‘So I am told, Doctor.’ Sloan cleared his throat and added, ‘As a matter of interest, Gilroy’s have their set of numbers and we—that is, the police—are holding Dr Meggie’s figures for the—er—time being.’
Dr Dabbe cocked an eyebrow.
‘Found in his car,’ said Sloan succinctly. ‘On the seat beside him. The Scenes of Crime people are still there. We’ll get the body here for you as soon as we can, Doctor.’
‘Alas, poor Meggie,’ said Dr Dabbe.
‘Quite so,’ said Sloan.
The pathologist became suddenly brisk. ‘Right, let’s look to the lady then—’
It was the best part of an hour before Dr Dabbe straightened up and pulled off his surgical gloves. ‘Left ventricular failure, Sloan, and myocardial degeneration.’
‘Natural causes—’ That, thought Sloan, mindful of another appointment, would at least help him in dealing with Gordon Galloway.
‘No doubt about it,’ said the pathologist easily. ‘She’d had a new hip and she’d had her tonsils and adenoids removed when a child but that’s about it. Just what you’d expect in a woman of her age with her history.’
‘No sign of any test drugs?’
‘No sign of them having killed her,’ qualified Dabbe, ‘but I’ll be reporting on the sections and specimens I’ve taken. There’s certainly nothing macroscopic—’
‘Macro—’ Detective Constable Crosby was having his usual trouble with his notes.
‘Opposite of microscopic, old chap. Means what you can see with the naked eye.’
The notes that Detective Inspector Sloan was making were mental ones. And he already suspected that there was more to this situation than met the eye, naked or otherwise.
‘You’re late back, Sloan,’ barked Leeyes, when the two policemen returned to the police station at Berebury.
‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Sloan. That writer—George Bernard Shaw, he thought it had been—who had said, ‘I never apologize’ could not in the nature of things have ever met Superintendent Leeyes but his advice still held good.
‘That son of the woman who died—’
‘Gordon Galloway?’ divined Sloan.
‘Him. He’s been waiting for you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘For a long time.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And he’s pretty cross.’
For once the superintendent was not exaggerating. Gordon Galloway was very cross indeed and made it clear he was not used to being kept waiting.
‘I’m sure I don’t know what I pay my rates and taxes for, Inspector,’ he began, every inch the busy man.
‘No, sir.’ Sloan resisted the temptation to refer him to the Town Hall for an answer to that question.
‘Especially when something like this happens, Inspector. It’s an outrage.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Of the four humours of mankind, there was no doubt which one fitted this short, portly man. It was choler.
‘I tell you, Inspector, it’s absolutely disgraceful. There’s no other way of describing it. Disgraceful. The very day my mother died, too, and while she was being experimented on.’
‘The pathologist,’ began Sloan, ‘has—’ but he got no further.
‘First, I find my poor mother being used as a human guinea-pig on her last few days on earth—’
‘I am informed, sir, that—’
‘And then when we get home from the hospital I find the ultimate insult.’
‘Where did you say, sir?’
‘At home.’
‘At home?’ Sloan reached for his notebook. This was different.
‘While my wife and I are over at the hospital making—er—the arrangements about my late mother, what happens?’
‘What?’ demanded Sloan crisply. He wouldn’t want to be Gordon Galloway’s secretary. That was one thing he was certain about.
‘On my garage door,’ said Galloway.
‘What was on your garage door?’ On second thoughts, he wouldn’t want to work for Gordon Galloway in any capacity.
‘This … graffiti. Quite unspeakable.’
‘What did it say?’ asked Sloan. There was after all graffiti and graffiti. And probably a generation gap between Gordon Galloway and whoever put it there.
‘Someone had written “No experiments on animals” all over my garage doors.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Sloan quickly.
‘It called me …’ said Galloway, turning a nasty shade of puce, ‘Me! A medical collaborator.’
CHAPTER TEN
Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you would fortune-tellers.
‘So?’ said Superintendent Leeye.
‘So I’ve sent Crosby back to the hospital,’ said Sloan, ‘to ask Dr Chomel whether she was paged or made a telephone call about Muriel Galloway while she was stitching up Darren Clements, and within his hearing.’
