After Effects

by Catherine Aird

  ‘Found Dr Meggie,’ repeated Sloan.

  ‘And about time, too,’ grumbled Leeyes. ‘You’ve been looking for him all morning and that should be long enough.’

  ‘Dead,’ said Sloan.

  ‘I’ve had that man Gordon Galloway on to me again about his mother,’ complained the superintendent. He stopped suddenly. ‘What was that you said, Sloan?’

  ‘Dr Meggie’s been found dead, sir.’

  ‘He has, has he—’

  ‘In his car.’

  ‘Find the car, find the man,’ said Leeyes sententiously.

  ‘With a tube leading from the exhaust pipe.’

  ‘Any note?’

  ‘One hasn’t been found,’ said Sloan precisely. ‘Only a file with the results of some drug trials he’s been working on.’

  ‘Remorse?’ suggested Leeyes with interest.

  ‘Too soon to say, sir.’

  ‘Not, mind you, that I think any of ’em feel it. Knocked out of them all at medical school, if you ask me.’

  ‘Very probably, sir.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We’re leaving for Larking now.’ He had chosen his words with accuracy. If Crosby drove there as fast as he usually did then there was no guarantee that they would get there in one piece; or even that they would arrive at Willow End Farm at all.

  ‘Don’t let Crosby play whacky races on the way there,’ said Leeyes. ‘Police cars come expensive.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ promised Sloan, adding, ‘Of course, sir, Dr Meggie’s death may be quite unconnected with Mrs Galloway’s’

  ‘Find out.’

  ‘Dr Byville,’ volunteered Sloan, ‘seemed unconcerned enough about her when we spoke to him at Berebury.’

  ‘Nothing at all to go by,’ said Leeyes darkly. ‘Remember, Sloan, that doctors get so used to people dying on their hands that they carry it off quite differently from normal people.’

  ‘He did tell us that Mrs Galloway was going to die anyway,’ pointed out Sloan.

  ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ retorted the superintendent unanswerably. ‘What you mustn’t forget, Sloan, is that anonymous call we had here at the station saying the old lady had been treated with something funny. There’s nothing routine about that—’

  ‘I won’t forget, sir,’ Sloan promised—and the very next minute did just that.

  He forgot absolutely everything as Detective Constable Crosby took the wheel of the police car and proceeded to put it through its paces on roads designed for haywains.

  A single twist of the kaleidoscope changed the whole picture for Dr Martin Friar, too. Until he heard the news about Dr Meggie, the Senior Registrar at Kinnisport Hospital had been feeling pretty upbeat.

  This was because he had had a stimulating—not to say thoroughly revivifying—exchange with Adrian Gomm, the artist at work on the mural in the front hall of the hospital.

  ‘Can’t exactly say that I can see what you’re getting at,’ he’d called up to the man as he paused on his way to Lorkyn Ward to examine the work in progress.

  The artist, who had the sort of long hair that brought out the worst in other men, had shrugged his shoulders and replied offensively, ‘Don’t suppose you do.’

  ‘Aren’t I meant to, then?’

  ‘It’s up to you.’ Adrian Gomm kept his back to the registrar and carried on painting. ‘There’s plenty of meaning in it for those that can see.’

  There was certainly plenty to look at in the half-completed mural in which the endless towering arches after the style of Giambattista Piranesi were challenged by dislocation after the manner of Maurits Cornelis Escher.

  Martin Friar, as affronted as the next man at the suggestion that he might not possess the seeing eye of the true art connoisseur, squinted up between the artist’s legs and said provocatively, ‘Looks like all the Circles of Hell to me.’

  ‘It’s meant to,’ came the short reply.

  ‘Beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all that?’ hazarded the doctor.

  ‘Beauty?’ At the mention of the word, Adrian Gomm turned to face the registrar, laying aside his brush and regarding Martin Friar with a belligerence surprising in one so epicene in appearance. ‘Beauty? In case you don’t know, this is a hospital not a pleasure garden. There’s no beauty here. You should know that. You work here, don’t you?’ He peered down at him from his working platform. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen you around.’

  ‘Too right, I do,’ said the registrar feelingly. ‘And how.’

