Trama

A Scotland Yard Inspector investigates odd hospital deaths during the London Blitz.

In a rural English hospital during WWII, a postman dies on the operating table. One of the nurses states that she has proof of who the murderer is. The facetious Inspector Cockrill suspects one of the five doctors and nurses who were in the operating theater to be the assassin. But four poisonous pills have disappeared....—Jean-Marie Berthiaume <jiembe@videotron.ca>

When not dealing with casualties from V1 raids on London, operating theatre staff at Heron's Park Hospital spend their time handling their jealousies, rivalries, and unrequited loves. When a nurse on the team announces publicly that a recent death in theatre was murder, she too soon meets a grisly fate. Enter unorthodox Inspector Cockrill from Scotland Yard to try to unravel the bitter cross-currents that lead to the crimes.—J-26

After Nursing Sister Marion Bates publicly claims that a recent surgical patient, postman Joseph Higgins, was murdered on the operating table, she too is found dead. Before being wheeled into the operating theatre, Higgins, who had been injured in a V-1 rocket attack, claimed to have recognized someone's voice. He also chastised the anesthetist, Dr. Barnes. When Bates is soon after found dead, stabbed in the chest with a scalpel, Inspector Cockrill of Scotland Yard arrives to investigate. Several members of the staff have secrets, be they love affairs or something else and it isn't at all clear who might be responsible or why. In the end, a surgical gown and a dab of paint leads Cockrill to the killer.—garykmcd

August, 1944 at Heron's Park Hospital in rural England. The region has routinely been bombed by the Germans. Dr. White, the chief administrator as of a month ago, has been taking measures to instill morale among the staff and faculty, such as through positive messaging, and a staff party which will be held in a couple of days. Inspector Cockrill with Scotland Yard narrates specific goings-on at the hospital as he writes a report on an investigation to his superior. He tells of one group of hospital staff, all working one evening in the operating theater together: Mr. Eden, the surgeon; Dr. "Barney" Barnes, the anesthesiologist; Marion Bates, the theater sister; and nurses "Woody" Woods, Freddie Linley, and Esther Sanson. Cockrill tells the soap opera-ish goings-on within this group, such as the personal relationship between Barnes and Linley which went on the rocks during this time despite his devotion to her, and the womanizing Eden who had once had a casual fling with Bates but has turned his sights on Linley. But Cockrill's report focuses on something he states up front: that within this collective of six, two would be dead in days, and one would be identified as a murderer. But it all begins with the death of local postman and former air warden Joseph Higgins, who had been injured by falling debris in one of those bomb attacks. It was not his injuries which killed him, but not surviving the activities in the operating room, he not making it through the administration of the anesthetic, ultimately deemed as murder. Cockrill had to determine who killed him and the method of execution, these determinations not as simple as the obvious of Barnes who administered the anesthetic. That investigation was complicated by the associated murder of the first operating room staff.—Huggo

Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim) of Scotland Yard begins retelling the story in voice over of the string of murders that occurred in a British Army Hospital during World War 2. It appears that a postman wounded by a German V-1 bomb has been brought into the operating theatre for surgery by Mr. Eden (Leo Genn) and Nurse Linley (Sally Gray), mysteriously dies from unknown causes during a relatively minor surgical procedure. For the anesthetist Dr. Barney Barnes (Trevor Howard) this is a repeat of a similar event he was responsible for from a few years back and he is confounded by the event. This is just the start as Nurse Bates (Judy Campbell), jealous over the attention that Eden shows to Sally, proclaims to a room full of hospital employees at a dance that the postman was murdered and further more that she knows where the clues are. As she goes to retrieve the evidence in the darkness of the operating theatre, a killer dressed in white operating scrubs appears behind her in a flash of light. After this and some other unexplainable events Inspector Cockrill comes in to investigate the case; he determines that any one of the five remaining medical professionals could be the murderer. When an attempt is made on the life of one of the nurses, Inspector Cockrill uses her as bait to draw out the real murderer by setting up an operation identical to the one in which the postman died, causing the murderer to appear.