Stiff News

by Catherine Aird

  ‘The office of the dead,’ intoned Crosby. ‘That’s where we are.’

  Dr Dabbe ignored this. ‘I can’t remember the woman’s name, not off the top of my head.’

  ‘Odd, did you say?’ Detective Inspector Sloan, policeman first, last and very nearly all the time, seized on the important word in their exchange without difficulty.

  ‘All right, then, Sloan,’ said the pathologist easily. ‘Have it your own way. Shall we say instead that it was slightly unusual?’

  ‘In what way exactly, doctor?’

  ‘Actually, Sloan, now I come to think about it, it was odd in two ways,’ said Dr Dabbe as his assistant advanced, bearing a heavy old leather-bound volume. ‘Thank you, Burns. Let me see now…’ The pathologist ran a bony finger down a list. ‘Don’t get any wrong ideas about this book, Sloan. They may make us keep records on computer here but they can’t stop us keeping our own as well. Yet. So we still keep this book going, just to be on the safe side … Ah, here we are.’ He looked up. ‘I thought so … on the twelfth of last month I performed an autopsy on one Maude Chalmers-Hyde, a female aged seventy-nine, of the Manor at Almstone.’

  ‘You said unusual in two ways,’ Sloan prompted him. They had computers down at the police station, too – and practically everywhere else as well – but he agreed with the pathologist. There was no substitute for the good old-fashioned handwritten policeman’s notebook. Concentrated the mind, did a pencil.

  ‘Unusual in one way, Sloan,’ said the pathologist, ‘because it was requested by the deceased’s general practitioner.’

  ‘Ah,’ rejoined Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘So that’s out of the ordinary, I take it?’

  ‘It is when the patient’s reached that age, multiple pathology being very common by then. Mind you,’ added Dabbe, ‘the doctor in this case was Angus Browne of Larking and he’s a stickler for having everything right.’

  Sloan, upholder of law and order as well as accuracy, said he was glad to hear it.

  ‘He refused to sign the death certificate,’ said Dr Dabbe, ‘and that meant the Coroner ordered a postmortem.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Sloan pulled out his pencil and notebook. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘The family were very cut up about it,’ murmured Dr Dabbe, ‘and said so.’

  ‘I’m sure they were,’ said Sloan smoothly. Pretty nearly all the families they dealt with in F Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary were cut up about something either literally or metaphorically. He didn’t know which was the worse for a policeman to have to deal with.

  ‘So you cut up the patient instead?’ contributed Detective Constable Crosby, who didn’t like attending post-mortems and was not averse to any delay in their starting.

  ‘I did,’ responded Dr Dabbe before Sloan could speak to the constable about what someone had once called ‘proper words in proper places’.

  ‘And?’ said the detective inspector.

  ‘And this is where it was quite unusual in another way,’ said Dr Dabbe cheerfully.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Because,’ said the pathologist solemnly, ‘my post-mortem findings agreed completely with the cause of death diagnosed by her general practitioner but which he had declined to certify to that effect.’

  ‘Not common?’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to have to tell you how uncommon,’ said Dr Dabbe. ‘Not suitable for your young ears. Besides, it might shake your faith in the medical profession or something.’

  ‘So why had the doctor wanted a post-mortem for this Maude Chalmers-Hyde then?’ persisted Crosby with the innocent air of one just wanting to get everything straight.

  ‘Because,’ said the pathologist neatly, ‘Angus Browne hadn’t thought she was quite ready to die from the condition from which she had been suffering at the precise moment when she did.’

  Sloan hunted for the right word.

  ‘Untimely?’

  ‘He thought, like Macbeth, that “she should have died hereafter”,’ said Dabbe.

  ‘When you got to go, you got to go,’ said Crosby to nobody in particular.

  ‘General practitioners get quite good at judging that sort of thing after a time, you know,’ remarked Dr Dabbe. ‘Most of ’em develop a feel for knowing when death is nigh.’

  ‘Practice makes perfect,’ said Crosby sententiously.

