After Effects

by Catherine Aird

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.

  The atmosphere of a house in mourning takes on a quality all of its own and Detective Inspector Sloan was alert for all the genuine signs of this when he and Crosby went back to the home of the late Dr Paul Meggie. The stillness of recent bereavement was certainly evident there: Bunty Meggie appeared to have been sitting where they had left her, some empty tea cups the only visible indication of the passage of time since the two policemen had been there before.

  She hadn’t changed her clothes and she was letting the telephone ring and ring—and ring.

  ‘There’s no one I want to hear from,’ she said when the bell started again.

  ‘It might be important,’ suggested Sloan.

  ‘It might be her,’ said the girl with deep animosity.

  It was the only sign of animation that she displayed. There was otherwise a dullness about her tone which showed that the reality of the death of her father had sunk in. She answered their questions in a remote, disinterested way but without hesitation. Yes, she was an only child. There had been another baby—a boy—but he had been what her mother had euphemistically described as ‘born sleeping’.

  ‘My father had always wanted a son,’ she added listlessly.

  She was, she declared, quite certain that the handwriting on the note calling him to Willow End Farm was his and she found some other samples of his handwriting for the two policemen without difficulty.

  Detective Inspector Sloan put them into his folder with great care while Crosby said with surprise, ‘I can actually read it.’

  ‘He wrote very clearly,’ she said gravely, ‘for a doctor.’

  ‘I wonder, miss,’ said Sloan, ‘if you would mind giving me an outline of your movements this morning after you heard your father’s car leave?’

  ‘I went back to sleep for a little while but I’d set my alarm for quite early because my partner and I—’

  ‘Your partner, miss?’ interposed Sloan. Now there was a word with a new meaning.

  She flushed and said gauchely, ‘My golf partner—’

  ‘Ah—’

  ‘She and I were due to play in the first foursome off the tee this morning.’ She paused and pushed her hair back. ‘It’s funny how long ago this morning seems.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’ Time as a perception and time as a dimension were two separate things. Sloan knew this because it had been a proposition that Superintendent Leeyes had had to debate in one of his Adult Education Classes: and he had sought the views of every serving officer in ‘F’ Division. That had been before he had been asked to leave the class over a misunderstanding about Galileo, velocity and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. ‘Did you have any breakfast?’

  ‘I had a very good breakfast,’ she said, ‘because I knew that I’d need it. You can’t play a full round at Kinnisport on an empty stomach. It’s a tough course.’

  ‘No, miss, I’m sure. Tell me, did your father have anything to eat before he went out?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sure he didn’t. For one thing, Inspector, if someone wanted him at five o’clock in the morning they wanted him pretty badly—’

  Detective Inspector Sloan was in complete agreement with her there. He was beginning to realize someone had wanted Dr Paul Meggie very badly indeed but not, he now thought, to give a medical opinion. ‘And for another thing, miss?’

  ‘He’d have left the washing up,’ she said simply. ‘He always did.’

  For the second time that day, Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby were attending a post mortem examination. And while it would have been true to say that in between times they had both grabbed some food, Sloan for one wasn’t sure that he had digested his.

  Dr Dabbe welcomed them with unimpaired courtesy. ‘Or should I be saying, “Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more”?’ he said, leading the way into the mortuary.

  Even though it was the speech that every schoolboy learned by heart, all Sloan could call to mind at this moment was something melancholy which went with it about ‘our English dead.’ He hoped he wasn’t going to have to add Abel Granger to the list of today’s post mortems. Berebury was, after all, not Harfleur.

  The laboratory attendant eased back the sheet from the face of the late Paul Meggie and Detective Inspector Sloan took his second look at the man. While Dr Dabbe regarded the body of his former colleague with apparent equanimity, Sloan considered what he saw before him with a professional detachment. He had never seen Paul Meggie in life. Even in death, though, he could see that the man must have been very personable. His features had a quite distinguished cast to them, while his little greying moustache was neatly trimmed and his figure still that of an active man.

