In the Teeth of Adversity Page 2

  Pandora arched her back and spat at him. She was a cat prepared to sell her life dearly. If she had to go, she was going to take someone else with her.

  “I think she prefers it,” I said. “At any rate, my secretary is due in about half an hour.”

  Which reminded me. I went back to the desk, ignoring the nasty comments from underneath it, and scrawled a hasty message. “Gone to the dentist. Emergency. Expect me when you see me. Doug.”

  It was as close to the truth as it was wise to get on paper.

  Chapter 2

  You don’t see people at their best in a dentist’s waiting room. In fact, you don’t see them at all. No one bothered to focus on me as I entered, and if my case had been as serious as I’d been representing to the receptionist in loud tones, I wouldn’t have bothered noticing them either.

  As it was, I had a good look round while I crossed to an empty chair. Three dulled faces looked up from glossy magazines, just checking to make sure I wasn’t anyone who was going to call their names.

  The fourth seemed actively annoyed that I wasn’t. “I’ve been here half an hour,” he complained. “It’s not like Malcolm to keep me waiting. Are you certain he knows I’m here?”

  “Quite positive, Sir Geoffrey.” The new receptionist, who had – unnecessarily – guided me into the waiting room, smiled brightly.

  The old boy twirled his moustache and leered at her, betraying as fine a set of porcelain choppers as had ever been seen outside an antique shop. That explained why he wasn’t afraid of seeing his dentist more than twice a year. Old Sir Malcolm – Endicott’s father – determinedly fighting the spectre of retirement, listed his chess and poker pals as patients and scheduled them throughout the working day, so that he could maintain the fiction of still engaging in a busy practice in his top-floor office. It was relatively harmless, as self-deceptions went, and I knew the active partners encouraged him in it – if only to keep him out of their hair and their offices.

  “Perhaps I ought to go up.” Sir Geoffrey leaned forward, shifting his weight to his silver-knobbed walking stick preparatory to rising. “Malcolm may have forgotten me. It’s a long time since you announced me.”

  “I’ll remind him again.” The receptionist had a steely note in her voice. “He is busy, you know.” It was clear that she had no intention of allowing patients to roam about the premises as they pleased.

  Which suited me. If there was any roaming to be done, I intended to be the one to do it, and it must be soon. By now, Zayle must have called the police and it would be beyond their comprehension if, having done so, he calmly rang downstairs for the next patient to be sent up so that he could fill in the time while waiting for their arrival. On the other hand, in the state he was in, it was just the sort of thing he might do. It was up to me to forestall him and get upstairs with him before the police came.

  I gave a muffled groan and put a hand up to my jaw. I didn’t even get a glance of sympathy from any of the others. Perhaps the groan had been too muffled – on my way out, I had snatched up a long scarf and wound it around my neck a couple of times. I felt that it not only gave the proper effect for someone suffering from a toothache, but it helped to disguise my identity.

  Loosening the scarf enough to let sound escape it, I tried again. This time I gave a modified version of the anguished yowl Pandora lets out when she realizes that we are actually going past the fishmonger’s without going in.

  There were three short, sharp exclamations of sound as magazines hit the floor, having dropped from nerveless fingers. As befitted one who had seen action in numerous campaigns through the course of several wars, Sir Geoffrey was the first to leap into action.

  “Good God, lad!” he cried. “Hold fast! Here –” He rapidly unscrewed the bulbous silver top from his walking stick and inverted the stick over it. The aroma of five-star Channel brandy filled the room as he thrust the bulb into my hand. “Here – drink this!”

  I’d always suspected the cat of overacting. But I couldn’t complain of inattention now. Every eye was on me. There was nothing to do but sip the brandy with what I hoped they’d take for a brave smile.

  “That’s the spirit, lad!” Sir Geoffrey encouraged. It certainly was – about 120 proof. He must have had it smuggled in privately.

