A Going Concern Read online

  ‘Probably nothing to it, of course,’ said Superintendent Leeyes largely, ‘but we can’t afford to take chances these days. Things aren’t what they used to be.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Sloan was on safe ground in agreeing to that. He was head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of the Berebury Division of the county of Calleshire and all reports of such crime as there was there found their way on to his desk. ‘Nothing to what, sir?’

  ‘To this very odd invitation to a funeral that I’ve been trying to tell you about,’ replied the superintendent unfairly. ‘Some old lady’s been and gone and left word with her solicitor that when she died the police were to be invited to her funeral.’

  ‘Why?’ enquired Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘She didn’t say why.’

  ‘Sorry, sir. I meant why me in particular,’ responded the detective inspector carefully. ‘Do we actually know if crime is involved in any way?’

  ‘We don’t know anything, Sloan,’ rejoined Leeyes testily. ‘Yet, that is. We’ve only just heard from her solicitor. What I’m saying is that you’ll have to go along to Puckle, Puckle, and Nunnery’s yourself and find out if they know anything more.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He had, after all, had even odder assignments in his time.

  ‘And, if they do know anything more,’ he added heavily, ‘whether they’re prepared to tell you, which isn’t the same thing by a long chalk.’

  ‘No, sir. Very good.’ Sloan reached for his notebook. ‘Today week, I think you said the funeral was. In the afternoon.’

  ‘Half past two,’ the superintendent said. ‘You can take Constable Crosby with you,’ he went on, immediately spoiling any suspicion of magnanimity by adding, ‘at least that’ll get him off our backs for the afternoon.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Sloan rigidly. Detective Constable William Edward Crosby was the youngest and most jejune member of the Force in the whole of ‘F’ Division and usually an incubus in any police operation which did not involve driving fast cars fast.

  ‘And there’s one good thing about going to a funeral,’ rumbled on Leeyes, ‘that’ll be a help to you both in the circumstances.’

  Sloan looked up. ‘Sir?’

  ‘It isn’t like a wedding where the ushers ask you whose side you’re on the minute you walk in through the church door.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Crumbs of professional comfort cropped up in the strangest of places.

  ‘Now that can be tricky,’ said the superintenent, veteran of many a family reunion. ‘At least at a funeral you can sit wherever you like in the church.’

  It was something that Detective Inspector Sloan had not considered before.

  ‘But if I were you, Sloan …’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I’d sit right at the back and keep my eyes skinned.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ In the interests of his own Criminal Investigation Department, Sloan tried another tack with the superintendent. ‘Has … I mean, sir, is it known if … er …, anything had occurred to the deceased that should … um … specifically call for our presence?’

  ‘Not as far as we know to date.’ The superintendent tossed a flimsy message-sheet in Sloan’s direction. ‘That’s all the paperwork that’s reached us so far.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said expressionlessly, picking it up.

  ‘Next Friday afternoon, then, Sloan, at St Hilary’s church, Great Primer … let me have your report in due course.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The detective inspector paused while he folded the paper away and then said: ‘Was she by any chance ever on the Bench, this old lady?’ In theory, all lay magistrates were totally detached from all policemen but it wasn’t a perfect world and inevitably relationships were formed over the years of working together in the same courts. This was something that those acting for the defendants did not like at all.

  ‘No, Sloan, she wasn’t,’ responded Leeyes smartly. ‘I’ve just had that checked out myself with the magistrates’ clerk.’

  ‘It was just a thought, sir.’

  ‘She might well have been, though,’ conceded the superintendent, whose mind was following a train of reasoning that would doubtless have upset the Lord Chancellor’s Department as well as nearly every defence counsel in the land. ‘The Assistant Chief Constable tells me that Mrs Garamond was a bit of a nob in her own right – what the wine people call Edelfäule.’

  ‘Pardon, sir?’ This last must have come straight from the superintendent’s Wine Appreciation classes: he was a great one for attending Adult Education evening courses on all manner of subjects – the more recondite the better.

