Skinner's ordeal

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There are few things in life as stomach-tugging as the ringing of a telephone at an unusual or unexpected hour.

Professor Sarah Grace Skinner lived with the phone in a state of watchful neutrality. For years, in medical practice in New York and in Britain, and more recently as a policeman's wife, it had been her constant companion.

Yet, even in the few weeks since she had taken up her new post at Edinburgh University, she had come to regard her small study in the old building as an island of peace. No one bothered her there. In all that time she had received precisely three telephone calls; one, internally, from the Principal to wish her luck with her first lecture, and the others from her husband, warning her that he would be late for dinner.

Now, when the phone rang in the second that she hung her overcoat on the tall stand in the corner of the room, she jumped involuntarily. She glanced at her Giorgio watch. It was 8.17 a.m., on the last Friday in October.

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