Dear Departed

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Hart and Atherton looked at each other. ‘Well, that’s two of us he’s insulted at one go.’

  Bill Simpson lived in a flat in a glum new block in one of the less appealing parts of Luton. Swilley was a good companion, and rode with Slider in silence all the way, where a lesser mortal would have troubled him with questions. Only when they got out of the car did she say, ‘How d’you want to work it, boss?’

  ‘If I’m right, he’s holed up and terrified, so he probably wouldn’t open the door to me. I want you to knock and get us in. Reassure him.’

  ‘Am I police?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I don’t think it’s anyone in authority he’s afraid of.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  The block was long and narrow rather than square, and four storeys high. Simpson’s flat was on the top floor, and the lifts weren’t working. They walked up the stairs, which smelt faintly of urine, but at least weren’t littered with abandoned needles. Glum, but not that rough, fortunately, Slider concluded. When they reached the door, Slider stood back out of sight and Swilley positioned herself in front of the peephole and knocked and rang. After a while she put her ear to the door, and whispered to Slider, ‘There’s someone in there. I can hear him moving about.’

  ‘Try again, and call out to him,’ Slider whispered back.

  She knocked again and called, ‘Mr Simpson? Could you open the door, please, sir? It’s the police, and we want to talk to you.’

  As Slider had hoped, the female voice gave the occupant hope. Swilley saw the shadow on the peephole, held up her warrant card, and smiled.

  ‘What do you want?’ came a muffled voice from within.

  ‘Just to talk to you,’ Swilley said. ‘It’s not trouble for you, I promise you.’

  ‘Let me see your ID,’ the voice said. ‘Put it through the letterbox.’

  Slider nodded, and Swilley obeyed.

  Eventually the voice said, ‘All right, it looks genuine. What do you want?’

  ‘I can’t talk out here. Please open the door. No-one’s going to hurt you. We just want to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘We?’ There was quick alarm. ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘I’ve got my boss, Inspector Slider, with me. He’s really nice, honest.’

  She moved aside and Slider moved out to where he could be seen, and held up his brief as well. That, too, had to be pushed through the letterbox before Simpson would consent to open the door a crack, with the chain on. Slider smiled gently at the portion of a face that appeared, and said, ‘I know you’re frightened, Mr Simpson. We’re here to help you, but you must tell us what it’s all about. Please let me in. I promise you, you’re not in trouble, and no-one’s going to hurt you.’

  ‘You don’t know,’ the voice quavered, and the red-rimmed eyes filled with tears. ‘They killed her, and they’ll come for me next.’

  ‘We’ll protect you. Please open the door.’

  He seemed convinced at last, or perhaps was simply too desperate for someone to talk to to resist. The door closed, the chain rattled off, and then it was opened again with great caution. Slider thought he was still expecting the sudden rush, the door kicked in and himself grabbed, so he stood quite still, until Simpson had examined his appearance fully. As to Simpson, he was unshaven, haggard, and exhausted-looking. His hair was matted and tousled, his eyes bloodshot and haunted, and his face was ravaged by that cruellest of diseases, adult acne. Slider found himself remembering Barrington again, his tortured former boss, who had ended up with a gun barrel in his mouth and half his head on the kitchen wall. Barrington’s face had been scarred like a moonscape from acne. A huge pity washed through him.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said again.

  Simpson’s lips quivered. He was close to breaking. ‘They must have known I overheard them,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘They killed her. It was my fault for going to her, getting her involved. I should have gone to her father, but he was out of the country, and I was afraid to wait. It was my fault she was murdered.’

  ‘No, no, it wasn’t,’ said Slider, edging in gently past him, Swilley following.

  ‘They killed her and they’ll come for me next. You’ve got to help me.’

  ‘I will help you,’ Slider said soothingly. ‘Just tell me exactly what it was you overheard.’

  Atherton put the phone down. ‘The cock o’ the walk’s not come in to work. Skulking at home with a stomach bug, apparently.’

  ‘It may be true,’ Slider said. ‘Fear does go to people’s stomachs sometimes.’

  ‘You think he knows what we – what you suspect?’

