A Detective at Death's Door

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘So you can’t,’ Pat said, looking round for somewhere to sit and finding only the hard, little, drum-like, green-upholstered chair on which in normal times Harriet arranged her clothes for the next morning. ‘And that’s only natural. But I’m still going to ask you all the questions I have to. If there does turn out to be some sort of link between a detective superintendent of the Greater Birchester Police and Robbie Norman, young apprentice motor mechanic from the god-awful Moorfields area, then well stand a chance, maybe, of finding your poisoner and putting them well away.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But, though I’ve been thinking a bit since John told me, I can’t for the life of me see there can be any link. But fire away, fire away.’

  ‘I will so. Now, I take it that the name Robbie or Robert Norman doesn’t ring any bell with you?’

  ‘No. None.’

  ‘And your car, have you ever taken it to the garage on the edge of Moorfields — Simpson’s it’s called — where the lad worked?’

  ‘No. No, never even heard of it. When I need anything doing to the car I go to one of the mechanics I know at the police garage. But have you asked John this? He might have taken his car in there.’

  ‘He has not.’

  ‘Worth a try.’

  ‘It was. So, now, do you have any sort of connection with anybody at all in Moorfields? Did you ever serve there?’

  ‘No, thank goodness, I never had the pleasure, even when I was just a sergeant.’

  ‘Do you ever go to any shops there? Anything like that?’

  ‘Do you mean one of the sex shops? Hardly my sort of thing!’

  ‘Ah, I didn’t have that in mind at all, at all. But there might be some special shop you sometimes go to. I don’t know. A halal butcher who sells better than average lamb? There’re half a dozen Muslim places like that in Moorfields. Did you ever go to one?’

  ‘Pat, you know the sort of thing people like me are apt to go in for all right. But, no, I’ve been about in Moorfields every now and again, but only on inquiries, and not all that often then.’

  ‘You’ve not been to church there ever? For a wedding, a funeral, anything? Or to a cinema house? Only I think the one there is another of your sex places.’

  ‘No, I certainly can’t think of anywhere.’

  ‘Well now, if you can’t, you can’t.’

  ‘So it’s the end of the line?’

  ‘Not at all, not at all. You should know better than that, Detective Superintendent Martens.’

  ‘You’re right, I should. So there are other lines of inquiry?’

  ‘Sure there are. All right, we’ve searched the whole of the striptease hall at the back of the Virgin and Vicar — and what a name that is; they should be ashamed — and haven’t found the smell of a physical clue.’

  He gave a rich guffaw of a laugh.

  ‘Ach, you should have seen me there with the best of them, in floppy old white overalls and great flapping overshoes, peering and poking, and not at all knowing what it was we were looking for, a wee bottle, a test-tube, or any little squeezy class of a thing.’

  ‘And there was nothing? Nothing at all?’

  ‘There was not. Or, if there was something, we didn’t know the significance of it. But there you are. And we’re not beat yet. We’ve still got a few of the people with you at the pool not fully questioned, and now there’s the whole lot from the pub.’

  ‘I wish I could be there, doing my share.’

  ‘But you can’t be, not even if you were able for it. You’re now our Victim Number One, don’t you forget. It’d never do to have you giving evidence for the prosecution when we get the case to court. No, all you can do just at present, and it’s asking plenty of you, I know, is to try to think if there’s anything, any wee thing, you do know about the attempt on yourself. And there’s one thing more: can you recall any young man who on any occasion did some odd job for you, say, at the house here? Or came calling for any reason whatsoever, offering to clean your car, anything? Take your time and think about it.’

  Harriet did take her time. And thought hard, for a little. But then she found her slippery mind had wandered off elsewhere. There is, there must be someone, someone in Birchester, who has poisoned first myself and now this young motor mechanic, whom I know nothing about. So why has this person put aconitine into something each of us was going to drink?

  Pat Murphy produced a noisy cough.

  ‘Now, by the look of you it’s wandering away you’ve gone. I can’t say I blame you, not after what you’ve been through. But have you been able to remember any recent caller at the house?’