Leeyes grunted. ‘It won’t only be him. You’ll have to look out for the rest of his mob.’
‘We’re doing that—’
‘Ten to one you’ll find any one of a dozen of ’em could have written on Gordon Galloway’s garage door.’ He sniffed. ‘If they can write, that is.’
‘And sir,’ Detective Inspector Sloan turned to something else, ‘I think we are going to find that the Coroner is going to request a post mortem on Abel Granger of Willow End Farm.’
‘You do, do you?’ growled Leeyes. ‘And are you going to tell me why or wait until I work it out for myself?’
‘He was on Dr Meggie’s Cardigan Protocol, too,’ said Sloan.
‘I see. And because he’s died, too, you think—’
‘No, sir. It’s not me. It’s Dr Angus Browne. He says he won’t sign the death certificate. Not since he’s heard about Dr Meggie.’
‘Hrrrmph.’ The superintendent blew out his cheeks.
‘Crosby didn’t get any joy out of the switchboard operator at St Ninian’s Hospital either. All she will say is that she was rung up early and asked to tell his underling that Dr Meggie wouldn’t be in.’
‘Not a lot of help, that, Sloan.’
‘No, sir.’ Sloan glanced down at his notebook.
‘And as far as we can ascertain the last person that Dr Meggie would seem to have spoken to as he left the hospital yesterday evening is an artist—’
‘An artist?’ The superintendent’s bushy eyebrows went up upon the instant.
‘—who is working on a mural in the front entrance hall.’
‘They didn’t used to have artists—’
‘Something, sir, to do with some scheme for brightening up older hospitals with—er—artistic efforts.’
‘So what’s this artist painting, then?’ demanded Leeyes truculently.
‘Actually, sir, this morning he’s been working on some mice—’
‘Mice!’
‘Mice.’ What they could have done with, decided Sloan, was Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill. ‘Laboratory mice.’
‘I don’t know what the world is—’
‘Adrian Gomm, that’s the name of the artist, sir,’ hurried on Sloan, ‘says he’s bringing the mice in because he thinks they’re part of medicine, too.’ Sloan still felt that Old Bill would have done it much better.
‘Part of medicine?’ snorted Leeyes.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan, resisting a strong temptation to add ‘Eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog’ himself.
‘I’ve heard of dormice for whooping cough,’ said Leeyes, ‘but surely we’ve come further than that by now? Why should mice come into the picture—’
‘Because he says they’re sufferers in the cause of medicine, too, sir.’ Sloan’s own first exchange with Adrian Gomm had also been quite combative. ‘He thinks his mural should represent both the good and the bad in modern medicine.’
‘If you ask me, Sloan,’ countered Leeyes swiftly, ‘he’ll have his work cut out to do that.’
‘The whole mural, you see, sir, is meant to be
allegorical—’ And he, Sloan, was meant to be enquiring into the deaths of Muriel Galloway and Paul Meggie and quite possibly old Abel Granger as well. But he didn’t say so: he had his pension to think of.
‘I suppose that’s something, Sloan,’ grunted Leeyes. ‘At least it’s better than having open-heart surgery on view.’ He stopped and glared at his subordinate. ‘Or has he got that in as well?’
‘Not yet,’ said Sloan cautiously. ‘What he has got is the bad on the left and the good on the right—that’s traditional, he says, just like the theatre stage.’
‘It may be traditional in art,’ Leeyes said flatly, ‘but let me remind you, Sloan, that down here at the police station the bad is all around us.’
‘Yes, sir.’ As Sloan understood it, that was the miasma theory of crime writ large. He probably felt the same way about medicine. ‘As I was saying, sir,’—Sloan hoped that that point was being taken too but doubted it—‘the artist says he talked to Dr Meggie as he left the hospital last evening and he seemed quite cheerful then.’
‘Whereabouts on the mural is he putting the mice?’ asked Leeyes.
‘In the middle, sir.’
‘They piebald or something?’
‘No, sir. White.’
