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Sir Charles rose. "The Medical Superintendent thought of that. The police say there's no sign of them on the coast road." His heart sank. "I was banking on you to have some idea." When Graham didn't reply, he made for the door. "There's nothing else for it, we'll have to search her room."

"There's no chance that it's the hepatitis? That she's in charge of a car -?" The younger man's voice trailed off.

"No. There was no sign of jaundice at two o'clock this afternoon - not even in the conjunctiva." He remembered with a stab how silent she had been: the sad blue eyes saying no to his proposition.

He set out quickly and Jim Graham hurried to keep up with him.

"I suppose Harry knew by lunchtime that you intended to give her the job?"

"Yes, but not that she'd turned it down."

"Lesley turned it down?" Graham was clearly incredulous.

"You sound surprised. Surely that's what you expected? I hear from Dr. Farquharson that you have other plans?"

"I meant to tell you tomorrow, sir. I'm off to Nova Scotia just as soon as I get on the register."

"I see." He had a stitch in his side from hurrying now. "You should get good experience there. I wish you both well." He almost forgot for a moment that they still had to find her.

"Both, sir?"

"Isn't Dr. Leigh going with you?"

The boy gave him a curious look. "Lesley? Oh, no, sir. She doesn't even know yet. I only made up my mind finally this afternoon." They lowered their heads and started out across the courtyard. "There's something else, sir. Sister Bishop's just told me. Lesley's been shielding me." He turned up his coat collar. "I've been sending blood counts to the lab. Apparently Harry threatened to expose me if she didn't -" There was a catch in his voice which could have been due to the biting wind.

"- do everything he asked?" The last piece of the jigsaw seemed to fall into place.

"And to think we had the nerve to say she didn't know how to play it to the rules!"

They had reached the staff quarters. Mrs. Frazer came out of the phone booth as they were stamping the snow from their feet. Her face fell when she saw that they brought no news. She led the way without question when Sir Charles said they wanted to see Dr. Leigh's room.

He went through the coats and suits in the two narrow lockers. There was a kind of ruthlessness about the way he set about it. But Lesley was obviously meticulous. Every pocket had been emptied.

He pulled open the top drawers of the dressing table and rifled through the contents for letters, envelopes - anything which might give them some clue. He drew a blank.

Everything was arranged in neat folds. All the underwear and sweaters were in polythene packs. The drawer at the bottom was locked. He straightened up. "Have you the key, Mrs. Frazer?"

The housekeeper shook her head. "No, sir. That's private. There's only one key. Dr. Leigh would have it with her."

Before she could stop him he had pulled our the middle one. Without ceremony he dumped it on to the bed. Sure enough he could reach the contents of the locked drawer underneath.

"Oh, Sir Charles!" Mrs. Frazer took a step forward.

"I'll take full responsibility." He already had his hands in it. Passport, Trustee Savings' Bank Book - he pushed them aside. This was more like it. He withdrew the blue diary.

The title page had her name and the hospital's address. There were no telephone numbers except his own. He turned to the back. No names or addresses.

A small withered heart's ease fluttered out on his hand. He was left staring at the entry for July the twenty-seventh.

"Have you found something, Sir Charles?"

He became aware of the other two watching him anxiously.

"I don't know." His voice was muffled.

He replaced the pressed flower and scanned a few other pages. He had no sense of snooping, of seeing what had not been meant for his eyes. When he came to the end of September he stopped. "If you were in some kind of jam. Miss Leigh, I'd like to think you would come to me with it." She had written it down. It was what came after which made him close the book.

"Would you mind straightening things here, Mrs. Frazer?" He put the diary carefully in his inside pocket.

"Not at all, Sir Charles. Did you find what you were looking for?"

"I think so," he said quietly. His voice didn't seem to belong to him at all. "You said she was making for the west gate?"

The housekeeper nodded.

"She always took the old road," Jim Graham replied to his next query.

"But that's impassable on a night like this."

"I doubt if she'd stop to consider that."

"She couldn't hope to make it in your car."

