‘Just the usual foul-up round the market,’ he said, pushing his empty plate away. ‘I’ve got a friend of yours waiting to see me, though.’
‘Policemen don’t have friends,’ said Sloan. It was one of the things that worried him about his unborn son. Would he get roughed up at school because his father was a copper? He’d have to teach the boy how to handle that early on …
‘True.’ Harpe gave a short laugh. ‘You’ll be pleased to know that Larky Nolson was heard to describe you as a working acquaintance in the pub down by the railway last night.’
‘So who’s the friend?’ Some bait Sloan rose to, some he didn’t.
‘A medico.’
‘Which particular pillar of the profession?’
‘Peter McCavity.’ Harpe grimaced. ‘Hardly a pillar.’
‘More like an unsure foundation,’ agreed Sloan.
‘Come in to confess about yesterday morning’s bollard.’ Harpe jerked his head sourly. ‘I dare say he’s forgotten about Friday’s by this time.’
‘Friday’s?’ Sloan let his interest in Dr McCavity’s Friday’s activities show.
‘He had the one on the corner of Cranmer Drive on Friday.’
‘That’s leading into Ridley Road, isn’t it?’
‘There’s just the church in between,’ said Inspector Harpe without conscious irony.
‘How do we know?’
‘Someone rang in to tell us he’d had it down.’
‘Who?’
‘Ah, they turned shy when we asked them that.’
‘Pro bono publico?’
‘Only up to a point,’ said Harpe realistically. ‘An anonymous telephone call isn’t evidence.’
‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells, then.’
‘There was one thing, though, that was odd, come to think of it.’
‘Yes?’ said Sloan. It was the odd things that made up police work.
‘The caller was male.’
‘Now that is odd,’ agreed Sloan. Most men who were car drivers had a ‘There but for the Grace of God …’ approach to minor motoring matters. Bollards weren’t exactly punchballs – but they weren’t people either. Not by a long chalk. Bothering to ring in with the driver’s car number was usually women’s work.
‘Shouldn’t think the good doctor knows what a no-claims bonus looks like,’ said Harpe, ‘so he’ll probably …’
‘When on Friday, Harry?’
Harpe looked up. ‘Late afternoon, I think. I could check.’
‘Please.’
‘Interested?’
‘Very.’
‘Want to come along while he’s in?’
‘It might help.’
It did. In a way. An unexpected way.
Dr Peter McCavity didn’t seem surprised to see Sloan. His lip curled. ‘“Cry Havoc,”’ he declaimed, ‘“and let slip the dogs of war.”’
Sloan paused. He didn’t go to Evening Classes like the Superintendent but sooner or later all boys’ schools performed Julius Caesar – if only because it wasn’t full of parts for boys who had to pretend to be girls pretending to be boys. Or worse: parts for boys who had to pretend they were girls.
For a moment he searched about in his memory for a suitable rejoinder but all that would come to his mind was something else from another school play. It was a picture of their third-form clown playing Stephano, the drunken butler in The Tempest – another play for schoolboys. Prospero’s daughter was the only female called for: the competition, as he remembered, had been for the part of Caliban. Stephano had staggered on stage clutching a bottle and saying between hiccups, ‘Here’s my comfort.’
Sloan did not say that now.
There was a time and a place for everything.
When he came to think of it, it was the people who did things out of time and out of place who gave them half their trouble down at the police station. The preacher who had written that bit in the Bible about there being a time for everything wasn’t wrong. And this wasn’t the time for bandying quotations with the doctor. Even if he could think of the right one, which he couldn’t.
Inspector Harpe wasn’t even attempting to. He was taking down the details of the accident to yesterday’s bollard.
‘Corner of Eastgate,’ he said patiently.
‘“The moving finger writes,”’ said Dr McCavity, who had clearly recovered some of his spirits during the course of the morning.
‘How about the one you had down on Friday afternoon?’ said Harpe impassively.
‘“And having writ, moves on”,’ said Peter McCavity impenitently.
