A Detective at Death's Door

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Of course. And so you’re dear John’s wife? I wonder we’ve never met. Didn’t he tell me you were some sort of policewoman?’

  Harriet forced a smile.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she said. ‘A detective superintendent actually. But I wanted to have a word with you in a strictly off-duty way.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s nice. I’m not sure I’d want to have official dealings with the police. Or not unless I had occasion to ring them up because of some trouble in the neighbourhood. I’m sorry to say there are round here some perfectly appalling ... well, criminals, I call them.’

  Like your dear son, John’s university friend, Harriet mentally commented.

  Mrs Upchurch manoeuvred her way past Harriet to the door, which she bolted top and bottom. She then led the way back down the narrow hall and into what she firmly called ‘the drawing-room’.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked. ‘It wouldn’t take long to make. Of course, I never have the kind they call — what is it? — instant.’

  Hastily Harriet lied her way out of coffee of any sort.

  ‘I really wanted to talk to you about St Aldred’s School,’ she announced, blandly omitting to say why.

  ‘That place. They ruined my Godfey, you know. I dare say your husband told you that he and Godfrey were great pals at the University.’

  No doubt about the capital U there.

  ‘Yes, John recalls him very well.’

  ‘I’m glad he does. But, as I was saying, St Aldred’s absolutely ruined Godfrey. When he first went there he was the sweetest little boy you could imagine. But he fell into bad company at that place. I mean, you would never have thought that Godfrey would have actually stolen, not when he went there. But in no time at all they were declaring he had done so. Stolen. And they said that he bullied the smaller boys too, hurt them. Of course, I didn’t believe it. But he had made undesirable friends — your John was at the High School, I believe — and they led him astray.’

  ‘Yes. Very sad.’

  ‘Well, of course, eventually I wanted to take him away. But where else could he go? There were no other decent schools nearby, and I couldn’t have little Godfrey going all through the city on buses. Buses.’

  ‘I understand. So Godfrey spent the whole of his schooldays at St Aldred’s?’

  ‘And I have to say his behaviour went from bad to worse. He was punished, of course. They were always very strict at St Aldred’s. But it seemed to have no effect. There wasn’t any understanding, simply none. So, I’m sorry to say, he became more and more difficult, even flatly contradicting his own mother. Of course, if my husband had been here, it would have been very different.’

  Harriet thought she wouldn’t ask about the absent Mr Upchurch.

  ‘I can imagine it would,’ she said quickly. ‘It must have been a very difficult time for you. Didn’t Godfrey find any of the masters at St Aldred’s sympathetic?’

  Her bodily shift into the direction she wanted the conversation to go seemed to pay off.

  ‘Oh, the masters there,’ Mrs Upchurch exclaimed. ‘Do you know, not one of them showed any friendliness at all for my poor boy? In the end, and you’ll hardly believe this, he had to confide in the school gardener.’

  Damn. The gardener. It’s the masters I want to know about.

  ‘Yes, that does seem awful,’ she said.

  Keep on with the right remarks.

  ‘Jamieson, that’s the man’s name, was very kind to Godfrey, I will say. He knew at once what sort of a boy he was, and did his best to get him out of any scrapes he got into. And, you know, sometimes he gave him some very good advice.’

  ‘That must have been nice.’

  Harriet reviewed her stock of soothing placebos. It seemed to be running dangerously low.

  ‘Oh, yes, Jamieson, although of course he was no more than a gardener, is a very good man. That’s why, when the school closed — it had ceased to pay its way, I understand — I took him into my employment. The garden here is far too large for me to manage. It needs a man.’

  But Harriet had scented a possible alternative path. Jamieson, that giver of good advice, might well know a lot about the staff at St Aldred’s in those days.

  ‘You know,’ she said shamelessly, ‘I’d like to meet Jamieson. It’s not often you come across someone like that. Is he here today?’

  ‘I’m afraid he isn’t. I had to let him go. I suppose he hasn’t been with me for two or three years. Now, at a very inflated salary I dare say, he’s at that Majestic Insurance Club, exactly where St Aldred’s used to be.’

