Some Die Eloquent

by Catherine Aird

  ‘The nuts,’ said the doctor astringently, ‘come when the teeth have gone.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Let me put it like this, Inspector.’ The general practitioner drew breath. ‘I do not for one moment anticipate that exactly one-sixteenth of Beatrice Wansdyke’s estate is going to alter my entire way of life.’

  ‘I see, sir.’ Now who was it had drummed into Sloan’s head that your income was the only thing you could anticipate: and that most of the other uses of the word were incorrect? His English master perhaps. He’d been taught mathematics too … ‘You did say a sixteenth, Doctor, didn’t you?’

  ‘My partner is entitled to half of anything I inherit from a patient.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Sloan quite spontaneously.

  ‘Every contingency,’ said the general practitioner ironically, ‘is provided for in a medical partnership agreement.’

  ‘Even down to splitting legacies?’

  ‘That is quite a normal feature,’ said Paston drily. ‘Even millionaires bleed.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Detective-Inspector Sloan started to do a spot of quick calculating.

  ‘Millionaires don’t crop up often,’ said the doctor.

  ‘But when they do …’

  ‘There isn’t an unseemly stampede in the practice to attend them.’ He coughed. ‘If you come to think about it, Inspector, I’m sure you’ll see …’

  Sloan did come to think about it.

  Dr Paston might be able to maintain a rather lofty attitude to money and riotous living. His junior partner, though, was quite a different matter. It was quite obvious to all and sundry that young Dr Peter McCavity had an instant use for every liquid asset that he could lay his hands on.

  ‘I may only be a forensic pathologist,’ said a plaintive voice down Sloan’s telephone, ‘but even I can distinguish margarine from butter.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Doctor?’

  The Detective-Inspector had come back to his desk at the police station in Berebury to find a heap of messages piled on it. He had been rifling through them when the telephone had rung and Dr Dabbe had been put through to him.

  He turned the message sheets over with his free hand.

  The Superintendent wanted a progress report.

  He would.

  Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division would like him to drop by his department. Happy Harry – he was always known as Happy Harry because he had never been seen to smile – was far too cautious to say why on paper.

  Very well. He, Sloan, would drop by Traffic Division.

  Soonest: as they said in telegrams.

  Mrs Margaret Sloan had telephoned to say that she was going out shopping during the afternoon. That was why there would be no reply if he should happen to ring home.

  He looked at his watch and felt a stab of guilt. He was uneasy about the phrasing too. He didn’t like the way the message had been put. ‘Should happen to ring’ carried overtones. Of course he would have rung as soon as he could …

  The last message was from the Duty Officer in the Control Room. He wished Detective-Inspector Sloan to know that there had been no answer to calls to Detective-Constable Crosby on his personal radio. They had been trying to raise him over the air from the Control Room for the best part of half an hour. Would he have gone out of receiving range without notifying them?

  And did Detective-Inspector Sloan want anything doing about it?

  Sloan replaced the messages on his desk.

  ‘Margarine from butter,’ repeated Dr Dabbe into his ear over the telephone.

  ‘What?’ said Sloan blankly. Now he would have to down tools and find out what Crosby had got up to.

  ‘And water from insulin,’ continued the pathologist. ‘Even I can spot the difference.’

  ‘Er – good,’ said Sloan.

  ‘And it was water, old chap.’

  Sloan concentrated his mind on what the pathologist was saying, banishing with a great effort the possible import of each of the messages waiting for him.

  ‘No doubt about it,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  ‘Someone had been at her insulin.’ All right, then. At least they knew where they were now.

  ‘Someone,’ said Dabbe, ‘had removed it from the bottle and substituted water.’

  ‘So,’ Sloan worked out his conclusions aloud as he went along, ‘she’d been having no insulin at all since she began to use that particular bottle …’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And she’d …’ He stopped and gave their subject the dignity of a name. ‘Miss Wansdyke had been giving herself injections of water instead of insulin.’

