Detective Constable Crosby had seemed at first unsure of what to do with his knees. Turning them first one way and then another, he had settled for enveloping his long arms round them and then locking his fingers together. He unclasped a hand now to point at a photograph in a silver frame.
‘That him, is it?’ he asked conversationally.
Hannah Glawari expelled her breath in a long, tearful sigh. ‘Yes, that’s my Paul.’
Only, decided Sloan, he wasn’t her Paul any longer. He’d died as Bunty Meggie’s father and presumably that was all. He braced himself to put a painful question to the distressed woman. ‘Forgive me, madam, but was—er—marriage—er—contemplated?’
‘We were to be married on Midsummer’s Day, Inspector. Paul said it would be a good time because we were both in the mid-summer of our lives.’ Here she broke down completely, quite beyond speech now.
Shaking off a powerful charm, Sloan made a swift return to his duties. As they left Hannah Glawari’s house he said to the detective constable, ‘Crosby, find out who Dr Meggie’s solicitors are.’
‘Sir?’
‘And enquire whether the good doctor had by any chance made a will in expectation of marriage before he died or a new one, for that matter.’
‘Beg pardon, sir, but why would that be?’
‘Because you can’t sue a dead man for breach of promise,’ said Sloan irritably. ‘That’s why.’
‘Driving a man to suicide, Sloan,’ pronounced Superintendent Leeyes weightily, ‘isn’t an offence yet.’
‘No, sir,’ Detective Inspector Sloan had, duty bound, reported back at Berebury Police Station before going over to the post mortem on Dr Meggie.
‘Although,’—Leeyes stroked his chin consideringly—‘I’m not at all sure that it shouldn’t be.’
‘Yes, sir. One day, perhaps.’ There were a number of actions that were both legal and bad. His own mother, who was a great churchwoman, was strong on sin and weak on parking offences. ‘Actually, sir, we’re not one hundred per cent certain yet about the suicide in Dr Meggie’s case.’
‘Ha!’
‘His daughter says,’ here Sloan chose his words with extreme care, ‘that her father had a telephone call about five o’clock this morning asking him to go to see a patient at Willow End Farm at Larking.’
‘Did he?’ said Leeyes, adding significantly, ‘And did she?’
‘There’s an old farmer there by the name of Granger who was very ill and, in fact, did die there later on today from heart failure.’
‘That’s three deaths,’ said Leeyes.
‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Sloan. From all accounts it was the merest chance that there hadn’t been four. Dr Dilys Chomel had told Crosby that the glass that had injured Darren Clements’s hand and arm had been perilously near an artery.
‘I’m glad you haven’t forgotten the woman in Berebury Hospital,’ said Leeyes tartly.
‘No, sir. I haven’t forgotten her. Or her son. I’m seeing Mr Gordon Galloway later on this afternoon. After we’ve heard what Dr Dabbe has to say about his mother.’
‘Willow End Farm, Larking,’ mused the superintendent, changing tack again. ‘That’s where the doctor was found, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Sloan coughed. ‘Only he wasn’t sent for.’
‘What’s that?’ The superintendent’s head came up with a jerk. ‘What do you mean?’
‘According to their statements neither the farmer’s family—the Grangers—nor the patient’s own doctor—that’s Angus Browne—telephoned Dr Meggie at five o’clock this morning to ask him to visit Abel Granger.’ He turned a page in his notebook. ‘Dr Browne did ring for him but not until later on in the morning.’
‘Puts things in a different light, that,’ conceded Leeyes upon the instant.
‘It means,’ ventured Sloan, ‘that whoever did send that message—’
‘Or says that the message had been sent.’
‘That’s something we’ll be looking into, sir.’ Sloan accepted his superior officer’s qualification without demur. ‘What it does mean is that whoever did cause that message to be written on the pad beside the deceased’s bed’—he didn’t think he could put it more precisely than that—‘knew that old Abel Granger was ill enough to warrant the consultant being called out at that time.’
‘And that Dr Meggie knew that too,’ put in Leeyes, ‘and would come if sent for. Doctors don’t always.’
