Prescription for Murder

by David Williams

  ‘That’s right. And much more complicated than the other one. Sounded as if it’d be ages before either of them would be ready.’

  ‘Five years at least. And even that’s optimistic.’ He paused, watching the full moon’s reflection in the river as the car sped by the Tate Gallery. ‘But if Seromig’s a success, the new drugs will fall into place very neatly as the next big profit earners. Especially after the Seromig patent runs out.’

  ‘And if Seromig isn’t a success?’

  ‘It’s bound to be a success if it cures migraine, which is what it’s supposed to do. If it doesn’t, a lot of money will have gone down the drain, and Closter Drug will just have to soldier on, doing what it’s been doing for the last five years. It wouldn’t be a disaster, but the company wouldn’t be too exciting for investors.’

  ‘Which would be a pity since it’s just gone public?’

  ‘Oh, it would have quite a few things going for it.’

  ‘Even if the directors aren’t exactly one big happy family.’

  Treasure pouted for a moment. ‘A degree of antagonism is often quite healthy in a management team. Bob Larden’s a good catalyst.’

  ‘I thought you were that. Stuart Bodlin says it’s essential you stay as Chairman. That you give the company style.’

  ‘How touching. I’m not sure a pharmaceutical manufacturer needs much style.’

  ‘Well Stuart obviously respects you enormously.’

  Treasure gave a cynical chuckle. ‘That’s not the reason for the loyalty. If Bob Larden became Chairman, someone else would have to be Managing Director. The likeliest contender would be Dermot.’

  ‘Which wouldn’t suit Stuart either.’

  ‘Because he’d like the job himself.’

  ‘You’re not serious? I mean, I don’t know much about running companies, but Stuart isn’t at all the managing director type is he?’

  ‘No he isn’t, except you’d be surprised at the number of people who privately yearn for jobs that are way above their capacities. Not that if it came to it most of them would actually want to be promoted. Not to industrial stardom.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s the illusion they enjoy. While even deeper down in the sub-conscious they know perfectly well they lack the ability to match the aspiration.’

  ‘So why the yearning?’

  ‘Oh, sometimes envy of the chap already in the top job. More often, jealousy of whoever’s really going to get it next.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a negative syndrome, but very common.’

  ‘In the theatre too,’ said Molly thoughtfully. ‘And Giles Closter-Bennet is another yearner like Stuart?’

  ‘Ah, there the negative syndrome has a related one attached to it.’

  ‘You mean, related by marriage. Barbara?’

  ‘That’s right. The ambitious wife. Quite a common quantity in that sort of situation. I’m sure Giles wouldn’t be ambitious on his own. It’s only because Barbara expects him to be. Basically he’s probably too lazy.’

  ‘I suppose Hughie McFee doesn’t have these hopeless ambitions?’

  ‘Curiously enough, if it weren’t for Dermot, Hughie would make a very competent managing director under Bob’s chairmanship. He’s very experienced, in the industry as well as the company. Very respected.’

  ‘Not too old?’

  ‘He’s fifty-two. I agree he looks older.’

  ‘Would he like the job?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘But Dermot’s better qualified?’

  Treasure hesitated. ‘I didn’t say that. It’s simply that if anyone else were appointed, the mercurial Dermot would probably resign on the spot. He’d regret it afterwards, but he’d still resign.’

  ‘And he’s too valuable to lose?’

  ‘Yes, he is. Immature in many ways, but exceedingly valuable.’

  ‘It sounds as though Mary Ricini is the only director happy with her lot.’

  ‘To an extent that’s true. She’s still learning the ropes of course.’

  ‘Of medicine? But she’s a qualified doc— ’

  ‘No, of management,’ he interrupted. ‘She’s a high flyer. Already too good for the job she’s doing. Give her a year or two, with broader experience, she could make a very good chief executive somewhere.’

  ‘But not at Closter Drug?’

  ‘Possibly. If she can be persuaded to stay long enough.’

  Molly was leaning forward, screwing up her eyes to see something ahead of them.

  Henry Pink was putting the car through a U-turn, just before Albert Bridge, and before swinging it into Cheyne Walk.

