After Effects (11 page)

‘And what was the message?' asked Sloan. He was beginning to get very interested in every single message sent and received this morning.

‘That old Abel had had a bad night and would I make him one of my first calls that morning.'

‘And did you?' enquired Detective Constable Crosby, looking up. The family doctors he himself had so far encountered hadn't ever seemed as biddable as that.

‘Aye.' Browne nodded. ‘I'd been going to see him today anyway. The man was going downhill pretty fast.'

‘This message,' said Sloan. ‘Do you know who rang you?'

‘It would have been the daughter,' said the general practitioner confidently. ‘Mrs Granger would no' have left him and the boys would have been out on the farm.'

Detective Inspector Sloan made a note to check that. ‘And you confirm not only that you weren't sent for before then but that nor did you telephone Dr Meggie at five o'clock this morning to ask him to visit your patient.'

‘I do.' He grimaced. ‘I'd no' be asking a busy man like Meggie to get up in the middle of the night to see a hopeless case. After all he'd seen him in his out-patient clinic at the hospital weeks ago and said then that there was nothing to be done.'

‘Except the Cardigan Protocol,' Sloan reminded him.

‘Och, well, that was just a long shot that might have done some good.'

‘But no harm?'

‘Do you no' understand what I'm saying, Inspector?' Angus Browne drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘I'm telling you the man was beyond aid. There was nothing to be lost in trying him on yon Protocol of Meggie's. Nothing at all. But that doesn't mean I'm prepared to sign something saying it had nothing to do with his dying. Not until I know it hadn't.'

Sloan switched direction before Crosby started taking an interest in the ethics of this. ‘You say, Doctor, that you wouldn't have sent for Dr Meggie at five o'clock in the morning to see a hopeless case.'

‘Aye, that's so.'

‘But if you had,' asked Sloan, ‘would he have come?'

‘Of course,' responded Browne promptly. ‘That's quite different.'

Sloan sighed. He doubted if he would ever master the niceties of medical interactions. Whilst there was obviously a fine balance on the general practitioner's part between deciding whether or not to send for the consultant, there was no such distinction when it came to his coming if sent for.

‘You sent for him all right later in the morning, though,' said Crosby, pleased with himself at spotting an illogicality.

‘Aye, but that wasn't for the patient,' said the doctor crisply.

‘No?'

‘That was for the relatives.'

‘Ah—'

‘And me,' said Angus Browne.

‘You, Doctor?' said Sloan, surprised.

‘Just in case they started feeling their father should have had more care and attention and wanted to take it up with me afterwards, you understand.' He grimaced. ‘Some families get funny that way.'

‘I see.' Sloan understood all right. They had that sort of trouble down at the police station, too. From people like Gordon Galloway.

‘Not the mother,' said Browne. ‘She knew the score all along. Besides, she's a sensible body. No, it's the younger boy there—'

‘Christopher Granger … the one who found Dr Meggie?'

‘Him.' Browne shot Sloan a keen look. ‘He's a bit of an altruist and all that sort of thing.'

‘What sort of thing exactly?' asked Sloan. It was a sad commentary on today's civilization that policemen had to be wary of altruists, but Sloan had found that when it came to the crunch they kicked as hard as the next man. And in much the same places.

Angus Browne stroked his chin. ‘He had a bust-up with the local hunt last year.'

‘Did he, indeed,' murmured Sloan.

‘Persuaded his father not to let them on their land. Mind you, by then old Abel wasn't really up to arguing. Then Christopher started working on his brother to turn the farm over to organic production. The next thing was humane farming—'

Detective Constable Crosby suddenly sat up and started to take notice. ‘That's when this little piggy doesn't go to market after all, isn't it?'

‘You could put it like that,' said the general practitioner blandly, giving the constable a distinctly professional look. ‘If you had a mind to.'

Dr Roger Byville pulled his car into Gilroy's Pharmaceuticals at Staple St James and walked in his usual measured way across the ample courtyard built in palmier days for carriages. He was at once ushered into the office of the Chief Chemist.

‘Roger!' George Gledhill was on his feet the moment Byville crossed the threshold, his expression very solemn and his tone muted. ‘You've heard about Paul, of course. All about him, I mean.'

Dr Byville regarded him impassively. ‘I have.'

‘Well?'

‘Well what?' countered Byville, who enjoyed the advantage of a medical training and was thus a past master at not being stampeded into immediate comment.

‘What would he want to go and do a thing like that for?'

‘I can't tell you.' Byville took a chair. ‘But no doubt it will emerge in due course.'

‘Emerge!' spluttered Gledhill. ‘Good grief, man, how do you think that we're going to—'

‘He may have left a letter,' said Byville with a calm that Gledhill found disconcerting.

‘Oh …' Gledhill's voice trailed away. ‘Of course.'

‘In my experience suicides usually do.'

Gledhill subsided. ‘Naturally, you know more about these things than I do.'

‘Yes,' said Byville calmly. ‘Actually, he may have left two letters. In the circumstances.'

‘I don't understand.' Gledhill looked up. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Didn't you know? Paul, poor fellow, was in the classic suicide situation. Not that he hadn't asked for it.'

‘I still don't understand,' insisted the chemist.

‘He was caught between a rock and a hard place.'

‘Cardigan and … what else?'

‘I'm not talking about Cardigan,' said Byville vigorously. ‘I'm talking about his domestic problems.'

‘Oh.' Gledhill looked blank. ‘I didn't know he had any.'

‘There was, on the one hand,' Byville informed him in his usual detached way, ‘a very designing woman and on the other hand an equally determined daughter.'

Gledhill's face registered a relief that was quite comical to see as he said, ‘I didn't know about them. It's Cardigan I've been worried about.'

‘What about it?' asked Byville bluntly.

‘Whether there'd been any … you know.'

But Byville wouldn't help him with words. ‘No, I don't know.'

‘Scientist are human, too, remember,' said Gledhill obliquely, although now he came to think of it he'd never seen any signs of humanity in Roger Byville.

‘Oh, Meggie was human, all right.' Byville gave a short laugh. ‘If you ask me that was half his trouble.'

George Gledhill shook his head. ‘I didn't mean that. I've been wondering whether things were all right with the Cardigan Protocol—'

‘Lack of rigorous scrutiny in his data?' suggested Byville in a tone Gledhill didn't relish.

‘There's always a lot of pressure for results,' said Gledhill, conveniently overlooking the fact that some of that very same pressure was applied by Gilroy's Pharmaceuticals.

‘Publish or perish,' agreed Byville. ‘That's the name of the game.'

‘Fictitious results have been known,' said Gledhill, ‘and fictitious patients, come to that—'

‘And fictitious substances,' Roger Byville pointed out unkindly.

‘—and,' said Gledhill bleakly, ‘we haven't got Meggie's Cardigan results. The police have got them.'

‘Ah, yes,' murmured Byville, as if reminded of something. ‘Cardigan. And what substance did you say that was?'

‘A compound of the alkaloid fagarine and—' The Chief Chemist's chin came up suddenly. ‘No, I think we'll leave it there, Roger. Until we see Paul's results ourselves.'

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.'