Chapter and Hearse Page 14

  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.’

  ‘Lady Alice…’

  ‘She,’ said the matron faintly, ‘was the only person in the whole establishment not taken ill and spent her time wandering around, seeing how people were.’

  ‘And she, I take it, was the only person not to have partaken of whatever it was that caused the food poisoning?’ deduced Sloan, since not even noblesse oblige protected one against tainted food.

  ‘Casseroled beef,’ said the Matron with a certain melancholy. ‘Dr Browne’ll be here as soon as he’s heard from the laboratory to explain to us exactly what was wrong with it. It was the only thing that everyone who was ill had eaten and everyone who had eaten it was ill.’

  ‘But Mr Lean had it too,’ said Crosby.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the Matron wearily, ‘Mr Lean had the beef casserole.’

  ‘He had his chips too,’ said Crosby almost – but not quite – sotto voce.

  The Matron, who still looked a trifle frayed at the edges, had too many other things on her mind to object to unseemly levity. ‘By the time Dr Browne got back here, Mr Lean was having trembling convulsions and he died very soon after that.’

  ‘We’ll be talking to Dr Browne,’ said Sloan, ‘as soon as he arrives.’

  ‘How long would the old boy have lasted otherwise?’ enquired Crosby irrepressibly.

  ‘Dr Browne wasn’t sure and he didn’t want to commit himself anyway. Not even when the family talked to him…’

  ‘I was going to ask about them,’ went on Sloan smoothly.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Alan Lean – he’s the son – had the chance of a few days’ holiday in France.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I said to go if they wanted to. It wasn’t as if there was anything more that anyone could do for his father and both he and his wife had been most attentive since Mr Lean had been here.’

  Sloan made another note.

  ‘We – that is, I – said they would have nothing to blame themselves for if he died while they were away. Obviously,’ the Matron expanded on what was clearly a well-worn theme, ‘it is – er – more satisfactory if the family can take their farewells here, but –’ She paused for breath. Unwisely, as it turned out.

  ‘All part of the service?’ suggested Crosby, filling the conversational gap.

  ‘But,’ she rallied, ‘I told them that if he were to die while they were away, we could always cope – do what was necessary and…’

  ‘And put things on ice,’ contributed Crosby helpfully.

  ‘After all,’ she said firmly, ‘as Dr Browne has been kind enough to say more than once, some of our patients – like Lady Alice, for instance – come here and forget to die.’

  ‘Except Thomas Lean,’ remarked Crosby inevitably.

  ‘We’d like to see Lady Alice,’ said Sloan. What he would also like to do was to deal with Crosby. But not here and not now. Later, in the privacy of the police station.

  * * *

  Lady Alice might have forgotten to die; she hadn’t forgotten Thursday’s excitements. It seemed that people vomiting all over the place had brought back the dear old days during the war when she had served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Until stemmed, she was inclined to reminiscence about the Bay of Biscay in winter in wartime.

  ‘But you were all right,’ said Sloan, getting a word in edgeways. ‘Yesterday, I mean.’ She had probably, he decided, been all right in the Bay of Biscay on a troopship too, submarines or no.

  ‘Never have liked onions,’ she cackled. ‘They don’t agree with me. So I don’t eat ’em.’

  ‘Very sensible,’ said Sloan.

  ‘They do me an omelette when there’s onions about,’ said the old lady.

  ‘And I understand you saw Mr Thomas Lean…’

  ‘He was like to die,’ said Lady Alice.

  ‘Like to die?’ echoed Sloan.

  ‘What they used to put first when they wrote their wills in the old days. They’d begin with “Like to die” and then you’d know they were making it on their deathbed.’ She looked at him and said sadly, ‘That’s the worst of having ancestors … there’s nothing new.’

  ‘But Thomas Lean ate some of the casserole?’ said the Detective Inspector, struggling back to the point.

  ‘As to that,’ responded Lady Alice, ‘I couldn’t say.’

  ‘He was taken ill…’

  ‘Oh, yes. But he hadn’t been sick.’ She looked at Sloan suspiciously. ‘Did you say you were both policemen?’

  ‘That’s right, your ladyship.’

  ‘St Michael types in disguise…’

  ‘Not really.’ It was Sloan’s mother who was the churchgoer of the family; he didn’t know the connection. ‘At least, I don’t think so.’

  ‘He saved three people from wrongful execution,’ said Lady Alice. ‘We had a painting at home of him doing it. Never liked it. It went for death duties.’

  ‘I don’t think that in this case there will be an execution.’

  ‘Pity.’ Lady Alice looked Crosby up and down. ‘Did you know that one of my ancestors who was the Bishop of Calleford used to hang people in the days when he had temporal powers as well as spiritual ones?’

  Sloan thought it was safe to say that things weren’t what they used to be, while Crosby hastened to tell her that he’d always gone to Sunday School when a lad.