  ‘How good a doctor was he?’ Sloan was more than a little reminded by Paul Meggie’s face of the copy of the death mask of Agamemnon which had adorned the upper corridor of his school. After all, they couldn’t all be as bad doctors as Dangerous Dan McGrew or there wouldn’t be anyone left alive in Calleshire.

  ‘Meggie was no fool,’ Dr Dabbe said promptly. ‘He’d got that rare commodity called clinical acumen. Not enough of it about these days. Good judgement is very important in a physician.’

  Sloan nodded. They had policemen in the Force with acumen—and policemen without it. And good judgement couldn’t be taught: that was something he’d never believed but he had learned it the hard way.

  ‘Good clinicians,’ pronounced Dabbe, ‘are a much under-rated commodity in these mechanized days, I can tell you, gentlemen.’

  ‘Mechanized?’ Crosby sat up. ‘Medicine?’

  Dabbe waved a hand airily. ‘Scans, X-rays, pathology, computers and so forth but I can assure you that under all those trimmings and his showmanship Meggie was a really good doctor. He didn’t,’ said Dabbe, paying the ultimate medical tribute by one doctor to another, ‘miss much.’

  ‘Which you would have found even if he didn’t?’ said Sloan. There was no fresh carnation in Paul Meggie’s buttonhole now but Sloan fancied Dr Dabbe’s little encomium would have pleased the man more.

  ‘True. And for my sort of pathology,’ said Dabbe ironically, ‘you can read “hindsight”.’ He suffered himself to be eased into his gown by his assistant and prepared to advance on the subject.

  Detective Constable Crosby, ever anxious to postpone the first incision, asked the pathologist what it was like cutting up someone you knew.

  Dabbe shot the constable a penetrating look. ‘It’s no different from examining anyone else,’ he said chillingly. ‘You can’t afford to have feelings in medicine.’

  Sloan, who had found the same thing applied to policing, opened his mouth to say just that but Crosby, greatly daring, forestalled him.

  ‘There must be something, Doctor,’ he persisted, ‘that upsets you.’

  ‘Crosby!’ Sloan stiffened. ‘I’m very sorry, Doctor,’ he apologized rigidly, ‘that my constable should have allowed his curiosity to get the better of him—’ Crosby he would deal with later. In the privacy of the police station.

  ‘No, no, Sloan,’ said Dabbe, stooping over the body of the dead man and beginning his external examination. ‘It’s a good question. The boy’s quite right. We’ve all got an Achilles’ heel. Mine, I don’t mind telling you, is cars.’

  ‘Cars, Doctor?’ echoed Sloan.

  ‘Don’t like seeing crashed cars,’ admitted Dabbe, by far and away the fastest living driver in Calleshire. ‘A good car is a beautiful thing. Sends a shiver down my spine when I see a badly damaged one.’

  ‘What I don’t like is—’ began Crosby.

  ‘And as for seeing them upside down in the ditch—’ The pathologist shuddered and lowered his head again. ‘I think it’s downright obscene.’

  It hadn’t occurred to Sloan that there might be an intimate side to a car, too.

  It seemed only a moment or two before the pathologist straightened up and said in his usual tones, ‘See the
October flush on his face? That spells carbon monoxide poisoning to me.’

  ‘Ah …’ Sloan knew all about the October flush: birds’ nests in the chimney in the summer, gas fires in the chimney in the autumn. Result: carbon monoxide poisoning in the human. ‘I am told he was on the—er—horns of a family dilemma.’

  The pathologist wasn’t listening. He was once again bending over the post mortem table but now his whole manner had changed. He reached for a magnifying glass and resumed his scrutiny of Paul Meggie’s face. It was the deceased’s mouth and lips that were engaging his attention.

  Somehow the atmosphere of the mortuary changed to match Dr Dabbe’s demeanour. The stillness of his concentration was pretty nearly palpable. Sloan almost held his breath in sympathy. If Crosby said so much as a word now, he, Sloan, would personally take him apart. At long last Dr Dabbe put the magnifying glass down and spoke. ‘I can’t be absolutely sure, Sloan, but I think that what I am looking at are some slight burn marks around the mouth?’

