After Effects

by Catherine Aird

  Sloan nodded his understanding. Almost everything at the police station had a number and was done by computer these days, too, but they hadn’t yet found a mechanical substitute for the smell of malfeasance somewhere.

  Or the nose that could sniff it out.

  Sometimes, of course.

  Not always.

  He wasn’t sure about the smell—if there was one—of anything here yet.

  Any more than he knew if the ‘leaning on the gate’ approach to problem-solving was better than feeding everything under the sun into a computer and pressing a few keys.

  Dr Byville was still talking. ‘But, gentlemen, you’d do better talking to the real expert. Naturally, Dr Paul Meggie as the Consultant Cardiologist to the Hospital Trust is the doctor in overall charge of the Cardigan Protocol.’

  Unfortunately, reported the Hospital Administrator regretfully after a further twenty minutes on the telephone, Dr Meggie was not available for interview. No one, it presently transpired—that is, when they’d cut their way through the Administrator’s circumlocutory manner of speaking—was quite sure exactly where Dr Paul Meggie was.

  The person who was missing Dr Paul Meggie most of all at this moment—and that rather to his own surprise—was his registrar.

  In the first instance Dr Martin Friar had welcomed the opportunity of taking his consultant’s clinic single-handed, then he had positively relished responding to a call from Barnesdale Ward about a case that could have been bacterial endocarditis. In Dr Meggie’s absence he had pontificated, prescribed and prognosticated—in fact, generally fulfilled the role of clinical specialist to which he so keenly aspired.

  It was different now.

  He had just been settling nicely into this agreeable mode when there was a call from a general practitioner out in the country. Dr Angus Browne wanted Dr Meggie to do an urgent domiciliary visit to see a Mr Abel Granger and made it quite clear that as Dr Meggie couldn’t be contacted, he, Dr Friar, would have to come instead.

  That was when Martin Friar’s difficulties had started.

  ‘Larking?’ he said. ‘Where’s Larking?’

  ‘Take the Cullingoak Road from Kinnisport and then second left after the pub,’ said Dr Browne. ‘Willow End Farm’s up a track on your right. Mind you keep right when it forks or you’ll end up in the stream. I’ll be at the house—the patient’s too ill to move or leave.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’ve promised the family a second opinion,’ said the general practitioner a trifle testily, ‘and I need it now. Tomorrow will be too late.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ promised Friar. ‘No problem.’

  But there was a problem when he got there.

  Not knowing what to do with his hands was only part of it. There was, of course, absolutely nothing Martin Friar could do with them. The registrar was having his first experience of watching a man dying in his own bed without the benefit of hospital support. It was, he soon realized, he—Martin Friar—not the patient, who was missing the benefit of hospital support. There was no hiding in Sister’s office or behind Dr Meggie here. The man was beyond aid and that was all there was to it.

  What Friar did have was the experience of watching a really skilled general practitioner at work in a domestic setting. Standing in a large farmhouse kitchen, round a big table scrubbed to bare-bone whiteness, was a silent anxious family, hanging on Martin Friar’s every word but still looking to their father’s own doctor—the man they knew and trusted—for real comfort. He could learn a lot, he decided, from listening to Dr Angus Browne.

  ‘Remarkable man, their father,’ the family doctor was saying in front of the adult children. The patient’s wife was where she’d been for the last seven days and nights—by her husband’s bedside. ‘Built this farm up from nothing.’

  The elder son nodded.

  ‘He’s had good home nursing, too,’ said the local doctor. ‘Everything he needed.’

  A daughter caught her breath.

  ‘A king couldn’t have had better care than he’s had,’ asserted Angus Browne. An historian might have suspected irony here since various monarchs had been subjected to medical treatments that could only have added to their discomfort and accelerated their demise, but the patient’s family took this pronouncement at its face value and were reassured.

  Martin Friar nodded gravely. Several kings that he knew about would have kept their thrones a lot longer had the same attention been paid to their electrolyte levels as it had to those of the old farmer upstairs but this was not the time to say so.

  ‘It’s Mother I’m worried about,’ said the younger son. ‘She hasn’t had her clothes off for nearly a week now.’

