A Going Concern (3 page)

‘Some marks on the south wall,' said Superintendent Leeyes sourly. The assistant chief constable might have been an antiquarian: the superintendent was not.

‘Really, sir?'

‘Reputed,' snorted Leeyes, ‘to be a thirteenth-century mark designating the boundary of the ancient parish Watch and Ward of Great Primer for the village constable.'

‘I'll look out for it, sir,' promised Detective Inspector Sloan solemnly, adding in the same tone, ‘Do we happen, by any chance, to know the cause of Mrs Garamond's death?'

‘Ha!' exclaimed Leeyes. ‘We know what her doctor put on the death certificate, Sloan, which may or may not be the same thing at all.'

‘Point taken, sir.' To say that the superintendent accorded the senior of the healing professions any reverence would have been an over-statement: he was a medical heretic of deep conviction and long standing. ‘What did the doctor put, then?'

‘Left ventricular failure,' said the superintendent. ‘It's there on that paper I gave you just now.'

‘Usually a natural cause,' observed Detective Inspector Sloan drily.

‘And senile myocardial degeneration.'

‘So she was old …' murmured Sloan, half-aloud.

‘Age is relative,' declared Leeyes, a man within sight of his own retirement. He paused and then said: ‘There is, though, just one odd thing about the death certificate – or, rather, about the circumstances in which the registered general medical practitioner signed it …'

‘Sir?' Detective Inspector Sloan was immediately all ears, his attention wholly engaged now.

‘The deceased had particularly asked her doctor to make a complete examination of her body after she had died. Made quite a point of it, Dr Aldus said.'

‘In fact, gentlemen,' Dr John Aldus repeated to Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby, when they were both sitting in his consulting rooms later that afternoon, ‘in this matter I may tell you Mrs Octavia Garamond had been specific to the point of bluntness.'

There were noises off in the background; somewhere a baby was crying and nearer at hand a telephone ringing. Nevertheless Detective Inspector Sloan leaned forward and invited the general practitioner to tell him exactly how it had been.

‘What she said to me on one of my last visits to her,' recounted John Aldus, ‘was: “You'll examine me properly, doctor, won't you, when I've died?”'

‘I'll make quite sure you're dead,' John Aldus had promised, wondering if Mrs Garamond was going to ask him to open one of her veins to make death absolutely sure. A lot of his elderly patients had a morbid – and quite unjustified – fear of being buried alive.

‘That's not what I meant at all,' the old lady had said severely. ‘Dammit, man, if you can't recognize death by this time then you've no business to be on your sort of income.'

He had said: ‘Then what do you mean?' taking her frankness in good part. Like most medical practitioners he spent a lot of his time trying to interpret the oblique remarks made to him by his patients and like all medical practitioners he had learnt to deal – and deal well – in euphemism. Old Mrs Garamond's bluntness made a refreshing change.

‘What I mean,' she had said straightly, ‘is that I want you to examine my corpse. Is that clear enough for you?'

Dr Aldus had been torn between being professionally soothing and naturally intrigued. ‘Of course I will,' he said gently, ‘if you want me to.'

‘I do. And properly, mind you. None of this just pulling back the sheet for a quick look.'

‘Tell me why …'

The old lady had given a high cackle and said: ‘Queen Victoria's doctor thought he knew his patient.'

‘Ah.'

‘It wasn't until she died that he discovered that she had had a ventral hernia.'

‘You haven't got a ventral hernia.'

Mrs Octavia Garamond had given him an enigmatic smile which had stuck in his mind ever since. ‘I know that.'

‘Then why,' he had asked, ‘are you so anxious that I examine you after death?'

She had refused to be drawn. ‘Put it down, doctor, if you like,' she said wheezily, ‘to honouring an old woman's last request.'

‘Very well.' John Aldus would have humoured her anyway, but, genuinely concerned now, he had asked: ‘Is there anything worrying you, m'dear?'

Her answer had been totally unexpected.

‘Hell, doctor, hell …' She coughed.

It had been a peffing cough, a heart cough, not a chesty one.