  *

  Harriet had planned, extricated at last from Mrs Upchurch’s web of carping and complaints, to ask her taxi driver, still hopefully waiting, to take her straight to the Majestic Club and the long-ago St Aldred’s School gardener. But the moment she thought that she would be going to the very place where ... where someone had deliberately poured the poison from monkshood into her drink, all her get-up-and-go abruptly faded away.

  Oh God, she found she was thinking, why can’t I just go home and get into bed?

  So John, when he came back, rather later than usual, found her fast asleep in her day clothes, and put her, a somnolent bundle, under the duvet. Then, at what she later discovered was half-past nine, the ringing of the phone woke her.

  John called up the stairs that Pat Murphy wanted a word, if she was fit to hear him.

  ‘Yeah,’ she muttered. Then, more loudly, ‘Okay. Yes, okay.’

  Get my head clear. I’m Pat’s colleague, if a colleague on sick leave. And I’m going to make myself well enough to listen to what he’s got to say. It’ll be to do with the Poisoner. And I want to know. I want to know.

  She reached for the handset.

  ‘Pat? Yes?’

  ‘I’m after disturbing you when you’d gone early to bed.’

  ‘No. Well, yes, as a matter of fact. But it doesn’t matter. What is it?’

  ‘It’s just this. Something I thought you’d like to hear.’

  ‘Won’t know till I do, will I?’

  ‘Sure, you’d never be able to guess. Commander Cleverdick has summoned assistance, psychological assistance. Who’s going to arrive in Birchester tomorrow afternoon, or earlier, but one Dr Scholl, known to some as Dr Smellyfeet?’

  Harriet blinked in astonishment.

  Am I dreaming? No, it can’t be that.

  ‘Pat,’ she managed to say, ‘how did this happen?’

  ‘None of my doing, I promise you. No, the notion came into Old Busybody’s head, and in two twos he’d called in your man. Simple as that. So would I be right if I was to say you’d like to see him when he gets a few minutes?’

  ‘You would. Tell him any time. Even if I’m still zonked out in bed, as I may well be the way I’m feeling at the moment.’

  *

  In the morning she found she seemed to possess more energy, though she decided her meeting with Mrs Upchurch’s Jamieson could well be postponed. After all, she thought, Peter Scholl may even arrive by eleven and get away quite soon from Commander Rance’s initial briefing, and it would be idiotic if I wasn’t here when he came. He’ll almost certainly have things to say to me more useful than mere talk about past times. Surely if a profiler’s any good — and I have to admit he was very useful to me before — he’s bound to have insights into the sort of man the Poisoner is likely to be. Let alone what different kind of a man might have been driven to put a vomiting agent into Sir Billy’s champagne and afterwards write that mad rant of a letter.

  What I really want him to do in fact is to confirm, or not, my idea of there being two separate people now involved in the inquiry.

  However, in the end, she had to wait, till quite late in the evening before there was a ring at the bell and Dr Smellyfeet, as she still occasionally thought of him in a genially friendly way, followed John into the sitting-room, a large bunch of white roses in his hand.

  Roses, she instantly saw, that were more artificial-looking than art
ificial ones themselves. But, poor chap, he must have had to buy them wherever he could, with shops now liable to shut early as people scuttled off to the safety of home in a Birchester under the ever-looming threat of sudden death.

  Peter Scholl was almost exactly as she remembered him. As ever, he wore student-type clothes, though the current T-shirt proclaimed, somewhat inexplicably, DON’T KILL COWS. His face, boyishly pink as before, was a little more lined, and the curls on his head, touched now with grey, were revealing a slightly larger bald patch.

  ‘Peter,’ she greeted him. ‘And flowers, such a huge bunch. John, see if you can find a vase for them, before they all wilt away.’

  How short, how terribly short, the life of flowers is, she instantly thought, struck into anxiety-ridden silence.

  But John had seen her sudden access of dismay, and took charge.

  ‘I’ll have a peer into that cupboard under the sink,’ he said. ‘See what I can find. A good drink of water will revive this lot, if they need reviving at all. And you two can have your chat without interference.’

  ‘Well, Harriet,’ Peter Scholl said, dropping into the chair she had gestured to, ‘I gather you’re persona non grata in the Murder Room here.’

  ‘So I am. But perhaps it’s a good thing. It means I can do something, strictly unofficially, towards finding this man who’s terrorizing the whole city.’

