Free Green for Danger by Christianna Brand Page B

his darting, bird-like way; small and brown and irascible, his shabby old felt hat that crammed sideways on his head in the familiar, Napoleonic fashion; Sergeant Bray following ponderously in his wake, keeping a weather eye open for anything gorgeous in the shape of V.A.D.s. “There’s nothing much to be done here, Moon,” said Cockrill at last briefly. “I want to get back before the black-out, so I’ll just see the widow first, as she seems to be clamouring for audition, and then I’ll buzz off home and report that the death was just the private misfortune of the gentleman in question, and that they may as well let the thing drop.” He stumped off to the small and dusty office that had been put at his disposal for the afternoon, and, rolling himself a wispy cigarette, flung his hat and mackintosh into a heap on the desk and sat down before it and composed himself to give ear.
    A large round black bundle was led in by a stony-faced corporal and dissolved immediately into a flood of tears. “Never a cross word,” sobbed Mrs. Higgins, standing patiently with out-thrust behind until somebody should put a chair under her. “Never a cross word in all our thirty-seven year of married life. Thirty-seven year and every year as happy as the year before; and all to end like this, first of all that ’Itler and now this ’ospital, first of all them bombs and now this sinful neglect of my pore old man. For sinful neglect it was, Inspector, and you can take my word for it; the things I’ve seen in this ’ospital, well you wouldn’t believe; the goings on! And now there ’e is, lying there dead in a nasty mortuary, a thing I couldn’t abide even to pass, let alone go into one; and all cut up and poked about by a lot of prying people that don’t know their own business and wouldn’t if they saw it. Thirty-seven year of married life and never a cross word, Inspector, and all to end like this!”
    â€œIt’s very hard on you, Mrs. Higgins,” said Inspector Cockrill, who knew better than to try and stem the flood before the first spate had exhausted itself.
    Mrs. Higgins gave a perfectly dreadful sniff. “Hard! Hard it is indeed, Inspector, and worse than hard! Here’s my pore old Joe, took in this ’orrible way, and me a widder and my fatherless orphans cast upon the world and what is the Government going to do about that I should like to know?”
    As Mrs. Higgins would have a pension from the Post Office where her husband had worked for many years, and as her fatherless orphans were grown men and women, making a nice little thing out of various aspects of the war effort, it was not likely that the Government was going to do very much. “Anyway, I’m glad to have a few words with you, Mrs. Higgins,” said the Inspector, crushing out his cigarette without much regard to table, office, Army clerks, for the use of, and immediately lighting another; “I’d like to know if you have any particular complaints to make, or if you know of anything which you think might explain your husband’s death …”
    Mrs. Higgins had spent a profitable hour at her husband’s bedside on the morning of his operation, listening to the account of the sleepless night he had passed. “Goings on, sir! They shove ’im in a corner bed, right next to the little room where them nurses sits; and the goings on in that little room, you wouldn’t ’ardly believe.” She related them in detail and the Inspector believed about half of it. “’Eard every word, ’e did, and saw everything that went on. Nurses and sisters and all—flirting away with them doctors in a way I wouldn’t like to describe,” cried Mrs. Higgins, describing it in detail all over again. “Call themselves nurses, indeed! Sluts, more like! And cruel—well! Left ’im lying on ’is bed half an hour or more before they