Some Die Eloquent (6 page)

‘It happens,' said the foreman.

‘I was quite small at the time.'

‘Ah.' That explained a lot to the foreman. Like why a well-spoken lad like this should be living in squalor and working with a road construction gang, though admittedly times had changed anyway. Time was when speech like his would have been aped up and down the site. Not any longer. The foreman reached for the last shot in his empty locker and said, ‘You'll lose your bonus, of course.'

Nicholas Petforth shrugged his shoulders.

That didn't surprise the foreman. He couldn't get at any of his men that way any longer. The odd ones had minds above money and the others were earning so much that it didn't matter to them anyway.

In the end the foreman agreed to Nick having next Saturday off as he agreed to most requests these days. Partly because he didn't think for all his broken-down appearance and bizarre clothing that Nick was the sort of man to lie and partly because he calculated that he'd have the Union after him if he didn't let him go. And then the consortium which was building the motorway and who would neither know nor care if he gave every man jack in the gang the whole week off provided they didn't lose money, would be after his blood.

‘You'll be back after the funeral, right?' he said, conscious that if there was ever trouble on the site he could be sure of just one thing: no one would ever uphold his authority.

‘Not if she's left me a fortune, I won't,' murmured the young man whom he knew as Nick, picking up his donkey jacket and protective helmet. ‘That's for sure.'

CHAPTER V

If you would publish your infatuation

Come on and try your hand at transmutation.

‘At least,' murmured Mrs Margaret Sloan, ‘I don't have to walk home.'

‘No,' agreed Sloan warily. He'd gone straight back to the ante-natal out-patients' clinic from the mortuary and metaphorically thrown his hat in first.

There was a constrained silence.

‘Everything – er – all right?' he asked.

‘Yes,' she said consideringly. ‘Yes, I think so.'

‘Good.' He paused. ‘Er … good.'

‘If you're talking about the baby, that is.'

‘Yes … er … naturally.'

‘Then it is.'

‘Er … good.'

‘And me?'

‘Of course,' he said hastily. He'd fallen into that, head first.

There was another small silence.

‘Is everything,' Sloan capitulated, ‘all right with you too?'

‘Yes, I think so,' she said demurely.

‘Good. Er … good. Here, let me take that.'

Mrs Sloan consented to having her shopping-bag carried as they walked down the hospital corridor.

‘The doctors are pleased, then?' said her husband with unaccustomed heartiness and a wholesale avoidance of the equally germane matter of whether or not Mrs Margaret Sloan was pleased at being abandoned in the ante-natal clinic.

‘The doctor,' said Margaret Sloan astringently, ‘was very pleased indeed.'

‘Good. I'm glad to hear it.'

‘But not with me.'

Sloan looked up.

‘He,' said Margaret Sloan, matron, ‘was pleased with a young lady called Briony.'

‘Ah, he was, was he?'

‘Exceedingly pleased. Mind you,' she added, ‘Dr Elspin is what I would call a very personable young man.'

Somehow this statement contrived to put Sloan on the wrong foot.

‘Would you?' he said.

‘Very,' said Margaret Sloan emphatically.

‘Ah!'

‘Nice manners.'

‘Has he?'

‘For a doctor,' she said.

‘I see.'

‘And you,' she said, ‘presumably were – er – caught up with someone called Beatrice?'

‘I was,' said Sloan carefully. The Ice Maiden was gradually – but ever so gradually – giving way to someone else, someone more like the woman he had married. He didn't want to say or to do anything that might halt the progression.

‘Aunt to a nurse called Briony, I take it?' said his wife.

‘That is so. The late Miss Beatrice Wansdyke. I understand that she has a niece on the staff at the hospital.'

‘If,' said Mrs Sloan, ‘what I overheard is anything to go by …'

‘Yes?'

‘She's going to have a nephew on the staff at the hospital too pretty soon.'

‘Ah.'

‘A nephew-in-law, actually.'

‘I see.' He listened attentively to her recital of what she had overheard. ‘So now they can get married and before she died they couldn't?'

