The Nursing Home Murder

‘Such threats are an intolerable impertinence,’ she said hastily. ‘I cannot understand why you do not deal with these people.’

‘The letter had nothing whatever to do with them, and my “unaccountable behaviour,” as you call it, has nothing to do with the letter. I am unwell and I’m worried. It may satisfy you to hear that John Phillips is coming in this evening.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

The front-door bell sounded. They looked at each other questioningly.

‘Ruth?’ murmured Lady O’Callaghan.

‘I’m off,’ he said quickly. Suddenly he felt more friendly towards her. ‘You’d better bolt, Cicely,’ he said.

She moved swiftly into his study and he followed her. They heard Nash come out and open the door. They listened, almost in sympathy with each other.

‘Sir Derek and my lady are not at home, madam.’

‘But there’s a light in the study!’

They exchanged horrified glances.

‘Perhaps Mr Jameson—’ said Nash.

‘Just the man I want to see.’

They heard Nash bleating in dismay and the sound of Miss Ruth O’Callaghan’s umbrella being rammed home in the ship’s bucket. With one accord they walked over to the fireplace. Lady O’Callaghan lit a cigarette.

The door opened, and Ruth came in. They had a brief glimpse of Nash’s agonized countenance and then were overwhelmed in embraces.

‘There you are, darlings. Nash said you were out.’

‘We’re only “not at home,” Ruth darling,’ said Lady O’Callaghan, very tranquilly. ‘Derek expects his doctor. It was too stupid of Nash not to realize you were different.’

‘Ah-ha,’ said Ruth, with really terrifying gaiety, ‘you don’t defeat your old sister like that. Now, Derry darling, I’ve come especially to see you, and I shall be very cross and dreadfully hurt if you don’t do exactly what I tell you.’

She rummaged in an enormous handbag, and fetched up out of its depths the familiar sealed white parcel.

‘Really, Ruth, I can not swallow every patent medicine that commends itself to your attention.’

‘I don’t want you to do that, darling. I know you think your old sister’s a silly-billy’—she squinted playfully at him—‘but she knows what’s good for her big, famous brother. Cicely, he’ll listen to you. Please, please, persuade him to take just one of these teeny little powders. They’re too marvellous. You’ve only to read the letters—’

With eager, clumsy fingers she undid the wrapping and disclosed a round green box decorated with the picture of a naked gentleman, standing in front of something that looked like an electric shock.

‘There are six powders altogether,’ she told them excitedly, ‘but after the first, you feel a marked improvement. “Fulvitavolts”. Hundreds of letters, Derry, from physicians, surgeons, politicians—lots of politicians, Derry. They all swear by it. Their symptoms were precisely the same as yours. Honestly.’

She looked pathetically eager. She was so awkward and vehement with her thick hands, her watery eyes, and her enormous nose.

‘You don’t know what my symptoms are, Ruth.’

‘Indeed I do. Violent abdominal seizures. Cicely—do read it all.’

Lady O’Callaghan took the box and looked at one of the folded cachets.

‘I’ll give him one tonight, Ruth,’ she promised, exactly as though she was humouring an excitable child.

‘That’s topping!’ Ruth had a peculiar trick of using unreal slang. ‘I’m most awfully bucked. And in the morning all those horrid pains will have flown away.’ She made a sort of blundering, ineffectual gesture. She beamed at them.

‘And now, old girl, I’m afraid you’ll have to fly away yourself,’ said O’Callaghan with a desperate effort to answer roguishness with brotherly playfulness. ‘I think I hear Phillips arriving.’

‘Come along, Ruth,’ said his wife. ‘We must make ourselves scarce. Good night again, Derek.’

Ruth laid a gnarled finger on her lips and tiptoed elaborately to the door. There she turned and blew him a kiss.

He heard them greet Sir John Phillips briefly and go upstairs. In his relief at being rid of his sister, O’Callaghan felt a wave of good-fellowship for John Phillips. Phillips was an old friend. It would be a relief to tell him how ill he felt—to learn how ill he really was. Perhaps Phillips would give him something that would help him along for the time being. He already felt a little better. Very likely it was a trifling thing after all. Phillips would know. He turned to the door with an air of pleased expectancy. Nash opened the door and came in.

‘Sir John Phillips, sir.’

Phillips entered the room.

He was an extremely tall man with an habitual stoop. His eyes, full-lidded and of a peculiarly light grey, were piercingly bright. No one ever saw him without his single eye-glass and there was a rumour that he wore it ribbonless while he operated. His nose was a beak and his under lip jutted out aggressively. He was unmarried, and unmoved, so it was said, by the general tendency among his women patients to fall extravagantly in love with him. Perhaps next to actors medical men profit most by the possession of that curious quality that people call ‘personality’. Sir John Phillips was, very definitely, a personage. His rudeness was more glamorously famous than his brilliant ability.

O’Callaghan moved towards him, his hand extended.

‘Phillips!’ he said, ‘I’m delighted to see you.’

Phillips ignored the hand and stood stockstill until the door had closed behind Nash. Then he spoke.

‘You will be less delighted when you hear my business,’ he said.

‘Why—what on earth’s the matter with you?’

‘I can scarcely trust myself to speak to you.’

‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘Precisely what I say. I’ve discovered your are a blackguard and I’ve come to tell you so.’

O’Callaghan stared at him in silence.

‘Apparently you are serious,’ he said at last. ‘May I ask if you intend merely to call me names and then walk out? Or am I to be given an explanation?’

‘I’ll give you your explanation. In two words. Jane Harden.’

There was a long silence. The two men stared at each other. At last O’Callaghan turned away. A kind of mulish huffiness in his expression made him look ridiculous and unlikeable.

‘What about Jane Harden?’ he said at last.

‘Only this. She’s a nurse at my hospital. For a very long time her happiness has been an important thing for me. I have asked her to marry me. She has refused, over and over again. Today she told me why. It seems you made capital out of a friendship with her father and out of her present poverty. You played the “old family friend” combined with the distinguished philanderer.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’