  “Terribly sorry,” I apologized. “My tooth ... suddenly ... emergency. But” – I shrugged deprecatingly, looking around at them – “you were here first ... with appointments ... I can wait” – visibly, I controlled a wince – “until the dentist can fit me in.” As I had expected, it was the one queue in which every true Englishman would gladly relinquish his place to another. The babble was deafening.

  “Wouldn’t hear of it.” “Take my place – only a check-up.” “I can wait. Nothing urgent.”

  “Nonsense, lad!” Sir Geoffrey’s voice overrode them all. “You can come up with me. Sir Malcolm himself will work on you.”

  I paled. Sir Malcolm’s tactics in field hospitals from the Somme to Salerno had figured largely in the bittersweet reminiscences of famous military leaders. To the point that it seemed probable, when future historians began investigating certain famous engagements in depth, they would discover an appointment with Sir Malcolm in the morning had led to more charges Over the Top than were motivated by any desire to win glory for King and Country.

  There might be nothing wrong with me when I went into Sir Malcolm’s surgery, but there would be when I came out.

  “Drink up,” Sir Geoffrey urged, “and we’ll be on our way. Don’t sip – gulp it down. That’s prime stuff. Why, I’ve seen amputations carried out in emergency field theatres with no more than that used as anaesthetic.”

  I gulped. “No, really,” I said, trying not to choke. “I couldn’t do that. I mean, the young Zayle is my dentist. It would offend professional courtesy, or something, if I went to his father, wouldn’t it?”

  “Quite right,” a no-nonsense female voice said firmly. “You must take my place. I must get back to the House, in any case. I can’t wait here all afternoon.”

  I took another look at the lady. Now that the colour was creeping back into her face at the prospect of evading her appointment and the magazine no longer masked her, I recognized her as the Rt. Hon. Kate Halroyd, one of our more embattled lady MPs.

  “Thank you,” I said. “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Not at all.” She reinforced her words with a wide smile, and I could see that she had had plenty of practice in the past at avoiding dental appointments.

  “You could take my appointment,” the other woman said. She, too, was identifiable now: the Hon. Edytha Cale-Cunningham, more usually seen in the context of horse and paddock and race meets. “But mine is with Ty – Mr. Meredith. He seems to be taking quite a long while, too,” she added wistfully.

  “Perhaps they’re in conference,” I suggested. With Morgana Fane expired upon their premises, the partners had quite a lot to confer over. I only hoped that Zayle had started the due processes of the law rolling before he’d got sidetracked. The thought unnerved me so much that I winced in earnest.

  “You mustn’t stand here in agony, poor boy,” the MP said as solicitously as though I’d been in her constituency. “Go straight up and tell Mr. Zayle that I said you were to have my appointment.”

  “Very kind of you,” I said. “If you’re quite sure –”

  “And tell Morgana to hurry up.” The other man hadn’t spoken before. As he was the only nonentity in the room – besides myself – that meant that he must be the latest in the constant succession of Morgana Fane’s business managers. “Tell her we’re due at Vogue in half an hour.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t for me to inform him that Morgana Fane was not receiving messages anymore. I wasn’t supposed to know yet. I was just an innocent bystander who had dropped in for emergency treatment.

  “Thanks,” I said, handing the silver bulb back to Sir Geoffrey. “Thanks – all of you. I really appreciate this.”

  “Wai
t a minute, lad.” Sir Geoffrey halted me as I started out. “Strategy – that’s what we need. All very well for this lady to give up her appointment, but that receptionist has her own ideas. I’ve crossed swords with her more than once. Damned contrary wench. She’d never let you get past her desk. Tell you what, I’ll engage her in conversation and you slip past when she isn’t looking.”

  It seemed as good a plan as any; I was still cheered to know that access to the surgery was guarded so zealously. It reduced the chance of anyone’s having wandered up to see what was taking so long. Not that I thought anyone had. They’d all been sitting around much too calmly for that. Morgana Fane’s was not a body one might stumble across lightly.

  Voices rose heatedly in the reception area. I didn’t need Sir Geoffrey’s frantic signal, as the receptionist flounced over to a filing cabinet, to slide past and dive for the door.