‘Can’t he make up his mind which side to put them on, then?’
‘It’s not that, sir,’ Detective Inspector Sloan took a deep breath and said, ‘Adrian Gomm says he’s put the mice in the middle because they’re both a good and a bad component of research.’
‘Tell me, Sloan,’ said Leeyes, ‘what is Detective Constable Crosby making of all this?’
‘Not a lot,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan truthfully.
Dr Angus Browne of Larking might have hedged about when talking to the family of his patient at Willow End Farm but he had done no such thing when he had been interviewed by the police in his own consulting room.
‘No, Inspector, I was not called to see Abel Granger during last night, nor did I send for Dr Meggie until later in the day. The first message I had was sent here by the family to my surgery round about nine o’clock.’
‘And what was the message?’ asked Sloan. He was beginning to get very interested in every single message sent and received this morning.
‘That old Abel had had a bad night and would I make him one of my first calls that morning.’
‘And did you?’ enquired Detective Constable Crosby, looking up. The family doctors he himself had so far encountered hadn’t ever seemed as biddable as that.
‘Aye.’ Browne nodded. ‘I’d been going to see him today anyway. The man was going downhill pretty fast.’
‘This message,’ said Sloan. ‘Do you know who rang you?’
‘It would have been the daughter,’ said the general practitioner confidently. ‘Mrs Granger would no’ have left him and the boys would have been out on the farm.’
Detective Inspector Sloan made a note to check that. ‘And you confirm not only that you weren’t sent for before then but that nor did you telephone Dr Meggie at five o’clock this morning to ask him to visit your patient.’
‘I do.’ He grimaced. ‘I’d no’ be asking a busy man like Meggie to get up in the middle of the night to see a hopeless case. After all he’d seen him in his out-patient clinic at the hospital weeks ago and said then that there was nothing to be done.’
‘Except the Cardigan Protocol,’ Sloan reminded him.
‘Och, well, that was just a long shot that might have done some good.’
‘But no harm?’
‘Do you no’ understand what I’m saying, Inspector?’ Angus Browne drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘I’m telling you the man was beyond aid. There was nothing to be lost in trying him on yon Protocol of Meggie’s. Nothing at all. But that doesn’t mean I’m prepared to sign something saying it had nothing to do with his dying. Not until I know it hadn’t.’
Sloan switched direction before Crosby started taking an interest in the ethics of this. ‘You say, Doctor, that you wouldn’t have sent for Dr Meggie at five o’clock in the morning to see a hopeless case.’
‘Aye, that’s so.’
‘But if you had,’ asked Sloan, ‘would he have come?’
‘Of course,’ responded Browne promptly. ‘That’s quite different.’
Sloan sighed. He doubted if he would ever master the niceties of medical interactions. Whilst there was obviously a fine balance on the general practitioner’s part between deciding whether or not to send for the consultant, there was no such distinction when it came to his coming if sent for.
‘You sent for him all right later in the morning, though,’ said Crosby, pleased with himself at spotting an illogicality.
‘Aye, but that wasn’t for the patient,’ said the doctor crisply.
‘No?’
‘That was for the relatives.’
‘Ah—’
‘And me,’ said Angus Browne.
‘You, Doctor?’ said Sloan, surprised.
‘Just in case they started feeling their father should have had more care and attention and wanted to take it up with me afterwards, you understand.’ He grimaced. ‘Some families get funny that way.’
‘I see.’ Sloan understood all right. They had that sort of trouble down at the police station, too. From people like Gordon Galloway.
‘Not the mother,’ said Browne. ‘She knew the score all along. Besides, she’s a sensible body. No, it’s the younger boy there—’
‘Christopher Granger … the one who found Dr Meggie?’
‘Him.’ Browne shot Sloan a keen look. ‘He’s a bit of an altruist and all that sort of thing.’
‘What sort of thing exactly?’ asked Sloan. It was a sad commentary on today’s civilization that policemen had to be wary of altruists, but Sloan had found that when it came to the crunch they kicked as hard as the next man. And in much the same places.
