Means Of Evil And Other Stories (10 page)

   A headache, Wexford reflected, was often one of the premonitory signs of a cerebral haemorrhage. Roy seemed to read his thoughts, for he said quickly:

   "She'd had a good many headaches while I was in the place working. Them non-drip plastic-based paints have got a bit of a smell to them, used to turn
me
up at first. I mean, you don't want to get thinking there was anything out of the way in her having an aspirin and laying down, guv. That'd happened two or three times while I was there. And she'd shovel them aspirins down, swallow four as soon as look at you."

   Wexford said, "Tell me about that afternoon. Did anyone come into the house between the time Mr. and Mrs. Betts went out and the time they got back?"

   Roy shook his head. "Definitely not, and I'd have known. I was working on the hall, see? The front door was wide open on account of the smell. Nobody could have come in there without my seeing, could they? The other old girl——Mrs. Betts, that is——she locked the back door before she went out and I hadn't no call to unlock it. What else d'you want to know, guv?"

   "Exactly what happened, what you and Mrs. Wrangton talked about, the lot."

   Roy swigged his tea, lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the last. "I got on OK with her, you know. I reckon she reminded me of my gran. It's a funny thing, but everyone got on OK with her bar her own daughter and the old man. Funny old git, isn't he? Gave me the creeps. Well, to what you're asking, I don't know that we talked much. I was painting, you see, and the door to the front room was shut. I looked in a couple of times. She was sitting there knitting, watching cricket on the TV. I do remember she said I was making a nice job of the house and it was a pity she wouldn't be there to enjoy it. Well, I thought she meant she'd be dead, you know the way they talk, and I said, Now come on, Mrs. Wrangton, you mustn't talk like that. That made her laugh. She said, I don't mean that, you naughty boy, I mean I'm going into a nursing home and I've got to sell the place, didn't you know? No, I said, I didn't, but I reckoned it'd fetch a packet, big old house like that, twenty thousand at least, I said, and she said she hoped so."

   Wexford nodded. So Mrs. Wrangton had intended to go ahead with her plans, and Doreen Betts's denial had either been purposeful lying to demolish her motive or a post-mortem white-washing of her mother's character. For it had certainly been black-hearted enough, he thought, quite an act it had been, that of deliberately turning your own daughter and her husband out of their home. He looked back to Roy.

   "You offered to make her tea?"

   "Yeah, well, the daughter, Mrs. Betts, said to make myself and her a cup of tea if she wanted, but she didn't want. She asked me to turn off the TV and then she said she'd got a headache and would I go to the bathroom cupboard and get her aspirins? Well, I'd seen Mrs. Betts do it often enough, though I'd never actually . . ."

   "You're sure she said aspirins?" Quite suddenly Wexford knew what it was that had seemed incongruous to him in Mrs. Betts's description of her mother's last afternoon of life. Doreen Betts had specified paracetamol instead of the common household remedy. "You're sure she used that word?" he said.

   Roy pursed his mouth. "Well, now you mention it, I'm not sure. I reckon what she said was, my tablets or the tablets for my head, something like that. You just do say aspirins, don't you, like naturally? I mean, that's what everybody takes. Anyway, I brought them down, the bottle, and gave them to her with a glass of water, and she says she's going to have a bit of shut-eye in her chair. But the next thing I knew she was coming out, leaning on that walking frame the welfare people give her. I took four, Roy, she says, but my head's that bad, I reckon it's worse, and I'm ever so giddy. Well, I didn't think much of that, they're all giddy at that age, aren't they? I remember my gran. She says she's got ringing in her ears, so I said, I'll help you into your room, shall I? And I sort of give her my arm and helped her in and she lay down on the bed with all her things on and shut her eyes. The light was glaring so I pulled the curtains over and then I went back to my painting. I never heard another thing till Mrs. Betts and the old boy come in at half five . . ."

Wexford closed
Practical Forensic Medicine
by Francis E. Camps and J. M. Cameron and made his way back to Castle Road. He had decided to discuss the matter no further with Mrs. Betts. The presence of her husband, shuffling about almost silently in his furry slippers, his feet like the paws of an old hibernating animal, rather unnerved him. She made no demur at his proposal to remove from the bathroom cabinet the prescription bottle of pain-killing tablets, labelled: Mrs. I. Wrangton, Paracetamols.

   Evening surgery had only just begun. Wexford went home for his dinner, having sent two items away for fingerprint analysis. By eight-thirty he was back in the surgery building and again Dr. Crocker had finished first. He groaned when he saw Wexford.

   "What is it now, Reg?"

   "Why did you prescribe paracetamol for Mrs. Wrangton?"

   "Because I thought it suitable for her, of course. She was allergic to aspirin."

   Wexford looked despairingly at his friend. "Now he tells me. I'd rather gathered it. I mean, today I caught on, but you might have told me."

   "For God's sake! You
knew
. You said to me, Nurse Radcliffe told me all about it. Those were your words. You said . . ."

   "I thought it was asthma."

   Crocker sat on the edge of his desk. "Look, Reg, we've both been barking up the wrong trees. There was asthma in Mrs. Wrangton's family. Mrs. Berts has nettle rash, her brother was a chronic asthmatic. People with asthma or a family history of asthma are sometimes allergic to acetylsalicylic acid or aspirin. In fact, about ten per cent of such people are thought to have the allergy. One of the reactions of the hypersensitive person to aspirin is an asthmatic attack. That's what Mrs. Wrangton had when she was in her forties, that and haematemesis. Which means," he added kindly for the layman, "bringing up blood from an internal haemorrhage."