  ‘That,’ agreed Dr Dabbe with caution, ‘would account for her symptoms, certainly.’ The pathologist spent a lot of his working life in the law courts and the long experience had made its mark.

  ‘There was something else that could be inferred as well.’

  ‘Was there?’

  ‘So I checked.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I wasn’t wrong.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The water that was still left in the insulin bottle was quite sterile.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sloan blankly.

  ‘If it hadn’t been,’ explained the doctor kindly, ‘she would probably have had a nasty abscess at the injection site by the time she died.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan in quite a different tone. ‘And she’d have gone back to her general practitioner with that, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘She would. Painful things, abscesses.’

  ‘Someone might have put two and two together, then.’

  ‘They might.’ The pathologist wasn’t making any promises in that quarter.

  ‘I see.’ Sloan nodded. ‘I should have thought of that, shouldn’t I?’ Time was when he’d never even seen that sort of thing – an abscess at an injection site. That was before the abuse of drugs became a feature of police life. Though there seemed a world of difference between youngsters dying in filthy holes and corners and a middle-aged schoolmistress meticulously treating her diabetes, presumably an unsterile injection had the same effect on all members of the human race. If you prick us, do we not bleed … No, that was something different.

  ‘Someone took care,’ remarked the pathologist.

  ‘The other bottles …’

  ‘Right as rain,’ said Dabbe with singular inappropriateness.

  ‘But there had been insulin in the one she was using though, hadn’t there? Once, I mean.’

  ‘Oh yes. It started off as the real stuff because there’s still a very faint trace of it in the water left in the bottle.’

  ‘The bottle labelled insulin,’ said Sloan heavily, thinking of someone ill and failing, increasing her dose and not getting any better. ‘Nasty.’

  ‘Murder always is,’ said Dabbe. ‘And I should know.’

  ‘Doctor …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Let me get this straight. Miss Wansdyke had been using this duff bottle up until the time she died. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘And all the other bottles are perfectly all right?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘So,’ said Sloan, ‘if she had happened to pick on one of the other bottles in the batch she was using then she wouldn’t have died when she did?’

  ‘No.’

  Sloan paused. Then:

  ‘Are you saying, Doctor,’ he asked, thinking aloud, ‘that someone must have tampered with the current one after she started using it, then? Not before?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ returned Dabbe promptly. ‘You see, Sloan, the only – er – non-destructive way into and out of that sort of bottle is by using a hypodermic syringe and pushing the needle through the rubber composition cap.’

  ‘Ah, I see …’

  ‘The patient might very well have noticed a puncture hole in a new bottle that she hadn’t used before.’

  ‘And would have suspected something then,’ concurred Sloan.

  ‘The dirty deed,’ pronou
nced Dr Dabbe in the manner of a pantomime king, ‘will turn out to have been done after she started using that particular bottle. You’ll see.’

  ‘So,’ said Sloan, who had always been quick at school, ‘if we could work out how many doses she had out of it we could expect to find an extra hole in the rubber cap?’

  ‘We could,’ said the pathologist. ‘It would be clever stuff all right, but …’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Too clever for open court.’

  ‘Ah.’ They – policeman and pathologist both – knew the dangers that lay in that direction. The Defence could be as clever as it liked. That pleased everyone except the police. The Prosecution had to be more careful about the weight of evidence. Pitching the full resources of the establishment against the lonely figure in the dock had a counter-productive effect on some juries. Especially nowadays.

  ‘Juries don’t like it,’ said Dabbe.

  ‘Juries,’ said Sloan shortly, ‘aren’t what they used to be.’

  ‘Twelve good men and true.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said Sloan. Since the property qualification had gone, juries were a random selection. Very. And it showed in the verdicts they brought in. ‘You don’t know where you are with juries these days. Take obscenity, for instance.’

  ‘Anything to oblige,’ murmured Dabbe negligently.

  ‘Often as not your new-style jury doesn’t even know what the prosecution is going on about.’