  ‘You were very lucky to escape the outbreak, Lady Alice,’ said Sloan, adding persuasively, ‘Tell me, did you notice anything out of the ordinary yesterday?’

  ‘Only in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘I went down there for more water jugs. Dash of salt and plenty of cold water’s what you need when—’

  ‘What was out of the ordinary?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘They weren’t shallots,’ she said.

  ‘
What weren’t?’

  ‘I may not like ’em,’ she said enigmatically, giving a high laugh, ‘but I know my alliaceous vegetables, all right.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ he said pacifically. ‘So?’

  ‘They were daffodil bulbs not onions. That dim girl who does the vegetables still had some on the sideboard. Saw ’em myself.’

  Dr Angus Browne said the same thing but more scientifically twenty minutes later. ‘The lab found the alkaloids narcissine – otherwise known as lycorine – and galantamine and scillotoxin – that’s one of the glycoside scillamines – in the vomit and in the remains of the casserole.’

  ‘And we found some Narcissus pseudonarcissus bulbs in the kitchen,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, not to be outdone in the matter of a ‘little Latin and less Greek’.

  ‘Easily enough mistaken, I suppose,’ grunted the doctor, who was neither a gardener nor a cook.

  ‘Animals seem to know the difference,’ said Crosby, adding brightly, ‘If they couldn’t tell them apart, then they’d be dead, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Just so.’ The doctor looked at the constable and said, ‘Anyway, the lab people have sent a copy of their findings over to Dabbe at the mortuary.’

  ‘We’ve been on to the Environmental Health people and they tell us they’ve taken the wholesale greengrocers apart without finding anything wrong,’ said Sloan, ‘but we’re going over there all the same.’

  ‘They say they haven’t found anything but onions in their onion sacks so far,’ chimed in Crosby. ‘They come in those string-bag affairs so you can see what you’re getting.’

  ‘There’s one thing that’s bothering me, doctor,’ said Sloan. ‘What I want to know is, if everyone else who had that casserole was promptly sick, why wasn’t the deceased sick as well?’

  ‘Easy,’ the doctor said. ‘He was on a whole raft of powerful anti-emetic tablets to stop him being sick. Vomiting is an established side effect of all his medication. He wasn’t sick because he was on them and because he wasn’t sick, he didn’t get rid of the toxic substances as everyone else did.’

  ‘It’s a bit like a selective weedkiller, isn’t it?’ offered Crosby cheerfully.

  Sloan stared at Crosby, struck by a new thought. ‘I must say, Doctor, I find all that very interesting. Very interesting indeed. But not as interesting as something my constable has just said. Crosby, let us now go the way of all flesh…’

  ‘Sir?’ The constable looked quite alarmed.

  ‘To the kitchen.’

  * * *

  The vegetable cook, her colour still not quite returned to normal, did her best to be helpful. Her job was to take what was needed from the cold store outside, weigh up what was needed for the day, and wash and prepare it ready for the cook, who came in later.

  And if she had done anything wrong yesterday she would like to know what it was, if they didn’t mind, and they might like to know that they’d been asking her to come and work at the Red Lion Hotel if she ever felt like leaving the nursing home. Very friendly, they were, at the Red Lion. Not like some places she could mention.

  ‘I’m sure they are,’ said Sloan pleasantly. ‘Now, will you just show us over the cold store again. There was something I forgot to look at before. The lock…’

  * * *

  ‘A warrant?’ echoed Leeyes back at the police station. ‘Who for?’

  ‘The son of the deceased,’ said Sloan. ‘On a charge of murder. Cleverest job I’ve come across in many a long day. Make everybody ill but just kill the one person who won’t be sick when he’s poisoned. All the son had to do was substitute the daffodil bulbs for the shallots in the cold store – you can see where he worked on the lock – and go away. I thought it was strange that he and his wife went abroad for the old boy’s birthday.’

  ‘What was so important about that? Couldn’t it have waited?’

  ‘Not if his father had written his pension funds in trust for him,’ said Sloan. ‘Thomas Lean would have had to die before he was seventy-five or take the pension himself. He left it as late as he dared because his father was so ill anyway.’

  ‘I think,’ said the Superintendent loftily, ‘that I shall tell the Coroner that some new evidence came to light.’

  Dead Letters

  Sixteenth-century Scotland

  The Sheriff of Fearnshire was definitely feeling his age. He was quite convinced too that winters were colder and lasting longer than they used to. And equally sure that summers were getting shorter and shorter every year. That Sheriff Rhuaraidh Macmillan’s joints were a good deal stiffer than they had been when he was a young man was beyond doubt. There was, however, nothing at all wrong with his brain – even when he had just, as now, been abruptly awakened from a fitful doze in his chair.