Angus Browne stroked his chin. ‘He had a bust-up with the local hunt last year.’
‘Did he, indeed,’ murmured Sloan.
‘Persuaded his father not to let them on their land. Mind you, by then old Abel wasn’t really up to arguing. Then Christopher started working on his brother to turn the farm over to organic production. The next thing was humane farming—’
Detective Constable Crosby suddenly sat up and started to take notice. ‘That’s when this little piggy doesn’t go to market after all, isn’t it?’
‘You could put it like that,’ said the general practitioner blandly, giving the constable a distinctly professional look. ‘If you had a mind to.’
Dr Roger Byville pulled his car into Gilroy’s Pharmaceuticals at Staple St James and walked in his usual measured way across the ample courtyard built in palmier days for carriages. He was at once ushered into the office of the Chief Chemist.
‘Roger!’ George Gledhill was on his feet the moment Byville crossed the threshold, his expression very solemn and his tone muted. ‘You’ve heard about Paul, of course. All about him, I mean.’
Dr Byville regarded him impassively. ‘I have.’
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ countered Byville, who enjoyed the advantage of a medical training and was thus a past master at not being stampeded into immediate comment.
‘What would he want to go and do a thing like that for?’
‘I can’t tell you.’ Byville took a chair. ‘But no doubt it will emerge in due course.’
‘Emerge!’ spluttered Gledhill. ‘Good grief, man, how do you think that we’re going to—’
‘He may have left a letter,’ said Byville with a calm that Gledhill found disconcerting.
‘Oh …’ Gledhill’s voice trailed away. ‘Of course.’
‘In my experience suicides usually do.’
Gledhill subsided. ‘Naturally, you know more about these things than I do.’
‘Yes,’ said Byville calmly. ‘Actually, he may have left two letters. In the circumstances.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Gledhill look
ed up. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Didn’t you know? Paul, poor fellow, was in the classic suicide situation. Not that he hadn’t asked for it.’
‘I still don’t understand,’ insisted the chemist.
‘He was caught between a rock and a hard place.’
‘Cardigan and … what else?’
‘I’m not talking about Cardigan,’ said Byville vigorously. ‘I’m talking about his domestic problems.’
‘Oh.’ Gledhill looked blank. ‘I didn’t know he had any.’
‘There was, on the one hand,’ Byville informed him in his usual detached way, ‘a very designing woman and on the other hand an equally determined daughter.’
Gledhill’s face registered a relief that was quite comical to see as he said, ‘I didn’t know about them. It’s Cardigan I’ve been worried about.’
‘What about it?’ asked Byville bluntly.
‘Whether there’d been any … you know.’
But Byville wouldn’t help him with words. ‘No, I don’t know.’
‘Scientist are human, too, remember,’ said Gledhill obliquely, although now he came to think of it he’d never seen any signs of humanity in Roger Byville.
‘Oh, Meggie was human, all right.’ Byville gave a short laugh. ‘If you ask me that was half his trouble.’
George Gledhill shook his head. ‘I didn’t mean that. I’ve been wondering whether things were all right with the Cardigan Protocol—’
‘Lack of rigorous scrutiny in his data?’ suggested Byville in a tone Gledhill didn’t relish.
‘There’s always a lot of pressure for results,’ said Gledhill, conveniently overlooking the fact that some of that very same pressure was applied by Gilroy’s Pharmaceuticals.
‘Publish or perish,’ agreed Byville. ‘That’s the name of the game.’
‘Fictitious results have been known,’ said Gledhill, ‘and fictitious patients, come to that—’
‘And fictitious substances,’ Roger Byville pointed out unkindly.
‘—and,’ said Gledhill bleakly, ‘we haven’t got Meggie’s Cardigan results. The police have got them.’
‘Ah, yes,’ murmured Byville, as if reminded of something. ‘Cardigan. And what substance did you say that was?’
‘A compound of the alkaloid fagarine and—’ The Chief Chemist’s chin came up suddenly. ‘No, I think we’ll leave it there, Roger. Until we see Paul’s results ourselves.’
After Effects Page 8
