Injury Time (11 page)

‘Oh, he wasn't doing the talking at that point, Inspector. It was Mrs Iverson who was telling us about it after he mentioned it.'

‘So,' reasoned the Inspector, ‘all the guests were looking at her?'

‘I suppose we were.'

‘So,' said Milsom patiently, ‘what was the doctor doing while she was talking?'

Henry Tyler cast his mind back to the fatal evening. ‘He was carving the fillet of beef. He'd just begun. He took off the first slice—you know, the rather well-done, brown bit at the end—and laid it on one side of the serving dish and then he cut the next slice off for the first lady and so on.'

‘We can't work out how he could have killed his wife while he was sitting at the opposite end of the table,' said Constable Bewman naively.

‘You have rather got it in for the doctor, haven't you?' said Henry easily.

‘It's common knowledge that most male murderers are widowers,' growled Milsom. ‘What we don't like, Mr Tyler, is that Mrs Iverson was poisoned in full view of the Coroner and the Chairman of the Bench.'

‘“Aye, there's the rub,” as William Shakespeare so wisely said,' murmured Henry.

‘And Miss Chalder is a very good-looking girl.'

‘Ah, so that's the way the wind blows, is it?' said Henry, his mind beginning to stray. ‘Mind you,' he added fairly, ‘doctors are able to get their hands on poison more easily than most of us.'

‘Oh, didn't I say, Mr Tyler? It wasn't a medical poison that was used to kill Mrs Iverson.'

‘No?' If Henry thought that there was a contradiction in terms about the words ‘medical poison' he did not let it show in his face.

‘More of a horticultural poison,' said the Inspector, ‘although not intended as such.' He consulted his notebook. ‘The substance was called ethylene chlorohydrin, if that means anything to you, sir.'

‘I'm afraid not,' said Henry regretfully.

‘Used to speed the germination of seeds and potatoes,' said the Inspector, ‘and as a cleaning solvent.'

‘And it's odourless,' chimed in Constable Bewman helpfully.

‘So there was no need to have anything highly scented or smelling strongly on the table,' said Henry at once.

‘I hope you never take it into your head to commit a murder, sir,' said the Inspector. ‘You do seem to have an eye for essentials.'

‘And how much of this—er—horticultural poison does it take to kill a human being?' asked Henry, ignoring this last.

‘Not a lot,' said the Inspector quietly. ‘Something under a fifth of a teaspoonful—say four or five drops—added to which it is highly soluble.'

‘It seems to me,' said Henry Tyler, in the last analysis a Ministry man, ‘that this stuff, whatever it is, is something that ought to be put a stop to.'

‘Very possibly, sir,' said the Inspector smoothly. ‘And after the fruit and nuts?'

‘We all moved back into the drawing-room for coffee,' said Henry, ‘and I performed my party trick with the cream and the back of the spoon.' He looked up. ‘It's not a conjuring trick, Inspector.'

‘I'm glad to hear it, sir.'

‘It's a question of how to get the cream to float on top of the coffee.'

‘Very difficult, I'm sure, sir.'

‘Not when you know how.'

‘I think that is going to be the case with the ethylene chlorohydrin, sir.'

‘Er—quite, Inspector. Well, with the coffee it's all a matter of putting the sugar in first and stirring well. That increases the surface tension on the top of the coffee—or is it the specific gravity?—so that when you dribble the cream slowly over the back of the spoon it stays on the top.'

‘And Bob's your uncle, so to speak?' said the Inspector, paying unconscious tribute to an old nepotism.

‘It worked,' said Henry. ‘Whether it distracted everyone else long enough to slip five drops of something into Mrs Iverson's coffee, I wouldn't know, Inspector.'

‘But we would, Mr Tyler. You see, Mrs Iverson never drank coffee. And we have it on the authority of those sitting near her that she did not drink it that evening.' He coughed. ‘If I may say so, your sister was particularly emphatic on the point.'

‘Good old Wendy,' said Henry. He frowned. ‘I say, Inspector, that does rather leave every avenue explored, doesn't it?'

Detective Inspector Milsom assented to this sentiment with a quiet nod. ‘Every avenue that we can think of.'

