Chapter and Hearse (17 page)

‘Hang it all, Venables, it must mean something…'

‘That's what my Minister thinks.'

‘There's quite a lot hanging on it, isn't there?' deduced Henry realistically.

‘You can say that again, Tyler. My ‘K' for a start…'

‘Quite, quite,' said Henry soothingly. Malcolm Venables was well known in the corridors of power to be suffering from ‘Knight starvation'.

‘Another odd thing about this message is that it's composed in words at all … Hang on, the waiter's coming back again.'

Henry exercised his own prestidigitatory skills by extricating the paper from the menu under cover of his napkin and slipping it beneath his table mat.

‘Two fish,' announced the waiter, setting down a pair of substantial platters. ‘Chef says to mind the plates. They're very hot.'

‘They're not the only things at the table too hot to handle,' said Henry when the waiter had withdrawn to a safe distance and he'd retrieved the paper. ‘I should think this
billet-doux
of yours is too.'

‘What we were hoping for,' persisted Venables, ‘was a drawing of the weaponry in question. We badly need to know if it's ours or theirs. A description wouldn't be half as good as a picture even if we could understand it, but we can't.'

‘So the numbers aren't measurements?' said Henry, picking up his fish knife and fork.

‘We've tried them every way we can – with and without computers – and no matter which way we hold them up to the light, they don't produce a measured drawing of any sort.'

‘There is one thing about the numbers, though, isn't there,' observed Henry diffidently. ‘Oh, yes, thank you, a little more of the Macon would go down very well.'

‘What's that?' Venables paused, the bottle suspended over Henry's glass.

‘There are no two the same.'

‘Oh, that,' said Venables dismissively. ‘Yes, the boffins pointed that out first before they really got to work. All the numbers between one and eighty-seven, none recurring. It didn't help, actually…'

Henry took another look at the text. ‘I wouldn't say that, old man. Lend me a pencil, will you?'

‘Here you are.' Malcolm Venables produced one with a chewed end from about his person.

‘Thanks. Now, give me a minute, will you? And don't you let your fish get cold. This'll take a minute or two…'

‘I say, what are you doing, Tyler?'

Henry pushed his own fish to one side and laid the paper flat on the table. He began to apply the pencil to the message. ‘Give me half a minute and I'll tell you.'

‘I hope you know what you're doing,' said Venables anxiously. ‘You do realize that I'll be done for if anything goes wrong with that message?'

‘Would the barrel of this gun of yours happen to look like this?' enquired Henry, a design beginning to take shape under the pencil.

‘Good God!' Venables sat up, his fish forgotten. ‘How did you work that out?'

‘And the sights like this?' What was even more clearly a very formidable piece of armoury emerged as Henry drew lightly over the written words.

‘I don't believe it…' breathed Venables. ‘I just don't believe it.'

‘I think you'll just have to,' said Henry bracingly as the final details of a horrendous weapon grew before their eyes. Realism was prized very highly at the Foreign Office.

‘That's it, all right,' said Venables with barely suppressed excitement. ‘How did you do it, Tyler?'

‘I joined up the full stops at the end of every sentence in order,' explained Henry modestly.

‘You did what?' spluttered the man from Mercantile and Persuasion.

‘Starting,' said Henry Tyler, ‘with the one that mentioned the figure one and going on to the one which talked about eighty-seven lobsters.'

‘I don't believe it,' said Venables.

‘It's called “Dot-to-Dot” and my niece does it rather well. She's seven, you know.'

Malcolm Venables wasn't listening. He was gazing out of the window. ‘Do you realize, Tyler, that we can come back here each year for the rest of time and sit at this table and spout Tennyson to each other?'

‘Tennyson?'

Venables nodded ‘You remember…'

‘No,' said Henry, who was getting really hungry now.

‘“And,”' quoted Venables dreamily, ‘“gazing from this height alone, We spoke of what had been.”'

Like to Die

‘The law,' pronounced Superintendent Leeyes heavily, ‘is an ass.'