‘Friday,’ said Harpe. ‘Junction of Latimer Avenue and Cranmer Drive.’
‘Another bollard?’ said McCavity, faintly tentative.
‘So we’re told,’ said Harpe.
‘So be it,’ said Dr McCavity. Sobered, he was more presentable. He had a rather anxious air of willingness to please about him now.
Sloan stirred. ‘Near Miss Wansdyke’s house.’
‘Really?’ he said without apparent interest. ‘Yes, I suppose it would be that way. I don’t know the house myself.’
Sloan maintained silence.
‘Dr Paston always looked after her himself,’ said McCavity.
‘Except when he was away,’ said Sloan.
McCavity shrugged his shoulder. ‘I couldn’t even sign the cremation certificate, she being my partner’s patient. He was ringing round on Monday to find someone outside the practice to complete the second part of the certificate.’
‘Cremation?’ said Sloan. Morton’s, the undertakers, had distinctly mentioned burial.
‘Didn’t you know? She was going to be cremated. It was all laid on. It was what she had wanted and apparently she’d always said so but in the end they didn’t take any notice. Nothing’s sacred these days, is it?’
Detective-Constable Crosby was still at the Berebury District General Hospital.
His clothes, which lacked credence as a police officer, fitted his new role rather better. He was sitting in the corridor outside Fleming Ward disguised as an anxious relative. This meant that when necessary he was able to sink his head between his hands. Necessity only arose when a nurse who might be Briony Petforth passed.
From this vantage position he could at once observe the door of Sister’s office and the swing doors that gave into the ward. There was another door beyond that of Sister’s office that led he knew not where.
Yet.
Being young and as yet not in possession of any of Francis Bacon’s hostages to Fortune, Crosby wasn’t too familiar with anxiety and how it should be portrayed. Restlessness came into it, he knew, but too much of that might draw attention to himself and that was the last thing he wanted to do. He’d seen people pacing up and down in hospital corridors too, but not with their heads sunk in their hands whenever a certain third year nurse passed.
So he had settled for an uninviting bench clearly placed just where it was for those waiting for news from Fleming Ward. As a situation it was not without interest. Someone came through the swing doors every other minute and twice they were held open for a patient on a stretcher coming back to the ward from the operating theatre. There was, however, no sign of a young man with auburn hair and freckles wearing a donkey-jacket.
For some time he thought perhaps Briony Petforth wasn’t on the ward and then, soon after the second stretcher case had arrived, she came through the swing doors and made straight for Sister’s office. Seconds later Sister sallied forth in person and went through into the ward with Nurse Petforth. Moments after that an invisible loudspeaker started paging the duty house officer.
Crosby was so wrapped up in this living charade that he didn’t even notice at first when a large woman approached. He gave a genuine start when she suddenly plumped down on the bench beside him.
‘Sorry, lad,’ she said, ‘but there’s only one bus I can catch in from Cullingoak to be at the hospital when visiting starts and I might as well wait here as at the bus station.’
He nodd
ed and turned his attention back to the ward doors. As any television producer could have told him, it was compulsive viewing.
‘Got someone in here, too, have you?’ enquired the woman presently.
‘Er – yes,’ he said, collecting himself.
A harassed-looking young man in a white coat with a stethoscope dangling from his pocket had just turned on to Fleming Ward. He would be the house surgeon.
‘It’s my husband,’ she said gratuitously. ‘Hasn’t been well all summer and in the end they said they’d better operate.’
‘Bad luck,’ said Crosby.
‘What’s yours in with?’
Crosby cast about swiftly in his mind. He had an aunt who had had to go into hospital once. ‘Gall-stones,’ he said with conviction.
The fat woman patted his arm. For one awful moment Crosby was seized with sudden doubt, and he began to wonder if gall-stones were a peculiarly feminine complaint. Then she said kindly, ‘That’s not serious, dear, these days, is it?’
