The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (11 page)

" … that I'm grateful to you for coming."

She was drinking her coffee but over the brim of the mug her eyes were grave as they appraised him. "I should be going," she announced as she placed the empty mug on the table. "I must ring for a taxi."

Yet now she had come, for whatever reason, he didn't want her to go. He had found that he didn't need to hide from all the memories, that some of them were good ones and worth holding. The ones about Helena, for a start.

"What about dinner?" he asked. "We could go into Melbury. There are some good restaurants there and it's only four miles away."

She was looking at her watch. "It'll take me three hours to get back," she said doubtfully.

"You could stay here … " And then because he didn't want to scare her he added, "There's a spare room made up."

But whether it was the relative meanness of the accommodation, or whether it was something else entirely, she was shaking her head. He had only one more weapon to use.

"We could talk about this job you want me to do."

*

He took her to the Chequers, a seventeenth-century inn that was all oak beams, walls that were out of true, and unexpected steps and low doorways. It had enough charm and period atmosphere to satisfy the most demanding tourist, as well as a small bistro in the conservatory at the back that Eisenmenger had discovered was really quite passable.

They sat at a small table next to an ancient, woodworm-riven pillar and he ate a Thai chicken dish while Helena satisfied herself with braised quail. The lighting was subdued, of course but he didn't mind. He had forgotten how enchanting she could look and how enchanted he could be. Although their relationship had never got beyond work, his regret only fuelled his romanticism as he covertly watched her every move.

After the meal they moved from their table to a small lounge for coffee having declined a sweet. They sat in overstuffed armchairs that had cigarette burns in the fabric, and the low table before them was ringed with stains. "So what is it that you want me to do? Another right to wrong?" He had feared that his desire to see her stay had overstretched him, that when it came to pay the price for seeing more of her he would suddenly remember his malaise. Yet he found real curiosity within himself.

Helena leaned towards him confidentially, her perfume suddenly his. Her eyes held the light of the wall lamp behind him.

"It may be nothing, but about a week ago I was contacted by a man called Sweet. Raymond Sweet."

The coffee came. Then, "He had recently lost his daughter, Millicent, to cancer."

"How old was she?"

"Twenty-three."

"And what kind of cancer?"

"Lymphoma."

He nodded. That was reasonable. "So what did he want with a solicitor?"

"He had a complaint against the hospital; it seems that there was a mix-up over bodies and she was cremated in the place of someone else."

"And I take it he didn't want her cremated?"

"He didn't want her interred at all."

He had just taken a sip of coffee and he pulled the cup away from his mouth before murmuring, "Ah." Then he frowned. "Why not?"

"He didn't believe the autopsy report. He said that she had been killed."

He looked at her and she gazed back and he would have enjoyed matters a whole lot more if he hadn't been trying to cope with his incomprehension. "But clearly she wasn't," he pointed out.

"He insists otherwise. He's adamant."

"Is he mad?"

She sought the appropriate words. "No, he's not mad. Driven, I suppose, would be a better word to describe him."

"So who does he say killed her?"

"Pel-Ebstein Pharmaceuticals."

It seemed to Eisenmenger that things were going from the ridiculous to the ludicrous. "PEP? You mean he's saying that she died from some sort of adverse reaction to one of their drugs?"

"Not exactly." She sipped her coffee, her lips hardly seeming to do more than brush the surface of the drink.
Lucky
coffee
. "Here."

She had by her side her handbag and from it she now produced a small hand-held dictation machine. She put it on the table between them and looked around as if afraid of being overheard. "I hope this isn't going to attract too much attention," she muttered, then she switched it on.

Intrigued Eisenmenger leaned forward to listen, but all he heard was a hissing, gurgling noise that he realized only after a short while was the sound of someone breathing. The sound quality was abysmal and it sounded as if it had been recorded in the rectum of a whale; then after a primordial age of strange, guttural, bubblings, " …
Help
… "

Eisenmenger was so surprised to hear anything intelligible that he glanced up at Helena. She was looking at him intently and he thought that he caught the start of tears in her eyes. The voice had been almost alien in its character, the word's meaning completely at odds with the peculiar, half-wheezed, half-gasped sound. It was as if a zombie had spoken.

There were a few more seconds of background before the voice came again. " …
Please
,
help
me
… " There was agony in those syllables; agony in the speaking and agony in just existing. It was a monster that was talking, a monster born of pain beyond Eisenmenger's power to imagine. Just listening to those words seemed to draw him into this thing's torment.

" …
Sue
? …
Sue
?"

The name brought humanity. Suddenly he could hear a real person and that only made it far, far worse. He thought that it could be no harder to bear, but then there was a whimper of even greater suffering, as if God had at that time briefly twisted the skewer in her eye. Then, " …
They
lied
,
Sue
…
It's
Proteus
…
It
must
be
Proteus
… "

And then there was a sigh and the breathing stopped and Eisenmenger felt peace and relief as he had never known them before.

He looked up into Helena's face and, seeing tears, felt like crying himself.

The pub's chatter went on around them; if anyone had overheard then they kept this to themselves.

*

On the way back to his house he tried to think, Helena beside him sunk into gloom as well as darkness. The night was clear but dark, with no moon or light pollution to hide the stars. Helena had barely touched her coffee again after listening to the tape; it had grown cold and covered with dark, fragmented skin as they had sat in the lounge and tried to soak up some comfort from their surroundings. It was as if the awful words and the pain-filled breathing had become a pall upon them. Even now he could still hear what had been said and the torment from which the words had been cast.

