A Going Concern

by Catherine Aird

  ‘I see.’ Something out of line should be meat and drink to a detective.

  ‘In the first place Harris and Marsh’s are very seriously under-funded by today’s standards in that field,’ said the voice calmly. ‘And if Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals are even contemplating offering one of their shares for two of Chernwoods’ Ordinary or something fancy like that, then all I can say is that Chernwoods’ board would want its head looking at as well.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Sloan a mite diffidently, ‘they’re simply going to buy into Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs?’

  ‘I don’t know what with,’ said the City man with spirit. ‘There’s not much in the way of cash reserves in these figures. And if they’re going to borrow to do it then I wouldn’t like to be their bankers.’

  ‘So …’ said Sloan.

  ‘So either they don’t know what they’re doing,’ said the voice down the line, ‘and you can take it from me that happens more often than it should, or they’re after something that Chernwoods’ doesn’t know it’s got – let alone you and me and Joe Public – or Chernwoods’ does know and isn’t telling, which is only nearly legal, or …’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Some fool has set his sights on getting control to satisfy his life’s ambition – that happens at all levels with people who should know better. No, if they were to ask my advice …’

  ‘Yes?’ It sounded to Sloan very much a case of ‘eat or be eaten’ in that jungle but he was always willing to learn.

  ‘I’d say a merger would be the only possible course of action that would stand up commercially in the market, plus promoting or sacking their dissident chief chemist.’

  ‘The word here,’ ventured Sloan carefully, wishing he’d played the game of Monopoly with more attention, ‘is that there’s a possibility of a management buy-out at Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs rather than be taken over by Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals.’

  ‘We heard that, too, and so I’ve had a word with one of my contacts about that, and my information,’ said the City man cagily, ‘is that that’s being led by their aforementioned chief chemist, name of Joe Keen.’

  Sloan made another note.

  ‘I hear he’s got a chip on his shoulder because they won’t give him a seat on the board. That,’ he added wisely, ‘is when a lot of people tend to get upset.’

  ‘How would a management buy-out work out with Chernwoods’?’ asked Sloan. He’d like to see one of those tried down at the police station in ‘F’ Division, not that he really thought they’d ever get rid of Superintendent Leeyes that way.

  ‘Well, they do say that there’s one fool born every minute,’ said the man in the City, sounding relaxed. ‘You can’t hope to save ’em from themselves, you know.’

  ‘No …’ That was a lesson learned early on in the Force.

  ‘If I were you, Inspector,’ he advised at a comfortable distance, ‘I should keep your breath to cool your porridge and let ’em get on with it.’

  ‘Ye – es.’ It was all very well for the expert to think like that.

  ‘Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs sounds an unlucky firm to me and the stock market’s pretty nearly as superstitious as Napoleon – it never likes unlucky generals.’

  ‘You mean now, sir? As in like this minute?’

  ‘Now, Crosby, as in now.’ Detective Inspector Sloan consulted a piece of paper. ‘The nursing home is on the road between Larking and Luston and is big enough not to be missed.’

  ‘All I’m missing,’ said Detective Constable Crosby plaintively, ‘is food.’

  ‘Old men in nursing homes who are said to be out of their minds can die as suddenly as old ladies who are said to have bad hearts,’ said Sloan incisively. ‘There’s no time like the present in police work, Crosby. You should remember that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The constable’s rebellious tone was muted to a nicety. ‘So it’s important, then, is it, sir?’

  ‘Either the good lady you interviewed didn’t turn up at the Grange on Thursday night,’ replied Sloan obliquely, ‘and just went in first thing in the morning instead and found Mrs Garamond dead, or …’

  ‘Or what, sir?’

  ‘Or,’ said Sloan ineluctably, ‘whoever went in to search for something had also been in the deceased’s bedroom during the night and there are photographs of footprints on other footprints to prove it.’

  ‘Every picture tells a story,’ observed the constable, putting his own foot down.

  ‘And,’ continued Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘if they went into the deceased’s bedroom in the night with a view to accelerating her death, Crosby, we have a case of murder on our hands.’

