BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY ERNEST DUDLEY
The Amazing Martin Brett: Classic Crime Stories
Department of Spooks: Stories of Suspense and Mystery
More Cases of a Private Eye: Classic Crime Stories
The Private Eye: Classic Crime Stories
The Return of Sherlock Holmes: A Classic Crime Tale
THE DR. MORELLE CLASSIC CRIME SERIES
Dr. Morelle and the Doll: A Classic Crime Novel
Dr. Morelle at Midnight: A Classic Crime Novel
Dr. Morelle Investigates: Two Classic Crime Tales
Dr. Morelle Meets Murder: Classic Crime Stories
The Mind of Dr. Morelle: A Classic Crime Novel
New Cases for Dr. Morelle: Classic Crime Stories
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1959 by Ernest Dudley
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Special thanks to Heather and Dave Datta for scanning this book.
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Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To the Memory of Jane Grahame
CHAPTER ONE
The atmosphere of the operating-theatre was decidedly warm. A gleam of white walls, the glitter of bottles and winking instruments, even the autoclaves and washbasin taps seemed to pick up the brilliance of the green-white light.
A team of people stood round the operating-table under the intense heat of the 500-watt lamp. The table was draped with a green cloth. The patient was entirely covered in green towels. Except for the head. They called it the working area because the chief was operating on the brain. Green-robed, wearing white rubber boots, green cap, white gauze breathing-mask like everyone else in the theatre, he went skilfully to work.
On either side of the operating-table near the patient’s head were instrument trolleys. These too were draped in green. Over the patient’s head, on a high table, scalpels and scissors winked in the brilliant lights.
The pretty brunette student staring down from the crowded, glass-enclosed students’ gallery into the operating-theatre wondered inconsequently who the patient was. He could be a murderer, for all we know, she thought.
The surgeon’s hand flickered. Instantly the senior dresser passed him the correct instrument. No word spoken. The silent language of hand signals.
The operation was at a critical stage. Lifting his eyes, one of the green-garbed figures glanced up and gazed round the theatre, he alone appeared detached, an observer. The pretty brunette whose attention had been oddly attracted by the tall figure before, perhaps because everyone else was vitally concerned with the operation, wondered who he was. She knew the short, dumpy man next to him. He was Sir Trevor Kirkland, the famous neurologist; it looked as if the other was there by Sir Trevor’s invitation to see the Swiss surgeon’s new method of trepanning. The registrar, the house-surgeon, the theatre sister, the anaesthetist, staff nurse, ward nurse, a team to back up the chief, a team with the most important job in the world, these she knew by sight.
A nurse passed that tall, detached figure carrying swabs. Green swabs, each with a fine metal line running through it, so that if by any ill chance one got left behind inside the patient, X-rays would soon pick it up. She began counting them, reported them all correct. She was concerned with nothing else. Just swabs.
Another nurse put used instruments back into the sterilizer.
There was a slight sound as the anaesthetist moved. He and his assistant sat at the foot of the patient, completely cut off from their colleagues behind the screen formed by the draped instrument trolleys set on either side and over the patient. While the other members of the team concentrated on the operation these two men were the sentinels of the patient’s life. They watched the black oval-shaped ball attached to the anaesthetic mask as it inflated and deflated in time to the patient’s breathing. At regular intervals they took the blood-pressure and checked the pulse.
The brunette student saw the tall man next to Kirkland return his gaze to the patient’s head. At the beginning of the operation the chief had scratched an outline on the shaven scalp to mark out the area where he was to operate. He had cut into the layers of skin which comprise the scalp. At this stage he had made brief, terse observations to the students who, robed and masked, were in the theatre.
He had drilled a hole in the skull itself to enable him to insert a very fine little saw. With this he cut away the bone. A delicate moment this, the outer layers of the skull are very hard, but the inner parts are spongy. To cut through them calls for extreme skill. Yet the chief, with his muscular hands and spatulate fingers had referred earlier in his strong accent and with macabre humour to this part of his work as carpentry.
The white walls of the operating-theatre were high and their shining cleanliness made them look even more bare than they were. On one side ran the row of wash-basins and taps, opposite were shelves which held large bottles of medicaments and beneath them stood trolleys on which were autoclaves, steel instrument-holders.
Everyone sensed a sudden rise of tension in the quiet, starkly clean operating-theatre. There was no hasty movement, just a slight contraction of the chief’s beetling eyebrows. The critical moment had been reached. The brain had been lifted from its cavity on tapes. Now the chief had to cut away the area which was to be removed.
Almost suddenly the movements of the black ball slowed down, nearly ceased. The chief knew nothing of the patient’s relapse. The anaesthetist knew. Knew the patient’s life depended now on his own skill, and the chief’s. He began pressing the black ball. In, out. His assistant checked the pulse.
The chief was warned of the patient’s condition. He gave no sign that anything was amiss. He signalled for an instrument. The senior dresser passed it, picking it from the tray prepared by the theatre-sister before the operation began. The chief began to cut. The theatre-sister was commenting to herself with professional pride that the chief, although she had never worked with him before, had not so far deviated from her arrangement of the layout of the instruments as she’d judged he’d need them.
The tall figure with the strange air of distinction about him heard the anaesthetist speak briefly to his assistant. Drugs were to be injected to sustain the patient. Slowly the black ball, which seconds before had hung like a symbol of death itself, began to move. Automatically. The breathing gradually strengthened. The patient’s blood-pressure was taken. It was normal. So was his pulse.
As if he knew that the present climax had been safely passed, the tall man allowed his gaze once more to leave the operating-table. His dark, hooded eyes travelled slowly round the theatre again, seeking perhaps some relief from the impersonal, almost inhuman skill of the chief.
The brunette up in the students’ gallery wondered when she would be down there as a dresser. Three of the dressers working on this op were fourth-year students. Now she saw a staring-eyed nurse gazing fixedly at the chief’s hands. Her own looked as if they were trembling. It looked like her first big operation. After this time it would never be so bad again.
Behind the glass windows of the gallery, high above the theatre floor, packed with the staring faces of students, the brunette turned to another, a man student beside her, and whispered. She had asked him if he knew who the tall figure was, he looked like someone important, didn’t he agree? There was a quick nod, then both turned their eyes back to the operating-table. The nurse was still counting swabs.
The black ball moved regularly. The operation had been in progress for four hours.
As the chief worked, the tall man noticed how the joints on his powerful wrists stood out, even under the rubber gloves.