An Empty Death

by Laura Wilson

  ‘They kept us back.’

  ‘Oh?’ Dacre injected the monosyllable with a note of surprise.

  ‘Needed some fresh blood.’ Wemyss shrugged in his turn. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘Mmm…’ Draining the remains of his first pint so as not to have to reply too quickly, Dacre said, ‘I suppose they must be keeping you pretty busy over there.’

  ‘I should say so.’ Wemyss grimaced. ‘We’re a man down, actually.’

  ‘Air raid?’

  ‘Poor chap got himself murdered. At least, that’s the on dit.’

  ‘Good heavens! What happened?’

  ‘Nobody’s really sure. Someone seems to have clobbered him on the head in the blackout. And then there was a nurse, managed to get herself strangled. That was actually in the hospital.’

  Dacre raised his eyebrows. ‘Good heavens. Patient run amok?’

  ‘God knows. Look…’ Wemyss eyed him for a moment, as if making a decision, then said, ‘Why don’t you come over and join us? Those two’– he glanced across at Betterton and Unwin, who were now watching him expectantly – ‘must be getting thirsty.’

  Pleased by the small evidence of an alliance between them, Dacre said, ‘If you don’t mind. I’ll give you a hand.’

  ‘All right, thanks.’

  Securing the remaining glass as well as his own, Dacre struggled behind him through the throng until they reached the corner table. Betterton and Unwin looked up curiously, and Wemyss, depositing the pints, announced, ‘Dacre. St Andrews man. Met at the bar.’

  ‘James Dacre. Hope you don’t mind,’ said Dacre. ‘Whose is this?’

  Betterton stood up. ‘Me, I think. Betterton. How do you do? This,’ he added, as Unwin, who had also risen, showed no sign of speaking, ‘is Unwin. Man of few words.’

  Handshakes followed, during which Unwin still did not speak. Dacre, deciding not to force the issue, or show presumption by sitting down, said, ‘If I’m barging in, do tell me. I shan’t be offended. Just that I find myself at a bit of a loose end.’

  ‘You must be the only medico in London who is,’ said Unwin. ‘How come?’

  ‘Well, as I was explaining, I’m not fit enough for the services, and the job I had in Scotland fell through – some sort of mix-up over paperwork which nobody could get to the bottom of, including me, although,’ Dacre laughed, ‘I must say, I didn’t try too hard.’ He’d prepared this little speech earlier. Tales of papers going astray and getting lost or destroyed were so commonplace that, as with bomb stories, everybody had their own and it was a fair bet that they’d be quickly bored with the details of anyone else’s misfortune. ‘Found myself digs in Euston – bit of a hole, but it’ll do for the time being…Anyway, here I am.’

  He was right. Unwin rolled his eyes in mute acknowledgement of bureaucratic cock-ups everywhere and said, ‘Well, pull up a chair.’

  Wemyss, picking up his glass for a toast, said, ‘Well, here’s how.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Betterton, raising his own. Dacre and Unwin followed suit.

  ‘To the future,’ Wemyss added, clinking glasses with Betterton. Turning to Dacre, he said, ‘He’s just got engaged to be married.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Dacre. ‘Got married myself, last year. Best thing I ever did.’ This was entirely unplanned, and as soon as he’d said it he wished he hadn’t. Of course, it was another point of difference between his new self and Todd, which was good, and it gave him an added respectability, but if it got about, it would be likely to queer the pitch with his girl. Thinking he’d better do some compensatory groundwork, he said, ‘Mind you, I’ve hardly seen her – she’s staying with her parents in Suffolk. Far too many glamorous American airmen up there for my liking.’ That was an inspired touch: if necessary, his wife could have an affair with a Yank, breaking his heart, which would appeal to the sympathetic nature he was sure his girl would possess. Rather good, actually. ‘Make sure you keep yours close to,’ he counselled Betterton, who grinned.

  ‘Oh, I intend to. Sooner rather than later, in fact. Courtesy of Wemyss here.’ He fished in his pocket and brought out a labelled key.

  Dacre raised his eyebrows in mystified enquiry.

  ‘Lucky old Wemyss has use of a suite at the Clarendon,’ said Unwin.

  Dacre whistled. The Clarendon was a smart West End hotel.

