‘If that’s your car by the front door,’ said Adrian Gomm, peering through an upper window, ‘then there’s some kids out there looking as if they’d like to try it on for size.’
As a manoeuvre, that worked quicker and Sloan was soon sitting in the relative privacy of the police car. Superintendent Leeyes would have to be kept in the picture, of course, but not before he had first tried to work one or two things out for himself.
Sloan had settled his frame in the front passenger seat, and stretched his legs out as far as they would go. ‘There’s something, somewhere, that we’re not getting, Crosby. Things do not add up whichever way they are looked at.’ He hesitated, thinking aloud. ‘There’s almost too much that doesn’t fit.’
‘A crystal ball would come in handy,’ volunteered Crosby unhelpfully.
‘And one of the things I can’t understand,’ mused Sloan, ‘is where the woman in the case comes in.’
‘Cherchez la femme,’ said Crosby, still unhelpful.
‘All the telephone calls we can’t trace were made by a woman, remember?’
‘For my money,’ said Crosby largely, ‘Bunty Meggie is the one with means, motive and opportunity.’
‘Why should she get steamed up about animal rights and put something on the Galloways’ garage doors?’
‘A blind,’ pronounced Crosby.
‘I think,’ said Sloan, ‘that it would be useful to have a tape-recording of the voices of all of them, including Shirley Partridge. She sent for us quickly enough when Dr Friar collapsed. We mightn’t have been told for ages … oh, and those girls with Darren Clements and his crowd—’
‘They don’t talk,’ said Crosby feelingly. ‘They shriek.’
‘And Dr Dilys Chomel,’ said Sloan. ‘The girl on the switchboard said she’d been in touch with Martin Friar more than once today because she’d made the telephone connection—’
Crosby hitched a shoulder up under his seatbelt. ‘No. I talked to Dr Chomel about that and she said they only discussed the spleen patient who died on Lorkyn Ward this morning. Apparently she knew the man because he’d started off in Berebury Hospital and then got transferred over to St Ninian’s not long before he died.’
‘She was looking after some of Dr Meggie’s Cardigan Protocol patients as well though, don’t forget.’
‘Perhaps that’s a blind, too,’ said Crosby. ‘The medics go in for double-blind trials, don’t they?’
‘As for the Merry Widow—’
‘She could have been luring him to his doom,’ said Crosby. ‘Him and anyone else.’
‘Siren voices, all of them,’ remarked Sloan absently.
‘Pardon, sir?’
‘The sirens,’ Sloan informed him, his mind on something else, ‘were sea nymphs whose songs were irresistible to men. They lured sailors on to the rocks.’
‘Christopher Granger’s a bit of a wet,’ said Crosby, whose line of thought was not too difficult to follow, ‘but his voice is all right.’
‘Dr Byville thought with Dr Friar it might have been a case of his doing a bit of experimental work on the Cardigan Protocol all on his own.’
Detective Constable Crosby had inserted himself into the driver’s seat and now started to play about with the radio. ‘Making his own name by finding out for himself what was wrong with Cardigan? That was what Dr Byville meant, wasn’t it, sir?’
‘It’s been done before,’ said Sloan, his mind going back to the library at his old school. There had been a painting there of Dr Edward Jenner vaccinating his own son against smallpox. What had struck Sloan then was that there had been no sign anywhere in the picture of an anguished and protesting Mrs Edward Jenner looking on. His own mother would never have let any doctor try out something new on him for the sake of experiment and he supposed most mothers would feel the same. Perhaps Dr Jenner hadn’t told Mrs Jenner what he proposed to do to their son. That would have been one way round the difficulty. Now they had something called ‘informed consent,’ didn’t they?
‘Some people will do anything to hit the headlines,’ said Crosby censoriously.
‘Fame is the spur,’ agreed Sloan.
If the picture was still there the present generation of schoolboys probably thought it was a depiction of a youth being initiated by a drug-pusher.
‘Not worth it,’ said Crosby confidently. ‘You’re a long time dead.’
