‘Ah, that’s what we wanted to know.’ Detective Constable Crosby made a new entry in his notebook. ‘You say she died naturally?’
‘That, too,’ said the young lady doctor drily, wondering if she would ever truly master the manifold intricacies of the English language.
‘Did you attempt resuscitation?’
‘No.’
Detective Constable Crosby said ponderously, ‘Not to attempt resuscitation when you can, miss, is murder.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ She shook her head and said, ‘It’s not to resuscitate when you should that’s murder.’
This much she did know. Dilys Chomel had paid particular attention her medical ethics lectures since in her own home country in Africa a very different view was taken of almost all such situations. Especially the survival of girl babies born to families who wanted only sons.
‘Deciding not to resuscitate makes the doctor into judge, jury and executioner,’ persisted Crosby, who didn’t like hospitals anyway.
‘That’s euthanasia,’ said Dilys Chomel firmly, deciding, since the policemen seemed a bit strong on ethics, not to reveal Dr Paul Meggie’s simple rule on resuscitating the terminally ill or very elderly. Detective Constable Crosby, she sensed, might not like it.
This unwritten procedure had been spelled out to her by her predecessor in the house officer’s job when she took it over. ‘You don’t,’ he’d said meaningfully, ‘do it without consulting Dr Meggie first, understood?’
‘But,’ she’d protested, ‘you’ve only got half a minute. By the time I’ve located Dr Meggie, the patient’ll be dead.’
‘Got it in one, haven’t you?’ he’d murmured, giving her a pitying look before going off to climb the next rung of the uncertain ladder that comprised the greasy pole of his medical career.
They took a very different view of the care of the elderly, too, in the far country from which Dilys Chomel had come.
They cherished them.
‘The Coroner,’ Detective Constable Crosby was saying at his stateliest, ‘has ordered a post-mortem examination at the request of the police.’
‘The consultant—’ began Dilys. In hospitals, consultants ranked directly under the Almighty.
‘The Coroner,’ repeated Crosby, ‘has ordered a post mortem examination.’ In the eyes of the police force the Coroner represented the Crown and thus easily outranked chief constables as well as hospital consultants. ‘And I’ve come to enquire into the whereabouts of the body of the deceased.’
‘If it hasn’t been released to the relatives,’ said Dilys, ‘then it’ll be over in the Potter’s Field.’
‘Come again, miss?’
‘Sorry.’ She tossed her head. ‘It’s what the staff here call the mortuary. Most hospitals, you see, have a private name for their mortuary so that the staff can mention it without upsetting the patients. Didn’t you know, Constable?’
Upsetting their clients wasn’t one of their worries down at the police station. There—like it or not—they called the charge room the charge room. Crosby still looked puzzled. ‘The Potter’s Field, did you say, miss?’
‘It’s from the Bible.’ A missionary culture had done well by Dr Chomel. ‘You’ll find it in St Matthew’s Gospel.’
‘I still don’t see—’
‘The Potter’s Field was where they buried strangers,’ explained Dilys Chomel. ‘Mrs Muriel Galloway’s body’ll be there if it’s still in the hospital.’
It was.
And, the mortuary attendant promised Detective Constable Crosby, it would be sent over to Dr Dabbe, the Consultant Pathologist, for a post mortem without delay.
Crosby thanked him and was just about to take his departure when the man asked him if Dr Meggie had turned up yet. It wasn’t like him, the mortuary attendant said, not to be at one or other of the hospitals, throwing his weight about as usual.
‘Not yet,’ said the detective constable, ‘but I expect he will.’
‘’Im and his perishing buttonhole,’ said the man. ‘Who does he think he is?’
‘God,’ said Crosby simply. ‘They all do.’
CHAPTER SIX
Doctors if no better than other men are certainly no worse.
‘Thanks for talking to my housewoman about that congestive heart failure on Women’s Medical over at Berebury this morning,’ murmured Roger Byville as he found himself standing just behind Dr Beaumont in the antiquated lift at St Ninian’s Hospital. He’d already forgotten the patient’s name. ‘It’s her first house job and she’s still very new here.’
