Learning Curve Read online

  Abruptly now the attention of both Derek Tridgell’s wife and daughter was again caught by a voice coming from the bed. ‘Dammit, dammit, dammit,’ the dying man said loudly and clearly. ‘For God’s sake, dammit.’

  Jane ventured a wry grimace. ‘I must say that’s not like Dad. He can usually manage something a bit stronger than dammit.’

  ‘He’s not himself,’ said Marion unnecessarily.

  Her daughter managed a faint smile. ‘You can say that again, Mum.’

  The man in the bed suddenly became increasingly agitated, his voice taking on an urgent, pleading note. Now Derek Tridgell was staring, his eyes unfocused, into the distance. He said, ‘I’m coming, man. Wait for me. I’m on my way.’

  ‘It happens, Mrs Tridgell.’ The community nurse, older and more experienced than the care assistants, had been a frequent visitor to the bedroom, and had been reassuring about the patient’s continual talking. ‘You mustn’t let it worry you.’

  The deathbed had seemed ordinary enough to the visiting nurse, too, she having seen it all before, but she was old enough now to have begun to think about her own end. A single woman, she knew she wasn’t going to be surrounded by any genuinely grieving relatives at hers. The Tridgell family would have been very surprised to learn that in some ways she envied them. There would be no loving kindness evident at her solitary demise. Professional to the last, though, she had always done what she had come to do and then left, displacing all thoughts about herself as she did so by concentrating instead on her next visit.

  Derek lay quiet and apparently calm for so long after the carers had gone that day that Jane said, ‘What about a cup of tea, Mum?’

  ‘I’d love one, dear.’

  ‘And something to eat?’

  ‘I don’t think I could manage anything just now, thank you. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I’ll be back in a jiffy,’ she promised. When she came back with a pot of tea on a tray she said, ‘I cleared the answerphone while I was waiting for the kettle, Mum.’

  ‘Thank you, dear.’ Marion had only answered the telephone when it had been her son on the line, there being no one else to whom she had wanted to speak at this time.

  ‘Kate Booth sent good wishes from all the cavers, so did someone from the firm – I’ve forgotten who – Jonathon himself, I think it might have been but his voice wasn’t very clear – and Amelia Thornycroft sent her love and said she and Simon were thinking of us and if there was anything at all we wanted we were to say.’

  ‘That was nice of them,’ said her mother absently, not really listening.

  ‘And,’ here Jane’s voice quavered a little, ‘the man from Barnett’s said that lawnmower’s been serviced and is ready to be picked up.’ The lawns at Legate Lodge had been Derek Tridgell’s pride and joy, always carefully trimmed, but they were already showing signs of neglect. Jane was surprised to discover how much she minded about this.

  ‘Paul can see to cutting the grass when he gets back,’ said Marion absently.

  Suppressing her immediate response that chance would a fine thing, Paul having to her certain knowledge never having handled the lawnmower in his life, Jane set about pouring the tea. It was then that a change came over her father. He suddenly sat bolt upright in the bed and announced in a loud and clear voice, ‘He did it, you know.’

  ‘Did what, dear?’ asked Marion, investing her words with a great tenderness that she hoped would get through to her dying husband.

  ‘Killed him, of course,’ announced Derek Tridgell loudly, giving a shuddering gasp and then falling back on his pillows, quite dead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘It’s not exactly a great deal to go on, sir, is it?’ ventured Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘Something a dying man is said to have cried out at the moment of death.’

  ‘But whichever way you look at it, Sloan,’ pronounced Superintendent Leeyes grandly, ‘what the deceased did say just might be a genuine reference to a killing and therefore we can’t ignore it.’

  ‘No, sir. Of course not, sir.’

  ‘However much we might like to,’ added the superintendent more realistically. ‘Remember, a man’s last words are considered to be the truth.’

  The two policemen were at the headquarters of ‘F’ Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary. These were in the market town of Berebury where Detective Inspector Christopher Dennis Sloan, who was known as ‘Seedy’ to his family and friends, was head of the force’s tiny Criminal Investigation Department. Such crime as there was in the eastern half of the county – save on the highway – usually ended up on his desk.

