Some Die Eloquent (3 page)

‘Another hundred and sometimes I think I'd stop,' said Leeyes forcefully. ‘Today's been murder. Harpe's got himself tangled up with a pack of rabid conservationists – Malcolm Darnley's crowd – at a county planning enquiry over some trees on a bend in the Calleford road. Haven't seen hair or hide of him all day and we've had three road traffic accidents already, not to mention that Dr McCavity's hit another bollard. That's his third this month.'

‘Chemisty mistress at …' began Sloan. Dr McCavity was old Dr Paston's new partner and visibly inclined to the bottle. His patients, however, liked him.

‘Sergeant Gelven's over at Almstone looking at a break-in and if you ask me that's about all he's going to be able to do to it.'

‘Chemistry mistress at the Grammar School,' said Sloan resolutely.

‘Kennedy's gone and got his foot trodden on by a bull down at the market.' Leeyes believed in airing his grievances to his subordinates – it kept their ambition within bounds. ‘He's up at the hospital, too. And Constable King's on annual leave. He would be, just when he's wanted …' Police Constable King routinely acted as coroner's Officer in Berebury.

‘Yes, sir. You …'

‘You've taken half a day's leave.'

Sloan drew breath, remembered that he hadn't got a quarter of a million pounds in the bank or anywhere else, and kept silent.

‘And Crosby's underfoot here,' said Leeyes, concluding his catalogue of woe by piling Pelion upon Ossa. Detective-Constable Crosby was not the brightest of the bright and still tended to be at the police station when other members of the Force were out on the job.

‘So,' said Sloan, ‘what you want to know is …'

‘What I want to know,' said Superintendent Leeyes, defining the problem neatly, ‘is exactly what a quarter of a million pounds is doing in the current account of Beatrice Wansdyke.'

‘Who died.'

‘What's that, Sloan?' came his voice sharply over the line. ‘What's that?'

‘The late Beatrice Wansdyke,' observed Sloan pertinently.

‘Exactly!' trumpeted Leeyes. ‘Dying must come into it somewhere.'

‘It usually does,' said Sloan, putting down the telephone receiver.

Sloan put his head outside the pathologist's secretary's office door and said, ‘You can have your office back now. Thank you.'

‘Oh, there you are, Inspector.' The secretary was standing in the corridor, talking to a young girl in nurse's uniform.

‘There was a message,' the girl was saying breathlessly.

‘You are …' began the secretary.

‘Nurse Petforth.' The girl looked anxiously first at her and then at Detective-Inspector Sloan. ‘I came as quickly as I could.'

‘Miss Briony Petforth?' said the secretary.

She nodded, whey-faced. ‘Sister said to come straight round here but she didn't say why. Is it …' She halted in mid-sentence and made a visible effort to control herself. ‘It's not … who …?'

‘Would you by any chance be a relative of the late Miss Beatrice Wansdyke?'

‘Oh yes.' A look of great relief passed over the girl's face. ‘She was my aunt.'

‘Then,' said the pathologist's secretary briskly, ‘that's what the message will have been about.'

An expression of puzzlement succeeded relief on Miss Petforth's countenance. ‘But she died on Sunday. At least we think it must have been on Sunday.'

‘Dr Dabbe,' said Dr Dabbe's secretary, ‘wants to do a post mortem and we find that there's been no formal identification.'

‘A post mortem? But I thought …' She pushed back a lock of auburn hair that had somehow found its way past her nurse's cap. ‘Dr Paston said …'

‘Only if you don't mind,' said the pathologist's secretary, ‘of course.'

‘I don't mind,' said Briony Petforth in such a neutral way that Detective-Inspector Sloan was quite unable to make up his mind whether she did or not. ‘It's just that my cousin's been seeing to everything.'

‘Yes, indeed.' The pathologist's secretary conjured up some papers. ‘That would be Mr Bertram George Wansdyke, wouldn't it?'

‘He's her executor,' responded the nurse obliquely.

‘We did try to get in touch with him,' said the secretary, ‘at his firm.'

‘Wansdyke and Darnley.'