  ‘His secretary may have told him we pumped her,’ Slider said. ‘I felt at the time she was suffering from a crisis of loyalties. Or he may just be worried because we turned up at all. He didn’t strike me as a man of great resolution or great intellect.’

  ‘He struck me as a pillock,’ said Atherton.

  ‘That’s what I said. Well, it’s good that he’s at home. We can kill two birds with one stone.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You can come this time,’ Slider said. ‘I may need you. I don’t know quite how the conversation’s going to go.’

  ‘He needs me,’ Atherton observed to the air, in a quavering voice.

  ‘Stop clowning, and let’s get going,’ said Slider.

  Cockerell’s house was in a village called Buckland Common, in the green and delicious edges of the Chiltern Hills. It was modern, large, set in an acre or so of manicured lawn, and built in the presently fashionable mock-Tudor style, whose vernacular involved stuck-on beams, diamond-pane windows, gables, long sloping roofs, and fancy tile hanging, but omitted any chimneys. There was also a tennis court and a deeply authentic Tudor detached double garage. Given its size, position and acreage, Slider reckoned it would probably market at about a million and a half, which hardly put the Cockerells in the poor and needy bracket. Ruth’s resentment of her father’s wealth was obviously comparative.

  It was she who opened the door. Slider recognised her from the photograph in Cockerell’s office. She was of medium height, slender, with dark hair in a hairdresser’s arrangement; she wore slacks and a short-sleeved jumper of expensive but dull knitwear; her face was expertly made-up, which went a long way to concealing that she was plain; but her expression was sullen and, at the sight of Slider and Atherton, became also alert and wary.

  ‘We’ve come to see your husband, Mrs Cockerell,’ Slider said.

  ‘Well, you can’t,’ she snapped. ‘He’s ill.’

  ‘I’m afraid I shall have to insist. It’s very important. Will you tell him we’re here, please?’

  Calculations flitted about behind her eyes, but at last she stepped back and let them in. ‘I’ll tell him, but I don’t know if he’ll come,’ she said ungraciously, and left them standing in the hall while she went upstairs.

  Slider looked quickly around. The interior was different from both Henry’s and Chattie’s, in that everything was modern and expensive, but conventional, arranged without flair or taste. It was the wealthy man’s equivalent of a room display in a Courts’ showroom. The nearest room on the left was the living room, on the right a dining room. The house smelt of furniture polish and new carpet, and was silent, not even a ticking clock anywhere, only the sound of birdsong coming faintly from the garden, struggling through the Tudor double-glazing.

  In the living room, on the floor beside one of the sofas, was an expensive crocodile handbag. Slider gave Atherton a sharp look and quick jerk of the head. Atherton went in and picked it up, looked through it quickly. He held up a mobile phone, one of the new tiny Motorolas that would fit into the top pocket of a man’s shirt. The same sort that Chattie had had. ‘Just one. Switched on,’ he said.

  Slider nodded and Atherton came back to his side. ‘Must be upstairs,’ Slider said quietly. ‘Probably in one of her drawers.’ And he remembered Nutty Nicholls saying once that women always kept things of value, or things they wanted to hide, in their und
erwear drawer.

  Slider took out his own mobile, tapped in the number of Atherton’s, and replaced it in his pocket. Then they waited in silence until footsteps came back down the carpeted stairs, and David Cockerell appeared, looking much less soigné than the last time, in a pair of grey flannel bags, a blue checked shirt open at the neck, and carpet slippers. Slider had a deep horror of men’s carpet slippers and an instinctive suspicion of anyone who would wear them. Cockerell was looking ill enough for his excuse to be true, but interestingly he did not seem to be worried by Slider’s and Atherton’s presence, only annoyed.

  ‘I don’t know what’s so urgent that you couldn’t wait until I was back at the office,’ he opened proceedings. ‘I’m not well, as my wife told you.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry to hear that,’ Slider said. ‘But it’s rather important. I have some things I want to talk to you about. Shall we sit down and be comfortable?’

  ‘You’re very free with my hospitality,’ said Cockerell, with weak indignation.

  ‘It might take a while,’ Slider said. As you’re not well, I thought you ought to sit down, but we’ll talk standing up if you like.’

