Chapter 1

Overheard

“_The death was certainly sudden, unexpected, and to me mysterious._”
_Letter from Dr. Paterson to the Registrar in the case of Reg. v.
Pritchard_

“But if he thought the woman was being murdered—”

“My dear Charles,” said the young man with the monocle, “it doesn’t do
for people, especially doctors, to go about ‘thinking’ things. They may
get into frightful trouble. In Pritchard’s case, I consider Dr. Paterson
did all he reasonably could by refusing a certificate for Mrs. Taylor
and sending that uncommonly disquieting letter to the Registrar. He
couldn’t help the man’s being a fool. If there had only been an inquest
on Mrs. Taylor, Pritchard would probably have been frightened off and
left his wife alone. After all, Paterson hadn’t a spark of real
evidence. And suppose he’d been quite wrong—what a dust-up there’d have
been!”

“All the same,” urged the nondescript young man, dubiously extracting a
bubbling-hot Helix Pomatia from its shell, and eyeing it nervously
before putting it in his mouth, “surely it’s a clear case of public duty
to voice one’s suspicions.”

“Of _your_ duty—yes,” said the other. “By the way, it’s not a public
duty to eat snails if you don’t like ’em. No, I thought you didn’t. Why
wrestle with a harsh fate any longer? Waiter, take the gentleman’s
snails away and bring oysters instead. .. .. . No—as I was saying, it
may be part of _your_ duty to have suspicions and invite investigation
and generally raise hell for everybody, and if you’re mistaken nobody
says much, beyond that you’re a smart, painstaking officer though a
little over-zealous. But doctors, poor devils! are everlastingly walking
a kind of social tight-rope. People don’t fancy calling in a man who’s
liable to bring out accusations of murder on the smallest provocation.”

“Excuse me.”

The thin-faced young man sitting alone at the next table had turned
round eagerly.

“It’s frightfully rude of me to break in, but every word you say is
absolutely true, and mine is a case in point. A doctor—you can’t have
any idea how dependent he is on the fancies and prejudices of his
patients. They resent the most elementary precautions. If you dare to
suggest a post-mortem, they’re up in arms at the idea of ‘cutting poor
dear So-and-so up,’ and even if you only ask permission to investigate
an obscure disease in the interests of research, they imagine you’re
hinting at something unpleasant. Of course, if you let things go, and it
turns out afterwards there’s been any jiggery-pokery, the coroner jumps
down your throat and the newspapers make a butt of you, and, whichever
way it is, you wish you’d never been born.”

“You speak with personal feeling,” said the man with the monocle, with
an agreeable air of interest.

“I do,” said the thin-faced man, emphatically. “If I had behaved like a
man of the world instead of a zealous citizen, I shouldn’t be hunting
about for a new job today.”

The man with the monocle glanced round the little Soho restaurant with a
faint smile. The fat man on their right was unctuously entertaining two
ladies of the chorus; beyond him, two elderly habitués were showing
their acquaintance with the fare at the “Au Bon Bourgeois” by consuming
a Tripes à la Mode de Caen (which they do very excellently there) and a
bottle of Chablis Moutonne 1916; on the other side of the room a
provincial and his wife were stupidly clamouring for a cut off the joint
with lemonade for the lady and whisky and soda for the gentleman, while
at the adjoining table, the handsome silver-haired proprietor, absorbed
in fatiguing a salad for a family party, had for the moment no thoughts
beyond the nice adjustment of the chopped herbs and garlic. The head
waiter, presenting for inspection a plate of Blue River Trout, helped
the monocled man and his companion and retired, leaving them in the
privacy which unsophisticated people always seek in genteel tea-shops
and never, never find there.

“I feel,” said the monocled man, “exactly like Prince Florizel of
Bohemia. I am confident that you, sir, have an interesting story to
relate, and shall be greatly obliged if you will favour us with the
recital. I perceive that you have finished your dinner, and it will
therefore perhaps not be disagreeable to you to remove to this table and
entertain us with your story while we eat. Pardon my Stevensonian
manner—my sympathy is none the less sincere on that account.”

“Don’t be an ass, Peter,” said the nondescript man. “My friend is a much
more rational person than you might suppose to hear him talk,” he added,
turning to the stranger, “and if there’s anything you’d like to get off
your chest, you may be perfectly certain it won’t go any farther.”

The other smiled a little grimly.

“I’ll tell you about it with pleasure if it won’t bore you. It just
happens to be a case in point, that’s all.”