‘Sir?' Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan raised an enquiring eyebrow but didn't commit himself to the general proposition. However much he agreed privately with any sentiment of his superior officer's, he had always found it prudent to wait to hear first exactly what it was that had provoked the Superintendent into generalization. He wondered what it was going to be this time.

‘A total ass,' repeated the Superintendent, pushing about some papers on his desk in a fretful manner. ‘Doesn't the man know we've got better things to do?'

‘Which man?' asked Sloan very tentatively. In Leeyes's present mood, it might even have been better not to have put the question at all.

‘The Coroner, of course,' snarled Leeyes.

‘Ah…' Now Sloan understood. Mr Locombe-Stableford, Her Majesty's Coroner for the town of Berebury in the county of Calleshire, was an old sparring partner – not to say arch-enemy – of the Superintendent. This was because he was one of the few people in the world whose authority exceeded his own.

‘It isn't even as if he doesn't know that we've got more than enough other things on our plate,' carried on the Superintendent in aggrieved tones. ‘Much more important ones than this potty little case…'

‘What case might that be, sir?'

Leeyes ignored this. ‘There's that road traffic fatality over at Cullingoak, for instance.'

‘Hit-and-run killers are very hard to find,' put in Sloan by way of apology. ‘Everyone's working on that one flat out.'

‘Just what I mean, Sloan,' said Leeyes sturdily. ‘And I told him so.'

‘The Coroner, sir.' Sloan came back to the matter in hand. ‘What exactly is it that he – er – wants us to do?' The Detective Inspector knew one thing about Mr Locombe-Stableford and that was – like it or not – his writ ran throughout the patch covered by ‘F' Division of the county constabulary.

‘The Coroner,' said Leeyes flatly, ‘has decided for reasons best known to himself to hold an inquest on a Mr Thomas Lean, a wealthy retired businessman…'

Since this action was totally within that august official's prerogative, Sloan waited.

‘… who died yesterday in a nursing home.' Leeyes tapped his desk and added meaningfully, ‘The Berebury Nursing Home.'

‘Ah…' said Sloan.

The Berebury Nursing Home was considered one of the best in the whole county. Only the well connected and the well off went there; Sloan promptly amended the thought – well, the well off anyway. It was no use being well connected unless you were also well off if you wanted to be treated at the Berebury Nursing Home. He'd heard that the fees were monstrously steep.

‘And they don't like it,' said Leeyes.

‘The nursing home, you mean, sir?'

‘Naturally.'

‘Not good for business,' agreed Sloan.

‘The Matron's in a proper taking about there being a post-mortem. Dr Dabbe's doing it now.'

‘I can see that she might be,' said Sloan, frowning at an elusive memory. ‘Isn't that where the Earl of Ornum's dotty old aunt is? Lady Alice…'

‘Shouldn't be surprised,' said Leeyes. ‘Now, this Thomas Lean hadn't been in there very long. He'd been pretty dicky for months and just got too ill to be nursed at home.'

‘So why the inquest?' Sloan was beginning to see why the Superintendent thought the Coroner was being perverse and making more work for the Consultant Pathologist at the Berebury District Hospital Trust, into the bargain.

‘Because his illness didn't kill him,' came back Leeyes smartly, ‘that's why.'

‘I see, sir.' Sloan reached for his notebook. That did sound more like work for the head of Berebury's tiny Criminal Investigation Department.

‘It was food poisoning. Or so the patient's doctor says.' The Superintendent sniffed. He didn't like giving medical opinion any more credence than was absolutely necessary.

‘And what have the family got to say?' Their views, thought Sloan, might be just as relevant as those of the Matron.

‘We don't know yet,' said Leeyes. ‘They were away on holiday when Thomas Lean died. They're on their way home from France now.'

Detective Inspector Sloan opened his notebook at a new page. ‘This old gentleman, sir…'

‘He wasn't all that old,' said Leeyes briskly. The Superintendent was getting towards retirement age himself and had turned against ageism. ‘He was just coming up to seventy-five and that's not old these days.'

‘No, sir,' agreed Sloan hastily. ‘No age at all.'