  ‘Well here’s your chance to start persuading, darling,’ Molly said. ‘That’s Mary paying off a cab outside our house. I wonder what she wants at this time of night.’

  Chapter Seven

  Doris Tanner, secretary to the Managing Director of Closter Drug, counted the cups again. There were seven on the tray. Then she remembered there would only be six people at the meeting. Mr Treasure hardly ever came to the weekly directors’ meetings, only to the formal monthly ones. And he definitely wouldn’t be coming today because he was in America. She took one of the cups away and, focusing hard through her glasses, counted the pile of saucers. If her husband Bert hadn’t made sexual demands of a very strenuous kind at five thirty on this same morning, Doris would not have been so dozy here at the office less than three hours later.

  Bert was a caution all right. What with his thinking it was Sunday not Monday like that. She took away one of the saucers. Bert was an emergency fitter with British Gas, and worked odd shifts. That was why he sometimes got randy at inconvenient times: well, inconvenient for Doris – and that was apart from his getting the days mixed up. Still, it’d be time to complain if he stopped fancying her, which would be a long time off yet, judging by current interest. She smiled to herself as she put the extra cup and saucer back in the high cupboard behind her desk. The special crockery was stored there – where she could keep an eye on it.

  The Tanners would both be thirty-seven in a month’s time: they’d even been born on the same day. Bert liked to say that proved they were made for each other. They had put off having children for a long time, for money reasons, then discovered they had left it too late, or good as. After Doris’s miscarriage two years before, they had been advised not to try for a baby again. Having to stay childless hadn’t bothered them much. Doris had mentioned adopting once or twice, but Bert wasn’t keen. They kept dogs instead – a pair of Alsatians. They had a neat, modern semi-detached house on a small estate a mile from the Closter factory. There was a handy-sized garden at the back.

  ‘Morning, Doris. Lovely day. Got the coffee on, I see.’ Bob Larden had come from the main corridor and into her office through the door in the small shared vestibule; the door to his own office was opposite. He was carrying his black leather document case, also the pile of professional journals he regularly took home on Fridays. He dropped the journals on Doris’s desk. ‘Present for you,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Did you have a good weekend then, Mr Larden?’ she enquired with a brightness that was still requiring effort. She usually addressed him as ‘Mr’, sometimes as ‘sir’: he wasn’t the type of boss whom you called by his first name. ‘It was ever such lovely weather,’ she added in her smoothed-out, Lambeth accent. You didn’t get Chelsea dolly birds doing the secretarial work around Longbrook, even in the top jobs like Doris’s. And Longbrook bosses should be truly grateful for that great mercy, was what Doris always felt, and sometimes said. She moved the journals to her ‘out’ tray. ‘Get out of London did you at all, Mr Larden?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said, his mind half on something else. Her question had reminded him that his wife had been working at a block of flats in Wapping for most of the previous afternoon and evening. The design job she was doing there had fallen behind schedule. He resented it when her work intruded on their time together. ‘Played a bit of tennis Saturday morning.’

 
; ‘Nice,’ she said.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Oh, we were very quiet. Enjoyed the weather.’

  These were the standard Monday morning answers to the standard Monday morning questions. Doris was sure he didn’t want to know about her weekend. He wouldn’t half be surprised, she thought, if she’d told him what she and Bert had been up to at dawn. Talk about contortions – and all because Bert had bought a sex manual in a book sale. Mr Larden wouldn’t have believed unglamorous Doris capable of such antics. Except he did look at her legs sometimes. She was no beauty – a thin rather than a slim brunette, with rather pronounced teeth – but she made the best of herself, and her legs were definitely her most attractive feature. She imagined his own sex life would be pretty boisterous with that young wife of his: she looked like a real raver from the photos – classy, but still a raver. Doris had never met Jane Larden.

  Larden was still standing in front of her desk while he studied the meeting agenda he’d taken from his case. He stroked his chin with his free hand. ‘Doesn’t look as if we’ll need you in the meeting for anything this morning, Doris. Mr Closter-Bennet will take the minutes. Should be a short meeting too. I’ll buzz if anything crops up.’ He glanced at the electric percolator that was making erupting noises on her side table. ‘Can we have the coffee before we start?’

