A Detective at Death's Door

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Yes, I see. And you’re right. Not that I can possibly tell anyone. My husband’s the only person allowed to visit me, you know.’

  ‘I do so. All right, now let me tell you that we’ve got the name of every single soul who was there round the pool at the Majestic Club at the time. They had security men on the gate, you know, two of ‘em because it was a busy bank holiday. But there are altogether as many as a hundred and twenty-seven potential suspects, men, women and — God help us — children, and, worse, they were in every state of dress and undress. Sure, if our man was strolling about there in full evening kit, I doubt if anyone would have taken any particular notice.’

  He sighed, or perhaps groaned.

  ‘Whatever, they’ve all got to be interviewed. We’re working away at that. Well down the list now, indeed. In theory anyhow whoever we’re looking for ought to be there on that list, but we haven’t had a smell of whoever it is so far. Your man’s not one of the club staff, I can tell you that. I went well into where that drink you had came from, and I’m one hundred per cent happy that the bottle of — what’s it? Campari? — is in the clear. You were the only one to call for the stuff that morning, and they opened a new bottle.’

  A sudden grin.

  ‘Sure, and I can understand why no one else wanted it. I asked for a shot meself, part of my duties as you may say, and, by God, I’ve never supped anything so near cough-mixture in all me life.’

  Harriet managed a pale smile.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Not to everyone’s taste. My boys call it cough-mixture, too. But in summer I like it.’

  ‘You’ve every right, so you have. But let me go on. I got hold of the bottle of soda water they used to make that mixture, and the lab checked it for me straight away. Pure as a mountain stream. So there can be no doubt it was someone beside the pool there who put that deadly stuff in your drink. But which of them it was, well, to be frank, at this moment we’ve no more idea than the saints above. I had a fingertip search underway within an hour of — of it happening. Might have been something thrown down there. Even whatever the poison was in. But there wasn’t. Twenty men and women, all in their white bodysuits, crawling about there in the hot sun, and finding nothing that meant anything. Not unless you count a sack full of fag-ends, sweet papers and ice-cream sticks, plus God knows what else.’

  ‘I put you all to a great deal of trouble. I’m sorry. You know, I’ve never thought before about an investigation from ... From what you might call the worm’s-eye view. Makes me think.’

  ‘Indeed it would. So can I ask the victim a few wee questions now?’

  ‘Of course, Pat. Of course. If there’s anything I know that’s going to help, I’m only too willing to come up with it. If I can.’

  ‘Right then. Your John — and there’s a nice fella, if ever I saw one — he told me he found you asleep when he came back from taking a Jimmy Riddle. Is that so? You had gone to sleep when he left you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I absolutely had. Or I’d dozed off, certainly. I’m not sure I was as deeply asleep as if I’d been in my bed at night.’

  ‘Ah, I know how it is. You’re lying stretched out there and the sun’s nice and hot and you shut your eyes. And then you don’t know if you’re sleeping or waking. But did you see anything, see anybody, near you as you nodded off? Anybody at all? Anything at all?’

  Harriet attempted to put herself back to that moment. But there was nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Almost everything had been blotted out that had happened in the hour before that awful moment when she took a swallow of her half-finished second Campari soda and found its taste somehow altered. Mr Hume Jones, when she had managed to ask him about it, had told her that memory loss was common after a trauma. The events immediately beforehand might eventually come back, or they might not. He had flashed her then his smile and, followed by his cluster of acolytes, had moved on.

  ‘No, Pat,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘No, I really didn’t see anybody, anything.’

  ‘But you did see your John coming back? Or did he have to tap you on the shoulder to wake you? Were you that deep asleep?’

  ‘No. No, I wasn’t. As a matter of fact — I remember this now — I woke just before John came up to me. You know, there’s sometimes something between people who’ve been married a long time. I don’t know what. Sympathy, thought transference, something electrical. But, whatever it was, I woke when I somehow sensed John was coming towards me. He was five yards away, ten.’

