After Effects

by Catherine Aird

  ‘No, Tracy, of course Dr Chomel’s not over here,’ said Shirley Partridge on the Kinnisport switchboard. ‘She never comes over here. You know that.’

  The land-line crackled.

  ‘I know it’s urgent,’ protested Shirley, ‘but there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘I’ve rung every single person I can think of,’ said young Tracy over at Berebury Hospital, ‘but nobody seems to know where she is. I’ve sounded her bleeper for her until I’m sick of it but the policeman sounded so upset when I couldn’t get hold of her that I thought I’d better carry on.’

  ‘A good idea,’ said Shirley Partridge wisely. ‘You never know, do you?’

  ‘Neither of the medical wards can trace her,’ Tracy sounded quite flurried, ‘and Sister Pocock’s off-duty this afternoon.’

  ‘What about the staff nurse?’ After all these years Shirley knew her lines of command.

  ‘Hasn’t seen her since the end of the morning. Seems Dr Chomel was very put out when she heard about poor Dr Friar.’

  ‘I don’t blame her,’ said Shirley Partridge, who had not only been very put out herself, too, but hadn’t yet been home to tell her mother about it.

  ‘The others didn’t know him so well, of course,’ said Tracy, ‘with him really being over with you at Kinnisport.’

  ‘Whatever they said about him,’ pronounced Shirley Partridge, generously overlooking the matter of Dr Friar’s shirt sleeves, ‘he was too young to die.’

  ‘Can’t you go any faster, Crosby?’ Detective Inspector Sloan wasn’t looking at the sky now. ‘She’s too young to die.’

  Rightly taking this question as rhetorical, Detective Constable Crosby, racing driver manqué, took a corner in a manner that, had Inspector Harpe seen him, would have kept him out of Traffic Division for ever.

  He pulled the police car out of the road from Staple St James on to the main road with a mere token glance in both directions and put his foot down before he said, ‘Where to exactly, sir?’

  ‘Berebury Hospital,’ came back Sloan, ‘to try to find someone who might know where to find Dr Dilys Chomel.’

  Crouching over the wheel, a cross between Jehu and Mr Toad of Toad Hall, Crosby bent his mind to covering the distance, while Detective Inspector Sloan addressed himself over the car radio to every police officer in ‘F’ Division.

  ‘Seek and detain a young African woman doctor by the name of Dilys Chomel. Five feet seven inches tall, well built with excellent carriage—’ He changed his tone for an aside. ‘What did you say her hair was like, Crosby?’

  ‘Rats’ tails with curls,’ said that young man. ‘Lots of them, all hanging down.’

  ‘They may save her life,’ said Sloan seriously.

  ‘How come?’ asked Crosby, effortlessly executing a pas de deux between two lorries.

  ‘More easily recognized,’ said Sloan tersely, turning back to speak into the microphone. ‘Also needed urgently for interview is Sister Pocock of the Female Medical Ward of Berebury Hospital, present whereabouts also unknown.’

  In the event Sister Pocock was located first and quite quickly. She was spotted from a patrol car stepping out of the hospital in mufti on her way home for the weekend.

  ‘Get her to the microphone,’ implored Sloan as Crosby performed a slalom manoeuvre round a traffic chicane. ‘I need to talk to her quickly.’

  Sister Pocock might have been an old battle-axe but she was also highly experienced in responding first and asking questions or—sometimes, more importantly—not asking questions afterwards.

  ‘Dr Chomel was given a lift down to the town this afternoon,’ she said in her precise, calm manner, ‘by someone to whom she had expressed a wish to be shown an old-fashioned barber’s pole. We happened to be talking about this one day in my office. I understand the caller knew of one in the High Street.’

  ‘Where in the High Street?’ demanded Sloan. Berebury High Street was long and, on a Saturday afternoon, seething with people.

  But that Sister Pocock could not say. She herself went to the hairdressing salon on the corner by the church, if that was any help.

  ‘I know the one with the pole,’ said Crosby, changing gear and turning the car around at speed. ‘I don’t go there myself, mind you, sir. It’s one of those funny places where everyone goes.’

