Dancers in Mourning (14 page)

‘Put it down.'

Sarah gulped and the nurse could restrain herself no longer.

‘She's frightened, poor lamb,' she said. ‘Hark at her. Put the dangerous thing outside the door. You're frightening her to death, sir. She'll have a convulsion.'

There seemed to be a certain amount of truth in her prophecy. Sarah was sitting upright on the bed, her eyes fixed on the dog and her face working horribly. Doctor Bouverie took her wrist in his hand and his eyebrows rose, yet, as the maid turned to the door he shouted at her with irritable obstinacy: ‘Put the dog down.'

Unwillingly and with considerable dramatic effect the girl set the dog on the floor and darted backwards. The terrier remained crouching, his eyes bright and frightened. Doctor Bouverie picked him up and ran his hands over the trembling body.

‘Not a very fierce little dog,' he said. ‘Now, you, little girl –' he looked at Sarah, ‘– why did he bite you?'

The maid stepped forward, eager to talk.

‘They were running in the field, sir, and he leapt at her,' she said breathlessly. ‘The dog's shut up when Miss Bellew's Dane is here, and he's always very fierce when he's first let out. Miss Sarah began to scream, so I ran up to hold him off.' She swelled at the recollection of her own bravery. ‘Then I saw he'd bitten her, so I shouted for Nurse.'

Mr Campion cleared his throat and ventured a question at the risk of annoying the doctor.

‘Did you tell her they'd have the dog destroyed?' he inquired.

The girl started and stared at him as though he had exhibited supernatural powers.

‘Well, yes, sir, I did,' she said after a pause. ‘I wanted to comfort her,' she added hastily. ‘I told her that Mr Spooner, the groom, would shoot him.'

Doctor Bouverie looked at Campion and laughed abruptly.

‘That's the end of that mystery,' he said. ‘Here, little girl, here's your dog.' He threw the animal on to the bed, despite the nurse's scream, and the child seized it, hugging it with a passionate affection which only a dog could possibly appreciate. The colour surged into her face and her eyes grew heavy. The terrier licked her eagerly.

Doctor Bouverie brushed the palms of his plump hands together.

‘Put her to bed,' he said. ‘Give her a hot-water bottle and a cup of milk cocoa. I'll send her a sedative. Somebody had better call down at my house for it. Keep the dog where it is.'

‘But the bite, doctor —' The nurse was irritable.

‘Paint it with iodine, my good woman. It's only a scratch. They were playing and he caught her. She's suffering from shock. This very silly little girl here told her that she was going to lose her pet and that it was going to be shot, so naturally she was frightened. She is very fond of him.'

Sarah and the dog remained clasped in each other's arms. It was not a sentimental picture, but rather a terrible one. The child's agony of affection was piteous.

The little maidservant hovered, indignant to discover her heroism and forethought so cruelly repaid. Doctor Bouverie regarded her.

‘Are you a Mudd?' he inquired.

‘Yes, sir. From Rose Green.'

‘Thought I recognised the shape of your skull.' The old man seemed pleased. ‘You be off about your work and don't get hysterical. All your family are fools. You noticed there was a bit of excitement in the house and you thought you'd stir up a little more. Isn't that it?'

‘No, sir.' Miss Mudd was scarlet.

‘Don't lie.' Doctor Bouverie had adopted his God voice again. ‘Be off. Never interfere.'

The nurse followed them out of the room, protesting.

‘Sarah can't sleep with the dog, sir.'

‘Why not?'

‘He may have fleas.'

The old man looked down at her. ‘Then wash him,' he said. ‘There are worse things than fleas. Listen to me. That's a very lonely, over-imaginative little girl in there, and if you take her dog away she'll lie awake and see him standing waiting to be shot. She'll hear the bang and she'll see him bleed and she'll see his little dead body as clearly as if you'd killed him in front of her eyes. Cruelty, my good woman, is a very relative thing. The child is suffering from shock, and it may interest you to know that more people die of shock than from any other disease. Go and cover them up. Keep them warm.'