  ‘Yes, I gathered from your Detective Superintendent Murphy that you’re not exactly taking things easily, as perhaps you should be. Rest, Harriet, rest is what you want after something as traumatic as what happened to you.’

  ‘It’s what everybody tells me. The Force MO said three months’ bloody rest. But, Christ, Peter I can’t just sit here or, damn it, lie there upstairs, and do nothing. I was the Poisoner’s first victim, and I’m bloody well going to fight him back.’

  ‘Him? You sound very sure about the gender. Commander Rance, with whom incidentally I’ve quarrelled, is equally adamant that he and his team, with perhaps some assistance from your friend Pat Murphy, are looking everywhere for a woman.’

  ‘Is that what you quarrelled with him over?’ she asked, with a spark of hope.

  ‘Well, yes. Yes, it was. The truth is that Rance had me brought up here, urgently. But when I arrived he simply instructed me that the Poisoner was a mad old woman who was attempting to acquire a million pounds by threatening to continue her activities. All he wanted from me was a run-down of her psychology. When eventually I said that, even with my limited knowledge of the circumstances, I didn’t think his scenario was necessarily very likely, he straight away dispensed, as they say, with my services. I’m actually on my way back now. I ought to catch the last suitable London train quite shortly.’

  ‘Right then, don’t let’s waste time. But at least let me get you something to drink first.’

  ‘No, no. Pat Murphy saw to that, twice over, in his welcoming way. So, do I understand you’re absolutely convinced the Poisoner is a man? I must say I had little doubt of it myself after I was shown that letter in the Evening Post.’

  ‘Star, actually. The Evening Star. But I have to tell you, though, like you, I’m sure that letter was written by a man, I don’t think it came from the Poisoner.’

  ‘But — ’

  ‘No, Peter. What do you think of this? The Poisoner began what you might call his spree when he suddenly saw me as the ideal target on which to exercise the feeling of the power of life and death he’d been nursing, for years, carrying round with him a fatal dose of aconitine.’

  ‘With you so far, and I think it’s probable you’re right.’

  ‘Okay, but here’s where I think things went astray for him. He failed to kill me. And that made him start off to prove he could still use that power of his, which he did on one, two, three innocent people in the city. Then someone else was apparently poisoned in the same way, Sir Billy Bell, former Lord Mayor of Birchester. But the Poisoner had had nothing to do with it. Big shock for him. So he stopped his activities while he sorted it all out. Then, when he had come to terms with having some sort of rival here, he went down to London and back up to Nottingham all on the same day and poisoned two other innocent people.’

  ‘Still with you, at least as regards the Poisoner’s likely behaviour. He’s plainly sort of inadequate, if I may for once put it in unequivocal language. But I don’t altogether see how this second poisoner you’ve postulated comes in.’

  ‘Right. Well, I believe he’s another nutter, as you high-powered psychologists call them, a man who was increasingly impressed by the series of murders he’d been reading about and decided to weigh in himself. Not with aconitine, which he had no idea how to obtain, but with an emetic of some sort. And he chose to give it to Sir Billy, someone he saw as deserving of punishment, a corrupter of holy, innocent Birchester, a man who had a chain of noisy music shops up and down the city, who owned cinemas playing pom films and a newspaper, the Star, that panders to the worst side of people’s nature.’

  ‘Okay,’ Peter Scholl said cautiously. ‘So have you any idea who this second poisoner is, and even why it has to be a man?’

  ‘Oh, that’s simple. He wrote the Mentor letter, and in terms that only a man would use.’

  ‘Agreed. Or as much agreed as a profiler ever is.’

  ‘Right, well, I think from what he put in that letter, mostly the Latin bits he peppered it with — and there are more of those in the original, which I managed to see — that he’s not only a man but that he may have been a schoolmaster once, and a pretty old-fashioned one at that.’

  ‘Yes ... could be, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, Peter, I hoped you would say, “Yes, yes, yes, you’re right of course”.’

  ‘So I might have done, if I’d been an enthusiastic amateur and not a hard-headed academic. But you can’t have forgotten, I don’t work by having sudden, brilliant ideas. I collect evidence, every little scrap I can, and then ... well, you remember, I look for a pattern, a pattern of behaviour.’