  ‘Unisex,’ divined Sloan. ‘Then it’s the one the other side of the river bridge.’

  ‘He may not have taken her there,’ began Crosby.

  ‘Too dangerous not to,’ said Sloan. ‘He’ll go there first and be seen with her there and then dump her afterwards. Don’t hang about, man. We haven’t got all day.’

  Crosby gave the accelerator pedal a joyous push and shot up the High Street, the police car’s two-tone horn blaring and its blue light flashing.

  Afterwards Detective Inspector Sloan on mature reflection was among the first to admit that a quieter approach might have been better. As it was Dr Roger Byville heard the police car’s siren, and turned his head in its direction. In one swift movement he pushed Dr Dilys Chomel out of his way and started to thread his way as speedily as he could through the shoppers in the crowded street.

  Elbowing his way past first one and then another with scant ceremony, it was soon clear which way he was heading. The progress of the police car through the multitude was even more hampered by the pedestrians instantly turning into fascinated bystanders. Not only did they slow the vehicle down but their very numbers obstructed Sloan’s view of the man.

  He tumbled out of the car and started running towards the river after his quarry. ‘Get the girl,’ he shouted at Crosby, as Byville made a last sprint towards the promenade along the riverside. ‘And stop him,’ he roared to the crowd, as he tore after Byville.

  The doctor turned and looked over his shoulder, putting on an even greater spurt as Sloan closed in on him. The detective inspector caught the flapping tail of Byville’s jacket but before he could get a better grip of the man, he had eeled his way out of the garment, leaving Sloan grasping an empty sleeve.

  The policeman lost a precious second there and Byville reached the iron railing with a clear lead on him. He vaulted over it into the river as Sloan hurtled fruitlessly after him over the paving stones of the promenade.

  Even as Byville hit the water Sloan saw a youth on the bridge struggle out of his jacket and kick his shoes off. The young man steadied himself on the bridge parapet for a moment in the manner of a practised swimmer and dived in after the man in the river.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Juries seldom notice facts and they have been taught to regard any doubts of the omniscience and omnipotence of doctors as blasphemy.

  ‘The problem, sir,’ explained Detective Inspector Sloan expansively, ‘was that almost everything we thought was important was quite irrelevant.’

  ‘It would be very helpful, Sloan,’ said Superintendent Leeyes, who could probably have taught Genghis Khan a thing or two about assertion techniques, ‘if you would refrain from talking in riddles.’

  It was the Monday morning and they were in the superintendent’s office in Berebury Police Station.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He waved his hand over a stack of notebooks and reports. ‘Let me put it like this. Nothing that we had actually been investigating had anything whatsoever to do with the real cause of the matter.’

  ‘Say that again, Sloan.’

  ‘That goes for animal liberationists, Dr Meggie’s—er—domestic problems and even the famous Cardigan Protocol. Mind you, sir, they were all deliberately made to seem very important by the murderer.’

  Unfortunately this unequivocal statement did not make the superintendent any happier. ‘And how then,’ asked Leeyes, in the last resort a self-preservationist, ‘do I explain the waste of police time while you were playing about with them?’

  ‘You could put it down to the workings of a highly trained mind,’ suggested Sloan. ‘That of Dr Roger Byville.’

  How clever that mind had actually been S
loan had not really started to work out until after the doctor and his rescuer had been brought out of the river, both very wet. The doctor was taken into custody, his rescuer borne shoulder high to the Dog and Duck.

  Sloan’s first visit after that had been to Berebury Hospital. A shocked but still game Dr Dilys Chomel had done her best to answer his questions.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, puzzled but alert, ‘we admitted here all of Dr Roger Byville’s patients who had had their spleens removed for any reason.’

  ‘But they didn’t do very well?’ suggested Sloan. He pulled himself up with a jerk. He shouldn’t be talking like the doctors did. He rephrased the question in police plain-speak. ‘Many of them died?’

  She nodded, her long curls swinging. ‘Yes and he told me they would. He said that he was very interested in the treatment of post-splenectomy cases but he should warn me that they were very prone to overwhelming infection and that we would lose more patients than we saved.’

