A Going Concern

by Catherine Aird

  Detective Constable Crosby came to life. ‘Her mouth?’

  ‘If you ask me,’ said the doctor with apparent irrelevance, ‘there are plenty more old ladies killed by suffocation by their exhausted carers than you people or their doctors ever know about.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan did not dispute that. He had always suspected that ‘losing a pillow-fight’ had another meaning in many an unsatisfactory nursing home for the elderly.

  The doctor was still recounting his actions. ‘I checked her tablets, too, just to be on the safe side. I wouldn’t have put it past her to take the lot if she’d had a mind to …’

  So, noted Sloan promptly, Dr John Aldus, registered medical practitioner, in spite of what he had just said, had been sufficiently impressed by his patient’s last request to make assurance doubly sure in some respects at least.

  ‘They were beside her bed but they were all present and correct,’ said Aldus. ‘Moreover, she hadn’t vomited at all.’

  ‘Who had been looking after her?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘A series of women from an agency in Calleford did the care side and my practice nurse looked in on her every other day. She gave her a blanket bath and so forth, and she had never noticed anything untoward …’

  Sloan made a mental note, though, that the good doctor had already seen fit to ask her.

  ‘That’s only since Mrs Garamond’s old maid died, of course.’ Aldus looked at Sloan. ‘Until then she had always had Ellen. I may say that Ellen was the archetypal ancient retainer and she used to do everything for her.’

  Crosby suddenly came to life again and asked very promptly: ‘And what did Ellen die from, then?’ Like the archetypal family retainer that she had evidently been, Ellen did not appear to have had a surname.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’ Aldus waved a hand in a roughly eastward direction. ‘She died over in Luston while she was visiting her niece. That’s where she came from, Luston.’

  ‘That must have been a bit of a blow for your patient,’ observed Sloan.

  The general practitioner hesitated. ‘I treat a great many old people, Inspector, and my experience is that the older people are the better they take that sort of thing.’

  ‘I can see that they might.’

  ‘And when they are very old, then they just have to think only of themselves – it’s a sort of protective selfishness. We’re talking about the survivors, of course.’ He paused and then added thoughtfully, ‘I don’t know if there’s a moral in that …’

  ‘Probably,’ said Sloan, who had been taught at an early age by a church-going mother all about there being sermons in stones.

  ‘That is not to say, naturally, that Mrs Garamond didn’t grieve about Ellen. She’d been with her for years and I’m sure she’d have been treated uncommonly well.’

  ‘What about family?’ said Sloan, policeman first, last, and all the time when working. In his experience where there was a death there was usually a relative.

  ‘Certainly none that I knew of,’ responded the doctor promptly, ‘and Ellen did tell me on one occasion that Mrs Garamond had been alone in the world for quite a long time.’

  ‘Outlived them all, had she?’ said Sloan, not unsympathetically. These were the owners of houses which eventually the police had to break into, where no one ever called, where the telephone never rang and no post came … where only the milkman provided a link with the outside world.

  ‘Must have done,’ agreed the doctor. ‘My patient once told me that she knew more people in the churchyard than in the village these days.’

  ‘And,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, getting back to the nub of the matter, ‘you expected her to die when she did?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d died at any time,’ replied Aldus frankly, ‘but you never can tell with heart cases, quite apart from the capacity of some old ladies to go on living almost for ever.’

  ‘So, then, doctor,’ Sloan glanced down at his notebook, ‘you were quite happy to issue a death certificate in this case?’

  ‘I was then.’ Unexpectedly he added, ‘I’m not now.’

  The telephone had started to ring again somewhere not far from the consulting room. It sounded like a tocsin.

  ‘Why?’ Sloan raised an eyebrow.

  ‘For two reasons, Inspector.’

  Sloan leant forward. ‘Yes?’

  Dr Aldus drummed his fingers on the desk in front of him. ‘I don’t know which to put first.’

  ‘Either will do,’ said the policeman evenly.

  ‘One reason is because you are here.’

  ‘And the other?’ prompted Sloan.

