‘And to the lambs going to the slaughter in those terrible lorries,’ shuddered the first girl, her frou-frou quivering with indignation.
‘What about the monkeys at Gilroy’s?’ demanded Darren Clements. ‘How would you like to be cooped up behind bars like they are?’
With heroic restraint Detective Constable Crosby refrained from saying exactly who he would like to see behind bars. The boy with glasses and the notebook had the look of a barrack-room lawyer as well as leader about him and he didn’t like to risk it.
‘Perhaps,’ sneered Cleversticks, ‘you think people can do whatever they like as long as they don’t frighten the horses. That’s a quotation, in case you didn’t know.’
Those were almost the exact sentiments, too, had Cleversticks known it, of the Mounted Police Division. Horses did not go fast enough for Crosby and he let it pass.
‘Don’t forget the factory-farmed pigs,’ contributed another of Clements’s cronies. He was wearing a gold ear-ring himself but no doubt would have objected to a pig being tagged.
‘Pigs is equal,’ announced the boy with glasses. ‘That’s a quotation, too,’ he added hurriedly, not liking the expression on Crosby’s face. ‘George Orwell said it. Not me.’
‘That’s as maybe,’ said Crosby grandly. ‘What I want to know is whether Christopher Granger from Larking is one of your mob.’
‘Why?’
‘Never mind for why,’ said Crosby magisterially. ‘Was he or wasn’t he?’
‘We don’t need to tell you,’ snapped the bespectacled youth.
‘Obstructing the police in the execution of their duty is an offence,’ remarked Crosby.
‘He was for a bit,’ admitted Clements.
‘Then he chickened out,’ said she of the frou-frou contemptuously. ‘No bottle.’
‘Is he still one of you?’ asked Crosby, getting out his own notebook.
‘He stopped coming when the going got rough,’ said one of the other girls. She, decided the constable, could be categorized as a born follower. Where Spectacles led, she would follow.
‘Like when you started to break into Gilroy’s?’ suggested Crosby.
‘Like whenever he wanted to,’ she said carelessly, tossing her hair out of her eyes. ‘It’s a free world, isn’t it?’
‘Except for the animals!’
‘Did you know,’ said Crosby, dredging up from his memory something he’d learned at the police training college, ‘that they used to try animals when they’d killed some one or even stolen something?’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Clements indignantly. ‘You’re having us on.’
The boy with the glasses nodded with some reluctance. ‘He’s right. They had proper trials with judge and jury. Can’t believe it, can you?’
‘Barbarians,’ said one of the young women.
‘Disgusting,’ said the other.
‘What did they do when they found them guilty?’ asked the born follower.
‘Hanged them,’ said Crosby, adding shamelessly as he got up to go, ‘and then they ate them.’
Shirley Partridge had had her mid-morning coffee and had even managed a little chat with the artist in the front hall of St Ninian’s Hospital. Funnily enough, Adrian Gomm’s tattered jeans and deplorable old jumper did not worry her. And, anyway, as she meant to report to her mother later, he was ever so nice when she admired his painting.
She was just telling him that the colours at the bottom of the painting were ever so nice, although she didn’t really like mice, when the Mayday call went out.
Shirley shot back to the switchboard as other people started to run overhead.
‘Mayday! Lorkyn Ward!’ Shirley put all the usual emergency procedures into operation. ‘Cardiac arrest.’ Automatically she put out calls for Dr Byville and Dr Beaumont in case either of them were still in the hospital. And sounded off the Senior Registrar’s bleeper since Dr Martin Friar should definitely be in the hospital and on duty.
And when he didn’t answer, she repeated the calls to his bleeper.
And when he still didn’t answer, sounded them again and again.
Minutes later she had an anguished call from Lorkyn Ward. ‘Switchboard, for God’s sake can’t you stop Dr Friar’s bleeper—it’s driving us mad.’
‘Of course,’ she said frostily. ‘If you want me to—’
‘He’s the one with the cardiac arrest,’ gasped a nurse. ‘We think he’s dead.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Most people … fall back on the old rule that if you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.