The radio in the police car crackled and suddenly came to life. The disembodied, slightly nasal voice of the operator at Berebury interrupted them. ‘A message has been received from a Christopher Granger of Willow End Farm, Larking—’
‘Receiving you,’ said Crosby, sitting up, his hand on the ignition switch.
‘He says,’ said the voice, ‘that he wishes to talk to Detective Inspector Sloan about the late Dr Paul Meggie.’
‘He does, does he?’ muttered Sloan out of earshot of the microphone. ‘Well, in that case we’d like to talk to him.’
In fact talking to Christopher Granger was made easier by the young farmer’s eagerness to say what he had to say. The words tumbled out.
‘I wonder if you’d mind repeating that, sir?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan in tones of arctic formality.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Christopher Granger readily. ‘I thought you’d understood.’
‘I think I did,’ said Sloan grimly.
‘When I found Dr Meggie’s car,’ said Christopher Granger all over again, ‘not of course that I knew it was Dr Meggie’s car at the time, you understand—’
‘I understand,’ ground Sloan between clenched teeth. ‘Go on.’
‘There was something lying on top of that folder on the passenger seat that you took away.’
‘That’s what I thought you said.’
‘It was a piece of stiff paper—almost cardboard—with this slogan written on it.’
‘Which said?’ Sloan’s pen was in his hand.
Christopher Granger had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘“No tests on dumb animals”.’ He hesitated. ‘It was written in red like it was blood, with drips drawn down from the letters.’
At this moment the only blood Sloan wanted was Christopher Granger’s but a long, long training prevented him from saying so.
‘I know I shouldn’t have touched it, Inspector, but I didn’t think at the time—’
‘That’s true,’ said Sloan peremptorily. ‘You didn’t. But you’ve thought now, have you?’
‘All I knew,’ he flushed miserably, ‘was that I’d come in for enough flak as it was from everyone on the farm for how I felt about cruelty to livestock and I didn’t think I could take any more, not with Dad dying and everything—’
‘Proper little mother’s helper, isn’t he, sir?’ said Crosby as they left a considerably chastened Christopher Granger at the farmhouse and started back down to the main road.
‘He might at least have kept that paper and given Forensics a chance,’ returned Sloan, ‘instead of just dropping it in the stream.’
Crosby jerked his head. ‘Not that we’d be a lot further forward if we did have it in our hands that I can see.’
‘We could’ve compared the writing with the graffiti on Gordon Galloway’s garage door,’ said Sloan, since he was, after all supposed to be teaching the constable something. On his part Crosby was supposed to be learning something—but that was different. ‘It would be evidence,’ he went on bitterly. ‘Do you realize, Crosby, that the only hard evidence we’ve got in this case so far are some tiny blisters round Dr Meggie’s mouth—’
‘And another doctor’s body,’ broke in the constable.
‘Cause of death so far unknown,’ said Sloan flatly. ‘And likely to remain so until Dr Dabbe gets back to dry land.’
‘There’s the Cardigan Protocol,’ said Crosby, slowing up for the junction with the metalled road. ‘Where to, sir?’
‘Headquarters,’ said Sloan without enthusiasm. Superintendent Leeyes would have to be disturbed on a Saturday all over again. And it was od
ds on that he wouldn’t like it. That quotation about the pitcher going to the well once too often had more than a ring of truth to it as far as the superintendent was concerned. ‘And as for the Cardigan Protocol, Crosby, Mrs Galloway didn’t have the real stuff and died, and Abel Granger did have it and also died. Martin Friar may or not have had it and may or may not have died from an overdose of it if he did.’
‘That must prove something, sir,’ said Crosby, touching the accelerator.
‘I dare say it does,’ said Sloan acidly, ‘but you tell me what.’
Crosby paused for thought. ‘That whoever wrote those words on Gordon Galloway’s door and rung us up to say she was on a drug trial didn’t know she wasn’t on the real thing or wanted us to think she was?’
‘That’s a possibility,’ admitted Sloan fairly. ‘Or if one person wrote the slogan and a different person rung, not one and the same, then neither of them did.’
Crosby tried again. ‘That the Cardigan Protocol didn’t make a blind bit of difference?’
