A Detective at Death's Door

by H. R. F. Keating

  *

  It came as no surprise to Harriet when, just an hour later, Mrs Pickstock came plodding up the stairs again and announced that Detective Superintendent Murphy wanted to see her.

  ‘Tell him to come up, tell him to come up,’ she said.

  ‘But — But are you sure you’re ready to let a gentleman come to see you? Would you like me to nip back home and fetch another of my bed jackets? I’ve got such a sweet one you can have, and the one you’ve got on is beginning to look a little the worse for wear.’

  ‘No. No, Mrs Pickstock, it’s a kind offer. But I really do want to see Mr Murphy as soon as possible.’

  ‘Well, if you think so. He’ll be here about little Tommy, I expect. After the way she’s been poisoned, just like you were.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine you’re right.’

  Pleased with her guesswork, Mrs Pickstock waddled out.

  And, with a rush of heavy steps on the stairs, Pat Murphy came in.

  ‘I hear you’ve been told,’ he said. ‘Victim Number Three. This changes everything.’

  ‘Right, Pat. Sit down, sit down. True enough, there can’t be any doubt now. Some sort of murderous maniac is roaming the city. Isn’t that so? Me at the Majestic Club, that young man over in Moorfields, and now this girl outside the City Hall. Aconitine in all three cases. Yes?’

  ‘You’re right. It’s been in my mind from the moment I heard how young Robbie Norman had died. That was why I tried every way I could to find some link between the two of you, to prove somehow it wasn’t a random act. But, no, there can’t be any doubt now. We’ve got what the papers call a serial killer. It’s the class of thing I’ve prayed would never happen while I was still a detective.’

  Harriet thought for some moments. Then she spoke.

  ‘Pat. Pat, it’s just possible, I think, that this is not a serial killer.’

  ‘Not? But what do you mean?’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘Look, this may be nonsense. I may still not be thinking straight. But ... well, I’ve sometimes in the past resolved a puzzling case by ... all right, by a sort of leap of the imagination.’

  ‘Sure, you have. Doesn’t everyone in Birchester CID know it?’

  ‘Okay, then, I’ll tell you what I’ve just thought. Or, no, it’s sort of what the lady who let you in, our neighbour, put into my head — Mrs Pickstock, a lady who seems to read nothing but Agatha Christies.’

  Pat Murphy, almost obliterating the little green chair he had sat himself on, let a frown of incomprehension etch his broad forehead.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Pat, I don’t know whether this is sense or total nonsense. I’m not really fit to judge. But I must tell you. I must.’

  ‘Then spit it out, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘I will. It’s this. What are the names of this poisoner’s three victims? One: Martens. Two: Norman. Three: O’Brien. Well, perhaps you don’t know but Mrs Pickstock’s favourite author once wrote a book called The ABC Murders, and — ’

  ‘Ah, I know it, so I do. I gave it a read years ago. Clever as can be, but altogether nonsense.’

  ‘But is it, Pat? John was saying to me, just yesterday I think it was, that Agatha Christie was very shrewd. So she could be right. In the book somebody murdered a Mrs A, a Miss B and then a Mr C, just so as to conceal that the one they really needed to eliminate was Mr C. And our poisoner could have read that book, just as the two of us did once, and dreamt up the notion of doing the same thing. Only this time in reverse order. So he’s murdered O, Tommy O’Brien, and N, Robbie Norman, just so that no one will think the one he wanted to eliminate was M, Detective Superintendent Martens, who perhaps got him twenty years a long time ago.’

  Chapter Six

  Pat Murphy laughed. A gusty roar of rich laughter.

  ‘Harriet, Harriet,’ he spluttered, ‘you’ve done it again. First it was your own John who was after murdering you. Then it was something about something black and white, or white and black. I could never make out what that was all about. And now ... now you’ve invented some diabolical old Birchester villain who’s gone about poisoning people left and right just so he can give Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens her comeuppance and get away with it. You ought to be a book writer, so you ought, though even Agatha Christie’d be hard put to have her murderer know that some girl sunbathing in City Hall Square, with a carton of drink convenient, happened to have a surname beginning with O.’