‘He’d go all right, sir.’ Sloan told the superintendent that Dr Browne had said that old Abel Granger—like Mrs Muriel Galloway—had been one of those entered for the trial of the drug code-named Cardigan.
Leeyes drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘I don’t like it, Sloan.’
‘No, sir.’ Sloan hadn’t thought for one moment that he would. He added something else the superintendent wouldn’t like either. ‘Someone telephoned Kinnisport Hospital first thing this morning to say Dr Meggie wouldn’t be taking his clinic there today and—’
‘And?’
‘And Bunty Meggie—that’s the deceased’s daughter—swears it wasn’t her.’
Shirley Partridge, who had taken the incoming call on her switchboard, had been sure it had been a woman on the line and she had told Detective Constable Crosby so. ‘The voice was a bit husky,’ she said, ‘as if she might have had a cold.’ That was all she remembered.
‘But was it the doctor’s daughter?’ Crosby had insisted. He had reached Shirley’s little glass-walled cubicle at Kinnisport Hospital only after a bruising encounter in the entrance hall with the artist, Adrian Gomm.
Of this she had been less sure.
‘Think back,’ he urged.
‘I don’t know Miss Meggie’s voice very well,’ said Shirley Partridge, professionally challenged. ‘She doesn’t often ring the hospital. Not since Dr Meggie got his own mobile telephone.’
‘But someone rang,’ persisted the young constable.
‘Oh, yes.’ Shirley Partridge had been quite confident about this. ‘And I took the message and passed it on straightaway to Dr Friar. He was the one who needed to know about taking the clinic instead of Dr Meggie, you see.’
Crosby’s expression suddenly became very cunning. ‘Did the caller ask for Dr Friar by name or did you just ring through to him yourself? Off your own bat, I mean.’
‘She said would I pass a message on to Dr Friar.’
‘But she didn’t ask to be put through to him himself?’ asked Crosby, who had never really mastered the matter of leading questions.
‘No.’
‘And when exactly did the call come?’
Shirley Partridge sank her head into her hands. ‘I’d have to think.’
‘Do that,’ commanded Crosby. ‘It’s quite important.’
‘You could always ask Dr Friar.’
‘I have,’ said Crosby. Dr Martin Friar, having been woken by the call, had immediately gone back to sleep. He had no idea when the telephone had rung.
‘It was early,’ she volunteered.
‘How early?’
‘Quite early.’
‘Was there anyone about? That funny chap doing the painting, say?’
‘Only Dr Teal. She kept on coming along here after she came off-duty at seven thirty.’
‘Did this woman ring before or after you saw Dr Teal?’
‘Oh, before,’ said Shirley Partridge, her face clearing. ‘She rang even before the calls for Niobe started to come in and they’re always early.’
‘Who’s Niobe?’ asked Crosby.
‘It’s not a person. It’s the name of one of the wards here. At least,’—Shirley Partridge remembered something—‘I think Niobe was a person in history. All the wards here, you see, are named after doctors in history—’
‘And Niobe was a doctor?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘But when they wanted a name for a new sort of ward in the hospital someone suggested they called it Niobe.’
‘Why?’
‘Niobe is the war
d here where they treat infertility—’
‘So?’
‘Niobe is someone in Greek mythology who wept for her babies that were not … Dr Teal explained it to me.’
Crosby turned slightly pink.
‘And the ladies,’ said Shirley, ‘who are to be admitted there have to take their temperatures early in the morning so they know whether to come in that day.’
Crosby turned even more pink.
‘Because, you see, it all depends on—’ but she was talking to thin air.
Detective Constable Crosby had fled.
CHAPTER NINE
Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed in it … the words ‘Remember, I too am mortal.’
One of the many things which Dr Dilys Chomel found difficult about being a house physician at Berebury Hospital Trust was the sudden switches of role required of her.
One moment there she was happily dispensing authoritative advice to patients and having people twice her age hanging on her every word. The next minute she was trotting along behind Dr Byville, being cut down to size by having her every suggestion about diagnosis and treatment subjected to comment and criticism. Teaching by humiliation it was known in the profession.
