A Going Concern (5 page)

‘If,' remarked Detective Constable Crosby out of the blue, ‘she was “Like to die” two years ago, then she took her time about it, didn't she?'

‘The last time I saw Mrs Garamond,' said the solicitor, ‘she quoted King Charles II to me.'

‘The Merry Monarch,' said Sloan, dredging something up from a classroom memory.

‘“A merry monarch, scandalous and poor” was what they said about him,' rejoined James Puckle instantly, ‘but what my client said to me then was that she was, like Charles II, “being an unconscionable time a – dying”.'

‘She wasn't like him, poor, though, was she?' ventured Detective Inspector Sloan, policeman rather than historian any day.

‘Oh, dear me, no, Inspector. On the contrary, in fact …' He paused. ‘Quite on the contrary, I should say.'

‘Money talks,' observed Detective Constable Crosby to nobody in particular.

Sloan leaned forward slightly and said to the solicitor: ‘Do you have any information at all, Mr Puckle, as to why the police should have been invited to attend Octavia Garamond's funeral?'

He shook his head. ‘None. It was merely one of a number of actions enjoined upon us by our client …'

Once a client, always a client, thought Sloan, was obviously a watchword at the firm of Puckle, Puckle, and Nunnery. Even if the charging clause had been revoked.

‘Scheduled to take effect as soon as she died, including the placing of her obituary notices in various specified newspapers. This, you understand, Inspector, was in case Miss Kennerley could not be located before the funeral or declined to act as sole executrix.'

‘You mean,' said Crosby with something like animation, ‘that she hadn't said she would?'

‘I mean,' said James Puckle, ‘that she hadn't been asked.'

‘That's funny for a start,' said the constable.

The mind of Detective Inspector Sloan though was working along quite different lines. ‘These requests that Mrs Garamond left with you, Mr Puckle …'

‘Yes?'

‘Were there any other instructions that we don't know about?' He paused and added, ‘And should?'

James Puckle said carefully: ‘One, perhaps.'

Detective Inspector Sloan said nothing at all rather loudly.

Almost as if he were talking to himself the solicitor murmured, ‘I see no harm in mentioning – perhaps I should anyway – that there was an instruction that the executrix …'

‘Amelia Kennerley.'

‘Was to be given the key to the Grange at Great Primer before anyone else at all went in there …'

FIVE

Bury him kindly, up in the corner;

The key, neatly labelled, was the first thing that Amelia Kennerley set eyes on when she entered her own home after arriving back from France on the Saturday morning. It was lying on the hall table, with a letter addressed to her beside it. From beyond, further through the house, she could hear a coffee percolator thumping away and, if the sound of piano music was anything to go by, a lady doctor at play.

‘If you want a bath first, I'll turn the coffee off,' called out the musician.

‘Coffee, coffee, my kingdom for a cup of coffee.' Amelia went straight through the hall to the kitchen. ‘I never did think that Richard III had his priorities right.'

A tousled iron-grey head appeared round the kitchen door. ‘There's grapefruit in the larder if you want it.'

‘What I want,' said Amelia firmly, ‘is to be told what's going on.'

‘Can't help you much there, I'm afraid.' Phoebe Plantin ran her broad, capable fingers through her untidy hair, rumpling it still further. ‘And your father's in South America. Not that he would be able to help all that much either. He never mentioned the Garamonds to me that I remember.'

‘Or me,' said Amelia regretfully. ‘Where in South America? Did he say?'

‘Somewhere in the Matto Grosso,' replied Dr Plantin, ‘with a tribe called the Pegola.'

‘Up-country?'

‘You know your father. With him it's always up-country.'

‘True.' Amelia used to describe her father as absent-minded until Phoebe Plantin had explained that he wasn't absentminded at all, but single-minded, which was quite different but had the same effect.

‘Not only, you will be pleased to hear,' said Dr Plantin, ‘do the Pegola South American Indians have a very unusual and interesting class structure untouched by the outside world but they are also said to have what is thought to be a unique method of communicating with each other without speech round the mountains.'

‘Irresistible,' agreed Amelia.