  Wemyss looked slightly sheepish. ‘I don’t actually live there. My father got it at the beginning of the war,’ he said. ‘He went back to the country last year but he kept it on for when he comes up. The rest of the time…’ Wemyss shrugged. ‘Well, let’s say I keep the key handy. Might as well put it to use.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Dacre, filing away this information for use in the future. ‘Shame to let it go to waste.’

  ‘I’d be obliged if you’d keep mum,’ said Wemyss. ‘Don’t want everyone to know, or they’ll all be wanting it.’

  Dacre nodded acknowledgement, and Wemyss turned to the other two. ‘I was just telling Dacre here about Reynolds and that poor nurse,’ he said.

  ‘Dreadful business,’ said Betterton, briskly. ‘Not,’ he added, ‘that anyone knows exactly what happened to either of them.’

  ‘Terrible.’ Dacre shook his head. ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘About three weeks ago,’ said Wemyss. ‘Don’t want a job, do you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact…’ said Dacre, ‘I mean…’

  ‘Don’t like to step into a dead man’s shoes?’ asked Unwin.

  ‘Well…’ Dacre hesitated. ‘There is that, but these things have to go through the appropriate channels, don’t they?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Wemyss, ‘but we’re fairly pushed, and with these new bombs…’

  ‘If the Powers-that-Be wait for anything to come through official channels,’ put in Betterton, ‘they’ll be waiting till Doomsday—’

  He stopped abruptly as the muffled crump of an explosion somewhere to the north of them made the building shake slightly and dislodged the paint from the ceiling. Putting a hand over his pint to protect it from the drift of nicotine-stained flakes, Unwin said, ‘And by the sound of it, Doomsday may be sooner than we thought.’

  ‘So,’ said Betterton, ‘carpe diem and all that.’

  Hoping that carpe diem didn’t also have some medical meaning he wasn’t aware of, Dacre said, ‘I’ll drink to that.’ Having done so, he said, ‘Who’s the head man there, then?’

  Forty minutes later, Dacre left the pub and – despite the blackout – strode down the street in a mood of elation, waving his torch. He had established that the man in charge was Professor Haycraft, manoeuvred Wemyss into effecting an introduction within the next couple of days, and demonstrated that he was a thoroughly good sort by wheedling another half-pint for each of them out of the barman. The gamble had paid off, and the evening had been a resounding success. He had given just enough information to allow them to arrive at their own conclusions, and found out a fair bit about them, too. He had also produced, in order to jot down the name of Wemyss’s ward, a sheet of writing paper with the letterhead of the prestigious Athenaeum Club and, just visible, the words ‘My dear James,’ in confident scrawl. The paper was stolen and the letter forged, but seeing their glances at it he knew it had done its job: the things people worked out for themselves had ten times the value of anything one might tell them.

  As he walked along, he turned the conversation over in his mind. Unwin had described Professor Haycraft as ‘a nice enough old buffer’, and the other two had concurred. Dacre suspected that this meant that the prof. was a fundamentally lazy person who wouldn’t be too bothered about checking up on his carefully prepared references. The fact that he’d be far busier than usual and distracted by recent events would also help.

  Past experience had taught him that, whenever possible, one should go to the top by the fastest and most direct route. Not only were the people in charge able to make decisions, but they were accustomed to doing so. They could afford to be more understandi
ng and liberal because they did not need to have second thoughts about how someone lower down might like it. And, once the top man accepted you, everyone else would…And Wemyss, Betterton and Unwin had accepted him already, hadn’t they? That meant there were three people who would be able to introduce him as Dr Dacre. Convince A, B and C, and D and all the rest will follow. He was definitely on his way to the top of the tree. He was going to be a doctor! It was a wonderful, heady feeling. And there was Fay Marchant, ripe and luscious, to look forward to…Oh, he was going to enjoy himself, all right.

  Twenty-One

  Ten days after Dacre’s encounter with the doctors, Stratton left DCI Lamb’s office with a heavy heart. Even though he’d managed to sort out his end of the NAAFI robbery, the stolen army tyres and several other cases in the past three weeks, Lamb’s parting shot had been that his patience was wearing thin and would Stratton please pull his finger out and conclude ‘the business’ at the hospital. Sitting at his desk with a tepid cup of tea, Stratton reflected that Lamb’s patience was always wearing thin, largely because he didn’t have much of it in the first place – a bit like Hitler, really. Although they appeared to have found the weapon used on Reynolds – much to Stratton’s surprise, the Home Office analyst had reported that one of the bloodied bricks collected by Ballard had two hairs on it which matched the victim’s – the extended door-to-door enquiries had revealed nothing, and neither, barring the fact that Reynolds may have been rather too friendly with Fay Marchant, had his own interviews at the hospital. Still, thought Stratton, finding that Reynolds had been hit with a brick indicated that, if it was deliberate, then it wasn’t premeditated – whoever had bashed him had simply picked up the nearest object to hand. The Leadbetter killing seemed more likely to have been the result of malice aforethought, as whoever had killed her had presumably lured her into the operating theatre first.

