Amendment of Life (10 page)

‘Mind you,' she said, automatically pulling herself up and resuming her professional mantle of careful optimism and encouragement, ‘most people can manage very well with monocular vision.'

‘Oh,' said Crosby, light dawning, ‘so that's why they call them binoculars.'

‘And, after all, losing an eye isn't the end of the world,' she said, intent, like all doctors, on minimizing other people's disasters. ‘We mustn't forget that.'

‘Didn't do King Harold a lot of good, though, did it?' said Detective Constable Crosby.

‘Really?' said the young doctor politely. Dr Chomel had been born in Africa and her interest in European history began somewhat later than William the Conqueror.

‘That's when he lost the Battle of Hastings,' said Crosby.

‘Ah…'

‘He's the one that had an arrow in his eye,' Crosby informed her.

‘Let us hope, Doctor,' interposed Sloan swiftly, ‘that your treatment has done the trick with little James.'

‘We hope so,' sighed Dr Chomel. ‘The earlier that the treatment's started the better, of course, and we think this case has been caught in time.'

‘And the exact nature of James's trouble is…?' asked Sloan. James's father, David Collins, had given his permission for the police to ask the doctors whatever they wanted to know, merely expressing the mumbled hope that they would understand the answers better than he did. James's mother was no longer alive to be asked about anything: especially whether she had found the strain of James's illness altogether too much to bear.

‘Retinoblastoma,' responded Dr Chomel promptly.

‘Ah,' said Sloan, looking with new respect at the young doctor. Being so fluent in English was quite something, but being as fluent in medical English as she was, was something very different. It was a new language to him, too. ‘Perhaps you'd be kind enough to spell that out for me.'

‘It's the commonest intraocular tumour of childhood,' she said when he'd written it down.

Crosby winced. ‘Does that mean there's a lot of it about?'

‘Not really,' the doctor said. ‘One baby in every twenty thousand suffers from it.' She smiled faintly ‘That's what I think you could call long odds.'

‘There's nothing that statistics don't make worse, said Detective Inspector Sloan briskly. ‘Nothing at all. Now what causes this … thing?'

‘James has got the inherited form,' said Dr Chomel. ‘It's an autosomal dominant condition.'

‘Really?' said Detective Inspector Sloan. His own introduction to inherited diseases had come from seeing Ibsen's play
Ghosts,
but he didn't think this was the same. ‘And Mrs Collins knew this?' There was something his own mother had been fond of quoting from the Bible – the Old Testament, for sure – about the sins of the fathers being visited on their sons, which didn't seem quite to fit the bill here, but had fitted
Ghosts.
He would have to think about that later.

‘She did afterwards,' said Dr Chomel. ‘That was part of the trouble—'

‘Trouble?' queried Detective Inspector Sloan, his head coming up like that of a bloodhound sniffing a scent.

‘There was a whole load of guilt washing about in the family,' said the young doctor moderately. ‘Knowing that the child had inherited the disease from either herself or her husband. Inevitable, I suppose.' She hesitated. ‘I can tell you that it worried Mrs Collins a lot – watching James suffer from something that one of them had given him.'

‘Not easy,' agreed Sloan. ‘Even though there was obviously no intention of inflicting harm.' The ‘guilty mind' was the acid test in police work. Someone who was killed by another, who had not intended to do so, had not been murdered – and that went for the victims of crimes committed by those not responsible for their actions. They were still dead, of course, but that was something different.

‘It was one of the things we talked about yesterday,' she said awkwardly. ‘I tried to explain that as the disease wasn't something that either of them had intended to pass on – or could even have known about – they shouldn't try to shoulder the blame for James having it, but I don't think she really listened.'

Something in this caught Detective Constable Crosby's wayward attention. He suddenly launched into Latin. ‘Not a case of mens rea, then,' he said brightly.

‘Mens rea?' she echoed uncertainly.

‘That's what the lawyers call that, don't they?' the Constable said. ‘An evil intention behind the action. They didn't have that, the parents.'

