by Otto Penzler
Incidentally, though Mandrell, the sole proprietor and only employee of Mandrell, Limited, is English and the author’s style sounds like someone from the United Kingdom, McAuliffe never traveled outside the United States.
“The Dr. Sherrock Commission” was first published in Of All the Bloody Cheek (New York, Ballantine Books, 1965).
THE DR. SHERROCK COMMISSION
Frank McAuliffe
DR. SHERROCK is remembered by the firm of Mandrell, Limited, with unequivocal sentimentality. He put us on our feet, so to speak. Which is more than I can say for the service he extended to many of his patients.
Odd chap, this Sherrock. He was a medical doctor with a practice in Liverpool. His home, with its steel-shuttered windows, was located in the posh Clairemont section. Each day the doctor made his transit from home to office in the rear of a locked Rolls. The chauffeur of the Rolls, a barrel-shouldered young man named Ben Nett, carried beneath his left arm an ugly bit of iron manufactured in Belgium and containing within its contours seven steel-headed bullets.
Once the auto arrived at the building that housed the doctor’s offices, it was driven down a ramp to an underground garage. Here the machine was parked in a wire-enclosed stall from which Sherrock stepped directly into an elevator that scheduled but two stops: the garage and the doctor’s offices on the third floor.
And this strange regimen did not slacken with Sherrock’s arrival at the office. He would not treat just anyone. Perhaps he had been less selective at one time, accepted patients purely on the criterion of their forfeiture of health. But in the period in which I knew the man he insisted that yours be an anatomy previously researched by his stethoscope before he would allow you the shelter of his office.
One would assume it financial folly for a doctor to so isolate himself from the community. Which M.D., I mean, survives without that one essential trapping of his practice—the patient? Not so. Sherrock sustained the vacuum and still remained the top yearly-income doctor in Liverpool. A feat, I am told, of no meager proportions, for the Liverpool of those days (about a year prior to the war) was a city glutted with medical men made notoriously tractable by starvation.
Sherrock prospered because he still retained a trusting core of old patients, his Clairemont neighbors for the most part—case histories he knew by memory—and their offspring.
What have we here, then? A snob who has discarded the ideals of his youth, the wistfully lofty tenets of his profession? No; there was more substance to Sherrock’s withdrawal. During the several months prior to my acquaintance with the man, the doctor had been exposed to a series of odd adventures, an unsettling record of mayhem that prompted anything but a sense of security.
On June 19, for instance, Daisy Sherrock, the doctor’s wife for eighteen years, encountered sudden escape from the balance of her life. On holiday in Wales the woman slipped, jumped, or was pushed from a promontory onto a covey of rocks bordering the Irish Sea. While it is true that the lady was renowned locally for her lack of beauty, it is doubtful that her extraordinary acrobatics improved her condition in any degree.
On December 26 of the same year (you will note that I am reluctant to wax specific regarding the identity of the year involved; I must refuse to do so for reasons that will remain my own) —anyway, on December 26 a Miss Sally Hickey received the following correspondence in the post: If you go ahead and do it I’m going ahead and kill you and him.
A rather irrelevant exhibition of faulty sentence structure, but noteworthy in this instance when you realize that Miss Sally Hickey was about to become the second Mrs. Sherrock. The doctor had announced their engagement on Christmas Day. Miss Hickey, a winsome slip of a girl, had, up until this time, known only that fame inherent in her occupation as a nurse in Dr. Sherrock’s office. She was evidently a medical woman of precocious skill, for it was she (not the older, more experienced, nurses) whom the doctor kept alone with him in the office for those late-evening experiments that are so much a part of the life of the dedicated physician.
There was no further enlightenment from the letter writer. Perhaps he had exhausted his gift.
Then on February 13 (that birth date, historically, of beautiful women) of the new year, a rifle bullet splashed through the window of Dr. Sherrock’s library. On February 19 a similar missile shattered the same window. These ballistic outrages commanded Dr. Sherrock’s attention rather abruptly, for he chanced to be seated in the room on both occasions. All windows of the great house, except those of the servants’ quarters, were shortly equipped with steel shutters.