  ‘Noble rot, Sloan. Noble rot.’

  ‘Ah.’

  What the assistant chief constable – that most well connected of men – had actually said was that the late Mrs Octavia Garamond was one of the few surviving members of the old school, coming as she did from the ancient Scottish family of Harquil-Grasset. That was before he had quoted something melancholy of G. K. Chesterton’s about the last sad squires who ride slowly down to the sea; but Superintendent Leeyes had grasped the essentials.

  ‘He said something else, too, Sloan.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘That it was an interesting old church out there at Great Primer …’

  ‘Really, sir?’ said Sloan politely.

  ‘From a police procedural point of view, that is.’

  ‘How come, sir?’

  ‘You may well ask,’ grumbled Leeyes, who didn’t hold with having toffee-nosed assistant chief constables in the Force anyway.

  ‘Stolen chalices?’ advanced Sloan. The aristocratic assistant chief constable wouldn’t have found wayward clergymen interesting, that was for sure.

  ‘Something historical,’ sniffed Leeyes, spiritual brother of the late Henry Ford.

  ‘Sir?’ Perhaps, then, thought Sloan, in days gone by the luckless incumbent out there at Great Primer had been sent to gaol for offences against the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874: heinous activities like lighting candles where lighted candles there should not be. Their lecturer at the Police Training College had insisted to a disbelieving class of young policeman that ritualism had always been good for a real parochial dust-up …

  ‘Some marks on the south wall,’ said Superintendent Leeyes sourly. The assistant chief constable might have been an antiquarian: the superintendent was not.

  ‘Really, sir?’

  ‘Reputed,’ snorted Leeyes, ‘to be a thirteenth-century mark designating the boundary of the ancient parish Watch and Ward of Great Primer for the village constable.’

  ‘I’ll look out for it, sir,’ promised Detective Inspector Sloan solemnly, adding in the same tone, ‘Do we happen, by any chance, to know the cause of Mrs Garamond’s death?’

  ‘Ha!’ exclaimed Leeyes. ‘We know what her doctor put on the death certificate, Sloan, which may or may not be the same thing at all.’

  ‘Point taken, sir.’ To say that the superintendent accorded the senior of the healing professions any reverence would have been an over-statement: he was a medical heretic of deep conviction and long standing. ‘What did the doctor put, then?’

  ‘Left ventricular failure,’ said the superintendent. ‘It’s there on that paper I gave you just now.’

  ‘Usually a natural cause,’ observed Detective Inspector Sloan drily.

  ‘And senile myocardial degeneration.’

  ‘So she was old …’ murmured Sloan, half-aloud.

  ‘Age is relative,’ declared Leeyes, a man within sight of his own retirement. He paused and then said: ‘There is, though, just one odd thing about the death certificate – or, rather, about the circumstances in which the registered general medical practitioner signed it …’

  ‘Sir?’ Detective Inspector Sloan was immediately all ears, his attention wholly engaged now.

  ‘The deceased had particularly asked her doctor to make a complete examination of her body after she had died. Made quite a point of it, Dr Aldus said.’
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  ‘In fact, gentlemen,’ Dr John Aldus repeated to Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby, when they were both sitting in his consulting rooms later that afternoon, ‘in this matter I may tell you Mrs Octavia Garamond had been specific to the point of bluntness.’

  There were noises off in the background; somewhere a baby was crying and nearer at hand a telephone ringing. Nevertheless Detective Inspector Sloan leaned forward and invited the general practitioner to tell him exactly how it had been.

  ‘What she said to me on one of my last visits to her,’ recounted John Aldus, ‘was: “You’ll examine me properly, doctor, won’t you, when I’ve died?”’

  ‘I’ll make quite sure you’re dead,’ John Aldus had promised, wondering if Mrs Garamond was going to ask him to open one of her veins to make death absolutely sure. A lot of his elderly patients had a morbid – and quite unjustified – fear of being buried alive.

  ‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ the old lady had said severely. ‘Dammit, man, if you can’t recognize death by this time then you’ve no business to be on your sort of income.’

  He had said: ‘Then what do you mean?’ taking her frankness in good part. Like most medical practitioners he spent a lot of his time trying to interpret the oblique remarks made to him by his patients and like all medical practitioners he had learnt to deal – and deal well – in euphemism. Old Mrs Garamond’s bluntness made a refreshing change.

  ‘What I mean,’ she had said straightly, ‘is that I want you to examine my corpse. Is that clear enough for you?’

  Dr Aldus had been torn between being professionally soothing and naturally intrigued. ‘Of course I will,’ he said gently, ‘if you want me to.’

  ‘I do. And properly, mind you. None of this just pulling back the sheet for a quick look.’

  ‘Tell me why …’

  The old lady had given a high cackle and said: ‘Queen Victoria’s doctor thought he knew his patient.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘It wasn’t until she died that he discovered that she had had a ventral hernia.’

  ‘You haven’t got a ventral hernia.’

  Mrs Octavia Garamond had given him an enigmatic smile which had stuck in his mind ever since. ‘I know that.’

  ‘Then why,’ he had asked, ‘are you so anxious that I examine you after death?’

  She had refused to be drawn. ‘Put it down, doctor, if you like,’ she said wheezily, ‘to honouring an old woman’s last request.’

  ‘Very well.’ John Aldus would have humoured her anyway, but, genuinely concerned now, he had asked: ‘Is there anything worrying you, m’dear?’

  Her answer had been totally unexpected.

  ‘Hell, doctor, hell …’ She coughed.

  It had been a peffing cough, a heart cough, not a chesty one.

  ‘There may be no such place –’ he had begun: but by then Octavia Garamond had not been really listening to him.

  ‘You remember what Ariel said, doctor, in The Tempest …’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here …”,’ she had quoted rather breathlessly.

  ‘“Hell is empty”,’ he repeated after her.

  ‘Shakespeare knew.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ The doctor was with her there. ‘William Shakespeare knew all right, especially after his son, Hamnet, died.’

  ‘“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here”,’ she said again, closing her eyes and losing interest in the rest of the consultation.

  THREE

  Bury him, comrades, in pitiful duty.

  Now, somewhere in the background of the doctor’s surgery, the telephone began to ring again. The baby had stopped crying, but there were other noises off. Dr Aldus looked intently across at the two policemen sitting in his consulting room and continued his narrative.

  ‘I arranged for Mrs Garamond to have an oxygen cylinder by her bedside to help her breathlessness but that was all I could get out of her, gentlemen, except …’

  ‘Yes?’ said Sloan attentively.

  ‘… Except that she did say to me on my next visit to her that she thought that her soul was going to be required of her one night quite soon.’

  Sloan looked up.

  The doctor went on: ‘I remember she quoted some fearsome old ballad to me about coming to Purgatory’s fire at last.’ He frowned. ‘I think she said it was from “The Lyke-Wake Dirge”.’ He shook his head. ‘There was no comforting her.’

  ‘And was it?’ Detective Constable Crosby leant forward with what seemed like genuine interest. ‘Her soul required of her soon, I mean?’

  ‘Within the week,’ replied the doctor tersely.

  Detective Inspector Sloan cleared his throat and asked if the doctor had prescribed anything specifically for his patient’s fear of hell-fire.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no nostrum in the British Pharmacopoeia which’ll treat that, Inspector. At least,’ he added drily, ‘not quite so late in the day as this.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sloan smoothly. There had been a couplet that had stuck in his mind since his schooldays which offered quite the opposite view:

  Twixt the stirrup and the ground

  Mercy I ask’d, and mercy found.

  But he forbore to quote it. The sentiment was for incurable romantics, not for unimaginative general practitioners; or even, come to that, for hard-bitten detective inspectors.

  The baby started to cry again.

  ‘Only a quietus,’ Dr Aldus was still continuing his own line of thought, ‘and I can assure you that I didn’t give her one of those.’

