Some Die Eloquent (16 page)

It was Detective-Constable Crosby's turn to sound sympathetic. He hoped that it wasn't the stout woman's husband who was causing all the commotion on the ward. Yet another doctor had now appeared and a bottle of blood had been rushed through the swing doors by someone else. There was no sign, though, of anyone resembling Nicholas Petforth.

The fat woman was speaking again.

‘Pardon?' he said.

‘The person you've come to see,' she said patiently.

‘Yes?' Warily.

‘Has he been in here long? Perhaps my hubby's in the next bed.'

‘Not long,' said Crosby truthfully adding even more accurately: ‘I'm not sure exactly where he is.'

She nodded comfortably. ‘They do move them about so.'

‘Or even,' said Crosby, artistically painting in a finer touch, ‘if he'll really want to see me.'

This struck an immediate chord with his neighbour. ‘You never can tell how hospital will take people, can you?'

‘No,' he said. What he was actually doing was considering whether the door beyond Sister's office led to the sluice or not.

‘Perhaps he'll have them to show you,' she remarked.

‘What?'

‘In a bottle.'

‘Show me what in a bottle?' demanded Crosby wildly.

‘His gall-stones.'

Crosby's aunt had spared him this.

‘They give them to you sometimes,' she said knowledgeably.

‘Souvenirs?' said the constable weakly. After all, they had a Black Museum at New Scotland Yard as incongruous, didn't they?

‘They did my next door neighbour,' said the woman, ‘when she had hers done.'

‘Did they?' said Crosby, discovering like many another inventor before him that those who build Kafka-esque castles in the air run the risk of the whole tottering edifice that they have fabricated brick by unsteady brick crumbling at the first touch of reality.

‘Seven as big as marbles,' the fat woman said.

The swing doors of the ward opened suddenly and Sister Fleming appeared. She made for her own office. If she noticed those sitting on the corridor bench she gave no sign of it. Like the rest of the hospital staff, she seemed to have the gift of ignoring those who waited on benches – or perhaps it was a skill honed down to a fine art. Just to be on the safe side, though, Crosby tucked his feet well out of sight. It wasn't so much that they were large: just that they were a policeman's feet.

Then another loudspeaker call went out. The Senior Surgical Registrar was wanted on Fleming Ward.

Now.

‘If not sooner,' muttered Crosby to himself. He reckoned he was as good as the next man at reading between those sorts of lines.

Sister surged back on to the ward.

The fat lady began to re-arrange her parcels again.

Crosby decided that this was his moment.

‘Just going along the corridor,' he murmured with absolute truth.

All Sister Fleming's forces were deployed on the ward and no one even looked at him as he slipped past the door of Sister's office. He could hear noises from a kitchen somewhere but it was the door beyond Sister's office that he was making for. If anyone had an eye on a rendezvous with Nurse Briony Petforth or was in search of a quiet place to hide up, this was the ideal spot for it.

Crosby advanced cautiously. On closer examination he decided it wasn't the sluice. That he could now see – and hear – was beyond. He opened the door. He was in a linen store of some description. Racks of sheets were faintly visible. He stepped forward and began to feel for the light switch.

It was the last thing he remembered.

Something very heavy came down behind his neck and hit him hard. A vicious reverberating explosion took place inside the confines of his skull. Detective-Constable Crosby subsided in a kaleidoscope of mental colour and for a long time knew no more.

CHAPTER XII

Alkali, tartar, salt in preparation

Matters combust or in coagulation.

Detective-Inspector Sloan had had to take another constable with him from the Berebury Police Station instead of Detective-Constable Crosby. He didn't want to interview Dr John Paston alone. Actually he didn't really want to take the time to interview Dr Paston at all at this particular moment. Not with Nicholas Petforth at large and the whole case a tangle of loose ends but there was in him ingrained an early training married to a dogged persistence which allowed no opening in an investigation to go unexplored.

The general practitioner's manner towards the two policemen could not have been described as inviting. He sat quite motionless behind his desk waiting for Sloan to speak.

