Some Die Eloquent

by Catherine Aird

  ‘Larky Nolson waved to me,’ she said indistinctly.

  ‘I’ll have him for that,’ swore Sloan.

  ‘It’s not a crime.’

  ‘Incitement to violence,’ growled Margaret Sloan’s husband. ‘That’s what that was.’

  An Accident Unit porter wheeling a patient on a stretcher trolley round the corner at that moment rolled his eyes and said to his mate at tea-break time that the young doctors were bad enough these days but he really didn’t know what the police force was coming to.

  To say that Superintendent Leeyes was displeased by the news of the result of the post mortem examination was an understatement.

  Detective-Inspector Sloan was sitting in the Superintendent’s office now. There had been a tacit – definitely unspoken – agreement between police husband and policeman’s wife that he was going back on duty.

  Leeyes was inveighing against all forensic scientists in general but medical ones in particular.

  ‘It’s always the same with pathologists,’ he complained. ‘When you don’t want them to find something they go and do, and when you do want them to come up with the goods they don’t.’

  Sloan maintained a prudent silence. Abstract truth was not a concept that appealed to the Superintendent at the best of times. And this was not the best of times. While it was not the worst of times either, it did not seem as if the Superintendent considered it was the age of medical wisdom.

  ‘So Miss Wansdyke died of her diabetes, did she?’ he rumbled after a moment. Perhaps it was the epoch of incredulity.

  ‘Dr Dabbe couldn’t find anything else, sir.’

  ‘He would if he could,’ conceded Leeyes illogically.

  ‘He’s doing a drug screen, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ That went without saying. Drug screens were routine in this day and age.

  ‘They may discover something in some of the other specimens they’ve taken.’

  ‘Disappointing there being nothing to find at autopsy.’ Leeyes grunted. ‘I should have thought there was bound to be more to her dying than natural causes.’

  ‘Seems a pity to die with all that money,’ Sloan agreed with the unspoken sentiment and then added a witticism of his own. ‘All this and Heaven too.’

  ‘Something doesn’t fit, Sloan,’ said the Superintendent severely.

  ‘No, sir.’ Sloan was quick to agree.

  ‘Doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘No, sir,’ he said immediately. He didn’t discount instinct. He never had. Hunch was half-way to detection. Always had been.

  ‘Doesn’t smell right either,’ pronounced Leeyes.

  ‘No, sir.’ You used all your senses in police work.

  ‘On the other hand I don’t see that we can do a lot more about holding things up.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So,’ said Leeyes generously, ‘you can just step round and tell the coroner we shan’t be standing in his way at all any more over the burial order.’

  His office was not the only thing Dickensian about Mr Robert Chestley. He was one of Her Majesty’s Coroners for the County of Calleshire and a practising solicitor. The man himself gave the impression of barely having left a hard butterfly-wing collar behind. A gold-rimmed pincenez contributed to a general aura of the nineteenth century, which was reinforced by the decor of an office in which little had been changed since his grandfather’s day.

  Detective-Inspector Sloan was not deceived.

  Unseen legal scale fees kept pace with the rise in the cost of living practically of their own volition. There was no need for any other changes.

  ‘You,’ said Mr Chestley, Notary Public and nobody’s fool, ‘have come about the late Miss Beatrice Wansdyke.’

  Sloan agreed that he had.

  ‘Constable King’s away,’ grumbled the coroner. Mr Chestley himself never took holidays. ‘He usually sees to everything.’

  Sloan concurred with that too. They were all agreed that the coroner’s Officer was a useful man to have around at a death. He saved the beatman a lot of routine work, devilled for the coroner and became – thank goodness – very skilled indeed at handling bereaved relatives.

  ‘Your Superintendent,’ said the coroner with emphasis, ‘prevailed upon me to order a post mortem examination.’

  He and Superintendent Leeyes were old adversaries. They had had several notable clashes in the past – usually over the duties of the Coroner’s Officer. This unfortunate policeman existed in a sort of leaderless no-man’s-land. Hostilities had broken out over this more than once.