  ‘Now then, Sloan,’ said Dr Dabbe, pulling on a green cap, ‘are you going to tell me what Angus Browne was quite happy to say this patient died from or am I supposed to make an educated guess?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan unfolded a copy of the death certificate that Lionel Powell had given him. ‘Chronic renal failure secondary to hypertension.’

  ‘Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult to demonstrate one way or the other for starters,’ said Dabbe. ‘Right, Burns, I’m ready now.’

  * * *

  ‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can,’ Mrs Muriel Peden promised the Powells, withdrawing rapidly. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have some things I must attend to first.’

  She had established Lionel and Julia Powell on their own in a small sitting room well away from the more stalwart of the residents still occupying the dining room. Julia Powell sank thankfully into an easy chair.

  ‘Trust your mother,’ said Julia bitterly as soon as the door had closed behind the Matron, ‘to be embarrassing right to the end.’ She was really wondering if it would be in order for her to slip her shoes off in here. She compromised by carefully easing her right foot out of its tight black patent-leather casing.

  ‘She could always be trusted to do that,’ said Lionel with a notable absence of filial piety.

  ‘She couldn’t even die quietly.’ Julia let out a deep sigh as the shoe came off. ‘Ah … that’s better.’

  ‘She was in a coma for three days,’ pointed out Lionel with meticulous accuracy.

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’ The relief of taking her right shoe off was so great that Julia promptly kicked off the left one too. ‘I meant she couldn’t die – well – decently like everyone else.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘You know what I mean, Lionel, and it’s no use your pretending you don’t.’

  He answered the thought rather than her words. ‘We can’t get away from the letter whatever we do.’

  ‘It might just have been your mother’s idea of a joke,’ said Julia Powell, her face flushed with champagne.

  ‘It might,’ he agreed cautiously.

  ‘You know what she was like.’

  ‘Only too well,’ he groaned. ‘Incorrigible. Absolutely incorrigible.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past her myself,’ said Julia Powell, aided by generous quantities of white wine as well as champagne.

  ‘Neither would I,’ admitted Lionel morosely.

  ‘And,’ Julia Powell almost wailed, ‘we still can’t find it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you quite sure they’ve given you all her papers?’

  ‘How can I be sure?’ he asked. ‘How can anyone be sure? Her letters have all gone … and as to who took them and why, it’s anyone’s guess.’

  ‘After all,’ she said as if he had not spoken, ‘you are one of your mother’s executors.’

  ‘That, at least,’ he said with a touch of irony, ‘is not in any doubt.’

  She sank back in the chair. ‘Well, Lionel, what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Julia sighed in pure exasperation. Lionel’s responses were always literal.

  He said gloomily, ‘We must accept the fact that we may never find it.’

  ‘Your mother was married to someone after her first husband was killed…’

  ‘So she always said.’

  ‘… and before she met your father.’

  ‘Before she married my father,’ Lionel corrected her automatically. ‘She may have met him before.’

  Julia dismissed this as hair-splitting and got straight to the point. ‘Well, why can’
t we find out who?’

  Lionel Powell steepled his fingers very much as he did in the office when he was composing his thoughts before commencing dictating an important memorandum. ‘Because, my dear, we do not know the country in which this … alliance … took place.’

  ‘If it did,’ she bounced back at him.

  ‘Exactly.’ He started to enumerate points on his fingers. ‘First of all we have no real evidence that she did marry someone else.’

  ‘She always said she had.’

  ‘That, Julia, as I have said many times before, is not evidence.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘What my mother said was always – let us say – imaginative but unreliable.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ snapped his wife. ‘And what about the famous Tulloch treasure that she was always talking about? How do we know that it – whatever it might have been – ever existed?’

  ‘We don’t.’

  ‘Have you ever seen anything that might have been it?’

  ‘Never,’ said Lionel.

  ‘Neither have I.’ She sniffed. ‘And if it’s jewellery that she hadn’t wanted me to have, which I can quite understand…’ It was something she couldn’t actually understand at all and paused for her husband to protest at this, but he didn’t so she hurried on, ‘… you’d have thought she’d at least have shown it to the girls. She was fond enough of them.’

