Dead in the Dog

That night, in the twilight before dinner, Peter Bright sat morosely in his room in the Mess, drinking a small whisky from his toothglass. He was no secret alcoholic, but kept a bottle of Black Label in his cupboard for the occasions when he preferred his own company to that of the anteroom across the way. Tonight he was in one of his antisocial moods and slumped in his unlovely easy chair after writing his monthly duty letter to his father, a family doctor in Sussex. His mother had died some years ago and he faithfully kept in touch with the old man, though tonight his letter was not up to his usual cheerful standard.

With the whisky getting warm in his hand, he glowered at the wall of the spartan room, his eyes fixed on a garish calendar supplied by the Chinese garage that serviced his MG, though the image of the simpering girl in a cheongsam failed to reach his brain. He was thinking of Diane Robertson and of all the unspeakable things he would like to do to that bastard James to get him out of her life.

As he had done at intervals for the past couple of months, he fantasized about ways of disposing of the husband, from poison to running him down with his car. He had fallen for the blonde very heavily indeed and though their flirting had progressed to energetic consummation, Diane had so far refused to consider a divorce. In fact, she seemed to have cooled off appreciably these past few weeks and the little red devil of jealousy that sat on his shoulder kept whispering that she had found someone else – possibly in the plural.

Peter threw down the rest of the spirit and unusually for him, got up to pour another. As he walked to the wall cupboard, few of his patients would have recognized their senior surgeon. Usually his major’s uniform was immaculate, with razor-edged creases down the sleeves and legs of his smartly tailored ‘jungle greens’. Tonight, after his shower at the end of the block, he had wrapped a cotton sarong around his waist, a red and white chequered tube that looked like a kitchen tablecloth. With bare chest and feet, he looked like some desert-island castaway, but the waved blond hair and the classical features made him look more like a Hollywood Tarzan than Robinson Crusoe.

He took his drink over to the desk and sat on a hard chair to drum his fingers restlessly on his writing pad. In two months’ time, his three-year tour in the Far East would be over and he had been promised a posting to the Royal Army Medical College at Millbank. After ten years in the army and having endured the first half of this tour in Korea, it was likely that after London, he would be promoted to lieutenant colonel and either given a senior post in the surgical hierarchy or even offered command of a hospital. But two months from now, he would be five thousand miles from Diane and all chance of securing the beautiful and passionate woman for a wife would be lost for ever. He deliberately thrust away any niggling doubt that she might no longer want him for a husband and concentrated on what action he could take.

Throwing down the last of the scotch, he made his decision.

Something drastic must be done or he might regret it for the rest of his life.

As the surgeon was mentally beating his bare breast and cudgelling his brains in the Officers’ Mess, his surgical teammate, anaesthetist David Meredith, was sitting in the stifling heat of a cinema in the garrison compound across the fence from the hospital. He was in the inflatable auditorium of the AKC – Army Kinematographic Corporation – which looked like the top half of a silver barrage balloon tethered to the ground.