to blame—but what’s done is done. The inspector will be here very soon and he’ll make all the decisions. In the meantime everything must be left exactly as it is.”
“But it’s nearly six o’clock.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
Mr Barraclough, in his agitation, nearly retorted: “Opening time, of course,” but he just managed a more seemly formula. “Six is the licensed hour for non-residents.”
Love was unmoved. “That doesn’t matter. I’ve locked the door. Nobody’s going to get a fright.”
He sat down in a chair near the lift. From it he commanded views both of the receptionist—of her upper parts, anyway; for the moment Love found sufficient the mere memory of his earlier glimpse of those portions he had appraised, after his first surprise, as ‘snazzy’—and of the main hotel entrance.
Through that entrance at exactly a quarter past six walked Inspector Purbright, Major Ross, Pumphrey, and the county police surgeon. Behind them, an ambulance drew across the forecourt in a half circle and backed somewhere out of Love’s line of vision.
The sergeant rose and hurried up to Purbright. His face had lost a good deal of its usual expression of luminous equanimity. Purbright gave him a concerned glance. “Don’t look so woebegone, Sid; they don’t charge you just for being here.”
“I’m ever so sorry, sir, honestly...”
“Nonsense. You had nothing whatever to do with it. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me. Now then...” Purbright looked about him—“I suppose we’d better view the remains. Where’d you put them?”
“I didn’t put them anywhere. They’re...he’s just sitting there in the lounge.”
Purbright took the key Love offered. He paused. “By the way, where’s the girl?”: