Authors: Laura Wilson
An Empty Death (40 page)
Lamb, resuming his stoic-courage-under-fire voice, said, ‘Oh, very well. You’d better wait outside.’
Stratton, who was buggered if he was going to pace up and down the corridor outside Lamb’s office like a man awaiting the arrival of his first-born, decided to nip out and see if he could get a packet of fags. The tobacconist on the corner, who knew him, conjured twenty Players from under the counter (‘Your favourites, sir’). Stratton returned to the station, where his cigarette-brightened mood was soon dispelled by having to hang about for the best part of half an hour before Lamb stuck his head out of his office to summon him.
‘Warrant’s at Marlborough Street. You can collect it on your way back to the hospital. Take Arliss, and for God’s sake try to be discreet.’
‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ said Stratton, with an air of meekness that caused Lamb to narrow his eyes suspiciously. ‘Thank you, sir.’
Arliss and the warrant collected, Stratton returned to Miss Fish-Face in the Administrative Department, who looked even less pleased to see him - although with Arliss grinning horribly at his elbow, this was hardly surprising. Thrusting the warrant under the woman’s nose, he asked for assistance in taking up the floorboards. Help arrived about twenty minutes later, in the form of a doddery porter armed with a claw hammer and an air of stoically borne but well-deserved failure. He refused to allow Stratton to do the job himself (and no chance of Arliss, who stood well clear with his hands clasped behind his back, lifting a finger). Holding Stratton back with an outstretched arm and wheezing about it being ‘’orspital business’, the old boy took a further ten minutes before managing to remove the board.
‘Nothing there,’ he said, as the three men peered down at the thick layer of dust. Thrusting his hand into the gap, Stratton found nothing more than a playing card and a stub of chewed pencil. There were no phials, and no evidence of broken glass.
The porter nailed the board down again while Arliss sucked his teeth and Stratton paced the corridor, checking the floorboards nearest the walls for more gaps. He found a couple about fifty yards down, and decided that these might as well come up, too - Fay hadn’t seemed certain exactly where the collision had taken place. Grumbling, the porter complied with his instructions, which resulted in a great deal of interest from a gaggle of passing nurses who stood about exchanging banter with the old man while he made valiant, but none-too-surreptitious, attempts to look up their skirts. This eventually caused him to wheeze so much that he doubled over in a paroxysm of coughing, whereupon Stratton took advantage of the situation to seize the hammer and do the work himself.
Finally, his hands and cuffs grey with dust, he had to concede that there was nothing there. The nurses having gone on their way, giggling, the porter recovered himself enough to yawn massively, causing his top denture to fall with a faint clopping sound and expose a set of shrunken gums, and tell Stratton that there was bugger-all to see and the whole thing had been a waste of time. Stratton thanked him and, leaving him to return the boards to their proper places and instructing Arliss to render assistance (some hope), went downstairs to Casualty to see if he could find Dr Dacre and clarify the situation.
‘You’re that policeman, aren’t you?’ Sister Radford looked quite as harassed as Sister Bateman. She eyed him warily, as if he were an unpredictable dog she was expected to pat.
‘Detective Inspector Stratton.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m sorry to barge in here like this, but I’d like a word with Dr Dacre, if he’s available.’
Sister Radford frowned for a moment, then her face cleared. ‘Of course - Dr Ransome must have told you.’
‘Told me . . . ?’
‘About Dr Dacre being one of the last people to speak to . . .’ she lowered her voice dramatically, ‘poor Dr Byrne.’
‘Oh? When was this, exactly?’
‘The afternoon before he . . . before it happened. Dr Byrne came up here—Isn’t that why you’ve come to see Dr Dacre?’
‘Well,’ Stratton prevaricated, ‘with cases like this, we do need to make sure . . .’ This being said in the reasonable tone of one professional person appealing to another for discretion, Sister Radford said briskly that she quite understood and would fetch Dr Dacre straight away.
Stratton gazed about him at the rows of people waiting, with patient resignation, to be treated. Hearing their low murmurs, punctuated every now and then by a hacking cough, and seeing the grey, worn faces, running noses, lank hair and drab, patched clothing, soiled by brick dust, the rough attempts at bandaging cuts and wounds with anything to hand - the only real touch of brightness being the occasional angry red of a boil or sore - he thought, we can’t go on much longer. None of us can; we’re exhausted - there’s no colour or spirit or jollity left. How can we bring up our children in a world like this? Monica and Pete, he thought, could quite well round on him one day and say, ‘Why should we listen to you?’ and he wouldn’t have an answer. After all, their generation could hardly do worse than his, or the one before it - two world wars and half the country in ruins . . . Thinking of the children reminded him of his and Jenny’s argument last night, over the fact that that bloody woman was stopping at their house. He could see her point about Mrs Ingram having no friends and relations, but all the same . . . He agreed with Don that she ought to go to the bin, but Jenny had seemed so on edge, so . . . what was the word . . . fragile, that was it, that he was glad he hadn’t pushed it. They’d have to discuss it again later. Stratton turned his mind to why Byrne had wanted to speak to Dacre. If it were a case of negligence, like Reynolds’s, which had resulted in the death of a patient . . . He heard someone say his name and looked up to see a dark-haired young man of medium size standing before him, white-coated, with a stethoscope around his neck and a bruise on his temple. ‘Dacre.’ The man smiled and offered his hand. ‘Sister Radford said you wanted to see me.’
‘Inspector Stratton, CID. I can see you’re busy, so I’ll try to keep it brief.’
‘Be glad of the respite, to be honest.’ Dacre grinned. ‘Rather a full house.’
‘What happened there?’ asked Stratton, indicating the bruise.
‘Bit of an altercation, I’m afraid. A rather large lady with a powerful left hook who took exception when I told her she was about to become a grandmother.’
‘Ah,’ said Stratton. ‘And the father?’
‘Heaven knows. The mother-to-be wasn’t entirely with us, if you know what I mean.’ Dacre tapped his head with a finger.
‘Don’t I just.’ Stratton found himself grinning in response. People - women - would like this chap, he thought. Not because of self-confidence or urbanity or matinée-idol looks - the charm was the self-deprecating type.
‘Oh, well.’ Dacre shrugged. ‘One born every day. How can I help you?’
Stratton, realising that he should be taking the lead, collected himself by clearing his throat and said, ‘I understand that you were involved in a bit of an accident a couple of days ago, when some morphine went missing.’
Dacre frowned. ‘Accident?’
‘Upstairs. A rather attractive nurse by the name of Fay Marchant.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Dacre smiled. ‘Couldn’t forget her in a hurry, could you? It’s just that rather a lot’s happened in the last forty-eight hours, Inspector. Let’s see . . . Well, we bumped into each other - entirely my fault, I’m afraid - and she dropped the things she was carrying. A tray, with a hypodermic syringe and morphine. I found one of the phials - smashed to pieces - but the others disappeared, and we thought they must have gone under the floorboards.’
‘We pulled them up to have a look,’ said Stratton, ‘but we couldn’t find anything.’
Dacre raised his eyebrows. ‘Very thorough. But I don’t understand why they weren’t there. I mean . . .’ he looked baffled, ‘there’s nowhere else they could have gone.’
‘You didn’t pick them up?’
‘Heavens, no! If we want morphine, all we have to do is . . .’ he held out his hand and made an eager schoolboy face, ‘please, Sister . . . We don’t have to pinch the stuff.’
‘And you’re sure they went into the crack between the floor and the wall?’
‘Pretty sure. To be honest, I was rather distracted by meeting the lovely Nurse Marchant, Inspector, and I’m afraid I took advantage of the situation by inviting her out for a drink with me that evening.’
‘She didn’t tell me that,’ said Stratton, privately acknowledging that, in Dacre’s shoes, he’d have done exactly the same.
‘Well, she wouldn’t. It’s strictly against the rules, you know.’ Dacre grinned again. ‘A very nice time we had, too. But I’m sure you’re not a bearer of tales, Inspector. I’d hate to get her into any trouble.’