  They did indeed find the nursing home without difficulty. It had begun life as a fine Victorian gentleman’s residence and was now the last home of a number of members of that unfortunate group of patients known as psychogeriatric.

  Mr Albert Harris was presently in a back bedroom no doubt once occupied by a poorly paid ’tween maid. She would have been rich indeed in comparison with its current occupant. His bedclothes were in considerable disarray, and his night attire only covered unselected parts of his anatomy. He was all too obviously there in body but equally certainly absent in mind; and he could have played the latter days of King Lear on stage without change of costume or rehearsal.

  ‘I’m a detective engaged on an investigation,’ said Sloan slowly and clearly.

  ‘Good,’ said the old gentleman promptly. ‘Someone’s stolen my teeth.’

  ‘He’s broken three sets,’ said the matron at his elbow. ‘He throws them at the nurses.’

  ‘I want to talk to you about Mrs Octavia Garamond,’ said Sloan.

  At the mention of that name a flicker of recognition passed over the old man’s face and Albert Harris, senior, clamped his toothless jaws shut.

  Sloan turned aside and said to the matron in a low voice that he wanted to tell Mr Harris, père, about the death of an old colleague but didn’t want to upset him.

  ‘You won’t upset him, Inspector, I promise you,’ she said wearily. ‘It’s the nurses who get upset here, not the patients.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan said: ‘Mr Harris, do you remember Hut Eleven?’

  ‘You’re not my son,’ piped Mr Harris.

  ‘No, I’m not your son.’

  ‘There was a war on,’ said the old chap. ‘Want my teeth, Nurse …’

  ‘There was a war on,’ agreed Sloan. ‘What was Octavia Garamond doing in Hut Eleven at Chernwoods’?’

  ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,’ croaked the man in the bed. ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Inspector,’ apologized the matron, ‘it’s not one of his better days.’

  ‘“Good, better, best,”’ chanted Harris, in high cracked tones, ‘“never let it rest, until the good is better and the better best.”’

  ‘What was good about Hut Eleven?’ asked Sloan.

  The edentulous face of Albert Harris assumed a remarkably cunning expression. ‘Mustn’t talk about Hut Eleven,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t ever talk about Hut Eleven to anyone. Not ever.’

  ‘You can talk to me,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan persuasively. ‘Tell me what Rikki-Tikki-Tavi did.’

  The old man grabbed his crumpled sheet and pulled it over his head.

  ‘Was it anything to do with Operation Tell-tale?’ Sloan asked.

  The sheet was flung back and Albert Harris said: ‘Mustn’t tell tales.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Sloan pacifically, ‘you mustn’t. Tell me about OZ instead.’

  Albert Harris suddenly burst into song. In the childish treble of the sixth age of man he burst into ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’.

  ‘Who was the wonderful Wizard of Oz?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, or course,’ responded the old man, suddenly looking quite rational. ‘Everyone knows that.’ He stared at Sloan’s face. ‘I don’t know you. Who are you, anyway?’

  ‘Someone who wants to know all about Hut Eleven and the others. Like Nicho
las Cochin …’

  ‘Fred’s dead,’ remarked the old man inconsequentially. ‘Poor Fred.’

  ‘Not Fred, Mr Harris. Nicholas Cochin …’

  ‘He didn’t know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  Harris’s face clouded. ‘Don’t know anything.’

  ‘Catherine Camus?’

  ‘No flies on Kate …’ The rationality came back momentarily and then the jaw clamped shut again. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘And Martin Didot?’

  ‘You’re not Martin Didot,’ said Albert Harris peering at him.

  ‘No, I’m not Martin Didot, but I want to know about him.’

  ‘He was only the boy.’ Albert Harris put out a hand and clutched Sloan’s arm with quite surprising strength for such a spindleshanks. ‘Where’s Fred?’

  Getting no answer to this he began to rock himself backwards and forwards in the bed, chanting: ‘Poor Fred, Fred’s dead …’

  ‘Sometimes,’ the matron said as she shepherded the two policemen out, ‘he’s quite good and sometimes he’s quite demented. You can never tell.’