  ‘It’ll be ready in two minutes.’

  ‘Good.’ He was glancing at his watch as he turned about to go across to his own office. It was 8.34. ‘Everyone’s cutting it fine this morning. Seen Mr Hackle?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s in yet, Mr Larden.’

  Regular informal directors’ meetings took place in Larden’s office every Monday morning at 8.45. They didn’t last long, and were held so that progress could be reported on major company activities. Larden called them essential exercises in top level communication. On the first Monday of the month there was an official board meeting instead, at ten o’clock, usually with Treasure in the chair. Douglas Figg, the Company Secretary, normally attended all the meetings and took the minutes, but he had succumbed to shingles three weeks before. Closter-Bennet had been taking the minutes instead, without much enthusiasm. This was why Doris had sometimes been called in to take the occasional long note.

  Hackle usually came to the Managing Director’s office ahead of the others to discuss the agenda. Twenty minutes later, with the meeting well under way, he still hadn’t appeared.

  ‘If we’re going to switch selling agents in Holland on the date we agreed, the Freight Department really has to know by the end of the month,’ Hughie McFee was saying.

  ‘We gave Dermot the credit clearance on that two weeks ago,’ said Closter-Bennet sharply, shaking his head. ‘We haven’t had any contracts for signing.’

  ‘Haven’t we fired the existing agents?’ asked Mary Ricini who wasn’t directly involved, but interested.

  ‘Yes, we have. So if we don’t act fast we’ll be left with no Dutch agent at all. Probably Dermot’s got it in hand,’ Larden scowled from his seat at the head of the oblong table, thinking there ought to be more people to accept delegated authority. Closter Drug had existed for long enough on this slim nucleus of working directors with little back-up, except in the Research Department, and with each member covering really unacceptably large areas of responsibility. The system had generated profit all right, but the strain was telling. He was about to say something on this subject when his secretary’s head appeared around the door. ‘Any news on Mr Hackle, Doris?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, Mr Larden. I just spoke to Mrs Hackle. She says he had to go to Nottingham after lunch yesterday. On unexpected business. He rang from there to say he had to stay overnight. He was planning to drive straight here this morning.’

  ‘Where was he staying?’

  ‘I asked Mrs Hackle. He hadn’t said.’

  The likelihood of Hackle needing to go to Nottingham on unexpected business on a Sunday, and then having to stay the night without saying where, was silently but not very solemnly debated by all those present. At least one wondered at the naïvety of a wife who accepted such a flimsy story from a husband whose faithfulness wasn’t exactly legendary.

  ‘Thanks, Doris.’ Larden shuffled the papers in front of him. ‘We’ll leave the Dutch situation till Dermot gets here. Traffic’s bad on the M1 probably.’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘There’s been a big accident near Luton,’ Stuart Bodlin put in quietly. ‘It was on the LBC news as I was arriving. There’s a big tailback they said.’

  ‘That’s it then, I expect. And you can never get through on a carphone when there’s a hold-up,’ said Larden shaking his head. ‘Let’s move on to these draft budgets, shall we? I think we should— ’ He stopped speaking, his eyes on the doorway. His secretary had appeared there again. ‘Yes, Doris?’ he said, a touch impatiently.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Larden. There’s someone on the phone who wants to talk to you about Mr Hackle. He says it’s urgent. He won’t give me his name. He sounds Irish.’

  Larden glanced at the others, shrugged, then got up and moved over to his desk wearing a stony expression. ‘Put him through.’ He leaned across the desk for the telephone, and waited a moment while Doris switched the call. ‘Hello, Larden here?’

  ‘Would that be Mr Robert Larden?’

  ‘Yes. Who’s this?’

  ‘Do you have the other directors with you, Mr Larden?’

  ‘Yes I do. I understand you have an urgent message for me from Mr Hackle?’ Doris was right, the accent was definitely Southern Irish. The voice was high-pitched but not excited.

  ‘Well now, the message concerns all the directors. D’you think you could turn on the amplifier I’m told you’ve got there? So everyone can hear?’

