Operation Nassau Read Online Free Page A

other hand, there was a degree of menace in the words. They implied, quite clearly, that the caller did not wish your life to be saved.’
    He laughed. It was a laugh I had heard many times before when questioning patients. It is important to show no disbelief. He said. ‘When you said joke, I got it. It’s all right. I haven’t got an enemy, but I have a very funny brother-in-law called George. His idea of humour. I’m sorry, Doctor. Did it keep you awake?’
    ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I was hardly to know a second occasion would involve me so quickly. Your wife has been sent for. I shall be in to see you again, but I suggest you allow at least two days in bed before you attempt to go home to Great Harbour Cay. Is there anything further you wish done for you?’
    ‘No, thank you,’ he said slowly. ‘At least -’
    ‘Yes?’ I had a round of the wards to do in five minutes.
    ‘I have another favour to ask you,’ he said. ‘I’d ask my wife, but she’s. . . well, she gets easily upset. I’d rather Denise thought it was a bad case of air-sickness . . . something small, something like that. If I’m going to get bills from New York, and maybe inquiries and correspondence, I’d rather a family friend looked after it all. I still have some small business interests, and–’
    ‘You won’t feel like business for a day or two,’ I said. ‘You want me to telephone a friend? Where can I reach him?’ I opened my notebook.
    He lay scanning my face, and I concealed my impatience. This meant, presumably, a mistress in another part of the island. However, no patient will recover unless his mind is at rest. I waited.
    ‘I want you to take a letter,’ he said. ‘To Coral Harbour. That’s where he is. Or so the papers all said three days ago. He’s Johnson Johnson, the portrait painter, maybe you know the name? And you’ll find him on his yacht, a biggish ketch called the Dolly .’
    I said I would think about it, and left him to write his letter while I did a tour of my cases. My two stomachs were doing quite well, the perforation having dispensed with his Levine already. We had lost the cervical spine dislocation. An amoebic abscess had come in, and two new tubercular cases: I read the notes on my desk. After a thorough afternoon’s work I walked through the private wing and across the path into the laboratory. There I found a room to myself, and set to analysing four samples I had taken from my bag in the hospital. One was of warm milk and the other of aspirin. The remaining two were from the contents of Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe’s stomach after each of his attacks.
    The warm milk was innocent, and so was the aspirin. But both the samples from Edgecombe confirmed my own clinical diagnosis.
    Neither attack had been caused by B. botulinus, or B. enteritidis or anything resembling an infected crab sandwich.
    Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe had been poisoned by arsenic.

 
     
TWO
    James Ulric MacRannoch was at home when I called in, on my way to the Coral Harbour marina.
    My father, in his efforts to deny to Japanese hands the substance of the MacRannochs, had rented for his sojourn in Nassau a delightful and expensive villa with a white pillared porch and a swimming-pool. Hummingbirds, species Calliphlox evelynae, lurked in the butterfly flowers, and the coconut palms were placed as nicely as sutures.
    Inside, he had pink bamboo furniture on pink mohair carpeting, offsetting the large coloured staff who stood about smiling, because of the amount he was paying them. This had all been settled by his friend the Begum long before we arrived, and I took nothing to do with it. I stayed with my father because he needed to be under medical supervision, but I was financially independent of him and intended to remain so, although the cost of living in the Bahamas was reducing my bank account to eunuchoidism.
    However, since I had finally made a clean incision in the chain of worthy and well-connected young suitors prepared by