  Angus Browne said sapiently, ‘She’ll no’ thank you for taking her away from your father now.’

  ‘But, Doctor,’ protested the younger son, her favourite, ‘she’ll collapse if she goes on like this.’

  The general practitioner shook his head and said with the wisdom of long experience, ‘She’ll no’ collapse, Christopher, all the while your father needs her. I can tell you that.’ He paused and then added significantly, ‘And it won’t be for long now, will it, Dr Friar?’

  Martin Friar looked solemn. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘So Dad’s nearly at the end of the road, is he?’ asked Simon, the elder son, his own role at the farm about to change significantly and new duties begin.

  ‘He’s had a good innings,’ responded Browne obliquely, ‘but I think they’ll be drawing stumps, soon.’ He turned politely to the quondam consultant and said, ‘Don’t you, Dr Friar?’

  Martin Friar nodded gravely. It was about the only thing he could do.

  ‘Although,’ said Angus Browne, automatically hedging his bets, ‘the heart has a remarkable capacity for keeping going.’

  The younger son found his tongue again. And was surprised to find how dry it was. ‘When …’ he licked his lips. ‘I mean … can you say how long?’

  ‘Not long now,’ said Browne gently, as they all heard the sound of another, rather noisier, car coming up the farm lane.

  ‘That’ll be the rector,’ said the daughter, taking off her apron and hurrying through the house. ‘We’d better get the front door open, hadn’t we?’

  Dr Browne led Martin Friar out of the back door as the representative of the next world came in at the front one—the seldom-opened farmhouse front door that the coffin would be going out of very soon.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ Browne said when they were well out of earshot.

  ‘There was nothing I could do.’

  ‘Oh, yes, there was,’ said Angus Browne unexpectedly. ‘Now you’ve seen the patient for yourself, you can go back and tell your boss that I don’t like this new drug he’s peddling one little bit.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Doctors have their uses, real as well as imaginary.

  Over in the village of Staple St James, Dr Paul Meggie had also been noted as an absentee by Gilroy Pharmaceuticals (Berebury) Ltd.

  ‘Sorry about this, Al,’ said George Gledhill, their Chief Chemist. ‘he wanted you to meet him while you were over here.’

  ‘These medical bods do tend to get held up more than some,’ replied Al Dexter easily. He was Head of Dexter Palindome (Luston) plc, manufacturing chemists, and liked other people to get off on the wrong foot anyway. ‘Can’t be helped.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be along all right, never worry,’ contributed Mike Itchen, Deputy Chief Chemist and resident boffin at Gilroy’s, in the laid-back manner he was cultivating so assiduously. ‘He’s keen.’ Behind the laid-back manner were the research brains of Gilroy’s.

  Al Dexter took another sip of his preluncheon drink. ‘Trobuble is, you can’t ever check up on the medics. All they’ve got to say is that they’ve had an emergency wall.’

  ‘True.’ George Gledhill glanced at his watch. ‘All the same, I don’t think we’ll wait to eat.’

  He pushed his chair back. Doctors with a penchant for drug research coul
d be recruited for clinical programmes without difficulty—for a fee, of course. Good cooks were more tricky to come by and trickier still to keep—fee or no fee. The cook at Gilroy’s was first class and all of their visitors enjoyed her cooking. Most of them relished the corporate dining room at the Hall, too, and Gledhill was happy to note that their guest had every appearance of a man who hadn’t seen his toes for quite a while.

  ‘Fine with me,’ said Al Dexter automatically. ‘Glad you yourselves could make it on time anyway. Sounds as if you’ve had a busy morning, both of you.’

  ‘We’ve got people looking at the roof now,’ said the Chief Chemist indirectly. ‘They were lucky not to get themselves killed, silly young fools.’

  ‘If that’s all they were,’ remarked Dexter, ‘then you haven’t anything to worry about, have you?’

  ‘The Health and Safety Executive for starters and the insurance people …’ began Mike Itchen, who was a worrier.

  ‘I mean,’ explained Dexter, ‘that if it was only the monkeys they were after, you don’t have problems, do you?’

  Gledhill looked up sharply. ‘You think they might have been real burglars?’

