Bodies from the Library 3

by Tony Medawar

  Nurse Farrer leaned over the young man’s bed. She could barely see his square snub-nosed face in the dim light. He was lying back on his pillow, looking up at her with a half-smile. His dark eyes glinted in the light of her pocket torch as she switched it on. Immediately he covered the torch with a strong hand, extinguishing its beam.

  ‘Douse that light!’ he whispered, urgently. ‘Look out the window!’

  She moved a little from the bed to do so. Outside, the blackness was complete. She could not even see the boundary hedge of the hospital, ten yards away.

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ she went back to tell him. ‘You been having nightmares?’

  The boy chuckled.

  ‘No fear!’

  ‘What was it, then?’

  ‘Light. Someone came along all the windows this side, shining it in. Midnight snooper.’

  ‘Sure it wasn’t a car moving in and out of the car park?’

  ‘It was a torch, I tell you. An ordinary hand torch, like this.’

  With a smile she could not see behind the light, he switched on and handed her back her torch. She gave a little gasp.

  ‘Barry! You’re the limit! I never noticed.’

  He raised himself on one elbow now to point at the window on the other side of the bed.

  ‘Whoever it was came right down this side, flicking his torch into each window. Disappointing for him, wasn’t it?’

  He laughed again, a little louder, so that Nurse Farrer had to reprove him in her crisp, rather hard voice. But Barry was irrepressible. He caught at her hand to draw her closer.

  ‘All that trouble and he only sees a lot of men. It was Treves Ward he was after, I don’t mind betting.’

  Nurse Farrer pulled away her hand.

  ‘You go to sleep,’ she said. ‘And none of your nasty ideas in my ward. If you’re not off by the time I’m back I’ll have to give you one of your pink pills.’

  He put up both hands in a mock gesture of self-protection, then pulled the bedclothes over his head and gave an artificial snore. Nurse Farrer went back to the concussion case in the blue-lighted cubicle.

  But Barry’s report had disturbed her. Twice before during her training, they had had this snooper trouble at the Annexe. The block consisted of six wards, a radium unit and operating theatres: all low, bungalow-type buildings, on either side of a central covered way, into which their entrance doors opened. Other doors led into the corridor at the lower end and at three places in the sides between the wards.

  The boundary hedge behind the Annexe was the original one, now much broken down with age and very inadequately wired over its worst gaps. A proper wall or even fence would have given some protection. The present arrangement was almost an invitation to intruders.

  Nurse Farrer determined to satisfy her own curiosity about Barry’s report. The boy was a bit inclined to practical joking. He must not be encouraged. He had been in six weeks now, after a motor-bike accident in which his right leg had been cracked in two places below the knee. At first he had been exaggeratedly depressed, irritable and difficult. Now he was just the reverse, and the older men in the ward, some of whom were easily offended, were beginning to dislike his new high spirits.

  So Nurse Farrer decided to check with the other wards in the Annexe. She called the probationer to watch the serious case, and went across the covered way to the door of Treves, a surgical ward for women.

  As soon as she was inside its outer door she knew that something was wrong. There were several lights on in the ward, but the outer rooms, ward kitchen, sluice room, Sister’s office, were all deserted. She pushed open the inner door and went in.

  A babble of indignant voices rose in her ears as she did so. She saw her opposite number at the far end of the left-hand row of beds, trying to restrain an hysterical patient who was calling out and attempting to leave her bed. Farrer hurried down the ward.

  The staff nurse looked up as she drew near. Though she resented Farrer’s arrival as a typical piece of high-handed interference, in the circumstances she could not refuse her proffered help. Together the two nurses succeeded in calming the distraught woman in the bed, to the extent of persuading her to lie back and tell them what had upset her.

  ‘Don’t talk if you’d rather not, Mrs Holmes,’ said the Treves Ward nurse, soothingly.