And all the time she was trying to keep on the good side of Sister Pocock who had been ruling the Women’s Medical Ward longer than anyone could remember and whose goodwill made all the difference to a quiet life.
Life at the moment was not quiet.
‘Is there anyone else on this ward who’s on the Cardigan Protocol?’ Dr Byville had heard the news about Dr Meggie and hurried straight back to the Women’s Medical Ward at Berebury Hospital.
‘The ventricular fibrillation in bed seven.’ The patient in bed seven had a name but Dilys Chomel had forgotten it and she doubted if Dr Byville had ever known it.
‘God knows what all this is about,’ said Byville irritably, ‘but I don’t like it.’
‘No, sir.’ Dilys Chomel had never liked the Cardigan Protocol but no one had ever asked her opinion.
‘And what Meggie wanted to go and do a thing like that for—’ It was the nearest Dilys Chomel had ever been to seeing Roger Byville animated. A normally colourless man, he was quite stirred now.
‘No, sir.’ Where Dilys Chomel came from suicide was not a problem. Keeping alive took up too much time and energy.
‘Start taking the ventricular fibrillation off the protocol,’ ordered the senior physician, ‘and step up her other drugs to compensate if necessary.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘But be very careful. There could just be some problems with Cardigan that we don’t know about.’
‘I understand.’
The consultant relaxed for a moment. ‘I reckon,’ he said unguardedly, ‘that all hell’s going to be let loose over this.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Dilys. ‘Do we … I mean, is there something that—’
He cut her short abruptly. ‘Anyone else on it here?’
‘No, sir,’ stammered Dilys. ‘Not since Mrs Galloway died.’
He jerked his head. ‘Anything back from the pathologist about her yet?’
Dilys Chomel shook her head. ‘Not so far, sir.’
‘See that I get it as soon as it comes.’ Dr Roger Byville looked up and down the ward. ‘You’d better give me a run-down on all of Dr Meggie’s cases here. I’ll have to take them over until they find someone else to fill his post and that isn’t going to be easy.’
Dilys obediently supplied him with the details and then came back to the condition of one of Dr Byville’s own patients on the ward. ‘I’m a bit worried about Mrs Aileen Hathersage—she’s the spleen in the end bed—’
He gave a quick frown. ‘Spleens are always worrying. Has she got any Howell-Jolly bodies?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ she said haltingly, trying hard to remember what Howell-Jolly bodies were. Something seen in blood, she knew, but she couldn’t for the life of her think what. She wished she dare get out her little vade mecum from her pocket and look it—or was it them?—up.
‘Find out,’ commanded Byville. ‘What’s the trouble with her now, anyway?’
‘I’m not sure, sir. Only that she’s rather ill today.’ Naïve as she was, Dilys Chomel had already learned all about the meiosis of medical-speak: doctor to doctor, that is. It was understatement raised to an art form. In that context ‘rather ill’ meant what the lay person would consider very ill indeed. By the same token, ‘not too good’ really meant dying. ‘She’s quite a lot worse,’ continued Dilys uncomfortably, ‘than she was yesterday.’
Byville gave an almost imperceptible shrug of his thin shoulders. ‘She had a splenectomy for some reason or other last year.’
‘It was ruptured in a road traffic accident,’ said Dilys, who had clerked the patient on her admission. ‘They couldn’t stop it bleeding.’
‘So,’ the consultant opened his hands in a gesture of hopelessness, ‘she’s lost her spleen. And now she needs it. Pretty badly, actually.’
‘Yes, sir, I know but—’
‘And, Dr Chomel, neither you nor I can put it back for her.’
‘No, sir, of course not.’
‘I expect the barber boys’ll find a way of doing it one day but not yet awhile.’
‘No, sir.’ Sister Pocock had had to explain to her why Dr Byville always called the surgeons the barber boys. Ever since then Dilys had been scanning the streets of Berebury looking for a red-and-white striped barber’s pole. Sister Pocock had also attempted—without success—to make her understand why it was that the physicians invariably considered themselves a cut above the surgeons.
‘And Mrs Hathersage will have been very prone to infection ever since.’