‘With complications,’ said the detective-constable a little coldly, his confidence restored. No hospital visitor likes to be demonstrated as visiting someone less ill than the next person’s relative: even when it was not so much a case of malade imaginaire as of imaginary invalid.
‘Ah, that’s different,’ she said at once. The fat woman began to rearrange her parcels. ‘My hubby now – they said in the beginning that he wasn’t going to be straightforward.’
It was Detective-Constable Crosby’s turn to sound sympathetic. He hoped that it wasn’t the stout woman’s husband who was causing all the commotion on the ward. Yet another doctor had now appeared and a bottle of blood had been rushed through the swing doors by someone else. There was no sign, though, of anyone resembling Nicholas Petforth.
The fat woman was speaking again.
‘Pardon?’ he said.
‘The person you’ve come to see,’ she said patiently.
‘Yes?’ Warily.
‘Has he been in here long? Perhaps my hubby’s in the next bed.’
‘Not long,’ said Crosby truthfully adding even more accurately: ‘I’m not sure exactly where he is.’
She nodded comfortably. ‘They do move them about so.’
‘Or even,’ said Crosby, artistically painting in a finer touch, ‘if he’ll really want to see me.’
This struck an immediate chord with his neighbour. ‘You never can tell how hospital will take people, can you?’
‘No,’ he said. What he was actually doing was considering whether the door beyond Sister’s office led to the sluice or not.
‘Perhaps he’ll have them to show you,’ she remarked.
‘What?’
‘In a bottle.’
‘Show me what in a bottle?’ demanded Crosby wildly.
‘His gall-stones.’
Crosby’s aunt had spared him this.
‘They give them to you sometimes,’ she said knowledgeably.
‘Souvenirs?’ said the constable weakly. After all, they had a Black Museum at New Scotland Yard as incongruous, didn’t they?
‘They did my next door neighbour,’ said the woman, ‘when she had hers done.’
‘Did they?’ said Crosby, discovering like many another inventor before him that those who build Kafka-esque castles in the air run the risk of the whole tottering edifice that they have fabricated brick by unsteady brick crumbling at the first touch of reality.
‘Seven as big as marbles,’ the fat woman said.
The swing doors of the ward opened suddenly and Sister Fleming appeared. She made for her own office. If she noticed those sitting on the corridor bench she gave no sign of it. Like the rest of the hospital staff, she seemed to have the gift of ignoring those who waited on benches – or perhaps it was a skill honed down to a fine art. Just to be on the safe side, though, Crosby tucked his feet well out of sight. It wasn’t so much that they were large: just that they were a policeman’s feet.
Then another loudspeaker call went out. The Senior Surgical Registrar was wanted on Fleming Ward.
Now.
‘If not sooner,’ muttered Crosby to himself. He reckoned he was as good as the next man at reading between those sorts of lines.
Sister surged back on to the ward.
The fat lady began to re-arrange her parcels again.
Crosby decided that this was his moment.
‘Just going along the corridor,’ he murmured with absolute truth.
All Sister Fleming’s forces were deployed on the ward and no one even looked at him as he slipped past the door of Sister’s office. He could hear noises from a kitchen somewhere but it was the door beyond Sister’s office that he was making for. If anyone had an eye on a rendezvous with Nurse Briony Petforth or was in search of a quiet place to hide up, this was the ideal spot for it.
Crosby advanced cautiously. On closer examination he decided it wasn’t the sluice. That he could now see – and hear – was beyond. He opened the door. He was in a linen store of some description. Racks of sheets were faintly visible. He stepped forward and began to feel for the light switch.
It was the last thing he remembered.
Something very heavy came down behind his neck and hit him hard. A vicious reverberating explosion took place inside the confines of his skull. Detective-Constable Crosby subsided in a kaleidoscope of mental colour and for a long time knew no more.
CHAPTER XII
Alkali, tartar, salt in preparation
Matters combust or in coagulation.