  ‘Need French lessons, do they?’

  ‘And when it is explained to them,’ said Sloan stiffly, ‘they won’t convict. Can’t see what all the fuss is about.’

  ‘I can tell you anyway,’ complained Dabbe, ‘that too clever by half prosecutions don’t go down well either, and as for …’

  ‘The trouble is –’ Sloan rarely let himself be carried away in this fashion ‘– that they can’t be flattered into thinking they understand any more. They know there are a lot of things they can’t grasp. People have been telling them so all their lives.’

  ‘They all know, though,’ agreed Dabbe sagely, ‘when they’re being buttered up.’

  ‘And they take against expert witnesses,’ said Sloan not entirely inconsequentially.

  ‘There’s nothing new about that,’ said the pathologist sturdily. ‘A watertight case isn’t watertight if the jury doesn’t like it.’

  Sloan agreed. As he did so his eye was caught by the little heap of message sheets on his desk. He came back to the matter in hand.

  ‘I think we can agree, then,’ he said, ‘that it wasn’t chance that Miss Wansdyke was using this doctored bottle now.’

  ‘If you’re asking my opinion,’ said Dabbe, ‘I should say on the contrary. By the way, Sloan …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Could you be a bit more careful with your adjectives? Gives the profession a bad name. Doctored, indeed! Whatever next …’

  The very ill patient on Fleming Ward did die.

  In spite of all that the doctors and modern medical science could do, the last enemy – death – supervened. Nature, as is her wont, won in the end. As it happened, the patient wasn’t the husband of the stout countrywoman to whom Detective-Constable Crosby had been speaking earlier but he had been somebody’s husband and Sister Fleming’s first duty was to tell his wife that he had died. Where handkerchief work was involved, so to speak, she always felt the task to be hers. When she delegated it to the young house officers she usually had to see the relative herself all over again.

  Once more with feeling, in fact.

  On Fleming Ward itself a certain briskness set in as the man died. Death represented a new procession of tasks and another course of action. It was a clear-cut and speedy course. Porters were summoned, screens appeared. The House Surgeon and a Registrar, suddenly idle, were treated to a little oblique and educative propaganda from the ward sister en passant.

  ‘I’ll fight for a patient for all I’m worth,’ said Sister Fleming quite fiercely, ‘but once they’ve gone I forget them completely.’

  The two young doctors got the message and melted away, consoled, to other duties.

  The ward sister always had been one to improve the shining hour. She turned her attention to the nurses.

  ‘And when you’ve made up a fresh bed, Nurse Petforth,’ she said sharply, ‘be sure to check the drip on the hemi-colectomy over there.’

  ‘Yes, Sister,’ said Briony obediently. In prison, in the Army, in the police force, you might be a name and number: in hospital it was quite different. If you were a patient on a medical ward you were known by the disease you had. If you were on a surgical ward it was by the name of the operation you had been admitted to have.

  ‘That drip should have been attended to before,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘And Nurse …’ She turned her baleful gaze towards the probationer who was helping Briony Petforth with her bed-making and whose very first encounter with death this had been.

  ‘Yes, Sister,’ said the young nurse tremulously. ‘You should have noticed before now that the appendix has come round from his anaesthetic.’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘See to him,’ she commanded, ‘as soon as you’ve finished the bed.’

  Rightly calculating that righteous indignation at this cavalier approach to the Pale Horseman of the Apocalypse would banish any backward thoughts about the patient they had just lost, Sister swept off to see the ward clerk about the admissions waiting list.

  Acknowledged tartar Sister Fleming might be, but there were times when she came into her own.

  ‘The patient is dead, long live the patient,’ muttered Briony rebelliously, attacking the bed-making with a certain savagery. While the dirty linen was being swept into a bag by the other nurse she set off for the linen room to collect fresh sheets and pillow cases.

  Something – she didn’t know what – was stopping her opening the door properly. She gave it an extra push and stepped inside feeling for the light switch. It was then that she saw the crumpled figure of a man lying supine on the floor.