"The MG would take the gradients, sir."

"It's not the hills I'm worried about, Graham. A car could get buried in those valleys tonight."

The two men were silent. Then both spoke at once.

"Your BMW, Sir Charles. Couldn't we make it - with chains?"

"We could get it as far as the first pylon. We'll need help."

"The others are waiting."

Morrison, Williams and Campbell stood in a knot at the end of the corridor.

"We've just heard the news." Pete Morrison stepped out from the group. "Is there anything we can do to help?" Already they were clad in anoraks and climbing boots.

He looked at the three men. "It may take your, good legs," was all he said.

"Take these things, Sir Charles." Mrs. Frazer came out of Lesley's room. She thrust an overcoat, sweater and slacks into his arms.

"If you let me have your keys, sir," Graham held out his hand, "I'll bring your car round."

"Anything I can do, Charles?" McLaughlan had come into the corridor. In the background he saw Queristri and Ross.

"You'll keep an eye on things here?" He appealed to the Indian and the pharmacologist.

"Of course. Of course." Both men spoke at once.

"Your Mercedes, Ian?" The other man nodded. "If you would take a couple of the men. And pick up Angela Bishop on the way out."

Doors had been opening. The medical auxiliaries had crept out of their rooms.

"Could we go with you? Perhaps another woman -?" Kate Ritchie was standing tentatively in her doorway.

He looked at Ian McLaughlan. "I don't think we have time to wait any longer."

"What you could do," McLaughlan turned to the girl, "is to let us have some of the blankets off your bed. Have any of you got torches?" He looked round the group.

"Oh, yes, certainly." The girls scattered to their rooms. They came back with the things.

"It suddenly comes home to you." Kate Ritchie looked ashamed. Even Nan Baillie, he noticed, seemed chastened.

"What starts out as a stupid joke suddenly snowballs into something serious like this."

If he hadn't been so anxious he knew he would have been furious. So many people had apparently been in on this. A vendetta kept up by his registrar for months. All sorts of people had suspected at least part of the truth. No one had thought to take a hand in it till it was almost too late. Everyone had been too concerned with not telling tales, with not getting involved in anything but gossip. Most, of all, of course, he blamed himself. "We've all been blind." He didn't trust himself to say more. He took the blankets the girl offered him. "We'd better hurry." He made for the door.

The telephone began ringing. Those nearest jumped for it.

It was the Medical Superintendent with a police report. Both cars had been found abandoned on the old moor road.

Lesley
was weaker than she had thought possible. It took all her reserves of strength to reach the wall where the sheep lay huddled. Through waves of exhaustion, she clung tenaciously to the knowledge that once there she could afford to rest. They would have found the most sheltered spot. They scattered at her approach and stood some feet away from her, staring. She sank at last into the hollow cleared of snow by the warm bodies.

After the scramble she felt strangely warm and sleepy. The wind scarcely seemed to have penetrated here at all. She listened, but there was no other sound, and gradually she relaxed. Her legs, unaccountably wobbly, didn't feel like her own. She looked at the stile. It still seemed so far away. For the first time she wondered if she was really going to make it. He'd said that it led to his garden, his house. Her flight from the car had had all the urgency of a homecoming. Now that she was here she wondered what on earth she had thought she could say to him.

The sheep, displaced from their hollow, gradually edged their way back. She was already asleep when they closed in on her.

She had no idea how long she had lain there when she awakened to the pungent fragrance of tobacco smoke. There was instant recognition. Panic rose in her like sickness. Dayborough sat only a few feet away, one leg astride the drystone dyke. He didn't take his eyes off her face as he swung the other limb over and let himself drop. She even heard the chuckles before she heard the oaths. He was lying in a crumpled heap on this side of the ditch.

It was the undisguised anguish through the cursing which brought her to her feet.

She hesitated and he looked up, his face a suffused mask of pain.

"Give me a hand," he said through his teeth. He tried to roll over, clutching his leg. His pipe lay some feet away in the snow. "Call yourself a doctor!"

