An Empty Death (41 page)

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Authors: Laura Wilson

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He glanced at his wristwatch. Half past five. He’d had more than enough for one day. He’d collect Arliss, look into the station to see how Ballard was getting on with tracing Todd, then go home for supper and an hour on his allotment. Fuck this, he told himself: I’ve earned a bit of peace and quiet.
Then, with a sinking heart, he remembered Mrs Ingram. Peace and quiet was exactly what he wasn’t going to get, at least not in his own home. It would have to be the allotment, then the pub. He was buggered if he was going to have another evening like last night.
Forty-Eight
D
acre felt pleased with his performance. His deliberately elaborate description of the symptoms of testicular torsion had done its job even better than he’d expected. Besides, Inspector Stratton had liked him; he could tell. After the shock of going into a public call box yesterday evening, and discovering that GER 1212 was, indeed, the number of West End Central police station - he’d put the receiver down pretty sharpish when he heard that - he’d spent a profitable couple of hours rehearsing exactly what he would say when interviewed, and it had all come out word-perfect, with just the right amount of spontaneity.
He watched the big policeman out of sight, then spun on his heels to face the rows of waiting patients. ‘Now then,’ he sang out, ‘who’s next?’
 
A couple of hours later, Dacre had finished work and returned to his lodgings. Apart from his failure to understand plumbum oscillans, which earned him a very funny look from Dr Ransome, he’d had an unexpectedly good day. It wasn’t in his medical dictionary - which he’d removed from his special hidey-hole in case a full search was instigated - but, when he discovered that plumbism was the medical term for lead poisoning, a dim recollection of chemistry lessons at school allowed him to work it out: swinging the lead. Malingering. Of course.
Guessing that Fay would come off duty at about the same time as he did, he’d wondered if he ought to nip upstairs to talk to her, but decided against it. It wouldn’t do to make himself conspicuous - for all he knew, Inspector Stratton might still be sniffing about the place. He’d see Fay tomorrow. He wanted to hear about her interview with the inspector. There was no reason to imagine that their stories hadn’t matched, but it was best to check. Besides, it would give him something to look forward to - it was high time he had her to himself again. Constantly thinking about her was distracting him, and that was no good at all. She must be secured, he thought, properly, and the quicker that happened the better, although, after the fiasco at the Clarendon, he’d need to go carefully with the sex stuff.
On his way home, he’d stopped at a café for a supper of tea and sausage rolls, and now he was settled in his single armchair with his pitifully thin pillow doubled up at the small of his back, a bottle of beer and glass to hand, and the Psychological Medicine textbook in his lap. He’d been reading for a couple of hours - some of it mundane, obvious, some fascinating, when he came upon a section about delusions and found something that made him laugh out loud.
French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras (b.1873, Verdun-sur-Garonne), gave his name to the Capgras delusion. First described in a paper in 1923, using the term ‘l’illusion des sosies’ (the illusion of doubles), this is a rare disorder in which a person believes that an acquaintance, usually a family member, has been replaced by an imposter of identical appearance, despite recognising familiarities in appearance and behaviour. It is most commonly found in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. Less often, it may be the result of trauma to the head (brain injury) . . .
He read about the Capgras’s patient Madame M., who insisted that her entire family had been replaced by imposters, then put the book down and took a swig of his beer. Whatever the opposite of Capgras Syndrome might be, everyone - sane or otherwise - in thinking that he, the false doctor, was real, was suffering from it. That should be Dacre’s Syndrome - or, more properly, it should be called by his original name. He mouthed this silently for a few moments, the sheer audacity of it making him laugh again.
There was no mention of how the Capgras problem might be treated. Perhaps nobody knew. If there could be people out there who thought that real people were imposters, then perhaps he - well, Dr Dacre - was just as real as a ‘real’ doctor, after all. What a strange idea . . . But then, even by his own standards, he’d had a pretty strange week. Stratton, he thought, was persistent, but he wasn’t a mind reader, and as long as he suspected nothing, then he, Dacre, would be in the clear. He’d fooled him, hadn’t he?
