Green for Danger (29 page)

“It was a gun,” said Freddi.

“My dear, do you think I don't know a gun from a
bomb
? After all the bombs
I've
heard! I remember one evening, patrolling the Heronswater Road …”

“Woody,” said Esther in a low voice, “I think I'm going mad.”

Woods put a hand out and touched her, gently and reassuringly, in the dark. She said, immediately: “Miss Pine, I honestly think we ought to stop talking and try to get some sleep.”

“Just what I was thinking myself,” cried Miss Pine. A gun crashed in a nearby field and she added automatically: “
That
was a near one!”

2

The three men, who would infinitely have preferred to face the bombs and remain in their comfortable beds, slept on straw palliasses in the basement of the Officers' Mess. P.C. Willing spoke not a word all night. He just sat and sucked his teeth.

3

It would have been a relief if, when they all met sick and heavy-eyed after breakfast next morning, they could have let off a little steam by comparing notes; but now Miss Brock was in attendance and a gentleman called Mr. Chinn. Miss Brock was dreadfully bright; she had moreover seized upon one of Frederica's little mannerisms and she used it unstintingly. “I couldn't be more sorry,” cried Miss Brock, refusing permission for Barney and Freddi to go for a stroll apart from the rest; and, “I couldn't be more grateful,” she assured them when they apathetically fell into line with her commands. “You want to badger 'em a bit more,” insisted P.C. Chinn, drawing her apart. “The Inspector won't like it if he hears you being so chummy like.” “I couldn't care less,” said Miss Brock, definitely.

Three days and three nights of it; of Miss Pine talking, of Miss Brock sparkling, of P.C. Willing sucking his teeth. Not a moment of privacy, not a moment to relax in, to speak openly, to speak confidentially.… Frederica bore it best, for it was her nature to be placid and self-dependent, and she had, moreover, the glorious power to be mildly rude to their tormentors. Eden was sarcastic, but his shafts flashed over their heads and left him impotently fretting. Moon was too kind, Barney too courteous, Esther too gentle and Woody too depressingly conscious that their guardians were doing no more than their duty, to allow them to seek relief in incivility. And all the time, in the background, Cockrill worked unceasingly to track down all he needed—proof!

On the third day, he put a pair of handcuffs into his pocket, demanded the use of the operating theatre for the very last time, and there assembled his victims. “The time has arrived to strike,” he said to Sergeant Bray, as they stood waiting under the now familiar central light, in the hot, green room. “And this is the place for it; we want a bit of atmosphere … the spot where the victims died and all that nonsense. Last night's air-raid was a blessing from heaven; they've hardly had a wink of sleep in the last three nights, and they're all at the end of their tethers. The murderer is going to crack to-day, or I'll throw up the case.” He said impatiently: “What are you grinning at?”

“It's the first time I ever 'eard an air-raid called a blessing from 'eaven, sir,” said Sergeant Bray, apologetically covering up his mouth with a large, red hand. Like many another, impervious to greater dangers, his stomach turned to warm water at the sound of a falling bomb.

The hospital stayed for a moment its work of mercy to look without mercy upon the six poor lepers being driven across the grounds and into the theatre. “I am a fugitive from a chain gang!” said Woody, dodging behind a bush and being chased out again by Miss Brock, who laughed gaily but laughed alone. From the tall windows of the wards, patients in their blue suits stared down; here and there a white veil appeared and stayed for a minute or two before virtuously driving them away. An orderly wheeling a stretcher down to the emergency theatre (grudgingly opened up to give Cockrill the freedom of the theatre proper) paused to look back; even the patient peered out from his blankets and shawls and forgot for a moment the sickening fear of his journey into the unknown, of the smell of the ether and the glimpses of tapered steel, the hot, slow, sliding of the hypodermic needle into reluctant flesh.…

Cockrill laid the handcuffs quite openly on the operating table beside him, but did not refer to them by so much as a glance. They stood in a shuffling line, with the great white light beating down on them remorselessly, on every change of expression, on every line and shadow, on every twitch of exasperated nerves. Six worn out, unhappy, exhausted people, and one of them a murderer. Cockrill began.