  Adrian Gomm glared at him. ‘You’re not the brute who’s driving that lady doctor to despair, are you? Coming in late every morning on purpose to make her late. Because if so, let me tell you—’

  ‘No, no,’ said Friar hastily. ‘That’s Mr Maldonson.’

  ‘Well, if you’ve found any beauty here in St Ninian’s,’ challenged the artist, ‘leaving aside that lady doctor, Mrs Teal, then you’re a better man than I am. If you ask me, this whole grotty outfit should have been pulled down years ago.’

  ‘Maternity,’ returned the doctor, thinking quickly. ‘There’s beauty in putting a newborn baby into its mother’s arms. It makes her beautiful, too, however plain she is,’ he added, surprising himself that he’d noticed and remembered.

  ‘That’s Nature not Medicine,’ retorted Gomm. ‘You lot can’t go grabbing the credit for Nature, although I’ve noticed you usually do.’ He turned his back on Friar unceremoniously and resumed his work, saying over his shoulder, ‘If you look carefully down there, you’ll see I’ve given Nature full marks.’

  Martin Friar obediently cast his eyes towards the bottom of the colourful mural and said, ‘Worms?’

  ‘One of the medical trials and tribulations of Job,’ returned Adrian Gomm, who appeared to be concentrating on an almond-shaped outline at the top right of the wall.

  ‘Ah, so you’re bringing religion in, are you?’ asked Dr Friar.

  ‘No holds barred in art, you know.’ Gomm wiped a sticky hand across his forehead. ‘I’ve got complete artistic freedom here—wouldn’t have touched the job otherwise—any more than you’d let someone else tell you what to prescribe for one of your patients.’

  ‘So what are you putting in that ellipse thing, then?’

  ‘It’s called a mandorla,’ said Gomm. ‘And I’m painting Christus Medicus in it, if you really want to know.’

  ‘Are you indeed?’ murmured Friar.

  ‘God as the Physician of his People.’ Gomm jerked a shoulder towards the left-hand side of his mural and went on, ‘That’s the scientific side over there but I’m still working on it.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘There’s something else, too, about what I’m doing on this wall.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘This mural’ll still be here when all your work’s dead and buried.’ The artist took an appraising look at his work. ‘And people will still be looking for meaning in it. Some of them,’ he added gratuitously, this time wiping his hands on his paint-stained jeans, ‘will find it, too.’

  ‘All right, all right, I get the message.’ The registrar started to go on his way and then halted, his eye caught by the representation of a sinister crouching figure in the bottom left-hand corner of the mural. It was half animal, half man: a hairy devil with horns and cloven hoofs but with a human face. Dr Martin Friar could have sworn—it couldn’t only be his imagination, surely?—that the face was meant to be that of the Senior Surgeon at St Ninian’s, Mr Daniel McGrew.

  ‘Dad dead?’

  The young woman who had answered the policemen’s knock on the front door of a detached house on the outskirts of Kinnisport was still wearing her golfing clothes.

  ‘I’m afraid so, miss.’

  Bunty Meggie sat now very still on a settee in the sitting room while Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby talked to her, her knee-length culottes and monogrammed sports shirt looking oddly out of place in the well-appointed, rather austere room.

  She looked from one policeman to the
other. ‘Are you trying to tell me that there’s been an accident?’

  ‘No, miss,’ said Sloan. That much at least was certain.

  She shook her head as if to brush away the news. ‘Not an accident?’

  ‘No, miss. I’m sorry to have to tell you that your father’s been found dead in his car.’ That it had been Dr Meggie’s car by the stream at Willow End Farm had been one of the easier things to confirm. Crosby had done it straightaway.

  ‘Well, then—’ said the young woman quickly.

  ‘With a tube leading from the exhaust pipe into the car,’ said Sloan.

  ‘And the engine still running,’ supplemented Crosby helpfully.

  Bunty Meggie suddenly clenched her fists, her face crumpling. She burst out, ‘That woman! It’s her. I know it is!’

  ‘What woman, miss?’ If there was one thing that Detective Inspector Sloan had learned it was when to produce a notebook and when not to. This was one of the times when he left it out of sight.

  ‘She’s driven him to it,’ wailed Bunty Meggie. ‘I knew she would.’

  ‘Who?’ prompted Sloan.