‘If you say so, doctor.' The woman was still indignant, but impressed in spite of herself.

The old man grunted at her in an Olympian fashion, and would have passed on had not a thought occurred to him.

‘Give the dog some warm milk,' he said. ‘It's a nice little dog.'

As they went down the stairs he glanced at Campion.

‘Lucky guess of yours,' he said and made the word sound a compliment.

Linda was still at the telephone as they passed through the hall. She sounded almost hysterical, Campion thought, and checked an impulse to go uninvited to her assistance.

‘But, of course,' he heard her say. ‘Of course. You must come here. Anything we can do we will. Oh, it
has
been a shock for you. I know. I do realise that, of course.'

Doctor Bouverie touched Campion's sleeve and led him out into the sunlight. On the step he paused, drawing in deep breaths of summer air through his small nose. He looked like some great animal, Campion thought; a bison, perhaps.

‘I don't like nerves,' he said. ‘Rolling pasture, beautiful trees, pretty flowers, birds, all respectable things, don't you know. Decent. Solid. I sometimes feel we should all be better off if we didn't think. All this intensive cultivation of the mind is bad. We're not constructed for it. Human machine won't stand up to it. Walk with me on that grass over there. I want to talk to you. Now about that poor woman who died last night; do you know if she was in the hands of a medical man?'

Campion considered.

‘I'm not sure,' he said, ‘but I should hardly think so. She's only just back from a two-year colonial tour, you know. I'll find out. Sutane's the man to ask.'

‘Wait a moment.' The old man spoke hastily. ‘I don't think I'll make any definite inquiries, don't you know. That's the business of the Coroner. I only wondered if you'd noticed anything about her yourself or if you had heard she'd suffered at all – coughs, choking attacks, spasms of holding the breath.'

Mr Campion's pale eyes became shrewd behind his spectacles.

‘No,' he said cautiously. ‘I should hardly think so. She was a professional dancer, don't you see. Still, one of the great men discovered these clinical disturbances are not always present in every case. Who was it? Morgan?'

Doctor Bouverie paused in his stride.

‘You're a very extraordinary young man. Studied medicine?'

‘Purely from the forensic point of view,' Mr Campion explained modestly. ‘When you mentioned those symptoms I naturally thought of
status lymphaticus
. You found that at the P.M., I suppose?'

‘I did. I don't know if there's any harm in telling you. Most interesting case.'

Doctor Bouverie paused after he had spoken. Campion remained encouragingly silent and the old doctor eyed him.

‘Consider myself a good judge of character,' he remarked unexpectedly. ‘You've been very civil to me and I'm inclined to trust you, don't you know. Rely on your discretion?'

‘Yes, I think you may, sir.' Campion did not smile.

‘Good.' Doctor Bouverie looked every inch the eminent Victorian he was. ‘As a matter of fact I'd like to talk it over with an intelligent man who knew the poor woman. The mischief is we don't know much about
status lymphaticus
. I'm afraid that must be faced. We know that if the thymus persists after a certain age – five, isn't it? – a certain state results. The trouble is that this state seems to vary with each patient. Now this woman, don't you see, had adenoids and tonsils removed at some time, probably in childhood, so there's nothing to help us there. I opened her up, don't you know, and I found the thymus considerably enlarged – considerably. The heart was not actually constricted, but the aorta was narrower than is usual and the heart itself was a little undeveloped, so, you see, this makes a different problem of it.'

Mr Campion felt his steps growing heavier and was exasperated with himself. It came to him suddenly that he did not want the truth to come out. He did not want this pompous but likeable old personage to put his blunt finger on the point that was sticking out a mile. He did not want the Sutane
ménage
to become disorganised by the tremendous emotional and physical upheaval of a murder inquiry, not because of Uncle William and his success, not because of Sutane and his career, but because of Linda, who in thirty hours had become a personality of altogether unreasonable importance in his own life.

Having faced this, he felt better.

Doctor Bouverie was talking again.