  ‘You would.’

  ‘So, if it still exists, where is it?’

  ‘She might,’ said Lionel, ‘have left it in the bank or in a safe deposit somewhere. But there isn’t a receipt with her things.’

  ‘That doesn’t prove anything, does it?’

  He replied mildly, ‘It makes it more difficult to locate though.’

  ‘She was always boasting about the things different men had given her,’ said Julia with distaste.

  ‘I don’t think she married them all,’ he said drily. ‘And for what it’s worth, my father told me that she was absolutely penniless – really down on her beam ends – when he married her, so everything would have been gone by then in any case.’

  ‘It’s all your father’s fault anyway,’ said Julia obscurely.

  Lionel made no attempt to deny this or to try to explain all over again that his father had left his entire personal estate to his widow for sound fiscal reasons.

  ‘Well then, who did she marry and why is it so important now?’

  ‘As to who it was, we don’t know. All she would ever say is that he was called Tommy Atkins.’

  ‘A euphemism for a soldier…’

  ‘Exactly. Although,’ he added, ‘for what it’s worth, when she married my father she was calling herself Smith, because that’s what’s on their marriage certificate and we’ve got a copy of that.’

  ‘So,’ persisted Julia for the umpteenth time, ‘why is it so important?’

  ‘Because in her will everything is to be divided equally between all her heirs of the body female whether legitimate or not and then their heirs.’

  ‘That’s you.’

  ‘And any other children she may have had.’

  Julia sat up very straight. ‘You mean we – you – won’t get everything?’

  ‘Not if she had other children.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘The more the less merry,’ said Lionel neatly. The memoranda which emanated from his desk at work were renowned throughout the department for their pithiness.

  ‘But we don’t know…’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, Lionel,’ her voice had sunk to almost a whisper now, ‘as things stand we may never know.’

  ‘That, my dear, is precisely what I am afraid of.’

  ‘But that means…’

  ‘It means,’ he interrupted her harshly, ‘that it’ll take years and years to prove one way or the other and that in the meantime we’ll be at the mercy of every Tom, Dick and Harry of a claimant.’

  She gave a bibulous half-laugh. ‘Tommy, anyway.’

  Chapter Seven

  Some men with swords may reap the field

  ‘What I want to know, Sloan,’ said Superintendent Leeyes grumpily, ‘is who precisely is having who on?’

  ‘That, sir,’ murmured Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘is something I can’t begin to say.’ He was telephoning back to Berebury Police Station from the pathologist’s office at the hospital mortuary, a draft copy of the post-mortem examination report in his hand.

  ‘Don’t trust me, I’m a doctor,’ misquoted Leeyes with relish.

  ‘Not,’ Sloan qualified his own last remark, ‘at this stage, anyway.’

  ‘And I suppose,’ said Leeyes, ‘that our friendly neighbourhood pathologist is hedging his bets as usual?’

  Sloan addressed himself to the telephone; he found for some reason that he was doing this standing to attention. ‘All I can say, sir, is that Dr Dabbe has reported that the cause of death as certified by the deceased’s general practitioner would appear to be correct.’

  ‘That,’ remarked Leeyes trenchantly, ‘wasn’t what the deceased said in her letter. She said she was going to be murdered.’

  Sloan forged on. ‘The pathologist confirms that the late Gertrude Powell had at the time of her demise been suffering from chronic renal failure and hypertension as stated.’

  ‘Suffering from,’ said Leeyes gnomically, ‘is not the same thing as dying from.’

  ‘Indeed not,’ agreed Sloan, continuing his reading aloud. ‘In addition to the foregoing he states that the deceased also had had some osteoarthritis and arteriosclerosis which, however, were not contributory factors to her death.’

  ‘Bandying words, as usual,’ pronounced the Superintendent, ‘that’s what he’s doing.’

  ‘Furthermore, Dr Dabbe says he has removed organs and tissue for analysis.’