  ‘She made him choose between us,’ she said tightly. ‘Oh, she was very clever, the devil.’

  ‘Who, miss?’ said Sloan again.

  ‘Oh, poor Dad!’ Bunty Meggie started to rock to and fro. ‘I should have known it would have been all too much for him.’

  ‘Should you, miss?’

  ‘I was to go, you see.’ She looked Sloan full in the face. ‘She didn’t care where.’

  ‘Go, miss? Where?’

  ‘Anywhere.’ She burst into uncontrollable, ungainly sobs, embarrassing to see. ‘Oh, poor Dad. He couldn’t take it. She was wicked, wicked.’

  ‘I shall need to know who, miss.’

  ‘Mrs Glawari.’ The girl gulped. ‘She wanted me to call her Hannah but I wouldn’t. I always called her Mrs Glawari and she didn’t like it.’

  ‘And who is Mrs Hannah Glawari?’ persisted Sloan, although he was beginning to think he could guess.

  ‘The woman who wanted to come here,’ she said fiercely, ‘and lord it over my mother’s house.’

  Sloan nodded, light having dawned.

  ‘I wouldn’t let her call Dad “Paul” either—not when she was talking to me.’ She choked. ‘I gave up everything to come home and look after Dad when my mother died and she … she … wanted to take it all away from me.’

  ‘By marrying Dr Meggie?’ said Sloan.

  She nodded, quite beyond speech now.

  ‘So—’ began Sloan, but he was interrupted by Detective Constable Crosby who was leaning forward unusually eager to say something.

  ‘So,’ Crosby delivered his line with great emphasis, ‘when did you last see your father then?’

  The girl turned a blotched face to him and sniffed, the historical allusion quite lost on her. ‘Yesterday evening.’

  ‘Not at breakfast?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t see him then. He had a call early this morning. The telephone bell woke me.’

  ‘How early?’

  She brushed a lock of dishevelled hair away from her eyes. ‘It must have been about five o’clock, I suppose. It was nearly light. After a bit I heard his car go out and I went back to sleep again.’

  ‘And then?’ prompted Sloan. Crosby had transferred his attention to some silver trophies in a glass cabinet on the other side of the room.

  ‘Then,’ she said, ‘when I did get up, I went off to play in a golf competition. My partner and I were due to be first off the tee.’

  ‘Was your father in the habit of getting emergency calls in the night like that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He didn’t get them often, just every now and then,’ she said readily. ‘This was to a farm somewhere out Larking way. I don’t remember the name.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘The address was scribbled on the pad by his bed,’ she said. ‘I found it when I made his bed. It’s still there.’

  ‘I take it, then,’ said the detective inspector, ‘that when your father didn’t come home you phoned Kinnisport Hospital to say that Dr Meggie wouldn’t be taking his clinic there this morning?’

  Bunty Meggie looked up at that and shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t, Inspector. He’d have left me a note if he wanted me to do that. He always did.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor.

  Over at Gilroy’s Pharmaceuticals at Staple St James the Chief Chemist, his deputy, and their public relations specialist were locked in conference. George Gledhill and Mike Itchen were agonizing over the best way to handle the news of the break-in at the pharmaceutical firm by the Calleshire Animal Activists. Pamela Gallop, their in-house expert, was telling them what that way was and not getting very far. Damage limitation is seldom popular.

  ‘Activists!’ snorted George Gledhill, going over old ground. ‘I shouldn’t have thought they could have activated a fruit machine. Not a brain between them.’

  ‘If we could be sure of that,’ said Itchen meaningfully, ‘then we’d really be getting somewhere, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘And what you advise then, Pamela, is that we forget the break-in?’ said George Gledhill, unwilling to acknowledge Itchen’s point. ‘From a public relations point of view, I mean.’

  ‘Dignified silence and all that?’ Mike Itchen put in his pennyworth.

  ‘I think that would be best for us,’ contributed their specialist. ‘After all, we’re not looking for lost monkeys this time, are we?’

  There was a corporate shudder at the memory of last time. That had been when the press had hinted at green monkey disease.

  ‘We should play it down as much as we can,’ added Pamela briefly. ‘It’s not good news.’

  Mike Itchen nodded his agreement. ‘The less said about it the better, if you ask me.’

