‘Doctors do,’ said Ricky, briefly.
‘And there was a boy friend in the case anyway?’
All unsuspicious, friendly—safe. Uniforms roaming about the house, meanwhile, yes: but what was there to find? Chief Inspector Cockrill closed the notebook in which he had been making what appeared to be random scratchings of an indecipherable nature and rose to his feet. ‘Perhaps Mrs. Harrison would show me over the house and let me get my bearings.’ And on the way upstairs he said, toiling after her, ‘All this must have been unpleasant for you?’
‘Horrible. But I’d never seen the girl before and I can’t say I fell in love with her. I don’t pretend to be personally all that upset.’ (Play it carefully!)
‘At least she won’t be able to make scenes about the doctor any more. I hear she was always creating, up at the hospital.’
She shrugged. ‘Everyone knew it was really the boy friend who was responsible for the child.’
He seemed to pause for a moment. He said quickly: ‘There was never any other suggestion, I suppose?’
She could have cut out her tongue; but anyway Ricky was sure to have come blurting out with it some time. She took the bull by the horns. ‘I dare say she was all for pretending my husband was the father; but of course she had no hope of being believed.’
They had come to the landing. He stood there, facing her, small for a policeman, elderly, a crest of grey hair crowning a splendid head. ‘All the same, you must have been worried? Mud sticks. If she’d gone round saying this kind of thing—’
‘She couldn’t go round saying it if she was dead.’
‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Chief Inspector Cockrill.
She lost a little of her poise. ‘Anyway we all knew it was this young man at the hospital.’
‘Oh, you knew that, did you?’
‘Matron told me when I rang her up.’
‘But that would be quite towards the end of the evening? By that time,’ he said, his bright, dark eyes oh hers, ‘you’d have had time to get pretty worked up about it all?’
And suddenly it wasn’t so easy and friendly after all and, showing him the room where the girl had died, the bathroom she had briefly visited, she knew that it hadn’t really been easy and friendly, not any of the time. Hysteria rose in her, his hand on the banister as he followed her back down the stairs seemed like a great spider, hairless and horrible, creeping down after her to fasten itself upon her very life. She crushed down the panic, forced herself to quietness; but her head seemed stuffed with warm cotton-wool, nothing was clear, she could not remember, could not correlate, could not calculate….
And in the hall Ricky came up to her, drawing her out of earshot. ‘Stella—I’m sure there’s some morphia gone from the surgery.’
‘Nonsense!’ she said sharply. ‘There can’t be.’ They would be asking this question soon; he must, he must, give calm, reassuring answers.
‘Suppose she helped herself while she was alone in the room?’
‘She never was alone in the room, Ricky. I didn’t leave her, not for a second; and then you and Frederick were there. Besides, the key—’
‘A nurse would know whereabouts to look for the key. We all have some convenient hidey-hole.’
‘But I tell you, Ricky, she wasn’t left alone. Do stop muttering or they’ll get suspicious. Later if you like, we’ll add up the book if that’ll make you any happier—’
But not Ricky! Ricky must go forward painfully to the Inspector and say that as he’s just been saying to his wife, he has a wretched feeling that there ought to be more morphia….‘You see, Stella,’ he said over their heads to her, ‘whatever she’d taken must be accounted for somehow. If she got it from here, we mustn’t let the blame fall somewhere else.’
There was an altercation at the surgery door. Someone was insisting that her child had been knocked down by a car just outside, she wasn’t going to carry him round to any other doctor’s, not if she knew it ‘You go ahead,’ said Cockrill, seeing Ricky’s stricken face as the mother seemed about to be turned from the door by the policeman posted there. ‘I’ll just take your poisons book and be skimming through it.’ And he sat down with it on his knee, turning the pages earnestly like a child with a picture book. Frederick, comfortably sure that all was well with it, went out to help with the screaming child. After a while, the Inspector looked up. ‘Both partners would have access to this book, Mrs. Harrison?’
‘Of course,’ said Stella.