  After much prevarication from Reynolds’s former colleagues at the Middlesex, he and Ballard had compiled a list of the dead doctor’s cock-ups and visited the bereaved spouses and relatives in an attempt to rule out the idea of a revenge attack. Leadbetter, it transpired, had never worked in Casualty, so it seemed unlikely that she’d either compounded or covered up any of Reynolds’s errors. The previous week, Stratton had been to Euston to see Mrs Beck, the mother of the boy who’d died of blood poisoning. That had been a depressing morning. The mother, with greasy hair and a grey face, was abject and lost in the dirty, cluttered tenement flat with cracked panes and walls stained by soot and brick dust from nearby bombing.

  ‘The doctor said he’d be all right,’ she said.

  ‘Was that Dr Reynolds?’ asked Stratton.

  Mrs Beck looked at him as if she didn’t understand the question. ‘A doctor said,’ she repeated, ‘Sammy’d be all right. He told me.’

  ‘But you don’t know the doctor’s name?’

  She shook her head. ‘He told me.’

  ‘What else did he say?’ asked Stratton.

  ‘Just that I wasn’t to worry over it, and…Well, they’d bandaged it up, hadn’t they? It was a nasty cut, but I never thought…perhaps the badness got into it later, I don’t know. I’d have taken him back before, only the doctor said it would get better left to itself and I didn’t want to cause any bother.’

  ‘What happened when you took him back to the hospital? Did you see the same doctor?’

  Mrs Beck nodded. ‘He just took one look at Sammy and took him away. I never saw Sammy again after that. I did ask, but they wouldn’t let me. They told me to go home. I come back in the morning, just like they said, and they told me he was dead.’

  ‘Did you see the doctor again?’

  Mrs Beck shook her head once more with the same hopeless lack of understanding. ‘Sammy’d died, hadn’t he? In the night.’

  ‘What about your husband?’ asked Stratton. ‘Was he there?’

  ‘He’s in France. I wrote to him about Sammy. The doctor said he’d be all right,’ she said, dully. ‘If only…’ She gazed at Stratton miserably.

  ‘You did your best for Sammy,’ he said, gently. ‘I’m sure of it.’ He rose from the battered wooden chair. ‘Thank you for talking to me.’

  Mrs Beck blinked at him and shuffled down the few feet of hallway to let him out of the flat. She couldn’t be more than forty, Stratton thought, but she moved like an old woman. He took his leave and was about to descend the stairs when she suddenly said, in an urgent tone, ‘He was a good boy. He was never in any trouble.’

  Stratton turned. ‘I’m sure he was a credit to you, Mrs Beck, and I am very sorry about what happened.’

  ‘Sorry isn’t going to make a bloody bit of difference, is it?’ he said to Ballard afterwards. ‘I’ll bet my last penny Reynolds never apologised to her, or even thought of it. The way she said “If only…” – it was the weight of it. She couldn’t bring herself to say the rest of that sentence – all those things: if only the doctor had been right, if only the wound hadn’t been poisoned, if only she’d taken him back to the hospital earlier, if only she’d had the confidence to make a fuss…’

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it, sir? People don’t want to make a fuss. That’s how my lot were, too.’

  ‘Which ones were they?’

  ‘The Greens. Widow and sister of the wrongly diagnosed diabetic. Can’t imagine either of them walloping Reynolds with a brick or anything else.’

  ‘Imagine living with it for the rest of your days, though. The thought that if you’d said something…But I suppose it’s the same as Mrs Beck not asking me why I was there. She just assumed I had a right to question her about the most painful thing that ever happened to her.’

  ‘People do, don’t they, sir? You know, white coat, mortar board, dog collar, any uniform, really. People just accept authority. If someone with a uniform tells you what to do, especially nowadays…Just as well, really. For us, I mean.’

  Now, sitting in his office, Stratton was reflecting on this conversation when there came a vigorous battering at the door.