Detective-Inspector Sloan had had to take another constable with him from the Berebury Police Station instead of Detective-Constable Crosby. He didn’t want to interview Dr John Paston alone. Actually he didn’t really want to take the time to interview Dr Paston at all at this particular moment. Not with Nicholas Petforth at large and the whole case a tangle of loose ends but there was in him ingrained an early training married to a dogged persistence which allowed no opening in an investigation to go unexplored.
The general practitioner’s manner towards the two policemen could not have been described as inviting. He sat quite motionless behind his desk waiting for Sloan to speak.
‘I have come,’ began that officer without preamble, ‘about the late Miss Beatrice Wansdyke.’
‘Again?’ said the doctor.
‘And,’ continued Sloan, ‘about your pecuniary interest in her death.’
Dr Paston gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, that!’
‘That,’ said Sloan totally unimpressed. In his time he had heard a great many dubious actions dismissed with a short laugh by the people who had perpetrated them. The activities had ranged from minor peccadillo to major misdemeanour but long ago he had come to realize that the enormity of crime lay – like beauty – solely in the eye of the beholder. The eye of the person who had committed it was always firmly glued to the wrong end of a telescope. The victim’s eye view was usually more accurate.
‘Rather a grand way of describing a small legacy, isn’t it?’ remarked Dr Paston.
‘Were you or were you not,’ Sloan forged on with his inquisition, ‘aware of it at the time of her death?’
‘No.’ He hesitated for a moment and then said, ‘No, as a matter of fact I wasn’t.’
‘Let me go back to Monday when she was found.’
‘Yes?’
‘You were informed of her death.’
‘Indeed I was.’
‘And visited the house.’
‘That is so.’
‘And began to prepare a cremation certificate.’
‘Yes.’ He looked puzzled.
‘Why?’
‘Beatrice had always told me that that was what she wanted.’
‘So,’ asked Sloan, ‘why are Morton’s now preparing for burial?’
‘That was the family,’ said the general practitioner immediately. From his tone it was obvious that families were an everyday complication of general practice.
‘Which part of the family?’ e
nquired Sloan cautiously. One thing he had learned over the years was that families did not invariably present as united groups.
‘It was George Wansdyke who actually mentioned it to me,’ said Paston, ‘but knowing the set-up there I dare say it was Pauline Wansdyke who didn’t like the idea.’
‘Ah.’
‘The Hartley-Powells,’ Dr Paston informed him drily, ‘are all buried over in East Calleshire.’
‘I see.’
‘In the ancient village churchyard at Great Rooden.’
‘And always have been?’
‘Since the Norman Conquest,’ said Paston gravely. ‘At least.’
‘Some people find ancestor worship easier with tombstones.’
‘I’d even begun to lay on a colleague,’ amplified the doctor, ‘to sign the second part of the cremation certificate when George Wansdyke told me the family wanted a burial instead.’
‘And when did you hear about the legacy?’
‘In the same breath as the burial.’ He tightened his lips into the semblance of a smile. ‘Wansdyke’s a businessman, not a sentimentalist, you know.’
Sloan, no time-waster himself, nodded.
‘At least,’ said Paston, ‘he did read over the message that came with the bequest.’
‘“In small recognition of his unfailing kindness over many years,”’ quoted Sloan from his notes.
For the first time the general practitioner looked momentarily disconcerted. ‘She wasn’t the sort of woman to leave everything to a home for lost dogs.’
‘No,’ said Sloan consideringly. Not for one moment had he forgotten a dead Airedale either. Late dog. Like late pig. Now that was from somewhere very far down in his subconscious. ‘You had no idea it was going to happen?’
‘None,’ Paston said vigorously. ‘And if I may say so, Inspector, I should have signed a declaration to that effect on the cremation certificate without hesitation.’
‘Quite so,’ said Sloan quietly. ‘Were you surprised?’
‘That, of course, is something quite different.’ He hesitated and considered this. ‘No, not inordinately.’
‘Have you any plans for using the money?’ Suddenly Sloan felt self-conscious. He must sound as silly as a cub reporter talking to the winner of a football pool. The answer he got, though, wasn’t exactly what he expected.
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