Some Die Eloquent (11 page)

‘She died of it,' nodded Sloan.

‘How it came about the way it did is your department, Sloan. Not mine.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,
as we say in the post mortem room.'

Sloan stood up. Medical Latin was one thing. When the pathologist took to quoting classical tags it was time to go. ‘Thank you, Doctor.'

‘You know, Sloan,' he said negligently as they crossed the room, ‘I think after all we only need the one notice here in our department.'

Sloan followed the direction of the doctor's bony finger as it pointed to a sign above the door.

‘Exit?' he said.

‘It says it all,' murmured Dr Dabbe, ‘doesn't it?'

Miss Simpson sighed and pressed the bell for her secretary.

‘Show them in,' she sighed.

Once upon a time the Headmistress of the Berebury Grammar School for Girls would have been seriously disturbed at the news that the police had arrived at the school and wished to see her. Not any more. The motor-car had put an end to that. So many of the Sixth Form had their own cars these days that brushes with the law were commonplace.

And if it wasn't the motor-car, as often as not it was the lure of the great unknown. Time was when girls seldom left home alone. Nowadays even schools like hers had pupils who absconded. Improbable as it seemed, it was one of the drawbacks of the single sex school.

Miss Simpson had her spiel on this theme practically word-perfect these days. The bolder spirits in a ‘girls only' school, she would insist to the School Governors, were practically certain to find trouble. The quiet girl from a sheltered background in a little village, she would remind startled parents who were on their way to being over-protective, was almost always at even greater risk.

‘And Gretna Green,' she would say ominously to both groups, ‘is the only Scottish place-name that they all know.'

As always, Miss Walsh, the Deputy Head, agreed with her.

‘There is nothing,' ran Miss Simpson's favourite sermon to Miss Walsh, ‘like seeing spotty boys all day and every day for keeping a girl in touch with reality.'

The Deputy Head, who cherished a secret passion for Omar Sharif and who read romantic novels in the privacy of her own bedroom, would nod sagely at this dictum too – but still call in at the library on her chaste way home.

‘A gipsy caravan,' she said wistfully to the Head now. ‘That's what I set my heart on when I was young. Dear me, how we all do grow up.'

‘Really!' exclaimed Miss Simpson. ‘You should have known better than that even then.' She looked at the door expectantly. ‘Let's hope it's not drugs this time, anyway. It will be one day, you know.'

‘The lure of another great unknown,' said little Miss Walsh incorrigibly.

It soon transpired that it wasn't drugs or missing pupils or motor-cars that the police wanted to see Miss Simpson about.

It wasn't even about a girl.

‘Miss Collins?' said Miss Simpson, puzzled. ‘Miss Hilda Collins?'

‘Miss Wansdyke's friend,' said Detective-Inspector Sloan.

‘Our biologist,' said Miss Simpson.

‘In the lab,' said Miss Walsh, consulting a timetable. ‘With the Fourth Form.'

The Fourth Form at Berebury High School for Girls clearly found the visit from an unknown male more exciting than the study of the life-cycle of the dog-fish upon which they were engaged when he arrived. Miss Hilda Collins, however, was equally the possessor of a lion-tamer's eye. One swift look round the laboratory from her and the Fourth Form had turned its attention back to
Scyllium canicula.

Detective-Inspector Sloan said he was sorry about the death of her friend.

‘You shouldn't ever feel sorry for anyone who dies suddenly,' said Miss Collins gruffly, pulling herself up and straightening her white coat.

Sloan, who in his time had felt very sorry indeed for a number of people who had died with startling suddenness – mostly as victims – nevertheless knew exactly what she meant and did not argue.

‘We don't let domestic and agricultural animals linger,' said the biologist, ‘do we?'

‘Not if we can help it,' agreed Sloan, his mind turning unbidden to a dead Airedale dog.

‘Then we shouldn't let humans,' said Miss Collins trenchantly. She led him to a little office at one end of the laboratory that was above and apart from the class, and then turned and looked him squarely in the eye. ‘Now, what do you want from me?'

‘When did you last see Beatrice Wansdyke?'