  ‘Buying time,’ said Leeyes uncharitably.

  ‘But until the histology is known,’ quoted Sloan, ‘the report cannot be completed.’

  ‘Will not be completed,’ said the Superintendent, ‘is what he means.’

  Sloan said nothing. For one brief inglorious academic term the Superintendent had attended an evening Adult Education course entitled ‘English as She is Spoke’. His premature departure from the class had come, after a preliminary skirmish over the gerund, as a direct result of a total inability to see eye to eye with the course tutor on the proper use of (to say nothing of the difference between) the words ‘will’ and ‘shall’.

  The sentence which the unlucky teacher had chosen to illustrate the correct usage was ‘I shall drown and no one will save me.’ He had unfortunately contrasted this with the less grammatically correct ‘I will drown and no one shall save me.’

  It was at this point that the dominie had parted company for ever with Superintendent Leeyes. That worthy had insisted that since this latter sentiment perfectly expressed the real intention of all the suicides in the River Calle whom he had ever known, the meaning was quite clear and thus could not possibly be bad English whatever the teacher said …

  ‘So where do we go from here, Sloan?’ his superior officer was asking now.

  ‘Back to the Manor at Almstone, sir, for a word with the Matron there,’ said Sloan. ‘After, that is, I’ve seen Dr Angus Browne over at Larking.’

  ‘There’s a sight too many medics about for my liking,’ Leeyes sniffed. ‘They always agree with each other too much and if they don’t, they don’t ever say.’

  ‘There is just one other thing, sir…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’d like some background on one of the other residents there. A Judge Calum Gillespie.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Nor me, sir.’

  Leeyes brightened. ‘An impostor?’

  ‘Seeing as he’s now ninety I expect it’s only a case of his having been before our time, sir.’

  ‘I collect senile judges, Sloan, and blind and deaf ones.’

  ‘I suspect that this one’s just
plain old,’ said Sloan, touched by a certain melancholy.

  * * *

  Judge Calum Gillespie was indeed old, and the blue veins on the backs of his hands stood out rather like the blue veins do in ripe cheese and certainly those hands were very unsteady, but he was not blind, deaf or senile. Nor had he forgotten the interrogation skills he had learned long ago.

  First, looking rather like an elderly tortoise, he thrust his neck out of his collar and let his gaze travel slowly round his sitting room, resting in turn on each of the three other men there. Then he regarded the little gathering for a long moment before speaking.

  ‘And why, pray,’ he asked at last, ‘was Mrs Powell’s funeral stopped?’

  Hamish MacIver shook his head. ‘Blessed if I know, Calum.’

  Walter Bryant inched his electric wheelchair backwards. ‘Nor me.’ He frowned. ‘Funny business, altogether.’

  ‘Don’t understand it at all,’ murmured the Brigadier.

  Captain Peter Markyate sounded peevish. ‘Gertie always was totally unpredictable. Always.’

  ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,’ objected Walter Bryant. ‘It’s not her fault that she died.’

  ‘I take it, gentlemen, that it’s not anyone’s fault that she died.’ The Judge continued his scrutiny of the faces of the other three men. ‘Is it?’

  ‘No, no,’ they chorused.

  ‘Am I to understand then,’ said the Judge, ‘that the doctor issued the death certificate in the ordinary way?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ nodded the Brigadier, easing his gammy leg from one position to another. ‘At least, we didn’t hear that he didn’t.’

  ‘Not like with Maude Chalmers-Hyde,’ said Captain Markyate.

  Walter Bryant nodded. ‘You know, don’t you, Calum, that Dr Browne didn’t write one when she died?’

  ‘Wouldn’t do it,’ chimed in MacIver. ‘Not even when the family pressed him.’

  ‘They couldn’t have found anything wrong with Maude’s death, though, at the post-mortem,’ said Walter Bryant, looking round at the others, ‘could they? I mean anything wrong, apart from what she had been suffering from.’

  The Judge turned his basilisk stare on the man in the wheelchair. ‘Was there anything else wrong to find?’