Some Die Eloquent

by Catherine Aird

  ‘No. We know she wasn’t feeling well on it. That’s why the doctor told her to increase the dose.’

  ‘Compounding the error,’ pronounced the Superintendent neatly.

  ‘Er – quite, sir.’ The depths of the Superintendent’s knowledge and ignorance were equally unfathomable to his subordinates. They couldn’t count on either. ‘Increasing the dose didn’t help, you see.’

  ‘And it should have done, I take it?’

  ‘Oh yes. In theory, anyway. That’s why Dr Paston upped the dose again after that.’

  ‘Or said that he did, Sloan,’ warned the Superintendent.

  ‘Yes, sir. Naturally.’ That went without saying at this stage. There was always an unwritten and unspoken caveat in all police work acknowledging the difference between what was given in an untried statement and what was offered – tested – in evidence.

  ‘Putting the dose up yet again didn’t help either, of course,’ observed Leeyes.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Nothing and nothing is still nothing.’

  ‘It reinforces the theory that what she gave herself wasn’t insulin.’ Sloan, who was no mathematician, shifted his ground slightly. ‘According to the medical men, her symptoms should have gone away on the bigger dose.’

  ‘Not got worse, like they did.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sloan, I don’t like the sound of this.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Someone wanted that woman dead.’

  ‘There could have been an accident,’ pointed out Sloan for form’s sake as much as anything. ‘A duff supply or something like that.’

  Leeyes gave a Machiavellian smile. ‘Putting the whole thing down to bad luck, are you, Sloan?’

  ‘No, sir, but …’

  ‘And the quarter of a million pounds to good luck?’

  ‘Never, sir …’ He meant that. The one thing he didn’t want any child of his to have was unlimited wealth on the grand scale. He didn’t call that good luck.

  ‘And,’ carried on the Superintendent, pursuing his own line of thought, ‘as for having the bad luck to have a fatal accident at the same time as having the good luck to have come by a large sum of money …’

  ‘Unlikely,’ agreed Sloan. The Furies usually went so far and no further. Not that you could count on that either.

  ‘One in the eye for Yin and Yang.’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘The unity of opposites.’

  ‘Er – quite, sir.’ Sloan quickly racked his brains. The Superintendent attended Adult Education Classes in his spare time. Indiscriminately. One way and another they had all left their mark on the Force.

  ‘Equal and opposite, you might say.’

  ‘Indeed, yes, sir.’ Was that, Sloan wondered, a hangover from Mathematics for All and Congruent Triangles or Eastern Philosophies for Enquiring Minds?

  ‘Someone,’ repeated Leeyes forcefully, ‘wanted that woman dead.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He cleared his throat. ‘If we accept that then I rather think that we can go a little further than that.’

  ‘Come on, then … don’t just sit there, man! Tell me.’

  ‘I think someone wanted her dead sooner rather than later.’

  The Superintendent shot Sloan a shrewd look from under his bushy eyebrows. ‘We’ve got a Speedy Gonzales about, have we?’

  ‘It would be possible to argue, sir,’ said Sloan, picking his words with care, ‘that withholding the insulin wasn’t doing the trick quickly enough for someone.’

  ‘Would it, indeed,’ said Leeyes discouragingly.

  ‘There’s the dog, you see, sir.’

  ‘The dead dog,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘The missing dog,’ Sloan corrected him. ‘I reckon that the missing dog was meant to be the last straw.’

  ‘On top of everything else. I see.’ He paused. ‘You think that even without insulin she was taking too long to die?’

  ‘Too long for someone’s comfort. Yes.’

  ‘What was the hurry?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sloan uneasily.

  ‘What had she got to be got out of the way in time for, then,’ he said, putting it another way.

  ‘I don’t know that either, sir.’

  ‘Something that has already happened?’ he mused.

  ‘Or,’ said Sloan warily, ‘something that is going to happen?’ That was always the policeman’s especial nightmare: the spur that kept the officer on the job long after people in other occupations had gone home for the night.

  Leeyes leant back in his chair, considering that. ‘Is there any hurry about the girl Briony Petforth’s marriage to the registrar fellow?’

  ‘Not that I know about.’

