After Effects (15 page)

‘Sometimes,' volunteered Itchen, ‘they call them “me too” drugs.'

‘Riding on someone else's research when the patent's expired,' explained Gledhill, ‘or taking out a licence.'

‘Not Gilroy's, though?' said Sloan, registering the fact that the firm wished to be considered as pure as driven snow.

‘Not Gilroy's,' said Gledhill firmly.

‘Here,' declared Itchen, ‘we only do pure chemistry.'

‘And original research,' chimed in George Gledhill. ‘We don't go in for generic competition at all.'

‘And,' said Sloan gently, ‘are you going to tell me the active ingredients of Cardigan now or are we going to have to get it analysed ourselves?'

‘We'll tell you,' said Gledhill without hesitation. ‘No problem there.'

‘It's mainly an alkaloid from an Argentinian plant of the family
Rutaceae
called fagarine, which we're combining with one of the angiotension converting enzyme inhibitors,' reeled off Itchen.

If he was hoping to blind the two policemen with science he had failed. Crosby looked bored and Sloan had had that manoeuvre tried on him before by even cleverer people than these two.

‘We're hoping that it will aid atrial fibrillation,' added Gledhill, ‘but it's early days still—'

Sloan's mother, a great churchwoman in her day, always insisted that to the pure all things were pure. Sloan wasn't at all sure that Gilroy's Pharmaceuticals—pure scientists that they might be—came into that category. It wasn't that reservation, though, that stopped him leaving Gledhill and Itchen the copy of Dr Meggie's trials results when they asked him to.

It was the smell of fear caught by his fine-tuned detective nostrils.

It wasn't Saturday that was different for Mrs Hannah Glawari. It was morning. Her toilette was a lengthy affair and it was apparent that the arrival of two policemen had interrupted it. She had a vaguely dishevelled air about her as she showed them into the parlour.

She essayed an apologetic smile. ‘I'm afraid it's a little early for me, officer.'

‘We're sorry to trouble you, madam, but there are one or two points we'd like to clear up.'

While Mrs Glawari was clearly not naive enough to believe this, she entered into the spirit of polite enquiry. ‘Of course,' she murmured. ‘Do sit down.'

‘As you know,' began Sloan, ‘we're looking into the death of Dr Paul Meggie.' He didn't know why ‘looking into' seemed so much more anodyne than ‘investigating' but it did.

‘I'm glad to hear it,' said Mrs Glawari with a certain emphasis not lost on Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘What is it exactly that you want to know?'

‘Whether you have a car—'

‘A little runabout, Inspector.'

‘And whether you know the spot where Dr Meggie was found.'

She shook her head. ‘I know,' she said with a certain dignity, ‘that people often go to a place with happy associations when they wish to end their lives, but the more I think about it the less like Paul that seems anyway—'

‘And what we should also like,' Sloan said, ‘is a tape-recording of your voice.'

‘My ordinary speaking voice?' she asked a little uncertainly.

‘Just that, madam. Crosby, the tape machine, please.'

Dilys Chomel spent her Saturday morning in an agony of indecision. Dr Byville's patient without her spleen was now going downhill rather rapidly and it was frightening to see. The house physician's dilemma was whether or not to telephone Dr Byville and tell him so.

This would undoubtedly call down his wrath and result in scorn being heaped about her head. Unfortunately, Dr Byville was available and on call this weekend which meant she couldn't very well ring the more approachable Dr Beaumont instead—which was a pity. That would be a breach of medical etiquette—far more dangerous to her leaving testimonial than the deaths of any number of ill patients.

Sister Pocock wasn't a lot of help either. She belonged to the old school which regarded all young doctors as ignorant and foolish. As far as she was concerned, if Dr Byville had said the patient was going to die, then die the patient would. She even preached to her nurses that there was no disgrace in finding a patient dead ‘as long as you don't find them cold.'

There would be no point in looking for help or comfort from that quarter.

No, what she would do was ring Dr Friar over at Kinnisport and share her fears with him. He would understand. He'd got a dying man on his ward too. A young one, to make it worse.

‘See one, do one, teach one,' she murmured sadly to herself as she went to ring him.

