Bitter Water

by Douglas Clark

  “It will be plastic coffee this time, no waiting for it to brew,” said Collier as he went through the door.

  Tip looked across at Masters. “I bet she gave him a time of it, Chief.”

  “When he insisted on the dressing, you mean?”

  “Yes. An uncooperative patient of any sort is a nuisance as anybody will tell you, but a temperamental girl like her, when her pride was hurt more than her body, could have been pretty petulant. And I reckon she was. I imagine Collier had his hands full on Saturday morning, even though he’s making very little of it.”

  “Are you suggesting I should question him a little more closely about the bit you imagine he glossed over?”

  “I raised the point, Chief, just in case it had escaped you and there was, in fact, a blazing row here on Saturday.”

  “Ah! That had not occurred to me, I must admit.”

  “But it’s valid,” grunted Green.

  “Of course.”

  “A row which dragged on all day and spilled over into Sunday, perhaps,” said Green.

  “Then what?” demanded Berger.

  “One thing at a time, lad,” counselled Green. “Let’s move forward cautiously.”

  “But something could have happened between them that resulted in … ”

  “Careful,” said Tip quietly and got to her feet to go to the door. She opened it just as Collier, who was carrying a tray, was about to tap it with his foot to ask for admission. He thanked Tip and set the tray down on the sofa table.

  “Help yourselves to biscuits,” he said. “I’ve only got ginger-nuts left. Carla didn’t care for them, but I’ve always kept a stock in because somewhere I once read they are the most sustaining of nibbles if you’re hiking or climbing, and sometimes stage rehearsals and the like are akin to scaling the Matterhorn.”

  Green helped himself to a couple. “Nice and crisp,” he said, breaking one noisily in his teeth.

  Masters was keen to get back to business.

  “You said you insisted on Miss Sanders wearing her bandage on Saturday. Can we go on from there, please?”

  “Can we all call her Carla, do you think? It is so much easier, and friendlier than the Miss Sanders bit.”

  “If that is what you would like.”

  “Yes, please. But to get back to the script … the quack had laid down the law about the bandage, so I wasn’t acting on my own opinion. He’d said that if Carla wanted to be back on stage by Monday she had to wear a bandage, not only to protect the wound but to support the injured ankle and to restrict the foot movement. He’d even taught me how to put it on—doing figure-of-eight turns round the instep and up the ankle.”

  “Basic first-aid bandaging,” said Berger. “We have to do it in recruit training.”

  “I suppose so, but I was never a Boy Scout.”

  “So you did the bandaging on Saturday morning?” asked Masters.

  “Yes. She wouldn’t let me fasten it with a safety pin. Had to use a lump of sticky tape. She wanted to wear tights, you see, and she thought she’d better have white ones to camouflage the bandage. I suggested slacks but the perverse little madam insisted on tights.”

  Masters caught a quick glance directed at him from Tip as they heard this and the accompanying hint of frustration in Collier’s tone. Meanwhile, the actor had taken up his cup of coffee and was taking a sip or two. As he put the cup down again, he continued: “Of course, all the white tights she had were laddered, so we had to go out shopping for more. She got a couple of pairs so that she’d have a new pair for the party that night.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Collier,” interrupted Tip. “Were you quite happy at the thought of Carla going out to the party on Saturday evening?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “So you suggested she shouldn’t go?”

  “No. I think I explained to you that Carla regarded this particular invitation as a bit of a must, but I did say to her that I would have been happier if the venue had been a little nearer home. I had to lay on the friendly neighbourhood mini-cab driver to take her.”

  “And to bring her back, presumably.”

  “I wanted to arrange for him to go back for her at a stated time, not too late, say eleven o’clock, but she wouldn’t have that. She said she was certain to be able to get a lift back into town. Which she was, of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  He turned back to Masters. “The trouble over the tights was worth it. By the time she got them on and selected the right gear and shoes you’d have had to look hard to see she was bandaged. But of course it wouldn’t do. You’ve probably guessed Carla was so proud of her legs that she didn’t like wearing slacks. But she reckoned with the bandage on, after all the tarradiddle over the tights, that she was still less than perfection. So in the end, after all, she wore a trouser suit for the damned party.”