  ‘The second reason,’ said the doctor steadily, ‘is that I had cause to believe that I might have had a pecuniary interest in my patient’s death …’

  ‘Had you, indeed?’ murmured Sloan.

  ‘And her solicitor … that’s James Puckle – young James, that is – hasn’t denied it. I asked him when I heard that the police were coming to see me and he wouldn’t say I hadn’t.’

  FOUR

  Muffle the dinner bell, solemnly ring.

  ‘Now just let me get this quite straight, Sloan,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  Since it was way past six o’clock in the evening and a Friday evening to boot, the two policemen had made their way out into the country to the home of the Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury and District Hospital Management Trust. They were sitting in the pathologist’s study while Detective Inspector Sloan explained the case of the late Mrs Octavia Garamond to him.

  ‘Am I to understand, then,’ carried on the pathologist, ‘that the police want me to perform a post-mortem examination solely on the strength of an old lady having expressed a wish to her general practitioner that he carries out a superficial – and I use the word in its exact sense – examination of her body after death?’

  ‘There is also,’ said Sloan sturdily, ‘the deceased’s written request, lodged with her solicitors, that the police be invited to the funeral.’ It was not often that he got the chance to beard the pathologist in his own den but Dr Dabbe had left his laboratory and gone home for the weekend. ‘Mrs Garamond died, we think, in the early hours of this morning …’

  ‘Funnily enough,’ continued the pathologist sedulously, ‘John Aldus, the general practitioner concerned, now wants me to do the same thing …’

  ‘Does he indeed?’ said Sloan alertly.

  ‘Because he says that he’s now fairly sure that he stands to get a legacy under the last Will and Testament of the aforementioned old lady.’

  ‘I’m seeing her solicitor first thing tomorrow morning,’ said Sloan, casting an interested eye through the study window and out into the garden beyond. The roses, he noted, at Pennyless Bench needed dead-heading rather badly. Crosby’s attention, though, had been attracted to a row of specimen jars on the mantelpiece. Where other men might have had ornaments or college trophies – or even a clock – there were standing a series of clear glass vessels in which were suspended what looked like spectacularly unhappy pickled gherkins.

  ‘There’s no law, Sloan, that I know of against a doctor being a legatee,’ said Dr Dabbe, who was also a doctor but, if his untended roses were anything to go by, Sloan decided, definitely not a gardener.

  ‘None,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan blandly.

  ‘Moreover, I gather that you’ve already talked old Locombe-Stapleford into agreeing with you …’

  ‘The Coroner,’ quoted Sloan demurely, ‘felt that a post-mortem examination was indicated in the best interests of everyone concerned.’

  ‘If you really mean everyone,’ the pathologist gave a wolfish grin and said pedantically, ‘then I would have thought myself that that rather depended on what I found, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘True, doctor,’ said Sloan, ‘very true.’

  ‘And,’ said the pathologist, this time with a dead-pan expression, ‘you’ve come over here after hours on a Friday evening to tell me this, or was it just a plea
sant evening for a run?’

  ‘I just happened,’ said Sloan guilelessly, ‘to hear the weather forecast for the weekend.’

  ‘Perfect for sailing,’ growled the pathologist who kept his Westerly Longbow at the marina at Kinnisport. ‘Even the tides are right.’

  ‘That’s what we thought, too, doctor.’

  ‘You might even say, Sloan’ – here Dr Dabbe gave the barometer a rueful tap – ‘in the immortal words of the bard, “Fair stood the wind for France”.’

  Sloan coughed. ‘It’s actually, doctor, in a manner of speaking the wind … er … from France that we’re more interested in at the moment.’

  The pathologist looked up. Detective Constable Crosby appeared to be engaged in counting the specimen jars on the pathologist’s mantelpiece.

  ‘We contacted the Coroner,’ said Sloan, ‘because Mrs Garamond’s sole executrix, who is the only living relative of the deceased known to her solicitors, Puckle, Puckle, and Nunnery …’

  ‘No shortage of relatives in that firm, is there?’ observed Detective Constable Crosby to no one in particular.

  ‘Is,’ persevered Sloan, ‘a young woman called Amelia Kennerley.’