  ‘I don’t think, sir, that we’ve got any unsolved murders on our patch,’ said Sloan, adding cautiously, ‘that is, of course, any ones that we actually know about.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any at all,’ countered Leeyes briskly. ‘There could be any number of accidents and suicides that weren’t what they were said to be.’

  ‘On the other hand, sir, even if we had some on the books, so to speak, and were able to solve one of them, the court couldn’t very well convict on the spoken evidence of the dead man since he can’t be cross-questioned. You can’t even libel the dead,’ he added irrelevantly, a little bit of common law coming back to him.

  ‘We could clear up a case, Sloan. That would be good,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘Naturally, sir,’ said Sloan smoothly, ignoring this volte-face on the part of the superintendent who usually had no time for criminal statistics.

  Or, come to that, the past.

  ‘It would go down well,’ mused Leeyes, his own track record always a matter of great importance to him. ‘Clearing up an old case, I mean. Quite the done thing these days, DNA being what it is.’

  ‘Quite so, sir,’ Sloan said, trying to recollect who it was in history whose body had been dug up in order to be hanged by revisionists, a later mob wanting its pound of flesh. Had it been the late Oliver Cromwell, dead of disease, who had been so treated for past misdemeanours reconsidered by history? He couldn’t remember. ‘That is, if the person who committed the crime is still alive and we are able to get a conviction without the testimony of the deceased, to say nothing of any DNA.’

  ‘Even so,’ agreed the superintendent after some little thought, ‘I don’t see how we could very well have a trial with a dead witness.’

  ‘Quite, sir,’ said Sloan, although he knew there were benighted regimes where this did happen. But then he knew, too, that once upon a time animals had been tried in this country for the murder of other animals: he reminded himself that therefore it didn’t do to be patronising of other nations – or of what had happened in the past either.

  ‘Even though we would know where to find the accuser,’ said the superintendent, heavily humorous. ‘He’ll be in the cemetery by then.’

  ‘Presumably there hasn’t been time for him to have been buried yet?’ said Sloan. He hoped that it was interment the family of the late Derek Tridgell were indeed planning. The superintendent didn’t like cremations, preferring the remains to be available to be seen both now and in the future should it ever become necessary.

  The superintendent shook his head. ‘No, not yet, Sloan, although apparently the doctor is quite prepared to issue a death certificate for the deceased since there is no doubt about the cause of his death – I’m told it was pancreatic cancer. I understand the family are awaiting the return of the deceased’s son from South America before they start to arrange the funeral.’

  ‘The only doubt, then, sir, seems to be about the death which the deceased declared at the point of his own demise that someone else, unnamed, had brought about,’ sighed Sloan, as he tried to encapsulate the problem as it affected the police and leaving aside the intriguing question of whether murderers could now be buried in consecrated ground. ‘I suppose the late Derek Tridgell didn’t by any chance say how this unknown someone had killed someone else equally unknown?’

  ‘No, all that the two women said he did talk abou
t was somebody called the remainderman. That word mean anything to you, Sloan?’

  ‘No, sir.’ He took a deep breath and, getting back to the matter in hand, pointed out carefully, ‘So, sir, all we can say for certain is that it was a very nearly dead man talking.’

  He had decided against discussing with his superior officer exactly what constituted a killing since all the legal eagles he knew were prepared to debate the definition ad infinitum. Besides which, in his experience, every motorist he had ever known who had been at the wheel in a fatal accident – and that was a killing if ever there was one – found it difficult to forget for the rest of their lives, and that was whether guilty or not, and whether convicted or not.

  ‘It’s what the man said that’s important, Sloan,’ the superintendent reminded him reproachfully, ‘and precisely when he said it.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan, making a mental note to look up the validity of deathbed confessions. He thought he remembered that that which was spoken in imminent expectation of death by the deceased came into a category all of its own in criminal law. He would have to think about this.

