‘Police?’ he said to Detective-Constable Crosby, rolling his eyes. ‘What is it this time? Something fallen off the back of a lorry again?’
‘Not today,’ said Crosby cautiously. ‘So far.’
‘Or have you come to tell me that you’ve found that load of aggregate that got nicked on the Calleford road?’
‘Not yet,’ said Crosby, ‘but I dare say we shall.’
‘That’s all very fine and large,’ said the foreman, ‘but it won’t help me. I had to get on to the quarry sharp for another load.’
‘Perhaps next time,’ suggested the constable, ‘the driver will use another transport café.’
The foreman gave him a shrewd look. ‘Mother Meg’s again? I’ve always said it was a proper thieves’ kitchen.’
‘Meals come a bit expensive there sometimes.’ Detective-Constable Crosby surveyed the motorway site from the vantage point beside the foreman’s hut. ‘Mucking Calleshire about a bit, aren’t you?’
‘Don’t you start …’
‘Like being on the moon but dirtier.’
The foreman twisted his lips. ‘You should have heard them at the Enquiry.’
Crosby grinned. ‘Our Mr Malcolm Darnley from Berebury there?’
‘It’s a wonder he didn’t get arrested.’
‘It’s a free country.’
‘Stabbed in the back, then,’ said the foreman.
The constable waved an arm. ‘Well, he did have something to complain about, didn’t he?’
‘Said he’d lie down under the first bulldozer.’
‘Someone nick that too?’
‘Wish he had and all,’ grumbled the foreman.
‘Saved a lot of trouble, would it?’ said the constable, looking round.
‘Someone,’ said the foreman with deep conviction, ‘will put that man Darnley in a wooden overcoat one day.’
‘A cement one, more likely,’ said Crosby, looking round at the desolate waste of concrete that surrounded them.
‘What? Oh yes. I dare say.’
‘It’s been done before,’ said the constable seriously. ‘At least we think it’s been done before. It’s not easy to prove.’
‘I can see,’ said the foreman, casting his eyes in the general direction of an embryo flyover, ‘that you’d likely be a bit short on evidence.’
Detective-Constable Crosby followed his gaze. ‘No more bother with that crane over there?’ he enquired solicitously.
‘Not that I’ve heard about.’ The foreman rolled his eyes. ‘Not that I get to hear everything, mind you.’
‘No,’ said Crosby consideringly, ‘you wouldn’t, would you?’
‘Not in my job,’ agreed the foreman. ‘Mark you, there’s some things I don’t want to know about, thank you very much.’
‘I can see that,’ said the constable.
The foreman indicated the crane. ‘We lock it up of nights now.’
‘Good,’ said Crosby pleasantly. ‘The Inspector will be glad to hear it.’
‘Who would have thought,’ demanded the foreman of the world at large, ‘that anyone would have wanted to use a great thing like that for safe-breaking?’
‘Someone thought of it,’ said Crosby. Larky Nolson hadn’t been the only criminal to have had trouble with a safe in their manor.
The foreman shrugged his shoulders. ‘There are always more ways than one of killing the canary.’
‘It got it open all right,’ rejoined the constable. ‘By the time we got here there was money everywhere.’
‘If we were to drop you from that height on to a spot of hard-standing,’ said the foreman, ‘I dare say you’d break open too.’
‘Yes,’ said Crosby simply. The manifold highly unpleasant ways in which various members of the police force had died in the course of the execution of their duty was one of the many facts that they impressed on them at their Training College. There was a book, too, where they turned over a page every day … He pulled out his notebook. ‘I’m looking for a man …’
‘I didn’t think you were just passing the time of day.’
‘Name of Nicholas Petforth. Tallish. Auburn hair.’
‘Nick? He was around.’ The foreman waved an arm. ‘Ask at the office.’
‘I did.’
‘Well?’
‘They said he was this way.’
‘Doesn’t look as if he is, does it?’
‘No,’ said Crosby literally. ‘Can’t say it does.’
‘Well, he was around then.’ The foreman pushed his cap to the back of his head. ‘Could he have heard that you were asking for him?’