  ‘Subject to my direction,’ the Superintendent always insisted.

  ‘Subject to my direction,’ the coroner would invariably counter.

  ‘His office derives from the parish constable,’ Leeyes would respond. ‘My pigeon.’

  ‘His office derives from the parish beadle,’ Mr Chestley would reply, ‘and that’s older. My pigeon, I think.’

  ‘Historical duties too obscure to be recorded,’ said Leeyes nastily on more than one occasion. The ancientness of the coroner’s own office always rankled with him. Sir Robert Peel had been so unconscionably late on the scene.

  ‘Jervis on Coroners …’

  ‘The Police Act 1964 …’ Superintendent Leeyes never gave up.

  ‘Useful to have a police officer around in case a crime has been committed,’ the coroner would throw in.

  ‘If you need a detective –’ Leeyes always came back smartly at that one ‘– we’ll send one round.’

  ‘The job calls for a trained man.’ The coroner – a pillar of the legal profession – always had a riposte for every rebuttal.

  ‘Waste of police manpower,’ had figured in Leeyes’s broadside in response to that.

  ‘If a job is worth doing,’ quoted Chestley, ‘then it’s worth doing well.’

  ‘No man can serve two masters.’ Leeyes did not hesitate to fall back on primary sources when it suited him.

  Then someone – the Chief Constable, probably – had called ‘Pax’ and a state of armed neutrality had been resumed.

  ‘So,’ said Mr Chestley to Detective-Inspector Sloan now, ‘I ordered a post mortem, the body being within my jurisdiction.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan. It was the latter point that mattered with coroners, though he never knew why.

  ‘That post mortem examination confirms the cause of death as certified by the deceased’s usual medical attendant.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan again.

  ‘Can you now give me any valid reason why I should not issue a Pink Form B?’

  ‘No,’ said Sloan uneasily.

  ‘I take it, Inspector, that Superintendent Leeyes had felt – er – a pricking of his thumbs.’

  ‘Information received,’ said Sloan tersely. Formal language was a refuge really, not an imposition: a cloak for that which was better not explained. ‘From persons about the deceased.’ The quaint archaism covered a multitude of hidden sources.

  ‘Pink Form B,’ expounded the coroner pedantically, ‘is of course a superior category of medical certificate of the cause of death.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan, surprised at the law’s homely touch. Down at the police station forms had numbers, not colours and letters.

  ‘Though,’ Mr Chestley continued his lecture, ‘as it happens, the result of the autopsy confirms the cause of death as certified by the registered medical practitioner who attended the deceased in her last illness.’

  ‘Dr Paston,’ said Sloan for simplicity’s sake.

  ‘The fact of confirmation is irrelevant,’ continued the coroner, adjusting his pince-nez.

  Not in Sloan’s mind, it wasn’t, though he did not say so. Corroboration was the word the police used for that and they could always use as much of it as they could get in the Criminal Investigation Department of any Force in the country.

  ‘… though,’ Mr Chestley immediately added a rider, ‘no doubt a comfort to the member of the medical profession concerned.’

  ‘Dr Past
on,’ said Sloan again.

  ‘But irrelevant.’ The coroner would not be gainsaid.

  ‘Really, sir?’

  ‘Post mortems,’ declared the coroner, ‘do not always confirm the certified cause of death.’

  Sloan could well believe this. People could be ill with one thing and die from another. Easily. And doctors could be wrong. Even more easily.

  ‘Mind you,’ said the coroner, unexpectedly reverting to his own profession, ‘Counsel’s opinion isn’t always perfect either.’

  Sloan cleared his throat and made a valiant attempt to get back to the business in hand. ‘The Superintendent says …’

  ‘But the system’s better than it was.’

  Sloan said he was glad to hear it.

  ‘Not so simple, though.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Sloan with unfeigned heartiness, ‘is as simple as it used to be.’

  The coroner adjusted his pince-nez again. ‘Before they had Dabbe and his fancy scientific outfit …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘They used to have a couple of old women.’

