No Escape (16 page)

“Oh, well.”

The consultant had reached the main corridor. These last words were spoken absent-mindedly, for his thoughts were already with the male patients he was about to see in the next ward he would visit. He looked up and down the corridor.

“Oh, there you are. Did you find it?”

Jane saw the houseman's young face, red from his rapid sprint to and from the Path Lab, appear beside his boss, smiling success.

“Good. Let's get on, then.”

Sister had seen Jane, standing respectfully against the wall. As soon as the other two had gone she turned to her, holding out her hand. Jane did not have to explain.

“They don't seem able to keep their minds on what they're supposed to be doing,” Sister grumbled. “I have all the forms laid out on my desk, names filled in, requests, even. And they can't make enough effort to add their own names to them.”

“It's Miss Dennison again,” Jane said. “If you could sign it yourself, please, Sister, ‘p.p.' whoever it ought to be—”

“Miss Gleaning won't mind and Dr Milton will never know? Very well. Come into my room. I hope you haven't been waiting long.”

Jane followed her, a little surprised by the cordial tone of Sister's voice. She had not been to the ward since the day of Sheila's death. She was afraid Sister would connect her permanently with that unfortunate girl.

Perhaps she did. But not with any animosity.

“Did you have to give evidence at the inquest?” Sister asked, handing back the completed form.

“Sheila, d'you mean? No, thank heaven.”

They looked at one another for a long moment. Then Jane said, quietly, “Mr Long and I went to Reading yesterday afternoon to see her mother and father. They're very respectable, very puritanical, terribly strict with her, I think. They'd lost a little boy.”

“Typical,” said Sister and sighed.

“Mrs Burgess gave me some beads of Sheila's. A long chain of white heads.”

“
Beads
?” said Sister and stopped.

“Yes. I was going to ask you sometime. Show them to you. Mr Long thinks she wore them in the ward.”

“A short string round her neck, almost a choker.”

“If you doubled them, yes, it would make a choker.”

“Single,” said Sister, with emphasis.

Jane stared, then shrugged.

“Oh well, they're poppets. You can do anything you like with them, can't you? Break them or join them any length. Mrs Burgess said she must have been wearing them when she was killed because they came back to her with the clothes after the police had seen them. They kept the suitcases. The police, I mean.”

“Sheila wasn't wearing beads—or any kind of jewellery—when she left this ward,” said Sister.

Jane suddenly remembered the paper in her hand.

“I must fly,” she said. “I've been ages too long already. May I show you the beads? I'd like to know if you saw them ever?”

She ran all the way back to the department. Miss Gleaning had been very busy while she was away and had not noticed the passage of time. Jane slipped back into the routine.

During her lunch hour she went away to the flat to get the beads, banging them round her neck inside her polo-necked jumper as Sheila had worn them in the train. At the end of the afternoon she went up to Alexandra Ward to show them to Sister.

“Just a minute,” Sister said. She went into the ward kitchen where one of the nurses was making tea in a very large teapot.

“Nurse Kimmins,” said Sister, formally, “you know Miss Wheelan from X-ray, don't you?”

The nurse, a dark girl with an olive skin and blue-black hair, turned and smiled.

“Tell Miss Wheelan about Sheila Burgess,” Sister went on. “What you told me and what you thought.”

“Well, I was seeing to her a good deal, you know, and I was struck by her changes of mood. She'd be up and down half a dozen times a day. I know she was a query nut case, but—”

“She was perfectly sane,” Jane said, steadily. “She was frightened, that was all.”

“It depends if you're frightened of something real or not, doesn't it? I mean, if it's imaginary then it's neurotic and that's—”

“Still not insanity. But I agree with you about her moods,” Jane said. “Absolutely. I never knew if I should find her excited and cheerful or down in the dumps, crying her eyes out.”

“That's agreed between you, then,” said Sister firmly. “Now let's go back to my room, Miss Wheelan—”

“But the beads—”

“Pardon?” said the nurse.

“Back to my room,” repeated Sister. Jane obeyed.

