Some Die Eloquent Page 4

  ‘And it didn’t?’

  ‘No, sir. She said that she went out to look for it herself but she hadn’t been feeling very well so she didn’t go far.’

  Policeman and pathologist both looked up at that.

  Dr Dabbe spoke first. Medically. ‘She wouldn’t have been feeling very well anyway if she was already on her way to a diabetic coma.’

  ‘But she didn’t know how it was that the dog had got out?’ said Sloan, thinking quickly along quite another tack. A law enforcement one.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Crosby.

  The pathologist shot the detective-inspector a shrewd glance. ‘Have we the same thing in mind, Sloan?’

  ‘Ransom?’ responded Sloan.

  ‘It’s a growth industry.’ Dabbe waved an instrument in the air. ‘First cousin to sky-jacking.’

  ‘Children in Italy …’ It was something, he supposed, that there were national traditions in crime, and that Great Britain did not always lead the way.

  ‘Dogs in England,’ said the pathologist, a cynic if ever there was one. ‘We’re a nation of animal-lovers.’

  ‘It might just have been an accident,’ said Sloan, ‘the dog getting out.’

  ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ said the doctor drily, ‘that a middle-aged woman in possession of a fortune will attract people anxious to part her from it.’

  Sloan coughed. ‘Would you say that an Airedale dog could be someone’s – er – hostage to fortune?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dabbe simply.

  ‘She was very upset,’ contributed Crosby, ‘especially when we told her that we hadn’t got her – er – Isolde.’

  ‘We’ll look for a note,’ conceded Sloan. ‘Just in case someone got ideas about ransom. Can’t very well do more than that at this stage.’

  ‘No.’ The pathologist went back to his work and in a matter of moments was totally absorbed again in what he was doing. Detective-Constable Crosby settled himself against a nearby bench while Sloan considered Miss Wansdyke and her curiously great wealth. It was some little time before Dr Dabbe straightened up and began peeling off his rubber gloves. He continued, however, to address the microphone which hovered – like Damocles’s sword – above the neck of the post mortem subject.

  ‘Right, Rita. That’s all. Get it typed out, will you, and I’ll sign a copy for the coroner.’ He tossed his gloves into a linen basket. ‘It won’t tell him much, Sloan.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I can’t find anything except the diabetes.’ He turned his back on Sloan while his assistant, Burns, undid his gown from behind. ‘Of course she’d got the usual signs you’d expect to find going with that condition in a woman of her age.’

  ‘Change and decay?’ Sloan’s mother was a great church-goer.

  ‘Ever present, old chap, but no other cause of death that I can see. Poison’s always a problem, though, in forensic medicine.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’ And it was, too. That, as every policeman – and pathologist – knew, was where the undetected homicide lay. Nearly always.

  ‘Naturally we’ll take a look at the bits and pieces that Burns here has got in his jars,’ said Dabbe a trifle unscientifically, ‘but there are certainly no signs that lead me to suspect anything out of the ordinary in the way of what the lawyers call noxious substances.’

  Burns drew a white sheet up over the body of Beatrice Wansdyke.

  ‘And no other natural causes,’ said Sloan, trying to keep his mind clear, ‘besides the diabetes.’

  ‘Just the diabetes,’ repeated the pathologist, tossing his gown into the linen basket after the gloves. ‘From my point of view there’s no doubt at all what she died from, even though someone somewhere may have smelt a rat.’

  ‘That’s all right, Doctor,’ interrupted Detective-Constable Crosby largely. He uncoiled himself from the bench against which he had been leaning. ‘After all, down at the station we’re in the rat-catching business, aren’t we?’

  Miss Simpson, Headmistress of the Berebury Grammar School for Girls, picked up a piece of paper from her desk and studied it carefully. The Deputy Head of the school, Miss Walsh, had just brought it into her study and laid it before her. The two women, seasoned schoolmistresses both, knew without discussion exactly how much burning of midnight oil the finished document represented.

  It contained all the revisions in the school timetable made necessary by the sudden demise of the senior chemistry mistress.