  ‘Did they, sir?’ Sloan shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He hadn’t come here on a busy day to be lectured on ancient customs. He was a police officer and he’d come about a sudden death.

  ‘They called them Searchers.’

  ‘Really, sir?’ It was Sloan’s invariable practice to allow other people to give him information – however recondite – without let or hindrance. Or interruption.

  ‘Two of them,’ said the coroner gratuitously, ‘used to totter along to the graveside and view the dead before burial.’

  ‘Did they, sir?’ He himself felt no necessity to bring the Bow Street Runners into the conversation.

  ‘They made up their minds what the cause of death was.’

  ‘It was one way of doing it, sir, I suppose.’

  ‘None of this stainless-steel nonsense,’ said the coroner, dismissing several thousand pounds’ worth of highly sophisticated forensic pathology equipment with a wave of the hand.

  ‘No.’ That would have saved the taxpayers a packet, though Sloan did not say so.

  ‘Then they’d pop round and tell the Parish Clerk.’

  ‘No red tape,’ observed Sloan, aware that some remark was expected of him.

  ‘He kept a stroke record,’ said the coroner.

  ‘Saved a lot of paper work,’ agreed Sloan, entering into the spirit of the thing in spite of himself.

  ‘And before you could say “Jack Robinson”,’ said the coroner, ‘you had your Bill of Mortality.’

  ‘Not,’ remarked Sloan, ‘quite as accurate as the Registrar General’s Statistics but good enough.’

  The coroner re-adjusted his pince-nez and looked thoughtful. ‘No three-ring Civil Servant circus either, of course.’

  ‘And so,’ said Sloan, making a game attempt to get back to the matter in hand, ‘you’ll just notify the Registrar General that Miss Wansdyke died from the complications of diabetes?’

  ‘I shall say,’ said the coroner cautiously, ‘that the pathologist so advises me and that I deem an inquest not necessary in all the circumstances that have been presented to me. I may, of course,’ he added unconvincingly, ‘be in error.’

  Mr Chestley might have considered this last possibility a little more seriously had he been present when Sloan got back to the police station.

  Detective-Constable Crosby rang in just after he reached his desk.

  ‘You’ve done what, Crosby?’ demanded Sloan martially. ‘Say that again!’

  ‘Found her dog, sir.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s hers?’

  ‘Long legs and short hair, sir, like you and Dr Dabbe said. An Airedale.’

  ‘Answering to the name of Isolde?’ said Sloan. It was not a name he for one would care to go around the streets of Berebury late at night calling out aloud, but even so …

  ‘Not answering to any name, sir. Not now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Dead,’ said Crosby lugubriously.

  CHAPTER VI

  No one can stop until there’s nothing left.

  At the Berebury District General Hospital Nurse Briony Petforth came off duty from Fleming Ward with relief. She thankfully changed out of her uniform into a soft blue and brown mixture matching skirt and jerkin that went well with her auburn hair. After a moment or two’s consideration she selected a rather more dressy blouse to go under her jerkin and slipped a couple of strings of contrasting beads into her handbag. They would do for later.

  She debated with herself for a moment whether she should telephone the ante-natal clinic again but in the end she decided against it. Roger Elspin knew where she was going. He would come along as soon as he could get away from the clinic and the ward. She sighed. Obstetrics was no speciality for a clock-watcher.

  Dermatology, she decided, was what he could take up after they got married. Skin patients never needed their doctor urgently in the middle of a dinner-party, or got him up in the small hours of the night either. They never died – and seldom got better, for that matter – and yet were always profoundly grateful for whatever could be done for them that helped. Dermatology it would have to be.

  Having thus mentally resolved the professional fate of one promising young obstetric surgeon, she slipped on a duffel coat and made her way across the town to North Berebury. Her cousin, George Wansdyke, and his wife Pauline lived in a detached house in Cullum Crescent. They received her with relief.

  ‘Poor Briony,’ said Pauline Wansdyke with a shudder. ‘Come in and sit down. I couldn’t have looked at Aunt Beatrice like you did. I really couldn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t mind.’ Briony brushed this to one side, marvelling, as she always did, at Pauline’s capacity for striking just the wrong note.