  ‘And she’s hardly a relative, is she?’ said Crosby. ‘Doctor, what’s in those jars you’ve got over there?’

  ‘Paralytic ileuses,’ said the pathologist. ‘I collect them, you know. Marvellous specimens, aren’t they?’

  ‘Amelia Kennerley,’ said Sloan concisely, refusing to be deflected, ‘is a great-niece of the deceased’s late husband.’

  ‘Collect them?’ echoed Crosby.

  ‘When I come across them, of course,’ said Dr Dabbe modestly. ‘Little hobby of mine.’

  ‘She is en route to Calleshire at this moment from the Dordogne,’ said Sloan, ‘and so couldn’t be contacted and invited to give her consent to the post-mortem being carried out.’

  ‘Are all of the people those bits belonged to dead?’ asked Crosby, still fascinated by the contents of the jars on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Oh, yes. Very,’ replied the pathologist cheerfully. ‘Now then, Sloan, tell me, are we using this autopsy as the final arbiter of clinical practice or do you really think there’s more to it than that?’

  ‘I don’t know, doctor. We haven’t got any more to go on than I’ve already told you.’ He stood up, ready to take his leave. ‘I understand that the deceased had known for some time that she wasn’t getting any better and had told her solicitor so.’

  ‘Ah, that was probably only to get him to get a move on with writing her Will for her,’ said Dr Dabbe, but he said it without conviction.

  ‘My late client’s exact words, as I remember, Inspector,’ said James Puckle, ‘were “like to die”.’

  The offices, down by the bridge, of Puckle, Puckle, and Nunnery, Notaries Public, had been built in the early part of the eighteenth century. As the partner who specialized in matters to do with the Town and Country Planning Acts (and a man old before his time if ever there was one), was fond of pointing out, there were telltale signs on the façade of their building by which the experts knew this.

  There was, for instance, a string course at roof-level which had become law in 1707 by virtue of the Second London Fire Act calling for the replacement of the old wooden cornices and modillions that had so accelerated the spread of the Great Fire of London in 1666.

  ‘“Like to die”?’ Detective Inspector Sloan duly entered the words into his notebook.

  The building fashion first set in London had taken its time to reach the sleepy little market town of Berebury, deep in rural Calleshire, but it had got there in the end. It had soon been followed by visible evidence of the implementation of the new law requiring the universal recessing of window frames by the statutory three inches, another measure planned to delay the advance of fire in timber and brick buildings.

  Detective Inspector Sloan was not interested in windows. To him the building just looked old.

  James Puckle, though, still had his mind harking further back in history than the Great Fire of London.

  ‘“Like to die”, Inspector,’ he said, ‘is just one of the expressions that used to be very common in the preamble to a great many medieval Wills.’

  ‘Really, sir?’ There was only one last Will and Testament in which Sloan was interested just at this moment and that belonged to Octavia Garamond.

  ‘Another very popular one was “written nigh unto death”.’ The solicitor – he wasn’t very old himself and looked rather out of place in these archaic surroundings – glanced across at the two policemen and said: ‘You see, Inspector, in times gone by our ancestors usually knew when they were going to die …’

  ‘Or had been told,’ put in Sloan.

  ‘Or had been told,’ concurred Puckle, ‘and they weren’t mealy-mouthed about it as we are in our day and age.’

  ‘Called a grave-digger’s spade a sexton’s shovel, did they?’ said Detective Constable Crosby, who was finding his chair uncomfortable.

  ‘I don’t mean, though, Inspector,’ said James Puckle, diplomatically sticking to the point, ‘to give the impression that Mrs Garamond’s was a death-bed Will, because it wasn’t.’ He steepled his fingers and assumed a solemn expression, immediately looking much older. ‘Death-bed Wills,’ he pronounced solemnly, ‘are usually bad Wills.’

  ‘I can see that they might be,’ agreed Sloan, remembering that the great Dr Samuel Johnson had said that when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. A death-bed sounded a much quicker proposition to him.

  ‘The profession doesn’t like them at all,’ went on James Puckle. ‘Working against the clock doesn’t make for considered thought.’

  ‘More haste, less speed,’ said Detective Constable Crosby helpfully.