  Miss Simpson let it lie in her hands for a moment before she considered it, thinking instead of Beatrice Wansdyke. From now on someone else was going to have to persuade girls to think scientifically, to take a proper interest in those twins of fundamental discovery, Boyle and Charles and their laws, and to learn about elements and atoms and (as far as Miss Simpson was concerned – she was an English specialist herself) other things.

  Anyway, from now on another teacher of chemistry was going to have to be categoric about nitric and nitrous and nitrate and somehow inculcate into her charges the intellectual reaches opened up by the study of organic chemistry.

  Miss Wansdyke’s syllabus would be up-to-date. There wouldn’t be any worry there. The Upper Sixth’s chances of university entrance would not be spoilt by her death. They would only suffer by loss of contact with a good mind. It had been a mind that had always been ready and prepared to stretch the thinking of the young. Girls who made sweeping statements once seldom made them a second time.

  It had been much the same in the staff-room. Colleagues who made unsupported assertions were apt to have them challenged pretty speedily. Miss Simpson sighed. Unfortunately staff-room politics seldom had anything to do with principles – scientific or even first.

  Miss Simpson let her eye fall on the timetable. Had Miss Walsh … yes, she had. The Head was not surprised to see that in her attempt to fill the gap in the timetable the Deputy Head had slipped in a couple of extra Economics classes for the Fifth Form. Beatrice Wansdyke wouldn’t have liked that. As a scientist, she had always resented the intrusion of Economics into the curriculum as a separate subject. Economics, she maintained, was not a proper teaching entity at all, but an ill-defined grey area which knew no morality, somewhere between geography and history. And the proper study of history, she was wont to parody Alexander Pope, is power, and if economics didn’t come into that she didn’t know what did. A science, she would insist, jealous of the purity of her own subject, it certainly was not.

  The aggrandisement of economics as a study apart though, thought Miss Simpson thankfully, Beatrice Wansdyke would not have minded the waters closing so quickly over the hole left by a departed chemistry mistress. The last thing she would have wanted was fuss. She would have thoroughly approved of the quiet rearrangement of the timetable and the stepping into her shoes of another teacher. The show, all dedicated pedagogues were agreed, must go on. Miss Collins would mind, of course. Hilda Collins and Beatrice Wansdyke had been good friends over the years – but then Hilda was a biologist and they were seldom sentimentalists.

  The Head paused in her thinking. She would have to decide herself whether to recommend to the Governors that young Miss Peel should go up a rung in the academic ladder. A promising youngster, Miss Wansdyke had thought her …

  Mentally apologizing to Beatrice’s memory for meditating on her successor quite so soon, Miss Simpson was confronted by the thought that her late colleague had not been greatly looking forward to her retirement. Sitting back and resting was no fine ambition compared with the satisfaction of stretching elastic young minds. Better, too, to die while still searching for her own particular Philosopher’s Stone.

  Beatrice had been too much of a realist, too, she was sure, not to have observed the inevitable advances of old age, the decline in physical activity, the slow closing-in of horizons, that went with the passing years. Her manner had got more and more dry with the passage of time, though the girls whom she taught did not seem to mind. Miss Simpson smiled wryly to herself in the privacy of her study.
There was no doubt that Beatrice Wansdyke had long ago reached that point in a schoolmistress’s career when she was cherished by her pupils as much for her idiosyncrasy as her teaching.

  The Head laid the revised timetable back on her desk. No … Beatrice Wansdyke wouldn’t have minded dying in harness, her duty done, her old friend Hilda Collins her chief mourner. She’d nursed her aged parents, kept her temper and her peace over the years with the silly, snobbish, brainless creature whom her brother’s son had married, and done what she could for her dead sister’s children. Nobody could have done more for the boy, Nicholas, than Beatrice, and who, added Miss Simpson charitably, could say yet that she had failed? He might improve and settle down in time. Who could say?

  Would he, though, she wondered, come to the funeral on Saturday?

