Some Die Eloquent (10 page)

‘And I have to have two good men and true down there every market day when they should be catching villains.'

‘His mission in life,' Sloan quoted something he'd read in the local newspaper, ‘is the preservation of the environment.'

‘The man's a first-class nuisance.'

‘Public-spirited,' murmured Sloan, ‘is the name of the game.'

‘Hrrrrrmph.'

‘Anyway George Wansdyke seems able to cope.'

‘Firm all right?'

‘Appears to be flourishing,' said Sloan. ‘They turn out the more rarefied plastic parts for industry and medicine and so forth. They do a lot of the research and development, too, I'm told. Take on promising young science graduates and all that sort of thing.'

‘No word of any money troubles?'

‘None.' He coughed. ‘Anyway, George Wansdyke doesn't get anything himself from his aunt's estate. His children get an eighth between them in trust, that's all.'

‘George Wansdyke,' pronounced Superintendent Leeyes didactically, ‘is the sole executor of an estate that everyone believes to be small –'

They were interrupted by the telephone.

‘Who?' said Leeyes testily. ‘Well, put him through, of course.' He looked at Sloan. ‘It's Dr Dabbe.' His tone changed. ‘Good morning, Doctor. About Beatrice Gwendoline Wansdyke … yes … yes, yes … I know all the background … yes … diabetes … insulin … what's that?' His eyebrows disappeared upwards. ‘What did you say?… Yes, I've got that … insulin … no insulin? Do you mind repeating that? Yes, that's what I thought you said. I'll send a man round for the report straightaway … Thank you.' He made to put the telephone receiver down, then changed his mind. ‘Doctor, are you still there?… Look here, how are you on dogs?… What?… No, not betting on them, doing post mortems on them … on one, actually … we may want one doing … That's very kind of you. Thank you.' He did put the telephone down this time. And then he turned back to Sloan, his face a study. ‘The pathologist reports that there was no trace of insulin in Beatrice Wansdyke's blood. He reckons she's been without it for several days.'

CHAPTER VIII

My face is wan and wears a leaden look;

If you try science you'll be brought to book.

The foreman on the motorway construction site was a much-tried man. He had, however, long ago reached that stage of controlled despair when he regarded each fresh burden with a certain masochistic satisfaction as providing further evidence of a malign fate's continued unkindness to him.

‘Police?' he said to Detective-Constable Crosby, rolling his eyes. ‘What is it this time? Something fallen off the back of a lorry again?'

‘Not today,' said Crosby cautiously. ‘So far.'

‘Or have you come to tell me that you've found that load of aggregate that got nicked on the Calleford road?'

‘Not yet,' said Crosby, ‘but I dare say we shall.'

‘That's all very fine and large,' said the foreman, ‘but it won't help me. I had to get on to the quarry sharp for another load.'

‘Perhaps next time,' suggested the constable, ‘the driver will use another transport café.'

The foreman gave him a shrewd look. ‘Mother Meg's again? I've always said it was a proper thieves' kitchen.'

‘Meals come a bit expensive there sometimes.' Detective-Constable Crosby surveyed the motorway site from the vantage point beside the foreman's hut. ‘Mucking Calleshire about a bit, aren't you?'

‘Don't you start …'

‘Like being on the moon but dirtier.'

The foreman twisted his lips. ‘You should have heard them at the Enquiry.'

Crosby grinned. ‘Our Mr Malcolm Darnley from Berebury there?'

‘It's a wonder he didn't get arrested.'

‘It's a free country.'

‘Stabbed in the back, then,' said the foreman.

The constable waved an arm. ‘Well, he did have something to complain about, didn't he?'

‘Said he'd lie down under the first bulldozer.'

‘Someone nick that too?'

‘Wish he had and all,' grumbled the foreman.

‘Saved a lot of trouble, would it?' said the constable, looking round.

‘Someone,' said the foreman with deep conviction, ‘will put that man Darnley in a wooden overcoat one day.'

‘A cement one, more likely,' said Crosby, looking round at the desolate waste of concrete that surrounded them.