  Detective Inspector Sloan, who worked against the clock all the time, did not say anything at all.

  ‘Quite apart from that,’ said the solicitor, ‘I can assure you that my client had given a great deal – I think I may say, a very great deal – of consideration to her – er – testamentary dispositions.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Sloan, the writing of Wills being, in his view, like the marriage contract, and not something to be entered into lightly and unadvisedly.

  ‘In fact, I think you might like to know, gentlemen,’ said James Puckle, ‘that Mrs Garamond’s last Will and Testament was dated almost two years ago.’

  Sloan tried to look suitably grateful for this less than riveting disclosure.

  ‘When it was drawn up by my grandfather,’ said James Puckle.

  Sloan said: ‘I remember him well …’ It wasn’t like living in a big city; in small country towns policemen really got to know solicitors.

  ‘And he was the executor of it as well,’ said Puckle.

  ‘Let me see, sir, he must have died a year or more ago now …’

  ‘Nearly two,’ said James Puckle.

  ‘So …?’

  ‘So Mrs Garamond executed a codicil …’

  ‘Appointing Amelia Kennerley instead?’ said Sloan.

  ‘And revoking the charging clause as well,’ nodded Puckle regretfully.

  Sloan looked up, asking bluntly, ‘Why?’ There was, after all, no shortage of Puckles in the firm, to say nothing of Charles Nunnery, who was, to Sloan’s certain knowledge of the Magistrates’ Court, still going strong.

  ‘Mrs Garamond – er – took against the remaining partners for some reason and appointed Miss Kennerley in my grandfather’s place …’

  Sloan’s note this time was a mental one. It would be committed to his notebook later.

  ‘My father – he was senior partner by then – advised Mrs Garamond most strongly of the unwisdom of entrusting the winding-up of an estate like hers to one so young. Moreover,’ he added significantly, ‘to someone quite unknown to her.’

  ‘And,’ pointed out Sloan, making a note now, ‘someone who wasn’t strictly speaking even a relative.’
r />   ‘Precisely, Inspector. But I understand from my father that our client was adamant in this matter.’ He suddenly looked quite boyish and grinned as he said: ‘Actually I found Mrs Garamond rather more than quite adamant in all matters.’

  ‘If,’ remarked Detective Constable Crosby out of the blue, ‘she was “Like to die” two years ago, then she took her time about it, didn’t she?’

  ‘The last time I saw Mrs Garamond,’ said the solicitor, ‘she quoted King Charles II to me.’

  ‘The Merry Monarch,’ said Sloan, dredging something up from a classroom memory.

  ‘“A merry monarch, scandalous and poor” was what they said about him,’ rejoined James Puckle instantly, ‘but what my client said to me then was that she was, like Charles II, “being an unconscionable time a – dying”.’

  ‘She wasn’t like him, poor, though, was she?’ ventured Detective Inspector Sloan, policeman rather than historian any day.

  ‘Oh, dear me, no, Inspector. On the contrary, in fact …’ He paused. ‘Quite on the contrary, I should say.’

  ‘Money talks,’ observed Detective Constable Crosby to nobody in particular.

  Sloan leaned forward slightly and said to the solicitor: ‘Do you have any information at all, Mr Puckle, as to why the police should have been invited to attend Octavia Garamond’s funeral?’

  He shook his head. ‘None. It was merely one of a number of actions enjoined upon us by our client …’

  Once a client, always a client, thought Sloan, was obviously a watchword at the firm of Puckle, Puckle, and Nunnery. Even if the charging clause had been revoked.

  ‘Scheduled to take effect as soon as she died, including the placing of her obituary notices in various specified newspapers. This, you understand, Inspector, was in case Miss Kennerley could not be located before the funeral or declined to act as sole executrix.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Crosby with something like animation, ‘that she hadn’t said she would?’

  ‘I mean,’ said James Puckle, ‘that she hadn’t been asked.’

  ‘That’s funny for a start,’ said the constable.

  The mind of Detective Inspector Sloan though was working along quite different lines. ‘These requests that Mrs Garamond left with you, Mr Puckle …’