‘That’s another possibility, although something made a big difference to Dr Martin Friar,’ observed Sloan bleakly as the police car picked up speed. ‘But what?’
‘Three doses of Cardigan?’ suggested Crosby, spotting a milk tanker ahead and moving out to position the car for overtaking on the narrow country road.
‘Since we have got no further with our investigations,’ began Sloan acidly, ‘I am in no particular hurry to get back to Berebury, let alone to meet my Maker.’
‘No, sir,’ agreed Crosby, abating the car’s speed not at all and getting ready to perform a virtuoso manoeuvre round the other vehicle. ‘Don’t worry, sir.’
‘There is therefore no need for party tricks at the wheel,’ said Sloan urgently.
‘Sorry, sir.’
Sloan wasn’t listening. He was suddenly thinking about party tricks. Last Christmas he’d been the one to collect his infant son from a children’s party while his wife, Margaret, did some Christmas shopping of her own. He’d got there early. And he’d been in time to see the bluff, gruff Father Christmas turn his back on the children for a moment, then face them again. Throwing off his red robe and pulling off his white beard and revealing a white satin outfit underneath, he had turned himself into the fairy at the top of the Christmas tree. It had only been when he spoke again—this time in a high feminine voice—that the little children had been convinced of what a wand could do.
It hadn’t been a wand that had turned a man’s voice into a woman’s one: and this particular father had taken the trouble to find out what had completed the party trick.
A few breaths of the gas helium.
When Detective Inspector Sloan next looked up, the milk tanker was nowhere to be seen and the lure of the open road was exerting its usual effect on Crosby’s speed.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said Sloan, ‘about going back to Berebury. Head for Staple St James—’
He very nearly added something about not sparing the horses, James, but with Crosby at the wheel decided against it. He wanted to live to catch a murderer.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The man who does evil skilfully, energetically, masterfully, grows prouder and bolder at every crime.
Detective Inspector Sloan looked up at the sky as an alternative to looking at the road ahead while Crosby was at the wheel. The only thing that the detective constable really enjoyed was driving fast cars fast, which was precisely why Inspector Harpe would not have him in Traffic Division.
Sloan noted that the sky was clear except for a few high clouds but there was a good stiff breeze bending the treetops, which was just exactly what Dr Dabbe would have wanted for his sailing race. Fair stood the wind for the pathologist, all right, but all the same Sloan would be glad when the doctor was safely back on the job at his mortuary table. It wasn’t that he would be unbearably surprised to learn that young Dr Friar had died from an overdose of whatever was in the Cardigan Protocol. He knew only too well that too much of anything—including alcohol—meant to cure could be fatal. Equally, he wouldn’t be bowled over to learn instead that the doctor had had a heart attack—but the police did need to know which—and soon.
Sloan took another look at the sky. He wasn’t quite so sure how favourable the conditions were for two policemen on their way to a pharmaceutical research firm but time would tell if they were propitious for detection.
As the police car turned off the main road towards the village of Staple St James something Dr Dabbe had said came into Sloan’s mind. The pathologist had thought that, showman or not, Dr Meggie had been a good doctor. It was a tiny little fact in a case that was, so far, noticeably short on hard fact. Although its significance—if it was significant—had so far escaped him, Detective Inspector Sloan conscientiously took it into consideration.
‘Sorry, Crosby, I didn’t quite catch that.’ Actually, he hadn’t even realized the constable had been speaking. They had arrived at Gilroy’s place at Staple St James without his noticing.
‘Which way in, sir? Back door or front?’
‘Back.’ This was no time for niceties.
In the nature of things policemen become specialists in measuring degrees of fear. When Detective Inspector Sloan had interviewed George Gledhill and Mike Itchen earlier that morning he had known that he had been talking to two frightened men. Now they were aware of Dr Friar’s death and he, Sloan, knew that he was talking to two very frightened men indeed.
Fear, of course, was an emotion that took people differently. There were those who became practically catatonic, paralysed to the point of being unresponsive to the most skilled police interrogation. Others couldn’t stop talking, their tongues loosened by an anxiety too great to handle.