  Where another girl might have screamed Briony Petforth reminded herself that she was a nurse. She bent down cautiously, noticing as she did so the blood coming from a wound on the back of the man’s head.

  She thought she recognized the man’s face but it wasn’t his name that she used.

  ‘Oh, Nick,’ she moaned. ‘Oh, Nick.’

  CHAPTER XIII

  We seek and seek, and were it once discovered

  We should be safe enough – expenses covered.

  ‘What!’ exploded Leeyes. ‘They’ve found who? Attacked? And injured, did you say?’

  ‘Detective-Constable Crosby.’

  ‘Where?’ spluttered Leeyes. ‘Wait until I …’

  ‘In the hospital, sir. On Fleming Ward.’

  ‘We should have searched it,’ declared Leeyes inevitably.

  Sloan ploughed on with the meagre information at hand. The Superintendent was a great one for being wise after the event. ‘Crosby was found lying on the floor in the linen room, sir.’

  ‘Assaulted in the execution of his duty,’ intoned Leeyes in tones suitable for a memorial service.

  ‘He’s unconscious,’ Sloan informed him hastily. ‘Not dead.’

  ‘One of my men,’ said Leeyes sonorously.

  ‘They’ve taken him down to Casualty.’

  ‘A good man, Crosby.’

  ‘Er … quite,’ said Sloan, savouring the occasion. Superintendent Leeyes’s geese were only swans now and then.

  ‘We’ll get whoever did this, Sloan,’ he said militantly, ‘if we don’t do anything else. And soon.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Sloan calmly. It was a fact of police life that people who killed or tried to kill policemen were usually caught sooner or later. Sooner, more often than not. For some reason too arcane for an ordinary person to explore, those who attacked policemen in Great Britain ran out of support from friends and relatives earlier tha
n other wrongdoers did. And more commonly than with most transgressors, someone turned them in. Perhaps as a penalty for breaking the rules by which the game of cops and robbers was played? Sloan didn’t know.

  ‘If they so much as touch a hair of his head,’ growled Leeyes, ‘I’ll …’

  ‘They’ve hit it,’ announced Sloan baldly. ‘Quite hard. Already.’ The Superintendent’s press conference would come later. He could say whatever he liked at that. Clichés and all. Now was a time for facts.

  ‘Grievous bodily harm, then,’ responded Leeyes automatically.

  ‘Could be,’ admitted Sloan. ‘He hasn’t come round yet. I’m on my way over there now.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Leeyes obscurely. ‘Close the ranks.’

  ‘We’ve put out a general alert.’

  ‘Good, good. No one else missing, is there?’ At times like this all of the Superintendent’s flock were dear to him.

  ‘No,’ said Sloan, startled. ‘Crosby and I are the only two on this job anyway.’

  ‘Better write your own report out, then, before you leave,’ said Leeyes lugubriously, ‘in case anything happens to you too.’

  ‘He’s only a boy really,’ said Sloan, heroically suppressing a number of other tempting retorts to this last. ‘If in fact it was actually Nicholas Petforth who hit Crosby.’

  ‘Boys,’ pronounced Leeyes with feeling, ‘can cause more trouble than men.’

  ‘It may not have been him, of course,’ said Sloan fairly. ‘There’s another possibility. All Briony Petforth will say is that she opened the door of the linen room and found Crosby there.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She also insists, sir, that she hasn’t seen her brother since before their aunt died.’

  ‘He would always know where to find her, though, Sloan.’

  ‘I gather,’ said Sloan drily, ‘that he is in the habit of coming up on the ward when he wants something.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘Probably. She didn’t say.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said the Superintendent, who was, after all, in a better position to judge than most men.

  Sloan, momentarily diverted, voiced something that had been puzzling him all along. ‘I’ve been thinking, sir, that Beatrice Wansdyke’s money must have come from somewhere pretty out of the ordinary.’