  ‘Now look— ’

  ‘So everyone can hear what Mr Hackle has to say,’ the caller interrupted, the voice sharpening. ‘He’s right beside me ready to speak. He’s very anxious to tell you something.’

  Puzzled, irritated, but beginning also to be alarmed, Larden pushed the conference button on the base of the instrument. ‘The amplifier’s on,’ he snapped.

  ‘Right you are then. Here’s Mr Hackle.’

  There was a pause, then came: ‘Bob, it’s me, Dermot.’ The voice emitting from the loudspeaker was faint, strained but unmistakable. ‘Can everyone hear me?’

  Larden glanced round at the others catching their nods. ‘We can hear you, Dermot. Only just though. Speak up, can you? Are you all right? Who’s that with you?’

  ‘Look, it’s serious, I’m afraid. You see, I’ve been kidnapped.’ The tone was a little louder now, the words well spaced. ‘There’s … they’ve got a knife at my throat, Bob. No kidding. They’re going to kill me unless you do what they say. I think they mean it.’

  It was an hour later when Dr Ricini rang the front doorbell of the twin gabled suburban villa in the West Ealing cul-de-sac. Then she stepped back a little, willing herself to exude calmness. She had rehearsed what she had to say several times in the car during the twelve-minute drive from the factory.

  It was a pre-war house, quite large, but the grey, pebble dash walls were as sombre as the faded if spotlessly clean curtains in the bay windows on either side of the doorway. The white paintwork was badly in need of renewal, and some of the woodwork was plainly decayed. An estate agent would have described the place as desirable but in need of repair – which is exactly how Dermot Hackle had described it to his colleagues at Closter Drug when he’d bought it on a long mortgage five years before. It seemed nothing had altered since that time.

  The small front garden was well enough tended. There was an area of recently mown grass, with a sundial on a stone pedestal in the middle. A flower border skirted the path up to the door and also the loose gravelled drive that ran from the gateway to the concrete garage on the right. Both halves of the dilapidated wooden street gate were propped open at drunken angles, looking as if they had been in that state for some time – possibly for years. There were red
tulips in bloom in the border, some dead-headed daffodils folded back with elastic bands, and a row of pruned roses showing plenty of bud as well as leaf. Dr Ricini enjoyed gardening. She had a garden of her own in Windsor – and wished she was in it now, or anywhere but here.

  She rang the bell again, debating what she should do if there was no one in. The door was opened almost immediately afterwards.

  A breathless Rosemary Hackle stood behind the threshold in a dowdy blue dress. She used the back of the hand holding the yellow duster to push away a thick strand of unruly hair that was hanging over one eye. ‘Mary, it’s you. Sorry I kept you. Is it about the migraine test? I— ’ she began, then stopped, with fright in her eyes. ‘It isn’t that is it? Oh God, something’s happened to Dermot?’ A hand had gone to her mouth, and she had paled.

  ‘No, Dermot’s all right. Honestly. There’s nothing to worry about.’ Mary stepped quickly into the hallway, closing the door herself, then she took Rosemary firmly by the arm. It was quite dark inside. ‘Where shall we go? In the kitchen?’ She’d never been to the house before. ‘Along here is it? I think we’d better have some tea. Not now. In a minute. Let’s sit down first. There’s something I have to tell you. Are the children at school?’

  ‘Yes. They both are. I was cleaning the bedrooms.’ Rosemary followed Mary’s example and took a seat opposite her at the plastic-topped table in the centre of the room. She still looked frightened. ‘Tell me what’s happened, Mary. Something has, hasn’t it?’

  Except for the newish paint on the walls and doors, it was a kitchen that hadn’t been refurbished since before the time when built-in units became fashionable. But it was almost excessively tidy, and if the unmatched cupboards, the elderly Aga cooker, and the rest of the contents had seen better days, they were all as well burnished as the worn lino on the floor. There was an open, half-glazed door leading outside into the back garden. A large black cat was sitting on the step there, half asleep in the sunshine.

  Mary leaned forward. ‘Dermot’s not hurt. But he’s been abducted. Kidnapped. But don’t worry, we’re going to get him back safe.’ She wanted to add how fervently she’d been praying for the past hour that that could be true.