  ‘I couldn’t have done it,’ repeated Pauline Wansdyke dramatically, ‘not if I’d been the last person on earth.’

  ‘We’ve all got to die,’ said Briony briefly. ‘There’s nothing unnatural about that.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with doctors and nurses,’ complained Pauline Wansdyke. ‘They get so unfeeling.’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ countered Briony spiritedly.

  ‘Dr Paston wasn’t in the least bit sympathetic about my bad back,’ said Mrs Wansdyke, not listening. ‘Just rheumatism, he said, and nobody knew how painful it was.’

  ‘Doctors and nurses have feelings just like everyone else,’ insisted Briony Petforth, forbearing to remind her that everyone – but everyone – had known all about how painful Pauline’s back had been. ‘More than some people, actually.’

  ‘Not Dr Paston,’ said Pauline, always inclined to the personal. ‘He was quite unfeeling, I can assure you.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘He gave me some white tablets that didn’t begin to touch the pain and told me to go away.’

  ‘He did say to come back if you weren’t any better, though,’ put in her husband fairly.

  ‘It’s just,’ continued Briony Petforth, more to herself than to the Wansdykes, ‘that doctors and nurses have to adjust to all the unhappiness around them all the time early on.’

  ‘Learn to live with it,’ nodded George Wansdyke.

  ‘But I don’t see why …’ began Pauline.

  ‘Otherwise,’ said Briony, between clenched teeth, ‘they’d go stark, raving mad, that’s why!’

  ‘Pauline was just going to make some tea,’ interposed George Wansdyke swiftly. He was adept now at smoothing over any hiatus created by his wife’s approach to the world. ‘And the children are in bed, so sit down and tell me exactly what happened at the hospital.’

  Briony sank thankfully into a chair. ‘Nothing much, really, George. I identified Aunt Beatrice as Beatrice Gwendolyn Wansdyke, that’s all.’

  ‘Sorry I wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘I would have come.’

  ‘I know you would,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t be helped.’

  ‘I’ve been on to Morton’s,’ he sai
d carefully. ‘They don’t know what all the fuss was about either.’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘No harm done. In fact, now we know for sure that it was the diabetes, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed George. ‘Not that there was ever any doubt in my mind.’

  ‘There was in someone’s,’ pointed out Briony, ‘otherwise …’

  ‘Quite,’ said George Wansdyke. ‘Anyway, everything should be plain sailing from now on, shouldn’t it?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said the girl fervently. ‘I hope so.’

  There was a pause and then she said more casually, ‘Roger’s coming round to collect me as soon as he comes off duty.’

  Wansdyke nodded. ‘Right.’

  ‘We’re going out somewhere to eat.’ She pushed back a stray lock of hair. ‘Not that I’m hungry.’

  ‘No,’ said Wansdyke, ‘but I dare say you’ll have plans to make.’

  She looked at him curiously. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘If you’re not going to live in the house in Ridley Road you’ll have to decide what to do about it pretty quickly, my dear. An empty house is just an open invitation to squatters these days. You can’t just leave it.’

  ‘Don’t rush me, George. Not yet. I’m … I’m not used to Aunt Beatrice not being there yet.’

  ‘Sorry. Take all the time you need, Briony.’ He pointed to a bureau in the corner. ‘I haven’t really begun to look at her affairs anyway. I’ve been devilish busy at work. Malcolm’s been on this export trip to the States. He’ll be back on Thursday, though, for this product launching we’ve got laid on and then I’ll be more my own man again, thank goodness.’

  Briony yawned. ‘Poor Aunt Beatrice never found her particular crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, did she?’

  George Wansdyke shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. But she enjoyed looking for it.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s all that matters.’

  ‘Travelling hopefully, you mean?’ He gave her a quizzical look.

  Briony wasn’t really listening. ‘That’s your front-door bell, isn’t it? Roger’s got away early if it’s him.’