  The thick carpeting on the stairs would have muffled any sound, even if I hadn’t been trying to be quiet. It wasn’t just that I preferred to remain unnoticed by the receptionist, nor even that I felt it would be lacking respect to the recently departed to make noise. It was something else – a dark, breathless void about the atmosphere – as though the whole house were gathering itself together against the explosion which was to come.

  I found Endicott Zayle hovering in the doorway of his tiny X-ray room between the surgeries. He was staring at the closed door of his own surgery with wide, haunted eyes, as though he were waiting for some spectre to emerge and begin haunting him for the rest of his life.

  He might be right. Certainly, if we couldn’t smooth this unhappy incident over, it would haunt him in the press and in his professional, if not private, life from now until retirement. It would even figure prominently in his obituary notice, the reminiscences of the event quite over-shadowing his own demise. Haunting enough for any man, with no help from the supernatural necessary.

  “You’ve called the police,” I said, trying to make it a statement and not a question.

  He turned wild, glazed eyes onto me and I knew the answer.

  “A doctor?”

  “I – I can’t. I couldn’t use the telephone downstairs where everyone could hear me. Any my other telephone” – he gestured helplessly toward the closed door – “is in there. I – I can’t go in there again.”

  I checked my watch. Incredibly, only a quarter of an hour had passed since we’d left my office. We still had time – if we didn’t delay any longer. I started for that closed door.

  “No, wait –” He grabbed my arm, holding me back. “Give me just another minute, to – to –”

  “You’ve had plenty of time to get used to it,” I said firmly, trying to shake him off. “The longer we delay now, the worse it will look.”

  “But you don’t understand.” He gripped tighter. “You can’t. You’re a layman. You only read about it in the papers from time to time. You can’t know what it means to a professional. It’s the nightmare we all dread. A patient – someone who looked and acted perfectly normal – sitting there, perfectly all right one moment. And the next – with no warning. You can never tell beforehand who’s going to react in what way. Every patient is a bit apprehensive. It’s too bad, but it’s natural – from their point of view – I suppose. But one of them – one in perhaps hundreds of thousands – is going to be so abnormally terrified that there’s a fantastic overproduction of adrenaline coursing into their bloodstream and – that’s it. They die! Right there in your chair. They die of fright.”

  It was a good routine. I nodded, making mental notes for future use, wondering if he could reproduce just those same impassioned tones if he was called upon to do it again for the press. However, the press was one thing – and just between ourselves was another. Between ourselves, there were other things to be sorted out.

  “Unless,” I said ruthlessly, “they die because a new anaesthetic isn’t all their dentist thought it would be.”

  For a moment, I thought his own adrenaline was going to come up with something pretty nasty. He went a mottled purple and began taking deep breaths.

  However, he’d let go of my arm and I took advantage of the opportunity to fling open the door of his surgery.

  Once that was done, it seemed to break the trance he was in and he entered slowly behind me. Everything looked much the same as it had on my last visit. The same sterilizing cabinet, the tray of instruments set out on the side table, the rack with the X rays of the day’s patients. Everything looked exactly the same to my eyes.

  Even the chair. Empty and waiting for me.

  “This was a pretty sneaky trick to get me to keep an appointment.” I turned to him accusingly. “Did Gerry think this one up for you?” There were times when I wouldn’t put anything past my partner, and this was one of them.

  “I don’t understand ...” His eyes bulged and his arms flapped feebly in protest against what he was seeing. “She was here – in that chair.” He advanced upon the chair as though the body might come into focus if he got near enough.

  “She isn’t there now,” I said, reinforcing the evidence of his own eyes.

  “But – but where is she?” That adrenaline must have been doing a war dance through his system now. I hoped he wasn’t going to expire upon my hands. “She can’t have just disappeared. What’s happened to her – her body?”

  I looked around helpfully, but the room remained the same. It was shining and clean – sterile in fact. And completely nook-and-crannyless, the better to achieve the acme of sterility. There wasn’t room to hide a small mouse, let along a full-grown female body.

