The Nursing Home Murder Read Online Free PDF

“
Hyoscine
gr. 1/100.” The tube being completely covered by its label, it was difficult to see the contents. He removed the cork, examined the inside closely, laid down the tube and took another, similarly labelled, from his case. His fingers worked uncertainly, as though his mind was on something else. At last she took one of the smaller syringes, filled it with sterile water, and squirted its contents into the measure-glass. Then he dropped in the hyoscine, stirred it with the needle of the syringe, and finally, pulling back the piston, sucked the solution into the syringe.
    Thoms came into the theatre.
    “We ought to get washed up, sir,” he said.
    He glanced at the table.
    “Hullo!” he shouted. “
Two
tubes! You’re doing him proud.”
    “One was empty.” Phillips picked them up automatically and put them back in his case.
    Thoms looked at the syringe.
    “You use a lot of water, don’t you?” he observed.
    “I do,” said Phillips shortly. Taking the syringe with him, he walked out of the theatre into the anæsthetic-room. Thoms, wearing that air of brisk abstraction which people assume when they are determined to ignore a snub, remained staring at the table. He joined the others a few minutes later in the anteroom. Phillips returned from the anæsthetic-room.
    Jane Harden and Sister Marigold helped the two surgeons to turn themselves into pieces of sterilized machinery. In a little while the anteroom was an austere arrangement in white, steel, and rubber-brown. There is something slightly repellent as well as something beautiful in absolute white. It is the negation of colour, the expression of coldness, the emblem of death. There is less sensuous pleasure in white than in any of the colours, and more suggestion of the macabre. A surgeon in his white robe, the warmth of his hands hidden by sleek chilly rubber, the animal vigour of his hair covered by a white cap, is more like a symbol in modern sculpture than a human being. To the layman he is translated, a priest in sacramental robes, a terrifying and subtly fascinating figure.
    “Seen this new show at the Palladium?” asked Thoms. “Blast this glove! Give me another, matron.”
    “No,” said Sir John Phillips.
    “There’s a one-act play. Anteroom to a theatre in a private hospital. Famous surgeon has to operate on man who ruined him and seduced his wife. Problem— does he stick a knife into the patient? Grand Guignol stuff. Awful rot, I thought it.”
    Phillips turned slowly and stared at him. Jane Harden uttered a little stifled cry.
    “What’s that, nurse?” asked Thoms. “Have you seen it? Here, give me the glove.”
    “No, sir,” murmured Jane, “I haven’t seen it.”
    “Jolly well acted it was, and someone had put them right about technical matters, but, of course, the situation was altogether too far-fetched. I’ll just go and see— ” He walked out, still talking, into the theatre, and after a minute or two called to the matron, who followed him.
    “Jane,” said Phillips.
    “Yes?”
    “This — this is a queer business.”
    “Nemesis, perhaps,” said Jane Harden.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Oh, nothing,” she said drearily. “Only it is rather like a Greek play, don’t you think? ‘Fate delivers our enemy into our hands.’ Mr. Thoms would think the situation very far-fetched.”
    Phillips washed his hands slowly in a basin of sterilised water. “I knew nothing of this illness,” he said. “It’s the merest chance that I was here at this hour. I’d only just got in from St. Jude’s. I tried to get out of it, but his wife insisted. Evidently she has no idea we — quarrelled.”
    “She could hardly know
why
you quarrelled, could she?”
    “I’d give anything to be out of it — anything.”
    “And I. How do you think I feel?”
    He squeezed the water off his gloves and turned towards her, holding his hands out in front of him. He looked a grotesque and somehow pathetic figure.
    “Jane,” he whispered,