“On _my_ side of the argument,” said the man called Peter, with triumph.
“Do carry on. Have something to drink. It’s a poor heart that never
rejoices. And begin right at the beginning, if you will, please. I have
a very trivial mind. Detail delights me. Ramifications enchant me.
Distance no object. No reasonable offer refused. Charles here will say
the same.”

“Well,” said the stranger, “to begin from the very beginning, I am a
medical man, particularly interested in the subject of cancer. I had
hoped, as so many people do, to specialise on the subject, but there
wasn’t money enough, when I’d done my exams., to allow me to settle down
to research work. I had to take a country practice, but I kept in touch
with the important men up here, hoping to be able to come back to it
some day. I may say I have quite decent expectations from an uncle, and
in the meanwhile they agreed it would be quite good for me to get some
all-round experience as a GP. Keeps one from getting narrow and all
that.

“Consequently, when I bought a nice little practice at . . .—I’d better
not mention any names, let’s call it X, down Hampshire way, a little
country town of about 5,000 people—I was greatly pleased to find a
cancer case on my list of patients. The old lady—”

“How long ago was this?” interrupted Peter.

“Three years ago. There wasn’t much to be done with the case. The old
lady was seventy-two, and had already had one operation. She was a game
old girl, though, and was making a good fight of it, with a very tough
constitution to back her up. She was not, I should say, and had never
been, a woman of very powerful intellect or strong character as far as
her dealings with other people went, but she was extremely obstinate in
certain ways and was possessed by a positive determination not to die.
At this time she lived alone with her niece, a young woman of
twenty-five or so. Previously to that, she had been living with another
old lady, the girl’s aunt on the other side of the family, who had been
her devoted friend since their school days. When this other old aunt
died, the girl, who was their only living relative, threw up her job as
a nurse at the Royal Free Hospital to look after the survivor—my
patient—and they had come and settled down at X about a year before I
took over the practice. I hope I am making myself clear.”

“Perfectly. Was there another nurse?”

“Not at that time. The patient was able to get about, visit
acquaintances, do light work about the house, flowers and knitting and
reading and so on, and to drive about the place—in fact, most of the
things that old ladies do occupy their time with. Of course, she had her
bad days of pain from time to time, but the niece’s training was quite
sufficient to enable her to do all that was necessary.”

“What was the niece like?”

“Oh, a very nice, well-educated, capable girl, with a great deal more
brain than her aunt. Self-reliant, cool, all that sort of thing. Quite
the modern type. The sort of woman one can trust to keep her head and
not forget things. Of course, after a time, the wretched growth made its
appearance again, as it always does if it isn’t tackled at the very
beginning, and another operation became necessary. That was when I had
been in X about eight months. I took her up to London, to my own old
chief, Sir Warburton Giles, and it was performed very successfully as
far as the operation itself went, though it was then only too evident
that a vital organ was being encroached upon, and that the end could
only be a matter of time. I needn’t go into details. Everything was done
that could be done. I wanted the old lady to stay in town under Sir
Warburton’s eye, but she was vigorously opposed to this. She was
accustomed to a country life and could not be happy except in her own
home. So she went back to X, and I was able to keep her going with
visits for treatment at the nearest large town, where there is an
excellent hospital. She rallied amazingly after the operation and
eventually was able to dismiss her nurse and go on in the old way under
the care of the niece.”

“One moment, doctor,” put in the man called Charles, “you say you took
her to Sir Warburton Giles and so on. I gather she was pretty well off.”

“Oh, yes, she was quite a wealthy woman.”

“Do you happen to know whether she made a will?”

“No. I think I mentioned her extreme aversion to the idea of death. She
had always refused to make any kind of will because it upset her to
think about such things. I did once venture to speak of the subject in
the most casual way I could, shortly before she underwent her operation,
but the effect was to excite her very undesirably. Also she said, which
was quite true, that it was quite unnecessary. ‘You, my dear,’ she said
to the niece, ‘are the only kith and kin I’ve got in the world, and all
I’ve got will be yours some day, whatever happens. I know I can trust
you to remember my servants and my little charities.’ So, of course, I
didn’t insist.

“I remember, by the way—but that was a good deal later on and has
nothing to do with the story—”

“_Please_,” said Peter, “_all_ the details.”

“Well, I remember going there one day and finding my patient not so well
as I could have wished and very much agitated. The niece told me that
the trouble was caused by a visit from her solicitor—a family lawyer
from her home town, not our local man. He had insisted on a private
interview with the old lady, at the close of which she had appeared
terribly excited and angry, declaring that everyone was in a conspiracy
to kill her before her time. The solicitor, before leaving, had given no
explanation to the niece, but had impressed upon her that if at any time
her aunt expressed a wish to see him, she was to send for him at any
hour of the day or night and he would come at once.”