  Harriet gave a deep sigh.

  ‘No, Pat.’

  The big Irishman heaved himself to his feet

  ‘I hardly expected there’d be anything,’ he said. ‘You don’t get a piece of luck like that every day of the week. So it’s back to questioning every friend and acquaintance that young man had and hoping one of them will know something that gives us a lead. And when we’re done with that, questioning once more the people at the Majestic Club. One of them might remember that for some reason Robbie Norman had gone right across Birchester and visited the club. Asking for a Saturday job maybe. Something, anything. I don’t know.’

  He shook his head from side to side, like a frustrated bull.

  ‘So now I’ll be off. Let you get on with getting yourself on your feet again.’

  He lumbered towards the door.

  ‘Stop, Pat, stop.’

  ‘Yes? There’s something?’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that. Sorry I raised your hopes. It — it’s just this. Pat, you will keep in touch with me, won’t you? You’ll let me know how it’s all going? Please.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t I? When one of the best in Birchester CID is there to put in her thoughts.’

  *

  However, it was not the encouragement that sprang up from Pat Murphy’s word of praise that buzzed and whirred like an angry bee in Harriet’s head that evening. John had brought his supper tray up to the bedroom, set it down on the smooth, untousled half of the bed where he usually slept, transferred to his bedside table his glass of wine — one of the oversize ones the twins gave us, Harriet noted, and all right he deserves it — and had drawn forward the little green chair on which the heavyweight Irishman had earlier plonked himself down. All ready for a gentle chat. But what had set Harriet’s anxieties swarming had been the not-so-gentle chat she had had earlier with Mrs Pickstock when she had brought up her customary cup of camomile tea with two Rich Tea biscuits.

  ‘John,’ she said to him at once, ‘why was it me?’

  John, looking cautiously at the sausages and oven-cooked French fries he had made for himself, spoke with deceptive calmness.

  ‘Why was what you?’

  ‘Why did someone attempt to kill me? John, you must have asked yourself that, too. Haven’t you? Haven’t you? So what answer have you got? Damn it, I’ve a right to know.’

  ‘Darling, of course you have, and of course I’ve thought about it,’ he replied, adding with a trace of bitterness, ‘among other things.’

  ‘Oh God, darling, I’m doing it again, forgetting about you, thinking about myself.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘But, you know, I can’t help it. I can’t do anything but think, think, think about the fact that someone tried to poison me. And I never find any answers to the questions that throb away in my head. John, can I tell you something that Mrs Pickstock said to me this afternoon?’

  ‘Of course you can. What on earth can she have said that’s put you into this state?’

  ‘Oh, well, it was my fault really.’

  ‘You haven’t contrived to quarrel with the old dear, have you? I know she can be a bit of a busybody, but she means well. She really does. And, frankly, she’s a godsend.’

  ‘No, no. No quarrel. No quarrel at all.’

  She took a sip of the cup of invalid’s Bovril John had brought up on his tray.

 
‘It was just that I allowed her to know it was poisoning I was suffering from,’ she said. ‘Oh, it was wrong of me, I know that. Pat still wanted it kept secret, certainly before we knew about this second poisoning. But the old bag — no, sorry, sorry. But your fellow Christie addict was going on and on about what could possibly have made me so ill, and how it must be because I’d been eating all the wrong things. And in the end I just burst out with it: “No, it isn’t lack of organic foods, it’s aconitine. Aconitine poisoning. I was poisoned, poisoned on purpose.” And then — and this is what got to me — she told me that her beloved Agatha in her autobiography says that, when she was working in a hospital back in World War One, the chief dispenser there once showed her a piece of deadly curare he always carried round in his pocket because, she said, it gave him a feeling of power. And ever since I’ve been sort of obsessed with the idea. John, do you think that whoever tried to poison me, and succeeded in poisoning that young man at the Virgin and Vicar pub, did it just to prove to themselves they had the power of life and death?’

