Skin and Other Stories Read online

  'Probably double that,' Robert said.

  'Then that's the first thing we look for,' the Inspector said.

  'I personally do not propose to go down on my hands and knees grubbing around in that pile of slush,' Robert said. 'I don't feel like it at this moment.'

  'Leave it to us,' the Inspector said. 'We'll find it. That was a clever place to hide it.'

  'My wife thought of it. But tell me, Inspector, if by some remote chance they had found it ...'

  'Impossible,' the Inspector said. 'How could they?'

  'They might have seen it lying on the floor after the ice had melted,' Robert said. 'I agree it's unlikely. But if they had spotted it, would they have taken it?'

  'I think they would,' the Inspector said. 'No one can resist a diamond. It has a sort of magnetism about it. Yes, if one of them had seen it on the floor, I think he would have slipped it into his pocket. But don't worry about it, doctor. It'll turn up.'

  'I'm not worrying about it,' Robert said. 'Right now, I'm worrying about my wife and about our house. My wife spent years trying to make this place into a good home.'

  'Now look, sir,' the Inspector said, 'the thing for you to do tonight is to take your wife off to a hotel and get some rest. Come back tomorrow, both of you, and we'll start sorting things out. There'll be someone here all the time looking after the house.'

  'I have to operate at the hospital first thing in the morning,' Robert said. 'But I expect my wife will try to come along.'

  'Good,' the Inspector said. 'It's a nasty upsetting business having your house ripped apart like this. It's a big shock. I've seen it many times. It hits you very hard.'

  Robert and Betty Sandy stayed the night at Oxford's Randolph Hotel, and by eight o'clock the following morning Robert was in the Operating Theatre at the hospital, beginning to work his way through his morning list.

  Shortly after noon, Robert had finished his last operation, a straightforward non-malignant prostate on an elderly male. He removed his rubber gloves and mask and went next door to the surgeons' small rest-room for a cup of coffee. But before he got his coffee, he picked up the telephone and called his wife.

  'How are you, darling?' he said.

  'Oh Robert, it's so awful,' she said. 'I just don't know where to begin.'

  'Have you called the insurance company?'

  'Yes, they're coming any moment to help me make a list.'

  'Good,' he said. 'And have the police found our diamond?'

  'I'm afraid not,' she said. 'They've been through every bit of that slush in the kitchen and they swear it's not there.'

  'Then where can it have gone? Do you think the vandals found it?'

  'I suppose they must have,' she said. 'When they broke those ice-trays all the ice-cubes would have fallen out. They fall out when you just bend the tray. They're meant to.'

  'They still wouldn't have spotted it in the ice,' Robert said.

  'They would when the ice melted,' she said. 'Those men must have been in the house for hours. Plenty of time for it to melt.'

  'I suppose you're right.'

  'It would stick out a mile lying there on the floor,' she said, 'the way it shines.'

  'Oh dear,' Robert said.

  'If we never get it back we won't miss it much anyway, darling,' she said. 'We only had it a few hours.'

  'I agree,' he said. 'Do the police have any leads on who the vandals were?'

  'Not a clue,' she said. 'They found lots of fingerprints, but they don't seem to belong to any known criminals.'

  'They wouldn't,' he said, 'not if they were hooligans off the street.'

  'That's what the Inspector said.'

  'Look, darling,' he said, 'I've just about finished here for the morning. I'm going to grab some coffee, then I'll come home to give you a hand.'

  'Good,' she said. 'I need you, Robert. I need you badly.'

  'Just give me five minutes to rest my feet,' he said, 'I feel exhausted.'

  In Number Two Operating Theatre not ten yards away, another senior surgeon called Brian Goff was also nearly finished for the morning. He was on his last patient, a young man who had a piece of bone lodged somewhere in his small intestine. Goff was being assisted by a rather jolly young Registrar named William Haddock, and between them they had opened the patient's abdomen and Goff was lifting out a section of the small intestine and feeling along it with his fingers. It was routine stuff and there was a good deal of conversation going on in the room.

  'Did I ever tell you about the man who had lots of little live fish in his bladder?' William Haddock was saying.

  'I don't think you did,' Goff said.

  'When we were students at Barts,' William Haddock said, 'we were being taught by a particularly unpleasant Professor of Urology. One day, this twit was going to demonstrate how to examine the bladder using a cystoscope. The patient was an old man suspected of having stones. Well now, in one of the hospital waiting-rooms, there was an aquarium that was full of those tiny little fish, neons they're called, brilliant colours, and one of the students sucked up about twenty of them into a syringe and managed to inject them into the patient's bladder when he was under his pre-med, before he was taken up to Theatre for his cystoscopy.'

  'That's disgusting!' the theatre sister cried. 'You can stop right there, Mr Haddock!'

  Brian Goff smiled behind his mask and said, 'What happened next?' As he spoke, he had about three feet of the patient's small intestine lying on the green sterile sheet, and he was still feeling along it with his fingers.

  'When the Professor got the cystoscope into the bladder and put his eye to it,' William Haddock said, 'he started jumping up and down and shouting with excitement.

  '"What is it, sir?" the guilty student asked him. "What do you see?"

  '"It's fish!" cried the Professor. "There's hundreds of little fish! They're swimming about!"'

  'You made it up,' the theatre sister said. 'It's not true.'

  'It most certainly is true,' the Registrar said. 'I looked down the cystoscope myself and saw the fish. And they were actually swimming about.'

  'We might have expected a fishy story from a man with a name like Haddock,' Goff said. 'Here we are,' he added. 'Here's this poor chap's trouble. You want to feel it?'

  William Haddock took the pale grey piece of intestine between his fingers and pressed. 'Yes,' he said. 'Got it.'

  'And if you look just there,' Goff said, instructing him, 'you can see where the bit of bone has punctured the mucosa. It's already inflamed.'

  Brian Goff held the section of intestine in the palm of his left hand. The sister handed him a scalpel and he made a small incision. The sister gave him a pair of forceps and Goff probed down amongst all the slushy matter of the intestine until he found the offending object. He brought it out, held firmly in the forceps, and dropped it into the small stainless-steel bowl the sister was holding. The thing was covered in pale brown gunge.

  'That's it,' Goff said. 'You can finish this one for me now, can't you, William. I was meant to be at a meeting downstairs fifteen minutes ago.'

  'You go ahead,' William Haddock said. 'I'll close him up.'

  The senior surgeon hurried out of the Theatre and the Registrar proceeded to sew up, first the incision in the intestine, then the abdomen itself. The whole thing took no more than a few minutes.

  'I'm finished,' he said to the anaesthetist.

  The man nodded and removed the mask from the patient's face.

  'Thank you, sister,' William Haddock said. 'See you tomorrow.' As he moved away, he picked up from the sister's tray the stainless-steel bowl that contained the gunge-covered brown object. 'Ten to one it's a chicken bone,' he said and he carried it to the sink and began rinsing it under the tap.

  'Good God, what's this?' he cried. 'Come and look, sister!'

  The sister came over to look. 'It's a piece of costume jewellery,' she said. 'Probably part of a necklace. Now how on earth did he come to swallow that?'

  'He'd have passed it if it had