4

He began very mildly, just talking to them. He leaned back against the operating table and jingled the money in his pocket; now and again he picked up the handcuffs, absent-mindedly, and jingled them instead. He talked about Higgins and the night he had been brought in, of the next day when he had died. “Just be Higgins for a moment, for me, will you, Captain Barnes? Just lie on the table here, and I'll put the mask over your face.… You'd be standing here, Major Moon, and you here, Major Eden? And Miss Woods and Miss Sanson were at the foot of the table, watching him die. Miss Linley—you weren't here to see that,
were
you? You were over in the cottage, asleep in bed?”

“Yes, I was,” said Frederica belligerently, for everything sounded like an accusation the way Inspector Cockrill was saying it.

“That's right. You'd only seen him for a minute, in the central hall, while he was being brought to the theatre, when you leaned over him and spoke to Esther Sanson, half an hour before he died.…”

It was strange and horrible to Barney to be lying on the table with the rubber mask over his face—held even lightly, over his face. The smell of the rubber, though familiar, was heavy and sickening. He felt stupefied by it, and said, pushing Cockrill's hand away: “You haven't got any gas turned on, have you?”

“Of course not,” said Cockrill innocently.

Certainly the water in the bottle was quiet. He kept his eyes on it, but could not rid himself of the panicky dread that he was getting at least a little gas through the mask. He was shaking all over when at last Cockrill let him get up. Frederica stood shakily beside him with huge, grey, frightened eyes.

Cockrill passed on from Higgins to Sister Bates. “She looked so amazed! As if she'd seen something she simply couldn't believe. What do you suppose that was?”

“I
know
what it was,” said Woody. She advanced her theory about Gervase Eden, but it did not seem so sane and confident now. Cockrill looked at her with interest from under his shaggy brows. “Oh so you had all that worked out, did you? It has only one snag, Miss Woods; how could Bates have known the masked figure wasn't Eden?”

“How could she have known? She could see, couldn't she?”

“She could see a masked figure.”

“Oh, for Pete's sake,” cried Woody, “don't let's have that masked figure stuff. Of course she could tell who it was. You always can—you can tell—well,
I
don't know, by the way people walk, by their gestures.…”

“But if the murderer was standing in the doorway?”

“Well, I bet she could have told,” said Woody stubbornly.

“Let's try,” said Cockrill. He chivvied the others into the washroom and mumbled instructions. A figured appeared suddenly, standing stock still at the theatre door. Woody opened her mouth to say that it was Gervase, but closed it again, for it was difficult to judge the height and it might have been Barnes; and then again you really couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman, and Esther was very much the same height as Barnes. The figure walked forwards slowly, and still she could not be sure. The eyes, which might have decided her, were downcast. She thought it was Gervase; she was sure it was Gervase.

“Say what I told you,” said Cockrill, and the figure said: “What have you got there?”

It was strangely moving; strangely uncanny. She knew that it was only one of her friends, dressed up, and yet she could not remain quite calm. The voice was muffled by the mask, muffled by the pounding of her own, over-excited heart. She thought it was Gervase; but it might have been Barney. She said “It's you, Gervase!” but added honestly, as he pulled off the mask: “I only just knew.”

“And you had time to think,” said Cockrill, standing in the doorway, looking pleased. “What's more you weren't in a state of terror. Sister Bates was, poor girl.”

They all had a dreadful vision of her crouching there, poor silly, pretty little Bates, hugging the stained gown to her breast, staring at her murderer with astonished, wide blue eyes, trembling still from her panic-stricken scuttle up the drive; of the green-gowned figure, the knife in its upraised hand. Woody said, in a strangled voice: “Twice! He stabbed her twice. He stuck the knife into her after she was dead …” and went and sat down, trembling, on a theatre stool. Barney pulled up another and sat down beside her. “Don't let it get you down, Woody. He's playing with us like a cat with a lot of mice.”

“The big cheese,” said Woody, managing a shaky smile.

“You look awfully green, ducky.”

