Dagger Magic

"Well, it's claimed another victim, maybe two. A man was killed there earlier this morning, and another's undergoing emergency surgery. The inspector's standing by, in case he regains consciousness, but it doesn't look good."

"I see."

"Here's the part you're going to love," Cochrane went on. "The man who's in surgery was still conscious when the police arrived. He claimed he'd veered off the road to avoid hitting a man and a pregnant woman - kept asking, 'Did I hit them? Did I hit them?"

"The problem is, none of the witnesses the police interviewed can recall seeing any pedestrians on the scene. Given the fact that the crash occurred in broad daylight, you'd've thought somebody would have seen the couple in question, but so far nobody's come forward with any descriptions. If I were a superstitious man, I'd be starting to wonder if maybe the driver of the crashed car might have seen a ghost."

As Master of the Hunting Lodge, Adam had known far stranger things to happen, but he forebore from saying so aloud. Though Donald Cochrane had received some peripheral esoteric instruction through his training as a Freemason, and McLeod had pegged him as a potential future recruit for the Hunting Lodge, his direct experience with the supernatural thus far had been solely in a support capacity. Adam himself was rapidly becoming convinced that there was more involved in the present case than malignant coincidence, but if things were about to shift into a more overt brush with the unknown, best to keep Cochrane at arm's length until they knew more.

"Well, it's reassuring to know that you aren't a superstitious man, Donald," he allowed. "I shouldn't think we'll find a ghost involved, but the situation does seem to go beyond mere coincidence. Do you happen to know the name of the surviving victim?"

"Aye, the inspector left it right here on his desk pad," Cochrane said. "The name's Malcolm Stuart Grant, with an address in Lanark. That's all I've got, though."

"That's enough for now," Adam replied, jotting the name on a notepad. "I just need to know who to ask for when I get to the Royal Infirmary."

"You'll go, then."

"Aye. Whatever the cause of these accidents, the effects would seem to be getting out of hand. I'll see what I can do to reshuffle my appointments for the rest of the morning. In the meantime, if Inspector McLeod should happen to check in, tell him I've received his message and will rendezvous with him at the hospital as soon as possible."

Uncertain how long he might find himself detained once he and McLeod met up, Adam rescheduled his two remaining patients for appointments the next day and postponed his usual morning rounds for later on in the afternoon, after which he signed out and headed for the car park.

He decided to risk the traffic on Morningside Road, and was relieved to find the route relatively uncluttered. Carrying on north and east along Bruntsfield Place, he bore right at the Toll Crossing onto Lauriston Place, whence a string of signs pointed the way toward the casualty department of Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary. He parked the Range Rover in a physicians' car park and headed toward the entrance.

It was not a hospital he normally frequented in his psychiatric practice, but its casualty department was reputed to be one of the two best in Scotland; Glasgow had the other. It was here that injured police officers and firefighters were most apt to be brought; he had watched with McLeod through several lonely nights when men's lives hung in the balance. He had been here once as a casualty himself - and Dr. Ximena Lockhart had been the on-call surgeon who had patched him up.

Shaking off the memory, he eased aside to let an ambulance crew wheel an empty gurney out of the building, then slipped inside and headed for the registrar's desk. He was reaching for his credentials when a breezy voice hailed him from farther along the corridor.

"Dr. Sinclair?"

Turning, he saw the familiar white-uniformed figure of Reggie Sykes, the orderly Ximena had been training in emergency-room procedures. Sykes's coffee-colored face split in a broad grin as he approached.

"I thought that was you, sir!" he exclaimed, the musical lilt in his voice proclaiming his Jamaican origins. "It's been a long time. Say, what you hear from that pretty lady of yours? How's her daddy gettin' on?"

The subject was one Adam would have preferred to avoid, but he knew Sykes had doted on the attractive American "Dr. X."

"I gather he's holding his own," he replied, not without some private reservations. "The last time we spoke on the phone, she described his condition as 'stable."

He hoped that Sykes would interpret the term optimistically, but the orderly pulled a grimace.

"Only stable, huh? With what he's got, that's not so good."