  ‘So he was. He told me you looked at him and smiled.’

  ‘Pat, you old devil. That was a trick question, asking if I’d seen John when you knew all along I had.’

  Pat grinned.

  ‘Ah, it was that, so it was. But, you know, I’m needing to know how much I can rely on what you’re telling me, poorly as you are.’

  Now Harriet grinned, though with rather less vigour.

  ‘What I ought to have expected after all,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I put your old man through one hell of an interrogation, wanting to get him to recall the least possible thing that might give us a clue. And it’s you I’m going to ask again now. Was there anything, any little thing out of the ordinary, that caught your attention just after John had left you?’

  ‘No. I said I couldn’t — ’

  Then something seemed to fly past the very back of her mind. Come and gone in half a moment.

  ‘Oh, there was something. No, it’s gone now. It was ... I don’t know. All I can say is: it was something black and white. I don’t know what. I don’t know at all. It — it may have been nothing, something black or dark moving with something white. Someone’s shirt, I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, don’t fret yourself. If it’s anything that matters, it’ll come back to you sooner or later. And if it’s nothing, then it’s nothing. But, if I’m not troubling you, there’s one more thing I have to ask.’

  ‘Go ahead, go ahead.’

  ‘It’s this. Just this. Enemies? Do you know of anybody, anybody at all, who might for some reason, or for no reason, want you dead?’

  The thought came to Harriet as a bottomless shock.

  Someone who wants me dead. No. Never. Why should ... ?

  But, well, a police officer might, after all, have done something to a villain that rankled. Is there someone I put away? Someone who, over the years in prison, might have been thinking and thinking of that cow who ... ?

  But, though she lay there attempting to pass her whole police life through her mind, no answer came.

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No, Pat, I really don’t — ‘

  And then, rising up like a waterspout from the heaving ocean, there came into her head something she had thought in the middle of the night, something perhaps she had dreamt.

  She actually reached out and clasped Pat Murphy’s big red hand as he sat there on the little hospital chair beside her.

  ‘Pat,’ she said. ‘Pat, there’s something terrible I’ve thought. Last night. In the middle of the night. I’ve been having terrible dreams, you know. Ever since I regained consciousness. Terrible. And there was this one, last night, or perhaps the night before. I get so confused. I’ve pushed it away. Pushed it down. But — ’

  She could go on no longer.

  Pat Murphy looked at her, looked at the drained white hand that was clutching his own.

  ‘Well now,’ he said, ‘how about telling me what this is all about?’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘John,’ she said. ‘Could it have been John?’

  Then a long gabble of ideas and suppositions came flooding out.

  ‘Listen, what’s the first action in any murder investigation? Look at the person who found the body, yes? And who found — found this body here? Or rather at the pool, beside the pool? Who did? John did. And most murders, what are they? Domestics. Domestics. Husbands kill their wives. They do. So it could be, couldn’t it? You asked about enemies. But couldn’t my husband be my secret enemy
? My murderer?’

  Pat Murphy looked at her.

  ‘And just when did your John put that poison into your cough-mixture soda?’ he said. ‘Remember, he went away for his Jimmy Riddle and you watched him go. You dozed off, and then what? You told me just now that you saw, or you sensed, him coming back towards you when he was — what? — ten yards away, five? And you gave him a smile.’

  Harriet found she had loosed her grip on that big red hand.

  ‘And then where’s a fellow like John going to get aconitine?’ Pat quietly went on. ‘He might, of course, he just might. But it isn’t so easy. I’ve been looking the stuff up. It comes from a plant called by some long Latiny name, but in plain English it’s monkshood. Now where’s John going to find monkshood, let alone boil it up or whatever? Have you got monkshood growing in your garden? Come on, now, answer up. Have you?’

  And under this genial bullying all Harriet’s night fears fled away. Things of the dark before the rising sun.