As it happened Gledhill was inclined to silence and Itchen to speech. Sloan took a policy decision about interviewing them separately. If he talked to one man alone, the other would have time to think. He didn’t want that to happen.
Uninvited he pulled up a chair in Gledhill’s office and said cosily that it was time for a chat. ‘A real chat,’ he added.
‘About what?’ managed Itchen, licking lips that were obviously dry.
‘Let’s start with the Cardigan Protocol, shall we?’
‘Nothing to add to what we told you earlier.’ Gledhill was quite taciturn.
‘What would be the fatal dose, would you say?’ asked Sloan, eyeing them both. ‘We shall of course be doing a full analysis ourselves—’
The two scientists exchanged glances. It was the Chief Chemist who spoke. ‘That would depend in the first place on the condition of the patient,’ said Gledhill.
‘Shall we postulate a perfectly healthy young male?’ said Sloan. From where he was sitting he could see over Gledhill’s shoulder into the garden. The maze was prominent in the foreground.
‘If any substance had been taken on an empty stomach,’ said Itchen, ‘it would have made a difference—’
‘So?’ persisted Sloan. This case, he decided, had a lot in common with a maze. Each and every new pathway except one led up a blind alley. The trick was to find the right pathway at every turn.
Itchen spoke with obvious reluctance. ‘Half-a-dozen tablets, say, would probably be enough to set up a fatal hypotension.’
‘And the number of tablets in each bottle of the Cardigan Protocol?’ asked Sloan.
‘Ten,’ said Gledhill, his expression strained.
‘That’s the real tablets, not the placebo,’ put in Itchen, who was looking distinctly white about the gills.
‘Like Russian roulette, isn’t it?’ observed Crosby chattily.
Nobody smiled.
‘Are you—er—postulating that that is what killed Dr Friar, Inspector?’ asked Itchen.
‘I’m asking questions about a number of anomalies,’ returned Sloan crisply. ‘Tell me, who else on the staff of St Ninian’s and Berebury Hospitals has been doing work for you?’
There was something almost palpable about the way in which b
oth men relaxed at the change of tack. Gledhill’s tenseness eased and Itchen, his colour returning, started to resume some of his laid-back style. This, Sloan noted, was obviously safe ground for them. He would go back to the dangerous places in a moment and catch them off-guard.
‘Dr Hulbert checked some data for us. Haematology’s his speciality,’ offered Itchen, ‘but then—’
‘Then he married money and lost interest in the extra work,’ finished Gledhill.
‘And Dr Beaumont’s never cared for research. Says he’s busy enough getting the work done properly and—’ Itchen was still the more voluble of the two men.
This was something Detective Inspector Sloan understood. Down at the police station they had those who saw everything as a statistic and those who got on with the job. ‘And?’
‘And there’s Dr Byville, of course,’ said Itchen, ‘but he’s not doing anything for Gilroy’s at the moment.’
Gledhill said, ‘Dr Byville put up a research project to the Committee but they turned it down last month.’
‘Oh?’
‘A comparison trial on post-splenectomy patients,’ said Gledhill readily enough.
‘We’ve got a promising drug,’ chimed in Itchen, ‘for preventing placenta praevia but Mr Maldonson’s making too much money as it is to want to do a controlled trial.’
‘What will you do about that?’ Sloan was always interested in how other people solved their problems.
‘We’re getting a younger man in Luston to do it for us,’ replied Itchen. Luston was in a decidedly more workaday part of Calleshire than Berebury.
George Gledhill leaned over and began rather tentatively, ‘Inspector, should there be anything about Dr Meggie’s or Dr Friar’s deaths that you think we should know, would you—’
Detective Inspector Sloan wasn’t listening. He was staring out at the maze, his mind elsewhere.
Suddenly he reached across Gledhill’s desk and picked up his telephone. ‘This an outside line?’
The Chief Chemist nodded.
Sloan dialled an emergency number. ‘Get me Berebury Hospital,’ he barked. ‘I need to talk to Dr Dilys Chomel. And quickly.’ He pointed at both scientists. ‘You stay here. Crosby, you get the car started. We need to move quickly.’
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