  If this was one of Albert Harris’s better days, Sloan didn’t like to think what his bad ones were like.

  FOURTEEN

  Kiss his poor feathers – first kiss and last

  Amelia sat on in her father’s study for a long time, her mind a gallimaufry of all that she had been told and had read that day. Only last week – it seemed aeons ago now – only this time last week she and Mary-Louise had walked up the hill to the bastide village of Domme and photographed the picturebook landscape of the Dordogne river valley below.

  Mary-Louise had quoted Goethe’s remark about no view being worth looking at for more than fifteen minutes and Amelia had contested this: and then conceded defeat after ten long minutes by succumbing instead to the even more tempting prospect of a chocolat Liègois.

  Her reverie in the study was brought to an end by the telephone bell.

  ‘It’s Dr Phoebe’s secretary,’ said a girl’s voice. ‘She’s asked me to ring you to say she’ll be very late back tonight and not to wait supper for her.’

  ‘Thank you for letting me know,’ said Amelia automatically.

  ‘She said to tell you that she’s got to go over to a clinical meeting at the Calleford Infirmary this evening but she said I should say that she’s had a look at your photograph under the magnifier …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She thinks she can make out what might be a motto at the top …’

  Amelia pulled a piece of paper towards her. ‘Let me find a pen … yes, all right, go ahead.’

  ‘She is almost sure it says “Nec temere”…’

  ‘Latin?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ said the secretary.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you …’

  ‘She thinks,’ said the secretary, spelling it out, ‘that it says “Nec temere, nec timide”.’

  ‘Nothing else?’ said Amelia urgently.

  ‘Not that Dr Phoebe could see with the magnifier here …’

  Amelia put the telephone down and then glanced quickly at her watch. She would ring Montpazier: the others would be bound to be back by now from wherever they had been for the day and be turning their minds to dinner.

  Getting through was easy, getting to the point of her call not so. Mary-Louise was full of questions and sympathy. ‘We’re fine, Milly, dear, but what about you?’

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it later,’ she promised. ‘Mary-Louise, tell me what “Nec temere, nec timide” means …’

  ‘Neither rashly, nor fearfully,’ said the language specialist immediately. ‘Listen, Milly, you really must come back here one day. We’ve had a marvellous outing today to an old castle called Bonaguil, and now we’re sitting on the terrasse with a kir before we eat …’

  It was another world.

  And about as remote as the Moon, Amelia decided, glancing at the clock before going for her jacket and slipping out quickly into the town.

  ‘Berebury Hospital switchboard here,’ said a girl’s voice. ‘Could Detective Inspector Sloan take a call from Dr Dabbe?’

  ‘He could,’ said Sloan warmly. ‘Sloan speaking …’

  ‘Ah, Sloan, I’ve just been talking to an old friend,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘Have you?’ said Sloan more warily. It was difficult to imagine anyone who was as cold-blooded as Dr Dabbe having family, let alone friends.

  ‘Met him the first day we did anatomy,’ reminisced the pathologist. ‘Shared a leg with him donkey’s years ago at our first human dissection.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Sloan discouragingly.

  ‘Been friends ever since,’ said Dabbe enthusiastically. ‘Funny how often you become friends with the chap you share a limb with.’

  ‘Very,’ responded Sloan, who felt a blinder blind date would be impossible to envisage. And why a dead leg should lead to bosom friendship, he couldn’t begin to think. It must have done, though, because the pathologist went on: ‘Agate did very well for himself afterwards – went in for toxicology, got a professorship, writes textbooks and all that sort of thing …’

  ‘Good,’ said Sloan vaguely.

  ‘He was first-rate even as a student – I’ve never forgotten the way he explored that first knee …’

  ‘Haven’t you?’ said Sloan restrainedly.

  ‘Well, I sent him a bit of that old lady’s liver for an opinion – thought that he’d be interested and like to have it anyway …’

  ‘And?’ said Sloan. The pathologist seemed to have reduced the whole business of autopsy and police investigation in one easy step to the level of two schoolboys swapping comics.

