After Effects

by Catherine Aird

  ‘Of course, there may be nothing in it.’

  ‘What would seem to be the trouble?’ he asked, conscious of sounding rather like a doctor himself.

  Leeyes waved a thin message sheet in the air. ‘They’ve had a death up there this morning.’

  ‘What sort of a death?’ enquired Sloan warily. They must, after all, be used to deaths at the hospital: he understood that ‘died or discharged’ came under the same heading in their records. ‘Not,’ he lifted an eyebrow, ‘yet another of Mr Daniel McGrew’s death-defying operations gone wrong, I trust?’

  Superintendent Leeyes shook his head. ‘No, not our careless neighbourhood cutter this time, thank goodness. It’s a medical case.’

  ‘Gone wrong, though?’ asked Sloan pertinently.

  ‘Can’t say, Sloan. Not at this stage, anyway. Too soon to know.’

  ‘And the trouble?’ In Sloan’s experience it was never too soon to know the exact nature of the trouble.

  ‘A death, at least,’ responded Leeyes, enigmatically. ‘Of an old woman. But what the trouble is, Sloan, I can’t rightly say yet.’

  ‘Unexpected?’ If there was a nub between those deaths which interested the police and those that didn’t then this was usually, but not always, it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then,’ ventured Sloan, ‘why us, sir?’

  ‘Oh, no, Sloan,’ Leeyes came back smartly. ‘It’s not as easy as that.’

  It was never easy, thought Sloan, but he did not say so aloud. It wasn’t worth it.

  ‘Although,’ conceded the superintendent grudgingly, ‘the relatives do all agree that they’d been warned ages ago that their mother was going to die. It’s about the only thing,’ he added sourly, ‘that they are agreed on.’

  ‘So?’ said Sloan. That could be good or bad.

  ‘And been duly and properly sent for before she did die,’ trumpeted Superintendent Leeyes. ‘No grounds for complaint there.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Sloan, leaning forward in his chair, ‘but I still don’t quite see where we come into the picture.’ Perhaps he would get his weekend off after all.

  ‘I’m not at all sure that we do, Sloan,’ barked Leeyes. ‘That’s the whole trouble. And you’ll have to find out first, Sloan, if we do and she does.’ He handed over the sheet of paper and added meaningfully, ‘You and Detective Constable Crosby.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ sighed Sloan. Constables—let alone detective constables—didn’t come more jejune than Crosby of that ilk.

  ‘Because,’ declared Leeyes ineluctably, ‘if he’s with you, then he’s not here.’

  ‘Quite so,’ murmured Sloan.

  ‘And I’m not having him underfoot in the station today a moment longer than I have to.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Sloan stiltedly. ‘I understand. As it happens, he’s over at the hospital now, taking a statement from an animal—er—liberator.’

  Leeyes mumbled something very pithy about all activists of any shape, size and persuasion before going on, ‘And find out if we are interested in the matter of this death at the hospital preferably before the deceased’s son—’ The superintendent rummaged about on his desk for another piece of paper. ‘I’ve got the name here somewhere—ah, here we are—Gordon Galloway, son of Mrs Muriel Ethel Galloway.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan gave an inward sigh and wrote both names down on a fresh page of his notebook as the prospect of his weekend off-duty faded.

  ‘And find out,’ repeated Superintendent Leeyes, ‘before the precious Mr Gordon Galloway takes it into his head to go straight to either the Coroner or the press over our heads.’

  ‘Like that, is it, sir?’ observed Sloan thoughtfully. Either way could spell trouble: and both ways spelt even more trouble.

  ‘What Mr Gordon Galloway wants, Sloan,’—Superintendent Leeyes rolled his eyes heavenwards—‘perish the thought, is action.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Just like the animal rights people, thought Sloan—but to himself.

  ‘And he wants it now. If not sooner. He says,’—here the superintendent changed his tone to a parody of a self-important man—‘he’s a businessman and that his time is valuable.’

  ‘What is it exactly, sir, that he is—er—unhappy about?’ asked Sloan, unimpressed. Businessmen who valued their own time—and nobody else’s—were not unknown in the course of police enquiries. ‘Do we know that at all?’