‘Mens rea means having a guilty mind,' explained Sloan to the doctor, ‘or a knowledge of the wrongfulness of the act. It's important in some legal cases.'

‘Not breaking the speed limit,' put in Detective Constable Crosby, whose great ambition it was to be transferred to Traffic Division. ‘It doesn't help that you didn't mean to do it then. If you've been speeding, it's open and shut.'

‘The parents couldn't have known,' the doctor said seriously, sticking to what she knew and understood, ‘not unless it had been present in either family before.'

‘I suppose, then, that it therefore follows', said Detective Inspector Sloan ineluctably, ‘that in due course James could pass on those genes, too.'

‘There would be a risk, of course,' she said uneasily. ‘And that was another of the things which was upsetting poor Mrs Collins yesterday.'

‘I should say so,' burst out Crosby.

Yesterday was what had been in Detective Inspector Sloan's mind all along, but he did not say so.

‘But it would be a quantifiable risk,' insisted the doctor.

‘So's the Lottery,' remarked Crosby.

‘As presumably would be the chances of the Collinses having another child with the same condition,' said Sloan, anxious to get the matter clear in his own mind, at the same time as hoping that Superintendent Leeyes would not want it explained in too much detail.

‘Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, if you ask me,' muttered Detective Crosby under his breath.

The doctor nodded. ‘There is always a small risk, but as you may imagine genetic counselling is notoriously difficult in this field,' she said. ‘And you need highly sophisticated DNA analysis to do it properly.'

‘I'm sure,' said Sloan warmly.

‘That may have been done, of course,' said the girl. ‘I wouldn't necessarily have been informed about that. It would have been between Mr Collins and his own doctor.'

Crosby had lost interest altogether after the mention of DNA.

‘Both parents were given genetic counselling as soon as James's condition was diagnosed, though it isn't easy.' She hesitated. ‘I don't think I am in a position to say more than that…' She looked round as a banshee wail came from a small girl who had spotted the approach of a hypodermic needle. ‘I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me,' she said.

‘We can go too now, sir, can't we?' said Detective Constable Crosby anxiously.

‘I did suggest Mrs Collins saw her own doctor,' called Dr Chomel over her shoulder as she hurried away, ‘about getting some sleeping tablets.'

Chapter Ten

‘We had to let the husband go earlier,' explained Superintendent Leeyes regretfully when Sloan got back to the police station in Berebury.

‘He was only reporting Margaret Collins missing, sir,' said Detective Inspector Sloan fairly. ‘Nothing more.'

‘That's as may be,' said Leeyes.

‘Quite so, sir,' said Sloan. He forbore to remind the Superintendent that merely reporting anything was not yet a chargeable offence in anyone's eyes but his. Not in England, anyway. He couldn't answer for some police states.

‘You'd better take this,' said Leeyes, waving a piece of paper in front of him. ‘You'll need it.'

Sloan read over the written report of what David Collins had told the police about his wife's disappearance.

Leeyes sniffed. ‘The man said he was going back to work and that they'd know where to find him if we wanted him.'

‘They did know,' said Sloan. ‘We wanted him to take a look at the body of this woman who's been found in the maze at Aumerle Court.'

‘No grounds to detain him on, of course,' carried on the Superintendent, for whom it was axiomatic that all husbands were guilty of killing their deceased wives unless it could be demonstrated otherwise. ‘Not at this stage anyway.'

‘We had every reason, though, to suppose that the body found in the maze is that of his wife,' said Sloan, ‘in that she answers to his description of her.' He had taken a conscious decision to bide his time before he conducted an indepth interview with Captain Prosser. One military aphorism that he was sure about was that time spent in reconnaissance was seldom wasted. ‘But we needed a positive identification as soon as possible, sir, and we got it from the husband. Dr Dabbe is on his way back to the hospital now to do the post-mortem.'

Leeyes grunted. ‘And what does our friendly neighbourhood pathologist have to say so far?'

‘Dr Dabbe isn't willing, sir, to be dogmatic about the time of death until after he's performed the postmortem.'