  ‘Come in,’ he shouted. The banging continued. Stratton raised his voice. ‘I said come in! There’s no need to bash the door down.’ The door opened, and Arliss – it would be – appeared, standing to attention with the self-satisfied air of one who had vital news to impart.

  ‘What is it, for God’s sake?’ asked Stratton irritably.

  Arliss cleared his throat in readiness before announcing, ‘Telephone message, sir. From Mrs Reynolds, sir.’ Arliss nodded, smugly.

  ‘Well, what did she say?’

  ‘It’s very important, sir. She wants to speak to you. Says it’s urgent.’

  ‘In that case, I suppose I’d better get round there straight away. Can you find me a car, and round up Miss Harris, if she’s available.’ Arliss continued gazing at Stratton, but did not move.

  ‘Go on,’ he snapped, ‘get cracking before you take root.’

  Arliss departed, leaving Stratton to pick up his notebook and put on his hat. Perhaps, he thought, Mrs Reynolds was going to provide the clue he was looking for.

  Twenty-Two

  It was a man who answered the door at Mrs Reynolds’s. Middle-aged and pinguid, he announced himself as ‘Alec Dearborn. I’m Blanche’s – Mrs Reynolds’s – brother.’

  Recognising the name of a well-known manufacturer, Stratton said, ‘Hairbrushes?’

  ‘That’s right. I do hope you won’t make this more unpleasant than it needs be,’ he said, officiously. ‘Mrs Reynolds is very upset.’

  As Stratton hastened to reassure him, he thought, So that’s where the big house comes from – the money was hers, not Reynolds’s.

  Dearborn led them through to the sitting room and hovered, silent and proprietorial, beside his sister, who was standing in front of the fireplace. Stratton could see that, despite her air of forced calm, she had grown gaunt in the past couple of weeks and the room had a neglected air, with soiled antimacassars and unpolished surfaces.

  Without preamble, Mrs Reynolds s
aid, ‘I found this,’ and held out a grubby square of paper.

  Stratton examined it. The writing – a round, schoolgirlish hand – was in pencil, and quite faint, but he could make out the words: Off at 6, essential I see you. Meet back gate. Must arrange something very soon. F x.

  ‘Where did you find this?’

  ‘In one of his jackets. The inside pocket.’

  ‘I see. Have you any idea who “F” might be?’

  ‘No. But it’s a woman, isn’t it?’

  Stratton hesitated. ‘I should say so,’ he said, gently.

  ‘She was pregnant, wasn’t she? “Must arrange something very soon…” What else could it mean?’

  ‘I don’t think,’ said Stratton hastily, ‘that we should start jumping to conclusions. There may well be a perfectly innocent explanation.’

  ‘I can’t think of one.’ From Dearborn’s face, it was evident that he couldn’t, either. Neither could Stratton, but he wasn’t going to admit it. ‘It must be somebody at the hospital,’ Mrs Reynolds continued. ‘It’s a clue, isn’t it? This F person, whoever she is, she could have had something to do with his death, couldn’t she?’

  ‘Well…’ Stratton chose his words carefully. ‘If she was pregnant – whether or not she was planning to have the child—’

  ‘She wasn’t. “Arrange something!” That means an illegal operation, doesn’t it?’ Beside her, Dearborn, nodding vigorously, made a harrumphing noise. ‘She’d got herself into trouble, and she was trying to make Duncan break the law.’

  ‘Not necessarily, Mrs Reynolds. And if she was pregnant, it is, of course, entirely possible that Dr Reynolds wasn’t the father.’

  ‘Why else would she ask him? Unless she was going to try and persuade him to run away with her.’

  ‘As I said, I don’t think we ought to jump to conclusions. I know this must be upsetting for you, but—’

  ‘I had no idea,’ said Mrs Reynolds, bleakly, to her brother. ‘I thought we were happy. We couldn’t have children–well, I couldn’t – but I was a good wife to him…This woman was trying to trap him, wasn’t she? To get him for herself. I don’t know how people can be so…so…shameless. She must have known that Duncan was married.’ She turned and stared at Stratton, hollow-eyed. ‘I found it two days ago. I’ve been sitting here looking at it ever since. I can’t think about anything else. He must have been lying to me, saying he was working, and all the time…this…’ Her words broke up in sobs. Obviously at a loss for words, Dearborn made feeble calming-down motions with his fat hands and it was left to Miss Harris to put a comforting arm around the weeping woman.