Stratton, thinking of Sergeant Ballard and Policewoman Gaines, and pleased that Dacre hadn’t taken the both-men-of-the-world line, said, ‘No, of course not. But it doesn’t solve the problem of where the morphine ended up.’
Dacre looked thoughtful. ‘I haven’t been here long, but I think the building’s taken a fair old hammering - not necessarily directly, but all this,’ he looked skyward, ‘does tend to make the old foundations shift about a bit. There might have been a crack below the crack, if you see what I mean.’
‘Possibly,’ said Stratton, ‘but there was a hell of a lot of dust down there, and I would have thought . . .’
‘You’re probably right. But short of taking the whole place apart . . . As I said, my attention wasn’t fully on the matter, so I suppose they might have just rolled away and been picked up by someone else. It’s not impossible. I know it doesn’t sound good, and I’m sorry not to be more help.’
‘Oh, well . . .’ Stratton gave a deliberately heavy sigh. He wasn’t so drawn in that he’d failed to notice Dacre’s assumption that Stratton thought he’d stolen the morphine phials rather than just pocketing them accidentally and forgetting about them. And he’d begun to feel that there was something not entirely right behind the easiness of manner - the man was holding his gaze for just a fraction too long. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘the other matter.’
‘Other?’ Dacre frowned.
‘I understand that Dr Byrne came up here to speak to you on the afternoon before his death.’
‘Oh . . . yes. Yes, that’s right, we did have a few words.’
‘Why was that?’
‘A medical matter.’
‘Which was?’
Dacre hesitated, staring at his shoes, then smiled in a rueful, schoolboyish way. ‘You might not wish to hear this, Inspector.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘It was about a testicular torsion.’
‘A what?’
‘Well, without going into too much detail, it occurs when the cord that takes blood to the testicle becomes twisted, which cuts off the supply. Prolonged torsion can result in the death of the testicle and surrounding tissue, which is what happened in this case, I’m afraid. It’s agonising, of course, no fun at all, and—’
‘Right. I get the picture,’ said Stratton, hastily. He’d started to feel sick fairly early on in Dacre’s description, and definitely did not want to hear any more. ‘And Byrne spoke to you because . . . ?’ he prompted, not at all sure that he wanted to hear the answer.
‘I’d never seen one before, you see - the poor chap was in terrible pain, but I hadn’t quite appreciated the urgency of the situation. Of course, the testicle had to come off - gangrene, you know, although they did manage to save the other one - and I’d asked Dr Byrne if the dead one could be kept, so that I could have a look at it. Then, next time, I’d be—’
‘Next time?’ asked Stratton, faintly. ‘Does it happen often?’
‘Only to children and young men - usually under twenty.’ Dacre gave him a sympathetic look. ‘No need for you to worry, Inspector, although a hard blow in the right place might—’
Stratton, who was fighting the impulse to clutch his groin, held up his hand.
‘Sorry,’ said Dacre. ‘But as I said, I was worried, because obviously it’s important to get the diagnosis correct, and—’
‘You can say that again,’ said Stratton, adding hastily, ‘but please don’t. How did Dr Byrne seem to you?’
‘It’s difficult to say. I’d only met him once, you see. He certainly didn’t seem agitated or anything like that. Inspector, are you all right?’
‘I think,’ said Stratton, who was unable to rid his mind of the vile images Dacre had conjured, and horribly aware of what could - surely to God - only be a sympathetic pain between his legs, ‘that I’d better get some fresh air.’
‘Good idea. Don’t worry, it’ll pass off.’
‘Thanks,’ said Stratton. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’ Stuffing his notebook in his pocket, and clapping his hat on his head, he made a hasty exit and, hurrying outside, leant against the nearest wall and took deep breaths, while focusing his attention as hard as he could on an ancient poster - FOR YOUR THROAT’S SAKE, SMOKE CRAVEN A - on the opposite side of the road. ‘No fun at all,’ he muttered to himself. That was what Dacre had said. ‘Christ!’
After several minutes, the feeling that he was about to puke receded enough for him to light a cigarette and make some jottings in his notebook. He suddenly had a feeling that the whole business was like a game of chess in which he was ignorant of the moves. Was he missing something obvious? If so, what the hell was it?
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