  ‘Oh. God, Pat, you’re right. How could anybody pick out a girl called O’Brien among all those half-naked bodies sprawled about the square? You’re right. It was nonsense. Total nonsense. I suppose I still haven’t properly realized what a state my mind’s in. But I’ll get better. I must.’

  ‘So you will, so you will. A week in bed here or maybe two, and you’ll be as sharp as ever.’

  ‘Jesus, I hope so. But tell me more about yesterday’s business. The girl, Thomasina O’Brien, was actually asleep there in the square, right?’

  ‘Right it is. You know how the youngsters flock there any time we get a bit of sun. Strip down as far as they dare, and lie soaking it up. Well, Thomasina was one of them. In her lunch hour. She worked at the City Hall, a telephonist. And beside her she had this big carton of blackcurrant drink. She’d drunk the half of it and left the rest on a step just beside her head. So then himself, or herself it could always be, comes along with that aconitine brew in some sort of container, and just tips it in. Easy does it. No one’s to notice. No need even to touch the carton. So there’s not even their prints on it. Our poisoner knows what he’s about all right.’

  ‘And no one saw them? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘It is. If all the questioning we’ve done of the bystanders — and of the by-lyers, if you like — means anything, nobody saw a blind thing. Most of them just as much asleep as poor Thomasina was. Still, we may find someone yet. There were plenty who hurried away when they saw or heard the girl spewing and vomiting the way she did.’

  ‘Only not so effectively as John made me do, and not with the immediate action afterwards that Mr Hume Jones at St Oswald’s was able to take.’

  For a flashback moment she felt once more John’s fingers pushing ruthlessly deep into her throat, as if they were there in reality once more.

  ‘That’s about the size of it, yes,’ Pat said.

  ‘So where do we, do you, go from here?’

  ‘I wish to God I knew. We go through all the usual procedures, of course. Trace every potential witness, however long it takes. But that’s a hell of a task. There’s still people from the Majestic Club we haven’t properly dealt with, and then there’s all the youngsters from the Virgin and Vicar, most of them not at all willing to talk to police. And what am I to do, for heaven’s sake, about this man or woman who’s going about with a little bottle or chemist’s phial ready to put more of the stuff into any glass or open carton or cup they fancy? If I had a hundred more officers to task, what’d be the use of having them patrol here and there just keeping their eyes open? They’d do no good at all, unless by a chance in a million they happened to see someone tilt something into somebody’s drink.’

  And you’ve no other line?’

  ‘Well, I’ve thought of trying to trace any monkshood growing in any gardens in the city. They tell me it’s not so common, so we might get somewhere in that way. If I had enough officers to conduct a proper search. And the people at the university, the what d’you call ‘ems, botanists — no, plant physiologists they are nowadays — they said monkshood will have finished flowering at this time of year. So how is anybody who’s not an expert even to spot the damn things? Tell me that.’

  ‘I wish I could, Pat. I wish I could. And I wish I was fit, and able to go out asking around myself, Victim Number One or not. But it’s all I can do to get myself out of bed and inch my way to the bathroom when I need to, like some sort of blind beggar.’

  ‘Ah, you stay where you are. I see you’ve got th
e phone there beside you, so I promise whenever I get a minute to myself I’ll call you. Any ideas you have, I’d be happy to hear them. But I must be getting back to the incident room now. Something may have turned up in some report or other. Or maybe the hungry Birchester press corps will be there clamouring. And you watch out for them, too. We’ve named you now, of course. But don’t let a single one of those ravening eejits put so much as a foot inside your door. And, remember this, just as soon as you’re able for it, there’s nothing I’d like better than to have you, victim or no victim, on sick leave or not, sitting in the incident room beside me.’

  Harriet lay there, thinking about what he had said, and occasionally breaking into surfacy giggles when she thought of herself as the corpse in the MNO murders. Good old Pat, too busy or too embarrassed to bring the invalid any flowers, like the ones the Chief Constable sent. But in the end giving me something far better than flowers that die. Giving me courage.