Then on March 8, just three weeks prior to the wedding, Dr. Sherrock found himself face-to-face with the secret aggressor. On his way to the office in his Rolls, the doctor encountered a vintage saloon that forced his own machine from the roadway at high speed. The Rolls struck a stone wall that fortunately gave way to superior craftsmanship, and Sherrock went unharmed.
The doctor, for all his submersion in the medical profession, was not a dense man. Upon sensing the bent of his enemy’s animosity—having it rather flung in his face, actually—Sherrock exhibited an astute knowledge of the basic ingredients of survival. He, for example, did not entrust his deliverance to the abilities of the Liverpool police (a loutish lot). Instead, following the roadway impertinence, he hired for himself the chauffeur with the automatic pistol, the Mr. Ben Nett previously mentioned.
In fact, the durable Mr. Nett became so much the constant companion of Dr. Sherrock and the doctor’s fiancée in the ensuing weeks that when the day of the wedding finally arrived, a certain degree of good-natured joshing befell young Nett. The alcoholic mouths of the wedding guests speculated with Ben on the sleeping accommodations being provided for the trembling bride.
“What’ll it be, lad? Three in a bed? Ho-ho-ho-ho.”
“How many loaded guns will the poor lass find facing her tonight? Eh? Ho-ho…”
Ahhh, when will Englishmen ever learn that dignity is the least resident in the brandy bottle?
The wedding went off as planned, but I understand the honeymoon trip to Italy was postponed until less hostile times. That is, postponed until the police, or somebody, should apprehend Mr. Michael Bell.
It had been suspected all along that the caretaker of Dr. Sherrock’s misfortune was one Michael Bell. After all, hadn’t it been Michael Bell who had injected into the demise of the first Mrs. Sherrock the fascinating rumor of possible “foul play”? Hadn’t it been Michael, a brash immigrant from Belfast, who had gone about the pubs in Clairemont muttering his dark, vulgar conclusions regarding “…me sister’s accident—if you’ll call that an accident…” immediately following the burial of the first Mrs. Sherrock? Yes, Michael was the brooding brother of the matron who had enjoyed the flamboyant swim in the Irish Sea. He was Dr. Sherrock’s brother-in-law.
Michael had also been the frequent escort of Miss Sally Hickey prior to her engagement to Dr. Sherrock. Michael it was who had taken the vivacious young nurse about the sights of Liverpool on those evenings when she was not enmeshed in after-hours research with the good doctor.
Thus it must have seemed to poor Mr. Bell that his whole world was being unraveled before his eyes, and all of the yarn ending in the hands of the physician. Sister gone…lady friend gone.
As I said, Dr. Sherrock and the Liverpool police suspected that Michael was the secret tormentor. But it was not until the day of the automobile rowdyism that they knew for certain. Sherrock swore that he had seen the contorted face of Michael behind the wheel of the offending machine. The authorities of course took after the lad with laudable vindictiveness. But Mr. Bell proved worthy of their zeal. He eluded the pack, and was still, two months following the Sherrock-Hickey nuptials, at large. More power to you, lad.
Mrs. Sherrock (née Hickey), poor lass, came to despise Michael Bell with a fervor equal to that expressed by her doctor-husband. The young waif had indentured herself to the god Matrimony, and she was eager to test the residual benefits thereof—to wit, her new buy
ing power. But instead, she found herself a prisoner in the steel-shuttered house. On the assumption that Mr. Bell had been rather in earnest when he threatened to kill both Sally and the doctor, the Liverpool police and Sherrock himself insisted that Sally remain confined.
The situation was at this flux when the talents of Mandrell, Limited, were solicited.
Despite the obvious impediments in the case, I accepted the Commission. My decision was considerably influenced by the hints of pending bankruptcy tended me by my creditors. As I deposited the advance fee to my account, my banker of the day, a Mr. Lovejoy, remarked, “Ah, it does my heart good to see so young a firm as your own finally making its way, Mr. Mandrell. Afraid there for a while we were going to lose you. So many bankruptcy decisions being brought on these days, eh? Although you young fellows shouldn’t be believing all those things you read in the press about the commercial houses. We are certainly not the ‘smugly solvent’ lot you hear about from those Bolshevik crybabies. No, indeed…Ah, Mr. Mandrell, our dossier on Mandrell, Limited, appears somewhat delinquent. We do not have your exact activity listed. What is Mandrell, Limited, in?”