  Put like that, Cockerell had to submit. He led the way into the living room. Slider almost held his breath over whether Mrs C would come with them, but it seemed she did not want to be left out of anything – or perhaps needed to know what they knew – and she followed them in. They all took seats, and under cover of the general sitting down, Slider pushed the send button on his phone. Atherton’s mobile rang.

  Slider and Atherton both reached for their phones. It had become a universal gesture, these days. Even Cockerell looked about for his own, and Ruth made a half-rise gesture towards her handbag before Atherton said, ‘It’s me,’ and answered it. Slider pressed the end button on his and returned it to his pocket. Atherton spoke a word or two into his phone, then rose and said to the company, ‘Excuse me. I’ll just take this outside,’ and left the room.

  Mrs Cockerell completed the movement towards her handbag, took it back with her to her seat, extracted a packet of cigarettes and lit one, without offering them to anyone else.

  ‘Well,’ Cockerell said impatiently to Slider, ‘what have you got to say to me? It had better be important.’

  ‘I think it is. You see, someone told me a story today, which I hadn’t heard before. It was very interesting. It seems that many years ago an Australian doctor discovered that ulcers weren’t caused by an excess of acid in the stomach, as everyone had always thought, but by a bacterium.’

  ‘Helicobacter pyloris,’ Cockerell said impatiently. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose most people do know it now. But the thing was, they didn’t then. This doctor did all sorts of tests and controlled experiments, and he proved conclusively that it was the bacterium that was to blame, and that you could eliminate it and cure the ulcers with a simple dose of antibiotic. Well, you’d think everyone would be delighted, and I suppose his patients were. But when the doctor tried to go public with his findings, things got rather nasty. The Australian medical profession and the drugs companies banded together to rubbish his ideas and prevent him publishing his findings. They condemned him as a quack and a lunatic. Because, you see, they had been making a fortune for years out of selling antacids to ulcer sufferers, and this doctor’s research was going to kill off the golden goose.’

  ‘What the devil has all this rigmarole got to do with me?’ Cockerell said testily, but there was consciousness in his eyes. Ruth Cockerell was watching Slider like a cat at a mouse-hole, her whole face and body intent and alert. Only one hand moved, lifting the cigarette to her mouth and away.

  ‘I’m getting to that,’ Slider said. ‘Just let me finish my story my own way, if you will, or I shall lose my thread. Anyway, this doctor’s life was made such a misery that he lost his practice, and he was hounded out of the country. He went to America, where eventually he managed to convince people that he wasn’t mad, and his findings were published, and gradually the right treatment began to be offered to ulcer sufferers. Though I believe there are still some doctors who won’t believe it and go on prescribing antacids and special diets. And the thing is that it was more than twenty years ago that this doctor first tried to get his ideas into the public forum. Twenty years! Doesn’t that astonish you?’ His audience didn’t answer. ‘You see, it hadn’t occurred to me before,’ Slider said pleasantly, ‘but of course there’s more money to be made out of cures that don’t work than cures that do, because the sufferers keep having to come back for more, and they will do anything and pay anything for relief. And this is especially true with common, non-life-threatening ailments which are, nevertheless, extremely unpleasant to put up with, like ulcers. And like acne.’

  Ruth’s expression did not change, and her body language gave nothing away, but Cockerell’s shoulders seemed to slump a little, and he drew a breath like a sigh, as of one caught at last. Still, he seemed prepared to play the end game.

  ‘I still don’t see what this has to do with me.’

  ‘Oh, I think you do, but I’m happy to spell it out for you. On Monday fortnight past, you were at the plant in Bedford for the opening of the new block. You were both there, in fact,’ he said, gathering Ruth with his eyes. ‘But you were not together the whole time. There was a rather good and rather liquid lunch, and just after it you separated for a very basic reason, and you, Mr Cockerell, went to the gents’ lavatory with one of your fellow directors.’

  ‘Is this really necessary?’ Cockerell said, with great scorn.

  ‘Yes, it is. Because while you were in there, perhaps fuelled by the champagne, you talked with rather too much frankness about Cornfeld’s new drug, Codermatol. But in fact, you were not alone. Someone was in one of the stalls and, without intending to, overheard what you said.’

