William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

'Look, Bobby, I've already told you -'

'Merely a supposition. Hypothetical.'

He pronounced the word 'hippotheetical' and Carriscant had to force himself not to smile.

'The supposition is completely absurd,' Carriscant said. 'You're implying that Dr Quiroga has something to do with these murders? Preposterous.'

'It's a lead, you've got to admit that. First the General Elpidio connection and now this scalpel. And the surgical precision of the mutilations. "Competently done", those were your words, not mine.' Bobby paused, pointing an unbandaged finger at Carriscant. 'Dr Quiroga's family come from Batangas in southern Luzon. It was one of the fiercest areas of rebellion. He made three trips there to my knowledge in the last year of the war.'

'So what? So have I. My mother lives in San Teodoro.'

'And during the war, in February and March of 1902 Colonel Sieverance's regiment was operating there. Too many connections, Carriscant, I can't ignore them.'

'You're grasping at straws,' Carriscant said. 'The flimsiest, most ephemeral of straws… Listen, I could have taken that scalpel. Any of my staff, any porter. Dr Cruz, Dr Wieland. Even Colonel Sieverance, even you. You've all been in my operating theatre, or have access to it.'

Bobby coloured and for a second or two looked very uncomfortable. 'There's no need for that quality of sarcasm, Carriscant. I have to follow up everything.'

Carriscant made an apologetic gesture, bowing his head. 'The scalpel does set up all manner of questions, I agree,' he said, looking hard at Bobby who, he thought, seemed particularly uneasy beneath his gaze. 'If we hadn't found it I would say that the woman's murder was completely unconnected to the soldiers'… She was pregnant, by the way, four months.' He paused: he decided to tell Bobby his own hypothesis. 'If you want my opinion, that scalpel was deliberately placed there. Not to implicate Dr Quiroga… But to implicate me.'

'For God's sake! Now you're being absurd. Who would do such a thing?'

'Dr Cruz or Dr Wieland. Or both of them.'

Bobby laughed, his confidence suddenly returning. 'You're saying they murder some peasant woman and then place one of your scalpels by the body? It makes no sense. These are men of genuine standing in the community. No, no.'

'I don't say murder. But they're more than capable of, of taking an opportunity to try and disgrace me. Cruz has many contacts with the police. Tondo police bring many fight victims to the hospital. To Cruz's wards.'

'I can't accept that.'

'They are completely unscrupulous and sworn enemies of mine.'

'This is fantasy. Pure melodrama.'

'I have to tell you what I think. They want to discredit me and they don't care how. I don't say they murdered the woman. There's a cholera epidemic in the provinces. Dozens of people die every week. And God knows how many spare bodies Cruz has in his fiendish laboratory. He could have -'

'No, stop. This is completely out of control. My dear Carriscant, these are ravings, nonsense. I'm surprised at you, old fellow, I always had you placed as a cooler, more collected type of person.'

'I'm convinced that scalpel was stolen from my operating theatre.'

'Look, I think we're jumping too far ahead. Damn rain's rotting our minds. Growing mildew.'

Carriscant decided to leave it at that. He was satisfied, however: his confession had achieved something unexpected. Bobby's relief at his accusations had been manifest, and too enthusiastically rebuffed. He was convinced now that the theft of the scalpel from his theatre was carried out by none other than Chief of Constabulary Paton Bobby.

Annaliese Carriscant spooned honey on to another triangle of toast and licked the spoon before returning it to the pot. She's eating too much, Carriscant thought, putting on more weight. There was a small bulge of flesh, an incipient double chin, growing beneath her jaw. With a sour pang of clarity Carriscant saw how unattractive his wife was, all of a sudden-how pinched, despite her new corpulence, how bland. Beside Delphine, she was – He pushed away his plate of chicken and rice. How could she eat toast and honey, slice after slice, all evening?

'I have to go to the hospital,' he said.

She looked at him, impassivity shading into contempt, he thought.

'I won't wait up.'

Carriscant pulled the dressing back over the wound. The patient was an Englishman, an officer in the coast guard, who had developed a large bronchocele or goitrous cyst on his neck which had grown to the size of an aubergine and which had been removed two days previously. He was still weak, but he appeared to be making progress. Carriscant moved on to the next bed but was interrupted by one of the nurses, Sister Encarnacion, who had hurried into the ward.

'Dr Carriscant, please, ward eleven. An emergency.' Carriscant followed her quickly along the corridor in the direction of the western wing of the hospital. Ward eleven was one of Dr Cruz's wards. As he left his own area of the hospital it was like crossing a frontier, he thought, or travelling backwards through time. At the extremities of his sphere of influence were the trestle tables with the enamel basins of disinfectant and carbolic soap, the trays of lime powder on the floor into which everyone entering his wards from Cruz's was obliged to step. Even the quality of the air seemed to change: here were old smells of putrefaction and unchanged linen and unwashed bodies. The corridors were grubby, the floors unswept, the walls printed with fingermarks and the greasy shine of human contact. Cruz still believed firmly in the airborne transmission of disease, that infection was caused by foul and noxious currents of air and as a result all the windows and doors of his wards were tightly sealed. Sister Encarnacion pushed open the door of ward eleven and led Carriscant into a long room, foetid and close, divided into cubicles, wooden walls floor to ceiling, with one bed inside each stall. The aim being, Carriscant supposed sardonically, the better to impede the noisome breezes that were killing 60 per cent of Cruz's patients. The nurse showed him into a cubicle and Carriscant peered down at a young man, a Filipino, who, he saw at once, had only a few days left to live.

'What's happened here?' he asked.

Sister Encarnacion explained that the man had been reroofing his hut, had fallen and had impaled himself on the bamboo fence that surrounded his garden. A sharp sliver of bamboo had entered his body just below the breastbone and had travelled upwards to pierce the heart.

A waterproofed canvas bag full of ice was resting on the man's chest. Carriscant lifted it off to reveal the heavy bandaging beneath. To his surprise he saw a rubber tube extending from the bandages leading into a glass bottle which was half full of blood. Drips fell from the tube's end.

'What's this?'

'A drain from the pericardium.'

'What?' This made no sense. Carriscant felt the man's pulse, very faint and irregular.

'What operation has Dr Cruz performed here?'

Sister Encarnacion told him, and added that Dr Cruz had been highly pleased with the result and had wanted the patient closely observed. A messenger had been despatched to Cruz's house, but the doctor would surely not arrive in time and seeing that Dr Carriscant was in the hospital…

Carriscant was amazed, more than amazed. Some more questioning elicited the facts that Cruz had opened the man's chest and exposed the sac that contained the heart and that had been pierced by the bamboo sliver. He had sewn up the wound in the pericardium leaving a trocar pushed into the heart cavity to drain it. Carriscant looked at the man. His face was blanched and pallid, covered in sweat, and he was breathing with difficulty. Cruz may have sewn up the wound in the pericardium but it was clear that the heart had been pierced also. There must be a tiny wound in the heart still pumping blood into the cavity, too much for any drain. Soon the pressure of the blood filling the heart cavity would stifle, and silence the beating, or else the lungs would give out, as the blood had probably flowed into the thoracic cavity too, crowding the lungs. There was nothing he could do. He turned away, frustrated and angry, and paced up the ward looking into the other cubicles, noting the grime on the shuttered windows. Most were empty: in one bed was a dead body, the sheet pulled over the face. Two other cubicles contained patients – a young boy and a young man – both had ice bags on their chests.