After Effects (16 page)

‘It's not death from natural causes,' snarled Leeyes, ‘until Dabbe says so. Is that clearly understood?'

‘Yes, sir. I am told,' advanced Sloan cautiously, ‘by the Administrator at the hospital at Kinnisport where Dr Friar worked, that sudden death from heart attack is not uncommon these days in overworked and highly stressed junior doctors.'

Superintendent Leeyes, whose view of administrators was not high, grunted.

‘He was also,' carried on Sloan, ‘being expected to—er—hold the fort as a consequence of Dr Meggie's sudden death as well as do his usual work for Dr Byville and some for Dr Beaumont.'

‘Did he just keel over or something?' enquired Leeyes in a detached way. He took the view that other people's workloads—whatever they were—were always lighter than his own.

‘He called his boss, Dr Byville, out to see a dying patient this morning and did a very short ward round with him and he was taken ill some time later.'

‘Too many people altogether dying for my liking,' remarked Leeyes.

‘And,' continued Sloan doggedly, ‘as far as we can ascertain at this stage—'

‘Sloan—' began Leeyes dangerously.

‘Find out,' amended Sloan on the instant, ‘some of them were going to die anyway.'

Superintendent Leeyes said that he didn't see what that had got to do with it, and delivered his own apotheosis on the point. ‘What matters is whether they died when they shouldn't have done. Or if they died because someone else wanted them to. That's the law, Sloan. You should know that.'

‘Yes, indeed, sir.' He didn't doubt that this would be the legal view. It was the more pragmatic medical one that worried him. He was not at all sure now that it would be the same as the legal one. ‘The problem is that Dr Meggie's death is the only one so far that we have what you might call valid reservations about.'

He was talking to the wrong man.

‘Valid reservations, Sloan?' exploded Leeyes. ‘People are dying like flies all around us and you go on about valid reservations! The place is like a shambles except that there isn't any blood. You'd better get busy.'

Saturdays were less different on the farm than they were at either the hospital or the police station. It was the seasons that changed the pattern of work there rather than any arbitrary divisions made by man. Christopher and Simon Granger each had their own duties at Willow End Farm and duly went about them during the morning while their mother and married sister gradually turned their thoughts from a dying man and towards a country funeral.

Unspoken but hanging about the second generation was a miasma of uncertainty about their father's will. Since they would have all thought it unseemly to discuss this before he was decently interred with his forefathers in Larking churchyard they spent their time in a leaderless hiatus; each thinking their own private thoughts.

Old Mrs Granger thought chiefly—and without affection—about Simon's wife because it was to her that she knew she would presently be surrendering her home. She knew enough though now about the role of a farmer's wife to know that it was too demanding a one for a farmer's mother and had her eye on a small bungalow with central heating near Larking Church. There would be room there for Christopher if he wanted to come with her.

Simon Granger had had enough sense to keep his wife out of the way for the time being. Time enough for her to come into her own when his mother had made her intentions clear. In between inspecting the hay he mulled over what his father's testamentary dispositions might be. Come what may, he reckoned his sister would come out best. She'd be able to get her portion and go back home to her husband and children without a care.

Christopher Granger walked over to inspect the bullocks, wondering if Simon would want to buy him out and toying with the idea of what he would do if he did. He knew now with a new unexpected certainty that he himself would never want to buy Simon out and saddle himself with debt for as far ahead as he could see.

He'd rather sell up than that.

With some capital he could live for a year or two while he did the one thing he'd always really wanted to do—go to art college and paint.

Idly he wondered if Simon would instead suggest paying him his share of the farm's income. That would be something to consider. Better for Simon than going to the bank—if Dad had left it that way, of course. And then there was his mother and sister to think about. A hard man his father had been but a fair one. Perhaps he needn't worry after all. Dad would have done what was best for family and farm, he could be sure.

Today he decided to approach the bullocks from above. He walked along the hill above the valley of the stream. He edged his way round the top field and found himself looking down on to the little patch of grass by the willows where yesterday there had been that car. It wasn't there now because yesterday evening the police had covered it in tarpaulins and notices about not touching anything and very carefully put it on a low-loader and taken it away.