  The young man who was the subject of Miss Simpson’s thoughts was at that particular moment by no means as sure as Pauline Wansdyke had been that he would be at his aunt’s funeral. This uncertainty had nothing to do with his wish to be there. It was to do with the nature and conditions of his present employment.

  ‘No,’ the foreman was saying flatly, ‘you can’t have next Saturday off.’

  ‘For a funeral,’ mumbled Nicholas Petforth.

  The foreman, it transpired, had heard that one before. Many times.

  ‘She was the only aunt I had,’ said Nicholas Petforth truthfully. That, though he didn’t tell the foreman so, was the whole trouble in the family. Aunts had been a bit on the short side. His father had had no sisters and his mother only one. This situation didn’t usually matter, but it had mattered in their family when it came to the point.

  ‘And Saturday,’ said the foreman without emotion, ‘is the only time this season that Luston Town will be playing Newcastle United.’

  Nicholas Petforth’s mobile face looked quite blank.

  ‘Away,’ added the foreman meaningfully. ‘You’d need the whole day to get there. And –’ he was a soured man ‘– and you’d be late back on Monday morning into the bargain.’

  ‘Ah, football.’ Petforth rearranged his features upon the instant to project a keen interest in the game. Negotiations about his going to the funeral had reached a delicate stage and he didn’t want them spoilt by an injudicious reference on his part to spectator sport.

  ‘Back late on Monday with a headache,’ added the foreman for good measure.

  Petforth dragged up a remark he’d overheard being made at a recent tea-break. ‘The Town team haven’t a chance without their usual centre-forward.’

  The foreman nodded. ‘Unluckiest accident in the history of the Club.’

  ‘And just before the big match,’ agreed Petforth solemnly. He became suitably deferential. ‘Do you think if he’d been fit to play … supposing he hadn’t broken his leg’

  The foreman shook his head. ‘Not a hope, if you ask me.’

  ‘Ah …’ Nicholas Petforth was careful not to make a specific comment. He had learnt a lot since he had come to work on the construction site. In his time there he had come to perfect an ideal response to almost all remarks thrown at him. Boiled down, it consisted of inviting the speaker to agree with his or her own last statement. It had proved a sure-fire way of winning friends and influencing people. Sometimes he threw in an additional ‘You’ve got a point there’ for good measure.

  He did now.

  ‘I know I have,’ declared the foreman. ‘Stands to reason in a small club like Luston Town.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘This aunt of yours,’ said the foreman.

  ‘More like a mother to me,’ said Petforth.

  The foreman looked at him sharply.

  The labourers he had under him these days weren’t like the ones he used to have. University students were two a penny on the site nowadays, graduates almost as common. They’d be having women heaving earth about next, as the Russians did, and the Chinese – not that some of the men around didn’t look like women. He’d got over thinking them all Maryannes, though. There just wasn’t anyone around any more with the clout to tell them to get their hair cut. And they weren’t all fools either. There had been a law graduate wanting to make a quick penny to set himself up who had taught the foreman himself a thing or two about questioning the authority of those above him.

  ‘Practically brought me up,’ offered the young man before him, whom the foreman only knew as Nick.

  ‘No family?’

  ‘Killed,’ said Petforth expressively, ‘in a pile-up on a motorway like this.’ He waved his hand to indicate the area they were working on. In fact at this early stage it bore no resemblance to a motorway at all. The three-lane landscaped tarmacadamed communications artery that was to come where they stood was little more than twinkle in the planners’ eye at this moment. In their minds’ eye – and in the artist’s impression – the well-intentioned road architects saw only the finished product – just as at Passchendaele the General Staff had only visualized victory. What the men on the ground saw in both cases was only mud.

  ‘It happens,’ said the foreman.

  ‘I was quite small at the time.’

  ‘Ah.’ That explained a lot to the foreman. Like why a well-spoken lad like this should be living in squalor and working with a road construction gang, though admittedly times had changed anyway. Time was when speech like his would have been aped up and down the site. Not any longer. The foreman reached for the last shot in his empty locker and said, ‘You’ll lose your bonus, of course.’