  I turned my look to Zayle with some suspicion. There wasn’t even any gas apparatus in the room. Dentists, I suppose, are only human. They must have their pressures and tensions like the rest of us. It was just possible that he was cracking up. And it was typical of Perkins & Tate’s luck that he should have chosen to have his nervous breakdown all over us.

  “You’re sure,” I inquired delicately, “that – er –”

  “Of course, I’m sure,” he snarled. “You don’t think I could mistake something like that?”

  “Not mistake, exactly,” I said. “But – perhaps you’ve been overworking lately?”

  It was the wrong thing to say, of course. But in a situation like this, it was hard to find the right thing.

  “Are you suggesting” – he began advancing on me with a nasty look in his eyes – “that I’m imagining things?”

  “No, no.” I backed away hastily. He wasn’t armed, but there were any number of sinister instruments lying on that tray, ready to be snatched up and wielded at a moment’s provocation. “Certainly not. It – it was just a theory that sprang to mind. I can see how silly it was.”

  “You mean –” He was not about to be mollified. “You don’t think I’m overworked. Possibly you don’t believe I work at all?”

  “No, no, you work very hard. I’m sure of it. I’ve seen you at work. You and your partner, both.”

  “Tyler –” His wild eyes turned toward the wall separating their surgeries. “Yes, Tyler. He might have come in to speak to me, taken in the situation, and –”

  “And disposed of the body for you,” I finished, without any great triumph. It was probably what had happened, which meant we were back where we started from, only in a worse mess than before. I’d have preferred the nervous breakdown. It was going to be even harder to present this to the press as a perfectly normal and understandable reaction than the original dereliction of duty.

  The police, also, took a notoriously dim view of people’s playing musical chairs with bodies – it looked like a suspiciously guilty reaction. And, I recalled, it was Tyler Meredith who had invented the new anaesthetic they were testing on Morgana Fane.

  “Well.” I looked at Endicott Zayle. Now that he had settled the question of the disappearance to what was apparently his own satisfaction, he seemed to have lost interest in it. He had stopped by the tray of instruments and was fiddling with them.
“Hadn’t we better go and ask him about it?”

  “Oh, no, that’s quite all right.” Zayle continued to potter happily with some sinister-looking probes and angled mirrors. “Tyler will have taken care of everything. We needn’t bother anymore.”

  While I considered it laudable – in fact, necessary – to have every confidence in your partner, I still felt Zayle’s attitude left something to be desired. Responsibility, perhaps. Not to mention a sense of duty, a conscience, a –

  Looking beyond Zayle, at the doorway, I found my thoughts colliding like irresponsible motorists on a foggy Ml. I tried to find my voice, and after a moment, I succeeded.

  “You’re sure,” I said softly, “you’re absolutely positive that Morgana Fane was really dead when you left her in that chair?”

  “Of course, I am.” He glared at me, bristling. “Don’t you think I can recognize a cadaver when I see one? What kind of fool do you take me for?”

  I smiled weakly, still looking beyond him. There wasn’t much of an answer I could give to that one. Not with Morgana Fane standing in the doorway behind him.

  Morgana Fane, alive and breathing. Breathing fire, in fact. She charged into the room, radiating fury.

  “There you are!” she said. “What in hell is going on around here?”

  Chapter 3

  I was glad she’d asked the question. I was dying to know the answer myself.

  Zayle stiffened as though he’d been shot in the back and turned slowly. “No,” he said. “No!”

  “Where did you go? Where have you been?” Morgana Fane whirled into the room, still on the attack. “I thought you were a reputable dentist, but you pump my lungs full of that disgusting stuff, and then you disappear for hours. I don’t believe you care that much” – she snapped her fingers in his face – “for your patients. You’re nothing but a quack!”

  “Miss Fane.” Zayle reeled backward. I stood by to catch him if he started to collapse, as seemed not unlikely. “My dear Miss Fane!”