No Love Lost (13 page)

Behind us in the dark was the one thing which needed explanation. My throat grew dry and I fidgeted.

‘Francia Forde was with them?' I murmured, and held my breath.

‘She was about.' His face was hardly so handsome with those deep lines in it.

‘You fell for her too?'

‘That was a mistake. I knew it. I was a fool.' I felt him draw into himself and the shutters come down between us. ‘That's something I can't tell you, or rather, something I won't tell you. Do you mind?'

Mind? Mind? When we had so little time!

‘Good heavens, no,' I said. ‘I'm dying to talk about myself. I've fallen for whooping-cough.'

‘Have you?' His interest came back like a light playing over me. ‘It's a tremendous subject. Most of the men I see in these days are still prescribing conium and ipecacuanha.'

‘Oh, I can do better than that.' I climbed stiffly on my hobbyhorse, while all the time behind us in the gloom lay Francia, hovering between life and death and holding in her limp fingers everything that to us was worth living for. Gradually our talk changed to the diseases of children, and before we knew it our old dreams were out again, hanging like beautiful swathes of coloured material from the cornices.

‘I've had my eye on Nurse Tooley for our clinic,' I said.

‘What, this one?' He was very interested. ‘Yes, she's quite exceptional, isn't she? I noticed that. What's she like with kids?'

‘Marvellous.' I started to say and the word had caught and died in my throat. I bent my head over my hands. There was nothing I could do. The tears ran down my face, over my chin and on to my coat. I stove my body into the chair and struggled with myself, and his hand crept over my elbow and on to my wrist, where it settled like a band of steel.

I heard it first. My ears, attuned to the faintest nuance in his voice, the slightest sound in the house, picked up the altered breathing from the bed. As I sprung to my feet the other sound came. It was deep, breathy, and quite horribly loud.

We were both on the other side of the room in an instant and John's fingers fumbled as he felt for the lamp switch. Francia lay as we had left her. She was on her back and her hair, like golden seaweed, lay spread across the pillow. But for the first time since I had seen her her eyes were open and as the light reached them they fluttered closed again. Her lips moved and very slowly she turned her head away. My heart turned slowly over in my side, or that was what it felt like. Hardly daring, I put out my hand and took her wrist. The pulse was not so fast. It fluttered no longer.

I looked at John on the other side of the bed. His face startled me. He was radiant. Pure joy looked out of his eyes as he watched her. His lips were half open as if he were helping her, forcing her, to speak.

She woke like the Sleeping Beauty after a thousand years. She was still drugged. Her eyes tried to focus and gave up. Her dry lips moved and she struggled with the clouds which held her. Her will to live was tremendous. I felt it in her pulse. She was fighting manfully. One could only admire her.

I gave her a tiny sip from the cup beside me and she swallowed greedily.

‘Francia.' John spoke sharply in the quiet room.

Her great eyes fluttered open and she looked full at him. Recognition was complete. There was even surprise.

‘John,' she said in a silly little baby voice, and her small claw of a hand, which still had crimson lacquer on its nails, closed pathetically over his.

In another moment she had gone again. He released himself gently and stood up and wiped his forehead. The dazed, delighted expression was still in his eyes and his voice had a catch in it.

‘We've done it' he said. ‘She'll do. That's Phase One. Now, Ann, wake the nurse.'

I could do nothing at all. I turned and went blindly out of the room with a mind which must have been in much the same state as the patient's.

When Nurse came hurrying in, fastening her belt and looking strange and older without her cap, he was walking about the room like a lunatic.

‘Broth,' he said abruptly. ‘Anything hot and fluid and nourishing. She'll wake up starved in a minute. You did this, Nurse, you and Dr Fowler.'

‘You must take the credit yourself, sir.' She was beaming at him and for the first time I saw little beads on her wide bumpy forehead. So she had been scared too, had she? ‘She is so frail, you see, I thought …'

‘Yes,' he said, looking down, ‘so very little.'