  ‘Okay, what’s the pattern of behaviour of the man I’ve called the Schoolmaster?’

  Peter Scholl laughed.

  ‘Absolutely no answer from me,’ he said. ‘No, Harriet, it’s not that I won’t help you. It’s that I can’t. I haven’t any evidence to go on. My one and only bit of advice for you is: look at all the evidence you can lay hands on, and then look for a pattern.’

  ‘But what sort of a pattern can I expect to find when the man I’m looking at has committed only one poisoning, and a half-cocked one at that?’

  ‘Then there won’t be one. Too bad for you, I’m afraid.’

  Harriet looked at him, fury rising in her head.

  He may have seen the signs.

  ‘But now I really must say goodbye to your husband,’ he said hastily, ‘and be on my way, or I’ll miss that train.’

  *

  Harriet may have believed that Friday she had no way of finding a pattern in the Schoolmaster’s actions. But almost at once there was another incident of a violent but not fatal vomiting attack, and it was followed by another letter to the Evening Star claiming responsibility.

  The victim, Harriet learnt in a swift phone call from Pat, was a man called Alastair Ames, a youngish local government officer who had the habit of chasing away the boredom of his working week by spending Friday nights partying at a pub in the Meads, the Three Donkeys, notorious for its loud music. He had suffered his violent vomiting attack there and been sent to hospital, though for no more than one night.

  From Mentor’s new letter, which Harriet seized on as soon as the Saturday issue of the Star was delivered, she learnt that it was the pub’s loud music that had brought down Mentor’s wrath on Alastair Ames. The letter, though short, was every bit as much of a rant as his first one.

  I warned a week ago that unless I was paid a penalty sum of one million pounds I would find it necessary to eliminate more of the inhabitants of the wicked city of Birchester. I have, however, taken one more warning step, in sim
ply causing to one who thoroughly deserves punishment a severe attack of vomiting. But, take note, this will be the last time that any other person I find it necessary to visit with retribution will remain alive. As my sacrificial victim on the altar of probity tonight I chose at random one of the noisy louts who habitually render the quiet of that once pleasant part of our city, the Meads, a hell of pandemonium at the public house which goes by the name of the Three Donkeys. I suppose in this age of panem et circenses

  Harriet noted, with a wry smile, that the Star had now added a translation: [Bread and circuses, Latin].

  She read on.

  few will appreciate the ages-old riddle still extant in that public house signboard. It shows, as it should, a painting of donkeys, but of two donkeys only, it being left to the onlooker to recognize in himself the third donkey. Donkeys of Birchester, now is the time to mend your ways. Now is the time to insist, as affirmation of your repentance, that the punitive fine I have imposed be paid.

  And the signature Mentor.

  Right, Harriet said to herself. It’s clear from all that farrago that Alastair Ames was not one of the purely random victims the Poisoner has been murdering. And, yes, the language is absolutely that of the first letter, even if it uses only one Latin phrase. Translated: H. Martens. So definitely, whatever Commander Rance may be thinking, this letter was not written by the Poisoner but by my Schoolmaster.

  She glanced over it again.

  And something stirred in her mind.

  She strode over to the bureau where she kept her various documents.

  Yes, here’s the cutting from the Star of that first Mentor letter.

  She read rapidly through the turgid, Latin-spattered column.

  Yes. Yes, yes. I’ve remembered correctly. Here it is: lying obscenely naked. How could I have forgotten that description of my bikinied self? And, yes again, that other pub where an aconitine poisoning took place, the Virgin and Vicar, is described as dedicated to displays of flesh, and then poor little Tommy O’Brien is said to be lying in the sun almost unclothed.

  All right, those are Mentor’s words, Schoolmaster’s words, not, if I’m right, the Poisoner’s words. But they have shown me — I think, I think — the pattern in the murders the Poisoner has committed. The sort of unconnected pattern which, just yesterday, Peter Scholl told me to look for. The trivial, on-the-side circumstances linking the three cases are that Tommy and myself, at the time the Poisoner slipped aconitine into our drinks were semi-naked and that young Robbie Norman was happily gawping at the naked strippers at the Virgin and Vicar. Here surely is the pattern that may, one day, point unerringly to the Poisoner.