Sloan said that he could see that they might, and that the patients might not like them either.
‘And, as I understand it,’ drawled Dexter, ‘the beauty of Cardigan is that it doesn’t have any.’
‘Just the one,’ said Detective Constable Crosby, who must have been listening in spite of all appearances to the contrary.
Dexter looked up alertly. ‘What’s that?’
‘All the people on it suddenly lost a lot of weight,’ said Crosby, turning to Sloan. ‘Don’t you remember, sir?’
‘So that’s what they were up to! Testing Naomite,’ exploded Dexter, a man transformed. For one wild moment Sloan thought the drug manufacturer was going to grab Crosby by the throat and shake him. ‘Say that again, Constable,’ he breathed, ‘and then show me the evidence. This, I want to see with my own eyes.’
‘Apparently,’ said Sloan, valiantly trying now to reduce scientific perfidy to bite-sized pieces for consumption by the superintendent, ‘Gledhill and Itchen were working their own little fiddle on the side.’
‘Ah, they were, were they?’ grunted Leeyes.
‘They were riding on the back of Dr Paul Meggie’s Cardigan trials—not that he knew, poor fellow.’
‘How?’
‘They were conducting a little nested case control study all of their own—’
‘Sounds to me more like they were lining their own nests,’ sniffed Leeyes.
‘—of something they had developed called Naomite.’ It had been Boaz who had ‘bought all at the hand of Naomi’ but that had been in the Old Testament and the superintendent wouldn’t want to know that.
‘Sloan, I am only a policeman, not a Nobel prizewinner.’
‘It’s like this, sir.’ Sloan had had the benefit of a lecture by Al Dexter. That entrepreneur had been very interested indeed in what Gledhill and Itchen had been up to. But not surprised.
Sloan said, ‘They set up this neat little scheme of testing something of their own under the umbrella of Dr Meggie’s perfectly proper pilot scheme which had been duly approved by all the regulatory authorities.’
‘Clever,’ nodded Leeyes.
‘Very clever,’ endorsed Sloan, briefed by Al Dexter, ‘because by using the subjects Dr Meggie’d selected they’d found a way of getting more accurately matched controls and reducing some of the variables and so they didn’t need as large a study.’
‘And I suppose,’ said Leeyes, waving a hand, ‘they’ll argue they were doing it all for the good of mankind anyway.’
‘Well,’ said Sloan cautiously, ‘they were looking for the Holy Grail of all research pharmacists—’
‘A cure for cancer?’
‘An instant treatment for obesity,’ said Sloan, coached by the realist from Dexter Palindome (Luston) plc. ‘Without a doubt they’d have been millionaires overnight, the pair of ’em.’
‘Where to, sir?’ Detective Constable Crosby asked Sloan as he joined him in the car.
‘Kinnisport Hospital,’ said Sloan. ‘To see an artist about his painting.’
‘Oh, him,’ said Crosby dismissively. ‘Full of funny ideas, he is.’
‘You’ve seen Dr Dabbe’s report?’ The pathologist had returned from his weekend in high good humour, the yachting trophy safely under his arm for another year.
‘What about it?’ asked Crosby.
‘Dr Dabbe says Martin Friar was poisoned with fagarine all right as well as one or two other things.’
‘And Dr Byville won’t say anything,’ said Crosby. ‘He’s a cool one, isn’t he, sir? Just sitting there and asking for his solicitor.’
‘You know, Crosby, somehow I don’t think that’s going to make a lot of difference now.’
Sloan was even more sure about this when they’d spoken to Adrian Gomm. The artist had painted a second alembic on the other side—the left half—of the mural. Where the first one had been coloured green, this one, splashing fluid out of the flask, was red.
‘I call it a parable for our time, Inspector,’ he said.
‘Good drugs on the one hand and bad ones on the other.’
‘Quite so,’ said Sloan. ‘Two sides of the same coin, you might say, sir,’ he added, since money came into both sides, too. He knew that now with a vengeance. ‘Can you by any chance recollect whether you were up your ladder when Dr Byville left Dr Friar on Saturday morning?’
‘Sure.’ The artist leaned forward and applied a brush stroke of red paint to the left-hand alembic. ‘Dr Friar walked him out to his car. Toadying, I’d have called it if I hadn’t heard them talking in the hall first.’
‘Go on.’
‘They were discussing a spleen patient who’d just died on the ward, and Dr Byville was telling Dr Friar not to let it worry him.’ Gomm drew himself up. ‘I hope someone would worry if I kicked the bucket that young.’
‘The Administrator would if you hadn’t finished this first,’ said Crosby, adding disparagingly, ‘unless he’s paying you by the yard.’
‘Then what?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan sharply. Dr Meggie’s murder by Roger Byville would be more difficult to prove than Dr Friar’s and what he wanted was more evidence than carbon monoxide poisoning by someone with access to helium and a riot-control agent.
‘Dr Byville told him to come to his car with him and he’d give him a swig of something to make him feel better,’ said the artist, rubbing grubby fingers down a grubby shirt.
‘A Mickey Finn,’ nodded Crosby.
Sloan leaned forward. ‘You could see into the car park through that high window, couldn’t you?’ he said persuasively, ‘because you saw those boys playing round our car when we were here.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Gomm, unaware that he had at that moment stopped being merely a commentator on good and evil in society and had become, willy-nilly, a player in the game of life. ‘Dr Byville got a flask out of his car and handed it to Dr Friar. He took a swig. I saw him.’
Detective Constable Crosby turned the car back towards Berebury, automatically overtaking some traffic he considered dilatory. ‘Clever of Byville to use some of the stuff from the Cardigan Protocol to kill Dr Friar with, wasn’t it?’
‘Fagarine,’ mused Sloan. ‘Dr Dabbe seemed to think it might have a future as a useful drug for the heart.’
‘So that only leaves the paperwork then, doesn’t it, sir?’
‘Yes. And that means,’ Sloan prompted him gently, ‘that there’s no hurry any more and therefore you needn’t drive so fast, Crosby. Cardigan’s over now.’
‘Yes, sir.’ He steered the car smartly past a couple of traffic-calming measures at speed and said confidentially, ‘You know, sir, I worked out why it was called Cardigan.’
‘Did you?’
‘Because “cardiac” means “appertaining to the heart”. I asked Dr Dabbe. Clever, isn’t it?’
About the Author
Catherine Aird is the author of more than twenty volumes of detective mysteries and three collections of short stories. Most of her fiction features Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan and Detective Constable W. E. Crosby. Aird holds an honorary master’s degree from the University of Kent and was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to the Girl Guide Association. She lives in a village in East Kent, England.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The chapter headings are taken from The Doctor’s Dilemma — A Tragedy by Bernard Shaw (1913). Reproduced by kind permission of The Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw estate.
Co
pyright © 1996 by Catherine Aird
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1057-3
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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