  *

  So next day, when the visiting nurse had taken her readings, asked her questions and pronounced her ‘doing fine’, she made up her mind. When John came to sit with her as he ate his Sunday lunch, the same sausages and oven chips that he had cooked for himself every evening in the week, she launched into her plan even before he had taken his first mouthful.

  ‘John, listen. On Monday I want to go over to Headquarters and see the Force MO. I want him to pass me fit at least for light duties. He’ll do it, if I make it plain to him it’s what I actually want. I’ve known him for years now, and quarrelled with him more than once. He’s a funny fellow, the world’s greatest expert, he boasted to me, on mulligatawny soup. But he’s also one of those medics who are in Chief Constables’ pockets. When some officer has done something that needs to be quietly swept out of sight, he’ll pass them as unfit, quick as you like once he’s had the tip. That’s what we clashed over in the past. But when he knows that I want quite the opposite of “Unfit for duty”, he’ll play ball. I know he will.’

  ‘All right, I dare say he might. But what about my conditions for snatching you out of the clutches of Mr No-hyphen? Number one was, I’ll thank you to remember, that you stay in bed till I say you can get up.’

  ‘But, John ... Look, you know I’m fit enough now. You spoke with the nurse after she’d seen me this morning, didn’t you? She said to me I was doing well. Don’t tell me she said something different to you.’

  ‘No, she didn’t. And you are doing well, so far. But she didn’t say you were fit to be on your feet, and I’d really be happier if you were to stay put, more or less anyhow, till the end of this week. You can go and see your Medical Officer, not tomorrow but on Monday week.’

  ‘John. Don’t you realize there’s a lunatic prowling the streets of Birchester? Perhaps at this very moment they’re putting poison in someone’s drink. I may not be able to do much towards stopping them, but I’ll be better than nothing. Poor Pat Murphy’s absolutely overwhelmed. The least I can do is to get up and go over to the incident room at Waterloo Gardens and take some of the strain. Isn’t that so? Isn’t it?’

  John sat looking at her.

  All right,’ he said at last. ‘All right, if you’ll spend the rest of today getting as much rest as you can, without thinking about your poisoner at all, I’ll drive you over tomorrow to your MO, if he’ll agree to see you.’

  *

  Harriet forced herself to move a little less like a blind beggar when she first got up at eight next morning. Even before John brought her up her breakfast — two thin slices of toast, no more — she found she was watching the clock in the radio flicking its way slowly onwards towards ten o’clock, the earliest she calculated that she could expect to find Dr Dalrymple in his surgery at Headquarters.

  At last 10.00 showed on the green strip.

  And she got the appointment she had half expected not to.

  ‘Yes, yes, a terrible thing to have happened to you, Mrs Martens,’ the mulligatawny soup expert concluded. ‘A terrible thing. You were lucky to find yourself in the hands of Emlyn Hume Jones. I doubt if anyone else could have brought you through.’

  ‘Well, yes, I was lucky. Very. And it’s thanks to him, I suspect, that I feel I’m back to normal now, or pretty well back.’

  A sudden shivering fit caused her almost to drop the handset.

  ‘Are you indeed? I’d have hardly expected it after a poisoning of that seriousness. It’s not much more than three weeks since it happened, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, I was lucky in another way,’ she replied. ‘My husband spotted what the matter was and took steps at once to make me vomit. I suppose that accounts for my good recovery.’

  But the feel, once again, of John’s fingers deep in her throat told her, if nothing else did, that she was steadily lying.

  ‘So,’ she brought herself to say, ‘can I come and see you, perhaps this morning? Perhaps you could certify me as at least fit for light duties?’

  ‘Delighted, delighted, Mrs Martens. Shall we say twelve noon? Yes, I should be free about twelve.’

  *

  John drove her.

  Flopping into the seat next to him, she thought how little capable she would have been of getting all the way across the city in any other manner. Even putting on clothes for the outside world had been more of a struggle than she had foreseen when, the night before, she had laid out on the green tub-chair her good linen jacket and the skirt that went so well with it. As well as placing ready on top underclothes not worn at all since the morning she had changed at the Club into her two-piece.