  ‘The police,’ growled Gledhill, ‘will do their charging whether we like it or not.’

  Pamela Gallop tapped her file. ‘I owe the editor of the Berebury paper a lunch.’

  ‘Breaking and entering, I suppose it’ll be,’ said Itchen, sounding worldly wise. It was part of his credo not to be surprised by anything these days.

  ‘They broke the roof,’ said Gledhill flatly, ‘and Darren Clements entered the hard way.’

  ‘The stringers,’ continued Pamela, ploughing a rather lonely furrow, ‘won’t pick it up if it’s not in the local newspaper in the first place. And by the time any case comes to court it’ll have all blown over.’

  ‘But, Pamela—’

  ‘Press reports put ideas into other people’s heads,’ said Pamela Gallop, belatedly remembering that it was her usual job at Gilroy’s Pharmaceuticals to do just that. ‘You never can tell where they’ll lead—’

  She broke off as a secretary entered the room in haste.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Gledhill,’ began the girl breathlessly, ‘but Dr Meggie’s secretary’s just been on the phone.’

  ‘I should think so,’ said Gledhill roundly. ‘What’s his story?’

  ‘It’s not like that, Mr Gledhill,’ said the girl, wide eyed. ‘He’s been found dead in his car. They think it’s carbon monoxide poisoning.’

  ‘Strewth!’ exploded Mike Itchen, quite forgetting his commitment to a cool urbanity. ‘What on earth did he want to go and do that for?’

  ‘And she said to tell you,’ went on the girl conscientiously, ‘that Dr Meggie had the Cardigan Protocol papers with him when …’ She faltered. ‘When it happened. The police have taken charge of them.’

  Pamela Gallop was not the only one to note that the news was received by both the Chief Chemist and his deputy with a regret tempered by acute anxiety.

  The flick of the kaleidoscope changed the whole future for Mrs Hannah Glawari, too.

  She sat now in the rigid stillness of shock in her pretty little sitting room in one of the early Victorian houses down by St Faith’s Church, overlooking the old market place. Detecti
ve Inspector Sloan was aware that he wasn’t meant to notice the fine tremor in her hands that she was doing her best to conceal. The quaver in her voice was more difficult to keep hidden.

  ‘Poor, poor Paul,’ she said. ‘He was torn, Inspector. Very torn. I could see that. Bunty is so terribly possessive of her father.’

  ‘Daughters are,’ said Sloan, who only had a son.

  ‘But he needed me, too.’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘There are things, Inspector, that a daughter can’t do and Bunty just didn’t understand that.’

  ‘No, madam,’ said Sloan. He was busy keeping one eye on Detective Constable Crosby who was altogether too precariously perched on a chintz pouffe. Crosby seemed too big for the room let alone the pouffe.

  ‘And a man in Paul’s position,’ said Mrs Glawari tremulously, ‘needs a wife.’

  Sloan nodded. It was too soon to know if a lady in Hannah Glawari’s position needed a husband. He suspected that this might be the case.

  A faraway look came into her eyes. ‘In some ways, Inspector, he was still a young man.’

  ‘Yes, madam, I’m sure.’ By the time Detective Inspector Sloan had seen Dr Paul Meggie he was looking a very old man indeed but he had to admit that that was nothing to go by.

  ‘And he cared for me.’ Her voice was much more quavery now.

  ‘I’m sure, madam,’ said Sloan neutrally. Even he could take in the difference between this very feminine room and the more Spartan spareness of the Meggie household. There hadn’t seemed too much stress on home comforts there.

  There was an even more marked difference between this petite, well-groomed and sympathetically dressed woman and Bunty Meggie’s sturdy sportive figure and practical clothes. Sloan could guess whom an extrovert image-conscious medical consultant might prefer at his side in public. And in private, too, very probably.

  ‘I know that Paul cared for me.’ Mrs Glawari twisted a ring on her left fourth finger and gazed at it thoughtfully. ‘He said so all the time. Besides—’

  ‘Besides?’ said Sloan. If Crosby fell off that pouffe he’d have his guts for garters.

  ‘Besides a woman always knows, Inspector. Always.’

  ‘I’m sure, madam.’ His own wife, Margaret, knew because he told her so. Always.