‘But he's over in Calleford on business all day,' said Dr Dabbe's secretary, ‘that's why the doctor thought that as you were on the spot and as it would save so much time …'

‘The funeral's been arranged,' said the girl. A certain amount of colour had come back into her face now.

‘Yes, indeed.' If the pathologist's secretary was very well aware that post mortems took a certain precedence over funerals she did not say so. ‘For next Saturday, isn't it?'

‘That was for the school,' Briony Petforth said. ‘It's to be on Saturday morning so that the girls themselves can choose whether they come or not. Not to have it thrust upon them compulsorily.'

‘How very thoughtful.'

‘That was my cousin's idea.'

Once again Sloan was unable to decide what Briony Petforth herself thought of it.

The pathologist's secretary was gathering up her papers. ‘So, Miss Petforth, if you would just come this way …'

Briony Petforth did not move.

‘Dr Paston,' she said instead, ‘gave us – the family, that is – a death certificate when … when … after she was found …'

‘Did he?' The pathologist's secretary turned to her file. ‘Then I may have it here.'

‘He put down hyperglycæmia and diabetic ketoacidosis as the cause of death,' said the girl. ‘I saw it.'

‘Oh yes?' The pathologist's secretary might have been a member of the medical profession herself, so skilled was she in parrying questions.

‘She was diabetic, you see.' Briony Petforth had now succeeded in getting the stray tail of auburn hair back under her cap.

‘Bad luck,' said the pathologist's secretary sympathetically.

‘Had been for years.'

‘Such a lot of it about, too, these days. Now, if you would just come this way, please …'

‘So why,' asked Briony Petforth, ‘is there being a post mortem?'

Someone else in Berebury was at that minute asking the very same question of someone quite different.

‘How should I know?' responded George Wansdyke at the other end of a telephone in Calleford, the county town of Calleshire. ‘All I had was that message to the office asking if I was available this afternoon and naturally they said I wasn't, because I was over here in Calleford. We've had this appointment with the director of United Mellemetics' Research and Development department lined up for weeks now, and with Malcolm being away until Thursday …'

‘But –' his wife cut him off short – ‘you told me that Dr Paston gave you a death certificate.' Mrs Wansdyke never encouraged mention of business detail. In fact she spent quite a lot of time trying to pretend to herself and her circle of friends and relations that her husband wasn't actually in anything so commonplace as business at all. Messrs Wansdyke and Darnley, she was wont to insist, were really more like scientific researchers than plastics manufacturers.

‘So he did,' said George Wansdyke. ‘Yesterday.'

‘Well, then …'

‘And it said something which he told me meant that she'd gone into a diabetic coma.'

‘That's doctors for you all the time,' said Mrs Pauline Wansdyke, momentarily diverted. ‘Dressing everything up in words nobody can understand. Why couldn't he say what he meant?'

‘He did,' said her husband mildly.

‘Your aunt died from her diabetes.'

‘And that's exactly what he put on the death certificate,' said George Wansdyke.

‘In Latin, though,' his wife came back at him swiftly.

‘They all do that.' In Greek actually, but he did not say so.

‘Showing off,' pronounced Mrs Pauline Wansdyke.

George did not argue.

Mrs Wansdyke returned like a homing pigeon to her original point. ‘They can't do a post mortem if they've got the death certificate.'

‘Can't they just!' responded George vigorously.

‘Well, can they?'

‘I don't suppose for one moment,' declared George Wansdyke, businessman, ‘that they are doing anything at all that they haven't the authority to do.' A working life spent – as a first priority – in satisfying an assortment of government departments, the Customs and Excise, the Inland Revenue, sundry local authorities, the Patents Office, and the Value Added Tax Commissioners had taught him only too well that there was invariably the power packed behind the punch. It was only in the jungle of private enterprise that you had to make sure first that you could see the colour of the other person's money, so to speak.

‘But …' began Pauline Wansdyke.

‘These sort of people,' he said ruefully, ‘don't need to exceed their authority. They've got all they need and plenty more where that came from. For all I know the coroner can still clap people in the Tower.'

‘The coroner?' murmured Pauline Wansdyke. ‘What's your aunt got to do with the coroner?'