‘Might have done.’ Crosby coughed delicately. ‘The word does get round.’
‘Then,’ said the foreman, ‘he probably didn’t stay to argue the toss and you’ve probably gone and lost me the only person who can drive that damned thing over there properly.’
The constable followed his gaze towards an enormous earth-moving machine that looked like some grotesque mechanized caterpillar with extra articulated jaws.
‘Watch out,’ said Crosby solemnly, ‘that someone doesn’t borrow that to dig up the Bank of England.’
Smell is undoubtedly the most evocative of all the senses. At least, Detective-Inspector Sloan would have been prepared to swear that it was the moment that he set foot inside the Berebury District General Hospital again. The hospital had that peculiar aroma compounded of as many ingredients as a witch’s brew – and very nearly as unsavoury – that seemed to be common to all such institutions. It was one, he decided, that you forgot as you left it but remembered pretty speedily as you stepped over the threshold again.
He went in through the main entrance of the hospital and set about making his way to the pathologist’s office. As he did so, he lifted his head to take another look at the signs supposed to guide patients in the direction in which they wanted to go. He revised that sentiment almost immediately to ‘the direction in which they needed to go’. He could not imagine anyone actually wanting to go to Isolation (a solid unbroken white ring with blankness inside).
He paused briefly under a symbol that represented a man leaning forward on one leg, the other thrust out behind him. The man could have stood for a ballet dancer or a skater. What he couldn’t have represented was any medical or surgical speciality that Sloan could possibly think of. He moved on, hurrying past the sign that clearly indicated the nursery. This was three doll-like babies side by side, wrapped papoose-style. ‘Triplets,’ he thought in horror to himself, lowering his eyes and quickening his pace. It was a contingency he was not even prepared to begin to contemplate, and he turned off the main corridor as soon as he could.
His mind, though, stayed with the subject of hospital signs. The mortuary didn’t have one. The solitary giant tearshaped symbol that could have fooled someone seeking that department (or tea and sympathy?) turned out to represent not a human tear but a drop of blood steering the way to the Blood Bank. Nothing representational marked out the mortuary. He said as much to Dr Dabbe as he entered his office.
‘It’s a nice thought,’ said that worthy. ‘The forensic equivalent of the good old barber’s pole. What do you suggest?’
‘Well …’
‘Something simple?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Skull and crossbones?’
‘Too Captain Hook,’ objected Sloan.
‘Ah, Sloan, you’ve been boning up on pantomime with the baby coming.’
‘There’s the empty skull. What about that?’ Sloan couldn’t have said why it was that he suddenly felt so light-hearted: perhaps because the death of Beatrice Wansdyke had turned into a proper case after all.
‘The “Alas, poor Yorick” style?’ said Dabbe. ‘Yes, that would do, Sloan, though I rather care for the French pattern myself.’
‘The French?’
‘They have something rather discouraging in red enamel labelled ‘Morte’ half-way up their electricity pylons.’
‘Do they?’ One day he woul
d travel, of course. His child would need to be shown the world.
‘The medievalists,’ Dabbe informed him, warming to the theme, ‘favoured a death’s head as an emblem of mortality.’
‘Sounds appropriate.’
‘Especially if there was a moral attached.’
‘There was always a moral attached in those days.’
‘True. But if you want to be really modern …’
‘Most people do,’ said Sloan inaccurately.
‘Then I think I should recommend death ritualized twentieth-century style.’
‘How?’ Sloan cast his mind round the possibilities. There were plenty of them.
‘From the Wild West …’
Sloan had forgotten that the pathologist was an armchair cowboy.
‘A smoking gun would do nicely,’ pronounced Dabbe. He stood up. ‘In the meantime, Sloan, we shall have to make do with what signs we’ve got, shan’t we? Come through.’
Sloan followed the pathologist from his office through a door marked quite clearly ‘Medico-Legal Department’.
‘A nice touch for those of our subjects still able to read,’ remarked Dabbe. ‘This way – what we want is in the laboratory.’