‘What? Oh yes. I dare say.'

‘It's been done before,' said the constable seriously. ‘At least we think it's been done before. It's not easy to prove.'

‘I can see,' said the foreman, casting his eyes in the general direction of an embryo flyover, ‘that you'd likely be a bit short on evidence.'

Detective-Constable Crosby followed his gaze. ‘No more bother with that crane over there?' he enquired solicitously.

‘Not that I've heard about.' The foreman rolled his eyes. ‘Not that I get to hear everything, mind you.'

‘No,' said Crosby consideringly, ‘you wouldn't, would you?'

‘Not in my job,' agreed the foreman. ‘Mark you, there's some things I don't want to know about, thank you very much.'

‘I can see that,' said the constable.

The foreman indicated the crane. ‘We lock it up of nights now.'

‘Good,' said Crosby pleasantly. ‘The Inspector will be glad to hear it.'

‘Who would have thought,' demanded the foreman of the world at large, ‘that anyone would have wanted to use a great thing like that for safe-breaking?'

‘Someone thought of it,' said Crosby. Larky Nolson hadn't been the only criminal to have had trouble with a safe in their manor.

The foreman shrugged his shoulders. ‘There are always more ways than one of killing the canary.'

‘It got it open all right,' rejoined the constable. ‘By the time we got here there was money everywhere.'

‘If we were to drop you from that height on to a spot of hard-standing,' said the foreman, ‘I dare say you'd break open too.'

‘Yes,' said Crosby simply. The manifold highly unpleasant ways in which various members of the police force had died in the course of the execution of their duty was one of the many facts that they impressed on them at their Training College. There was a book, too, where they turned over a page every day … He pulled out his notebook. ‘I'm looking for a man …'

‘I didn't think you were just passing the time of day.'

‘Name of Nicholas Petforth. Tallish. Auburn hair.'

‘Nick? He was around.' The foreman waved an arm. ‘Ask at the office.'

‘I did.'

‘Well?'

‘They said he was this way.'

‘Doesn't look as if he is, does it?'

‘No,' said Crosby literally. ‘Can't say it does.'

‘Well, he was around then.' The foreman pushed his cap to the back of his head. ‘Could he have heard that you were asking for him?'

‘Might have done.' Crosby coughed delicately. ‘The word does get round.'

‘Then,' said the foreman, ‘he probably didn't stay to argue the toss and you've probably gone and lost me the only person who can drive that damned thing over there properly.'

The constable followed his gaze towards an enormous earth-moving machine that looked like some grotesque mechanized caterpillar with extra articulated jaws.

‘Watch out,' said Crosby solemnly, ‘that someone doesn't borrow that to dig up the Bank of England.'

Smell is undoubtedly the most evocative of all the senses. At least, Detective-Inspector Sloan would have been prepared to swear that it was the moment that he set foot inside the Berebury District General Hospital again. The hospital had that peculiar aroma compounded of as many ingredients as a witch's brew – and very nearly as unsavoury – that seemed to be common to all such institutions. It was one, he decided, that you forgot as you left it but remembered pretty speedily as you stepped over the threshold again.

He went in through the main entrance of the hospital and set about making his way to the pathologist's office. As he did so, he lifted his head to take another look at the signs supposed to guide patients in the direction in which they wanted to go. He revised that sentiment almost immediately to ‘the direction in which they
needed
to go'. He could not imagine anyone actually wanting to go to Isolation (a solid unbroken white ring with blankness inside).

He paused briefly under a symbol that represented a man leaning forward on one leg, the other thrust out behind him. The man could have stood for a ballet dancer or a skater. What he couldn't have represented was any medical or surgical speciality that Sloan could possibly think of. He moved on, hurrying past the sign that clearly indicated the nursery. This was three doll-like babies side by side, wrapped papoose-style. ‘Triplets,' he thought in horror to himself, lowering his eyes and quickening his pace. It was a contingency he was not even prepared to begin to contemplate, and he turned off the main corridor as soon as he could.