  Dilys Chomel could still not bring herself to use Roger Byville’s name more than she had to.

  ‘And as far as you know this will be borne out by the records on both the Male and Female Medical Wards here?’ Even now there were trained medical-records staff working through these. Sloan had not failed to note the simple satisfaction it had given the nursing staff to call the Administrator in to work on a Saturday afternoon to ruin other weekends to arrange for this task to be done.

  ‘Oh, yes, Inspector. Even the young man we shipped over to Kinnisport died.’

  ‘That,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan soberly, ‘was the whole trouble.’ Early indications from those trained staff who were going through the records of the medical wards at Kinnisport Hospital suggested that the patients admitted there usually lived.

  ‘I don’t understand—’

  ‘But Dr Byville thought you might have done and that was why you were in such danger, Doctor.’ If the girl hadn’t been fully fledged as a medico yesterday, she certainly was today.

  ‘I still don’t understand—’

  ‘And I think,’ said Sloan, pursuing his own line of thought, ‘that we may assume that Dr Martin Friar—like Dr Meggie—had noticed what was going on.’

  ‘But,’ she cried, ‘I still don’t know what that was.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan did. Now.

  ‘Dr Byville had been refused permission by the Ethics Committee to do some comparison trials—that’s where you treat two comparable groups of patients with the same condition with two different drugs, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, some of her own confidence beginning to return. ‘Go on.’

  ‘So,’ said Sloan, ‘I reckon that he gave his patients at Kinnisport Hospital one set of drugs—’

  She sat up. ‘They lived. Martin had noticed that. He told me.’

  ‘And those patients here at Berebury Hospital were given another lot of drugs entirely.’

  ‘And they died,’ said the house physician sadly. ‘I can tell you that.’

  ‘And then,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘along comes this young man whom you had here who asked to be transferred over to Kinnisport to be nearer his family.’

  She clapped her hands to her forehead. ‘I remember Martin saying Dr Byville was cross about that.’

  ‘I’ll bet he was,’ said Sloan warmly. ‘That not only spoilt his series but put his scheme at risk of being discovered by Martin Friar.’

  Dilys Chomel looked him squarely in the face. ‘Are you telling me, Inspector, that Dr Meggie had already tumbled to it?’

  He nodded. ‘That’s what we think. Dr Meggie, like most of the other consultants, had beds at both hospitals and his, being medical as well, were in the same wards.’

  ‘Dr Meggie was a good doctor,’ she said, unconsciously echoing Dr Dabbe. ‘He wouldn’t have sat back and done nothing if he had thought something was wrong—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And neither,’ she said stoutly, ‘would poor Martin.’

  ‘Which,’ repeated Sloan later on to Superintendent Leeyes, ‘is why they both had to die. At least,’ added Sloan, ‘I think to be strictly honest, sir, Dr Friar didn’t have to die.’ It was something that was worrying him.

  ‘What’s that, Sloan?’ Leeyes’s head came up with a jerk. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I should have spotted much sooner that only someone who knew the set-up and that Martin Friar was Dr Meggie’s senior registrar would have rung the hospital at Kinnisport on Friday morning about changing the clinic.’

  ‘Anyone could have found that out,’ said Leeyes robustly, adding to Sloan’s great surprise, ‘The police aren’t perfect, you know, any more than doctors are and it’s a great mistake for anyone to think they are … Doctors lose patients just as the police lose people, and they don’t let it put them off their stride.’ He grunted. ‘And neither should you. Wouldn’t do at all.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Makes for a lot of trouble, that way of thinking,’ said Leeyes, who to Sloan’s certain knowledge had never admitted any such thing before. ‘Myself, I think there’s a lot to be said for faith healing. Now, tell me, where do those two pretty boys at Staple St James come in?’

  ‘Ah … I’ll tell you, sir. It’s a long story.’

  After he’d left Dr Chomel on the Saturday afternoon Sloan had been driven back to Staple St James by an indefatigable Crosby. George Gledhill and Mike Itchen were where they’d been when he’d left them. The two scientists might have been cast in stone as the policeman recounted what had become of Dr Byville. The news, though, loosened their tongues.