‘Dead?’ howled Superintendent Leeyes, quite affronted. ‘He can’t be.’
‘Cardiac arrest,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan succinctly. He had not shared Dr Dilys Chomel’s inhibitions about disturbing the great and the good when they were off-duty and had promptly appraised his senior officer of the news about Dr Martin Friar, Saturday morning or not. It had not made for popularity.
‘And are you anywhere nearer the other sort of arrest?’ demanded Leeyes trenchantly.
‘We’ve cleared away some of the undergrowth,’ said Sloan obliquely, lapsing into horticultural vernacular. ‘I think the Merry Widow’s in the clear because she would have been better off if Paul Meggie had lived to sign that Will in Expectation of marriage that Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery were drawing up for him—’
‘Always presuming that she didn’t know it hadn’t been signed.’ The superintendent could always find an objection.
‘And the daughter,’ persisted Sloan, ‘I would assume, would have been the one to have been disadvantaged by its being signed.’ He added his own caveat before the superintendent did. ‘Always presuming she knew anything about it at all.’
Leeyes snorted. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, Sloan, but I don’t like it.’
‘It may be natural causes,’ said Sloan, who did not understand what had been going on either and was sure he wouldn’t like it when he did, ‘although nothing has been said about Martin Friar having been ill before.’
‘And we still don’t know if the Cardigan Protocol had anything to do with yesterday’s two deaths.’
‘Not Muriel Galloway’s anyway,’ said Sloan, ‘because according to Gilroy’s records she wasn’t on the stuff in the first place. As to Abel Granger—’
‘Yes?’
‘Dr Dabbe took some specimens for analysis so we don’t know yet.’
‘Where’s our friendly neighbourhood pathologist now, might I ask?’
Sloan shot a look at his watch. ‘About level with Cranberry Point, I should say.’
‘Where!’
‘I should imagine that by this time, sir, he’ll be making for the Cunliffe Gap.’
‘You mean,’ he said with rising indignation, ‘he’s out in a boat?’
‘Well out,’ said Sloan. ‘And heading for the open sea.’ And if he knew Dr Hector Smithson Dabbe, ahead of the field too; if ‘field’ was what you called the entrants of a yachting race.
‘Hasn’t he got a ship-to-shore radio telephone?’ That was old technology, not new. The superintendent was opposed to all new technology on principle.
‘We’ve tried that, sir.’ Sloan coughed. ‘I understand that Dr Dabbe didn’t take any form of communication with him.’ The pathologist was nobody’s fool.
‘We’ll get the helicopter to pick him off his yacht then,’ vowed the superintendent. ‘Time it earned its oats. That’d get it away from Traffic Division for a change and a good thing, too.’
‘I very much doubt if Dr Dabbe would consider jumping ship—’
‘Well,’ growled Leeyes, ‘whatever you do, don’t you let that moron of a deputy of his lay a finger on that body until Dabbe comes back.’
‘No, sir,’ said Sloan, although he wasn’t at all sure how he was going to accomplish this.
‘It’s not death from natural causes,’ snarled Leeyes, ‘until Dabbe says so. Is that clearly understood?’
&n
bsp; ‘Yes, sir. I am told,’ advanced Sloan cautiously, ‘by the Administrator at the hospital at Kinnisport where Dr Friar worked, that sudden death from heart attack is not uncommon these days in overworked and highly stressed junior doctors.’
Superintendent Leeyes, whose view of administrators was not high, grunted.
‘He was also,’ carried on Sloan, ‘being expected to—er—hold the fort as a consequence of Dr Meggie’s sudden death as well as do his usual work for Dr Byville and some for Dr Beaumont.’
‘Did he just keel over or something?’ enquired Leeyes in a detached way. He took the view that other people’s workloads—whatever they were—were always lighter than his own.
‘He called his boss, Dr Byville, out to see a dying patient this morning and did a very short ward round with him and he was taken ill some time later.’