But the switchboard at St Ninian's Hospital couldn't locate Dr Martin Friar and by the time a disconsolate Dr Dilys Chomel had got back to the Women's Medical Ward the patient without her spleen had died.

Detective Constable Crosby was not making a lot of headway either. He had been dispatched by Sloan to interview Darren Clements and his fellow animal rights campaigners. He had tracked the group down to a dim café near the railway station in Berebury. They were sitting in a huddle at the back, all very young and earnest.

‘Why, if it isn't Mr Plod the Policeman!' called out Clements, his bandaged hand well to the fore.

‘That's enough of that,' said Crosby.

‘No law yet against being in a café, is there?' asked a thickset youth wearing glasses and with an open notebook before him on the table. The cleversticks of the group, decided Crosby.

‘No,' said Crosby. ‘There's an old one against conspiring to break the law though, or weren't you thinking of doing that?'

‘What about the people who murder animals then?' shrilled a girl in black tights topped by something resembling a frou-frou. ‘Aren't they breaking the law, then?'

‘Causing unnecessary suffering is against the law,' began Crosby, ‘to animals, that is.' As far as he was concerned the same law should apply to humans, too—well, to policemen, anyway—but even in his short life he'd seen that it didn't.

‘Tell that to the fox,' hissed another girl, ‘before they blood someone with his blood.'

‘And to the lambs going to the slaughter in those terrible lorries,' shuddered the first girl, her frou-frou quivering with indignation.

‘What about the monkeys at Gilroy's?' demanded Darren Clements. ‘How would you like to be cooped up behind bars like they are?'

With heroic restraint Detective Constable Crosby refrained from saying exactly who he would like to see behind bars. The boy with glasses and the notebook had the look of a barrack-room lawyer as well as leader about him and he didn't like to risk it.

‘Perhaps,' sneered Cleversticks, ‘you think people can do whatever they like as long as they don't frighten the horses. That's a quotation, in case you didn't know.'

Those were almost the exact sentiments, too, had Cleversticks known it, of the Mounted Police Division. Horses did not go fast enough for Crosby and he let it pass.

‘Don't forget the factory-farmed pigs,' contributed another of Clements's cronies. He was wearing a gold ear-ring himself but no doubt would have objected to a pig being tagged.

‘Pigs is equal,' announced the boy with glasses. ‘That's a quotation, too,' he added hurriedly, not liking the expression on Crosby's face. ‘George Orwell said it. Not me.'

‘That's as maybe,' said Crosby grandly. ‘What I want to know is whether Christopher Granger from Larking is one of your mob.'

‘Why?'

‘Never mind for why,' said Crosby magisterially. ‘Was he or wasn't he?'

‘We don't need to tell you,' snapped the bespectacled youth.

‘Obstructing the police in the execution of their duty is an offence,' remarked Crosby.

‘He was for a bit,' admitted Clements.

‘Then he chickened out,' said she of the frou-frou contemptuously. ‘No bottle.'

‘Is he still one of you?' asked Crosby, getting out his own notebook.

‘He stopped coming when the going got rough,' said one of the other girls. She, decided the constable, could be categorized as a born follower. Where Spectacles led, she would follow.

‘Like when you started to break into Gilroy's?' suggested Crosby.

‘Like whenever he wanted to,' she said carelessly, tossing her hair out of her eyes. ‘It's a free world, isn't it?'

‘Except for the animals!'

‘Did you know,' said Crosby, dredging up from his memory something he'd learned at the police training college, ‘that they used to try animals when they'd killed some one or even stolen something?'

‘I don't believe it,' said Clements indignantly. ‘You're having us on.'

The boy with the glasses nodded with some reluctance. ‘He's right. They had proper trials with judge and jury. Can't believe it, can you?'

‘Barbarians,' said one of the young women.

‘Disgusting,' said the other.

‘What did they do when they found them guilty?' asked the born follower.

‘Hanged them,' said Crosby, adding shamelessly as he got up to go, ‘and then they ate them.'

