A Dead Man in Malta Read Free

But—‘“You’ll have to get out when the war comes,” he said.
    ‘“And you’ll have to get out right now!” said the Chief, as mad as hell.
    ‘Well, then he went to the Co-Cathedral. You been there? Well, you ought to go. It’s a wonderful place. What with all those chapels of the langues. Amazing! So they tell me. I don’t often go myself, though my wife says I should. Anyway, he went there and looked around.
    ‘“There’s a lot of space here,” he said, “which could be put to better use.”
    ‘Well, you know what doctors are. Bloody infidels, the lot of them. Oh, saving your presence, Doctor! Anyway, it got the Church in an uproar. And half the island. They went to the Governor about it. But, of course, he’s got other things on his plate just at the moment. This business at the hospital, for instance. So he didn’t pay much attention.
    ‘But there you have it. The old fellow’s a bit cracked these days. He’s got a bee in his bonnet and goes round making himself a nuisance. There’s no harm in him, really. It’s just that he’s a pain in the ass. Saving your presence, madam!’
    ‘He doesn’t sound quite the sort of person you should be talking to, Felix,’ said Mrs Wynne-Gurr.
    Felix closed his lips and reserved his position.
    They went down to the water together, the Wynne-Gurrs and Seymour and the Inspector, and took a water-taxi, or dghajsa , as Seymour was learning to call them, to the Senglea side. Down at water level, and closer to the warships, they looked enormous and very threatening. Seymour wondered if there could be anything in what that cracked doctor had said about a war being just around the corner. Sitting there in the sunshine in the open boat it was hard to believe it.
    At Bighi they parted, the Wynne-Gurrs going in one direction, the Inspector taking Seymour in another. He led him to a small room in the hospital in which three doctors were sitting. Two of them were British, the third, Maltese. ‘And let me correct, right away, an impression you may have gained,’ said one of the British doctors: ‘our nurses here are first class.’
    The other British doctor nodded.
    ‘First class,’ he confirmed. ‘Compare well with any I’ve seen in London. Or Portsmouth, for that matter. Cot deaths, for Christ’s sake! This is a naval hospital not a bloody maternity one!’
    ‘Yet we do have to face it,’ said the Maltese doctor quietly: ‘there’s something that needs explaining. They shouldn’t have died.’
    ‘It does happen, Eduardo.’
    ‘I know. But usually there’s some explanation.’
    ‘Well, there is here.’
    ‘Three?’ said the Maltese doctor. ‘We haven’t had a single death of that sort in the past two years. But we’ve had three! In not much more than a month.’
    ‘Yes, but … respiratory failure!’
    The Maltese doctor turned to Seymour. ‘You may not be aware of medical conventions, Mr Seymour. “Respiratory failure” is a medical certificate convention. You put it down because everybody understands it and accepts it. There is no further argument, which is a handy thing from a doctor’s point of view. And it is not untrue, because it is what happens when you die. You stop breathing. But it is not, of course, what causes death. That is always due to some other medical factor. But you may not want to put it down. Or, of course, you may not know. As in these cases. The problem here is that there is no other medical factor.’
    ‘Shock?’ suggested one of the other doctors tentatively.
    ‘People don’t usually die of shock. One has to allow for it, of course. I thought I’d better allow for it in the case of that German. I was the doctor who examined him when he was admitted, and I looked particularly for symptoms of shock. I would certainly have been showing them if it had been me. Going down into the water from a great height. But I couldn’t find any. I thought, though, that there could be delayed symptoms so I kept him in for