  The superintendent adjusted the message sheet on his desk in front of him and read it out aloud. ‘The man’s wife – his widow now, of course – and his daughter were both present in the room at the time and heard him quite clearly say someone had killed someone.’

  ‘But not who or how?’ asked Sloan hopefully, although two witnesses were always better than one, unless their testimony differed.

  Or, perhaps, even if it did.

  Perhaps especially, then.

  ‘I’m afraid not, Sloan. They say that he then fell back on the bed without speaking again and was confirmed as dead very soon after by their general practitioner.’

  ‘Is that all the evidence we have, sir? If I may say so, it doesn’t seem to amount to a great deal.’

  ‘And I’m afraid they said he’d been talking nonsense for quite a while before he died,’ said Leeyes, glancing down again at a message sheet on his desk.

  ‘So what we don’t know, I take it, sir,’ said Sloan, ‘is whether this statement was nonsense, too.’

  ‘Exactly, Sloan.’

  ‘Then I’d better try and find out what the patient had been prescribed in the way of medication first,’ said Sloan. No policeman needed to be reminded of what some drugs did to the human mind. ‘And get some witness statements.’

  ‘Witness statements, Sloan,’ barked the superintendent severely, ‘which I must remind you that we can’t ignore and mustn’t put on the back-burner.’

  ‘Of course not, sir,’ said Sloan virtuously. He wasn’t sure whether or not in this instance witness statements would come into the category of circumstantial evidence. It was too soon to say.

  ‘And, Sloan,’ went on the superintendent, ‘don’t forget that the two women’s accounts of what was said agree in every particular. So far,’ he added lugubriously.

  Sloan suppressed an automatic rejoinder that this could also mean collusion: or that mother and daughter might have had an agenda all of their own. Instead he asked if the two women had also both agreed to the police being told about the dying man’s last words or just one of them had insisted on it. ‘Since if they hadn’t, sir, we wouldn’t have known anything about what had been said, would we?’

  Sloan thought that fact was interesting in itself and tucked it away in the back of his mind.

  ‘I couldn’t begin to say about that, Sloan.’ Leeyes pushed a piece of paper towards him. ‘All we’ve got to go on so far is the message we had from the daughter.’

  ‘I still wonder why they told us?’ mused Detective Inspector Sloan aloud, reaching for his notebook. ‘I’d better have the wife’s name and address.’

  ‘Marion Tridgell, of Legate Lodge, High Street, Friar’s Flensant.’

  ‘And the daughter’s?’

  ‘Jane, of that ilk and address,’ said the superintendent. ‘She’s an art student,’ he added in a tone of voice that could only be called condemnatory.

  ‘Right, sir. I’ll get on to them straightaway.’ There was other work on his desk awaiting his attention – an outbreak of more petty theft in Cullingoak and a case of serious fraud in Almstone to say nothing of what looked suspiciously like a Ponzi scheme at Pelling – but they would have to wait until he had reported back to the superintendent. He knew that.

  ‘And it would be a great help,’ added Leeyes, heavily sarcastic, ‘if you would be so kind as to take Detective Constable Crosby out to Friar’s Flensant with you and therefore out of my sight.’

  ‘Sir?’ said Sloan. Detective Constable Crosby, the most jejune recruit to the division, was not an asset in any investigation but he was usually kept at a safe distance from the superintendent.

  ‘He tore a strip off a man who was in a car using my reserved parking place at the station yesterday …’ said Leeyes.

  ‘But, sir …’ began Sloan, since the superintendent’s reserved parking place at the police station was the nearest thing to hallowed ground that he knew.

  ‘But the man in the car was doing it by prior arrangement with me, seeing that he was one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary,’ snarled Superintendent Leeyes.

  A loud clatter at the front door of Legate Lodge at Friar’s Flensant heralded Paul Tridgell’s arrival home. He stepped in through the doorway at the same time as letting his rucksack slip off his shoulders with audible relief. It landed with a noisy bump on the floor of the hall.

