Читать онлайн «Colonel Butler's Wolf»

BUTLER LISTENED TO the sound of the nurse's quick step recede down the corridor until it was lost in the nursing home's silence, an expensive silence as far removed from the National Health Service as a dummy2. htm

Rolls-Royce was from a five-ton lorry.

For a moment he stood looking at himself in the mirror on the back of the door. Presumably its function was to enable Matron to check her uniform and her expression before leaving her office to patrol her kingdom; old RSM Hooker had had just such a mirror on his office door in the regimental depot.

But others did, like the reflection before him. It wasn't the hard face and the clashing reds of skin and hair which bothered him. They were only a little more out of place over a civilian suit than they had been over a uniform. He had always looked a bit like a prizefighter; now he looked like a retired prizefighter. But where had that air of defeat come from?

He sighed and turned away. Possibly it came from too many errands like this one, small and nasty errands that he scorned to escape. And which were being given him more and more often, he suspected.

It had even been an errand very much like this one which had started Hugh Roskill on his way to this place.

The thought of Hugh directed his eye to the steel filing cabinets beside the window. Hugh's case history and progress report would be in there and it would take him ten seconds to pick the silly lock and see for himself how far Hugh was swinging the lead.

He scowled with disgust: so far down the slope he had come that the exercise of his petty thief's skills was almost instinctive even when unnecessary. This was all mere routine and Hugh had undoubtedly been telling the simple truth—it wasn't the sort of thing a man would lie about, even one who enjoyed being fussed over by pretty nurses drawing twice the pay of their overworked sisters in the public service.