  ‘He wants to see a lung section,’ said Dabbe happily. ‘He says that the presence of one of the halogenated hydrocarbons can’t be ruled out. He thinks he might just be able to isolate one of the agents there.’

  ‘Does he?’ said Sloan, who didn’t like being blinded by science. ‘And what are they?’ He also had a rooted objection to being made to seem foolish by mispronouncing words he didn’t know.

  ‘Good question,’ said the pathologist. ‘They’re a big group of chemical nasties used mostly as industrial cleaning agents and agricultural growth accelerators.

  ‘I see.’ Sloan turned a page in his notebook over. ‘Industrial, did you say?’

  ‘My old pal Agate – we called him Stony, of course – says he thinks that there might have been some substance containing one of these halogenated carbons administered to the deceased …’

  ‘Does he?’ said Sloan, the words ‘think’ and ‘might’ being a trifle too circumspect for a detective inspector – any detective inspector.

  ‘In Agate’s opinion something has left traces in the liver and kidneys sections which could well be consistent with ethylene poisoning.’

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan. Agate, whoever he was, had learned professional caution over the years. Opinions were something that anyone could hold: and did.

  ‘The halogenated hydrocarbons are a very volatile group,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘But Dr Aldus said she’d died from heart failure,’ pointed out Sloan. The superintendent could be very volatile, too: especially when presented with conflicting medical statements.

  ‘And so she did,’ said the pathologist stoutly. ‘The mode of death would have been respiratory and circulatory failure – which is precisely what Dr Aldus expected her to die from.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘It is the cause of death that we are discussing now, Sloan, not the mode. That’s something quite different.’

  ‘So what you are saying, doctor,’ Detective Inspector Sloan was not prepared to play hair-splitting games with specialists, ‘is that Mrs Garamond’s death could have been as a result of her having inhaled something?’

  ‘A noxious substance,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  ‘Poison gas, you mean?’

  ‘Let us say rather that it might have been a gas that was p
oisonous,’ qualified the doctor.

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan. Any minute now they would be arguing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

  ‘There were those marks still on her face …’ said Dabbe.

  ‘I’ll have that oxygen cylinder checked out straight away,’ said Sloan, making a note. ‘Of course, doctor, if it was one of these halogen things you were talking about …’

  ‘Halogenated hydrocarbons,’ supplied the doctor obligingly.

  ‘Then that could mean we would be dealing with somebody who knew what they were doing chemically.’

  ‘Well,’ conceded Dr Dabbe, ‘you wouldn’t exactly pick ’em up in a child’s home chemistry set.’

  ‘I was beginning to think that might be the case,’ said the detective inspector, pulling his notebook towards him and writing Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs and Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals at the head of the next page.

  ‘What my friend would like to know,’ continued Dabbe, ‘and me, too, of course, Sloan, naturally – is whether there is anyone whom you might just be happening to be keeping an eye on who might know their chemical onions so to say.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan unenthusiastically.

  ‘Ah … good man. Agate said it might help a lot if we know what any suspects could get hold of easily.’

  ‘A little matter of the work forces of two firms of manufacturing chemists,’ Sloan said, adding meaningfully, ‘plus everyone who has ever worked for the said firms. And, doctor, that’s only for starters …’

  He had already added the name of Dr John Aldus to his list.

  ‘’Ullo, ’ullo,’ said Tod Morton when Crosby walked in to the undertaker’s yard back in Nethergate Street, in Berebury. ‘What’s all this here then?’

  ‘Pinching my lines, if nothing else,’ declared the detective constable. ‘I could book you for that, Tod Morton, but I won’t.’

  The undertaker held up his hands in mock surrender and said: ‘All right, all right. I shan’t say “Let’s be having you …”’

  ‘Just as well,’ growled Crosby.

  ‘Because I’ll get you in the end,’ said Tod, winking. ‘I get everybody in the end, you know.’