‘I understand that, sir, but—’
‘And will remain so for the rest of her life. Some authorities,’ he said, belatedly conscious of a duty to teach, ‘maintain that the immunity improves with time but I have yet to see the evidence of that myself.’
Greatly daring, Dilys Chomel said, ‘I’m afraid what we’re giving her doesn’t seem to be doing her much good.’
‘I don’t suppose it is,’ said Byville dispassionately.
‘But—’
‘Most of these people,’ said Byville, a medical nihilist if ever there was one, ‘die from an overwhelming infection.’
‘She’s just not responding,’ said Dilys worriedly.
‘A mild infection in a person without a spleen progresses to a major one very quickly. That’s her trouble—’ He broke off as his call-pager started bleeping. ‘You’d better tell the husband I’ll talk to him. After he’s visited her, mind you, not before. That’s something you’ll soon learn, Dr Chomel. Not to give bad news before the relatives see the patient. Tell ’em on their way out and let them have time to sleep on it and get their faces straight before they visit again.’
‘Thank you, sir—’
But Dr Byville was already on his mobile telephone. ‘Gledhill? Hello, yes, I’ve heard. It’s bad news, all right. What’s that? Right, I’ll come over to you now.’ He turned back to Dilys. ‘I’m going to Gilroy’s at Staple St James. If you can’t get hold of me, ring Martin Friar at Kinnisport. He’ll have to stand in for Paul over there.’
Dr Dabbe, the Consultant Pathologist at Berebury, welcomed Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby to his domain with his usual affability. ‘Keeping me busy today, gentlemen, aren’t you? Two police cases in one day.’
‘We’re not sure yet if Muriel Galloway is a police case,’ said Sloan cautiously. ‘There’s a post mortem because there are certain allegations that she died as a result of a drug trial.’
‘So do most patients, Sloan,’ said Dabbe cheerfully.
‘I’m not sure, Doctor, that I—’
‘You could say, Sloan, that everyone who dies while they’ve been taking medication has been taking part in a drug trial.’
‘Really, Doctor?’
‘Wel
l,’ said Dabbe mischievously, ‘the drugs have been tried, haven’t they, and not worked.’
‘Tried and failed, you mean?’ Crosby looked interested at last.
‘Right,’ said the doctor.
‘Or trial and error.’ The constable caught the pathologist’s drift more quickly than usual.
‘Hit and miss often describes it better.’ Dr Dabbe reached for his green operating gown.
Sloan was not disposed to argue with him. After all, the pathologist was in a better position to know that than anyone else.
‘Otherwise known,’ continued the pathologist robustly, ‘as “treating empirically”.’
‘What is being alleged in the case of Muriel Galloway, Doctor,’ he said, ‘is that her death was hastened by her taking part in what I am informed is called the Cardigan Protocol and perhaps—’ he coughed, ‘it is not yet known if this was so—the drug that is being tested in that Protocol.’
‘Ha!’ said the pathologist, looking alert. ‘Nice point, that, Sloan. And who may I ask, does know? Now that Meggie’s dead, too, I mean.’
‘It is believed,’ said Sloan carefully, ‘that Dr Meggie did not know.’
‘Ah, a double-blind trial. That’s as it should be, of course,’ said Dabbe. ‘So who does know?’
‘I understand,’ said Sloan, ‘that the pharmaceutical chemists, Gilroy’s, over at Staple St James, have a list of those numbered bottles of tablets which contained the substance code-named Cardigan—’
‘Which may or may not have been dangerous,’ mused Dabbe, putting on a green surgical cap.
‘—and those numbered bottles with tablets which appeared identical and which contained an inert substance.’
Dr Dabbe stroked his chin. ‘And presumably poor old Meggie had a list of patients and the numbers on the bottles they have been given—’
‘Yes, Doctor,’ said Sloan steadily.
‘Without knowing t’other from which?’ said Crosby, who didn’t like post mortems and was never in a hurry for them to get started.
‘Right. And ne’er the twain set of matching numbers shall meet,’ continued Dabbe, ‘until the trial’s well and truly over, I take it.’
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