The Nursing Home Murder Read Free Page B

gesture. She beamed at them.
    “And now, old girl, I’m afraid you’ll have to fly away yourself,” said O’Callaghan with a desperate effort to answer roguishness with brotherly playfulness. “I think I hear Phillips arriving.”
    “Come along, Ruth,” said his wife. “We must make ourselves scarce. Good night again, Derek.”
    Ruth laid a gnarled finger on her lips and tiptoed elaborately to the door. There she turned and blew him a kiss.
    He heard them greet Sir John Phillips briefly and go upstairs. In his relief at being rid of his sister, O’Callaghan felt a wave of good-fellowship for John Phillips. Phillips was an old friend. It would be a relief to tell him how ill he felt — to learn how ill he really was. Perhaps Phillips would give him something that would help him along for the time being. He already felt a little better. Very likely it was a trifling thing after all. Phillips would know. He turned to the door with an air of pleased expectancy. Nash opened the door and came in.
    “Sir John Phillips, sir.” Phillips entered the room.
    He was an extremely tall man with an habitual stoop. His eyes, full-lidded and of a peculiarly light grey, were piercingly bright. No one ever saw him without his single eye-glass and there was a rumour that he wore it ribbonless while he operated. His nose was a beak and his under lip jutted out aggressively. He was unmarried, and unmoved, so it was said, by the general tendency among his women patients to fall extravagantly in love with him. Perhaps next to actors medical men profit most by the possession of that curious quality that people call “personality.” Sir John Phillips was, very definitely, a personage. His rudeness was more glamorously famous than his brilliant ability.
    O’Callaghan moved towards him, his hand extended.
    “Phillips!” he said, “I’m delighted to see you.”
    Phillips ignored the hand and stood stock-still until the door had closed behind Nash. Then he spoke.
    “You will be less delighted when you hear my business,” he said.
    “Why — what on earth’s the matter with you?”
    “I can scarcely trust myself to speak to you.”
    “What the devil do you mean?”
    “Precisely what I say. I’ve discovered you are a blackguard and I’ve come to tell you so.”
    O’Callaghan stared at him in silence.
    “Apparently you are serious,” he said at last. “May I ask if you intend merely to call me names and then walk out? Or am I to be given an explanation?”
    “I’ll give you your explanation. In two words. Jane Harden.”
    There was a long silence. The two men stared at each other. At last O’Callaghan turned away. A kind of mulish huffiness in his expression made him look ridiculous and unlikeable.
    “What about Jane Harden?” he said at last.
    “Only this. She’s a nurse at my hospital. For a very long time her happiness has been an important thing for me. I have asked her to marry me. She has refused, over and over again. To-day she told me why. It seems you made capital out of a friendship with her father and out of her present poverty. You played the ‘old family friend’ combined with the distinguished philanderer.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Don’t lie, O’Callaghan!”
    “Look here— ”
    “I know the facts.”
    “What sort of tale have you listened to!”
    “One that brought me here to-night angrier than I ever remember myself before. I know the precise history of your — your friendship with her. You amused yourself, evidently. I dislike overstatement but I believe it would be no overstatement if I said, as I do say, that you’ve ruined Jane’s life for her.”
    “Damn’ sentimental twaddle!” said O’Callaghan breathlessly. “She’s a modern young woman and she knows how to enjoy herself.”
    “That’s a complete misrepresentation.” Phillips had turned exceedingly white, but he spoke evenly. “If, by the phrase ‘a modern young woman,’ you mean a ‘loose