BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY ERNEST DUDLEY
The Amazing Martin Brett: Classic Crime Stories
Department of Spooks: Stories of Suspense and Mystery
More Cases of a Private Eye: Classic Crime Stories
The Private Eye: Classic Crime Stories
The Return of Sherlock Holmes: A Classic Crime Tale
To Love and Perish: A Classic Crime Novel
THE DR. MORELLE CLASSIC CRIME SERIES
Dr. Morelle and the Doll: A Classic Crime Novel
Dr. Morelle at Midnight: A Classic Crime Novel
Dr. Morelle Investigates: Two Classic Crime Tales
Dr. Morelle Meets Murder: Classic Crime Stories
The Mind of Dr. Morelle: A Classic Crime Novel
New Cases for Dr. Morelle: Classic Crime Stories
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1962 by Ernest Dudley
Special thanks to Heather and Dave Datta
for scanning this book.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To the Memory of Jane Grahame
CHAPTER ONE
The woman half-sitting up in bed could see the rooftops of the houses about half-a-mile away on the other side of Castlebay. The slated roofs of the town huddled down in the valley against the side of the estuary glinted in the sunlight of that dying winter evening of 1955.
There had been a drizzle of sleet earlier, but it had cleared. The banked clouds had shifted beyond the town and out to sea. Now the evening sky was a washed-out blue in the dusk that seeped into the house from the garden.
Ellen Merrill heard a movement next door. Ever since the beginning of her illness her husband had moved into the next room. She had insisted on it. It was essential, she had said, that he got his proper sleep; after all, he still had his work to do. No point in him becoming tired and perhaps falling ill himself.
Dick Merrill was nearly six feet in height, slim and with blond wavy hair, and with features almost classically chiselled, with a short nose, and a smallish mouth. If there was a weakness to be seen in the curl of his lower lip, it was more than balanced by the strength of his jaw. Perhaps his only bad feature were the slightly protuberant eyes which were a bright blue. His eyelashes were dark, and thick. The war had interrupted his job as an accountant which he had just started with a London firm after having become qualified. The end of the war left him the way it had left a few million others, restless and unable to pick up the threads. For a couple of years he had got by on his gratuity, dabbling in the motor business, not very successfully.
And then he had met Ellen Carslake. Her father had left her around £10,000 when he had died a couple of years before. Carslake had been a widower and she was the only child. She had gone overboard for Merrill at first sight.
Ellen Merrill glanced at the clock beside her even as she heard footsteps outside her door; it was Dick coming to give her the medicine which Dr. Griffiths had prescribed her. Her thoughts turned to Dr. Griffiths who had left her with his usual quiet smile and nods of encouragement. But she recalled again what she had thought at the time; had there been a shadow of baffled anxiety in his eyes which she had not noticed before? Or was it her imagination playing tricks on her?
She sighed gently. Her imagination was working overtime lately, but the thought nagged at her again. Was Dr. Griffiths worried about her? Was the illness which had lasted so interminably too much for him? Or for any other doctor? A cold feeling held her. And then she was comforted by the recollection that though once or twice when her husband had suggested calling in someone else, he had later agreed with her not to do so. She took it to mean that her illness wasn’t causing him that much concern, after all, that he felt confident that Dr. Griffiths would get her well.
Her mind circled around Dr. Griffiths, a short chunky man who had once been dark, but whose hair was now grey and receding from a round forehead. His father before him had been a doctor, the good old-fashioned kind, but Griffiths was pretty well up with the times. What had been good enough for his old man wasn’t necessarily good enough for him. Perhaps one reason for his attitude was that he’d travelled quite a bit both as a ship’s doctor, and during the war when he’d spent some time with the forces in Italy.
It was while he had been abroad that his wife on a visit to some friends in London had been killed in an air-raid. There was a son who’d also followed in his father’s footsteps, and after qualifying had also gone to sea as a ship’s doctor on the New Zealand run. He had met a New Zealand girl; they had got married, and he’d decided to settle down in Auckland, where he was now practising. He was always inviting his old man to go out there for the fishing, and he’d shown Ellen Merrill some photographs and told her how his son’s descriptions of the sport to be had made his mouth water.
‘But it’s too far,’ he used to tell her, ‘so I’ll have to wait until I can retire. Which’ll be never. Like my father before me, I shall die in harness.’
She could hear her husband’s footsteps approaching. She forced herself to sit upright, composed her expression into one less sad and ill, and her eyes travelled round the room.
She had always kept a soft spot in her heart for Castlebay, she had often visited it on holiday with her father. She had been lonely after his death and almost as rootless as Merrill; her earlier associations with Castlebay where she had known happy times gave her the idea that she might be able to settle down there with her husband.
Dick Merrill stood in the doorway and came into the room smiling at her confidently, the medicine glass in his hand. ‘Time for a little aperitif, darling.’
She forced herself to smile back at him and took the glass.
‘I wouldn’t mind taking it,’ she said, ‘though it is so horrid, if it did me some good.’
He patted her hand and she noticed how the sunburned skin contrasted with her own pale fingers which seemed to have become so bony. ‘It’s what the doctor ordered,’ he said.
She had spoken to Dr. Griffiths about changing the medicine and he’d said he’d give her something different, but it still tasted the same to her. It still seemed to do her no good.
‘Knock it back, darling,’ he was saying, ‘and no heeltaps.’
She drank it up, closing her eyes at the unpleasant taste, and opening them suddenly she found herself staring into his, his gaze fixed on her curiously attentive. At once his mouth curved over his white teeth in a smile.
Her eyes shifted from his to the silver-framed calendar over the fireplace. 1st December. ‘Which reminds me. I mustn’t forget his cheque.’
She felt rather than saw an eye turn quizzically at her and she wished she had left the thought unspoken. Why did she, she asked herself, remind him however obliquely that she held the purse-strings? Like the business of her settling Dr. Griffiths’s bill regularly at the end of the month, as she had done since the beginning of her illness, meticulously sending him her cheque without waiting for his bill.
‘I think you must be about the only patient who pays a doctor’s bill before they get it,’ she heard him say in an amused tone.
He was smiling at her as if she were a child. ‘You know Dr. Griffiths never sends bills to anyone,’ she said. ‘That’s why.’ He gave her a little shrug. ‘I know what you are going to say,’ she said.
‘I think he’s a jolly good chap,’ he said. ‘But I expect he doesn’t do so badly all the same.’
‘I know, perhaps it is a bit silly of me, but I always feel