Superintendent Leeyes puffed out his cheeks. ‘You won't ever catch him being helpful, Sloan.' The Superintendent suspected the opinions of all specialists on principle.

‘But he's prepared to narrow it down to after the victim was last seen alive.' He didn't know yet whether the woman was a victim of someone else or herself – or just of intolerable pressure.

‘And to just before she was found dead, I suppose, as usual?' interrupted Leeyes sardonically.

‘And to over twelve hours ago,' finished Sloan patiently. It meant that the woman had been dead before ten o'clock that night before, which it was helpful, in police terms, to know.

‘That means we're talking about yesterday, Sloan.'

‘Sunday,' agreed Sloan, not sure where this was leading.

‘Bad day for family relationships, Sunday,' opined the Superintendent. His own Sundays were invariably spent on the golf course. ‘If the woman was driven over the edge, that is.'

‘We can't say about that yet, sir.'

‘How did Dr Dabbe get in and out of the maze without being airborne?'

‘Dyson and Williams solved that one for us, sir.' The two men were the police photographers. ‘They had a tall ladder with them. Apparently they never travel without it. We could all see where we were going a treat after that.' He had already realized both that there must have been tall ladders around at Aumerle Court when the yew was cut and, more importantly, that Captain Prosser had not seen fit to mention the fact to the police.

Nor, come to that, had the two workmen, who presumably did the cutting. It was something else to think about and he made a mental note of the fact.

‘By the way, Sloan,' said Leeyes, ‘you can stand Crosby down. That goat that was stolen out Staple St James way,' he looked down at his desk, ‘name of Aries … funny name for a goat—'

‘Someone's pet, then,' deduced Sloan without difficulty. ‘And a ram.'

‘Really? I don't know how you can tell. Well, it's been found safe and sound – but a bit hungry – over at the Minster in Calleford. Tethered in the garden of one of the houses in the Close.'

‘Someone's idea of a joke, I suppose,' said Detective Inspector Sloan wearily. Jokes never went down well with policemen busy on weightier matters such as death and detection.

‘What we have to be grateful for, Sloan,' said Police Superintendent Leeyes with deep feeling, ‘is that the animal rights' activists do not appear to have been involved.'

‘Yes, indeed,' said Sloan, deciding not to mention those who took against anthropomorphology and thus the naming of animals. He had too much on his mind just now to worry about either a goat called Aries or people who thought attributing human characteristics and names to pet animals demeaned the creature. Besides, down in the cells they had some prisoners whose behaviour wouldn't have been countenanced by any right-thinking goat. ‘I'll tell Crosby that, sir. We're going over to the post-mortem now.'

*   *   *

‘Do come along in, gentlemen,' said Dr Dabbe, the consultant pathologist to the Berebury and District General Hospital, welcoming Sloan and Crosby to the mortuary there, ‘and we'll see what we can tell you about the deceased, won't we, Burns?'

Burns merely nodded. The taciturnity of the pathologist's laboratory assistant was legendary.

Detective Constable Crosby, who did not enjoy attending post-mortem examinations, positioned himself as far away as he could from the figure on the metal slab. Detective Inspector Sloan took up a stance at what he regarded as a decent distance and studied the dead woman carefully from there.

‘Everything's ready for you now, Doctor,' murmured Burns, mercifully unspecific as to detail.

‘We have here', Dr Dabbe began speaking into a microphone suspended above the examination table, ‘the body of a young woman aged…' The pathologist looked across at the Detective Inspector. ‘Do we know how old she was, Sloan? No sense in guessing if we know.'

‘The husband says she was twenty-five,' replied Sloan carefully. The Superintendent would never accept an unsupported statement from Sloan or anyone else. As far as he was concerned, it was always hearsay until proved otherwise.

‘Twenty-five … and the body has, I am informed,' said Dr Dabbe, resuming his reporting mode of speech into the microphone, ‘been identified by the said husband as that of Mrs Margaret Collins.'

‘Turned a nasty shade of grey when he said it was her, David Collins did,' put in Detective Constable Crosby gratuitously from the sidelines. ‘He went nearly as pale as she is now when we showed her to him.'