‘Nothing that I know about,' said George grimly. ‘Yet.'

‘Well then, why should he want to put anyone in the Tower?'

‘What I meant was,' explained George, immediately regretting his flight into imagery, ‘that it seems to me that the coroner in England can do pretty well what he likes.'

‘Oh, I see. George …' Pauline Wansdyke made up in pertinacity what she lacked in comprehension.

‘Yes?'

‘Where does the coroner come in, then?'

‘Someone must have asked him for a post mortem.'

‘Not you?'

‘Not me,' said George Wansdyke. ‘And I'm her sole executor.'

‘Briony wouldn't have done, surely?'

‘No, not without telling me. Anyway, she's a nurse and she was sure that Beatrice had died of her diabetes.'

‘I know. She said so straightaway yesterday. So why all the fuss if they know already?'

‘You don't seem to have got the point yet,' said George tightly. ‘It isn't the medical people being in academic doubt about the cause of death and wanting to find out so that everything's neat and tidy.'

‘No?'

‘No,' said George. ‘Otherwise they'd have asked our permission for a post mortem.'

‘Oh.'

‘Someone's got the coroner to order one, which is a different kettle of fish altogether!'

‘Who would do that?'

‘I don't know,' said George Wansdyke, ‘but I'm certainly going to find out.'

‘Wait a minute,' said Pauline.

‘I know what you're going to say.'

‘Nicholas?'

‘I wouldn't put it past him,' said George Wansdyke.

‘I wouldn't put anything past him,' said Pauline spitefully. ‘Anything at all.'

‘No,' said George.

‘Nicholas Petforth,' said Pauline, rolling the words round her tongue.

‘Another name for trouble,' he said ironically.

‘No sense of family at all,' said Mrs Wansdyke, who had been a Miss Hartley-Powell before her marriage and never forgot it.

‘He's not going to be buried in the family grave when his time comes,' said George vigorously. ‘Not if I have any say in the matter.'

‘Oh,' said Mrs Wansdyke, whose attention span was not a long one, ‘that reminds me. Morton's rang to say that they were arranging to open the grave up as planned on Friday.'

‘Good,' said George absently. ‘We'll see about bringing the stone up to date afterwards.'

‘I wonder if he'll come to the funeral on Saturday,' said Pauline.

‘Who?'

‘Nicholas, of course. He always said he was fond of his aunt.'

‘Actions speak louder than words,' said George Wansdyke. ‘We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?'

‘He'll come,' forecast Pauline Wansdyke with conviction. ‘For sure. You see if he doesn't.'

‘If he's still got a suit to his back …'

CHAPTER III

Although the devil didn't show his face

I'm pretty sure he was about the place.

The funeral of Beatrice Wansdyke was the last thing on the mind of Detective-Inspector Sloan as he followed the pathologist through the mortuary doors into the dissecting room proper. In police measurement terms next Saturday and a funeral was a very long way away from this Tuesday and a post mortem. A week was a long time in other things besides politics.

Dr Dabbe was soon struggling into gown and rubber apron. He was helped in this exercise by his assistant, a perennially silent man called Burns.

‘There's one thing, Sloan,' said the pathologist, busily rolling up his sleeves.

‘Yes?'

‘The dibs don't show here, do they?'

‘No, Doctor.' Sloan was the first to agree with that. Nothing of this world's goods showed in the post mortem room.

The pathologist, gowned now, moved over towards the dissecting table and ran his eyes over the body. ‘No external signs of violence immediately visible,' he murmured. ‘I haven't missed any gunshot wounds, have I, Burns?'

‘No, Doctor,' said the assistant, adding deadpan, ‘Not yet.'

This was evidently a private joke between master and man.

‘Nor a stab in the back?'

‘The back has not been stabbed,' said Burns.

‘That leaves the field clear to begin, then,' said Dabbe easily. He reached up and adjusted a small microphone hanging a little way above the post mortem table. ‘Are you there, Rita? We're ready now.'

The voice of the pathologist's secretary came back to them through some unobtrusive intercom. ‘I'm here, Doctor. Carry on.'