  ‘No, Pat,’ she said, ‘we haven’t got monkshood growing in our garden. I’d know if we had. And — And it’s also called wolfsbane. John told me that. And — And — ’

  An uncontrollable giggle.

  ‘And Agatha Christie told him.’

  ‘So she did, so she did. He was after telling me about that book of hers. Twisted Wolfsbane. Wasn’t that it? And didn’t that come from some old poet? Keats. Yes, Keats. But I think I’ve been here bothering you long enough. Too long perhaps. So I’ll be off. And you just forget about all that nonsense, lie there and take it easy. Get back to your old self. What they used to call you when you were over in B Division, the Hard Detective. Get yourself back to being the Hard Detective. That’s who we want to see with us again.’

  The door closed softly behind him.

  Harriet lay there trying to get into some sort of order in her head all she had learnt from the man in charge of her case. But it was too much of an effort.

  Have I got a headache, she asked herself.

  And then, in a burst of self-directed fury, she thought, Christ, I must know whether my head’s aching or not.

  What a state I’m in. To be so feeble. All very well to say to John that if someone has attempted murder by poisoning they must be caught and put away in case they do it again, but what damn use can I be in helping to see that they are found and caught? None at all, none at all. But I must ... I should ...

  Oh. Right, damn it. I have got a headache. It’s getting worse by the minute. I need something for it. Hume No-hyphen said I could have something if I needed it.

  Right, ring the bell, get Nurse Bhattacharya. Ask her for a pill.

  Oh, God. The bell-push, it’s too far away. I can’t get my arm to stretch that far. I don’t know how to get it to move. I can’t. I can’t.

  Chapter Three

  Damn it, Harriet said to herself on the day that Nurse Bhattacharya seized hold of John’s wilted freesias in one hand and gathered up in the other the Chief Constable’s Michaelmas daisies, their foliage turned to a dry brown, to whisk them both off to the dustbin. Damn it, I am a detective. And not a bad one, even if that label, the ‘Hard Detective’ is only the half of what I can do. All right, I’m the victim, by some absurd chance, of an attempt at poisoning that only just failed to come off, and I ought to be able to see, if anybody can, how that case, my case, can be resolved.

  Only I can’t. I can’t because the whole business is, so far as I can see, wrapped in what old Agatha Christie might have called impenetrable mystery. And I can’t make even one step towards resolving the case because I’m stuck here in this hospital room unable to do anything. At the mercy of Nurse Bhattacharya. Deprived even of a telephone because a phone is thought to be too exciting for a patient who needs nothing but an existence of dead, featureless calm.

  Right. Tomorrow morning when Mr Hume Nohyphen Jones arrives with his simpering white-coated train I’m going to tell him it’s time I went home.

  *

  That evening, one final supper, mostly pushed aside. One final cup of cocoa, sipped in spite of herself. The metal rest at the back of the bed clipped out of the way into its nighttime position by a nurse a little more human than the dread Bhattacharya.

  And sleep. Broken sleep, of course, as it had been night after night ever since she had heard the voice of Mr Hume Jones proclaiming, ‘We’ve pulled you through.’ But, broken or not, sleep. Then the curtains flicked sharply back, she was heaved upright, and the thermometer, the bedpan and the washing bowl once more. But at last the door swept wide open and Mr Hume Jones, fine woollen shirt apricot-coloured today, white coat as far back on the shoulders as ever, was there in front of her.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Hume Jones,’ she snapped out quickly as she could, well knowing that the form was that the great physician should greet the humbly grateful patient and then receive acknowledgement of the dose of bedside manner he had bestowed.

  ‘Well, we are on the mend, aren’t we?’ came his reply now, accompanied by a look that should have frozen the remaining flowers on the locker at the bed’s foot.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think I am on the mend, as you put it. Certainly enough to be off home as soon as you give the word.’

  The eyebrows at the top of the long man-in-the-moon face rose.

  ‘Oh, no. I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. Nurse, temperature chart, if you please.’