Leeyes pulled one of the pieces of paper on his desk towards him. ‘That's right. Seventy-four and eleven months. His birthday … oh, his birthday would have been tomorrow.'

*   *   *

The Matron of the Berebury Nursing Home seemed as upset about that as she was about everything else. ‘You see, gentlemen, we always try to celebrate the birthdays of all of our patients … poor dears. Nothing elaborate, naturally.'

‘Naturally,' agreed Detective Inspector Sloan.

‘Not in their state of health,' chimed in Detective Constable Crosby. Because they were so busy down at the police station, Sloan had taken the detective constable with him to the nursing home as being better than nobody. Now he wasn't so sure that Crosby was better than nobody.

The Matron, who looked more than a little wan herself, waved a hand. ‘You know the sort of thing, a glass of sherry and a special cake and so forth – not that poor Mr Lean would have been fit to join in anything approaching a celebration today.'

‘No?'

‘And, as it happened, none of us would have felt like eating. Not after yesterday.' She shook her head sadly. ‘And this would have been his last birthday, you know. He wasn't going to get better.'

Detective Constable Crosby looked interested.

‘He'd come in here to die,' explained the Matron. ‘He'd been going slowly downhill with cancer for a long time, but the chemotherapy was keeping him going – and the painkillers, of course. Then it got that the family couldn't manage any more.'

‘I see,' said Sloan carefully. There were some homes, the police knew only too well, where the painkillers killed more than the pain, but this hadn't been what had alerted the Coroner about this death.

‘And,' she said, ‘they were certainly helping him to hold his own.' She made a gesture of despair with her hands. ‘If it hadn't been for this terrible food poisoning, we might have had him with us yet for weeks – perhaps months…'

It began to sound as if the Coroner was being pedantic to a fault and that the Superintendent was right after all. Mr Locombe-Stableford had dug his heels in over a legal nicety: a verdict of misadventure, perhaps, rather than natural causes.

‘Tell me about yesterday,' invited Sloan.

‘Everyone was very, very ill.' She shuddered at the memory. ‘But everyone … staff and patients.'

‘And especially Mr Lean…'

‘Well, no … not at first anyway,' she said, drawing her brows together. ‘That was the funny thing.'

‘Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?' asked Crosby.

She stared at him and said repressively, ‘It was thought strange that he should appear to be less ill than everyone else and yet be the one to die.'

Detective Inspector Sloan leaned forward. He would deal with Crosby later, but all policemen were professionally interested in things that were funny peculiar. ‘Go on…'

She winced. ‘I – we – that is, everyone else started off with some dizziness and then abdominal pain…'

‘Quite so,' said Sloan, making a note.

‘And then there was nausea followed by severe vomiting.' The Matron obviously found reporting in the third person easier and went on in a more detached way: ‘Several staff and patients collapsed and some of them then had diarrhoea…'

‘But only Thomas Lean died,' said Crosby insouciantly.

She inclined her head.

‘How did you manage?' asked Sloan. Perhaps the Coroner wasn't just being difficult …

‘Dr Browne was very good. He came at once and saw everyone and took away specimens and so forth.'

Sloan nodded. He knew Dr Angus Browne – a family doctor of the old school. He was forthright but kind – and careful.

‘He sent for the Environmental Health people or whatever it is they call themselves these days too.'

Very careful then, Dr Browne had been. Which was interesting.

‘Food poisoning, you see, being a notifiable condition…'

‘And then?'

‘I can't really tell you that.' The Matron looked embarrassed and murmured apologetically, ‘You see, I was one of the casualties myself at the time.'

‘I understand.' Sloan turned over a page in his notebook. ‘So…'

‘So we had to call in extra staff.'

He looked up quizzically.

‘Anyone,' she amplifed this, ‘who hadn't eaten luncheon here on Thursday – night staff, people on stand-by and some agency nurses.'

‘And then…'

‘People started to recover later that night and by the next morning everyone was all right again.'

‘Except Thomas Lean,' said Crosby mordantly.

‘We – that is, the substitute staff alerted by Lady Alice – sent for Dr Browne again when they saw how poorly he had become.'