‘I have come,' began that officer without preamble, ‘about the late Miss Beatrice Wansdyke.'

‘Again?' said the doctor.

‘And,' continued Sloan, ‘about your pecuniary interest in her death.'

Dr Paston gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, that!'

‘That,' said Sloan totally unimpressed. In his time he had heard a great many dubious actions dismissed with a short laugh by the people who had perpetrated them. The activities had ranged from minor peccadillo to major misdemeanour but long ago he had come to realize that the enormity of crime lay – like beauty – solely in the eye of the beholder. The eye of the person who had committed it was always firmly glued to the wrong end of a telescope. The victim's eye view was usually more accurate.

‘Rather a grand way of describing a small legacy, isn't it?' remarked Dr Paston.

‘Were you or were you not,' Sloan forged on with his inquisition, ‘aware of it at the time of her death?'

‘No.' He hesitated for a moment and then said, ‘No, as a matter of fact I wasn't.'

‘Let me go back to Monday when she was found.'

‘Yes?'

‘You were informed of her death.'

‘Indeed I was.'

‘And visited the house.'

‘That is so.'

‘And began to prepare a cremation certificate.'

‘Yes.' He looked puzzled.

‘Why?'

‘Beatrice had always told me that that was what she wanted.'

‘So,' asked Sloan, ‘why are Morton's now preparing for burial?'

‘That was the family,' said the general practitioner immediately. From his tone it was obvious that families were an everyday complication of general practice.

‘Which part of the family?' enquired Sloan cautiously. One thing he had learned over the years was that families did not invariably present as united groups.

‘It was George Wansdyke who actually mentioned it to me,' said Paston, ‘but knowing the set-up there I dare say it was Pauline Wansdyke who didn't like the idea.'

‘Ah.'

‘The Hartley-Powells,' Dr Paston informed him drily, ‘are all buried over in East Calleshire.'

‘I see.'

‘In the ancient village churchyard at Great Rooden.'

‘And always have been?'

‘Since the Norman Conquest,' said Paston gravely. ‘At least.'

‘Some people find ancestor worship easier with tombstones.'

‘I'd even begun to lay on a colleague,' amplified the doctor, ‘to sign the second part of the cremation certificate when George Wansdyke told me the family wanted a burial instead.'

‘And when did you hear about the legacy?'

‘In the same breath as the burial.' He tightened his lips into the semblance of a smile. ‘Wansdyke's a businessman, not a sentimentalist, you know.'

Sloan, no time-waster himself, nodded.

‘At least,' said Paston, ‘he did read over the message that came with the bequest.'

‘“In small recognition of his unfailing kindness over many years,”' quoted Sloan from his notes.

For the first time the general practitioner looked momentarily disconcerted. ‘She wasn't the sort of woman to leave everything to a home for lost dogs.'

‘No,' said Sloan consideringly. Not for one moment had he forgotten a dead Airedale either. Late dog. Like late pig. Now that was from somewhere very far down in his subconscious. ‘You had no idea it was going to happen?'

‘None,' Paston said vigorously. ‘And if I may say so, Inspector, I should have signed a declaration to that effect on the cremation certificate without hesitation.'

‘Quite so,' said Sloan quietly. ‘Were you surprised?'

‘That, of course, is something quite different.' He hesitated and considered this. ‘No, not inordinately.'

‘Have you any plans for using the money?' Suddenly Sloan felt self-conscious. He must sound as silly as a cub reporter talking to the winner of a football pool. The answer he got, though, wasn't exactly what he expected.

‘The nuts,' said the doctor astringently, ‘come when the teeth have gone.'

‘Pardon?'

‘Let me put it like this, Inspector.' The general practitioner drew breath. ‘I do not for one moment anticipate that exactly one-sixteenth of Beatrice Wansdyke's estate is going to alter my entire way of life.'

‘I see, sir.' Now who was it had drummed into Sloan's head that your income was the only thing you could anticipate: and that most of the other uses of the word were incorrect? His English master perhaps. He'd been taught mathematics too … ‘You did say a sixteenth, Doctor, didn't you?'