‘There may be no such place –' he had begun: but by then Octavia Garamond had not been really listening to him.

‘You remember what Ariel said, doctor, in
The Tempest
…'

‘Tell me.'

‘“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here …”,' she had quoted rather breathlessly.

‘“Hell is empty”,' he repeated after her.

‘Shakespeare knew.'

‘Oh, yes.' The doctor was with her there. ‘William Shakespeare knew all right, especially after his son, Hamnet, died.'

‘“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here”,' she said again, closing her eyes and losing interest in the rest of the consultation.

THREE

Bury him, comrades, in pitiful duty
.

Now, somewhere in the background of the doctor's surgery, the telephone began to ring again. The baby had stopped crying, but there were other noises off. Dr Aldus looked intently across at the two policemen sitting in his consulting room and continued his narrative.

‘I arranged for Mrs Garamond to have an oxygen cylinder by her bedside to help her breathlessness but that was all I could get out of her, gentlemen, except …'

‘Yes?' said Sloan attentively.

‘… Except that she did say to me on my next visit to her that she thought that her soul was going to be required of her one night quite soon.'

Sloan looked up.

The doctor went on: ‘I remember she quoted some fearsome old ballad to me about coming to Purgatory's fire at last.' He frowned. ‘I think she said it was from “The Lyke-Wake Dirge”.' He shook his head. ‘There was no comforting her.'

‘And was it?' Detective Constable Crosby leant forward with what seemed like genuine interest. ‘Her soul required of her soon, I mean?'

‘Within the week,' replied the doctor tersely.

Detective Inspector Sloan cleared his throat and asked if the doctor had prescribed anything specifically for his patient's fear of hell-fire.

‘I'm afraid there's no nostrum in the
British Pharmacopoeia
which'll treat that, Inspector. At least,' he added drily, ‘not quite so late in the day as this.'

‘Quite so,' said Sloan smoothly. There had been a couplet that had stuck in his mind since his schooldays which offered quite the opposite view:

Twixt the stirrup and the ground

Mercy I ask'd, and mercy found.

But he forbore to quote it. The sentiment was for incurable romantics, not for unimaginative general practitioners; or even, come to that, for hard-bitten detective inspectors.

The baby started to cry again.

‘Only a quietus,' Dr Aldus was still continuing his own line of thought, ‘and I can assure you that I didn't give her one of those.'

‘Quite …' murmured Sloan, making a note to check, all the same.

‘I'm only a country doctor,' rumbled on John Aldus, ‘not a priest.'

‘Confession is good for the soul,' remarked Crosby chattily.

Aldus turned to the constable and said: ‘So it may be, but doctors don't deal in absolution – not if they've got any sense, that is.' He frowned. ‘Besides …'

‘Yes?' prompted Sloan.

‘Mrs Garamond was on quite enough medication as it was anyway. Quite enough.'

‘For her heart?' said Sloan: it wasn't for her fear of hell, then.

‘For her heart,' said the doctor flatly. ‘There's no treatment for growing old yet, Inspector, although people have been looking for the elixir of youth long enough.'

‘True,' agreed Sloan, who was only nearly old enough to be interested in the subject.

‘Ageing is a process, not a disease,' Aldus went on, ‘although I dare say a treatment for even that will come along one of these fine days.' He grimaced. ‘But not in my time, I hope.'

Detective Inspector Sloan had another, quite different, question for the medical man. ‘This last request of the deceased, doctor, did you carry it out?'

‘As a matter of fact, Inspector, I did – even though it isn't usual when there isn't going to be a cremation.'

‘Why?'

Aldus hesitated. ‘Because she asked me to, I suppose; because I was curious perhaps; because …'

‘Because she was there?' suggested Detective Constable Crosby unexpectedly. ‘Like Everest?'

‘That, too, I suppose.' If Aldus was surprised by the simile, he did not let it show. ‘But, like us all, principally in case I'd missed something.'

‘And had you?' enquired the detective constable insouciantly, while Sloan listened carefully. The fear of having missed something important was one thing which all true detectives shared with the medical profession: and the agony of finding this out too late was common to both callings.