Seating the detective-inspector on a stool in front of a bench, the pathologist reached for a series of little bottles. Less confidently, Sloan reached for his notebook.
‘Beatrice Wansdyke died from the effects of diabetes,’ said the pathologist. ‘That still holds. She probably had all the symptoms – you’ll be able to check on that. She certainly had all the signs, including dehydration. We got as far as that at the post mortem yesterday.’
‘Yes.’
‘What I would have expected to find was some indication in the post mortem blood sugar levels that she’d had some insulin not so long before death.’
‘And you didn’t?’
‘I didn’t.’ The pathologist pulled a sheet of paper along the bench and then started looking for a particular test tube in a long row in a rack. His hand hovered over them. ‘There’s a fortune waiting for the man who can invent a foolproof way of keeping laboratory specimens attached to their pathological notes.’
‘And for the discoverer of a perfect jury system,’ said Sloan feelingly. ‘Every copper who’s ever lived could have done with that.’
‘These two seem to match,’ said Dabbe, comparing two separate sets of numbers. ‘Anyway, this blood sugar level is far too high for her to have been within shouting distance of a dose of insulin for days.’
‘Interesting,’ said Sloan cautiously.
‘She also had heavy glycosuria.’
‘That’ll have to keep for the expert witnesses,’ said Sloan, making a lay attempt at writing it down.
‘And ketonuria.’
Sloan wrote that down too. After a fashion.
‘It all adds up to the same thing,’ said the pathologist.
‘She didn’t have her insulin when she should have done?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So?’
‘So either she stopped taking it,’ said the doctor.
‘Or,’ said the policeman, ‘something or someone kept it from her.’
‘Medico …’ began Sloan.
‘Or legal,’ finished Dabbe.
‘Difficult.’
‘Those are the only two inferences that I can draw, too,’ said the pathologist amiably. ‘And I shall be quite happy to say so in a court of law.’
‘Either way it didn’t do her any good.’
‘Either way it killed her,’ said Dr Dabble unequivocally.
‘She died of it,’ nodded Sloan.
‘How it came about the way it did is your department, Sloan. Not mine. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, as we say in the post mortem room.’
Sloan stood up. Medical Latin was one thing. When the pathologist took to quoting classical tags it was time to go. ‘Thank you, Doctor.’
‘You know, Sloan,’ he said negligently as they crossed the room, ‘I think after all we only need the one notice here in our department.’
Sloan followed the direction of the doctor’s bony finger as it pointed to a sign above the door.
‘Exit?’ he said.
‘It says it all,’ murmured Dr Dabbe, ‘doesn’t it?’
Miss Simpson sighed and pressed the bell for her secretary.
‘Show them in,’ she sighed.
Once upon a time the Headmistress of the Berebury Grammar School for Girls would have been seriously disturbed at the news that the police had arrived at the school and wished to see her. Not any more. The motor-car had put an end to that. So many of the Sixth Form had their own cars these days that brushes with the law were commonplace.
And if it wasn’t the motor-car, as often as not it was the lure of the great unknown. Time was when girls seldom left home alone. Nowadays even schools like hers had pupils who absconded. Improbable as it seemed, it was one of the drawbacks of the single sex school.
Miss Simpson had her spiel on this theme practically word-perfect these days. The bolder spirits in a ‘girls only’ school, she would insist to the School Governors, were practically certain to find trouble. The quiet girl from a sheltered background in a little village, she would remind startled parents who were on their way to being over-protective, was almost always at even greater risk.
‘And Gretna Green,’ she would say ominously to both groups, ‘is the only Scottish place-name that they all know.’
As always, Miss Walsh, the Deputy Head, agreed with her.
‘There is nothing,’ ran Miss Simpson’s favourite sermon to Miss Walsh, ‘like seeing spotty boys all day and every day for keeping a girl in touch with reality.’
The Deputy Head, who cherished a secret passion for Omar Sharif and who read romantic novels in the privacy of her own bedroom, would nod sagely at this dictum too – but still call in at the library on her chaste way home.
