After Effects (7 page)

‘No, Roger.' Beaumont paused and then with more relevance than was perhaps tactful said, ‘This heart failure of yours—'

‘Yes?'

‘Is it going to mean,' asked Beaumont delicately, ‘trouble?'

‘Not if I can help it,' responded Byville. ‘Oh, I know she was on Paul's Cardigan Protocol but that wasn't what killed her.'

‘No, no, I'm sure,' said Beaumont hastily.

‘And I told that detective inspector so.'

‘Paul isn't going to like it, though, all the same.'

‘No, he isn't.' Byville nodded his agreement to this. ‘Not one little bit. He's very keen on his precious test results for Cardigan is our Paul.'

That, decided Dr Beaumont, was one way of putting it but he did not say so aloud.

Roger Byville looked up as at long last the old lift wheezed to a halt at the top floor of St Ninian's. ‘Got a moment to spare yourself, Edwin? I've got an interesting spleen on Lorkyn Ward. Come and have a look at him with me, if you've time. A young man of twenty-five, who's been ill for two weeks. He insisted on being shipped over here from Berebury so the family could visit … I'm afraid he's not doing very well.'

‘That you, Shirl?' The land-line from Berebury on the St Ninian's switchboard sprang to life. ‘Tracy here.'

Shirley Partridge completed a telephone connection to Barnesdale Ward and then spoke to Berebury Hospital. ‘Who did you say? Oh, Dr Meggie?' She shifted her head to get a better look at the attendance board. ‘No, Tracy, he's still not in.'

‘There's someone here who wants to see him,' announced Tracy with relish.

‘I'm afraid they're going to be unlucky then,' retorted Shirley. ‘Sorry.'

‘Something to do with Female Medical.'

‘They want him, do they?'

‘No. Not them,' said Tracy, savouring the exchange. ‘It's the police who want him. They're on their way over to St Ninian's now.'

‘I'll tell them when they arrive,' promised Shirley who was almost as skilled as the medical profession at playing down simple human drama.

‘They're hoping to see him straight away,' persisted Tracy.

‘That might be more difficult,' said Shirley Partridge, pursing her lips. ‘Seems as if everyone wants to talk to him today and nobody knows where he is. He hasn't left word and I've tried all the usual places. And I can't raise Miss Meggie either.'

‘Have you tried the golf course?' suggested Tracy slyly.

Bunty Meggie, the doctor's daughter, having done her stint as telephone minder ever since her mother's death, had been released from her servitude by the advent of the mobile telephone.

‘Or the Merry Widow,' added Tracy, tongue in cheek. ‘He might still be with her.'

Shirley Partridge flushed. ‘Not in the middle of the morning,' she said primly.

‘If you ask me,' said Tracy frankly, ‘she's not the sort to be seen before twelve. Half a ton of make-up takes a bit of putting on.'

‘Was there anything else?' asked Shirley, who, had she known it, was with Siegfried Sassoon in the matter of not liking those who ‘talked lightly of his deathless friends.'

‘There's a patient over at the Golden Nugget raising Cain,' reported Tracy, ‘because old Merrylegs hasn't been in there to see her yet.'

‘Is it something serious?'

Tracy gave a snort. ‘I'll say it is. If she isn't discharged in time she'll have to pay the fees for another night in there and that's not chicken feed.'

‘Oh, dear.' Shirley Partridge sounded quite worried. Dr Meggie's private practice was near and dear to him. That it also cost the patients very dear didn't weigh with her at all. ‘That's not like him,' she said carefully.

‘It isn't.' Tracy endorsed this with more vigour than was really kind.

‘Not if he said he would be there,' said Shirley loyally.

Not only was Dr Meggie not to be found at any of the hospitals—that much Detective Inspector Sloan had quickly established—but it soon transpired that he had missed an important lunchtime engagement at Gilroy's Pharmaceuticals at Staple St James.

‘Important?' queried Sloan rather sharply. Policemen worked in a field where luncheon was lucky if you got it but only incidental to work, not part of it.

‘That's what their Chief Chemist told me, Inspector,' said Dr Meggie's clinical secretary, a little nervously. ‘Mr Gledhill sounded quite put out when he rang. I understand they'd got someone over from Luston specially to meet him.'

‘Perhaps Dr Meggie just forgot.'

‘Never.' Although clearly flustered the secretary drew herself up and said, ‘Besides, I reminded him myself yesterday.'

‘So the engagement was in his diary?' said Sloan.