"Susan Warthin only discovered that message three days after she had found the body?" he asked at last.

"That's right. She'd had the flu. She only made the trip to Millicent Sweet's house because there was no answer when she telephoned. What with the effects of the bug and the shock of finding the body, she was laid up in bed for seventy-two hours."

"And we're sure that that is the voice of Millicent? It couldn't be a hoax?" Even as he asked this he was thinking,
Some
hoax
.

She shook her head. "According to the phone company that call came from Millicent's number. It came through at eight twenty-two on the morning of the fourth. Just after Susan had left to go looking for her."

Some idiot in a white Porsche overtook them at speed on a blind bend. The headlights were gone from sight within a few seconds. The road was always being used as a racetrack.

"So presumably Millicent must have heard the telephone when Susan tried to contact her but couldn't get to it before she rang off. In the time it took Millicent to get to the phone and dial her number, Susan had already left."

"That's the way I read it."

He considered this, then realized that he was about to miss the turning. He swung off the main road down the long, serpentine lane that led to the hamlet where he was living. Occasionally brave moths were caught in the car's lights. "I take it she wasn't expected to die from her lymphoma quite so suddenly."

Helena was staring straight ahead through the windscreen. She said only, "She wasn't expected to die at all. When she had gone to her GP ten days before, there was no sign she had anything other than flu."

Eisenmenger glanced briefly at her profile. They passed the duckpond on their left and the car braked outside the schoolhouse. "None at all?" he asked.

She shook her head. "The GP gave her a thorough examination, concluded it was just the flu and advised her to go home to bed with regular paracetamol."

They got out of the car and he unlocked the door. The house was cold and there was the slightest smell of damp in its air. He offered her a nightcap of brandy, which she accepted. As they sat with them in the small sitting room he tried to sort things out in his head.

"So she went from no tumour to death by tumour in ten days." He considered. "Well, it's possible. Certainly there are some haematopoietic tumours that can behave extremely aggressively — acute myeloid leukaemia may and I would guess that Burkitt's lymphoma could do it — but it's still odd."

"Why?"

"Because we have to postulate that the disease process was so rapid that it literally prevented her from contacting anyone about it — her friends, her doctors, even her neighbours. No cancer should do that."

Helena was huddled forwards on the fraying fabric of the sofa. Clearly she found it cold in the room. "I guessed as much," she said. "The ironic thing was that she was terrified of cancer, and yet here she is, dying from it quite suddenly. Presumably that was why she worked in the field."

Surprised, he said, "Did she?"

Elelena nodded. "At the Medical School. She was a cell biologist working with Professor Robin Turner in the Department of Cancer Genetics."

Why did that make him feel slightly perturbed? He couldn't dissect out the reason for the discomfort he now felt. The scar tissue on the palms of his hands began to itch again. Hands cupped around the glass of brandy, Helena asked suddenly, "Why do you have to have it so bloody cold in here? Can't you put some heat on?"

He feigned surprised, mumbled, "Is it cold? I didn't realize," then bent down before the gas fire to light it with the box of matches on the mantelshelf. He didn't bother to explain that he hated the warmth because the sweat made him aware of his scars.

When it was alight and gently hissing heat into the room he stood and she said, "That was where Pel-Ebstein come in. Before this job she worked for them."

Sitting down as far from the gas fire as he could, he asked, "How long did she work for PEP and how long ago?"

From a slim grey briefcase Helena produced a file. Consulting it she said, "She was with them eighteen months ago, having spent a year and three-quarters there."

"And how does her father reckon that they killed her?"

The warming of the room seemed to be working, for Helena's body was slightly less foetal. "He doesn't know. He's devastated and he's bewildered and he's angry. He can't put together a coherent explanation of why he's convinced that her death is connected to the work she did for PEP, but he's one hundred per cent sure that it is."

It sounded like an exaggerated grief reaction to Eisenmenger. Doctors were used to it; relatives, unable either to explain or to encompass the shock of losing someone close, were filled with rage, rage that was usually directed at the easiest target. Often it was the doctors but not infrequently someone or something else that was peripheral but conceivably involved.

Still, there were undoubtedly odd aspects to the case …

Helena said, "When the body was accidentally cremated, you can imagine how that seemed to him."

Feeding the paranoia; solidifying suspicion into delusional reality.

"How did that happen, precisely?"

"There's an internal hospital enquiry going on, but as far as I can determine, two bodies were mislabelled. The undertakers took what they thought was the body of Clara Fox, a road traffic accident victim. The cremation took place on Wednesday morning. It was only when Mr Sweet went to view Millicent on Wednesday afternoon that the error came to light."

Bodies in mortuaries were identified theoretically by at least two labels to prevent such cock-ups — one tied to a toe, the other to a wrist — but often that didn't happen and anyway when undertakers came to pick them up, no one had the time or the inclination to make a detailed examination of a cold, flesh-white corpse. Again it was an entirely feasible error that had been committed before, but Eisenmenger found himself wondering …

"I assume you have a copy of the PM report," he said with a faint smile.

Helena returned the smile as she produced some A4 sheets from her briefcase.

As he took the report he murmured, "This seems familiar," but in truth it seemed many more than twelve months since their first meeting at which she had last handed him an autopsy report. He began to read it.