SURGEON AT ARMS

Graham recognized Sheila Raleigh. She must have just returned from France. 'I must apologize,' he told her absently. 'I've had rather a lot of things occupying me. It's about the Annex Club, I suppose?'

'No, it isn't.' She looked round. 'Could we have a moment alone?'

'Yes, of course.'

They said nothing until he let her into his flat. He felt she had chosen a damn inconsiderate moment to call. 'I hope you're liking the job?'

'Yes, it's wonderful. I can't thank you enough. Particularly after I said such bitter things to you once.'

'I deserved them.'

'No, you didn't. But you can understand how I felt at the time? I had to blame someone. It all seemed so pointless otherwise.'

Impatient to get rid of her, Graham asked, 'What can I do for you now.'

'It's about your house, Graham. In France.' She sat down, frowning. 'There's something fishy about it. There was a man who came to look at it, just before I left yesterday. A Frenchman, a very nasty piece of work. He arrived in a Citroлn with two others, who looked like thugs. Apparently…well, apparently you don't own the place at all. Lord Cazalay does. He's been "selling" it to a dozen different people. Oh, Graham, I'm so sorry! It must be awful to have lost all that money.'

25

For a week Graham read the morning and evening papers with eagerness and apprehension. But the Press stayed infuriatingly bare of facts, reassuring or deadly. Lord Cazalay and ferrety-faced Arthur were remanded in custody by the Bow Street magistrate on some comparatively trivial charge, a detective-superintendent implying from the witness box that all hell was in store for them once it could be properly documented. The disgraced Fred Butcher was announced by his distraught secretary as having entered an unnamed nursing-home for 'nerves'. He had sent his passport to Scotland Yard, though purely as a matter of courtesy.

The Tory party, squashed for a couple of years under Mr Attlee's majority, fell like bluebottles on the festering wound in the pure-white body of socialism. They even stripped the friable wrappings from the mummified first Lord Cazalay, recalling with glee that his disgrace had occurred under the sway of Ramsay MacDonald. There was a dreadful fuss in the House of Commons. The Speaker twice suspended the sitting, leaving the chamber like a despairing headmaster shaming his boys with a display of dignity. Two more Ministers resigned (but kept their passports). Then the Government neatly announced an investigatory tribunal to be established, under a judge of unassailable wisdom and impartiality. The matter was henceforward _sub judice,_ and could not with propriety be raised in public at all. The House simmered down, the legislators turning their vigilance to the raising of the school-leaving age to fifteen.

After ten days of uncertainty, paralysing all his activities and most of his thoughts outside his professional ones, Graham ran into John Bickley in the Cavendish Clinic. He had just finished his last case of the afternoon, loosening a Dupuytren's contracture in the palm of a stockbroker (the deformity interfered badly with his shooting). As he pushed open the door of the surgeons' room to change, he found the anaesthetist in his long green theatre gown, packing away rubber masks, tubing, swabs, syringes, and other tools of oblivion into a square black-leather bag.

'That was the best advice anyone's given me in my life,' Graham said at once.

John looked up. 'About not operating on that spiv fellow?' He gave a smile. 'You know, I hadn't the slightest expectation that you'd take it.'

'If I had, I'd be well and truly up the creek by now, wouldn't I? With all this fuss, all these political people getting interested, trying to outdo each other scratching up the dirt. The ridiculous aspect of the whole affair is that I'd nothing to worry about from Cazalay. Nothing at all. He simply swindled me out of my money. He didn't even buy those pernicious francs in the first place.'

'How much did you lose?'

'Five thousand quid.'

John's eyebrows shot up.

'Yes, I'm a mug,' Graham admitted. 'Cazalay might as well have sold me a gold brick or the Eiffel Tower-didn't some bright Frenchman flog it to the Germans for scrap during the war?' He undid a length of bandage round his waist, and slipped the white linen operating trousers from his spindly legs. 'But perhaps it was a reasonable fee to pay for the shock treatment. I've learnt my lesson. Henceforward Trevose sticks to the straight and narrow path.'

'Oh, come, Graham! You're making yourself sound like an old lag, not an ornament to one of our Orders of Chivalry.'

Graham threw his trousers into the corner with an impatient gesture. 'You know what I mean. Well, you ought to. You don't imagine I'm unaware of your going about referring to me as "Flash Harry"?' John laughed. 'By the way, I'm giving up my private practice,' Graham added.

The anaesthetist paused in packing away his apparatus and stared at him. 'You're not serious?'