Green for Danger (20 page)

“But how could any of us have wanted to kill Higgins?” cried Major Moon impatiently. “That's the crux of the matter. The attempt on Frederica was probably made because she ‘knew too much' as they say in the novels; and the murder of Sister Bates was almost certainly for that reason. But why should any of
us
have wanted Higgins to die?”

Woody did not repeat her theory of the feelthy postcards. Instead she suggested that perhaps Sister Bates had killed Higgins and somebody had killed
her
in revenge.

“Oh, nonsense, darling,” said Esther. “Why should Bates have wanted to kill Higgins in the first place?”

“Well, because he'd heard a scene between her and Gervase, in here, and he was going to publish it all round the hospital.”

“Even if that could have been a motive for either of them, Woody,” said Major Moon gravely, “it would be more likely to be Eden.”

“Yes, but we know it can't have been Gervase, anyway,” protested Woods, “because he certainly wouldn't have tried to kill Frederica, later on. He was terribly keen on Freddi—he'd never have tried to harm her.”

“Why do you say he
was
fond of her?” said Esther.

“Well, is, then, if you like.”

“I don't think your defence would cut much ice with Inspector Cockrill, Woody,” said Major Moon quietly. He finished his cup of tea and got to his feet and his mild, blue eyes were full of anxiety and distress. “I like Eden,” he said, rather inconsequently. “I have always liked him; he's a—he's a charming fellow. I wish … I don't think …”

Esther wished that the conversation might end, for she was dying to tell Woody about William. She said, firmly: “Gervase couldn't have had anything to do with the murders of Higgins or Bates, for the simple reason that he couldn't have had anything to do with the attempt on Freddi, whether he likes her or not. He was nowhere near the cottage this morning; he couldn't have wedged up the window and turned on the gas tap. He didn't know that the meter needed a shilling.”

“No,” said Major Moon; “of course.” But he still stood, looking down miserably at his toes, and he seemed to be on the brink of a resolution. He said at last: “I don't like to say this but.… You girls must look after yourselves.… Esther, you must look after yourself, my dear. I don't want to say a word against Eden, not a word, but … well, after I met you girls in the park this morning, I saw Eden, you know. When I run around the grounds of a morning I take an old tweed coat with me, just to put round my shoulders when I cross the road, back to the Mess. This morning I dropped it down beside a bush; and as I stood there putting it on, Eden came out of the Mess. He—well, Esther, he looked carefully up and down the drive; I don't like to say it, my dear, but he did. Then he went over to your cottage and—he glanced up at the window, stood looking up at the window; and then he pushed open the door and went in. A minute afterwards he came out agan and looked about him; by that time I was at the gates of the Mess and I suppose he didn't see me. But I saw him. Eden may not have known about the shilling, my dear girls, but two minutes before Frederica came off duty and back to her bed—I saw him coming out of your house.” He added, heavily, turning to the door: “What worries me is—why hasn't he mentioned it?”

3

William had a visitor on the following afternoon. Detective Inspector Cockrill arrived at the door of the ward, and stood peering in rather nervously, his felt hat crushed into a shapeless bundle under his arm. Cheese appeared at his elbow. “In
spec
tor—how lovely to see you again!”

“Have I ever seen you before?” said Cockie, bleakly.

“Oh, In
spec
tor! The first night you came here, don't you remember? My friend and I talked to you in the Com's office, over at the V.A.D. Mess; you were so sweet to us!” said Cheese with a girlish wriggle; and added that she and her friend had been wondering ever since if they could ever dare to ask him for his autograph.

“You'd better not,” said Cockie in a fearful voice. “What do you take me for—a film star?” He suddenly waved his stick: “Hallo, my boy! Coming to have a talk with you …!” and marched over to William's bedside, leaving Cheese flat. “Got out of his bed the wrong side, this morning,” she confided to an equally disappointed Chalk.

Cockrill had known William's father, as he knew most of the personalities of North Kent. “Hallo, Cockie,” said William, struggling up to an almost sitting position. “How ripping to see you!”