‘That was what was implied, certainly,' said Mrs Margaret Sloan.

‘Well, well, well,' said Sloan, ‘that is interesting.'

‘I rather thought,' murmured his wife mischievously, ‘that you wouldn't think I'd been wasting my time.'

‘Margaret Sloan,' he said gruffly, ‘I won't have that from you or anyone else.' He took a quick look up and down the corridor. They seemed for the moment to be alone. He dropped the shopping basket and put both arms round her. He was delighted to find that the Ice Maiden had melted away completely.

‘Larky Nolson waved to me,' she said indistinctly.

‘I'll have him for that,' swore Sloan.

‘It's not a crime.'

‘Incitement to violence,' growled Margaret Sloan's husband. ‘That's what that was.'

An Accident Unit porter wheeling a patient on a stretcher trolley round the corner at that moment rolled his eyes and said to his mate at tea-break time that the young doctors were bad enough these days but he really didn't know what the police force was coming to.

To say that Superintendent Leeyes was displeased by the news of the result of the post mortem examination was an understatement.

Detective-Inspector Sloan was sitting in the Superintendent's office now. There had been a tacit – definitely unspoken – agreement between police husband and policeman's wife that he was going back on duty.

Leeyes was inveighing against all forensic scientists in general but medical ones in particular.

‘It's always the same with pathologists,' he complained. ‘When you don't want them to find something they go and do, and when you do want them to come up with the goods they don't.'

Sloan maintained a prudent silence. Abstract truth was not a concept that appealed to the Superintendent at the best of times. And this was not the best of times. While it was not the worst of times either, it did not seem as if the Superintendent considered it was the age of medical wisdom.

‘So Miss Wansdyke died of her diabetes, did she?' he rumbled after a moment. Perhaps it was the epoch of incredulity.

‘Dr Dabbe couldn't find anything else, sir.'

‘He would if he could,' conceded Leeyes illogically.

‘He's doing a drug screen, of course.'

‘Of course.' That went without saying. Drug screens were routine in this day and age.

‘They may discover something in some of the other specimens they've taken.'

‘Disappointing there being nothing to find at autopsy.' Leeyes grunted. ‘I should have thought there was bound to be more to her dying than natural causes.'

‘Seems a pity to die with all that money,' Sloan agreed with the unspoken sentiment and then added a witticism of his own. ‘All this and Heaven too.'

‘Something doesn't fit, Sloan,' said the Superintendent severely.

‘No, sir.' Sloan was quick to agree.

‘Doesn't feel right.'

‘No, sir,' he said immediately. He didn't discount instinct. He never had. Hunch was half-way to detection. Always had been.

‘Doesn't smell right either,' pronounced Leeyes.

‘No, sir.' You used all your senses in police work.

‘On the other hand I don't see that we can do a lot more about holding things up.'

‘No.'

‘So,' said Leeyes generously, ‘you can just step round and tell the coroner we shan't be standing in his way at all any more over the burial order.'

His office was not the only thing Dickensian about Mr Robert Chestley. He was one of Her Majesty's Coroners for the County of Calleshire and a practising solicitor. The man himself gave the impression of barely having left a hard butterfly-wing collar behind. A gold-rimmed pincenez contributed to a general aura of the nineteenth century, which was reinforced by the decor of an office in which little had been changed since his grandfather's day.

Detective-Inspector Sloan was not deceived.

Unseen legal scale fees kept pace with the rise in the cost of living practically of their own volition. There was no need for any other changes.

‘You,' said Mr Chestley, Notary Public and nobody's fool, ‘have come about the late Miss Beatrice Wansdyke.'

Sloan agreed that he had.

‘Constable King's away,' grumbled the coroner. Mr Chestley himself never took holidays. ‘He usually sees to everything.'

Sloan concurred with that too. They were all agreed that the coroner's Officer was a useful man to have around at a death. He saved the beatman a lot of routine work, devilled for the coroner and became – thank goodness – very skilled indeed at handling bereaved relatives.

‘Your Superintendent,' said the coroner with emphasis, ‘prevailed upon me to order a post mortem examination.'