Now there was nothing but a little flattened grass and tyre marks to show where it had been and where a man had died. A glint of movement over to his left caught his eye and he saw a tiny car—it looked like a child's toy at this distance—snaking its way up the farm road.

At this distance he could see that it was the maroon-coloured vehicle the rector drove and that it was heading for the farm house. Christopher Granger stood there irresolutely for a little while and then turned on his heel and started back towards home.

There was something he had to tell the police.

Even Dr Byville's legendary medical composure appeared to have been shaken by the sudden death of his registrar.

‘I was only talking to the fellow a couple of hours ago,' he said to Sloan and Crosby when he had been retrieved from a consulting session at the private clinic to join the two policemen at Kinnisport Hospital. ‘Doesn't seem possible.'

‘He was all right then, I take it?' murmured Sloan. They were all three in the sister's office of Lorkyn Ward which was where Dr Martin Friar had expired.

The Consultant Physician paused before he answered. ‘Yes and no, Inspector. He did say something to me about thinking he might've got an infection on the way though he couldn't very well have gone off duty in the circumstances.'

‘Ah—'

‘He said his chest was feeling a bit tight and so forth but that he was quite well enough to keep going.' Byville grimaced. ‘What he told me was that he'd take an aspirin or something as he didn't want to start on a course of antibiotics if it wasn't anything—'

‘Only it was something,' intoned Crosby, ‘wasn't it?'

‘God, yes! He must have been cooking a coronary thrombosis all along.' Byville started to doodle on a pad on sister's desk. ‘I must confess I didn't think anything of it at the time but now—'

Now, Sloan would have been the first to concede, was different from then. It almost always was.

‘Not surprising, of course,' went on Byville, ‘that he should have a coronary. Paul Meggie's death had undoubtedly started to get to him—'

‘As well it might,' contributed Sloan.

‘And I must say the death in the ward this morning wasn't a nice one.'

‘Was that patient on the Cardigan Protocol too?' asked Crosby.

Byville shook his head. ‘No, it was a spleen, not a heart case. Different ball game altogether and miles away, you understand, from the cardiac system anatomically speaking.'

‘I see, sir,' said Sloan. It was not strictly true that he saw. The human anatomy that policemen were taught—and learned later—was of a very basic variety. In more ways than one.

‘We'll have to wait for the
post mortem
to be sure, of course,' carried on Byville worriedly. ‘He might have had an aortic aneurysm, for instance, or another of that sort of time-bomb type of condition which is just waiting to happen without anyone knowing that it's there.' He frowned. ‘They're beginning to talk in the literature of something called Adult Sudden Death Syndrome now.' His shoulders sagged. ‘It's no use our second guessing, Inspector, or theorizing ahead of the facts either.'

‘No, Doctor,' agreed Detective Inspector Sloan. This was part of his own credo, too, if not his superintendent's.

Just then the door opened and the ward sister came in. ‘Yes, Sister,' Sloan said. ‘What is it? I'm sorry we had to commandeer your office—'

This nurse was no Florentinian battle-axe left over from the Crimea. She was youngish and patently more than a little frightened. She came and stood uncertainly in the middle of the room. Sloan didn't know to which of them she intended to speak and in fact she avoided all their eyes by addressing the floor.

‘It's the Cardigan Protocol bottles—'

‘What about them?' demanded Dr Byville sharply.

‘Three of them are missing from the ward drug cabinet,' she said, flustered and a little breathless. ‘I've just checked.'

‘The bloody fool,' said Byville compassionately.

‘The poor bloody fool.'

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

All that can be said for medical popularity is that until there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare not face it.

‘Where to now sir?' asked Detective Constable Crosby as the two policemen clattered down the stone staircase of the old local authority hospital at Kinnisport.

‘The car,' said Sloan tersely. ‘I need to sit and think. Come along.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Crosby, pausing out of sheer habit to look at the mural on his way across the entrance hall. He regarded what was being painted and called up dubiously, ‘That a vase?'