  But Mrs Holmes was eager now to begin. Controlling her sobs she managed to say, ‘I was having such a lovely sleep and then the light shone in my eyes, and woke me up. I thought it was you, nurse, at first. Then the light moved away on to Mrs Brook, and I glimpsed an awful face at the window, sort of glaring in. Like a horror film on the telly, it was. My heart seemed to stop and then Mrs Brook gave a scream and the lights went on down the ward and we were all starting up and calling out and I suppose I lost my head a bit. I’m ever so sorry, nurse.’

  She was crying freely now. Nurse Farrer patted her shoulder briskly.

  ‘We saw the light in Brodie, too, across the way,’ she said. ‘Someone thinks it fun to do a Peeping Tom, I expect. I hope he’s disappointed. We’ll report it to Sister, of course.’

  ‘I have reported it,’ said the nurse in Treves, coldly. She wished Farrer would go. Interfering, as usual. The only one who knew what to do, of course, and told others to do it. Bossy wasn’t the word!

  Nurse Farrer, realising at last that her presence in another ward would not look too good if Sister found her there, turned away abruptly, and hurried back to her own territory, where she immediately rang up Night Sister to tell her of Barry Williams’s experience. She did not mention the later commotion in Treves. It was the deputy she spoke to. Night Sister had already left to go to the Annexe, she learned. So, determined to go one better than Treves, she rang up the porters’ lodge at the main gates of the hospital.

  Here she was answered by Bates, the senior night porter. He and his colleague, Holford, shared the work between them, Bates remaining at the telephone exchange, and Holford carrying out such jobs as wheeling an emergency case from a ward to an operating theatre and back again later, or taking a dead body from a ward to the mortuary, or directing and assisting an ambulance to park and discharge its occupants. If no such work turned up, Holford’s duty was to patrol the grounds once or twice during the night.

  When Nurse Farrer’s call came through, Holford was sitting in the lodge, relaxing with a cigarette and an evening paper. He was not at all pleased, and for some minutes made no attempt to move.

  ‘Better see if you can locate the perisher,’ suggested Bates. ‘He only seems to have been at those two wards nearest the hedge. Scarpered when the women started their hullabaloo, I reckon. But you better have a look round.’

  ‘I’ll give him another minute or two,’ answered Holford, who had no desire to meet the intruder on a pitch black narrow path in the wilds, as he called the undeveloped part of the hospital grounds between the Annexe and the main block. ‘I’m not risking my life with a lunatic. And that’s what he must be. Nasty-minded beggar at that. Why don’t they get on with this plan for a new laboratory? Then it would all join up, so you could walk right through the place without crossing the open.’

  ‘That wouldn’t stop a snooper,’ answered Bates, reasonably. ‘Good high wall with wire on top. That’s what we need.’

  Holford put his head out of the lodge, cursed the darkness of the night, and withdrew to take up his torch. It was a powerful one, rubber-covered to protect it from rain. He wrapped a scarf round his neck, put on an overcoat, and set off towards the Annexe, shining a long beam from side to side, but not venturing from the middle of the path as he moved along.

  Arriving at the Annexe covered way, he found Night Sister and the two staff nurses standing there. The unwanted visitor had not been seen at any other windows in the block. Evidently the disturbance he had caused in Treves had scared him away. Holford reported that he had seen no one on his way from the porters’ lodge, and they all agreed there was nothing more to be done. Night Sister left, accompanied by Holford
, and before they parted at the main building she asked him to go back again, to escort the nurses across the grounds to the main dining room where they had their midnight meal. Rather reluctantly, for the night was cold, Holford set off once more.

  Meanwhile, in the corridor at the Annexe, Nurse Farrer and Judy, the staff nurse from Treves, were on the point of returning to their respective wards, when they heard a tapping at one of the doors farther up the corridor. Both girls started, but Farrer recovered first and hurried towards the door. When she had peered through the glass upper part, she unlocked it quickly, and Dr Guy Stevens came through.

  ‘What’s the big idea, locking me out?’

  She told him. Night Sister had ordered all three of the side doors into the covered way to be locked at night until further notice. The main entrance was open, and well lit outside and in. No sinister person would be likely to go near it.

