The Twisted Root

patients clean and comfortable," Thorpe said a trifle sharply. "They do not have medical training or experience, and are not given responsibilities except to do exactly as they are told." He did not look at Hester.
    Robb digested that information thoughtfully and without comment. Before he could formulate any further questions the apothecary entered, closely followed by Callandra, who avoided Hester’s eye.
    "Ah!" Thorpe said with relief. "Phillips. Sergeant Robb here believes that a considerable amount of medicine has gone missing from our supplies, stolen by one of our nurses, and that this fact has provided the motive and means for her to be blackmailed." He cleared his throat. "We need to ascertain if this is true, and if it is, precisely what amounts are involved, how it was taken, and by whom." He had effectively laid the fault, if not the responsibility, at Phillips’s door.
    Phillips did not answer immediately. He was a large man, rather overweight, with wild dark hair and a beard severely in need of trimming. Hester had always found him to be most agreeable and to have a pleasing, if somewhat waspish, sense of humor. She hoped he was not going to get the blame for this, and she would be painfully disappointed in him if it were too easy to pass it onto Cleo.
    "Have you nothing to say, man?" Thorpe demanded impatiently.
    "Not without thinking about it carefully," Phillips replied. "Sir," he added, "if there’s medicine really missing, rather than just wastage or a miscount, or somebody’s error in writing what they took, then it’s a serious matter."
    "Of course, it’s a serious matter! "Thorpe snapped. "There’s blackmail and murder involved."
    "Murder?" Phillips said with a slight lift of surprise in his voice, but only slight. "Over our medicines? There’s been no theft that size. I know that for sure."
    "Over a period of time," Thorpe corrected him. "Or so the sergeant thinks."
    Phillips fished for his keys and brought out a large collection on a ring. First he opened one of the drawers and pulled out a ledger. "How far back, sir?" he asked Robb politely.
    "I don’t know," Robb replied. "Try a year or so. That should be sufficient: ’
    "Don’t rightly know how I can tell." Phillips obligingly opened the ledger to the same month the previous year. He scanned the page and the following one. "Everything tallies here, an’ there’s no way we can know if it was what we had then in the cupboards. Doesn’t look like anyone’s altered it. Anyway, I’d know if they had, and I’d have told Mr. Thorpe."
    Thorpe stepped closer and turned the pages of the ledger himself, examining from that date to the present. There were quite obviously no alterations made to the entries. It told them nothing. The checking in of medicines was all made in the one hand, the withdrawals in several different hands of varying degrees of elegance and literacy. There were a few misspellings.
    Robb looked at them. "Are these all doctors?" he asked.
    "Of course," Thorpe replied tartly. "You don’t imagine we give the keys to the nurses, do you? If the wretched woman has really stolen medicines from this hospital, then it will be sleight of hand while the doctor’s back was turned, perhaps attending to a patient taken suddenly ill, or while he was otherwise distracted. It is a perfectly dastardly thing to do. I trust she will be punished to the fullest extent of the law as a deterrent to any other person tempted to enrich herself at the expense of those in her care!"
    "Could just be wastage," Phillips observed, his eyes wide, looking from Thorpe to Robb. "Not easy to measure powders exact. Close enough, o’ course, but over a couple o’ dozen doses yer could be out a bit. Ever considered that, sir?"
    "You couldn’t blackmail anybody over that," Robb replied, but his expression indicated that he said it with reluctance. "There must be more. If there is nothing in the past that is provable now, would you check your present stocks exactly against what is in your books?"
    "Of course." Phillips had very little choice, nor for that matter, had Robb.
    They stood silently while Phillips went through his cupboards, weighing, measuring and counting, watched impatiently by Thorpe, anxiously by Callandra, and with unease by Robb.
    Hester wondered if Robb had even a suspicion that his grandfather’s suffering had been treated by this very means, with medicine stolen not for gain but out of compassion by Cleo Anderson, whom he now