  ‘Times have changed,’ said the Superintendent obscurely.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ It was something that would have to be gone into, all the same.

  ‘Your wife all right, by the way?’ enquired Leeyes gruffly.

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir.’ Sloan kept his voice even with an effort. The Superintendent’s patently obvious thought processes didn’t need a Sigmund Freud on hand with explanation. They never had. ‘But,’ Sloan continued vigorously, ‘if there’s anything suspicious about Dr Roger Elspin I can tell you one thing, and that’s that he’s not going to have anything to do with my wife’s confinement, obstetrical registrar or not, even if –’ he searched wildly round in his mind for alternatives – ‘even if I have to deliver her myself.’

  ‘Don’t tempt Providence,’ advised Leeyes soberly. ‘Remember that every policeman in his time …’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’ Sloan let his pent-up feeling evaporate and came back to the case in hand. And the beehive. ‘Miss Wansdyke, sir … where shall we go for honey?’

  ‘What’s that, Sloan?’

  ‘Ridley Road, sir. That’s where I’m going now.’

  CHAPTER X

  The slippery science stripped me down so bare

  That I’m worth nothing, here or anywhere.

  ‘Mr Wansdyke will see you now, Inspector.’ A young secretary turned back from the telephone switchboard at her reception desk. ‘It’s the second door on the left.’

  The first door had Malcolm Darnley’s name on it. It was open and the room empty.

  George Wansdyke’s office was the next one to it. Two men who had been in there talking to the businessman slid unobtrusively towards the door as he and Crosby approached.

  ‘Our Mr Carruthers,’ Wansdyke introduced them briefly, ‘the Head Progress Chaser …’

  Detective-Inspector Sloan acknowledged the introduction with interest. They weren’t short of progress chasers down at the station, though there they went under slightly different names. Like ‘the Press’ and ‘the Chief Constable.’

  ‘… and,’ went on Wansdyke, ‘Bill Benfleet, Advertising and Public Relations executive.’

  The Public Relations man immediately gave Sloan a hearty professional handshake. ‘We’ll be straight back, Mr Wansdyke,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘That press release has got to be done today whatever happens.’ He waved another acknowledgement at Crosby and gave a quick meaningless smile to George Wansdyke. ‘Time and tide and newspapers wait for no man.’

  ‘Welcome, Inspector.’ Wansdyke motioned Sloan and Crosby into chairs that were considerably more comfortable than the ones in either the doctor’s surgery or the hospital. The man seemed more confident in his office than he had done at home. Sloan could understand this. Mrs Pauline Wansdyke’s propensity for not letting any time elapse between thought and speech must be unnerving.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Sorry about the unfortunate aroma.’

  Detective-Constable Crosby raised his head like a pointer and sniffed the air.

  Sloan’s mind went back to his childhood. ‘Carbolic?’ he hazarded.

  ‘We’ve just taken delivery of some phenol,’ Wansdyke explained. ‘It’s one of the commonest components we use. That and the aldehydes.’

&nbs
p; Crosby lowered his nose again, like a bloodhound this time.

  ‘The smell seems to get into everything.’ Wansdyke was apologetic.

  ‘Plastic,’ said Sloan. ‘That’s what you manufacture here, sir, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ said Wansdyke, nodding assent. ‘We go in for the more rarefied varieties these days, but –’ he pointed across the room – ‘time was when we didn’t.’

  The two policemen followed his gaze to an early set of crudely moulded red products in plastic laid out in a display cabinet. Crosby sniffed.

  ‘That’s what we made in my father’s day. They’re practically museum pieces now.’

  Crosby looked doubtful.

  ‘We’ve come a long way since then, technically and aesthetically,’ Wansdyke assured him.

  ‘Plastic’s never exactly beautiful, is it, sir?’ interposed Sloan diplomatically before the constable could speak.

  Wansdyke gave a short laugh. ‘I don’t know about that but I do know the world would have a job to get by without it now.’

  ‘It did before,’ remarked Crosby mulishly.

  ‘I suppose the end product is getting better all the time,’ said Sloan hastily, though surely he had read somewhere, hadn’t he, that what really mattered was a better mousetrap.