When she had shut the door Sister said, “I don't want that girl connecting the beads with Sheila's behaviour. You see now what I'm driving at?”

Jane did see. Sheila's anxiety over her possessions. Her constant wish to go back to her lodging. Her insistence upon having her suitcases in the ward. Her wearing these beads.

She put her hand inside her jumper, pulled up the string again and breaking it at one bead, laid it out in a straight line on Sister's table.

“You mean there might be a pep drug or something in them,” she said.

Sister opened a drawer and took out a pair of pliers.

“My only tool, but good for nearly everything,” she said.

She detached a single bead, put it between the jaws of the pliers and pressed them together. The bead cracked with a very faint noise. Opening the pliers, two small fragments of a tiny hollow case and a small heap of white powder fell to the table.

“The powder may be the crushed part of the bead,” said Jane. “
Are
poppets hollow?”

“I wouldn't know,” Sister said, looking for a duster in another drawer. “Make what you like of it. I think there's quite a strong possibility Sheila took drugs. That's all.”

“So do I, now.” Jane answered. She was remembering the landlady, Mrs Coates, who had hinted at it in her bitter, resentful voice.

She swept up the beads, fastened them round her neck again and thanking Sister for her help, went thoughtfully home to the flat.

Back in the flat Jane found Mary in the kitchen, ironing. This peaceful and prosaic scene, coming at the end of a working day so full of unusual, even fantastic happenings, made her laugh.

“What's so funny?” Mary asked. The shirt she was ironing was an old one, but did not seem to her to be a worthy object of derision.

“He's turned up again,” Jane said. “Guess where?”

“Who's turned up?” Mary asked, defensively, then, her mind waking up, said, “Not that doubtful charmer—Barry—”

“Gerry,” answered Jane. “Gerald Stone.”

“Lying in wait for you outside the gates? Chasing you up the road?”

“Neither. As a patient in the department.”

“
No
!”

“Yes, indeed. A genuine sprain of his left wrist. All puffed up and painful. Limited movement. But no fracture.”

“So he wasn't putting it on, but using it as an excuse to see you?”

“Apparently. He overreached himself though. He didn't know the Gleaning.”

Jane told her friend the full story of that morning's activities, including their outcome.

“Are you really going out with him again? I thought he'd scared the pants off you over the films?”

“In a way, yes. But I'm still curious.”

She regretted her promise to Superintendent Garrod, but having given it, she could not explain to Mary her position as potential informer or amateur sleuth. Instead she started on the afternoon's discoveries. Mary showed more interest in these.

“Let me have a look at the beads,” she demanded.

Jane fished up the string once more, lifted it over her head and handed it to her friend.

“What's the point of wearing them inside your jumper?” Mary asked.

“I didn't put them on for show,” Jane answered. “Only to take them up to show them to Sister when I had time. The Gleaning doesn't like us to wear jewellery of any kind at work, even plain white beads. Anyway a string this length would get in the way. I'm jolly glad I did have them out of sight, as it happens.”

“Why?”

“You never know. Gerry may have snoopers in the hospital for all I know.”

“Honestly! Aren't you overdoing the cloak and dagger just a tiny bit?”

“Perhaps I am. After all, thousands of girls have white beads.”

Jane described her conversation with Sister. Mary was highly amused. She went away and brought back a hammer. Putting a piece of newspaper on the hearth in the sitting-room, she unfastened two beads from the string, put them down and hit them hard.

As before they disintegrated into a white powder and a few more solid chips.

“Hollow!” she said, nodding agreement with Jane's description.

“Exactly. No, don't smash any more. I agree with Sister we shall have to—”

But Mary did not apply the hammer to the third bead she detached from the string. She put it into her mouth.

“Sugar-coated,” she said, with satisfaction. “Like all the best pills, you can suck at the start. Pills they are, my girl. Sister was right when she suggested they might carry drugs. Ugh!”

She ran back to the kitchen and spat out the remains of the bead into the sink.

“Bitter in the middle,” she said, indistinctly, rinsing her mouth with cold water. “I wonder what the dope is.”