  This was why he was immediately alert when the youngest and smallest maid in his establishment suddenly staggered into his room heavily burdened with a pile of peats for the fire. For one thing, the fire was burning well and patently had no need at all of more peats until it was time to bank it up for the night. Another incongruity he noted was that it was not usually a maidservant who brought them into his sitting room, and certainly never this little one. Working at the peat hags and hauling their fuel about afterwards were considered to be man’s work even though the peats did get lighter as they dried out.

  The girl set the peats down by the fireside and came straight across to his side, standing close to his chair.

  ‘There’s a wee mannie that’s after wanting to talk to you, sir,’ she began timidly, sketching a token curtsy in his direction.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Please, sir –’ the curtsy was deeper this time – ‘I’m Elspeth from the kitchen.’ That she was not familiar with the room was evident from the way in which she stared round at it.

  ‘I didn’t hear the pipes,’ the Sheriff said. The house at Drummondreach had a hall-boy whose sole duty it was to herald equally the approach of friend and stranger with a fanfare of welcome on his uillean pipes. And set the bagpipes to sound the tocsin of warning too, should a known foe be sighted in the distance.

  ‘Please, sir, the wee mannie wasn’t at the door…’ The girl was no height at all herself but she had a bright look. ‘And I didn’t see anyone coming up the brae either…’

  One of the many things that being Sheriff of Fearnshire had taught Rhuaraidh Macmillan over the years was that a man could not be too careful to whom – and of whom – he spoke. Unknown men at his door very much came into this category: they could spell danger.

  ‘He dinna’ come by the high road, sir,’ she said.

  ‘So?’ he barked crisply.

  ‘Please, sir, he came out of the wood at the back.’

  ‘Ah…’ The Forest of Ard Meanach came right up to the very edge of the Drummondreach policies. A man could come out of the trees there without being observed from afar.

  ‘I saw him in the steading when I was after getting the eggs from the nests.’

  ‘You did, did you?’ mused the Sheriff, thinking quickly. Back-door visitors could be very dangerous. It wasn’t so much who came out of the wood that was a worry these days as what was liable to crawl out of the woodwork afterwards. And there was no knowing in the Scotland of today what exactly that might be – or where it might lead. He sighed and started to climb stiffly out of his chair. ‘Well, then, Elspeth, you had better send my clerk to me at once and then go and bring the man in here.’

  ‘He’d no’ come in,’ responded the girl. ‘He said to say to you that he couldn’a.’

  ‘He couldn’a?’

  ‘And that he wouldn’a anyway, even if he could.’

  The Sheriff, on his feet now, looked down at her. She was scarcely more than a child. But a bright child, for all that. ‘Why not?’

  ‘He says he needs must talk to the Sheriff privately.’

  Rhuaraidh Macmillan frowned and said, ‘I see.’ These were difficult times in Scotland and a man in a position of authority such as the
Sheriff of Fearnshire had to be careful, very careful. Actually, all men in Scotland now had to be very careful; and some women too, even more so. There was one woman in particular who should have been more so. A royal one, not noted for her wisdom …

  ‘He’s still outside,’ she said, pointing over her shoulder in the direction of the wood behind the house. ‘He called out to me on my way across the steading, but aye softly … and only after he’d seen I was alone.’

  Sheriff Macmillan shot her a keen glance. ‘And where exactly is he now?’

  ‘In the little bothy behind the steading, sir.’

  ‘Alone?’ Men had been known to have been ambushed before now by messages such as these. Good men and true …

  ‘Yes, sir.’ She curtsied again. ‘There’s just himself.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Please, sir, I looked specially when I went back to get the peats for the fire.’

  ‘And did you ask him who he was?’ If there was ever to be ‘a chiel among them, taking notes’ it had better not be this sharp-witted youngster or they would all be doomed.

  ‘Yes, sir, but he wouldn’t be after telling me his name.’

  ‘Ah…’ The Sheriff of Fearnshire was not totally surprised at this; only that whoever it was who wanted such secrecy had risked coming to Drummondreach in daylight in the first place. The burden of his spiel must be important, that was for sure. And urgent too.

  ‘And he had his face hidden by his plaid,’ she said, as if she had read his mind. ‘But –’ she gave him a mischievous sideways glance – ‘I ken’t well enough who it was anyway.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he commanded her.

  ‘It’s Murdo Macrae from Balblair, sir.’

  ‘And how did you know that?’ Sheriff Macmillan knew Murdo Macrae all right. Murdo had always been a sound man, in favour of the rule of law and order even in distinctly shaky times: unhappy times, such as they were in just now, when no man knew who was his friend and who was his foe; and, more worryingly, knew who was a government spy – or, even worse, a double agent – whose aims and objects were not the administration of justice but the furtherance of the power of his political masters. He knew without being told that if Murdo Macrae had something to say then that something would be important, more important still if he deemed it to be a clandestine matter.