‘Too many people altogether dying for my liking,’ remarked Leeyes.
‘And,’ continued Sloan doggedly, ‘as far as we can ascertain at this stage—’
‘Sloan—’ began Leeyes dangerously.
‘Find out,’ amended Sloan on the instant, ‘some of them were going to die anyway.’
Superintendent Leeyes said that he didn’t see what that had got to do with it, and delivered his own apotheosis on the point. ‘What matters is whether they died when they shouldn’t have done. Or if they died because someone else wanted them to. That’s the law, Sloan. You should know that.’
‘Yes, indeed, sir.’ He didn’t doubt that this would be the legal view. It was the more pragmatic medical one that worried him. He was not at all sure now that it would be the same as the legal one. ‘The problem is that Dr Meggie’s death is the only one so far that we have what you might call valid reservations about.’
He was talking to the wrong man.
‘Valid reservations, Sloan?’ exploded Leeyes. ‘People are dying like flies all around us and you go on about valid reservations! The place is like a shambles except that there isn’t any blood. You’d better get busy.’
Saturdays were less different on the farm than they were at either the hospital or the police station. It was the seasons that changed the pattern of work there rather than any arbitrary divisions made by man. Christopher and Simon Granger each had their own duties at Willow End Farm and duly went about them during the morning while their mother and married sister gradually turned their thoughts from a dying man and towards a country funeral.
Unspoken but hanging about the second generation was a miasma of uncertainty about their father’s will. Since they would have all thought it unseemly to discuss this before he was decently interred with his forefathers in Larking churchyard they spent their time in a leaderless hiatus; each thinking their own private thoughts.
Old Mrs Granger thought chiefly—and without affection—about Simon’s wife because it was to her that she knew she would presently be surrendering her home. She knew enough though now about the role of a farmer’s wife to know that it was too demanding a one for a farmer’s mother and had her eye on a small bungalow with central heating near Larking Church. There would be room there for Christopher if he wanted to come with her.
Simon Granger had had enough sense to keep his wife out of the way for the time being. Time enough for her to come into her own when his mother had made her intentions clear. In between inspecting the hay he mulled over what his father’s testamentary dispositions might be. Come what may, he reckoned his sister would come out best. She’d be able to get her portion and go back home to her husband and children without a care.
Christopher Granger walked over to inspect the bullocks, wondering if Simon would want to buy him out and toying with the idea of what he would do if he did. He knew now with a new unexpected certainty that he himself would never want to buy Simon out and saddle himself with debt for as far ahead as he could see.
He’d rather sell up than that.
With some capital he could live for a year or two while he did the one thing he’d always really wanted to do—go to art college and paint.
Idly he wondered if Simon would instead suggest paying him his share of the farm’s income. That would be something to consider. Better for Simon than going to the bank—if Dad had left it that way, of course. And then there was his mother and sister to think about. A hard man his father had been but a fair one. Perhaps he needn’t worry after all. Dad would have done what was best for family and farm, he could be sure.
Today he decided to approach the bullocks from above. He walked along the hill above the valley of the stream. He edged his way round the top field and found himself looking down on to the little patch of grass by the willows where yesterday there had been that car. It wasn’t there now because yesterday evening the police had covered it in tarpaulins and notices about not touching anything and very carefully put it on a low-loader and taken it away.
Now there was nothing but a little flattened grass and tyre marks to show where it had been and where a man had died. A glint of movement over to his left caught his eye and he saw a tiny car—it looked like a child’s toy at this distance—snaking its way up the farm road.
At this distance he could see that it was the maroon-coloured vehicle the rector drove and that it was heading for the farm house. Christopher Granger stood there irresolutely for a little while and then turned on his heel and started back towards home.
There was something he had to tell the police.
Even Dr Byville’s legendary medical composure appeared to have been shaken by the sudden death of his registrar.