‘Not that I could see,' said John Aldus. ‘All that I found when I examined her was the body of an anile woman, wasted as I would have expected in one so old, a little oedematous still in spite of diuretics – you don't see anasarca much these days – and very slightly cyanosed.'

Sloan leant forward. ‘Tell me, doctor, what might there have been?'

The general practitioner looked slightly abashed. ‘I must confess, Inspector, that it did just cross my mind – I know it sounds silly – that I might just find something that Mrs Garamond hadn't wanted me to know about in life.'

‘Like Queen Victoria?' asked Crosby intelligently.

Aldus nodded slowly. ‘In a way.'

‘Like what exactly?' persisted Sloan.

‘It had occurred to me,' said the doctor somewhat defensively, ‘that I might just conceivably find something ineradicable on her skin …'

‘Like a tattoo?' said Sloan.

The baby which had been crying in the background suddenly stopped. Into the silence the doctor said quietly: ‘Like a concentration-camp number.'

Sloan jerked his head. ‘The Mark of Cain.'

‘It wasn't too far-fetched a thought, Inspector,' said Aldus. ‘I remember being told by someone – not by Mrs Garamond, though – that she'd done something unusual by way of war-work, although I never knew quite what.'

‘Ah,' said Sloan, who knew that even now there were still closed books in some offices of state.

‘She'd been married to a very distinguished scientist, too, and she'd been an educated woman herself,' said Aldus. ‘I did know that – besides you only had to talk to her … For all I knew, Inspector, she might have been caught abroad when the war began. Or gone there after it had started.'

‘But you didn't find anything like that, did you, doctor?' persisted Sloan.

‘No,' he said, shaking his head. ‘Just, like Christian, old scars to bear with her into the next world. Big enough ones, mind you. Appendix and gall-bladder, I should have said at a guess. Surgeons weren't so tidy with their incisions in the old days. No key-hole surgery then.'

‘Any bruises?' asked Detective Inspector Sloan prosaically, even though he, too, knew his
Pilgrim's Progress
.

‘No.' Dr John Aldus hunched his shoulders forward. ‘And I didn't find anything in her mouth either when I examined that.'

Detective Constable Crosby came to life. ‘Her mouth?'

‘If you ask me,' said the doctor with apparent irrelevance, ‘there are plenty more old ladies killed by suffocation by their exhausted carers than you people or their doctors ever know about.'

Detective Inspector Sloan did not dispute that. He had always suspected that ‘losing a pillow-fight' had another meaning in many an unsatisfactory nursing home for the elderly.

The doctor was still recounting his actions. ‘I checked her tablets, too, just to be on the safe side. I wouldn't have put it past her to take the lot if she'd had a mind to …'

So, noted Sloan promptly, Dr John Aldus, registered medical practitioner, in spite of what he had just said, had been sufficiently impressed by his patient's last request to make assurance doubly sure in some respects at least.

‘They were beside her bed but they were all present and correct,' said Aldus. ‘Moreover, she hadn't vomited at all.'

‘Who had been looking after her?' asked Sloan.

‘A series of women from an agency in Calleford did the care side and my practice nurse looked in on her every other day. She gave her a blanket bath and so forth, and she had never noticed anything untoward …'

Sloan made a mental note, though, that the good doctor had already seen fit to ask her.

‘That's only since Mrs Garamond's old maid died, of course.' Aldus looked at Sloan. ‘Until then she had always had Ellen. I may say that Ellen was the archetypal ancient retainer and she used to do everything for her.'

Crosby suddenly came to life again and asked very promptly: ‘And what did Ellen die from, then?' Like the archetypal family retainer that she had evidently been, Ellen did not appear to have had a surname.

‘I can't tell you that.' Aldus waved a hand in a roughly eastward direction. ‘She died over in Luston while she was visiting her niece. That's where she came from, Luston.'

‘That must have been a bit of a blow for your patient,' observed Sloan.

The general practitioner hesitated. ‘I treat a great many old people, Inspector, and my experience is that the older people are the better they take that sort of thing.'