“You aren't bearing up so terribly well yourself,” said Woods, as though this were an accusation.

“That business of making me lie on the table—does he think
I
poured CO
₂
down the poor chaps' throat?”

“Well, you did actually, didn't you? I mean, you didn't know you were doing it of course.…”

Eden paced restlessly up and down the theatre. “Why the hell should he pick on me to dress up in the gown? Did Woody give him some idea or other, blundering in with her theories? Why
me
? What did he think he was proving?” He wore his customary air of slightly exasperated humor, but his hands were not quiet for a moment. Freddi came over to him. “Do keep still, Gervase, you're getting on my nerves.”

“I didn't know you had any nerves,” said Eden, for Frederica's placidity had sorely tried him in the last three maddening days.

“Well, I have, and they're somewhat shaken up this morning; what did he mean by saying in that phoney voice that I had talked to Higgins just before he died?”

“Well, so you had, hadn't you?”

“I spoke to Esther while she was wheeling him to the theatre. I just asked Higgins how he felt or something. There was nothing to it.”

“Well, all right, then; you haven't got anything to worry about.”

“He said it in such a funny
voice
,” insisted Frederica, jerking nervously at her tie.

Cockrill's funny voice had meanwhile succeeded in reducing Esther to the point of collapse. The theatre was desperately hot and stuffy and there was no window. She said faintly: “I simply must have some air.”

Cockrill indicated the open door of the anæsthetic-room. “Go and sit down for a minute.” He pushed the door wide open so that he could watch her while she flung up the window and stood drinking in great gulps of the cold outside air. Woody made a movement to go to her, but his eyes said: “No. Stay here.” He turned his attention to Major Moon.

Major Moon was not very easy to ruffle. There seemed to be a settled melancholy upon him that was far removed from panic or even unease. He kept his troubled eyes upon Esther as she stood at the window. Cockrill said at last, irritated: “It's all right. She won't run away. It's barred.”

It's barred! They all looked up, shuddering, at the crisscrossed, heavy iron. Would one of them be thus caged in for ever, when this interminable scene came at last to an end? Would one of them spend the rest of his life behind bars—the rest of his life, his short life, until the day when he was taken away to a place appointed, and there hanged by the neck.… Freddi's lovely neck, or Esther's, so long and slender, or Woody's where the deepening ‘bracelets' gave away her age? Or Major Moon's pink and chubby throat, or Eden's thin one, or Barney's where the little golden hairs grew low at the nape of the neck? Cockrill interrupted their thoughts. He held out his hand suddenly and in it was a tiny glass bottle. “Have you ever seen this before?”

“It's mine,” said Frederica. “It's where I used to keep my morphia.”

“The morphia you didn't give up to me?”

“Yes,” said Freddi sullenly.

“And where is that morphia now?”

“It was stolen,” said Freddi, still sullenly. “It was taken out of my haversack the other day.”

“Who stole it?”

“I don't know. Anyone might have. We were all in and out of the room.”

“Anyone?” said Cockrill.

“Any of us six,” corrected Frederica miserably.

There was a frozen silence. Cockrill again broke the tension. He turned and swooped suddenly upon something which he had left in a heap in a corner of the theatre. “Now, Major Moon—have you ever seen this before?”

And suddenly the old man's face was pink and chubby no longer, but a dreadful haggard grey; his hands trembled and his childish blue eyes were full of a stupid wonder. He stammered as though he hardly understood what was said to him: “It's my old tweed coat.”

“Which you put on every morning after you run round the grounds? You leave it under a tree and just slip into it while you walk across the main road to the Mess? Is that right?”

“Yes, that's right,” mumbled Major Moon.

Cockrill slid a hand into each of the pockets; he placed on the operating table, side by side, a handkerchief, a stub of pencil, a couple of old letters and—two or three coins. “So you
do
carry money, Major Moon, when you run round the grounds?”

From the window of the anæsthetic-room, Esther swung slowly round and stood staring at them. Moon said, mumbling desperately: “Are you trying to suggest that it was I who gassed Frederica?”

Cockrill picked up the handcuffs. He did not reply.