Shirley Partridge had had her mid-morning coffee and had even managed a little chat with the artist in the front hall of St Ninian's Hospital. Funnily enough, Adrian Gomm's tattered jeans and deplorable old jumper did not worry her. And, anyway, as she meant to report to her mother later, he was ever so nice when she admired his painting.

She was just telling him that the colours at the bottom of the painting were ever so nice, although she didn't really like mice, when the Mayday call went out.

Shirley shot back to the switchboard as other people started to run overhead.

‘Mayday! Lorkyn Ward!' Shirley put all the usual emergency procedures into operation. ‘Cardiac arrest.' Automatically she put out calls for Dr Byville and Dr Beaumont in case either of them were still in the hospital. And sounded off the Senior Registrar's bleeper since Dr Martin Friar should definitely be in the hospital and on duty.

And when he didn't answer, she repeated the calls to his bleeper.

And when he still didn't answer, sounded them again and again.

Minutes later she had an anguished call from Lorkyn Ward. ‘Switchboard, for God's sake can't you stop Dr Friar's bleeper—it's driving us mad.'

‘Of course,' she said frostily. ‘If you want me to—'

‘He's the one with the cardiac arrest,' gasped a nurse. ‘We think he's dead.'

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Most people … fall back on the old rule that if you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.

‘Dead?' howled Superintendent Leeyes, quite affronted. ‘He can't be.'

‘Cardiac arrest,' said Detective Inspector Sloan succinctly. He had not shared Dr Dilys Chomel's inhibitions about disturbing the great and the good when they were off-duty and had promptly appraised his senior officer of the news about Dr Martin Friar, Saturday morning or not. It had not made for popularity.

‘And are you anywhere nearer the other sort of arrest?' demanded Leeyes trenchantly.

‘We've cleared away some of the undergrowth,' said Sloan obliquely, lapsing into horticultural vernacular. ‘I think the Merry Widow's in the clear because she would have been better off if Paul Meggie had lived to sign that Will in Expectation of marriage that Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery were drawing up for him—'

‘Always presuming that she didn't know it hadn't been signed.' The superintendent could always find an objection.

‘And the daughter,' persisted Sloan, ‘I would assume, would have been the one to have been disadvantaged by its being signed.' He added his own caveat before the superintendent did. ‘Always presuming she knew anything about it at all.'

Leeyes snorted. ‘I don't know what's going on, Sloan, but I don't like it.'

‘It may be natural causes,' said Sloan, who did not understand what had been going on either and was sure he wouldn't like it when he did, ‘although nothing has been said about Martin Friar having been ill before.'

‘And we still don't know if the Cardigan Protocol had anything to do with yesterday's two deaths.'

‘Not Muriel Galloway's anyway,' said Sloan, ‘because according to Gilroy's records she wasn't on the stuff in the first place. As to Abel Granger—'

‘Yes?'

‘Dr Dabbe took some specimens for analysis so we don't know yet.'

‘Where's our friendly neighbourhood pathologist now, might I ask?'

Sloan shot a look at his watch. ‘About level with Cranberry Point, I should say.'

‘Where!'

‘I should imagine that by this time, sir, he'll be making for the Cunliffe Gap.'

‘You mean,' he said with rising indignation, ‘he's out in a boat?'

‘Well out,' said Sloan. ‘And heading for the open sea.' And if he knew Dr Hector Smithson Dabbe, ahead of the field too; if ‘field' was what you called the entrants of a yachting race.

‘Hasn't he got a ship-to-shore radio telephone?' That was old technology, not new. The superintendent was opposed to all new technology on principle.

‘We've tried that, sir.' Sloan coughed. ‘I understand that Dr Dabbe didn't take any form of communication with him.' The pathologist was nobody's fool.

‘We'll get the helicopter to pick him off his yacht then,' vowed the superintendent. ‘Time it earned its oats. That'd get it away from Traffic Division for a change and a good thing, too.'

‘I very much doubt if Dr Dabbe would consider jumping ship—'

‘Well,' growled Leeyes, ‘whatever you do, don't you let that moron of a deputy of his lay a finger on that body until Dabbe comes back.'

‘No, sir,' said Sloan, although he wasn't at all sure how he was going to accomplish this.