‘What we want, Inspector,' he said bracingly, ‘is a new avenue or a fresh look at an old one.'

‘Either would do very nicely, sir.' With an ironic smile Milsom said: ‘Which do you recommend?'

‘Oh, a new look at an old problem,' said Henry Tyler at once. ‘We don't have new problems in the Foreign Office.'

‘The only matter which you have brought to our attention, sir, which seems to have escaped everyone else's notice was the—er—untimely mention of the footbell.'

‘Which doesn't get us very much furth—Wait a minute, Inspector, wait a minute.'

‘Yes, sir?'

‘Suppose it does?' Henry ran his hands through his hair in a gesture of excitement that his sister would have recognized well. ‘Suppose it was meant to turn all eyes towards our hostess?'

‘And take them off your host?' said Milsom astringently.

‘Exactly!'

‘Well?'

‘Well, if it was intended as a distraction, then that must have been the moment when he poisoned his wife. That follows, doesn't it?'

‘It's a thought worth considering, sir.'

‘Watch out, Inspector, if you can talk like that in response to one of my brainwaves we'll have you working here.'

‘No, thank you, sir. We've got enough troubles of our own in Calleshire.'

‘I think you're going to have one less in a minute.' He brought his fist down on his desk with a bang. ‘Inspector, until this moment I have always felt that the benefit of a classical education was over-rated.'

‘Indeed, sir?'

‘But not now! Parysatis, wife of Darius, killed Statira, the wife of Artaxerxes, in much the same way as Margot Iverson was murdered.'

Detective Inspector Milsom leaned forward, his notebook prominent. ‘Tell me …'

‘Now I know what else it was Dr Iverson did when he went through to see to the claret before dinner.' Henry rubbed his hands. ‘First he probably smeared a little horseradish sauce or even some colourless Vaseline on the righthand side of the carving knife. He then added a fatal dose of your ethylene stuff to it and put it back on the carving rest …'

‘With the other blade facing upward.' Detective Constable Bewman could hardly contain his excitement. Then his face fell. ‘But why didn't the first guest get the poisoned beef?'

Detective Inspector Milsom said quietly, ‘Because the doctor laid the first slice of the fillet—the browned outside piece that you don't give to guests—to one side of the carving dish … Mr Tyler said so.'

‘But put it on his wife's plate later without anyone noticing,' said Henry. ‘Only the left-hand side of the carving knife touched everyone else's meat.' He sat back in his chair. ‘Parysatis did it with a chicken and I should have thought of it before.'

THE HARD SELL

‘Morning, Harry.' Detective Inspector Sloan shifted his chair an inch or two to indicate to Inspector Harpe that there was room to sit beside him at the table in the police canteen.

‘Morning.' The Inspector from Traffic set a mug of tea and a pile of ham sandwiches down on the table and pulled up a chair.

Sloan let him settle to food and drink before asking cautiously: ‘How's life?'

‘Busy,' he said, taking a bite.

This was not an unexpected reply since Inspector Harpe was head of ‘F' Division's Traffic Department and thus never without work. In addition to this he maintained a ceaseless campaign against drinking and driving—and an even more bitter one against those lawyers and magistrates whose view of what constituted random breath-testing did not coincide with his own.

Detective Inspector Sloan let the tea and sandwiches exert their customary beneficial effect on Harpe's temper before venturing further comment.

‘All well in your neck of the woods?' he enquired presently. ‘Like the motorway?' After drinking drivers Inspector Harpe reserved his ferocity for fast ones and was in the habit of referring to Calleshire's short stretch of motorway as The Route of All Evil.

Happy Harry grunted. ‘Had a fatal last night.'

Sloan nodded sympathetically. This, no doubt, accounted for some of his colleague's taciturnity. Road traffic accidents, however trivial, were never exactly fun and where there was a death involved they were even less nice and, no matter what anyone said, policemen never did get inured to them. He said, ‘There's always too many RTAs …'

‘This wasn't exactly a road traffic accident.' Harry frowned. ‘At least not within the meaning of the Act.'

‘How come that you got it, then?' asked Detective Inspector Sloan, professionally curious.

‘The caller said there'd been a car accident and so naturally we attended.'