  ‘Research,’ nodded Wansdyke. ‘We do a lot of that here, Inspector.’

  ‘Your aunt was doing some, too, sir, wasn’t she?’ Sloan trawled the remark in front of Wansdyke.

  He wasn’t sure what it was that he had expected by way of response. Perhaps the half-deprecating indulgence that grown men usually showed to aunts. George Wansdyke’s reaction to what Sloan had said, however, was totally serious.

  ‘She was indeed. On a most interesting hypothesis, Inspector.’

  Sloan waited. Everyone had a different way of describing their own particular crock of gold that lay where the rainbow ended.

  ‘Recovering nitrogen from the atmosphere was what she was aiming at – no less,’ said the businessman.

  Sloan cleared his throat. ‘A worthy goal, sir.’

  ‘A great step forward for mankind. That’s why my partner – Malcolm Darnley – you may have heard of him, Inspector?’

  Sloan nodded.

  ‘He’s devoted to conservation, you know.’

  Had Inspector Harpe been present he would no doubt have ground his teeth. Sloan contented himself with admitting that he knew Malcolm Darnley by reputation.

  ‘Well, he feels so strongly about these things that he too was quite happy to let Beatrice use our laboratory facilities at the weekend.’

  ‘And had she found it – what she was looking for?’

  ‘The sixty-four thousand dollar question, you might say,’ observed Crosby easily from the sidelines.

  Sloan drew breath to speak. That was lèse-majesté, pure and simple.

  ‘If she had,’ said Wansdyke lightly, ‘she hadn’t told me.’

  ‘Your research …’

  ‘Tied up with development,’ said the businessman. ‘Ours and other people’s. There doesn’t seem to be any danger of people not wanting synthetic resins for the rest of my lifetime, and my son’s either.’

  Running out of crime was one thing they didn’t have to worry about down at the police station. There’d be plenty for his son to take care of, too. If he had a son.

  Crosby started on another objection. ‘But …’

  ‘At least,’ intervened Sloan hastily, ‘plastic lasts. Not like some things these days.’

  ‘Quite,’ said George Wansdyke briskly. He straightened the blotter on his desk. ‘Now what can I do for you two gentlemen?’

  ‘What we’d really like, sir,’ said Sloan frankly, ‘is the key to your aunt’s house.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Something’s – er – turned up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her dog.’

  ‘How?’ asked Wansdyke, startled.

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘Dead and buried, actually.’

  ‘Beatrice must have found it herself, then,’ said Wansdyke, relaxing.

  ‘Must she, sir?’

  ‘We looked for it everywhere after … when … after we found Beatrice.’

  ‘Did you, sir? It was in the garden.’

  ‘We thought it must have just run away.’

  ‘No,’ said Sloan thoughtfully, ‘I don’t think that’s what happened.’ His grandmother had been enough of a sentimentalist to have a copy of Sir Edwin Landseer’s painting of a dog called ‘The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner’ in her front parlour. It had made a great impression on him as a small child.

  ‘We were afraid it was hungry or frightened,’ said Wansdyke. ‘Briony was quite worried in case it was suffering.’

  ‘It didn’t seem to have suffered a lot,’ replied Sloan tangently.

  ‘Good. What with poor Beatrice herself …’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘It never rains but it pours, doesn’t it?’ observed Crosby chattily.

  Wansdyke turned his gaze towards the detective-constable. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So,’ said Sloan, rising to his feet, ‘we thought we would just check that everything was all in order round there, if that’s all right with you, sir.’

  ‘Of course.’ The businessman felt in his pocket for the keys. ‘The electricity and water are off at the main but not the gas …’

  ‘Nurse! Nurse! Nurse Petforth …’

  ‘Coming.’

  ‘Nurse!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Sister wants you.’

  Briony Petforth straightened her cap in a purely reflex action before she looked round. ‘Where is she?’

  One of Sister Fleming’s most notable administrative qualities was that of always seeming able to materialize anywhere on the ward without warning.

  ‘Her office.’

  Briony automatically smoothed her apron as she hurried there.

  ‘A telephone call for you, Nurse,’ said Sister, oozing disapproval. ‘It should not be necessary for me to have to remind you that nurses on duty are not expected to receive telephone calls.’