  ‘He just wouldn’t take no for an answer, I suppose,’ burst out Gledhill, ‘the cold-blooded old devil.’

  ‘He always did think he was cleverer than anyone else,’ commented Mike Itchen. ‘Mind you, he was really upset when the Hospital Ethics Committee said he couldn’t do what he wanted.’

  ‘You’d have thought he would have stopped when half the patients died,’ said Gledhill, adding by way of explanation to the two policemen, ‘That’s our cut-off point with animals, by the way.’

  ‘You better hadn’t tell young Darren Clements that,’ remarked Crosby. ‘He and his little friends might come back.’

  ‘Just for the record,’ said Sloan, sticking to the point, ‘did whatever Byville was using come from here?’

  Both men were adamant that his supplies hadn’t come from Gilroy’s Pharmaceuticals.

  ‘The Cardigan Protocol, yes,’ said Gledhill unhesitatingly. ‘Roger Byville’s substances, whatever they were, definitely not. It should be quite easy to check, if you wish, Inspector.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ He coughed. ‘There are just one or two other things to be followed up before we go.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gledhill, running a dry tongue over even drier lips. ‘Go on.’

  ‘And someone else whom we’d like to see.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ stammered Gledhill nervously.

  ‘The man whom you’d arranged for Dr Meggie to meet here on Friday,’ spelt out Sloan. ‘At lunchtime. Remember?’

  ‘Oh, him.’ Relief flowed out of Gledhill’s voice while Mike Itchen’s taut posture immediately slackened. ‘That was only Al Dexter of Dexter Palindome over at Luston. He had been getting ready to take a look at the Cardigan Protocol with a view to advising us on any possible production difficulties, that’s all.’

  ‘And will there be any difficulties?’ enquired Sloan.

  ‘Too soon to say,’ returned Gledhill hurriedly. ‘Much too soon.’

  ‘But the trial was completed, wasn’t it?’ said Sloan innocently.

  ‘Yes, yes, Inspector, but we will still need to do a lot of work on it, won’t we, Mike?’

  ‘Quite a lot.’ Itchen hastened to agree with him.

  ‘Why?’ asked Sloan mildly. ‘You’ve told me that you’d already got the meeting with Al—Dexter, I think you said the name was—lined up for just that very purpose.’


  ‘You’ve still got Dr Meggie’s workings, that’s why,’ said Gledhill, tiny beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead. ‘We’d need them before we could get much further.’

  ‘I am sure,’ said Sloan formally, ‘that we shall be able to let you have copies in due course.’

  Mike Itchen leaned forward. ‘And when might that be, Inspector?’

  ‘After our scientists have been over them,’ said Sloan pleasantly. ‘I’m sure you’ll understand that they’ll need to examine them pretty closely first.’

  Gledhill’s face took on a greyish tinge. ‘Thank you, Inspector,’ he managed with a visible effort. ‘Perhaps then we’ll talk to Al Dexter again.’

  ‘We, Crosby,’ had declared Sloan once they were back in the privacy of the police car, ‘on the other hand are going to talk to Al Dexter now. Get us over to Luston, will you? I don’t like loose ends.’

  There was something else, too. Talking to Gledhill and Itchen had been too much like playing hunt-the-thimble for Sloan’s liking. All it had needed was a room full of excited small children calling out ‘Getting warmer’ and ‘Getting colder’. The message when Al Dexter’s name had been mentioned was definitely ‘Getting colder’: that was when both men had visibly relaxed. It would do no harm at all, Sloan had decided, to talk to Al Dexter of Dexter Palindome (Luston) plc. They tracked him down at his home at the better end of the town.

  ‘Sure, Inspector,’ the manufacturer said laconically, ‘I’m ready to take on making Cardigan for the wider world just as soon as Gilroy’s give the word. They know that.’ He cocked an enquiring eyebrow at the two policemen. ‘It sounded to me as if they’d developed a really worthwhile product.’

  ‘Good,’ said Sloan absently.

  ‘And one without any side-effects.’

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan. ‘Presumably that’s good, too?’

  ‘They’re often the problem, you know.’ He tapped his finger. ‘Side-effects can make or break a product.’