‘No trouble,’ said Beaumont politely, ‘although there was nothing to be done, I’m afraid.’
The lift creaked to a standstill at the first floor and two nurses and a pathology technician got out.
‘The family are kicking up a bit of a stink all the same,’ said Byville now that the two doctors were alone together.
‘Are they?’ Dr Edwin Beaumont inclined his head sympathetically. It was the relatives of Mr Daniel McGrew’s patients who usually did that.
Pour cause.
Byville said, punching the lift button with quite unnecessary force, ‘They’re asking for a post mortem.’
‘That should put their minds at rest.’
‘I hope it does.’ Byville gave an unamused laugh. ‘They’ve already been to the police.’
Dr Beaumont raised his eyebrows and decided against getting out of the lift at the floor which he’d been heading for. ‘On what grounds?’ he asked carefully, as they continued upwards.
‘God knows.’ Byville grimaced. ‘The next thing they’ll be doing is talking to the local newspaper. The editor would enjoy that.’
‘It would be a great pity,’ observed Edwin Beaumont in his usual measured way.
‘It would.’ In contrast with most of the other consultants on the staff of the two hospitals, Roger Byville was a controlled, rather colourless man, but even he sounded heated now. ‘St Ninian’s gets quite enough bad publicity as it is from the antics of that maniac, McGrew. We don’t need any more.’
Dr Edwin Beaumont glanced at the lift indicator and sighed. ‘Our Dan doesn’t exactly help the healing image, does he?’
Byville scowled. ‘I can never see why the surgical people don’t shop him. I would. Gives the whole place—let alone the profession—a bad name.’
‘Not our headache, though,’ said Beaumont, one physician to another, and unmindful, too, of Edmund Burke’s famous dictum that for evil to flourish it was only necessary that good men do nothing.
‘Thank God it isn’t,’ said Byville.
‘I’ve heard,’ advanced Beaumont cautiously, ‘that even the Three Wise Men don’t know what to do about him next.’
‘I never did hold with that idea.’ Roger Byville sniffed contemptuously. ‘Catch someone as egocentric as Dangerous Dan being told by three of his professional colleagues—’ It was well known that Daniel McGrew didn’t admit to having peers ‘—that he’s not doing his job properly—’
‘Well—’
‘And then his pulling his socks up. I don’t know about you, but I don’t call that likely, myself.’
‘Quite,’ agreed Dr Beaumont, although that wasn’t the way in which he himself would have described the remit of the three distinguished surgeons who were summoned when a Calleshire consultant showed signs of what were euphemistically described as ‘human failings’. ‘Quite,’ he said again.
‘And I still don’t see why,’ grumbled Byville, ‘I should have to pay whopping insurance premiums for medical defence just to keep clowns like McGrew out of trouble.’
‘No, Roger.’ Beaumont paused and then with more relevance than was perhaps tactful said, ‘This heart failure of yours—’
‘Yes?’
‘Is it going to mean,’ asked Beaumont delicately, ‘trouble?’
‘Not if I can help it,’ responded Byville. ‘Oh, I know she was on Paul’s Cardigan Protocol but that wasn’t what killed her.’
‘No, no,
I’m sure,’ said Beaumont hastily.
‘And I told that detective inspector so.’
‘Paul isn’t going to like it, though, all the same.’
‘No, he isn’t.’ Byville nodded his agreement to this. ‘Not one little bit. He’s very keen on his precious test results for Cardigan is our Paul.’
That, decided Dr Beaumont, was one way of putting it but he did not say so aloud.
Roger Byville looked up as at long last the old lift wheezed to a halt at the top floor of St Ninian’s. ‘Got a moment to spare yourself, Edwin? I’ve got an interesting spleen on Lorkyn Ward. Come and have a look at him with me, if you’ve time. A young man of twenty-five, who’s been ill for two weeks. He insisted on being shipped over here from Berebury so the family could visit … I’m afraid he’s not doing very well.’