I hardly heard him. I went into the bathroom and met a drawn, hard powderless face with red eyes peering at me out of the mirror. My hair looked as though someone had been trying to pull it off me in a bunch, and my white coat was wet round the neck. My bag was in there and I did what I could with myself, but my hands were shaking and there was something funny about my eyes. They had grown, for one thing, and looked like a tragedy queen's in full make-up.

When I came out, John had fixed himself a high seat where he could command the bed, and he was sitting there, one hand on her pulse, his gaze fixed steadily on her face.

‘Damned near normal,' he said over his shoulder. ‘Do you think I'd raise the house if I burst into song?'

I bit back what I was going to say and made myself very busy.

‘I wonder if I ought to go and help Nurse?'

‘No. She'll find anything that's there. Nurses like that have six senses. They find sustenance in deserts and under flowerpots. You leave it to her.'

‘And the patient to you?'

He didn't even notice my tone. ‘Yes,' he said contentedly, ‘and the patient to me. Look out.'

Francia stirred again and he gave her water, and I washed her
mouth. She was gaining every minute, and every minute I was seeing more and more clearly the sort of person I thought she must be. Her beauty was but the half of it, I suspected.

John cut into my thought. ‘Of course you don't know her, do you?' he said cheerfully. ‘You wait.'

On the last word he bent over her again, and so mercifully did not see my face.

Nurse returned triumphant with a smoking bowl on a tray.

‘Just tinned soup,' she apologized, ‘but it's a good kind. Mr Gastineau had to come out and find this for me himself, or I shouldn't have got a thing. I've told him to send down to the town, wake somebody up and get me some meat extract.'

John waved her to the hearth. He was still in ecstatic mood.

‘Keep it hot a minute. She won't be so long now.'

Since there was absolutely nothing for me to do, I sat down in the larger of the two chairs by the fire. My idea was to think out the next step. What were we going to do about Gastineau? The problem of Francia seemed to have been settled. John was attending to that.

The heat crept over me and the relief from the strain of the last thirteen hours was very relaxing. Sleep hit me like a hammer. I felt it and hardly struggled against it. My last conscious thought was that there was nothing, nothing that I could do.

I awoke feeling that I was sailing slowly up an enormous lift shaft, and opened my eyes to see the cold light turning the chintz curtains grey. In the room, very far away, someone was speaking. It was a voice I had never heard before, female and husky and affected, and it said, unless I was still dreaming:

‘Not t'irsty, t'ank you.'

I sat up and saw Nurse Tooley looking down at me, a harassed expression on her shining face.

‘Well, it's a wonderful thing to be able to sleep,' she remarked. ‘I've heard you say so yourself, Doctor. Good morning to you.'

‘I say, I'm sorry.' I got up and stretched my cramped legs. John was still at the bedside. I could see his shoulder blades, sharp and weary-looking, showing through the white linen of his coat.

Raised now, on a heap of pillows, her hair combed and her
eyes wide open, lay Francia. As I went over I realized that something was different and before I reached the bedside I knew what it was. The entire atmosphere had changed. During all the terror and misery of the night we three had been comrades, linked by a single outlook. Now that was gone. A stranger had arrived.

John got up. He was exhausted and there were dark rings to his eyes.

‘Take over, will you? I don't want her to sleep for a bit. See what you think of the general condition.'

‘You're going to leave me?' The patient, who was as weak as a fish and still had the drug about her, managed to convey a sort of halfhearted seductiveness and her little hands moved.

‘Just for a while.' John spoke firmly and kindly and exactly as any other doctor would have done. ‘Dr Fowler will look after you.'

‘Vewy well.' Her great eyes rolled away from him and came to rest on me. ‘Can you move me? I'm tired. One of my shoulders hurts. I don't know which one. Well, find out, can't you?'

Her speech was still slurred and she must have been only half there, but it was perfectly plain that she had one manner for men and another for women, neither of them guaranteed to have been successful, I should have thought.