  ‘No, Sister.’

  ‘Except of an urgent personal nature about family matters.’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘The caller,’ she said, ‘insists on speaking to you.’

  ‘Thank you, Sister.’

  Sister Fleming gave her a curious look and handed over the telephone receiver.

  ‘Briony?’ said a man’s voice. ‘Is that you? This is George Wansdyke.’

  ‘Yes?’ she said cautiously. Sister Fleming was sitting at her desk only inches away.

  ‘Look here, I’ve just had the police round at the office asking for the key of Ridley Road.’ Wansdyke lowered his voice. ‘I’ve given it to them, naturally, but I’m worried about Nick.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said dully, ‘so am I.’

  ‘He’s disappeared from his job on the motorway site. I checked.’

  ‘I know,’ she said miserably.

  ‘And as far as I can make out from the layabouts there he’s left that dreadful squat in Luston, too.’

  ‘I expect he’s sleeping rough again,’ she said without thinking.

  Sister Fleming lifted her head.

  ‘Or else he’s found somewhere else to stay,’ she added hastily.

  ‘And,’ added Wansdyke, ‘they’ve found the dog.’

  ‘Isolde!’ exclaimed Briony. ‘Where?’

  ‘Buried in the garden,’ said George Wansdyke.

  ‘Buried in the garden!’ cried Briony. ‘Dead, you mean?’

  Sister Fleming’s eyebrows almost reached her starched cap.

  ‘Dead, I do mean,’ said Wansdyke grimly.

  ‘But who … how … why?’

  Sister Fleming wasn’t even troubling to conceal her interest now.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Wansdyke, ‘and I don’t want to start guessing.’

  Detective-Insp
ector Sloan had not expected to be back at the hospital again quite so soon. This time he had Detective-Constable Crosby with him.

  ‘Which way, sir?’

  ‘Ah,’ murmured Sloan, ‘you have a point there. Think of the place as a maze with a man in the middle – a man we want to talk to. His name is Elspin – Dr Roger Elspin.’

  Miss Wansdyke’s house in Ridley Road had been unrevealing. Neat and tidy but unyielding of clues to a quarter of a million pounds. And no ransom notes had been immediately visible – for the dog or anyone else. He was momentarily tempted to wonder if Ted Blake’s wife had made a mistake in what she had overheard – until he remembered the absent insulin. Dr Dabbe didn’t make mistakes.

  ‘There’s an enquiry desk over there, sir,’ said Crosby.

  There was also an exceedingly attractive young receptionist sitting at it.

  ‘No,’ said Sloan thoughtfully, ‘I think not.’

  Verbal enquiries for a doctor by members of the constabulary on duty seldom did that doctor’s reputation any good. Besides, Sloan was as curious as anyone else. He wanted to see where the symbolic direction signs got Crosby.

  ‘We could have him called,’ suggested the detective-constable, whose own personal radio was a perpetual anathema to him. ‘Let Big Brother find him for us.’

  ‘We’ll find him ourselves,’ said Sloan decisively, ‘and then we’ll have a nice quiet chat.’

  ‘Quiet, sir? Here?’

  The constable had a point. The one thing the hospital wasn’t was quiet.

  ‘They could do with their “Hospital – Quiet Please” sign inside here,’ remarked Crosby. ‘Not out on the road.’

  ‘It isn’t there,’ remarked Sloan. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Our Dr McCavity been out for a drive, then?’ enquired Crosby.

  ‘Friendly neighbourhood students, Inspector Harpe thought,’ replied Sloan absently. ‘Souvenir hunting.’ The ways of students remained obscure to him. ‘This way, I think.’

  The constable, though, seemed curiously reluctant to move away from the hospital’s entrance concourse. ‘What, sir, if anyone asks us who we are?’

  Sloan, who made a point of wearing clothes as unremarkable as those of the next man, looked Crosby up and down. The constable’s wearing apparel tended to be influenced by the silver screen. Sloan drew a breath. ‘Representatives from a pharmaceutical company, I think.’ Then he caught sight of Crosby’s trendy tie and added drily, ‘One of the lesser firms, I should say myself. Now, come on …’