‘That you, Shirl?’ The land-line from Berebury on the St Ninian’s switchboard sprang to life. ‘Tracy here.’
Shirley Partridge completed a telephone connection to Barnesdale Ward and then spoke to Berebury Hospital. ‘Who did you say? Oh, Dr Meggie?’ She shifted her head to get a better look at the attendance board. ‘No, Tracy, he’s still not in.’
‘There’s someone here who wants to see him,’ announced Tracy with relish.
‘I’m afraid they’re going to be unlucky then,’ retorted Shirley. ‘Sorry.’
‘Something to do with Female Medical.’
‘They want him, do they?’
‘No. Not them,’ said Tracy, savouring the exchange. ‘It’s the police who want him. They’re on their way over to St Ninian’s now.’
‘I’ll tell them when they arrive,’ promised Shirley who was almost as skilled as the medical profession at playing down simple human drama.
‘They’re hoping to see him straight away,’ persisted Tracy.
‘That might be more difficult,’ said Shirley Partridge, pursing her lips. ‘Seems as if everyone wants to talk to him today and nobody knows where he is. He hasn’t left word and I’ve tried all the usual places. And I can’t raise Miss Meggie either.’
‘Have you tried the golf course?’ suggested Tracy slyly.
Bunty Meggie, the doctor’s daughter, having done her stint as telephone minder ever since her mother’s death, had been released from her servitude by the advent of the mobile telephone.
‘Or the Merry Widow,’ added Tracy, tongue in cheek. ‘He might still be with her.’
Shirley Partridge flushed. ‘Not in the middle of the morning,’ she said primly.
‘If you ask me,’ said Tracy frankly, ‘she’s not the sort to be seen before twelve. Half a ton of make-up takes a bit of putting on.’
‘Was there anything else?’ asked Shirley, who, had she known it, was with Siegfried Sassoon in the matter of not liking those who ‘talked lightly of his deathless friends.’
‘There’s a patient over at the Golden Nugget raising Cain,’ reported Tracy, ‘because old Merrylegs hasn’t been in there to see her yet.’
‘Is it something serious?’
Tracy gave a snort. ‘I’ll say it is. If she isn’t discharged in time she’ll have to pay the fees for another night in there and that’s not chicken feed.’
‘Oh, dear.’ Shirley Partridge sounded quite worried. Dr Meggie’s private practice was near and dear to him. That it also cost the patients very dear didn’t weigh with her at all. ‘That’s not like him,’ she said carefully.
‘It isn’t.’ Tracy endorsed this with more vigour than was really kind.
‘Not if he said he would be there,’ said Shirley loyally.
Not only was Dr Meggie not to be found at any of the hospitals—that much Detective Inspector Sloan had quickly established—but it soon transpired that he had missed an important lunchtime engagement at Gilroy’s Pharmaceuticals at Staple St James.
‘Important?’ queried Sloan rather sharply. Policemen worked in a field where luncheon was lucky if you got it but only incidental to work, not part of it.
‘That’s what their Chief Chemist told me, Inspector,’ said Dr Meggie’s clinical secretary, a little nervously. ‘Mr Gledhill sounded quite put out when he rang. I understand they’d got someone over from Luston specially to meet him.’
‘Perhaps Dr Meggie just forgot.’
‘Never.’ Although clearly flustered the secretary drew herself up and said, ‘Besides, I reminded him myself yesterday.’
‘So the engagement was in his diary?’ said Sloan.
‘It was in mine,’ she said astringently, pointing to her desk. ‘Dr Meggie was expected over at Staple St James at one o’clock after his clinic.’
‘For lunch?’ Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby had not eaten yet.
‘I understand,’ she said, ‘it was to discuss the progress of the Cardigan Protocol over a meal.’
‘All right. A working lunch.’
The secretary indicated an empty in-tray on her desk. ‘He always took the computer printout of the results home with him at night.’
Sloan didn’t like computers.