‘A gipsy caravan,’ she said wistfully to the Head now. ‘That’s what I set my heart on when I was young. Dear me, how we all do grow up.’
‘Really!’ exclaimed Miss Simpson. ‘You should have known better than that even then.’ She looked at the door expectantly. ‘Let’s hope it’s not drugs this time, anyway. It will be one day, you know.’
‘The lure of another great unknown,’ said little Miss Walsh incorrigibly.
It soon transpired that it wasn’t drugs or missing pupils or motor-cars that the police wanted to see Miss Simpson about.
It wasn’t even about a girl.
‘Miss Collins?’ said Miss Simpson, puzzled. ‘Miss Hilda Collins?’
‘Miss Wansdyke’s friend,’ said Detective-Inspector Sloan.
‘Our biologist,’ said Miss Simpson.
‘In the lab,’ said Miss Walsh, consulting a timetable. ‘With the Fourth Form.’
The Fourth Form at Berebury High School for Girls clearly found the visit from an unknown male more exciting than the study of the life-cycle of the dog-fish upon which they were engaged when he arrived. Miss Hilda Collins, however, was equally the possessor of a lion-tamer’s eye. One swift look round the laboratory from her and the Fourth Form had turned its attention back to Scyllium canicula.
Detective-Inspector Sloan said he was sorry about the death of her friend.
‘You shouldn’t ever feel sorry for anyone who dies suddenly,’ said Miss Collins gruffly, pulling herself up and straightening her white coat.
Sloan, who in his time had felt very sorry indeed for a number of people who had died with startling suddenness – mostly as victims – nevertheless knew exactly what she meant and did not argue.
‘We don’t let domestic and agricultural animals linger,’ said the biologist, ‘do we?’
‘Not if we can help it,’ agreed Sloan, his mind turning unbidden to a dead Airedale dog.
‘Then we shouldn’t let humans,’ said Miss Collins trenchantly. She led him to a little office at one end of the laboratory that was above and apart from the class, and then t
urned and looked him squarely in the eye. ‘Now, what do you want from me?’
‘When did you last see Beatrice Wansdyke?’
‘Thursday afternoon,’ said Hilda Collins without hesitation. ‘We had a cup of tea together in the staff-room after school finished. At least I had a cup. She had three. She said she seemed to be very thirsty all the time.’
‘Not Friday?’
‘I didn’t come in to school on Friday. I’d had a bit of a cold and lost my voice.’ She twisted her lips wryly. ‘It’s the one faculty that you can’t do without in this job.’
‘And how was Miss Wansdyke on Thursday?’ enquired Sloan, making a mental note.
‘Not well,’ said Hilda Collins immediately. ‘She hadn’t been at all well lately. I – we’d – all begun to get a bit worried about her. And so had she, I think. She wondered if she might have picked up some disease while she was in France.’
If that noted xenophobe, Superintendent Leeyes, had been present he, too, would have tried to blame the French first.
‘She went with a school party on a tour of the chateaux of the Loire in the summer holidays, you know, Inspector.’
Detective-Inspector Sloan, who had seen for himself that ‘Calais’ was not engraved on Miss Wansdyke’s heart – or anywhere else – and who knew about the absence of insulin in her bloodstream, saw no occasion for blaming the French.
‘But the doctor said not,’ went on the biologist. ‘He just told her to step up her dose of insulin.’
‘Quite,’ said Sloan, keeping silent on the highly germane fact that her friend had died without a trace of it in her body.
‘I’m glad she went quickly,’ said Miss Collins with such fervour that Sloan looked up.
He hadn’t, so far in his police working life, encountered a ‘mercy killing’ but there was always a first time.
‘I’m a member of a euthanasia society,’ she said.
Sloan was not surprised.
‘When my time comes,’ averred the schoolteacher, ‘I shall take something.’
Sloan nodded. A lot of people said that they weren’t prepared to wait for Death the Reaper. But they usually did.
‘Tell me a little about Miss Wansdyke,’ invited Sloan. He needed to fill out the curiously empty picture of a chemistry mistress that was all he had so far. ‘Had she any hobbies, for instance?’
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