  Guy Stevens was inclined to make light of the matter. He was a house officer of only two years’ standing, working on the surgical side. His experience was limited. Nurse Farrer, a couple of years his senior, did not hesitate to tell him so.

  ‘And you’re always right, Betty, aren’t you?’ said Guy, still refusing to be serious.

  She hustled him into Brodie Ward. He had taken her out once or twice, and she was really rather attracted, except when he behaved as he did now. For his part, Guy was beginning to feel she was more of a liability than an asset. But it was not going to be easy to shake her off.

  He did his night round in Brodie, and Nurse Farrer went to the door of the ward with him. In the dim light of the corridor she looked appealing. He caught her hand to pull her to him, but she had been offended by his earlier attitude, and was not going to give in now.

  Judy, just inside the door of Treves, heard the ensuing scuffle, and caught sight of Dr Stevens’s furious scarlet face as he was flung out of the Annexe. Quarrelling again, she thought. Honestly, some people don’t know when they’re well off.

  A fortnight passed, with no further alarms. Night Sister had reported the occurrence to Matron, who told the Hospital Secretary, who telephoned the Chairman of St Stephen’s House Committee, who mentioned the matter to the Chairman of the Hospital Group Management Committee. The matter was placed on the agenda for the next cycle of committees in two months’ time. Recommendations would be made and passed on, until they reached the Regional Board, which would inevitably turn down any project so costly as a wall or an extra member of the staff.

  The Matron, however, did manage to arrange for Holford to act as a permanent escort for the Annexe night nurses on their way to and from the main dining room.

  This worked smoothly until a night when Holford’s services were required in the operating theatre at the Annexe. He was still on duty there at midnight, and the nurses decided that they would go together in a body rather than wait for him. By this time they had forgotten the former panic, which after all had affected the patients much more than the staff. The girls gathered in the covered way, pulling their cloaks round them.

  ‘Where’s Betty?’

  ‘Go and tell her, Judy.’

  The girl was back in a few seconds.

  ‘She says go without her. One of her patients has gone along to the toilet and not come out. She must wait for him, she says.’

  ‘Typical!’

  ‘She’ll catch us up.’

  They trooped off in a body, leaving the wards in charge of the probationers, whose turn for a meal came after their seniors got back.

  Nurse Farrer did not catch them up. She did not appear while they ate their meal. When they got back to the Annexe she was not there. Night Sister and Holford, now free to help, searched the grounds between the main block and the Annexe, and at three in the morning they found her, lying outside the Hospital Secretary’s office, dead.

  The Senior Registrar was called, and Matron, and the police. There was nothing the doctor could do, except confirm Night Sister’s finding. Before long Detective-Superintendent Coleridge was on the scene and the investigation was under way.

  The Hospital Secretary’s office formed one half of a one-storey concrete building, situated near the boundary, not far from the Annexe. The other half held the engineer’s stores and had its own entrance. At the office end a wide door was set back between the two walls of a short porch. Nurse Farrer was lying face downwards in a corner of this porch. Her forehead was grazed, her neck was broken. On the back of her head was a fairly large bruise.

  ‘Looks as if she was hit from behind,’ said the police doctor, who had arrived soon after Superintendent Coleridge. ‘She fell against the corner of the wall, I think, and broke her neck. Otherwise she’d be alive now. This blow wasn’t enough to kill her, only concuss. She’s been dead about three hours, I imagine.’

  There had been no struggle, no assault. Simply that one blow from behind, and the unlucky fact that she was near the door when it was delivered.

  ‘Why was she here at all?’ Coleridge asked aloud.

  ‘She shouldn’t have come this way,’ Matron explained. ‘She ought to have been with the others.’

  She explained the circumstances and Coleridge nodded. He had seen the hospital report about the snooper two weeks ago.

  ‘She may have seen or heard someone on the path, and gone out of her way to avoid him,’ he suggested.

  Matron shook her head.

  ‘Nurse Farrer wasn’t the sort to run away. If she heard anyone behind her she’d turn to face him, and get the better of him, too. She had a sharp tongue in her head, and was rather too fond of using it, poor girl.’