“Don't
you
start asking for my autograph,” implored Cockie; he chucked his hat on to the floor beside his chair, and took out a tin of tobacco. “I suppose I can smoke in this vale of antisepsis?”

“Yes, rather, of course you can. Here,” said William, producing the three cigarettes remaining out of his daily ration of five; “do have one of mine.”

“No thanks, I prefer my own.” His nicotined fingers packed and rolled; he said, not looking up from his work: “How's your leg, my boy?”

“Oh, it's quite all right,” said William, breezily. “Getting along like a house on fire.”

“Are you all right in this place? Do they look after you properly?” “Good lord, yes,” said William devoutly. “It's marvellous.” Cockrill raised an eyebrow and looked about him. It did not seem so particularly marvellous. The tables down the centre were brightened by a few flowers in an assortment of rather hideous vases, and the up-patients lounged round them in their blue linen coats and trousers, doing jig-saw puzzles or writing letters; or clustered round the beds of those not yet up, playing Housie-housie or Whist. Large notices on the walls forbade gambling for money, under pain of death, so the pennies and ha'pennies were kept tucked away under pillows. A man only just out of bed was being led slowly and with infinite patience and kindliness, by a great lout of a guardsman, up and down the ward. “There you are, mate! Doing fine, you are.…” The Red Cross librarian came round with a trolley-load of books. They scrabbled in their lockers for last week's. “Give us a nice bit of blood and thunder, Miss.” “You give 'im a love story, Miss, that's what'e wants … a nice bit of romance.…” A man lying drowsy from his pre-operative injection was loudly consoled by his friends. “Won't be long now, old boy. Have a nice ride, mate; give our love to the operating theatre.” A couple of robots in long, green gowns whisked in with a wheeled white trolley, and bundled him on to it; covered with blankets and with his head wrapped up in a rug, he was wheeled out of the ward. “Good luck, chum!” cried the men, and went back, apparently unmoved, to their Housie-housie. On a bed stripped down to the rubber sheet, a man lay without pillows, coming-to from his anæsthetic. A scarlet face was raised for a moment, two bright eyes looked vacantly into space, and the head dropped back with a heavy thud. “You lay still, mate,” yelled half a dozen voices; and a man got up and went over and held the man's wrist for a moment, bending over him. “You lay quiet, boy, and don't keep shoving yer 'ead up.” He called down the ward: “Here, nurse; 'e's coming round,” and went and sat down to his game again. “Pore beggar; I wouldn't be in 'is shoes! Thank 'eavens, I've got mine over.” A man with a broken back, lay on a high, S-shaped bed, staring up at the ceiling as he had lain and stared for six weeks and must lie for many weeks more. Number seven, who still had asthma, inhaled Friar's Balsam in sickly wafts, peering out balefully from under a woolen shawl. Cockrill finished his first cigarette, ground out the butt with his heel, and then respectfully picked it up and put it in the ash-try on William's locker. He said, without preamble: “I suppose you know about these—deaths? Higgins, and the Bates girl.”

“Yes I know about them. News travels like wildfire in a place like this, and poor old Higgins was a pal of mine.”

“How did you come across him—up at the brewery?”

“No, I worked under him in the A.R.P.,” said William. “He was leader of a rescue squad, you know. I didn't get called up for about a year after war broke out, so I thought I would do a bit of voluntary work while I waited, just to prevent the girls from handing me white feathers in the streets, you know. He was a marvellous old boy, was Joe. I went through all the raids with him; we never missed a blitz and we had a lot of fun. When I came back on leave I dropped down to the Town Hall to see him, and got caught in the raid there; we were sitting talking and listening to the radio while he waited to go out on a job, when—whang! a bloody great bomb hit the place smack in the middle and the whole roof caved in. The other three chaps copped it, but Joe and I were protected by a beam or something, I suppose, and lay there trapped by the legs. He asked me if I was O.K. and then I must have passed out, I think; when I came to again we were still there, but he was unconscious. Then the chaps got down to us and hauled us out; they took him first, of course, because I was more or less all right.” He added, grinning: “I'd like to be able to tell you that I implored them to leave me and save the old boy and I would stick it out till the end, but I didn't have a chance, because that's exactly what they were going to do anyway! The fantastic thing was that the radio went on working all the time; we'd been listening-in to the German broadcast, and while I lay there in the dark—with water dripping all round me, a gas-escape somewhere not too far away, and my leg caught under a girder and giving me hell—some filth-hound was droning away about how effete and rotten I was, and how we all ought to make friends with Germany before it was too late. There was a frightful din going on outside, and the bombs were dropping down like ripe apples.…”