  ‘It’s what I would have been worried about,’ said Al Dexter. He didn’t have the look of a man who worried about anything. ‘Good cover for getting in—animal rights—if you were looking for something, don’t you think?’

  Gledhill and Itchen carefully avoided looking at each other.

  ‘In my experience,’ Dexter added authoritatively, ‘people are prepared to believe anything about animal rights activists.’

  ‘We’ll look into it,’ said Itchen in the neutral tones he favoured these days. He had an expression that was similarly blank.

  ‘You’re still working on Naomite surely,’ said Dexter, ‘aren’t you?’

  Gledhill looked round quickly as if someone else might have been listening. ‘It’s only in the embryo stage, Al,’ he said. ‘Nothing doing there at all yet.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Dexter comfortably, ‘but they don’t know that, do they?’

  ‘And nothing doing at the Ethics Committee at Region this morning either,’ added Itchen gloomily. ‘We only had one submission and it got the chop.’

  A different sort of ethic prevailed as Al Dexter studiously avoided enquiring about the form of Gilroy’s new submission. He was here with other fish to fry and if the two chemists wanted to tell him about their firm’s newest compound then they would tell him fast enough. And if they didn’t, then he, All Dexter, didn’t really want to know.

  ‘Just like Byville’s last effort,’ said the Chief Chemist regretfully. ‘He’s a trier, though, I’ll give the man that.’

  Dexter raised an enquiring eyebrow.

  ‘They wouldn’t wear our APX 125 trials, Al.’ George Gledhill shook his head. ‘A great pity, especially as Byville was so keen to test the refined compound. Said he’s nearly there with some really good “effect-size” figures.’

  ‘Byville’s no good with committees,’ pronounced Itchen weightily. ‘Puts their backs up as soon as he opens his mouth.’

  ‘He’s really into spleens, though,’ said Gledhill. ‘Been making quite a speciality of treating them lately. We might have something for you there one day, Al.’

  ‘But he’s no good with people,’ insisted Mike Itchen, still brooding about the committee meeting. ‘Doesn’t see that he’s got to convince the Safety of Drugs Committee before he gets anywhere,’—he sniffed—‘for all that he wants to examine everyone in Calleshire without a spleen. And,’ he added mordantly, ‘some with.’

  ‘If you can corner the market,’ said Al Dexter simply, ‘then you should.’ It was the spirit that made millionaires.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ said Mike Itchen.

  Dexter Palindome (Luston) plc weren’t research chemists, but manufacturing ones. They didn’t have to waste their substance on research-and-development programmes which got through money like water. They merely processed what the boffins thought worth making, leaving the risk business to others. Their highest-paid employees weren’t research chemists at all but production engineers and marketing men.

  ‘I don’t think anyone’s aiming to corner the market,’ said George Gledhill piously. He didn’t add that with patents and licences this was hardly necessary these days. ‘With Roger Byville it’s more of an interest.’

  ‘And,’ said Itchen, ‘it’s not such a crowded field as some.’

  ‘I guess Joe Public doesn’t really understand the spleen,’ said Al Dexter.

  ‘You can say that again,’ said Mike Itchen, who found the lay members of the Ethics Committee the most difficult of all to deal with. Give him a scientist any day. Unless he could have a businessman, of course.

  ‘So what,’ asked Dexter curiously, ‘didn’t they like about the APX 125 trials, then?’

  ‘Everything,’ said the Chief Chemist, rising to his feet rather abruptly. ‘Come on, let’s eat.’

  A curious mixture of altruism and business acumen had led the founding fathers of the firm of Gilroy Pharmaceuticals (and they were men only now just starting their retirement) to buy a large, empty Victorian mansion. It was a time when large, empty Victorian mansions were something of a drug on the post-war housing market.

  ‘The dining room’s straight ahead,’ Mike Itchen reminded Dexter.

  It would certainly have been a misnomer to call it a canteen. The Hall at Staple St James had not been quite stately enough for preservation and had been converted into offices and research laboratories well before the Victorian revivalists had been sufficiently interested or organized enough to protest.

  ‘Some eating place you’ve got here,’ said Dexter, suitably impressed by a painted ceiling reminiscent of the worst excesses of the French neo-classical period.