His mind, though, stayed with the subject of hospital signs. The mortuary didn't have one. The solitary giant tearshaped symbol that could have fooled someone seeking that department (or tea and sympathy?) turned out to represent not a human tear but a drop of blood steering the way to the Blood Bank. Nothing representational marked out the mortuary. He said as much to Dr Dabbe as he entered his office.

‘It's a nice thought,' said that worthy. ‘The forensic equivalent of the good old barber's pole. What do you suggest?'

‘Well …'

‘Something simple?'

‘Naturally.'

‘Skull and crossbones?'

‘Too Captain Hook,' objected Sloan.

‘Ah, Sloan, you've been boning up on pantomime with the baby coming.'

‘There's the empty skull. What about that?' Sloan couldn't have said why it was that he suddenly felt so light-hearted: perhaps because the death of Beatrice Wansdyke had turned into a proper case after all.

‘The “Alas, poor Yorick” style?' said Dabbe. ‘Yes, that would do, Sloan, though I rather care for the French pattern myself.'

‘The French?'

‘They have something rather discouraging in red enamel labelled ‘Morte' half-way up their electricity pylons.'

‘Do they?' One day he would travel, of course. His child would need to be shown the world.

‘The medievalists,' Dabbe informed him, warming to the theme, ‘favoured a death's head as an emblem of mortality.'

‘Sounds appropriate.'

‘Especially if there was a moral attached.'

‘There was always a moral attached in those days.'

‘True. But if you want to be really modern …'

‘Most people do,' said Sloan inaccurately.

‘Then I think I should recommend death ritualized twentieth-century style.'

‘How?' Sloan cast his mind round the possibilities. There were plenty of them.

‘From the Wild West …'

Sloan had forgotten that the pathologist was an armchair cowboy.

‘A smoking gun would do nicely,' pronounced Dabbe. He stood up. ‘In the meantime, Sloan, we shall have to make do with what signs we've got, shan't we? Come through.'

Sloan followed the pathologist from his office through a door marked quite clearly ‘Medico-Legal Department'.

‘A nice touch for those of our subjects still able to read,' remarked Dabbe. ‘This way – what we want is in the laboratory.'

Seating the detective-inspector on a stool in front of a bench, the pathologist reached for a series of little bottles. Less confidently, Sloan reached for his notebook.

‘Beatrice Wansdyke died from the effects of diabetes,' said the pathologist. ‘That still holds. She probably had all the symptoms – you'll be able to check on that. She certainly had all the signs, including dehydration. We got as far as that at the post mortem yesterday.'

‘Yes.'

‘What I would have expected to find was some indication in the post mortem blood sugar levels that she'd had some insulin not so long before death.'

‘And you didn't?'

‘I didn't.' The pathologist pulled a sheet of paper along the bench and then started looking for a particular test tube in a long row in a rack. His hand hovered over them. ‘There's a fortune waiting for the man who can invent a foolproof way of keeping laboratory specimens attached to their pathological notes.'

‘And for the discoverer of a perfect jury system,' said Sloan feelingly. ‘Every copper who's ever lived could have done with that.'

‘These two seem to match,' said Dabbe, comparing two separate sets of numbers. ‘Anyway, this blood sugar level is far too high for her to have been within shouting distance of a dose of insulin for days.'

‘Interesting,' said Sloan cautiously.

‘She also had heavy glycosuria.'

‘That'll have to keep for the expert witnesses,' said Sloan, making a lay attempt at writing it down.

‘And ketonuria.'

Sloan wrote that down too. After a fashion.

‘It all adds up to the same thing,' said the pathologist.

‘She didn't have her insulin when she should have done?'

‘Exactly.'

‘So?'

‘So either she stopped taking it,' said the doctor.

‘Or,' said the policeman, ‘something or someone kept it from her.'

‘Medico …' began Sloan.

‘Or legal,' finished Dabbe.

‘Difficult.'

‘Those are the only two inferences that I can draw, too,' said the pathologist amiably. ‘And I shall be quite happy to say so in a court of law.'

‘Either way it didn't do her any good.'

‘Either way it killed her,' said Dr Dabble unequivocally.