  John, crouched there on his little chair, let his sausages grow colder.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘fantastic though it seems, I suppose that is possibly what has happened. I should have thought of it myself. I remember that passage in An Autobiography. Agatha Christie was deeply impressed by the incident. She even, much later, used the idea in one of her better books. And, you know, say what you like about her puzzles, she was a shrewd judge of human nature, and quite right to have her suspicions of that creepy hospital dispenser.’

  ‘So you think that’s what our man — perhaps I shouldn’t say man, but an obsession with power is surely more of a masculine trait — that what he was motivated by was a lust for power, the power of life or death?’

  ‘No, I won’t be led into making assertions of that sort. We don’t know anything like enough. But what you might call pure malignancy does undoubtedly exist. Read Shakespeare. Or, rather, now that I think where that diagnosis comes from, read Coleridge on Othello. He spoke of Iago’s motiveless malignancy.’

  Harriet stared at him.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘would you like a sip of my wine? Might do you good.’

  ‘God, no. No, I feel I’ll never be well enough to drink alcohol again.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Mrs Pickstock, bright in the morning. ‘Friday the thirteenth. I sometimes wonder how I get to the end of the day when it’s a Friday the thirteenth.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mrs Pickstock,’ Harriet answered, managing to inject a touch of robustness into her words. ‘If you think about it, nothing happens on that day more awful than on any other. You shouldn’t let yourself be affected by superstitions like that.’

  ‘But it’s true. It is true. It was on a Friday the thirteenth, seven years ago to the day, that my poor hubby died. He was there with me in the morning at breakfast, and then, just as he was taking down the shopping bag from its hook to go to Sainsbury’s for me, he dropped down dead. They said it was what’s called Sudden Death Syndrome. Friday the thirteenth syndrome, I call it.’

  Harriet felt a black cloud descend, obliteratingly.

  She could say nothing more. The energy with which she had countered Mrs Pickstock’s seemingly enjoyable pessimism had vanished. Gone as if it had never been there since the moment she had lifted that cherry-red glass of Campari soda and taken her one long, dreadful swallow.

  She fell back against her pillows.

  I’m as bad as I was in St Oswald’s, she found herself thinking. Just as bad. I thought I’d been saved from the poison. But I haven’t been. I’m going to die. In the end I’m going to die of it. I’ll never do anything to find that man of — what? — motiveless malignancy. Never. I’m finished. Finished.

  Through the bedroom’s wide window she saw a sky of deep, unbroken blue. She shut her eyes against it.

  Summer’s not for me. This Indian summer’s not for me. I’m going to die. I’ve been poisoned to death. Poisoned.

  Mrs Pickstock was still chattering on, but she hardly heard a word. Dame Agatha ... Dame Agatha ... Dame Agatha.

  Sleep then, mercifully, came clouding over her.

  *

  She lay asleep, if fitfully, till well on in the afternoon. When at last she realized she was fully awake she found Mrs Pickstock placidly standing beside her bed, a tray between her hands.

  ‘Well, dear,’ she was saying, ‘I didn’t like to wake you with your bit of lunch. You seemed to be so determined to stay asleep. But when I peeked in just now and saw you were stirring, I thought I’d bring you up something to have straight away. It’s the really special soup I get from Organics ‘R Go, Four-bean and Ginger. They say there’s nothing like it for bucking you up.’

  A waft of steam came to Harriet’s nostrils. And at once she felt a rising wave of nausea.

  But she heaved herself forward on her pillows while she tried to think what she could say. Sudden Death Syndrome, Sudden Death Syndrome, she could not help repeating to herself. How can I reject what I’ve been brought by the woman whose husband fell dead at her feet?

  ‘Oh, Mrs Pickstock, thank you. That’s so thoughtful of you. But, if you don’t mind, I won’t start on it just now. To tell you the truth, I’m hardly properly awake yet. But I’ll have it before it gets cold, I promise.’ It seemed to be enough.

  ‘Just as you like, dear. It keeps lovely and hot for quite a while. I think it must be the ginger.’

  ‘Yes, I expect it is.’

  ‘Oh, that’s Hubby’s car. I’ll leave you then. We don’t want to come between husband and wife, do we?’