  But before long she realized that the drive was not going to provide her with the period of rest she had hoped for, time to prepare herself for facing Dr Dalrymple. Tucked away at St Oswald’s and in the quiet of her bedroom at home since, she had forgotten, it seemed, how batteringly noisy traffic was. But there was worse. She felt as if, every two or three minutes, some oncoming vehicle was about to smash straight into them.

  She turned to look at John. He was sitting there at the wheel, perfectly calm.

  So why am I, beside him, flinching and flinching?

  And it’s not just the traffic. Everything I set eyes on seems to be, yes, menacing. The buildings loom down at me. The hoardings scream out. Too insistent, too bright, too yammering.

  There. There. Huge red letters. Total Stock Liquidation.

  Liquidation. The Stalinist word. And here in the city, there’s the poisoner. Perhaps at this very moment making their way along the pavement just beside us. Set on liquidating their next victim.

  What’s that? What’s that? I saw something. Something black and white. Out of the corner of my eye. And it meant ... it meant something. Something I ought to know about. But I don’t. And it’s gone. Gone, whatever it was.

  And the appalling row is going on and on. The hooting, the roar and rattle of engines. Machinery. And, yes, now blaring music.

  Where’s that coming from, for heaven’s sake?

  Yes. Yes, that shop just there. Sounds A Bell. What a ridiculously silly name. A music place, I suppose.

  ‘John, that shop where the music’s coming from — pouring from. Is it new?’

  He turned for a moment to look and gave a grunt of a laugh.

  ‘Good heavens, no. Been there for years now. Well, four or five at least. It’s one of the Bell chain, owned by none other than Sir Billy Bell, last year’s Lord Mayor of Birchester. You must know of him.’

  ‘I suppose I do, though I can’t remember a thing about him now.’

  ‘No? Not about the big success story? Started with one shop, selling records, as I suppose they were then. He called it Sounds A Bell after himself, and it caught on. He opened shop after shop, here and elsewhere. In a very short time he’d got to be one of the city’s richest men, and then he bulldozed his way on to the City Council and the Lord Mayor’s chair. Now he owns one of the football clubs, don’t remember which of them, and dozens of other money-making businesses. Oh, yes, including the Evening Star, bought fro
m the Chronicle Group last year. You must remember.’

  ‘But I don’t. Not at all. And, you know, that’s frightening. Forgetting facts I must have known perfectly well. Suddenly not to have them there in my head. It’s awful.’

  ‘They’ll come back. Or that’s what medical opinion in general seems to believe. In due course it’ll all come back. All the trivia too. Won’t you be pleased.’

  They had begun to get to the outskirts of the city as John had talked, and Harriet found that, with the lessening traffic and her attention fixed on what he had been saying, she was feeling less fraught.

  God, I hope I can keep myself this steady when Dalrymple takes out his stethoscope.

  But now, suddenly, with John able to go a little more quickly, a fear that had occasionally touched her when being driven fast, rather than driving herself, filled and flooded her mind. The consciousness of how frail in reality a car was. The notion that one tiny miscalculation, one small internal fracture, would send them in an instant plunging to death.

  An ambulance came hurtling along from the other direction, siren howling.

  It was all she could do not to return scream for scream. Death at high speed filling her mind.

  She made herself turn her head and pick out where the needle on the speedometer was pointing. Forty. Only forty miles an hour. And John totally in charge.

  I must not let things like this happen to me. I must not. It’s because I’m still far from normal. I’m weak. Physically, a certain amount. And mentally a hell of an amount. Which I must not let Dr Dalrymple see. At any cost.

  *

  ‘No,’ said Dr Dalrymple, wobbling cheeks, red mulligatawny-soused wattle ears, stethoscope dangling on lurching paunch. ‘No, my dear, you’re nothing like fit enough, not even for light duties. You ought to be in bed, lying flat on your back. You should hear the beat of your heart. It’s in a thoroughly bad state. I wonder you even managed to get all the way here.’

  ‘My husband drove me,’ Harriet replied stiffly.