“Why, I suppose hunting describes it best,” I murmured.
“Hunting? You mean big-game hunting? Buena macubula and all that?”
“Yes, big-game hunting,” I said.
“My, my. That doesn’t sound any too broad-based, reliable, or…ah…economy-attached, if I may say so.” (Followed by a positive geyser of derogatory clichés.) “Can you tell me, is our Mr. FitzHunt aware of Mandrell, Limited’s corporate structure?”
You suet-voiced popinjay. You no longer have Mandrell, Limited, beneath your pound-sterling thumb; the loan is up to date. So now you would impose this false insecurity to our negotiations. Bondage me with fear. Not on your life, sir. Mandrell, Limited, now has teeth.
“I would appreciate it, Mr. Lovejoy,” I said, “if you would summon the necessary articulation to correctly pronounce my name. It is Man-DRELL. Not Man-DRILL. A minor distinction, to be sure, yet one the zoologists of the world have seen fit to emblazon with significance.”
“Oh, I say, I hadn’t meant to…well now, back to our analysis of Mandrell, Limited’s growth potential. You see—”
“Good day, Mr. Lovejoy. You will find my checks in the post.”
I moved on from my bank—yes, indeed, “my” bank—to a sleazy building in Blackpool. To the eternally suspicious gentlemen encountered therein I handed over the sum of nineteen pounds. They in turn grudgingly parted with an Afghan rug which they had been holding but which belonged to me.
“Nineteen pounds. That’s not one-tenth the worth of this thing,” I was informed by a Mr. Grimes of Customs.
“Not one-fiftieth,” I corrected him. “But you see it is damaged here, the two holes? So the full import duty could hardly be assessed.”
“Not if I’d been in charge…Here, those look to be bullet holes!”
“Yes, they certainly do. Good day, sir.”
At this period in my life I was admittedly a bit dotty on the subject of fine rugs. An affectation, probably, that has not survived my maturity. On this occasion, however, I found myself particularly indebted to Dr. Sherrock. Had it not been for the advance monies from the Sherrock Commission, I fear I would have been driven to some desperate act in order to retrieve the Afghan rug from the customhouse.
These, then, were the fruits of my labor. Let us pursue now the labor itself. The Dr. Sherrock Commission.
In order that you may not be misled, let me point out that it was not Dr. Sherrock who negotiated the Dr. Sherrock Commission with Mandrell, Limited. That would have been somewhat incongruous, as you shall see.
My major concern, following my acceptance of the Commission, consisted of arranging a face-to-face meeting with the harried doctor. The meeting, of necessity, had to be within a format that Sherrock’s schedule, with its bristling aura of defensive security, firmly did not allow.
As a first maneuver I motored up to Liverpool and presented myself at Sherrock’s offices. With my arm supported by a dramatic, blood-spotted sling, I supplicated at the desk of the nurse-receptionist for emergency help. Through lips made blubbery by pain, I demanded that the talents of Dr. Sherrock should immediately be brought to bear on my tortured arm. I was informed that a Dr. O’Shaughnessy, a colleague of Sherrock’s, would honor my affliction. “Dr. Sherrock is not available.”
“You are not understand, Lady Nurse,” I sniveled. “I am Igor Kaminski. Great pianist. Greatest since Gaultflegal. The critics, some say greater than Gaultflegal. I? I must be neutral….I am trapped here, Liverpool, this stupid city, by the concert. I am let nobody, nobody, touch-a these lovely hands except Sher-rook.”
I held out for the nurse’s attention my injured paw. The fingers of the hand were so grotesquely intertwisted that I would be lucky were I ever again to zip my trousers with same, much less play the piano. The ring finger itself was split fully in half all the way to the second joint. The collection of malformed digits that she viewed was of course of my own manufacture. Mostly a block of plaster of Paris sculpted to my needs and carefully tinted to an over-all yellowish purple, except for the areas of bruised red where two of the fingernails hung by a thread of cuticle. Rather overdone, actually, but the thing passed for a ruptured hand if only because there was nothing else it could possibly have been.