  ‘Built to last, did the Victorians,’ said Mike Itchen with his first show of enthusiasm.

  ‘We’ve found a use for almost everything here except the maze,’ said George Gledhill proudly, going into his set party piece for visitors. ‘You name it and we’ve got it here. Stables, ice-house, game larder, laundry, greenhouses, cellars … you’ll have a little of this white Burgundy won’t you, Al?… lake, grotto …’

  ‘What on earth’s a grotto?’

  ‘It’s where the bad man of the garden lived. You know—before the era of something nasty in the woodshed came in.’ Gledhill looked preternaturally solemn. ‘No real old garden was complete without a hermit.’

  ‘You don’t say!’ Al Dexter went back to a topic he found more interesting. ‘Say, do you people get much hassle from these ethics committees of yours?’

  Mike Itchen frowned. ‘It all depends.’

  ‘On the face of the guy putting the product forward?’ suggested Al, since human nature is the same the world over. ‘Or other things?’

  ‘Well, Al,’ temporized Itchen, ‘you know yourself what committees are like.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Al Dexter untruthfully. There were no committees built into the corporate structure of Dexter Palindome (Luston) plc. The decision-making process was delegated to a nail-biting level; bucks stopped as far down the management pyramid as possible and all potentially unprofitable work was headed off at the pass long before it got on to anyone’s time-sheet.

  ‘They’re the very devil,’ admitted the Chief Chemist since he was talking to a contractor and not a business rival. ‘How it can be OK to let thousands suffer and die from some untreatable condition and all wrong for one poor sod—’

  ‘Who was going to die anyway,’ contributed Mike Itchen cynically.

  ‘—to snuff it while we’re using him to try to find a cure for the same thing beats me.’

  ‘It’s an unfair world,’ agreed Al Dexter ambiguously.

  ‘In the first place,’ grumbled Gledhill, still sore from this morning’s rejection, ‘the Ethics Committee’s always so totally negative.’

  ‘It’s not their product, of course,’ contributed Al Dexter reasonably.


  ‘And as for the Safety of Medicines people …’ carried on Gledhill.

  ‘Never a breath of enthusiasm there,’ seconded his deputy.

  ‘That’s their whole trouble,’ said Gledhill. ‘All they want to do is keep their noses clean.’

  ‘And what they don’t like,’ said Mike Itchen, ‘is criticism. Can’t take a breath of the stuff.’

  They didn’t come more worldly than Al Dexter. ‘They don’t have anything riding on success, that’s the difference.’

  The Chief Chemist shrugged. ‘True.’

  ‘And you fellows have,’ said Dexter simply; he pronounced the word with relish: ‘Cardigan.’

  Gledhill’s face lit up suddenly. ‘I’ll say we have. And so has Dr Paul—fresh carnation buttonhole—Meggie. Wherever the old fox’s got to this morning.’

  Detective Constable Crosby drew a neat line in his notebook after talking to the luckless Darren Clements in the Accident and Emergency Department. He hadn’t got very far. That young man was clearly prepared for martyrdom rather than disclose the names of his confederates.

  ‘Me, shop my mates?’ he’d said. ‘You must be joking. Catch ’em yourself.’

  ‘I dare say we will,’ replied Crosby equably. ‘We caught the monkeys all right last time and your lot aren’t as clever.’

  He found Dr Dilys Chomel more co-operative, although she wasn’t herself making a lot of sense of her interview with the detective constable. For one thing she was still rather confused and for another the policeman wasn’t making himself very clear.

  ‘You had an old lady here this morning, miss, on Woman’s Medical in heart failure—’ Crosby had taken a unilateral decision about addressing any young woman with hair like rats’ tails as ‘Doctor’.

  ‘Mrs Galloway?’ said Dilys, who hadn’t really reckoned on having the police in on her first death. ‘Yes. She died, of course … I mean.’ she halted in mid-speech. She had just realized that she was sounding like the woman in the children’s verse who had swallowed a fly and worked her way up to swallowing a horse. She, too, had died, of course. The House Physician started again. ‘I mean,’ she said haltingly, ‘naturally she died. She was very, very ill.’