  ‘Burn marks?’ Burn marks brought in a new dimension. Sloan said, ‘But what about the carbon monoxide, Doctor? There was a tube from the exhaust into the car. I saw it.’

  Dr Dabbe looked unusually grim. ‘I think we are going to find that the burn marks preceded the carbon monoxide poisoning.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘In fact, Sloan, I think we might postulate that they facilitated it.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan was not a man to stand on ceremony. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, but I just don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m not at all sure that I do,’ said Dabbe, looking down at the body of a man he knew, ‘but what I think we are looking at here might be second-degree burns.’

  ‘Burn marks?’ echoed Superintendent Leeyes. ‘What exactly are you trying to tell me, Sloan?’

  ‘The pathologist,’ quoted Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘is of the considered opinion that some substance as yet unidentified was applied to or made contact with in some other way—’

  ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ interrupted Leeyes truculently.

  ‘Sprayed,’ said Sloan cogently.

  Leeyes sniffed. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Made contact with the area round the deceased’s mouth and nose immediately prior to his death.’

  ‘What he’s saying then, Sloan, is that this—’

  ‘He suggests’—Sloan turned over a page of his notes—‘that the application of this substance—liquid or gaseous, he doesn’t know which yet—might have been made with a view to rendering the deceased incapable of action while the carbon monoxide gas from the car exhaust took effect.’

  ‘He does, does he? And,’ barked Leeyes, ‘does he have any happy thoughts on what this substance might have been?’

  ‘Two possibilities that he put forward,’ responded Sloan sturdily, ‘are a riot-control agent or chloroform.’

  ‘So,’ said Superintendent Leeyes ineluctably, ‘it’s not suicide.’

  ‘No, sir.’ That much had been apparent to the detective inspector in that Temple of Truth, the post mortem laboratory.

  ‘Or accident,’ concluded Leeyes aloud, ‘or natural causes—’

  ‘No, sir. In fact, Dr Dabbe says the deceased was particularly healthy for his age.’

  Leeyes growled, ‘That leaves murder—’

  ‘Very probably, sir.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Neither did Sloan, his free weekend irretrievably lost now. Reminded by this, he said, ‘There’s something about this weekend, sir.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Sloan coughed. ‘Dr Dabbe managed to convey to us without, of course, being in any way medically unprofessional or unethical, sir, that—’

  Superintendent Leeyes conveyed without any difficulty at all what he thought about self-serving medical ethics.

  ‘Quite so, sir,’ responded Sloan. ‘You see, these burn marks are absolutely minimal—’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘If, sir, Paul Meggie’s body hadn’t been found until later—say this evening or tomorrow—which, seeing it was on a side track, was quite on the cards—’

  ‘Get on with it, Sloan.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Or if Dr Dabbe had felt he shouldn’t be doing the post mortem examination on account of his knowing Dr Meggie personally—’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought he was one to be squeamish,’ growled Leeyes. ‘I reckon he’s as cold-blooded as they come.’

  Sloan let this pass and carried on, ‘Then his stand-in, who’s from the other side of Calleshire, would have had to do the post mortem—’

  ‘So?’

  Sloan said delicately, ‘I understand this other chap’s been known to miss small things—’

  ‘Ah, I see. He’s the Dangerous Dan McGrew of the pathological world, is he!’ snorted Leeyes. ‘Is that what you’re trying to say?’

  ‘Sort of, sir,’ Sloan said, adding, ‘Of course, it won’t be so dangerous when it’s a pathologist operating, not a surgeon.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Leeyes roundly. ‘The law is much more important, Sloan, than an individual life. Don’t you realize that the police are guardians of the social fabric of this country? And if murder goes unrecognized as murder, then where are we?’

  ‘It would have been this man who would have examined the deceased,’ said Sloan steadily.

  ‘Why wouldn’t Dr Dabbe have been available then?’

  ‘He’s racing his Westerly at the Kinnisport Regatta all weekend.’

  ‘And who knew that?’