Once, when Cockrill was driving along the Heronsford Road in his car, an incendiary had hit the roof and gone right through to the back seat and set the whole concern on fire; he would dearly have liked to tell about it and about the time he had driven slap into a crater that hadn't been there half an hour before—how if he'd been only twenty minutes earlier, if he hadn't called in at the Black Dog in Pigeonsford village and had a glass of beer with the landlord, if he hadn't stopped to offer a lift to three Auxiliary Territorial Service girls, and gone a few miles out of his way to take them to their station, he might easily have been killed.… But William, having got his own bomb-story off his chest, had returned to Higgins. “I can't think who on earth could have wanted to bump the old boy off; I mean, he was an awfully good fellow, really, one of the best, never did any harm to anyone; you can't go through the raids working for a man, and not know what he's really like.” His own part in going through the raids, humbly working ‘for' William Higgins, postman, did not appear to impress him as anything particularly praiseworthy.

Cockie started a small conflagration at the wispy end of a new cigarette. “Do you know any of the other people concerned in this case?”

William drew deeply on his own cigarette, and replied that he knew Esther Sanson; she—well, actually she worked in this ward. “And I know little Linley; she was on night-duty here, before she got her head put in the gas-oven; and I've seen Eden in the ward, looking at his cases, and Barnes, of course; and Major Moon looked at my leg this morning, as the surgeon who originally did it is away on leave. He seems a nice old boy. My father used to know him on various committees and things, and Dr. Barnes too—this chap's father.”

“Do you know Miss Woods?”

“No. She told Esther—she said she was coming to see me one day and make my acquaintance, but she hasn't turned up. I used to play with some children of that name when I was so-high; I wonder if she'll remember me?”

“I doubt it,” said Cockie dryly. As William looked surprised, he added rather quickly: “Tell me about little Miss Linley; you saw a good deal of her, that night you were brought in, I suppose?”

“Yes, she was marvellous to me,” said William, at once. “I must have been a frightful nuisance having to be rigged up with this thing in the middle of the night, but she went about it quite calmly and coolly as if she had nothing else to do all night, and of course she was frantically busy really, poor kid. Even Higgins had to admit that she was wonderful, though he didn't have much use for her, having seen her necking with her boy-friends earlier in the evening, in the bunk next door; but he had a terrible night, poor old boy, in a lot of pain, and not able to get any sleep, and he said that she was terribly good to him; she never left the ward for a moment, and he didn't know how she kept it up, a fragile looking little thing like her. She's a funny girl, though; I heard her talking to old Moon, night before last, in the bunk; he was telling her about his child being knocked down and killed by a man on a bicycle; and all she could think of by way of sympathy was to ask him politely what colour the bicycle had been! Esther says it's because she's really shy under all that poise; and rather inarticulate and that she would like to be friendly and sympathetic, but she can't.”

Cockrill would never have thought Frederica devoid of self-possession. “She seems rather—hard,” he suggested. “Is she a good nurse?”

“Oh, the perfect article,” said William immediately. “She talks to you as though you were a naughty and rather mutton-headed little boy, and quite convinces you that your leg doesn't hurt at all, really, and that, if you only knew it, you have a passionate desire to eat your nice ground-rice pudding. She hasn't got any use for weakness or self-pity, but when things are bad … gosh! she's too sweet. The chaps simply love her. Of course she talks as though it were all a perfect bore, and she simply didn't know
what
she was doing here anyway! but that's just because she doesn't like slop. I must say, I like Frederica. I think she's grand.”

A man groaned horribly in a bed half-way up the ward. Cockie shuddered, reaching under his chair for his hat. “Poor devil—what's wrong with him?”