‘It's what's called an alembic, mate.' Adrian Gomm looked down on them both from his ladder. ‘It's the sort of vessel in which they used to try to sell the secret of eternal life in Chaucer's day.'

‘Haven't found it yet, have they?' riposted Crosby. ‘Not in this place, anyway.'

‘A little thing like that didn't stop 'em trying to sell it,' said the artist cheerfully. ‘You should know that. People were gullible then and they're gullible now.'

‘That's something different—' Crosby showed a tendency to argue as Sloan urged him on his way.

‘If that's your car by the front door,' said Adrian Gomm, peering through an upper window, ‘then there's some kids out there looking as if they'd like to try it on for size.'

As a manoeuvre, that worked quicker and Sloan was soon sitting in the relative privacy of the police car. Superintendent Leeyes would have to be kept in the picture, of course, but not before he had first tried to work one or two things out for himself.

Sloan had settled his frame in the front passenger seat, and stretched his legs out as far as they would go. ‘There's something, somewhere, that we're not getting, Crosby. Things do not add up whichever way they are looked at.' He hesitated, thinking aloud. ‘There's almost too much that doesn't fit.'

‘A crystal ball would come in handy,' volunteered Crosby unhelpfully.

‘And one of the things I can't understand,' mused Sloan, ‘is where the woman in the case comes in.'

‘
Cherchez la femme
,' said Crosby, still unhelpful.

‘All the telephone calls we can't trace were made by a woman, remember?'

‘For my money,' said Crosby largely, ‘Bunty Meggie is the one with means, motive and opportunity.'

‘Why should she get steamed up about animal rights and put something on the Galloways' garage doors?'

‘A blind,' pronounced Crosby.

‘I think,' said Sloan, ‘that it would be useful to have a tape-recording of the voices of all of them, including Shirley Partridge. She sent for us quickly enough when Dr Friar collapsed. We mightn't have been told for ages … oh, and those girls with Darren Clements and his crowd—'

‘They don't talk,' said Crosby feelingly. ‘They shriek.'

‘And Dr Dilys Chomel,' said Sloan. ‘The girl on the switchboard said she'd been in touch with Martin Friar more than once today because she'd made the telephone connection—'

Crosby hitched a shoulder up under his seatbelt. ‘No. I talked to Dr Chomel about that and she said they only discussed the spleen patient who died on Lorkyn Ward this morning. Apparently she knew the man because he'd started off in Berebury Hospital and then got transferred over to St Ninian's not long before he died.'

‘She was looking after some of Dr Meggie's Cardigan Protocol patients as well though, don't forget.'

‘Perhaps that's a blind, too,' said Crosby. ‘The medics go in for double-blind trials, don't they?'

‘As for the Merry Widow—'

‘She could have been luring him to his doom,' said Crosby. ‘Him and anyone else.'

‘Siren voices, all of them,' remarked Sloan absently.

‘Pardon, sir?'

‘The sirens,' Sloan informed him, his mind on something else, ‘were sea nymphs whose songs were irresistible to men. They lured sailors on to the rocks.'

‘Christopher Granger's a bit of a wet,' said Crosby, whose line of thought was not too difficult to follow, ‘but his voice is all right.'

‘Dr Byville thought with Dr Friar it might have been a case of his doing a bit of experimental work on the Cardigan Protocol all on his own.'

Detective Constable Crosby had inserted himself into the driver's seat and now started to play about with the radio. ‘Making his own name by finding out for himself what was wrong with Cardigan? That was what Dr Byville meant, wasn't it, sir?'

‘It's been done before,' said Sloan, his mind going back to the library at his old school. There had been a painting there of Dr Edward Jenner vaccinating his own son against smallpox. What had struck Sloan then was that there had been no sign anywhere in the picture of an anguished and protesting Mrs Edward Jenner looking on. His own mother would never have let any doctor try out something new on him for the sake of experiment and he supposed most mothers would feel the same. Perhaps Dr Jenner hadn't told Mrs Jenner what he proposed to do to their son. That would have been one way round the difficulty. Now they had something called ‘informed consent,' didn't they?