  ‘I suppose not. So, goodbye. And thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  A few minutes later, while the soup was till faintly steaming, John came in.

  ‘Has she gone?’ Harriet asked in a whisper.

  ‘Oh, yes. She was ready to go the moment I came in at the door. Hat on her head, plastic bag from that organics place in hand.’

  ‘Thank goodness. I know she means well, but I do find her hard to take. Listen, could you put that bowl of soup away somewhere? I can’t stand the smell of it.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll just pop it outside the door.’

  ‘No, put it down the loo, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘All right, if you want that.’

  It was scarcely a minute before he returned. But during that time all she had felt when Mrs Pickstock had come out with what had happened to her husband one Friday the thirteenth came pouring back.

  ‘John,’ she said at once. ‘John, am I going to die? Did they truly get rid of all the poison at St Oswald’s? I — I’m sure they didn’t. I feel so awful at times, I really do.’

  John gave her a steady look.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, you are going to die. But not just yet. Probably in forty years’ time, or even fifty.’

  ‘Oh, John, don’t be such a pig. But were you telling me the truth? I’m really not likely to die now from the effects of aconitine? They were right not to do that thing, put me on a heart-lung machine, back at St Oswald’s? I won’t — I won’t have anything like Sudden Death Syndrome?’

  ‘No more than I will, I hope. But, come on, you’re just letting the black thoughts get to you. Understandable in your present state of weakness. Come to that, it’s understandable for me, every now and again when I’m feeling low for some reason. How many times have I said to you that I think I’m suffering from cancer of the great toe?’

  ‘Well, actually,’ she said, unable to stop herself giving him a smile, ‘I don’t think you ever have, till now. Cancer of the great toe, indeed.’

  ‘Well, if I haven’t come out with it to you, it’s only because I was being very brave about it.’

  ‘All right, hero. And, John, when it’s suppertime, I think I could manage some wine, half a glass.’

  *

  ‘Did you hear about that poor girl in City Hall Square?’ Mrs Pickstock breezily asked as she came in next mor
ning after the nurse’s temperature and blood-pressure visit.

  Harriet looked at her.

  ‘No, I don’t think I have. Was it something on the radio? I haven’t felt up to switching it on yet. There’s only so much bad news I can take. Or good, come to that. So what is it?’

  ‘It’s in the Chronicle as well, though I did hear it on Radio Birchester first.’

  Harriet felt a spasm of annoyance at this failure to produce the direct answer. She suppressed it and waited in silence.

  ‘Why, it’s that poor girl. Murdered, they said. Murdered. There she was — if the paper hasn’t made it all up — lying asleep in the sunshine there in the square, and murdered. On Friday the thirteenth. Didn’t I tell you something awful always happens if it’s a Friday on the thirteenth?’

  You did, Harriet thought sourly. You told me your husband died from Sudden Death Syndrome then, and I thought I’d so hurt you by saying Friday the thirteenth was just a silly superstition that I went into a black decline. And here you are talking about the thirteenth just as lip-lickingly as if the poor man’s been dead not for seven years but twenty-seven.

  ‘But tell me what it was they said in the Chronicle? I don’t think they make things up there. Or not very often. Not like the Evening Star. So what happened?’

  ‘Well, as I said, there was this poor girl, Thomasina her name was. Only the paper said she was always known as Tommy. Tommy O’Brien. And in the sun — you know how hot it was yesterday, just like the height of summer — she fell asleep outside the City Hall, in the square. Sunbathing. You can catch some nasty skin trouble doing that, you know. And she had open beside her one of those plastic cartons of drink, the sort teenagers are always buying.’

  A sudden dread struck at Harriet. A carton of drink ... open beside her ... and ... ’

  ‘And what happened, Mrs Pickstock? What happened?’

  ‘Well, this is what they said. Someone must have put something, something poisonous, into that carton. And when she woke up poor little Tommy took another drink from it, and before anyone could do anything she was dead. Poisoned. They said on the radio there was, well, sick all over the steps at the side of the square.’