“And was he ever sent for?”

“No. The old lady was deeply offended with him, and almost the last bit
of business she did for herself was to take her affairs out of his hands
and transfer them to the local solicitor. Shortly afterwards, a third
operation became necessary, and after this she gradually became more and
more of an invalid. Her head began to get weak, too, and she grew
incapable of understanding anything complicated, and indeed she was in
too much pain to be bothered about business. The niece had a power of
attorney, and took over the management of her aunt’s money entirely.”

“When was this?”

“In April, 1925. Mind you, though she was getting a bit ‘gaga’—after
all, she was getting on in years—her bodily strength was quite
remarkable. I was investigating a new method of treatment and the
results were extraordinarily interesting. That made it all the more
annoying to me when the surprising thing happened.

“I should mention that by this time we were obliged to have an outside
nurse for her, as the niece could not do both the day and night duty.
The first nurse came in April. She was a most charming and capable young
woman—the ideal nurse. I placed absolute dependence on her. She had been
specially recommended to me by Sir Warburton Giles, and though she was
not then more than twenty-eight, she had the discretion and judgment of
a woman twice her age. I may as well tell you at once that I became
deeply attached to this lady and she to me. We are engaged, and had
hoped to be married this year—if it hadn’t been for my damned
conscientiousness and public spirit.”

The doctor grimaced wryly at Charles, who murmured rather lamely that it
was very bad luck.

“My fiancée, like myself, took a keen interest in the case—partly
because it was my case and partly because she was herself greatly
interested in the disease. She looks forward to being of great
assistance to me in my life work if I ever get the chance to do anything
at it. But that’s by the way.

“Things went on like this till September. Then, for some reason, the
patient began to take one of those unaccountable dislikes that
feeble-minded patients do take sometimes. She got it into her head that
the nurse wanted to kill her—the same idea she’d had about the lawyer,
you see—and earnestly assured her niece that she was being poisoned. No
doubt she attributed her attacks of pain to this cause. Reasoning was
useless—she cried out and refused to let the nurse come near her. When
that happens, naturally, there’s nothing for it but to get rid of the
nurse, as she can do the patient no possible good. I sent my fiancée
back to town and wired to Sir Warburton’s Clinic to send me down another
nurse.

“The new nurse arrived the next day. Naturally, after the other, she was
a second-best as far as I was concerned, but she seemed quite up to her
work and the patient made no objection. However, now I began to have
trouble with the niece. Poor girl, all this long-drawn-out business was
getting on her nerves, I suppose. She took it into her head that her
aunt was very much worse. I said that of course she must gradually get
worse, but that she was putting up a wonderful fight and there was no
cause for alarm. The girl wasn’t satisfied, however, and on one occasion
early in November sent for me hurriedly in the middle of the night
because her aunt was dying.

“When I arrived, I found the patient in great pain, certainly, but in no
immediate danger. I told the nurse to give her a morphia injection, and
administered a dose of bromide to the girl, telling her to go to bed and
not to do any nursing for the next few days. The following day I
overhauled the patient very carefully and found that she was doing even
better than I supposed. Her heart was exceptionally strong and steady,
she was taking nourishment remarkably well and the progress of the
disease was temporarily arrested.

“The niece apologised for her agitation, and said she really thought her
aunt was going. I said that, on the contrary, I could now affirm
positively that she would live for another five or six months. As you
know, in cases like hers, one can speak with very fair certainty.

“‘In any case,’ I said, ‘I shouldn’t distress yourself too much. Death,
when it does come, will be a release from suffering.’

“‘Yes,’ she said, ‘poor Auntie. I’m afraid I’m selfish, but she’s the
only relative I have left in the world.’

“Three days later, I was just sitting down to dinner when a telephone
message came. Would I go over at once? The patient was dead.”

“Good gracious!” cried Charles, “it’s perfectly obvious—”

“Shut up, Sherlock,” said his friend, “the doctor’s story is not going
to be obvious. Far from it, as the private said when he aimed at the
bull’s-eye and hit the gunnery instructor. But I observe the waiter
hovering uneasily about us while his colleagues pile up chairs and carry
away the cruets. Will you not come and finish the story in my flat? I
can give you a glass of very decent port. You will? Good. Waiter, call a
taxi . . . 110A Piccadilly.”