Psychiatry was definitely the way forward. He’d be capable of understanding others in a way that no ordinary person could hope to do. In comparison to him, ordinary people were blindfolded and blundering. He could break new ground. Father of modern psychiatry - that sounded good. Bringer of a new dawn in the understanding of the human mind . . . No, the human spirit. That sounded better. He’d become a professor. He’d be revered, consulted by committees and governments, decorated . . .
Dacre leant back in his chair and closed his eyes, enjoying the image of a medal conferred by a grateful monarch, and, watching with pride and decked out in furs and finery, Fay - Mrs James Dacre, wife to the eminent professor . . .
How could he have thought he’d be content with being a mere doctor? This, he thought, clutching the psychiatry textbook, this was the future . . . Away from the Middlesex with its meddling policeman to a place far from filthy old Euston Road, to live in a fine detached house with a couple of acres of garden, and Fay, his wife, by his side. The sooner he started laying plans, the better. The first step would be to tell Fay that he was asking his ‘wife’ to divorce him. Better leave it for a week or so, though, wouldn’t do to spring it on her too soon . . .
Forty-Nine
‘
N
ot much luck tracing Todd, sir, I’m afraid.’ N ‘Oh?’ Stratton, who had just informed Ballard about the progress - or lack of it - made the previous day, squinted at the sergeant through the dusty, smoke-clouded shaft of morning sunlight that had managed to penetrate the dirty office window.
‘According to the hospital’s Administrative Department,’ said the sergeant, ‘he was born in May 1912, which makes him thirty-two years old.’
‘Why isn’t he in the forces?’
‘Call-up deferred on compassionate grounds, apparently.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t know, sir. They couldn’t find the information.’
‘Well, there must have been something official.’
‘Yes, sir. To be honest, they were rather vague about it. I got the impression they’d lost the document.’
Stratton shook his head in disgust. ‘That’s just what we need . . . Anything else?’
‘Well, I’ve discovered that there were two Samuel Todds born in May 1916. One in Gravesend - died at two years old - and one in Bristol. He was killed on active service in 1941, when the Repulse went down.’
‘Nobody else?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, you’d better try the rest of 1912, and, if nothing comes up, 1910 to . . . I don’t know . . . 1918, just in case. He might have falsified the date for some reason.’
‘Yes, sir . . . Or - it’s just a suggestion, sir . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘It might not be his name at all, sir. After all, it’s happened before. There was that chap we arrested a couple of months ago who was passing himself off as an RAF flight lieutenant, and the bloke last year who said he was a brigadier.’
‘Oh, yes. Thompson, wasn’t it? But he was mad as a hatter. And in any case, even if he’d been normal - impersonating a member of the services is one thing, but why would anyone want to lie in order to become a mortuary assistant, for Christ’s sake?’
‘An unhealthy fascination with corpses, sir?’
‘Interfering with dead women, you mean . . . Jesus, that’s all we need. I suppose it might explain why Byrne hid those photographs - the call-up story was eyewash, and he’d sacked him for improper behaviour but he was keeping them just in case . . . but why didn’t he say anything to us?’
‘Wanted to keep it quiet, sir. Bad for the hospital’s reputation if it got out - and after all, they were dead, weren’t they? And he wasn’t sacked, he left. The Administrative Department said he’d been called up and it was all above board.’
‘Had they seen his papers?’
‘They couldn’t find any record of those, either.’
Stratton raised his eyebrows. ‘I see. Have you got his last address?’
‘Yes, sir. And I asked one of the local coppers to check with the landlady. A Mrs . . .’ Ballard leafed through his notebook, ‘Barnard. She said Todd left on the twenty-fifth of June. Told her he’d got a job up north somewhere.’
‘She didn’t know exactly?’
‘No, sir. But she seemed to think he was exempt from the call-up because of bad health.’
‘Did she indeed? Well, that does make it sound as if he left under a cloud for some reason or other. Of course, it doesn’t explain why the photographs were tucked under Byrne’s blotter. Unless he just happened to keep them there.’
‘Odd place, though, sir. And one of them was at his house.’
‘Yes . . . And we need to get to the bottom of this missing morphine, too.’ Stratton sighed. ‘I suppose it means taking the rest of those floorboards up, but we’ll need a general search, as well. I’ll see who I can round up for that, and then I’d better go back to the mortuary and see Higgs - find out if he knows anything about Todd, or if he’d seen him do anything . . .’ Stratton rolled his eyes, ‘unusual to the dead.’
 