  ‘Everyone who read yesterday’s local newspaper,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, a touch of melancholy in his voice. ‘He was last year’s winner and the paper did a feature on him.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It is always safer to operate.

  In purely chronological terms Martin Friar was barely a year older than Dilys Chomel. Medically speaking, though, he felt he was already well on his way to early middle age.

  Nevertheless even he, more experienced as he was, did not feel he could cope without some support with the imminent death on Lorkyn Ward of a young man. He had telephoned the Women’s Medical Ward at Berebury Hospital—and got Dilys Chomel instead of Dr Byville.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s gone over to Gilroy’s,’ said Dilys. ‘Is it urgent?’ Three months ago she would have asked if it was important. Now only the urgent mattered: everything else in her day had to be subordinated to that which would not wait.

  ‘It’s this spleen of Dr Byville’s we shipped over here the other day to be nearer his family. Remember?’

  ‘I remember.’ Dilys Chomel had not forgotten only because she had been grateful at the time to have one fewer very ill patient to look after.

  ‘He’s not going to do,’ said Martin Friar who had also picked up the correct lingo, doctor to doctor. ‘And I’ve already,’ he added ruefully, ‘got it in the neck anyway for agreeing to take him.’

  Dilys gave a little shiver which she was glad he couldn’t see. ‘We’ve got a woman here who’s just the same. She’s going downhill all the time.’

  ‘My chap’s spleen was compromised by chemotherapy—’

  ‘This woman was in a road smash.’

  ‘What’s yours on?’

  Dilys detailed a list of drugs.

  ‘Mine, too,’ he said gloomily. ‘He’s having exactly the same. Actually there’s a woman in the female ward here doing better on something different but old Byville won’t let me put my chap on it too. He said changing therapeutic horses in midstream could be clinically dangerous.’

  ‘It can’t be more dangerous than dying, surely,’ objected Dilys.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Friar with feeling. He’d already learned that in hospital there were a great many things for a doctor worse than a patient dying. Some of them were worse for the patient, too.

  ‘Dr Byville hasn’t suggested prescribing anything different for the woman here,’ said Dilys Chomel, ‘so, whatever it is, it can’
t be all that good.’ She paused before saying tentatively, ‘You’ve heard about Dr Meggie, I’m sure?’ They didn’t have what she supposed she should call ‘active suicide’ in her home country and she didn’t like to put the phrase into words.

  ‘I have indeed. I must say I was surprised,’ said Martin Friar judiciously. ‘He didn’t ever strike me as that type at all.’

  ‘Nor me,’ said Dilys humbly. ‘He always seemed to me to be on top of everything.’ She herself was very conscious of not being on top of a lot of things these days.

  ‘Always.’

  ‘I suppose something was too much for him after all.’ If someone committed an offence against society where Dilys Chomel came from they were expected just to go home and die. Of inanition, usually; absolution was unheard of.

  ‘You never know with these things,’ said Friar sagaciously.

  ‘Perhaps he was a bit of a dark horse,’ suggested Dilys.

  ‘Doggish, more like,’ said Martin Friar. ‘I hear there’s a femme fatale in the woodwork.’ Friar, who was not yet thirty, still thought the idea of late-middle-aged marriage faintly risible.

  ‘What we would call an old goat,’ said Dilys surprisingly.

  ‘Perhaps.’ He changed his tone. ‘Or it could be something else, something quite different.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We’ve already had the police here,’ he said, ‘asking which patients had been entered for the Cardigan Protocol. I should think they’ll be with you soon.’

  She ventured a question. ‘What do you think was wrong with Cardigan?’

  ‘Something,’ he said evasively, ‘but don’t ask me what.’

  The police weren’t on their way to Berebury Hospital. They were at Gilroy’s Pharmaceuticals at Staple St James. With some difficulty Sloan had persuaded Crosby that the wide sweep of the carriage drive was not a place for exhibition motoring. He directed him instead to the stables entrance. Discrete as their arrival had therefore been it clearly threw the Chief Chemist and his deputy.