  Chart reverently handed forward.

  ‘Hm, yes. Yes, some change. But we’re not out of the woods yet, not by any means.’

  Why can’t the bugger say what my actual temperature was this morning? Because it was down to bloody normal? Or at least somewhere near it. But, no, I suppose it’s because I’m something of a prize patient. A prize specimen, the record salmon he’s pulled from the stream. And he wants to keep me here to be gazed at.

  But, give him the credit he deserves. He did pluck me back from the grave. He and his team really did do that.

  ‘But, Mr Hume Jones, thanks to your care, I really do feel as if I’m almost completely over it now.’

  A lie, of course. But I want to get home. To where I’ll have a phone at my disposal and can at least make a few inquiries. Into the attempted murder of Detective Superintendent Martens, Greater Birchester Police.

  ‘That’s very good to hear, Mrs Piddock. It’s a sign that you’re recovering, almost as rapidly as we hoped. But I’m afraid I have to tell you that you’ve a long way to go yet. Let me see, you were admitted, as I well remember since I had to be called in specially, on the August bank holiday Monday, on the twenty-sixth that is. And today’s date is — ’

  An abrupt check. Eyes swivelling round left and right. And no one able to produce the date, or not with printed evidence.

  All right, I’ll do it, Harriet thought. There’s The Times halfway down the bed where the girl left it.

  She heaved herself forward, extended her right arm. Her groping fingers fell just short. She scrabbled at the bedclothes.

  But, no.

  No, damn and blast it, I haven’t got the strength.

  But then one of the white-coated junior housemen managed to pull from his jacket pocket a much-folded gaudy copy of the Express.

  ‘September the eighth, sir. It’s the eighth today.’

  ‘Of course. So, Mrs Piddock, you have been with us little more than a fortnight, during a good deal of which time you were undergoing very arduous medical procedures. Indeed, at one stage, let me tell you, you were in fact clinically dead. And you were also subjected, let me see, to no fewer than fifteen electric shock treatments. You’re naturally in a state of physical and mental exhaustion, however much you feel you’re better than you were. Look how just now you failed to get hold of the paper there, barely two feet away. You thought I hadn’t noticed, didn’t you?’

  The smile flashed. White teeth.

  ‘No, I don’t think there can be any question of you leaving us just yet. Not for some considerable time to come, indeed.’

&
nbsp; Harriet sank back on her pillows.

  *

  By the time of John’s visit she had regained enough willpower to say to him the moment he came in — bunch of deep-red roses in his hand — ‘John, I want you to do something.’

  ‘Well, glad to find you want anything. A definite improvement.’

  ‘Right, it’s this. I want you to go to Mr Hume Jones and, hyphen or no hyphen, I want you to persuade him that I ought to be allowed to go home. This morning I asked the wretched man if I could go, and he produced a lot of poppycock reasons why I had to stay here. And, you know, really it’s only because he wants to keep his prize patient as long as he possibly can.’

  John looked down at her with an expression of mild interest.

  ‘And what were those poppycock reasons exactly?’

  Trust him to pick on the key point. And I know, all right, those reasons aren’t total poppycock. But I want to go home. I must go home. If I don’t, there’ll be nothing at all I can do to resolve the murder, the attempted murder, of Detective ... Superintendent ... Martens.

  ‘Well,’ she said, feeling her way, ‘he said it’s been only a fortnight since I was brought in here and that wasn’t long enough for me to be ready to go home. And then he claimed I was at one point clinically dead. But what does he mean by that? It’s only some medical jargon. Must be. I mean, either I was dead — which plainly I wasn’t — or I was alive. All right, if only just.’

  ‘If that’s all he said to you, I can tell you he spared you a good deal. There was an anxious hour or so when they thought you would have to have a temporary heart bypass. They’d have put you on a heart-lung machine, Hume Jones told me, and used a filter pump to clear out what they thought were still traces of aconitine in your blood.’