‘I don't think he actually tried to resist it,' said Professor Kennerley's second wife without rancour. ‘He went as soon as he could.'

Amelia grinned. She had only been ten years old when her own mother had died and it had been ages afterwards before the significance of something that she had heard her mother, Helena, say when she was very ill had dawned on Amelia. Helena Kennerley, who had been a great friend of Phoebe Plantin's as well as her patient, had known full well that she was going to die.

One day Amelia had overheard her mother say to Phoebe: ‘You'll look after both my pretty chickens, won't you, love?'

Even now Amelia had not forgotten Phoebe's speechless, deeply moved, nod, but it had been much, much later before she realized that her mother had been quoting the bereaved Macduff in Shakespeare's
Macbeth
, and even later still before it dawned on her that Helena Kennerley had been meaning to say that in some ways her husband was more child than man.

‘One of Puckles' clerks came round earlier with the key of the Grange for you,' Phoebe informed her, ‘and an appointment with the firm first thing Monday morning as they thought you'd need it.'

Amelia scanned the letter from the solicitors and then said: ‘Phoebe, is this your weekend off duty by any chance?'

‘It is, praise be. Not another spotty child or running nose until Monday morning.'

‘Then please could you take me over to Great Primer later on? When I've had a chance to have a bath and grabbed something to eat?'

‘Surely.' One of Dr Phoebe Plantin's great virtues as a stepmother was that she not only never made helpful suggestions but always fell in with those of other people when she could. ‘The Grange shouldn't be too difficult to find. Oh, and by the way, Tod Morton, the undertaker, called as well. He wants you to give him a ring when you can, even though it's out of hours …'

Another place which did not keep office hours was the mortuary.

It was the middle of one of the sunniest Saturday afternoons of the year when Dr Dabbe welcomed Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby to the post-mortem laboratory. Burns, Dr Dabbe's perennially silent post-mortem room technician, jerked his head in their direction by way of greeting.

‘Come along into the Temple of Truth, gentlemen,' said the pathologist, ‘where all shall be revealed and I'll tell you which of the three causes of death it was that actually killed … Octavia Garamond, did you say her name was?'

‘Three?' queried Detective Inspector Sloan rather sharply. In his book there had always been four causes of death: natural causes, accident, suicide, and homicide. ‘Only three, Doctor?'

‘Only three, Sloan.' The doctor held up a bony finger. ‘Firstly, disease … what William Shakespeare described in his splendid statement on genetics as “the thousand ills the flesh is heir to”. Burns, my gown …'

‘Naturally. I can see that.'

‘Secondly, there's medical treatment.'

‘Medical treatment?' echoed Detective Constable Crosby naïvely.

‘Otherwise known as iatrogenic disease,' said the pathologist. ‘Or diseases caused by doctors. There's a lot of it about.' He turned round while Burns tied his gown.

‘Comes from keeping on taking the tablets, I suppose,' said Sloan drily, ‘prescribed for the aforementioned diseases.'

‘Or even,' went on the pathologist with deep cynicism, ‘for the wrong disease. Burns, my gloves.'

‘And thirdly?' asked Sloan. He thought that the medical profession had a famous precept about first doing no harm but he didn't like to say so at this point.

‘Thirdly's diagnosis,' finished Dr Dabbe laconically. He held out his hands for the rubber surgical gloves.

Detective Constable Crosby, prepared to postpone the post-mortem for as long as he could, said: ‘How can you die of a diagnosis then, doctor?'

‘Happens all the time,' said Dabbe, waving one gloved hand. The other hand he held out in front of him. ‘Now, this one, Burns.'

‘How come?' said Crosby.

Colloquial English, decided Detective Inspector Sloan, was all very well for the police station canteen but he was in two minds about apologizing to the doctor for Crosby's use of it here and to him when Dr Dabbe responded directly to the constable.

‘First, Crosby, your doctor tells you that you've got the dreaded lurgies.'

‘So?' responded Crosby.

‘So,' said the pathologist, in no whit put out, ‘you get hold of an out-of-date medical dictionary and read up all about the lurgies.'

‘And?' said Crosby, even more informally.