  “What had you to say to that, lad?” asked Green.

  Collier shrugged. “After living with Carla for eighteen months or so, I’d got used to little changes of mind like that. So I said nothing. It kept her so busy for most of the day that she seemed to forget the injury, as such. It was the unsightliness we were concentrating on. But she ate up at lunchtime and she had a bit of something with me before I went to the theatre. She was being picked up at seven, because Carlyle’s house is about an hour away by car.

  “I rushed back from the theatre so that I should be here when she got back or if she wanted picking up somewhere. But to my amazement the lights were on when I got here and I found her in bed. And I must say that was a surprise. I hadn’t expected her to come home so early.”

  “Why had she done so?” asked Masters. “Was she ill?”

  Collier grimaced and picked up his cup again. He took a gulp of the, by now, half-cold coffee. “No.” He put the cup down and looked across at Masters. “She fell into the swimming pool. I must confess to you that sometimes—particularly at parties—Carla used to take a bit on board. That’s one reason why I wouldn’t let her drive herself to Carlyle’s house—besides the busted ankle, of course. So I suppose she had a few drinks and got the staggers as well as having a groggy ankle. Anyhow, she went in. They fished her out, gave her some dry clothes and some Samaritan drove her home.”

  “Is that all you know about the incident?”

  “That’s it. As I said, she was in bed when I got home. There she was, well before midnight, all tucked up, hair dried, the lot.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “Yes. She told me about going into the pool, and there was a large plastic bag with her wet clothes in it sitting in the middle of the bedroom floor.”

  “Did she explain how she came to be in the water?”

  “Not exactly, but I could gather what happened. Five or six of them in a group beside the pool. All fairly well tanked up, I imagine, holding glasses and laughing, probably moving a bit unsteadily. One of them was bound to go in, I’d have thought. It just happened to be Carla.”

  “She didn’t claim she was pushed?”

  “She made no deliberate accusation. I imagine in a group like that there was bound to be a nudge.”

  “Arms round each others’ necks, I suppose,” grunted Green, “and staggering about. Probably got too near the edge and in she went.”

  “I think that must have been it,” agreed Collier.

  Masters asked quietly: “Was Carla coherent when she spoke to you?”

  “Completely. No sign of alcoholic haze. I imagine the ducking had sobered her up quite a bit, and then there was the drive home, of course, to complete the process.”

  “That sounds reasonable enough, but was she—apart from being completely sober—in apparent good health?”

  “As far as I could tell she was. Mark you, I wasn’t looking for anything wrong. What I mean is, I asked about the ankle. She said she had kept the bandage on, even though it had got a bit tight when it got wet, because she hadn’t wanted all the bother of redoing it. That’s if she’d been in a fit state to do
it for herself.”

  “She should have had it off,” grunted Green. “When the bandage tightened it would have been bad for her circulation.”

  “I told her that, but she said it loosened again when it dried, so I didn’t take it off at that hour of the night to put a new dressing on. Carla wouldn’t have let me anyway. She was nicely snuggled down after the events of the evening and she’d not have taken kindly to being disturbed for that.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Berger to Collier. “We sometimes get hoicked out of bed like that in the force, and I can’t think of much worse. I know it always annoys me.”

  Masters asked, “If Carla was perfectly all right at midnight on Saturday, when did she first complain of feeling ill?”

  “On Sunday morning at about, oh, I suppose eight o’clock, when I got up to make coffee. She said she thought she’d got flu.”

  “So what action did you take?”

  “At first? I gave her a cup of hot lemon and a couple of paracetamol tablets. I didn’t think it could be flu.”

  “Why not?”