‘And had there?'

‘Oh, yes, there had been a car accident, all right,' responded Harpe simply, ‘and it was certainly death by motor car. I'll grant you that.'

‘I wonder how the statisticians will deal with it, then,' mused Sloan. He'd never felt the same way about statisticians since he'd heard about the one who had drowned in a river whose average depth was six inches …

‘It's not the numbers game that I'm interested in,' snorted Harpe.

Sloan toyed with the idea of repeating the old joke about statisticians to Happy Harry but decided against it. Instead he asked: ‘What happened, then?'

‘Funniest thing,' said Harpe. ‘It was at this meeting of the Calleshire Classic Car Club. They have their get-togethers at …'

‘I know,' said Sloan. ‘Down at the old railway goods yard.'

‘More's the pity,' said Harpe: this was another beef of the Traffic Inspector's. ‘Now if all the freight went by goods wagon on the railways we'd have half the traffic and a quarter of the problems we get on the roads.'

‘And if all the population stuck to the Ten Commandments,' said the Head of ‘F' Division's Criminal Investigation Department, ‘then I'd be out of a job. What happened, Harry?'

‘Well, you know the goods yard as well as I do. They've still got some old platforms down there even though they've taken up the tracks as well as the waste ground where the old railway sidings used to be …'

‘Berebury North Station,' supplied Sloan. ‘That was.'

‘Closed by the good Dr Beeching, I suppose …'

‘No,' said Sloan, who was Calleshire born and bred. ‘Berebury North closed before the war when the fish trade fell away. The herring failed. What happened yesterday?'

‘Well, they were using the old railway down platform to show off these classic cars. They don't make them like that any more, Sloan. Beautiful jobs, they are. You should have seen the old Aston Martin they had there. Now there's a car with everything …'

‘What happened?'

But there was no rushing the Traffic man: he might have been making a statement to the court, his tale was so measured. ‘They'd just got the cars all lined up in a row with their front wheels right up to the edge of the platform so that they could have their photographs taken for some magazine. Lovely to see proper bodywork and real chrome …'

‘Best side to London if it was the down platform,' observed Sloan.

Irony was always wasted on Inspector Harpe who paused, searching for a good simile. ‘Like so many race horses.'

‘Were they showing their paces too?' enquired Sloan. ‘And pawing the ground?'

‘There's no need to be sarcastic, Sloan. They all go—it's just that they don't go far or so fast these days.'

‘No different really then from any other geriatrics, eh?' Sloan took a drink from his own cup. ‘And do I take it, Harry, that one of them went far enough to kill someone?'

The Traffic Inspector nodded, his mouth full of sandwich. ‘Sort of,' he mumbled.

‘While it was on the down platform?'

The nod was even more vigorous this time.

‘It went over the platform?' divined Sloan.

‘That's right.' The sandwich had gone down red lane now. ‘A pearl grey 1961 2.4 Jaguar came off over the edge and fell on to a chap who was thinking of buying it.' A rare flash of humour burgeoned over Happy Harry's melancholy features. ‘He bought it all right.'

‘Who was at the wheel?'

‘Didn't I say, Sloan? That was the interesting thing. No one.'

‘No one?'

‘As many witnesses as any court could want are ready and willing to swear to there having been no one—but no one—in the car when it moved forward. First thing they looked at—after sending for us and the ambulance, of course.'

‘What about the engine?'

‘Ticking over in drive. You see, the owner—a man by the name of Daniel White—was trying to persuade the deceased to take the Jaguar in settlement of some betting debt and was making him listen to how sweet the engine sounded when it took this great leap forward like the Chinese under Mao Tse Tung.'

‘Did the throttle-return spring snap?' suggested Sloan, whose interest in foreign affairs wasn't as far-reaching as it should have been. His grandfather had always worried about the Yellow Peril: he was more interested in a newly killed man. ‘Metal fatigue must be a problem in those old things.'

‘First thing we checked after we'd got the boy out from under,' grunted Harpe. ‘Right as ninepence—the throttle-return spring, I mean. Ned Tolland was dead.'

‘I see.'

‘Mind you, he must have been just in front of the Jag at the time it hit him and a good three feet below it …'