Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

He ran to fetch a blanket and laid it over the messenger, leaving only her face uncovered. He lowered his cheek to a point a fraction of an inch from her face and detected a faint susurrus of breath from her nostrils. He ran to the bathroom and brought a damp cloth to lay across her forehead, covering the ugly black circle where the bullet had emerged.

By the time Dr McClintock arrived, Caligula Foxx had completed dressing and arrived on the ground floor via his personal elevator. He strode to the motionless form on the polished wooden floor.

The door knocker sounded. Andy Winslow, who had been kneeling beside the wounded messenger, sprang upright and admitted the iron-haired, red-cheeked doctor. Andy took Dr McClintock’s homburg and winter coat. Reuter had also arrived, emerging from the kitchen. He accepted the doctor’s accoutrements from Winslow and disappeared.

Dr McClintock made a cursory examination of the supine messenger, then rose to his feet. “This is truly amazing. Not unprecedented, but still most unusual.”

Foxx sputtered. “Never mind the commentary, Fergus. What have you found? Is she alive? Dead? Speak up.”

Dr McClintock shook his head in disbelief. “This woman has been shot. Not from very close range — there are no powder burns around the entry wound. I would say that the bullet was a.22 calibre. So small a round punched a hole in her skull. A larger bullet, a.38 or.44, would have smashed the skull at point of entry, but this.22 or whatever it was punched cleanly in.”

Andy Winslow interrupted the doctor’s monologue. “Is she alive, though?”

Dr McClintock nodded emphatically, his steel-wool eyebrows working up and down. “Absolutely. Mr Winslow, summon an ambulance at once.”

The call was made quickly.

While they awaited the arrival of the ambulance, Dr McClintock asked Andy Winslow what had happened and Winslow repeated his story. “I think the driver of that LaSalle automobile shot the messenger. The double set of footprints that you mention would fit with that, Mr Winslow.”

Andy Winslow rubbed his chin, his eyes still fixed on the softly breathing woman. “But you said that the shot was not fired from very close to the victim.”

“I did indeed.” Dr McClintock pursed his lips. “Most likely the miscreant fired from across the street, then ran to the house, performed some brief task, ran back and drove away. Would there have been time for that, do you think? Did you hear the shot fired?”

Andy Winslow said, “No, I was in the lavatory brushing my teeth. I only came to the door when I heard the knocker sound. A.22 fired from across the street might not have been audible even though the door knocker was.”

Caligula Foxx had found a seat in an antique ladder-backed chair, from which he observed the proceedings. Now he gestured Andy Winslow to him, murmured a rapid series of instructions in his ear, and sent him on his way.

Winslow left the house. In moments, the doors of the two-car garage behind the residence — once a Colonial-era carriage house — were opened and a yellow Auburn roadster, its folding top and canvas side-windows in place against the cold, rolled forth. The roadster disappeared up West Adams Place, Andy Winslow at the wheel.

Back in the house Dr McClintock tilted his head questioningly at Caligula Foxx. “Is that correct procedure, Caligula? I imagine Lieutenant Burke will be arriving shortly, along with the ambulance. Shouldn’t Mr Winslow have stayed here?”

But by now Andy Winslow had reached the office of the Postal Telegraph Company not far from Caligula Foxx’s house. He drew his roadster to the curb, leaped from the car, ran up a short flight of terrazzo steps and burst through the door. He demanded to see the manager and was introduced to one Oswald Hicks, a Cuban-looking individual wearing a business suit, a Clark Gable moustache, and wavy black hair.

Andy Winslow identified himself and described the incident at West Adams Place.

Hicks’s eyes widened. He raised a carefully manicured, mahogany-coloured hand to his face. “Come with me!”

He led Andy Winslow back to the public office, asked the clerk on duty to tell him who had carried messages in the past hour and had not returned. The clerk didn’t have to look it up. “Not much business this morning, Mr Hicks. Martha’s the only messenger on duty. Martha Mayhew. She went out” — he checked his log book — “forty minutes ago. Night letter going to a Mr Foxx on West Adams.”

Hicks turned to Andy Winslow. “You’re sure she’s alive?”

Andy grunted an affirmative.

“And you summoned an ambulance?”

Andy repeated the sound.

“They would probably take her to St Ambrose’s. Let’s go there, sir.” He left the clerk in charge of the office and they headed for the street. Andy Winslow led the way to his roadster and piloted the Auburn through quiet, Sunday-morning streets, to pull in at the hospital. Martha Mayhew had been admitted and taken on a rolling gurney to the newly established radiology laboratory, pride of St Ambrose’s medical staff.

There was little for either of them to do at St Ambrose’s.

While Dr McClintock stood by, a young intern explained, they had taken X-rays of the patient’s head. The foreign object — the intern did not refer to it as a bullet — had entered at the rear of the patient’s skull, had passed through the channel between the two lobes of her brain, and had exited through her forehead.

It was a thousand to one chance, the intern said, then corrected himself, a million to one chance. A fraction to the left or right and severe, possibly fatal, brain damage would have resulted. But, as it was, the only concern was possible infection. The patient would be monitored, the entry and exit wounds kept clean, sulpha drugs applied if necessary. The entry and exit wounds were small enough to heal without further surgery. Barring the unexpected, she should be released in a few days, with only a small round scar on her forehead to show for her near encounter with the grim reaper.

Hicks asked, “How can that be? Thank heaven Miss Mayhew is alive, but as you describe the wound, Doctor — this is incredible.”

The intern, looking almost like a child costumed to play doctors, looked from Hicks to Winslow and back. “You know the brain is composed of two hemispheres. They’re quite separate from each other, connected only by a sort of bridge or highway, the corpus calossum. It seems that the object passed between the hemispheres and above the, ah, bridge. It’s not unprecedented, sir. We studied a far worse case in med school. Back in 1848 a poor fellow named Phineas Gage was tamping down an explosive for a construction project. The dynamite went off and drove the tamping rod through his cheek, up through one eye, through his brain, and out the top of his skull. You’d think he was a goner for sure but he recovered and lived a normal life.”

Shortly, the patient was in a private room. She had regained consciousness but had no recollection of being shot. “I parked my bike and climbed the steps. I remember I had the knocker in one hand and Mr Foxx’s night letter in the other. Then I–I don’t remember anything until I woke up in this bed.”

“You had the night letter in your hand?” Andy Winslow asked.

“Yes, I remember distinctly. I had it in my hand and — ”

At this point the door of the hospital room swung open and Lieutenant Adam Burke strode into the room, followed by a couple of uniformed officers. He glared at Andy Winslow. “You left the scene of a crime, Winslow.”

Andy looked innocently at the cop. “I did?”

“You know damned well you did. Who the hell do you think you are, letting a corpse into the house and then leaving her there on the floor to die.”