  ‘Quite …’ murmured Sloan, making a note to check, all the same.

  ‘I’m only a country doctor,’ rumbled on John Aldus, ‘not a priest.’

  ‘Confession is good for the soul,’ remarked Crosby chattily.

  Aldus turned to the constable and said: ‘So it may be, but doctors don’t deal in absolution – not if they’ve got any sense, that is.’ He frowned. ‘Besides …’

  ‘Yes?’ prompted Sloan.

  ‘Mrs Garamond was on quite enough medication as it was anyway. Quite enough.’

  ‘For her heart?’ said Sloan: it wasn’t for her fear of hell, then.

  ‘For her heart,’ said the doctor flatly. ‘There’s no treatment for growing old yet, Inspector, although people have been looking for the elixir of youth long enough.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Sloan, who was only nearly old enough to be interested in the subject.

  ‘Ageing is a process, not a disease,’ Aldus went on, ‘although I dare say a treatment for even that will come along one of these fine days.’ He grimaced. ‘But not in my time, I hope.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan had another, quite different, question for the medical man. ‘This last request of the deceased, doctor, did you carry it out?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Inspector, I did – even though it isn’t usual when there isn’t going to be a cremation.’

  ‘Why?’

  Aldus hesitated. ‘Because she asked me to, I suppose; because I was curious perhaps; because …’

  ‘Because she was there?’ suggested Detective Constable Crosby unexpectedly. ‘Like Everest?’

  ‘That, too, I suppose.’ If Aldus was surprised by the simile, he did not let it show. ‘But, like us all, principally in case I’d missed something.’

  ‘And had you?’ enquired the detective constable insouciantly, while Sloan listened carefully. The fear of having missed something important was one thing which all true detectives shared with the medical profession: and the agony of finding this out too late was common to both callings.

  ‘Not that I could see,’ said John Aldus. ‘All that I found when I examined her was the body of an anile woman, wasted as I would have expected in one so old, a little oedematous still in spite of diuretics – you don’t see anasarca much these days – and very slightly cyanosed.’

  Sloan leant forward. ‘Tell me, doctor, what might there ha
ve been?’

  The general practitioner looked slightly abashed. ‘I must confess, Inspector, that it did just cross my mind – I know it sounds silly – that I might just find something that Mrs Garamond hadn’t wanted me to know about in life.’

  ‘Like Queen Victoria?’ asked Crosby intelligently.

  Aldus nodded slowly. ‘In a way.’

  ‘Like what exactly?’ persisted Sloan.

  ‘It had occurred to me,’ said the doctor somewhat defensively, ‘that I might just conceivably find something ineradicable on her skin …’

  ‘Like a tattoo?’ said Sloan.

  The baby which had been crying in the background suddenly stopped. Into the silence the doctor said quietly: ‘Like a concentration-camp number.’

  Sloan jerked his head. ‘The Mark of Cain.’

  ‘It wasn’t too far-fetched a thought, Inspector,’ said Aldus. ‘I remember being told by someone – not by Mrs Garamond, though – that she’d done something unusual by way of war-work, although I never knew quite what.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan, who knew that even now there were still closed books in some offices of state.

  ‘She’d been married to a very distinguished scientist, too, and she’d been an educated woman herself,’ said Aldus. ‘I did know that – besides you only had to talk to her … For all I knew, Inspector, she might have been caught abroad when the war began. Or gone there after it had started.’

  ‘But you didn’t find anything like that, did you, doctor?’ persisted Sloan.

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Just, like Christian, old scars to bear with her into the next world. Big enough ones, mind you. Appendix and gall-bladder, I should have said at a guess. Surgeons weren’t so tidy with their incisions in the old days. No key-hole surgery then.’

  ‘Any bruises?’ asked Detective Inspector Sloan prosaically, even though he, too, knew his Pilgrim’s Progress.

  ‘No.’ Dr John Aldus hunched his shoulders forward. ‘And I didn’t find anything in her mouth either when I examined that.’