‘You see,’ she hesitated, ‘he’s always very careful about confidentiality.’
‘Yes, miss.’ Sloan could have wished, though, that Dr Meggie wasn’t being a quite so secretive about his own whereabouts today. He, Sloan, had promised an old gardening friend that he would drive over to Cullingoak tomorrow to admire his friend’s new greenhouse rose.
The rose was called ‘Celeste’. It was in full flower now and it wasn’t even the middle of May yet, and its scent was said to be quite memorable.
At the present moment the disappearance of Dr Paul Meggie had a less attractive smell and distinct overtones of the Marie Celeste; which was something very different.
He made a note of the doctor’s home address. ‘Come along, Crosby.’
Just as a single twist of a kaleidoscope changes the picture but keeps the same constituents, so the death that day of old Abel Granger at Willow End Farm, Larking, brought about a new arrangement in the dispositions of his immediate family.
Old Mrs Granger, who had encountered death before, folded her husband’s hands across his still chest, closed his eyes and drew her best Egyptian cotton sheet over the face that had been her constant companion for the best part of fifty years. Simon, the elder son, went off to telephone Dr Angus Browne and Morton & Sons, the Berebury undertakers, while the daughter tried to persuade her mother to rest.
Christopher Granger, the younger son, to whom death so far had been a stranger, drew on his boots, whistled for his dog and went outside. It was more breathing space than fresh air that he felt he needed but the land makes its own demands on those who live by it and he set out to make a conscientious—if rather overdue—survey of the family’s acres. There were some bullocks being fattened in the Thither field which always needed a weather eye kept on them. If they could find a way out of their pasture, then find it they would.
The further he walked the better Christopher began to feel. He’d have to face his mother later on, of course. He half hoped she wouldn’t break down when she saw him and he half hoped she would—he didn’t really know what to hope. What he did know was that he wasn’t in any hurry to go back indoors. His sister would be bustling about and Simon would be busy doing all the right things. All he wanted to do was to have a quiet think.
He called his dog and decided to walk home along the lower—the longer—path, the one that ran alongside the stream and through the willow copse.
That was when he saw the car.
It was on the track that led to the gate and he thought that he could hear the engine running.
He quickened his pace. Someone coming up to the farm—the undertaker, perhaps—it looked a smart enough car to be the undertaker’s—they made a lot more money than farmers did these days—must have taken the wrong track at the fork. A lot of drivers did that if they didn’t know the way to the farmhouse. He’d go down and open the gate. You couldn’t turn a car there otherwise; not with the strea
m on one side and a drainage leat on the other.
As he got nearer he was more sure still that he could hear the car’s engine running so he waved to the driver. He must have only just come that way.
‘Wait there,’ he called out. ‘I’ll have to open the gate for you.’
The man at the wheel made no response. He seemed to be leaning forward studying the dashboard.
Christopher Granger advanced curiously, his dog at his heel.
The farmer’s son might until today have been something of a stranger to human death but his acquaintanceship with it was being rapidly extended.
That this man was dead, Granger was never in any doubt at all after he had seen him. It wasn’t so much the appearance of the body that convinced him as the fact that there was a length of flexible tubing leading from the exhaust pipe to the almost closed window behind the driver’s seat.
Without thinking Christopher Granger opened the driver’s door and slipped his hand inside the car to turn off the engine. As he did so the man’s body canted over the door sill towards him. He fielded the dead weight quite as automatically and expertly as if it had been that of a sheep. As he did so his eye was caught by a boldly labelled document folder lying on the passenger seat beside the dead man.
Re-energized and shaking slightly in a way that his country-bred mother would have called ‘shreugly,’ Christopher Granger made his way back to Willow End farmhouse very quickly indeed.
The words ‘Cardigan Protocol’ written on the label of the document folder meant nothing to him at all.
Then.
CHAPTER SEVEN
That instrument of torture, the night bell.
‘You’ve done what?’ barked Superintendent Leeyes down the telephone line from Berebury Police Station to St Ninian’s Hospital at Kinnisport.
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