Detective Inspector Sloan winced: young constables got brasher and brasher.

‘And you learn from the old dictionary,' carried on Dr Dabbe, ‘that patients who have the dreaded lurgies don't get better.'

‘Like the people whose innards are in those glass things you've got?' said Crosby.

‘Exactly,' concluded the pathologist cheerfully, ‘so you go home and turn up your toes, too.'

Crosby knitted his brows. ‘Sort of witch-doctors but the other way round?'

‘I think,' said Detective Inspector Sloan austerely, ‘we can take it that Mrs Garamond did not die of her diagnosis. We're ready when you are, doctor.'

Gowned and gloved, the pathologist advanced purposefully towards the body of an anonymous-looking old woman, a handwritten ticket tied to her right big toe the only visible sign of her having had an identity at all. ‘If I could have a motto over the door here it would be
Mortui Vivos Docenti
,' Dabbe said.

‘We're got a blue lamp over ours,' remarked Crosby, who did not enjoy attending post-mortems.

Sloan, who said nothing, found his mind had wandered from the mortuary to a certain spot in Calleford Minster. The body of old Octavia Garamond reminded him of nothing so much as one of those ancient tombs in the Minster where a long-dead prelate was shown in effigy on a table tomb at eye level in all his mitred glory, while lying underneath he was depicted as bare cadaver, the moral drawn in alabaster for all to see. There was no mitred glory about the late Mrs Garamond now.

Dr Dabbe stood immobile beside the post-mortem table and said: ‘You should treat the dead patient just like the living, Sloan. Did you know that?'

‘No, doctor.'

‘Use your eyes first, your hands next, and your tongue last. If at all.'

‘Yes, doctor.'

Dabbe peered over the deceased's face – and broke his own rule. ‘Something a bit odd here, Sloan …'

‘Where, doctor?'

‘Round her nose and mouth. Look for yourself.' The pathologist pointed to a thin ring of pressure marks which were only just visible.

‘She'd been having oxygen,' said Sloan.

‘Which might account for it,' agreed Dabbe, continuing with his visual examination. ‘No other signs of abnormality on head or neck. Make a note of that, will you, Burns?' The pathologist took a step or two to the right. ‘And nothing on the chest. There are two scars on the abdomen – signs of old surgical assaults …'

It was interesting, thought Sloan, to learn that the medical profession as well as the patient considered surgery as an assault.

‘Cholecystectomy, I should say – do you know, Sloan, that they do it with mirrors these days – I know, tell me it reflects them great credit – and down here, at a guess, a very old appendectomy … more of a laparotomy, really. The surgeon can't have known what he was looking for when he went in there. The really fancy surgeons don't take the appendix out nowadays – comes in handy for spare parts later, you see …'

‘Really, doctor?' The detective inspector leaned forward politely and took a look. John Bunyan had been right when he had caused Mr Standfast to say at the end of
Pilgrim's Progress:
‘My scars I take with me to the other side.' Perhaps – who could say? – that was all anyone ever took with them into Kingdom Come …

‘Big enough for him to have got both his hands in up to the elbows, I would have thought,' said Dr Dabbe straightening up. ‘Tell me, is there anything you think I should be particularly looking out for in the case of' – the pathologist squinted down at the parcel label attached to an elderly
digitus maximus
and read aloud – ‘Octavia Louise Augustina Garamond?'

‘The death certificate says …' began Sloan and left the sentence unfinished. The pathologist's expression showed exactly what he thought about death certificates.

‘I've seen it,' Dabbe said, giving his rubber gloves an extra onward tug and reaching for a scalpel. ‘Do you know that three quarters of all necroscopies disclose previously unknown and clinically important findings? Now, then …'

It was a full hour before he pulled his gloves off again.

When he spoke it was to Burns, his technician. ‘What have you got down so far?'

‘Oedema of the brain and lungs, doctor, dilation of the heart with fatty degeneration of the myocardium …'

‘Aldus got that bit right anyway,' said Dabbe. ‘Go on …'

‘Yes, doctor.' Burns read out: ‘Fatty infiltration of the liver and congestion of the spleen and kidneys. Samples of all organs taken.'