‘I refreshed my memory on the subject this morning,' he said. ‘The experts seem to be still quarrelling about it. No one knows what the weight of the thymus in a normal healthy body ought to be. But the fact remains that when one gets a sudden death from insufficient causes it very often is this over-development. I've had several cases in my time. One poor fellow died under chloroform having his teeth out, I remember, and a child up at Birley stuck its head through its crib rails and died apparently by act of God. Then down on the Lower Green a man got his brother by the throat in a quarrel and the fellow died in his hands, but not from strangulation. We were all very puzzled at the time. In all these cases the thymus was very much enlarged.'

He cleared his throat, and it occurred to Campion that he was enjoying his own lecture.

‘To go back to this poor wretched woman,' said Doctor Bouverie. ‘Looking at her last night we both noticed the skull fracture caused by the fall. There was a Pond fracture of the vault with an extended fissure to the base, by the way. The head injuries would have killed her in an hour or so had she not been dead already.'

Campion took a deep breath. It was coming, then.

‘She was not killed by the car?' he said dully.

‘I don't think so.' Doctor Bouverie was pleased with himself. ‘She died from fright, you know. Fright acting on the
status lymphaticus
. As she stood waving to Mr Sutane she felt faint, overbalanced, and the shock killed her. When she reached the ground she was dead.'

Campion stared at the old man and controlled an insane desire to laugh with relief. It took him some seconds to realise what had happened, but gradually it dawned upon him. Doctor Bouverie was a man of simple and direct thought. From the beginning he had been confronted by a problem of accident or suicide. At first he had accepted the actual injuries made by the car as the cause of death, so that he was not concerned with that aspect of the case. The question which had bothered him to the exclusion of all others was why Chloe Pye had ever left the bridge. Now his discovery of the enlarged thymus had provided him with an explanation and he had accepted it. The simple fact that Chloe Pye's heart must in this hypothesis have ceased to pump less than five seconds before her head and rib-cage were crushed and that bleeding would in that case have been copious had still miraculously escaped his attention. Campion felt like the child at the party who tries not to watch the conspicuously placed thimble in the old nursery game. He tried to remember Chloe Pye as she had appeared on the night before; he saw again her torn bathing suit and her lacerated chest where the tyre had crushed and ripped it. There should have been blood there, quantities of blood, not merely the superficial bleeding of the smaller veins.

The doctor's discovery, however, explained the real cause of death. Campion wondered who it was who had so frightened Chloe Pye that she had died. No great strength would have been needed to kill her, perhaps even no strength at all. The thought of the man in the doctor's story who had taken his brother by the throat only to feel him die in his hands returned to his mind. He wanted to leave the old man before the question which rose to his lips escaped him. Were there any slight bruises on her neck, on her shoulders?

He was saved from the indiscretion by the appearance of Sutane, who came striding across the lawn towards them, a loose silk dressing-gown flapping round his angular form. He was eager and inquisitive and the force of his personality swept over them in a wave of which they were physically and uncomfortably aware. In his intensity of need he reminded Campion of the luckless Sarah and it was evident that he had the same effect upon the doctor, for the old man spoke of the child at once.

‘Purely shock, Mr Sutane. The incident was quite sufficient to account for it.'

The younger man stared at him as if he were demented.

‘Shock?' he said. ‘Good heavens, the car passed over her!'

Doctor Bouverie stiffened and his old eyes were severe.

‘I'm talking of your daughter, sir,' he said.

Sutane blinked and they were aware of his mental effort as he tore his mind away from the one subject to the other. It was the most striking thing about the man, this extraordinary vividness of the unspoken expression of his thoughts.

‘Sarah?' he said, not without interest. ‘What's the matter with her?'

Doctor Bouverie froze. Campion felt his contempt and he regarded the two of them helplessly. He knew that the doctor could never conceive a situation in which a man might love his child and yet have literally no time in which to think of her, while Sutane would never realise that a world existed in which time for thought was not only unrationed but as free and bountiful as to have no value at all.

‘Your little daughter is being well looked after. A maid frightened her. She thought she was going to lose her dog.' The doctor spoke coldly and with active dislike for the monument of human selfishness which he thought he saw before him.