Colin Watson - Coffin Scarcely Used

But of Alderman Leadbitter there was no sign. Wherever pewter antique tankards were being displayed that evening, it was not in the company of these unexceptional specimens of ailing humanity.

Love pondered what he should do next. Obviously he would be wasting his time and ruining a whole day’s tedious work by staying where he was.

He got up and went out into the hallway, watched with mournful contempt by the waiting patients. The rest of the house was silent. It might, he guessed, be largely unoccupied. There were five other doors on this floor and he walked quickly from one to another. At each he listened briefly. Behind only one was there a sound. It was a mumbled conversation between a woman and a man with a Scots accent. Love decided that this must be Hillyard’s consulting room. He heard nothing of the boomingly hearty voice of Alderman Leadbitter, with which he was by now only too familiar.

On tiptoe he climbed rapidly to the first turn of the staircase, paused to listen again, then ascended more slowly to the floor above.

Fixed to the wall opposite the head of the stairs was a small green baize notice board, to which a typed sheet was pinned.

The paper bore the day’s date and was marked off into three columns.

In the first was what seemed to be a series of times, varying between 7.30 and 8.30. The second column contained numbers—either 1, 2, 3 or 4. In the third were sets of initials.

At the head of the sheet were the words ‘Treatment Schedule’.

Love, wary by now of code theories, contented himself with rapidly jotting a copy of the table into his notebook. He had barely finished when a door shut loudly somewhere on his left. He darted instinctively in the opposite direction and drew himself into the deeply shadowed corner of the landing farthest from the staircase wall.

A man emerged from an opening in the wall about ten feet beyond the notice board. He was wearing an overcoat and carried a hat. At the top of the stairs he halted and stood looking down into the hall for several seconds. Then he began to descend. A minute later Love heard the gentle thud of the front door.

This was interesting. The man was Herbert Stamper, who farmed on the west side of Flaxborough Fen: a prosperous and venal gentleman, much troubled by the stubborn survival of an ailing and intolerant wife. Love recalled that his name had appeared on Purbright’s list of antique fanciers.

From below came the noise of voices. Love peered cautiously over the rail and saw a woman coming out of what he had assumed to be the surgery door. Some sort of cheery farewell was being wished her from within the room. As finally she turned and crossed the hall, a buzzer sounded and the chesty man, with wheeze at full cock, slouched from the waiting-room to the doctor’s door.

Love turned back and sought the point at which Mr Stamper had made his appearance. It proved to be the entrance to a corridor that ran at right angles to the landing wall. An arrowed card, bearing the direction ‘Treatment cubicles (Male Patients)’, hung from a nail. Four doors, at intervals of several feet, were set along the left wall of this passage. The end appeared to be blank.

Exploring further along the landing, Love discovered another corridor, running parallel to the first. In this case, however, its four doors were on the right. The card at the corner announced ‘Treatment cubicles (Female Patients)’. Love turned back and re-entered the male corridor, feeling that at this stage the proprieties ought to be observed.

He put his ear to the door marked ‘1’. There was silence inside. Slowly he turned the handle and pressed against the panels. The door would not move. Then he pulled and found the door had been made to open outwards. The space within was little bigger than a cupboard. It was fitted with a mirror and clothing hooks and seemed intended to serve as a small dressing-room. There was another door immediately opposite. Love tried it, but it had been locked or bolted from the other side. No sound came from whatever lay beyond.

Love stood wondering how much longer he would be able to poke his way around the private house of a doctor against whom he had no evidence or even what a magistrate would deem reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, and how he would explain his presence there if challenged. Both questions defeated him, so he put them resolutely from his mind and puzzled instead over a noise that reached him faintly from a direction he could not fix.

He went back into the corridor and tried the door numbered ‘2’. As he opened it, the sound he wanted to identify grew louder. He listened. There was no doubt about it. Leadbitter had been run to earth.

The noises that came through the inner door of the closet were those of the alderman repressing his normal boom to a confidential growl, interspersed with asinine chuckles. The general effect was curious. Love thought it suggested mild delirium under anaesthetic.

Was Leadbitter undergoing a minor operation of some kind? It was possible. The clothing he had been wearing during the day was hung untidily on the hooks at the side of the cupboard-like compartment and tossed on the narrow bench below them. Love checked them over. Only socks and shirt appeared to be missing.

He pressed his ear to the inner door. The alderman’s noises were now faint and intermittent. A sigh...a groan...a contented gasp...The anesthetic must have taken effect. Very gently, Love tried the door. It would not yield.

As he stood looking at it, he heard footsteps approaching fairly rapidly along the corridor. He turned to close the cubicle door but realized that this would entail reaching out of his present comparatively secure shelter.

Before he could make up his mind what to do, a shadow fell across the entrance. He did his best to defend his position by staring boldly straight into the face of the large man who now peered in at him.

Surprisingly enough, the new arrival did no more than pause, deliver a friendly wink, and pass on along the corridor. A door opened and closed—Love judged it to be the last in the row—and there was silence once more. Not even an aldermanic grunt broke the stillness.

Going out into the corridor again, Love reflected on the stranger’s amiability. He supposed the wink to have been a natural gesture for one patient to make to another. The camaraderie of hospitals, he had heard, was a jolly business, maintained by fellow sufferers to minimize their apprehension of knives, needles and other surgical terrors.

He eased open the door of the third cubicle. There was no clothing in this one. Automatically, he tried the farther door. To his surprise, it moved freely, and he was just in time to tighten his grip on the handle to prevent the door swinging open away from him. With his free hand he pulled the outer door closed at his back and stood for some seconds in the resultant darkness before beginning to edge his way slowly into the space ahead.

The room, if that was what it was, was comfortably warm, but absolutely dark. Love took tiny, silent steps forward, feeling tensely for obstacles with feet and outstretched hands. It was not his sense of touch, though, but his ears that warned him to pause.

Somewhere in front of him, quite near, was being made a soft rhythmical sound. It was, he thought, a sort of gentle brushing, regular and mechanical. Brushing—or dragging, perhaps. As he listened, an earlier speculation returned to mind and was instantly mated to the new problem. Of course—anaesthesia. It was a pump or respirator of some kind that he now could hear. He recalled an operation scene in a film, where bladders softly inflated and deflated as the surgeons bent over their task.

But why no lights?

Slowly and with infinite caution, Love slithered first one foot, then the other, over the carpet. Carpet? He frowned. Hospitals never had carpets. But that wasn’t to say private clinics did not. Never mind, he was nearing whatever was making the soft exhalations. He felt in his overcoat pocket for the torch he carried. The time had come for a showdown, whatever the consequences. He could always plead lost directions. He levelled the torch and slid his thumb to its button...