  ‘The medical attention that his late mother got—or, rather, didn’t get—in Berebury Hospital.’

  ‘And is there any reason why that should be a matter for us?’ persisted Sloan. Police time was valuable, too, although it wasn’t fashionable to say so in the present social climate. ‘They’re usually quite good up there—except for Mr McGrew,’ he added hastily. It wasn’t for nothing that that particular surgeon was known throughout the country of Calleshire as Dangerous Dan.

  ‘Mr Galloway alleges that the doctors were criminally negligent in their treatment of his late mother,’ spelled out Leeyes.

  ‘What? All of them?’

  ‘Well, the House Physician mainly.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan smoothed out the page of his notebook and said, ‘On what grounds, precisely?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Four?’ That sounded a bit overdone to Sloan.

  ‘That’s as far as I could make out,’ the superintendent grunted. ‘The fellow was a bit uptight.’

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘Firstly,’—Leeyes held up a finger as he started to enumerate—‘the doctor who actually treated their mother on the ward is female—a Dr Dilys Chomel.’

  Sloan didn’t say anything. The superintendent’s own misogynism was too much of a byword at the police station for any comment.

  ‘Secondly,’—another finger came up beside the first—‘she is very young.’

  They had just the same trouble in the Force with raw constables who got younger and younger every year. The unwanted Detective Constable Crosby was just such a case in point. He didn’t even look the part, let alone act it. Perhaps Dr Chomel didn’t either.

  ‘Thirdly,’ said Leeyes, continuing to recite Gordon Galloway’s litany, ‘Dr Chomel was wearing jeans.’

  ‘Ah,’ nodded Detective Inspector Sloan, veteran of many, many court proceedings, ‘that won’t have helped.’

  ‘And fourthly,’ said Leeyes, with the air of one playing a trump card, ‘she isn’t English.’

  It was a close thing but, if anything, the superintendent’s xenophobia exceeded his notable misogynism. All Sloan did was to glance studiously at the papers in his hand. ‘It doesn’t exactly amount to a hill of criminal beans, does it, sir?’ he said at last.

  ‘No,’ conceded the superintendent with unexpected readiness, ‘but wait for it, Sloan, wait for it …’

  Sloan waited.

  ‘But what Gordon Galloway didn’t tell me and doesn’t know—at least I don’t think he does, unless it was him, of course—is that an hour after his mother died this morning we had an anonymous telephone call here at the station …’

  ‘Did we, indeed?’ murmured Sloan.

  ‘Which our switchboard traced to a callbox near the hospital …’

  Detective Inspector Sloan looked up.

  ‘To the effect,’ went on Leeyes, ‘that this woman, Muriel Galloway, had been entered in a drug trial when she was first admitted to the hospital.’

  Sloan opened his notebook again.

  The superintendent went on briskly, ‘A drug trial that the unknown caller—’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Female, switchboard thought but couldn’t quite decide for certain. The voice sounded a bit muffled. Probably disguised through a handkerchief, they thought.’

  Sloan made another note.

  ‘A drug trial that the caller,’ finished Leeyes, effectively writing off Sloan’s weekend off-duty once and for all, ‘thought very dangerous indeed and might have killed her.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The
theory that every individual alive is of infinite value is legislatively impractical.

  At first the Administrator at the Berebury Hospital thought Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby had come about the perennial thefts from the hospital kitchen, reported again and again to the police.

  ‘It’s still going on, Inspector,’ he complained. ‘If it’s not from the stores, then it’s from the kitchen instead.’ He grimaced. ‘Proving it, of course, is a horse of another colour.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Sloan endorsed this with feeling. His choice of villain there was one of the underchefs, name of Dave: the one with the guileless baby-face. Butter—and much else—was certainly melting away somewhere even if it wasn’t in the underchef’s mouth. ‘But it’s not about that.’

  The Administrator, a man conditioned to bad news, waited for the name of Mr Daniel McGrew to be mentioned. ‘Women’s Medical?’ he echoed, sounding surprised. ‘That’s the physicians. We don’t usually have any—’ He pulled himself together and said, ‘Dr Byville and Dr Meggie have their beds there.’

  ‘We’d rather like a word,’ said Sloan, deceptively low-key, ‘with whoever had the late Mrs Muriel Galloway in their care.’

