The woman who rose from the high-backed chair behind the uncluttered desk was the embodiment of “matron.” Tall, stout to her earlobes, dressed in navy blue garnished with unnecessary bits and bobs of gold—brooch and buttons—she wore an expression of recent upheaval that was probably her default look. Her name was Mrs. Maltings, according to the little metal plate on the desk.

As she was saying she’d been told of their coming, a little girl strayed into their presence. She looked cute, curly-haired and human.

“Marcia,” said Mrs. Maltings, “you should be having tea at Play-Time.” The woman made fluttery “go-away” motions with her fingers.

But Marcia, seeing two new and good-looking men, was not so easily routed. She presented the much-handled cloth horse she was carrying to Tom, saying, “This is Sunny.”

“Ah! And do you ride Sunny round the gardens out there?”

Marcia clapped both her hands and Sunny up to her face. What? A grown-up man thinking a girl could ride a toy horse? What a wonderful break in grown-up experience!

Part of which was coming round the desk to spoil it all. She was calling out to an as yet invisible party: “Sandra?”

As if she’d been waiting in the wings, a young woman appeared and hurried over to them.

“Sandra, you really must see better to your charges.”

But upon seeing the two men, Sandra seemed no more interested in seeing to things than had Marcia.

Nor was Tom, who crooked his finger at Marcia as he took a packet of gummy bears out of his coat pocket. “If I give you these, will you promise to share them with your friends in playtime? But only if they promise they won’t let the gummy bears ride Sunny around?”

Sandra was as happy about the bears as was Marcia, for it gave them a way out without being ordered by Mrs. Maltings.

“For a policeman, you have quite a way with children,” she said to Tom.

“I have quite a way with murder suspects, too.”

Not knowing quite what to do with this piece of unasked for (and undesired) information, Mrs. Maltings started showing them around. The hospital was small, with perhaps ten patient rooms, a delivery room, a café-like room, a children’s playroom populated that afternoon by a half-dozen little ones, a large waiting room. The hospital-sterility was considerably softened by warm, homelike touches, such as small-figured wallpaper in patient rooms, along with good linen and pretty coverlets and blankets on the wider-than-average hospital beds.

“It’s a very pleasant look; I’d think those who got admitted here would find it a world apart from what they’re used to. Disease, drugs, hunger, want—”

“Indeed. Many of the people who come here are simply malnourished and worn out from living in the streets.”

“Or pregnant?”