  Superintendent Coleridge did not seem to be listening. The Hospital Secretary, roused from his bed, had just arrived with the keys to the office.

  ‘Sorry to get you up, but we need your help.’ Coleridge explained. ‘Looks as if she noticed something wrong near your office, while she was going, alone, towards the main block. Perhaps a light on inside, or a figure moving. Open up, please.’

  Mr Walters, considerably shocked and still only half awake, did as he was told. When he had opened the door he stood back, expecting Coleridge to go in.

  But the Superintendent merely pushed the door wide open and shone his torch into the darkness. He saw a short passage with closed doors at either side, and an open door ahead. He turned to Walters.

  ‘Take my torch,’ he said, ‘and go into the room at the end. That’s the main office, I take it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Walters again did as he was told, and stood in the office turning the torch slowly from side to side. He was plainly visible from the doorway and beyond. Also clearly to be seen was a large safe.

  Superintendent Coleridge walked in and switched on all the lights.

  ‘Right,’ he said, briskly. ‘No disturbance here, but you never can tell. I’ll leave you with Detective-Sergeant Jones, Mr Walters. He’ll go through everything with you. Try the safe for a start. You keep a certain amount of money there, I suppose?’

  ‘Wages, yes. And deceased patients’ property until it’s claimed by the relatives. And petty cash.’

  ‘Just so.’

  Leaving Sergeant Jones to supervise this move, and the taking of fingerprints and photographs on the spot, he went away to the main block to pursue his inquiries with the hospital staff.

  Night Sister, convinced that the crime had been committed by the unknown intruder who had so startled the Annexe a fortnight before, explained her views with much emphasis.

  ‘Nurse Farrer was an excellent worker,’ she said, ‘but a bit too self-reliant. Tonight’s behaviour was typical. First she thinks she ought to make sure all her patients are in bed before she leaves. Quite unnecessary. There is always someone in charge. Then it was very silly to think she could order a grown man out of a lavatory.’

  ‘Was that what she did?’

  ‘So I hear. It meant Nurse Farrer had to start out alone. The others were tired of waiting for her, quite naturally. Even so, it was very off
icious to go out of her proper way to find out what was happening at the office, if anything was.’

  Superintendent Coleridge pursed his lips.

  ‘You don’t think she had a date?’ he asked, drily.

  Sister’s face grew scarlet.

  ‘Our nurses don’t behave like that,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t they have boyfriends?’

  ‘Of course they do. But they keep their private affairs for their off-duty periods.’

  ‘I see.’

  The Superintendent did not look convinced.

  ‘It has been suggested to me that Nurse Farrer was interested in one of the resident doctors. And that they had quarrelled recently.’

  ‘You mean Dr Stevens? Well, I know for a fact he was in the operating theatre tonight. An emergency appendix. That was why Holford was not able to escort the girls over.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Superintendent again. ‘I wonder if I might have a word with Dr Stevens?’

  ‘Must you get him out of bed again tonight?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. And its nearly morning, after all. I’d like to see him here in about half an hour from now.’

  Guy Stevens did not appear at his best with the Superintendent. He was half asleep and very tired after his exertions of the day before, and his work in the theatre only five hours ago. The added shock of Nurse Farrer’s violent death only made his confusion and resentment worse. Coleridge was ready to believe he was lying, and rather poorly at that.

  ‘Do you deny you were interested in this girl?’

  ‘In Betty Farrer? Well, yes, up to a point.’

  ‘Up to what point?’

  Guy flushed.

  ‘She threw her weight about too much,’ he said, ungallantly. ‘She was so efficient,’ he amended, not wishing to slander the dead, and rather horrified at his own complete lack of any sense of grief or loss. The Superintendent had also remarked this.

  ‘You don’t seem much upset,’ he said.

  ‘Of course I’m upset. It’s terrible. But there was never anything serious between us. I’ve hardly spoken to her for the last couple of weeks. We quarrelled, actually.’