  “The weather was gorgeous, and flu doesn’t seem to fit in with heat waves, somehow. I guessed at a cold brought on by falling into the swimming pool. I’ve heard of summer colds. They’re quite common, I believe. But not summer flu.”

  “I think you made a reasonable assumption,” said Masters. “And took the right action in giving her a hot drink and a couple of paracetamol. There’s very little else you could have done at that stage.”

  “When did she dry her hair?” asked Green. “At the party when she changed into dry clothes? Or did she wait until she got home?”

  “I asked her that. She said she had borrowed a hair drier from Mrs. Carlyle, but I reckoned she hadn’t dried her hair all that well. Carla had a lot of very fine hair which took a devil of a lot of drying, and in her state, having had a drink or two and then a ducking, to say nothing of her injury, I thought she hadn’t done it too well and had travelled home with it half damp.”

  “You said all this to her?” asked Masters.

  “While she had her hot lemon stuff. But she wouldn’t agree.” Collier looked round at the four attentive faces of his audience. “She insisted it was flu because she felt rotten in herself. She said that didn’t happen with a cold. Feeble, was how she said she was feeling. I thought, to be honest, she was feeling glum because she’d made a bit of a fool of herself at Carlyle’s party and as a result had developed a cold which might keep her out of her show for even longer than the damaged leg, and that she was, consequently, dramatising a bit.”

  “How soon did you change your mind, Mr. Collier?”

  “Quite soon. Carla refused all food, so after spending ten minutes or so trying to persuade her to have something I went into the kitchen to get myself a bit of breakfast and to brew the coffee I’d intended to make but had substituted for her hot lemon. I thought she might like a cup of coffee, but I didn’t want to rush her, so I sat in the kitchen for … oh, about half an hour, I suppose, looking through the Sunday paper. There was a write-up of her show in it, so I took it through, with the coffee, for her to read, and that was when I saw that she really and truly wasn’t well. She was very flushed and her forehead was sweaty.”

  “Was that when you first called the doctor?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t much after half past nine when I rang. The quack was a bit put out, but I insisted he should come. He arrived about ten o’clock.”

  “And what was his diagnosis?”

  “Flu. A heavy bout. He gave me a lot of instructions for looking after Carla and a prescription for one of those soluble analgesics.”

  “Then he left?”

  “He had a word or two with me in here. Just to say that he reckoned the attack would be short-lived and I wasn’t to worry about the sweating because flu is accompanied by marked sweating as well as headache, muscle pains, weakness and shivering. I remembered them as he reeled them off.”

  “Like learning a part, perhaps,” suggested Tip.

  Collier smiled at her and then turned back to Masters. “I accepted what he said, of course, and it accounted for Carla saying she felt feeble. But I did ask him about her show because I knew Carla would be busting a gut to get back.”

  “Did he give you a probable time for her return?”

  “Not exactly. What he did say was that I hadn’t to let her worry about Barley because she wouldn’t be able to start work until her temperature had got back to normal for a couple of days and all weakness and dizziness had gone. He even suggested that the attack could be a blessing in disguise as it would give her ankle and leg time to heal completely before she took over her part again.”

  “You said the doctor gave you a prescription. Did you take it to some Sunday-opening chemist yourself?”

  “No. I felt I ought to stay with Carla. I toyed with the idea of getting a nurse in, but you don’t engage a nurse for flu, do you?”

  Masters shook his head. “They would probably refuse to come for so trifling a reason as a common-or-garden febrile disease such as flu.”

  “Thanks,” said Collier, feelingly. “I’m bloody glad to hear you say that because I’ve been wondering whether, if I had had a trained nurse here, she might have spotted something in Carla’s condition … something that might have saved her.”

  “Forget it, son,” growled Green, gruffly. “The medics didn’t, and you were here most of the time.”

  “That’s how I saw it.” Collier ran his hand through his hair. “I knew I could be with her until I set out for the theatre on Monday night, and I reckoned that by that time she would be over the worst and if she wasn’t I’d get one of our friends in to sit with her.”

