Doctor On The Brain Read Free Page A

lost, first love.
    At that moment the dean’s daughter Muriel was sitting just some fifty yards away in the medical school library. She looked at her large wristwatch with its sweep second hand for the twenty-second time that morning. She bit her lip, suppressing her impatience. The moment was not yet ripe. She must control herself. Otherwise, she couldn’t effectively put the carefully thought-out plan into operation.
    During her final year as a medical student, Muriel generally left home in the morning before her father. She liked to hang about the casualty department, or nose round the wards – the patients conveniently being roused and exposed to medical attention since well before six a.m. – in the hope of coming upon instructive cases before the other students began crowding about. Sometimes she disappeared to the library, the gift of a Victorian brewer, with its riotously carved pale oak, vaulted ceilings and almost opaque leaded windows, then thought the necessary background to piety, justice, learning or the medical treatment of paupers. She sat in a bay lined with books, at a table with piled bound volumes of the British Medical Journal and Lancet, propped open in front of her Recent Advances in Medicine , at its side a note-book. That morning she had neither made a note nor read a word. She stared at the printed page through large round metal-rimmed glasses, like the dean’s, as unseeing as a nervous patient behind a waiting-room magazine.
    Muriel looked at her watch again. Two minutes and a half to nine o’clock. She stood up abruptly. Zero hour. If her timing was correct, running over the ground the morning before, she should arrive at her target precisely at the opportune moment.
    She shut the volume of Recent Advances . She looked round anxiously. She was still alone. It was early for even a conscientious student to be found in the library, but some girl from her own year might easily have looked in to check some facts, then casually attached herself as Muriel left, ruining the whole scheme. She took off her reading-glasses and slipped them with her notebook into a capacious brown handbag. For a second her fingertips stayed in the depths. It was still there, of course. She fancied it was still even warm.
    With a brisk step, Muriel turned towards the library door. She was tall, like her mother, her feet in flat shoes rather too large. Her plain brown dress was new, but like all her clothes seemed to belong to the fashion before last. Her hair was gathered into an untidy ponytail by a twisted rubber band. She was slim – when inspecting herself in her bedroom mirror on the top floor of the dean’s house, as she had so frequently over the past few weeks, she had to agree that her anatomy, though no different from any other girl’s, was tastefully distributed. It was a conclusion which frightened her a little. Had she tried, she could have made herself look as inviting as any of the hundreds of young women working at St Swithin’s. But she told her mother she hadn’t the time, and her father agreed beautification was quite unnecessary, the male students at St Swithin’s being as undiscriminating as a bunch of sex maniacs newly liberated from Broadmoor.
    Muriel left the library for the courtyard, but turned away from the steps of the main hospital entrance. St Swithin’s had grown as haphazardly as London itself, and in the four hundred years of its existence had thrown up buildings which met in awkward corners and narrow passages all over its irregular site. She followed a flagstoned alleyway beside the Georgian maternity department, skirted the brand-new sixteen-floor steel-and-glass surgical block and with a quick glance over her shoulder made towards the red-brick baronial battlements housing the pathology laboratories. She hurried past the gothic front door, and with another apprehensive glance turned round the back, then briskly mounted the black metal fire-escape. The door leading into the third