‘Thursday afternoon,' said Hilda Collins without hesitation. ‘We had a cup of tea together in the staff-room after school finished. At least I had a cup. She had three. She said she seemed to be very thirsty all the time.'

‘Not Friday?'

‘I didn't come in to school on Friday. I'd had a bit of a cold and lost my voice.' She twisted her lips wryly. ‘It's the one faculty that you can't do without in this job.'

‘And how was Miss Wansdyke on Thursday?' enquired Sloan, making a mental note.

‘Not well,' said Hilda Collins immediately. ‘She hadn't been at all well lately. I – we'd – all begun to get a bit worried about her. And so had she, I think. She wondered if she might have picked up some disease while she was in France.'

If that noted xenophobe, Superintendent Leeyes, had been present he, too, would have tried to blame the French first.

‘She went with a school party on a tour of the chateaux of the Loire in the summer holidays, you know, Inspector.'

Detective-Inspector Sloan, who had seen for himself that ‘Calais' was not engraved on Miss Wansdyke's heart – or anywhere else – and who knew about the absence of insulin in her bloodstream, saw no occasion for blaming the French.

‘But the doctor said not,' went on the biologist. ‘He just told her to step up her dose of insulin.'

‘Quite,' said Sloan, keeping silent on the highly germane fact that her friend had died without a trace of it in her body.

‘I'm glad she went quickly,' said Miss Collins with such fervour that Sloan looked up.

He hadn't, so far in his police working life, encountered a ‘mercy killing' but there was always a first time.

‘I'm a member of a euthanasia society,' she said.

Sloan was not surprised.

‘When my time comes,' averred the schoolteacher, ‘I shall take something.'

Sloan nodded. A lot of people said that they weren't prepared to wait for Death the Reaper. But they usually did.

‘Tell me a little about Miss Wansdyke,' invited Sloan. He needed to fill out the curiously empty picture of a chemistry mistress that was all he had so far. ‘Had she any hobbies, for instance?'

Miss Collins considered this. ‘Just the one.'

‘Ah.'

‘More of a passion than a hobby.'

‘People get like that,' said Sloan. Other people, of course. Growing roses well was just a relaxation as far as he was concerned, naturally.

‘Everyone has to have something.'

‘The dog?' he offered tentatively.

The biologist shook her head. ‘No, no. Not Isolde. No, Beatrice was looking for something.'

Sloan waited.

‘Everyone has their Holy Grail,' she said.

‘We're all seekers after something,' he advanced in his turn. He was old enough now to know that. With some it was the Truth: but not with everyone. ‘What was Miss Wansdyke looking for, Miss Collins?'

‘A way of using the nitrogen that's present in the air,' said Hilda Collins unexpectedly. ‘She felt that it ought to be possible to convert it.'

‘Oh,' said Sloan blankly.

Miss Collins took pity on him. ‘It would be a sort of latter-day turning of stone into gold. They tried that a lot in the Middle Ages.'

‘I see.'

‘Poor Beatrice,' said Hilda Collins. ‘She never did find it.'

‘Where did she look?' he asked. ‘Or rather, where did she do the looking?' Air, after all, was free.

The biologist smiled. ‘She used to use the laboratories down at Wansdyke and Darnley. At weekends. They didn't mind. She'd done more than her bit for the family.'

‘So I am told.'

‘Perhaps,' added Miss Collins abruptly, ‘her nephew will come to his senses now.'

‘Nicholas Petforth?'

‘Not a bad boy,' pronounced the schoolteacher judiciously.

The phrase had long ago lost its meaning to anyone who had spent any time at all in a Juvenile Court.

‘His trouble, Inspector, is that he spends all his time being afraid that he's taking after his father.'

‘It does happen,' advanced Sloan cautiously. He had every intention of his son – if the baby should be a boy – taking after him. Or else.

‘Nature, not nurture?' murmured the biologist quizzically.

‘Well …'

‘Or nurture, not nature?'

‘A bit of both,' comprised Sloan. He was going to see that that child of his – theirs – when it came was going to be brought up properly too.

‘But then you're a policeman, aren't you?' She shot him an intelligent look.