‘It was in mine,' she said astringently, pointing to her desk. ‘Dr Meggie was expected over at Staple St James at one o'clock after his clinic.'

‘For lunch?' Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby had not eaten yet.

‘I understand,' she said, ‘it was to discuss the progress of the Cardigan Protocol over a meal.'

‘All right. A working lunch.'

The secretary indicated an empty in-tray on her desk. ‘He always took the computer printout of the results home with him at night.'

Sloan didn't like computers.

‘You see,' she hesitated, ‘he's always very careful about confidentiality.'

‘Yes, miss.' Sloan could have wished, though, that Dr Meggie wasn't being a quite so secretive about his own whereabouts today. He, Sloan, had promised an old gardening friend that he would drive over to Cullingoak tomorrow to admire his friend's new greenhouse rose.

The rose was called ‘Celeste'. It was in full flower now and it wasn't even the middle of May yet, and its scent was said to be quite memorable.

At the present moment the disappearance of Dr Paul Meggie had a less attractive smell and distinct overtones of the
Marie Celeste;
which was something very different.

He made a note of the doctor's home address. ‘Come along, Crosby.'

Just as a single twist of a kaleidoscope changes the picture but keeps the same constituents, so the death that day of old Abel Granger at Willow End Farm, Larking, brought about a new arrangement in the dispositions of his immediate family.

Old Mrs Granger, who had encountered death before, folded her husband's hands across his still chest, closed his eyes and drew her best Egyptian cotton sheet over the face that had been her constant companion for the best part of fifty years. Simon, the elder son, went off to telephone Dr Angus Browne and Morton & Sons, the Berebury undertakers, while the daughter tried to persuade her mother to rest.

Christopher Granger, the younger son, to whom death so far had been a stranger, drew on his boots, whistled for his dog and went outside. It was more breathing space than fresh air that he felt he needed but the land makes its own demands on those who live by it and he set out to make a conscientious—if rather overdue—survey of the family's acres. There were some bullocks being fattened in the Thither field which always needed a weather eye kept on them. If they could find a way out of their pasture, then find it they would.

The further he walked the better Christopher began to feel. He'd have to face his mother later on, of course. He half hoped she wouldn't break down when she saw him and he half hoped she would—he didn't really know what to hope. What he did know was that he wasn't in any hurry to go back indoors. His sister would be bustling about and Simon would be busy doing all the right things. All he wanted to do was to have a quiet think.

He called his dog and decided to walk home along the lower—the longer—path, the one that ran alongside the stream and through the willow copse.

That was when he saw the car.

It was on the track that led to the gate and he thought that he could hear the engine running.

He quickened his pace. Someone coming up to the farm—the undertaker, perhaps—it looked a smart enough car to be the undertaker's—they made a lot more money than farmers did these days—must have taken the wrong track at the fork. A lot of drivers did that if they didn't know the way to the farmhouse. He'd go down and open the gate. You couldn't turn a car there otherwise; not with the stream on one side and a drainage leat on the other.

As he got nearer he was more sure still that he could hear the car's engine running so he waved to the driver. He must have only just come that way.

‘Wait there,' he called out. ‘I'll have to open the gate for you.'

The man at the wheel made no response. He seemed to be leaning forward studying the dashboard.

Christopher Granger advanced curiously, his dog at his heel.

The farmer's son might until today have been something of a stranger to human death but his acquaintanceship with it was being rapidly extended.

That this man was dead, Granger was never in any doubt at all after he had seen him. It wasn't so much the appearance of the body that convinced him as the fact that there was a length of flexible tubing leading from the exhaust pipe to the almost closed window behind the driver's seat.

Without thinking Christopher Granger opened the driver's door and slipped his hand inside the car to turn off the engine. As he did so the man's body canted over the door sill towards him. He fielded the dead weight quite as automatically and expertly as if it had been that of a sheep. As he did so his eye was caught by a boldly labelled document folder lying on the passenger seat beside the dead man.

Re-energized and shaking slightly in a way that his country-bred mother would have called ‘shreugly,' Christopher Granger made his way back to Willow End farmhouse very quickly indeed.

The words ‘Cardigan Protocol' written on the label of the document folder meant nothing to him at all.

Then.

CHAPTER SEVEN

That instrument of torture, the night bell.

‘You've done what?' barked Superintendent Leeyes down the telephone line from Berebury Police Station to St Ninian's Hospital at Kinnisport.

‘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.'