  Nicholas Petforth shrugged his shoulders.

  That didn’t surprise the foreman. He couldn’t get at any of his men that way any longer. The odd ones had minds above money and the others were earning so much that it didn’t matter to them anyway.

  In the end the foreman agreed to Nick having next Saturday off as he agreed to most requests these days. Partly because he didn’t think for all his broken-down appearance and bizarre clothing that Nick was the sort of man to lie and partly because he calculated that he’d have the Union after him if he didn’t let him go. And then the consortium which was building the motorway and who would neither know nor care if he gave every man jack in the gang the whole week off provided they didn’t lose money, would be after his blood.

  ‘You’ll be back after the funeral, right?’ he said, conscious that if there was ever trouble on the site he could be sure of just one thing: no one would ever uphold his authority.

  ‘Not if she’s left me a fortune, I won’t,’ murmured the young man whom he knew as Nick, picking up his donkey jacket and protective helmet. ‘That’s for sure.’

  CHAPTER V

  If you would publish your infatuation

  Come on and try your hand at transmutation.

  ‘At least,’ murmured Mrs Margaret Sloan, ‘I don’t have to walk home.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Sloan warily. He’d gone straight back to the ante-natal out-patients’ clinic from the mortuary and metaphorically thrown his hat in first.

  There was a constrained silence.

  ‘Everything – er – all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said consideringly. ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Good.’ He paused. ‘Er … good.’

  ‘If you’re talking about the baby, that is.’

  ‘Yes … er … naturally.’

  ‘Then it is.’

  ‘Er … good.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said hastily. He’d fallen into that, head first.

  There was another small silence.

  ‘Is everything,’ Sloan capitulated, ‘all right with you too?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ she said demurely.

  ‘Good. Er … good. Here, let me take that.’

  Mrs Sloan consented to having her shopping-bag carried as they walked down the hospital corridor.

  ‘The doctors are pleased, then?’ said her husband with unaccustomed heartiness and a wholesale avoidance of the equally germane matter of whether or not Mrs Margaret Sloan was
pleased at being abandoned in the ante-natal clinic.

  ‘The doctor,’ said Margaret Sloan astringently, ‘was very pleased indeed.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘But not with me.’

  Sloan looked up.

  ‘He,’ said Margaret Sloan, matron, ‘was pleased with a young lady called Briony.’

  ‘Ah, he was, was he?’

  ‘Exceedingly pleased. Mind you,’ she added, ‘Dr Elspin is what I would call a very personable young man.’

  Somehow this statement contrived to put Sloan on the wrong foot.

  ‘Would you?’ he said.

  ‘Very,’ said Margaret Sloan emphatically.

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Nice manners.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘For a doctor,’ she said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And you,’ she said, ‘presumably were – er – caught up with someone called Beatrice?’

  ‘I was,’ said Sloan carefully. The Ice Maiden was gradually – but ever so gradually – giving way to someone else, someone more like the woman he had married. He didn’t want to say or to do anything that might halt the progression.

  ‘Aunt to a nurse called Briony, I take it?’ said his wife.

  ‘That is so. The late Miss Beatrice Wansdyke. I understand that she has a niece on the staff at the hospital.’

  ‘If,’ said Mrs Sloan, ‘what I overheard is anything to go by …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She’s going to have a nephew on the staff at the hospital too pretty soon.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘A nephew-in-law, actually.’

  ‘I see.’ He listened attentively to her recital of what she had overheard. ‘So now they can get married and before she died they couldn’t?’

  ‘That was what was implied, certainly,’ said Mrs Margaret Sloan.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said Sloan, ‘that is interesting.’

  ‘I rather thought,’ murmured his wife mischievously, ‘that you wouldn’t think I’d been wasting my time.’

  ‘Margaret Sloan,’ he said gruffly, ‘I won’t have that from you or anyone else.’ He took a quick look up and down the corridor. They seemed for the moment to be alone. He dropped the shopping basket and put both arms round her. He was delighted to find that the Ice Maiden had melted away completely.