  The Administrator pressed a button on the telephone on his desk and asked for Sister Pocock. ‘Mrs Galloway was a patient of Dr Byville’s,’ he informed them a few minutes later, looking worried. ‘He wasn’t in earlier this morning and Dr Meggie was supposed to be on call for him—’

  ‘Supposed?’ Sloan picked up the salient word without difficulty.

  ‘Apparently,’ frowned the Administrator, ‘no one has been able to get hold of Dr Meggie this morning so the ward contacted Dr Beaumont over at Kinnisport and he advised the House Physician before Mrs Galloway died.’

  ‘Second reserve,’ remarked Detective Constable Crosby, who was more interested in football than hospitals.

  ‘And where was Dr Byville then?’ asked Sloan, wishing that Crosby was the tiniest bit interested in detection as well.

  ‘Oh,’ the Administrator relaxed. ‘He was over at Region—at Calleford, that is—making a presentation to the Drug Safety Committee meeting there.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ invited Sloan.

  ‘Oh, not your sort of drug, Inspector,’ said the Administrator, smiling quite kindly. ‘Our sort of drug. We do quite a lot of medical drug trials here at Berebury for Gilroy’s, the pharmaceutical people out at Staple St James—you’ll know them, I dare say, Inspector.’

  Sloan said he knew them all right.

  ‘Ah, of course,’ the man said. ‘I was forgetting. The animal rights activists.’

  ‘Very active, they are, some of them,’ contributed Crosby, who had taken an unrepentant statement from Darren Clements. ‘Not to mention the monkeys. They’re pretty nippy, too.’

  ‘We don’t have any responsibility for the—er—work done on the animals there,’ said the Administrator, ‘but …’

  ‘But?’ said Sloan encouragingly.

  ‘But we are naturally concerned with the observing of the strict guidelines for any clinical trials we do here.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘So—’

  ‘So we’d like a word with Dr Roger Byville,’ said Sloan blandly.

  ‘Sister Pocock says he’s back now.’

  ‘If he can spare us a moment,’ murmured Sloan, still low-key.

  Dr Byville, at least, was not deceived by this deceptively diffident approach. But not overawed either. In fact he was quite brisk.

  ‘Muriel Galloway?’ he said, quite composed. ‘Her cause of death, Inspector, was exactly as I certified. There were no doubts in my mind when I signed the death certificate and there are none now.’

  The policeman murmured something indistinct—and unspecific—about unhappy relatives.

  ‘In my opinion,’ responded Byville without hesitation, ‘there were no clinical grounds for holding a post mortem.’ He looked meaningfully at Detective Inspector Sloan and went on, ‘Nor, as far as I am aware, were there any other reasons.’ The specialist’s glance rested briefly on Detective Constable Crosby’s youthful visage before he turned back to face Sloan, saying interrogatively, ‘There may, of course, be other factors of which I am unaware.’

  Sloan did not answer the question directly. Instead he said, ‘And it did not seem to you, then, Doctor, a death to be reported to the Coroner?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ returned Byville robustly. ‘No suspicious circumstances had been reported to me; the patient had been in hospital for over a week before she died; there had been no anaesthetic or surgical intervention—what else could there possibly have been to justify referral?’

  ‘I couldn’t say—’ began Sloan.

  But the physician hadn’t finished. ‘Nor had the woman been starving herself to death before she came into hospital or anything like that.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Detective Inspector Sloan mildly.

  ‘Nothing but natural causes,’ asserted Dr Byville with undiminished vigour.

  ‘And you had no reason to suppose that Mrs Galloway’s death was in any way related to any medical procedure or treatment she had been receiving?’

  ‘Quite the contrary, Inspector,’ rejoined the physician smoothly. ‘I can assure you that but for the treatment that she had been having, she’d have died months—if not years—ago. Mrs Galloway had been in congestive heart failure for a long time.’

  ‘I see, Doctor.’ Detective Inspector Sloan paused, his notebook open and his pen at the ready. ‘And did that treatment by any chance happen to include a new drug that was being tested on the patient?’