“I don't suppose you've swallowed enough for us to find out,” said Jane, in a voice of disappointment,

“Callous brute!”

Mary went back to the sitting-room and sat down, clearly observing herself with particular care. Jane sat clown opposite, watching her friend.

At the end of a quarter of an hour Mary said, “I feel very peculiar.”

“You've been concentrating,” said Jane, kindly. “I expect that's why.”

“I can concentrate without feeling dizzy and—well—odd. Distinctly odd.”

“Up or down?” asked Jane.

“Both. One after the other.”

“Not the dizziness, clot! D' you feel on top of the world or down in the pit?”

“Neither. Just alarmed. The dizziness is now passing off.”

“I suppose,” said Jane, thoughtfully, “I ought to eat a whole one.”

“You'll do no such thing!” Mary got to her feet, lurched forward, recovered and sat down again.

“Perhaps I'd better not as you're still under the influence,” said Jane. “I'll see if I can get hold of Tim.”

“You do that,” said Mary and leaning back in her chair, shut her eyes.

Tim was out, the porter told Jane, but was expected back in an hour. Technically he was on duty, but following his usual habit had gone for a short walk. Jane left a message for him, asking him to ring her when he came in, but the evening passed without his call until at eleven, when Mary was in her bath and Jane preparing to follow her, the front door bell rang and Tim was on the threshold, looking anxious.

“Oh!” said Jane, “I didn't expect you to come round.”

Tim found this damping.

“They said you rang and wanted to get in touch with me.”

“I asked for you to ring me.”

As this was an accurate statement of the message he had really received, Tim grinned again to cover his slight confusion.

“Well, I'm here,” he said. “May I come in?”

“Of course.”

It was Jane's turn to feel embarrassment. She took him into the sitting-room, offered him a drink, which he refused and said, irrelevantly, “Mary's in the bath.”

“Was that what you wanted to tell me?”

Jane laughed.

“Of course not. But it has to do with her, actually.”

“With
Mary
?”

She noticed, with satisfaction, that his first anxious look, dispelled by seeing her safe and sound, did not return.

“In a way, yes.”

She gave him a full account of the poppet bead pills, including her friend's experiment. Tim showed disappointingly little surprise. He said, after some thought, “She spat out most of it, did she?”

“I should think so—yes.”

“In that case I shouldn't expect a big reaction. In fact a friend of mine wanted to test these purple hearts, so-called. You know the things I mean? He took one, very cautiously, and it had absolutely no effect whatever. He was very disappointed. Of course the action is sometimes delayed with these things. You rest up to an hour or so and then get results.”

“Up to—”

Jane sprang to her feet. She went out into the hall of the flat and called, “Mary!” There was no answer. She rapped on the bathroom door and called again. Quite suddenly Tim was beside her. Jane rattled the handle.

“We don't usually lock ourselves in,” she said. “But I heard her put the bolt across when you rang the bell.”

“Get out of the way,” Tim said, briefly.

He burst through without much difficulty. Mary was half lying, half sitting in the bath, her head and arms dangling over the side. Her eyes were closed.

They lifted her out without speaking and laid her on the bathroom floor. Jane wrapped towels round her while Tim felt her pulse and looked at her pupils.

“Just asleep,” he said, cheerfully. “We'll get her into bed first and call Garrod after.”

The superintendent was at his own home, also on the way to bed. But he dressed again and arrived at the flat just before midnight. Jane let him in, explaining that Tim had gone back to the hospital since he was on duty there, but had left a note with details of Mary's condition.

“This comes of interference,” Garrod said, sternly. “How many times must I tell you and that young man—”

“He had nothing to do with this until he got here tonight,” Jane hastened to his defence. “Sister Alexandra and I had a talk about Sheila's beads and Sister smashed one to see what was inside. So when I told Mary about them we smashed another two and then Mary ate one. At least only part of it. She spat it out because the middle was bitter. The outside is sugar-coated, apparently. Mary said she felt a bit funny but nothing much. It was when I was talking to Tim—Mr Long—and I noticed Mary was too long in the bath—”