  Marion Tridgell hurried forward and greeted him with a little hug of welcome. He put his arms round his mother’s shoulders and squeezed them gently. He was dishevelled from lack of sleep and badly in need of a shave. ‘Sorry to be too late, Mum,’ he said. ‘I did try.’

  ‘I know you did, dear.’ Marion gave her son another hug, ‘but South America’s a long way away. I know that.’

  ‘And I was up country, which didn’t help.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Besides, I hadn’t realised poor old Dad was quite so ill.’

  ‘I’m not sure that any of us did to begin with,’ said his mother sadly. ‘I don’t think I quite took in what the doctor was telling me at the time. One doesn’t, you know. Anyway, I know Dad would have quite understood.’

  Paul looked back over his shoulder as there was a knock at the front door behind him. ‘Oh, I forgot. Mum, can you rustle up the taxi fare? I haven’t got any English money on me.’

  As his mother went to get her handbag, he called after her, ‘Where’s Jane?’

  ‘Making tea.’ She gave a shaky laugh as she came back, purse in hand. ‘Drink tea – that’s all either of us seem to have been able to do since – well, you know.’ Mother and son nodded their complete mutual understanding: it didn’t need speech.

  ‘I know. I’m not hungry either,’ he said, giving a great stretch. ‘What I really need now is a bath and a shave. Let me pay the driver and then I’ll go and give Jane a hand with the tray.’

  After paying the taxi driver, Paul made his way into the kitchen and greeted his sister. ‘Hi, Jane, I’m back at last.’

  ‘Hi,’ she said, notably low-key and busying herself over the kettle.

  ‘Sorry and all that – about not being here.’

  Jane passed a hand over tired eyes. ‘Honestly, Paul, I don’t think it would have made any difference if you had been so I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Dad didn’t even know Mum at the end, let alone me. It was awful.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Paul,’ she sighed. ‘Poor Dad. You mightn’t even have recognised him if you had got back in time. I couldn’t believe that he could have looked as wizened and old as he did when he died. He was yellow all over, too.’

  ‘But he wasn’t old, was he? I mean not really old. And he was so fit and active, too.’

  ‘Squash and speleology,’ she said. ‘That’s what he always said kept him fit. Although Dr Browne did say we should remember that being fit and being healthy were two very different
things.’

  ‘Good thinking.’ He went on awkwardly, ‘You know I wouldn’t have stayed away for so long if he’d been really old. You know that. Or if I’d known how very ill he was. Mum didn’t tell me, not properly, until last week that he was actually dying. You know what she’s like.’

  She nodded. ‘I know she didn’t want to worry you. But that wasn’t it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. The worst part was that towards the end Dad just wouldn’t stop talking.’

  ‘What on earth about?’ Her brother stared at her and listened to her account of their father’s last days. Then he said with elaborate casualness, ‘Was he talking about anything particular? While he still could, I mean.’

  ‘He talked all the time, although we weren’t sure what it was all about,’ she said. ‘That was what was so funny. Then he started to go on about someone called the remainderman being wrong, if you know what on earth that means.’

  Paul Tridgell wrinkled his nose. In one of his many attempts to find a career which he liked, let alone one to which he was suited, Paul had briefly worked in a bank. ‘If I remember rightly, the remainderman’s the person who gets the dibs in the end – however many other people have had their hands on it along the way. To put it another way: in the long run, the survivor wins.’

  ‘The last man standing, I suppose you might call it,’ she said thoughtfully.

  ‘Or he who laughs last laughs longest,’ said her brother, more cynically.

  ‘So who could the wrong remainderman be?’

  ‘Search me.’ He gave a prodigious yawn. ‘Actually, it’s a bit like a tontine used to be but they’re not legal any more. Too many people got knocked off in the process.’

  ‘What he was saying didn’t mean a thing to me or Mum,’ she said, putting a milk jug on a tray, adding, ‘Neither does a tontine for that matter.’

  ‘Here, I’ll carry that,’ he said, moving forward. ‘Did he say anything really important?’