‘I was only talking to the fellow a couple of hours ago,’ he said to Sloan and Crosby when he had been retrieved from a consulting session at the private clinic to join the two policemen at Kinnisport Hospital. ‘Doesn’t seem possible.’
‘He was all right then, I take it?’ murmured Sloan. They were all three in the sister’s office of Lorkyn Ward which was where Dr Martin Friar had expired.
The Consultant Physician paused before he answered. ‘Yes and no, Inspector. He did say something to me about thinking he might’ve got an infection on the way though he couldn’t very well have gone off duty in the circumstances.’
‘Ah—’
‘He said his chest was feeling a bit tight and so forth but that he was quite well enough to keep going.’ Byville grimaced. ‘What he told me was that he’d take an aspirin or something as he didn’t want to start on a course of antibiotics if it wasn’t anything—’
‘Only it was something,’ intoned Crosby, ‘wasn’t it?’
‘God, yes! He must have been cooking a coronary thrombosis all along.’ Byville started to doodle on a pad on sister’s desk. ‘I must confess I didn’t think anything of it at the time but now—’
Now, Sloan would have been the first to concede, was different from then. It almost always was.
‘Not surprising, of course,’ went on Byville, ‘that he should have a coronary. Paul Meggie’s death had undoubtedly started to get to him—’
‘As well it might,’ contributed Sloan.
‘And I must say the death in the ward this morning wasn’t a nice one.’
‘Was that patient on the Cardigan Protocol too?’ asked Crosby.
Byville shook his head. ‘No, it was a spleen, not a heart case. Different ball game altogether and miles away, you understand, from the cardiac system anatomically speaking.’
‘I see, sir,’ said Sloan. It was not strictly true that he saw. The human anatomy that policemen were taught—and learned later—was of a very basic variety. In more ways than one.
‘We’ll have to wait for the post mortem to be sure, of course,’ carried on Byville worriedly. ‘He might have had an aortic aneurysm, for instance, or another of that sort of time-bomb type of condition which is just waiting to happen without anyone knowing that it’s there.’ He frowned. ‘They’re beginning to talk in the literature of something called Adult Sudden Death Syndrome now.’ His shoulders sagged. ‘It’s no use our second guessing, Inspec
tor, or theorizing ahead of the facts either.’
‘No, Doctor,’ agreed Detective Inspector Sloan. This was part of his own credo, too, if not his superintendent’s.
Just then the door opened and the ward sister came in. ‘Yes, Sister,’ Sloan said. ‘What is it? I’m sorry we had to commandeer your office—’
This nurse was no Florentinian battle-axe left over from the Crimea. She was youngish and patently more than a little frightened. She came and stood uncertainly in the middle of the room. Sloan didn’t know to which of them she intended to speak and in fact she avoided all their eyes by addressing the floor.
‘It’s the Cardigan Protocol bottles—’
‘What about them?’ demanded Dr Byville sharply.
‘Three of them are missing from the ward drug cabinet,’ she said, flustered and a little breathless. ‘I’ve just checked.’
‘The bloody fool,’ said Byville compassionately.
‘The poor bloody fool.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
All that can be said for medical popularity is that until there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare not face it.
‘Where to now sir?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby as the two policemen clattered down the stone staircase of the old local authority hospital at Kinnisport.
‘The car,’ said Sloan tersely. ‘I need to sit and think. Come along.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Crosby, pausing out of sheer habit to look at the mural on his way across the entrance hall. He regarded what was being painted and called up dubiously, ‘That a vase?’
‘It’s what’s called an alembic, mate.’ Adrian Gomm looked down on them both from his ladder. ‘It’s the sort of vessel in which they used to try to sell the secret of eternal life in Chaucer’s day.’
‘Haven’t found it yet, have they?’ riposted Crosby. ‘Not in this place, anyway.’
‘A little thing like that didn’t stop ’em trying to sell it,’ said the artist cheerfully. ‘You should know that. People were gullible then and they’re gullible now.’
‘That’s something different—’ Crosby showed a tendency to argue as Sloan urged him on his way.
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