‘As the twig is bent,' Sloan came back.

‘It works with the right handed thread clockwise honeysuckle,' conceded the biologist with a glint of humour, ‘and the left-handed thread anti-clockwise bindweed.'

‘If you start it in the right way,' said the policeman who was also a gardener.

‘
Homo sapiens
doesn't keep all the rules,' observed Hilda Collins with profundity.

‘There are those,' proffered Sloan, ‘who say, “Give me a boy until he's seven …”'

‘And,' responded Miss Collins, ‘those who say that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.'

‘Even unto the third and fourth generation,' finished Sloan. His mother had been most particular about his Biblical education.

Miss Collins suddenly looked through the office window. ‘Turn the scalpel the other way, Veronica,' she called out. ‘You'll never dissect anything with the blunt side. Go on, child! Cut! It won't bite you, you know. It's quite dead.' She turned back to Sloan. ‘Where was I?'

‘Heredity, I think, miss.'

‘Fathers,' said Hilda Collins, looking Sloan up and down, ‘only amount to half the genetic programme.'

Sloan had never considered paternity in quite that light before and said so.

‘Though,' remarked Miss Collins academically, ‘in some ways the Rhesus monkey's father is of relatively little importance.'

Detective-Inspector Sloan said nothing. He had always in any case been on the side of the angels anyway. Apes were less appealing.

‘The little woman,' said the biologist, following a completely different line of thought, ‘does her share, too.'

‘Er – quite so,' said Sloan, making up his mind there and then that Margaret, his wife, was not going to hear about this interview at all. Some aspects of police work were not for home consumption.

‘There was nothing wrong with Nicholas Petforth's mother, I can assure you.' Miss Collins plunged her hands deeply into the pockets of her white coat. ‘Young Briony's her living image.'

‘Nature, not nurture,' said Sloan neatly.

She acknowledged this with a quick jerk of her head. ‘And there'll be nothing wrong with the boy when he stops running away from himself.'

‘It would help,' observed Sloan mildly, ‘if he stopped running away from us.'

‘Like that, is it?' She raised ungroomed eyebrows heavenwards: and then turned away from him again. ‘Deeper, Veronica! Cut deeper …'

For his money, thought Sloan, Miss Hilda Collins could have slit the throats of a whole pack of dogs.

CHAPTER IX

My eyes are bleared with work on preparations,

That's all the good you get from transmutations.

‘Just a few enquiries, Doctor,' began Detective-Inspector Sloan. The general practitioner's consulting room was a much less intimidating place than the hospital. There were no white coats about and precious few instruments visible. The chairs and the desk were more homely, too. Detective-Constable Crosby was sitting in the chair that was slightly behind and to one side of the doctor's direct line of vision and was presumably the one intended for the patient's friend or relative. Sloan himself was occupying the patient's chair facing the doctor.

Dr John Paston regarded him straightly across the desk. ‘About what, Inspector?'

‘The late Miss Beatrice Wansdyke.'

‘Ah yes. Of course, Inspector.' The general practitioner relaxed almost imperceptibly: but Sloan noticed. Few people realized to what extent body signs gave them away. And that those signs were the more revealing just because they were usually completely uncontrived. Even a professional straight-face like Dr Paston was not able to conceal them completely. And the professional watcher of people across the desk from him duly took note.

‘She was one of your patients, I believe,' said Detective-Inspector Sloan, realizing, when he came to think about it, that this matter of understanding and portraying body language was one of the main ingredients of really first-class stage acting.

‘Indeed, yes.' The doctor pushed a stethoscope to one side. ‘For many years.'

‘We understand that she suffered from diabetes.'

‘That is so.'

Sloan was as quick to notice the quality of the response as he had been to notice the body signs. Never to advance more information than was requested was the hall-mark of the skilled interviewee. The doctor was the sort of witness who would stand up well to cross-examination in court. There was no spilling over of extraneous detail here: nothing to give an interrogator a handle.

‘Long-standing?' said Sloan.

‘Very.'

‘How did she cope?'

This at least elicited a slightly more expanded reply from the general practitioner.