   "OK, I'm not bone ignorant," Wexford snapped, "and I've been reading up hypersensitivity to acetylsalicylic acid . . ."

   "Mrs. Wrangton couldn't have had aspirin poisoning," said the doctor quickly. "There were never any aspirins in the house. Mrs. Betts was strict about that."

   They were interrupted by the arrival of smiling Dr. Moss. Wexford wheeled round on him.

   "What would you expect to be the result of——let me see——one point two grammes of acetylsalicylic acid on a woman of ninety-two who was hypersensitive to the drug?"

   Moss looked at him warily. "I take it this is academic?" Wexford didn't answer. "Well, it'd depend on the degree of hypersensitivity. Nausea, maybe, diarrhoea, dizziness, tinnitus——that's ringing in the ears——breathing difficulties, gastric haemorrhages, oedema of gastric mucosa, possible rupture of the oesophagus. In a person of that age, consequent upon such a shock and localised haemorrhages, I suppose a brain haemorrhage . . ." He stopped, realising what he had said.

   "Thanks very much," said Wexford. "I think you've more or less described what happened to Mrs. Wrangton on June 2nd alter she'd taken four three hundred milligram tablets of aspirin."

Dr. Moss was looking stunned. He looked as if he would never smile again. Wexford passed an envelope to Crocker.

   "Those are aspirins?"

   Crocker looked at them, touched one to his tongue. "I suppose so, but . . ."

   "I've sent the rest away to be analysed. To be certain. There were fifty-six in the bottle."

   "Reg, it's unthinkable there could have been a mistake on the part of the pharmacist, but just supposing by a one in a million chance there was, she couldn't have taken forty-four tablets of aspirin. Not even over the months she couldn't."

   "You're being a bit slow," said Wexford. "You prescribed one hundred paracetamol, and one hundred paracetamol were put into that bottle at Fraser's, the chemist's. Between the time the prescription was made up and the day before, or a few days before, or a week before, she died, she took forty tablets of paracetamol, leaving sixty in the bottle. But on June 2nd she took four tablets of aspirin. Or, to put it bluntly, some time before June 2nd someone removed those sixty tablets of paracetamol and substituted sixty tablets of aspirin."

   Dr. Moss found his voice. "That would be murder."

   "Well . . ." Wexford spoke hesitantly. "The hypersensitivity might not have resulted in a stroke. The intent may only have been to cause illness of a more or less severe kind. Ulceration of the stomach, say. That would have meant hospitalisation for Mrs. Wrangton. On the Welfare State. No exorbitant nursing home fees to be paid there, no swallowing up of capital or selling of property. Later on, if she survived, she would probably have been transferred, again for free, to a geriatric ward in the same hospital. It's well-known that no private nursing home will take the chronically sick."

   "You think Mrs. Betts . . .?" Dr. Moss began.

   "No, I don't. For two good reasons, Mrs. Betts is the one person who wouldn't have done it this way. If she had wanted to kill her mother or to make her seriously ill, why go to all the trouble of changing over sixty tablets in a bottle, when she had only to give Mrs. Wrangton the aspirins in her hand? And if she had changed them, wouldn't she, immediately her mother was dead, have changed them back again?"

   "Then who was it?"

   "I shall know tomorrow," said Wexford.

Crocker came to him at his office in the police station.

   "Sorry I'm late. I just lost a patient."

   Wexford made sympathetic noises. Having walked round the room, eyed the two available chairs, the doctor settled for the edge of Wexford's desk.

   "Yesterday," Wexford began, "I had a talk with Mrs. Elsie Parrish." He checked the doctor's exclamation and sudden start forward. "Wait a minute, Len. She dropped a matchbook before we parted. It was one of those with a glossy surface that very easily takes prints. I had the prints on it and those on the paracetamol bottle compared. There were Mrs. Betts's prints on the bottle, and a set that were presumably Mrs. Wrangton's, and a man's that were presumably the painter's. And there was also a very clear set identical to those on the matchbook.

   "It was Elsie Parrish who changed those tablets, Len. She did it because she knew that Mrs. Wrangton fully intended to retire to Summerland and that the first money to go, perhaps before the house was sold, would be the few thousands of capital she and Doreen Betts were to share. Elsie Parrish had waited for years for that money, she wanted to buy a car. A few more years and if she herself survived it would be too late for driving cars. Besides, by then her legacy would have been swallowed up in nursing home fees."

   "A nice old creature like that?" Crocker said. "That's no proof, her prints on the bottle. She'll have fetched that bottle often enough for old Ivy."

   "No. She told me she had never been upstairs in Ivy Wrangton's house."

   "Oh, God."

   "I don't suppose she saw it as murder. It wouldn't seem like murder, or manslaughter, or grievous bodily harm, changing tablets over in a bottle." Wexford sat down, wrinkled up his face. He said crossly, dispiritedly, "I don't know what to do, Len. We've no way of proving Mrs. Wrangton died of aspirin poisoning. We can't exhume her, we can't analyse 'two handfuls of white dust shut in an urn of brass.' And even if we could, would we be so inhumane as to have a woman of——how old is Elsie Parrish?"

   "Seventy-eight."

   "Seventy-eight up in court on a murder charge. On the other hand, should she be allowed to profit from her crime? Should she be permitted to terrorise pedestrians in a smart little Ford Fiesta?"

   "She won't," said Crocker.

   Something in his voice brought Wexford to his feet. "Why? What d'you mean?"

   The doctor slid lightly off the edge of the desk. "I told you I'd lost a patient. Elsie Parrish died last night. A neighbour found her and called me."