He and Superintendent Leeyes were old adversaries. They had had several notable clashes in the past – usually over the duties of the Coroner's Officer. This unfortunate policeman existed in a sort of leaderless no-man's-land. Hostilities had broken out over this more than once.

‘Subject to my direction,' the Superintendent always insisted.

‘Subject to my direction,' the coroner would invariably counter.

‘His office derives from the parish constable,' Leeyes would respond. ‘My pigeon.'

‘His office derives from the parish beadle,' Mr Chestley would reply, ‘and that's older. My pigeon, I think.'

‘Historical duties too obscure to be recorded,' said Leeyes nastily on more than one occasion. The ancientness of the coroner's own office always rankled with him. Sir Robert Peel had been so unconscionably late on the scene.

‘Jervis on Coroners …'

‘The Police Act 1964 …' Superintendent Leeyes never gave up.

‘Useful to have a police officer around in case a crime has been committed,' the coroner would throw in.

‘If you need a detective –' Leeyes always came back smartly at that one ‘– we'll send one round.'

‘The job calls for a trained man.' The coroner – a pillar of the legal profession – always had a riposte for every rebuttal.

‘Waste of police manpower,' had figured in Leeyes's broadside in response to that.

‘If a job is worth doing,' quoted Chestley, ‘then it's worth doing well.'

‘No man can serve two masters.' Leeyes did not hesitate to fall back on primary sources when it suited him.

Then someone – the Chief Constable, probably – had called ‘Pax' and a state of armed neutrality had been resumed.

‘So,' said Mr Chestley to Detective-Inspector Sloan now, ‘I ordered a post mortem, the body being within my jurisdiction.'

‘Yes,' said Sloan. It was the latter point that mattered with coroners, though he never knew why.

‘That post mortem examination confirms the cause of death as certified by the deceased's usual medical attendant.'

‘Yes,' said Sloan again.

‘Can you now give me any valid reason why I should not issue a Pink Form B?'

‘No,' said Sloan uneasily.

‘I take it, Inspector, that Superintendent Leeyes had felt – er – a pricking of his thumbs.'

‘Information received,' said Sloan tersely. Formal language was a refuge really, not an imposition: a cloak for that which was better not explained. ‘From persons about the deceased.' The quaint archaism covered a multitude of hidden sources.

‘Pink Form B,' expounded the coroner pedantically, ‘is of course a superior category of medical certificate of the cause of death.'

‘Yes,' said Sloan, surprised at the law's homely touch. Down at the police station forms had numbers, not colours and letters.

‘Though,' Mr Chestley continued his lecture, ‘as it happens, the result of the autopsy confirms the cause of death as certified by the registered medical practitioner who attended the deceased in her last illness.'

‘Dr Paston,' said Sloan for simplicity's sake.

‘The fact of confirmation is irrelevant,' continued the coroner, adjusting his pince-nez.

Not in Sloan's mind, it wasn't, though he did not say so. Corroboration was the word the police used for that and they could always use as much of it as they could get in the Criminal Investigation Department of any Force in the country.

‘… though,' Mr Chestley immediately added a rider, ‘no doubt a comfort to the member of the medical profession concerned.'

‘Dr Paston,' said Sloan again.

‘But irrelevant.' The coroner would not be gainsaid.

‘Really, sir?'

‘Post mortems,' declared the coroner, ‘do not always confirm the certified cause of death.'

Sloan could well believe this. People could be ill with one thing and die from another. Easily. And doctors could be wrong. Even more easily.

‘Mind you,' said the coroner, unexpectedly reverting to his own profession, ‘Counsel's opinion isn't always perfect either.'

Sloan cleared his throat and made a valiant attempt to get back to the business in hand. ‘The Superintendent says …'

‘But the system's better than it was.'

Sloan said he was glad to hear it.

‘Not so simple, though.'

‘Nothing,' said Sloan with unfeigned heartiness, ‘is as simple as it used to be.'

The coroner adjusted his pince-nez again. ‘Before they had Dabbe and his fancy scientific outfit …'