It was the plea which could never be ignored. Perhaps, after all, he was really hurt. Even as she went towards him she knew it was probably a trick. She put out a hand.

A moment later she was pinned underneath an arm like an iron vice.

She had seen that look in other eyes. Only then there had been strong-armed male nurses near at hand.

Two hundred yards away was the stile. If only she could keep him talking!

He shifted his position slightly.

"You haven't hurt yourself at all, have you?" She strove to keep her voice calm.

"You always were a little fool." She caught the authentic ring of the old Dayborough.

"Why?" she said despairingly. "Why any of it?" Her mind ranged over the mounting campaign of victimisation; professional discreditments; the slur on her moral integrity; and when all else had failed, the attacks on her person. She saw now that she'd never stood a chance because of him. "What did I ever do to you?"

"Giving yourself airs as usual, Miss Leigh." It was still the old sneer. "What makes you think it had anything to do with you at all?" He lurched at the arm she had managed to wrest free. He was breathing heavily, his breath misting in the night air. Funny the things you noticed at a time like this: snowflakes frosting the heavy dark brows; the fact that his nose was cyanosed with the cold. She relaxed for a moment trying to catch him off guard.

"You were only a pawn in the game," he said.

"But I thought you were his friend." (How could this creature ever have been anyone's friend?)

"This is one thing he's not going to get handed to him on a plate." His head went back in a harsh laugh. It sounded strange in this muffled, silent world of snow.

She struck out, and he reeled back. But this time the element of surprise wasn't enough. She had a strange sinking feeling as the hands came down for her throat.

All her own fault. Everything thrown away. The fifth column in the mind. Thrashing about in the snow, the relentless weight above her, she could no longer remember what Sir Charles had meant by that.

All over now. She felt the hands tighten. Nothing but the red flare; the choking, bursting sensation in the head; a roaring, rushing ocean which boomed and receded from her ears.

And then there were voices; flashing lights; dark figures converging on them from the stile; someone hurtling through space in a flying rugby tackle; and arms that held her as though they would never let her go.

Gradually it registered that the Chief was here.

"I won't go back. I won't go back!"

He was cradling her gently, soothing her like a child. "No one's taking you anywhere that you don't want to go."

She clung to him. "You won't leave me, will you?"

He held her tightly. "If I have my way, I'll never leave you again."

"There's nothing wrong with me," she said half-tearfully. "Nothing that a rest won't put right."

"I'm inclined to agree with your diagnosis, Doctor - but if we stay here much longer the prognosis may deteriorate." He shifted on the one good knee that would bend.

She was all contrition.

"I'm only teasing, my dear." He pulled her to him again. For a moment neither of them made any effort to rise.

"I can't stop shaking. I suppose the reaction is setting in."

"We'll go home," he said at last.

There seemed to be so many people on the hill. Torches were moving along the dyke of the smugglers' road. She heard voices saying that it must be the police. She was vaguely aware of Jim and the others. Angela Bishop was kneeling in the snow beside Dayborough. She had his head in her lap.

Dr. McLaughlan separated himself from the group. "Leave everything to us, Charles," he said quietly. "We'll see to the rest."

And then miraculously they were alone and she was being carried in strong arms across the stile.

It was later, much later, before she got round to asking questions.

Clad in her own things and wrapped in warm blankets, she was lying on a couch before his huge study fire. With the broth inside her she already felt stronger. In the distance she could hear the clatter of dishes as his housekeeper cleared up in the kitchen.

"What will happen to him now?"

"Harry? It's out of our hands - a matter for the police. Whatever the outcome I'm afraid it can't escape the attention of the disciplinary committee."

"I'm sorry," she said.

He gave her a strange look. "When will you learn to start thinking of yourself?" He walked over to the window and looked out over the moorland. "It's stopped snowing now. When you feel sufficiently recovered, I'll take you back. You should be in bed by now."

"I don't feel I'll ever be able to sleep again."

"I'll give you something to help settle you tonight." He was at his most professional now.