‘My partner is entitled to half of anything I inherit from a patient.'

‘I didn't know that,' said Sloan quite spontaneously.

‘Every contingency,' said the general practitioner ironically, ‘is provided for in a medical partnership agreement.'

‘Even down to splitting legacies?'

‘That is quite a normal feature,' said Paston drily. ‘Even millionaires bleed.'

‘Quite so.' Detective-Inspector Sloan started to do a spot of quick calculating.

‘Millionaires don't crop up often,' said the doctor.

‘But when they do …'

‘There isn't an unseemly stampede in the practice to attend them.' He coughed. ‘If you come to think about it, Inspector, I'm sure you'll see …'

Sloan did come to think about it.

Dr Paston might be able to maintain a rather lofty attitude to money and riotous living. His junior partner, though, was quite a different matter. It was quite obvious to all and sundry that young Dr Peter McCavity had an instant use for every liquid asset that he could lay his hands on.

‘I may only be a forensic pathologist,' said a plaintive voice down Sloan's telephone, ‘but even I can distinguish margarine from butter.'

‘I beg your pardon, Doctor?'

The Detective-Inspector had come back to his desk at the police station in Berebury to find a heap of messages piled on it. He had been rifling through them when the telephone had rung and Dr Dabbe had been put through to him.

He turned the message sheets over with his free hand.

The Superintendent wanted a progress report.

He would.

Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division would like him to drop by his department. Happy Harry – he was always known as Happy Harry because he had never been seen to smile – was far too cautious to say why on paper.

Very well. He, Sloan, would drop by Traffic Division.

Soonest: as they said in telegrams.

Mrs Margaret Sloan had telephoned to say that she was going out shopping during the afternoon. That was why there would be no reply if he should happen to ring home.

He looked at his watch and felt a stab of guilt. He was uneasy about the phrasing too. He didn't like the way the message had been put. ‘Should happen to ring' carried overtones. Of course he would have rung as soon as he could …

The last message was from the Duty Officer in the Control Room. He wished Detective-Inspector Sloan to know that there had been no answer to calls to Detective-Constable Crosby on his personal radio. They had been trying to raise him over the air from the Control Room for the best part of half an hour. Would he have gone out of receiving range without notifying them?

And did Detective-Inspector Sloan want anything doing about it?

Sloan replaced the messages on his desk.

‘Margarine from butter,' repeated Dr Dabbe into his ear over the telephone.

‘What?' said Sloan blankly. Now he would have to down tools and find out what Crosby had got up to.

‘And water from insulin,' continued the pathologist. ‘Even I can spot the difference.'

‘Er – good,' said Sloan.

‘And it was water, old chap.'

Sloan concentrated his mind on what the pathologist was saying, banishing with a great effort the possible import of each of the messages waiting for him.

‘No doubt about it,' said Dr Dabbe.

‘Someone had been at her insulin.' All right, then. At least they knew where they were now.

‘Someone,' said Dabbe, ‘had removed it from the bottle and substituted water.'

‘So,' Sloan worked out his conclusions aloud as he went along, ‘she'd been having no insulin at all since she began to use that particular bottle …'

‘Correct.'

‘And she'd …' He stopped and gave their subject the dignity of a name. ‘Miss Wansdyke had been giving herself injections of water instead of insulin.'

‘That,' agreed Dr Dabbe with caution, ‘would account for her symptoms, certainly.' The pathologist spent a lot of his working life in the law courts and the long experience had made its mark.

‘There was something else that could be inferred as well.'

‘Was there?'

‘So I checked.'

‘And?'

‘I wasn't wrong.'

‘Well?'

‘The water that was still left in the insulin bottle was quite sterile.'

‘Oh,' said Sloan blankly.

‘If it hadn't been,' explained the doctor kindly, ‘she would probably have had a nasty abscess at the injection site by the time she died.'

‘Ah,' said Sloan in quite a different tone. ‘And she'd have gone back to her general practitioner with that, wouldn't she?'