The Satan Bug by Alistair Maclean

Author:Alistair Maclean [Maclean, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction:Misc
ISBN: 9780754085713
Publisher: Collins
Published: 1962-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

"I'm not going into any damned hospital and that's final," I said irritably. With a couple of ham sandwiches and half a tumbler of whisky inside me I was feeling much more my old nasty self again. "Sorry, Doc, but there it is."

"I'm sorry too." The doctor bending over me in the bed in that police bungalow was a neat, methodical and precise man with a neat, methodical and precise voice. "I can't make you go, more's the pity. I would if I could, for you're a pretty sick man in urgent need of radiological examination and hospital care. Two of your ribs seem cracked and a third is definitely fractured. How badly and how dangerously I can't say. I don't have X-ray eyes."

"Not to worry," I said reassuringly. "With the way you've strapped me up I can't see any broken ribs sticking into a lung, or out through my skin for that matter of it."

"Unless you yield to an irresistible compulsion to indulge in violent gymnastics," the doctor said dryly, "we need not concern ourselves with the possibility of you stabbing yourself to death. What does concern me is the likelihood of pneumonia—broken bones plus the exhausting, unpleasant and very wet time you've been through provide an ideal breeding ground. Pneumonia together with broken ribs make for a very nasty condition. Cemeteries are full of people who could once have testified to that fact."

"Make me laugh some more," I said sourly.

"Mrs. Cavell." He ignored me and looked at Mary, sitting still and pale on the other side of the bed. "Check respiration, pulse, temperature every hour. Any upward change in those— or difficulty in respiration—and please contact me at once. You have my number. Finally I must warn you and those gentlemen here "—he nodded to Hardanger and Wylie—"that if Mr. Cavell stirs from his bed inside the next seventy-two hours I refuse to regard myself as in any way medically responsible for his well-being."

He picked up his tool-bag and took off. As the door closed behind him I swung my legs off the bed and started to pull on a clean shirt. It hurt, but not as much as I expected it would. Neither Mary nor Hardanger said anything and Wylie, seeing that they had no intention of speaking, said, "You want to kill yourself, Cavell? You heard what Dr. Whitelaw said. Why don't you stop him, Superintendent?"

"He's off his rocker," Hardanger explained. "You'll observe, Inspector, that not even his wife tries to stop him? Some things in this life are a complete and utter waste of time and making Cavell see sense is one of them." He glared at me. "So you've been coming all over clever and lone-wolfish again, haven't you? And you see what happens? Look at the bloody mess you're in now. Literally. Look at it. And nothing to show. When in God's name are you going to realise that our only hope lies in working together? The hell with your d'Artagnan methods, Cavell. System, method, routine, co-operation—that's the only way you ever get anywhere against big crime.

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