Inspector Queen’s Own Case

“Oh, it’s all right. Baby was cross all day, I can’t imagine why. I didn’t leave him for a moment. And I’ve been in to him twice since I put him beddy-bye. Do you suppose he could have caught my cold?”

“I’ll have a look,” Jessie said wearily. “But I’m sure he’s all right, Mrs. Humffrey, or this noise would have made him restless. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

“I’ll look with you.”

Jessie shrugged. She opened her door, turned on her bedlamp, and tossed her hat and gloves on the bureau.

“I hope I did all the right things,” Mrs. Humffrey said. “He was so fretful at 10.30, the last time I looked at him before I went to bed, that I put a big pillow between his head and the headboard. I was afraid he’d hurt himself. Their tender little skulls...”

Jessie wished her tender little skull would stop aching. She tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. “I’ve told you, Mrs. Humffrey, that’s not a wise thing to do when they’re so tiny. The bumpers give him all the protection necessary.” She hurried toward the nursery.

“But he’s such an active child.” Sarah Humffrey stopped in the doorway, a handkerchief pressed hygienically over her mouth and nose.

The nursery was hot and close, although Jessie noticed in the faint glow of the nightlight that the Venetian blind on the window overlooking the driveway was drawn all the way up and the window was wide open. Also, someone had removed the window screen, and the room was full of bugs.

She could have slapped the ineffectual woman in the doorway.

She tiptoed over to the crib.

A vice closed over her heart, and squeezed. The baby had kicked his covers off. He was lying on his back, his fat little legs helter-skelter, and the pillow was over his face and torso.

It seemed to Jessie Sherwood that a million years passed between the constriction of her heart and its violent leap. In that infinite instant all she could do was stare down at the motionless little body, paralyzed.

Then she snatched the pillow away, kicked the side of the crib down, and bent over.

“Put the overhead light on,” she said hoarsely.

“What? What’s the matter?” quavered Mrs. Humffrey.

“Do as I say. The light!”

Mrs. Humffrey fumbled for the switch on the wall, the other hand still over her mouth and nose.

Jessie Sherwood, R.N., went through the motions as prescribed, her fingers working swiftly, by training and habit as cool as a surgeon’s — as if they were, in fact, the fingers of a surgeon, or of anyone not herself. Inside a sick something was forming, a nausea of disbelief.

Two months old. Two months.

And as she worked over the cold little limbs, trying not to see him as he was but only as he had been — in her arms, in his bath, in his pram on the beach — she knew he would never be any older.

“He’s dead,” Jessie said without stopping, without looking up. “He’s suffocated, I’m giving him artificial respiration but it’s useless, he’s been dead for some time, Mrs. Humffrey. Call your husband, call a doctor — not Dr. Holliday, Greenwich is too far away — call Dr. Wicks, and don’t faint till you do, Mrs. Humffrey. Please don’t faint till you call them.”

Mrs. Humffrey screamed piercingly and fainted.

With some surprise Jessie found herself a long time later wrapping another blanket around Sarah Humffrey in the master bedroom. The spirits of ammonia were on the bed shelf near the books on infant care, with the stopper out, so she knew she had done the right things automatically, or perhaps it was at Dr. Wicks’s direction — she could hear his voice from the hall. Mrs. Humffrey was lying across the bed, her head hanging over the side; she was conscious, moaning, and Jessie thought it a pity that her professional training had made her bring the woman out of the blessed land of shock. In fact, Jessie thought, Sarah Humffrey would be better off dead.

Then she remembered, and the memory brought her to her senses.

Dear God, she thought.

She hauled the moaning woman to a comfortable position on the bed and walked out on her.

Now she remembered everything. Where had she been? How long was it? It would have taken some time for Dr. Wicks to dress and drive over. How long had he been here?

The doctor was in the hall talking to Alton Humffrey. The gaunt millionaire was leaning against the wall, shading his eyes as if the light hurt them.

“It’s always a question, Mr. Humffrey,” Dr. Wicks was saying. “I’m afraid we don’t know very much about this sort of thing. In some cases we find a widespread, diffuse infection, probably viral, that simply doesn’t show up except on autopsy, and not always then. It could have been that. If you’d consent to an autopsy—”

“No,” Alton Humffrey said. “No.”