  Dr Byville looked up sharply and gave a short, cold laugh. ‘Oh, so that’s what’s worrying you, is it? Yes, Inspector, Muriel Galloway had been entered for a clinical trial. Nearly all the heart patients here have. There’s no secret about that.’

  ‘A clinical trial …’ Detective Inspector Sloan wrote that down. It was other sorts of trials that came more easily to his mind but he was always ready to learn.

  ‘A clinical trial, Inspector,’ swept on the consultant dispassionately, ‘given the code name of “Cardigan”, properly set up and approved by both the Regional and Hospital Ethics Committees and conducted by the cardiologist over at Kinnisport, Dr Meggie, in accordance with a strict protocol laid down by them—’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan, making another note.

  ‘—on a compound supplied by Messrs Gilroy (Berebury) Ltd, a pharmaceutical company at Staple St James, no doubt,’—he tightened his lips—‘known to you as well as to the animal rights vandals.’

  ‘This new drug, Doctor,’ said Sloan, forbearing to mention the trouble that the police—as well as Gilroy’s—to say nothing of the monkeys, who had found that freedom palled—had had there, too, ‘that you were experimenting on Mrs Galloway with—’

  ‘Testing, Inspector,’ intervened Byville, looking pained. ‘Testing. The experiments are done on animals.’

  ‘Testing, then,’ amended Sloan, whose object was not the bandying of words.

  ‘I can assure you that her being entered for the Cardigan Protocol didn’t make any difference to her dying. She was going to do that anyway.’

  Detective Constable Crosby turned to the physician and said innocently, ‘So it didn’t save her either, then?’

  ‘No,’ said Roger Byville shortly. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, policeman first and policeman last, put a rather more important question to the doctor. ‘Or accelerate her death?’

  ‘In my opinion, no. Not even if she was given it in the first place. I couldn’t say about that, of course.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘No,’ said Byville.

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘What I said, Inspector,’ said Byville coldly, ‘was that Muriel Galloway was taking part in the clinical trial.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So she may not actually have been given the drug.’

&
nbsp; ‘You mean,’ said Sloan, light dawning, ‘that there would have been dummy tablets—’

  ‘I mean,’ countered the doctor firmly, ‘that any proper protocol naturally contains matched controls.’

  ‘So Mrs Galloway might have been having only harmless tablets?’ This, Sloan realized, was going to take some explaining to the superintendent.

  ‘Inert would be a better description than harmless, Inspector,’ remarked the doctor.

  ‘Inert,’ conceded Sloan between clenched teeth. ‘So she might only have been having inert tablets—’

  ‘She might.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Byville precisely, ‘she might not.’

  Sloan’s teeth were now so tightly clenched that he was surprised the others couldn’t hear them grinding.

  ‘Do you toss for it?’ enquired Detective Constable Crosby with every sign of genuine interest. ‘Heads you get the real stuff, tails you don’t?’

  Dr Roger Byville didn’t look as if he’d ever tossed anything more than a pancake and that a long time ago. ‘Matched controls,’ he said stiffly, ‘are selected every bit as carefully as test cases.’

  Sloan didn’t like test cases in law. He didn’t know anything about medical ones; but he was beginning to think he wasn’t going to like them either. ‘But surely, Doctor,’ he said, ‘withholding a life-saving new drug could be potentially harmful, too.’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed. That’s quite different,’ said the specialist readily. ‘Once we are really certain that it is effective, then it would be quite unethical to withhold it from all sufferers.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So then,’ said Roger Byville immediately, ‘the comparison trials with the matched controls would be abandoned forthwith and the new drug given to all patients with the condition from then on.’

  ‘How do you tell?’ asked Crosby.

  Dr Byville smiled thinly. ‘It’s not always very easy.’

  ‘This new drug—’ began Sloan, going back to his notebook.

  ‘Provisionally called Cardigan,’ supplied Byville.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ invited Sloan, hoping that the doctor’s words wouldn’t be long ones.

  Dr Byville visibly relaxed while he expounded on what they hoped to gain from the medicinal properties of the drug called Cardigan. ‘It’s got a compound number, too, Inspector—these things are all done by computer these days. There’s no room for sheer inspiration any more but more than that I can’t tell you.’ He smiled thinly. ‘It’s not my baby, you see.’