  Cockerell looked startled. He stared at Slider in a strained way. Interesting, Slider thought: Simpson’s fears were quite unfounded. Cockerell had not known he was overheard, or, therefore, who had overheard him.

  Slider went on: ‘GCC makes a huge amount of money from selling acne treatments, none of which is really more than a palliative. But Codermatol really works. Obviously if it came out, it would kill off GCC’s golden goose, just as the Australian doctor’s findings about the Helicobacter would have. That was why GCC was so eager to buy Cornfeld Chemicals – so that it could suppress the new drug and make sure it never came on the market.’

  ‘That’s preposterous!’ Cockerell said. ‘It’s total rubbish.’

  ‘It’s exactly what you said in the washroom that you were going to do. You had been in the forefront of the negotiations with Henry Cornfeld. You had to make him believe that you were interested in the new drug, and you had to make the offer for his company high enough to convince him that you were, because you knew that if he knew you never meant to let it reach the market, he would never have let you take over the company.

  ‘Of course, you had no idea your plot had been uncovered until Chattie telephoned you on Monday last week. The person who overheard you had gone to her with the story, in the absence abroad of her father, knowing her reputation for liberal thinking and charitable actions.’

  Ruth snorted at that point, apparently overcome by the praise of the deceased. Slider glanced at her curiously. She changed it to a cough, stubbed out her cigarette and lit another.

  ‘You arranged to meet her on Tuesday, in the hope that you could persuade her to go along with the plot. Did you offer her money? I’ve been wondering what inducements you used. Well,’ he dismissed the question with a wave of his hand as it was obvious it would not be answered, ‘it doesn’t matter. She refused absolutely to go along with it, and warned you, moreover, that she was going to tell her father as soon as he got back from the States exactly what was going on. And she knew, as you did, that Henry Cornfeld was a man of principle, in this if not in his private life, and that he was immensely proud of Codermatol. He would not allow you to bury it. Th
e sale would not go through – and you had so much to lose, hadn’t you, Mr Cockerell?’

  Atherton came back in at that moment, and by nothing more than a blink told Slider that he had been successful. Slider felt a huge rush of relief. They were on the right track. A hideous embarrassment and a writ like a Rottweiler to the goolies were going to be avoided.

  ‘Sorry,’ Atherton said, sitting down. ‘Have I missed much?’

  ‘We were just about to calculate what Mr Cockerell stood to lose if the Cornfeld acquisition didn’t go through,’ said Slider. ‘To begin with there were the shares in Cornfeld Chemicals. Mrs Cockerell’s ten per cent, which had been given to her, and the ten per cent you bought very cheaply from Jassy would both show a very nice profit and net you a huge lump sum. And then there was your job at GCC, the promotion, share options and golden eggs you could expect from a company whose continued prosperity you had assured. So Chattie had to be stopped. You were heard to say, when you got back from the meeting with her, thank God there were a few days left – which meant, of course, before Henry Cornfeld came home. Once she’d had a chance to tell him, all would be lost. She said she was going to wait and tell him face to face. But what if she changed her mind and telephoned him in the States? It wasn’t safe to take the chance. And the next morning, Chattie was murdered.’

  Cockerell made a strangled sound, and his eyes flew wide open. ‘Good God! You don’t think—? You can’t possibly think I killed her? I’m not a murderer! I could never do a thing like that.’ He stared at them wildly. Ruth was keeping very still, her whole body outlined in tension, still watching and waiting, but poised for sudden action. ‘Come on!’ Cockerell pleaded, almost groaned. ‘I wouldn’t hurt her, let alone kill her. I admit I felt a moment’s relief when I heard she was dead, because – well, you were right about the other thing, and she was going to ruin it for all of us, the stupid girl. I said to her, you stand to gain as much as the rest of us. Everybody wins, you, me, your father, everyone. But she wouldn’t listen. Went all pious and ethical on me, talking about the sufferings of millions. I said to her, it’s only bloody acne, not cancer of the liver, but she wouldn’t budge. I could have throttled her – oh, God, I don’t mean that! That’s just a figure of speech! Look, I know what we were doing about suppressing the drug was unethical, and I’m owning up to it, but murder’s something different. I could never kill anyone, never. And certainly not for something like this. It’s fantastic!’