In the next twenty-five minutes I learnt about Francia Forde, and an hour later I could have written an essay on her, and I was a less jealous but infinitely more puzzled woman. She was the most unsubtle person I had ever met and she had one interest – Francia. She was practically without subterfuge; and greed, which is of all the vices the one most instantly apparent to the average human being, gleamed out of every word and every movement and every look. Her hands were greedy, her eyes were greedy. The moment she was not acting, rapacity appeared. Poor little thing, she didn't even hide it.

Whatever I had expected, it had not been this. Gastineau's story was completely convincing in every particular save the important one. It seemed impossible to me that he should have loved her. Yet, when I remembered that the incident had taken place at the beginning of the war, ten years ago, when she must
have been still in her teens, perhaps it was not so difficult. She must have looked like a flower. Perhaps even her greediness had been pretty, like a child's.

The thing I did not understand at all was John. He was sitting with his back to me in the chair I had slept in, and I saw his dark head above it. If he had been taken in, even for an hour by
this
, he simply wasn't the man I thought he was.

I left Francia to Nurse and went to him. He considered me with narrowed eyes and did not move. His arms were folded and he looked like a sleepy bird.

‘What are we going to do with her?' He did not speak aloud but mouthed the words very elaborately, so that I was bound to follow them.

After a bit he tried again. ‘Can't leave her here, can we?'

It was the one mood I had not expected. We were in a fine old predicament, the two of us.

‘I'll find out.' I spoke with decision. The problem of Gastineau was yet to be solved. Our duty was plain. We ought to remove the woman and inform the police, and yet I shrank from it. I was not a detective … or a judge either. Yet one could hardly leave him loose, perhaps to try to kill again. However, I could make him talk. He owed me that at least.

I went out of the room, stepped on to the dark landing, closed the door very softly behind me as a doctor should, and froze.

Seated near the top of the stairs was the man with the umbrella. He still had it with him, neatly rolled, hanging over the back of the chair. His hat was on his knees.

He rose as I appeared and favoured me with one of his apologetic stares.

‘Good morning, Doctor. May I hope that the patient is a little better?'

I was not afraid of him any more. I made the discovery with a stab of delight. Indeed, eyeing him now, it seemed absurd that I ever had been, he was so meek and gentle-looking.

‘Yes, thank you,' I said cheerfully, and was about to pass when he made a most surprising remark.

‘I fear everyone else has gone,' he said. ‘That was why I thought it best to come up here.'

‘Gone?' I repeated stupidly.

‘Oh dear.' It seemed to his favourite expletive. ‘I made sure you knew. Otherwise I should have certainly ventured to warn you. But since you had seen Mr Gastineau destroying his papers I made certain you had guessed his intentions. He and his servants went off in the car soon after the nurse came down for broth. I think she told someone to go for meat extract, but as they all took their suitcases I really don't suppose they will be back.'

It was the longest speech I had ever heard him make. He towered over me and his pale eyes were frighteningly intelligent as they looked down into mine.

‘I sincerely hope I've not been unhelpful, but since I heard you trip over the manservant's trunk in the back kitchen I really thought that you were aware that they contemplated flight.'

His excessive formality might have been funny at any other time.

‘Where were you?' I demanded.

‘I – er – I moved,' he said obliquely. ‘I didn't want to introduce myself just then.'

‘Who are you?' I nearly said, ‘Who on earth are you?' but I had the impression that might have hurt him.

He was very dignified. He produced a card at once, with relief, I thought. Engraved on the pasteboard in fine flowing script were the words:

‘Oh, a detective agency!' I exclaimed in triumph, and a flush appeared on his high cheekbones.

‘We don't call ourselves that, Doctor,' he protested gently. ‘We are a very old established firm. We specialize in finding lost people with the maximum amount of discretion. Most of our work concerns lost relatives, of course, but this … this was rather different. In this case we represent Messrs Moonlight, a rather larger concern than our own if not quite so long established.'

‘I see,' I agreed slowly.