“This Dr. Sher-rook, I am heard of him,” I said. “He is must fix me. I must play tonight.”
“Dr. O’Shaughnessy will see you, if you care to wait,” the nurse said, staring coldly at my affliction. “We do not treat non-English patients, as a rule. Dr. Sherrock’s orders. But in this case, since you are in the Arts, perhaps…”
I carried on a bit more, banging about Dr. O’Shaughnessy’s office and screeching that none but “Dr. Sher-rook himself” should examine my hand, but to no avail. O’Shaughnessy and another white-smocked gentleman eventually prescribed massive home rest for me and flung me from the building. It would serve you right, you medical swine, should Igor Kaminski elect to never play again. How, I ask you, sirs, are you to explain my absence at the next Buckingham Palace command performance?
Thus, in my first move to complete the Sherrock Commission I gained little but a growing respect for the good doctor’s hunger for privacy. I returned to London, taking with me the abused but talented hand of Igor Kaminski, and sat brooding at my desk in this bit of an office I had acquired just off Bristol Square. The Dr. Sherrock Commission represented the first substantial Commission in the short history of Mandrell, Limited. It had to be brought off with ringing virtuosity. The firm’s reputation would be built on nothing less.
Following a full day of contemplation, I had all but decided that if I were to retain my infant business, and my Afghan rug, I would be forced to risk the temper of the doctor’s armed chauffeur, Mr. Ben Nett. I would intercept Sherrock during his daily home-to-office ride. Then, lo! before I had time to act on this somewhat dangerous decision, the correct strategy came suddenly to me on the winds of Fortune. Fortunate for me, that is. A bit on the awkward side for the third party involved, a gentleman named John Austin.
Austin was an incumbent M.P. from Liverpool, Labour man. He had, according to the shocked report in The Times, been struck down by an auto on a street of his own district while returning home from an electioneering rally. The offending machine—described by a witness as an old Bentley, color red, if you can imagine such a thing—had sped off without pausing to ascertain even the extent of the M.P.’s injury; which, upon his removal to St. Malachy’s Hospital, proved to be grievous.
The key, the very key to my dilemma, served up by the voting stock—slack, blind cattle—of Liverpool!
I immediately flew north and presented myself at old, gray St. Malachy’s to involve myself in the succor being tended Mr. Austin. To the hospital authorities, I was a doctor engaged by the Labour Party. To the politicians on the scene, I was present on behalf of the Austin family. And to the family, I w
as a member of the hospital staff. It was all rather simple. Most of the people I encountered during my three days of medical duty, even the members of the M.P.’s family, appeared more concerned with the political ramifications surrounding the incident than the ministrations being accorded the near-deceased.
An ugly theory had invaded the affair. It was indignantly whispered, through filed teeth, that the Tories had done in poor M.P. Austin, had paid the driver of the red Bentley to obliterate their opposition, an expediency well in keeping with Liverpool political tradition. A very serious game down there.
On two occasions during my medical tour I was able to achieve the sickroom unescorted and spend a few minutes alone with the patient. Following the first of these visits, I looked in on the superintendent of the hospital and informed him that his famous charge had regained coherence for a few seconds during my visit and had voiced a request.
“He wants a particular doctor called in for further consultations,” I told the super. “A Dr. Sherrock. I’ve heard of Sherrock but, unfortunately, do not know him personally.”
“I know Dr. Sherrock,” the super said. “I’m afraid he’ll not come to the hospital. He lives under…well, some rather peculiar pressures.”
I shrugged. “Just as well. The patient evidently has enormous faith in him; but, after all, Sherrock is no more than an M.D., possessing God knows what degree of competence.”
“Dr. Sherrock is the highest caliber of physician,” the super told me coldly. The super didn’t like me. He didn’t like my splayfooted stride, my paunchy, hunched posture, my stained school tie, or my grimy, fingerprint-crusted eyeglasses. He, in particular, did not enjoy the cloud of bad breath that hung about me like a cape (in reality a bit of pungent cheese smeared on the upper arms and neck). I was not at all the super’s conception of the doctor one summoned to minister to a Member of Parliament. Which is not surprising, since the disguise I have described was inspired not by a doctor but by a banker, my Mr. Lovejoy.