A further application to Lamb, who had now added deep, rumbling sighs to his bearing-up repertoire, resulted in permission to take Piper, Watkins and Policewoman Harris with him to the Middlesex.
After another dismal encounter in the Administrative Department, Stratton took his search party, now augmented by the old porter, to Matron Hornbeck. To his relief, she proved far more helpful than old Fishy upstairs, and agreed to conduct an inventory to make sure that no other phials of morphine had gone missing. After issuing instructions, Stratton felt confident enough to leave the others to pull up the rest of the floorboards in the corridor and conduct a search, and went to find Sister Bateman. When she had confirmed that Fay had been sent to the basement operating theatre with a set of notes on the evening of Dr Byrne’s death, he thanked her and went down to the mortuary.
 
‘They’re sending us that Dr Ferguson for the time being,’ said Higgs, nodding approvingly. He was squatting against the wall in the main mortuary room, holding one of Stratton’s cigarettes pinched between his thumb and forefinger so that it pointed into his palm. The harsh, greenish light on his wizened features and jockey’s frame made him look like the Artful Dodger a week dead. ‘He’s coming over this afternoon. And Miss L’s agreed to stay.’
Stratton, opposite him on the only available chair, said, ‘That’s good. I wanted to ask you about Sam Todd.’
‘What about him?’
‘Did he talk much about himself?’
Higgs sucked on his cigarette and stared into space for what seemed like several minutes, two very thin trickles of smoke emerging, eventually, from his nostrils. ‘Not a lot. But I never give him my life story, neither. What’s he done?’
‘Nothing, so far as we know. What did he tell you?’
‘Said he’d been moving about a fair bit - that’s why they only just cottoned to him for the call-up—’
‘That was the reason he gave?’
‘Yes. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Long time, mind, but then they didn’t get onto the older ones until a year or so back.’
‘How old was he?’
‘Dunno. Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? Something like that, I reckon. They’ll have all them details upstairs though, won’t they?’
‘Did he tell you anything else?’
‘Not that I recall . . .’ Higgs took another drag. ‘Wait, though. He said he’d worked for the government. Some department or other.’
Stratton made a note. ‘Where was that?’
‘Haven’t the foggiest . . .’ Higgs gave his earlobe a pensive tug. ‘No. If he did tell me, it’s gone.’
‘Was it in London?’
‘I should think so. He told me he used to live at Shepherd’s Bush.’
‘When was that?’
‘Before he come to work here, he said. But he was a good bloke, Inspector - one of the best we’ve ever had here.’
‘How did he get on with Dr Byrne?’
Higgs looked mildly surprised. ‘Same as anyone. You knew Dr Byrne a bit, didn’t you? More time for the dead than the living. We was used to it.’ Exhaling, he added, ‘I miss him, you know. A real expert, he was. Best pathologist we’ve ever had.’
‘Did you ever notice Todd behaving strangely with any of the bodies?’
‘What, dirty?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never. Nothing like that. I know the sort of thing - we had a bloke like that when I was working at Southwark, years ago. Found him at it. Reported it straight away. I won’t have nothing like that in my mortuary.’ He glared proprietorially towards the sheeted shape that lay on one of the slabs, as if daring some invisible pervert to lay a finger on it. ‘And Dr Byrne would have had him out on his ear.’

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