  “Quite right,” said Masters. “The doctor had told you the attack would be short-lived and, after all, scores of thousands of people every year contract flu and get over it quite safely. But you were about to tell us how you got the prescription made up.”

  “You’re interested in that prescription,” said Collier shrewdly.

  “Naturally. I’m trying to discover the reason why Miss Sanders developed the illness that killed her. Anything she took must be of interest to me.”

  “I suppose so,” said Collier, wearily. “It was a simple matter, really. A few days earlier we’d asked two friends of ours, Rex and Annette Dent, in for a prelunch drink.”

  “On the Sunday?”

  “When else?”

  “Actors?”

  “Yes. At a bit of a loose end at the moment, though. I rang Annette and explained the position to her. She immediately jumped to the conclusion that I wanted to put them off, but that was the last thing I wanted. I asked her if they could come round earlier than arranged so that they could collect the prescription from here, take it to the nearest chemist that was open and then bring the medicine back before we had our drinks.”

  “Mrs. Dent agreed?”

  “Like a shot. She’s a nice person. They both are. They were round here in no time, and Rex had even rung a police station to find out the nearest chemist that was open. They had to wait until eleven for it to open up, but they were first in the queue and they were back here very quickly, so I gave Carla her first dose before half-past.”

  “How was she then?”

  “Not good. She was shivering and complaining of a headache. She also said her legs and thighs—I suppose she meant the muscles—were painful.” Collier again ran his hand through his hair and looked round at them all as if completely bewildered. “It was exactly what the quack had told me to expect,” he said wildly. “So I didn’t worry. I was concerned about her, of course, but I thought everything was just taking its natural course and going exactly according to plan. Annette Dent thought so, too, and she’s the sort of woman who has nursed people through flu. She said Carla’s condition was just like a heavy dose of flu would be.”

  Green looked across at Tip. “If you can find your way about the kitchen, love, make us another brew of coffee, there’s a good l
ass. We could all use one.”

  As Tip collected the already used cups before going to the kitchen, Masters again addressed Collier. “You had been told by the doctor that Miss Sanders had influenza and a married woman who, as you said, had encountered flu on previous occasions and so was likely to recognise the symptoms, also supported the diagnosis. Why should you have believed otherwise? What could you have done?”

  Collier spread his hands. It was the first really theatrical gesture he had made, and though it came as a surprise from a man who had shown himself to be down-to-earth in every way, it was nevertheless a convincing sign of resignation.

  Masters continued. “When I asked what could you have done, I really meant what more could you have done, because I am presuming you sent for the doctor again?”

  Collier nodded miserably. “Annette, Rex and I had our drinks. It wasn’t exactly a rowdy party, with Carla lying ill next door, but we had a couple apiece and nattered a lot. I suppose it was getting on for one o’clock when we heard the noise from the bedroom. Annette jumped to her feet and said, ‘Carla’s being sick.’ It was a retching noise we’d heard, but we weren’t prepared for what we saw when we rushed into the bedroom.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Carla had vomited, but her face and the bed cover were … well, not covered in blood, exactly, but heavily spattered.”

  “You mean,” said Green, “that the lass had been coughing up blood?”

  Collier shook his head. “That was my first thought, but it turned out to be a heavy nosebleed.”

  “Nosebleed?” echoed Green in surprise. “What had she been doing? Blowing it too hard? Or had she fetched herself a fourpenny one, somehow?”

  “There was no sign that she’d hit herself, and she hadn’t got a cold. Not enough to warrant hard blowing, anyhow. But I was pretty scared. The quack hadn’t said she would vomit, let alone start to bleed, so I decided he’d got to come and see her again. While Annette cleaned Carla up, I got on to Denyer. I thought I might well be in for a bit of a battle with him, but when he heard about the vomiting and nosebleeding he whipped round here pretty smartish.”

  “What was his attitude when he did arrive?” asked Masters quietly.