Learning Curve Page 8

  ‘Go on,’ said Sloan. ‘I’d like to know about that.’

  ‘Something much needed to assist nerve regeneration. It was good stuff.’ He sighed ‘Even so, we’re encouraged not to prescribe it any more, more’s the pity.’

  ‘Too dangerous?’ suggested Sloan, the consequences of the drug thalidomide having cast a long shadow. After hearing Chris Honley’s account, Sloan wanted to hear from a medical professional that it wasn’t unsafe.

  Dr Browne shook his head. ‘No, it’s because there’s a much cheaper product on the market these days which we have to use instead.’

  ‘Called Mendaner?’ hazarded Sloan.

  ‘That’s the one, Inspector. It does much the same job as the other, of course, but neither of them would have done this patient any good unfortunately.’

  ‘Did Derek Tridgell know he was going to die?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Inspector,’ said the general practitioner briefly. ‘He asked me and I told him. And his wife. They were too old and aware for me to try to steal death.’

  ‘Steal death?’ queried Sloan. He thought he knew the Theft Act backwards and he couldn’t remember death coming into that.

  ‘Making sure that the patient dies without knowing that he or she is dying,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s not so popular these days. Everyone seems to be told now.’

  ‘Whether they like it not,’ concluded Sloan quietly.

  ‘The longer you live, the sooner you’ll die,’ remarked Detective Constable Crosby to nobody in particular from the sidelines.

  ‘I was taught, Inspector, that a good physician appreciates the difference between postponing death and prolonging the act of dying. And about ars moriendi.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Crosby.

  ‘Dying well,’ said the doctor pithily.

  ‘And would what he said when he was dying have been affected by the drugs he was on?’ asked Sloan, first and foremost an investigating officer.

  ‘Everything he said and did would have been affected by them,’ said Dr Browne unequivocally. ‘We’re not talking aspirin here, Inspector. More the double effect.’

  ‘The double effect, Doctor?’ What Detective Inspector Sloan was wondering was whether, although they might not be talking aspirin, they might be talking involuntary euthanasia instead: a mercy killing by another name, perhaps?

  ‘The double effect is dealing with pain at the expense of shortening life,’ said the doctor concisely.

  Detective Inspector Sloan decided that though he might not have known what the double effect was, he did recognise hair-splitting when he met it.

  The general practitioner could have read his mind because he said, ‘That, for your information, Inspector, is not the same thing as a mercy killing.’

  Detective Constable Crosby, his wayward interest suddenly engaged, leant forward and asked, ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘A factor in the age-old struggle between pain and death, Constable,’ said Dr Browne. ‘I don’t know about you, gentlemen, but I myself think it better that death wins.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘Mind if I go out tonight, Mum?’ asked Paul Tridgell, reappearing downstairs from his bedroom dressed in his usual relaxed gear again. His dark suit had already been consigned to the back of his wardrobe.

  All three members of the bereaved family were back again at Legate Lodge in Friar’s Flensant after the funeral. Metaphorically as well as literally, shoes were being kicked off.

  ‘Of course not, dear,’ said Marion Tridgell.

  Jane said quickly, ‘I’m staying in with you, Mum.’

  ‘That will be nice, dear,’ her mother said placidly. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t cook for me tonight,’ said her son, making for the door. ‘I couldn’t eat another thing.’

  ‘Me neither,’ chimed in Jane.

  ‘I thought the Lamb and Flag did everything very nicely today,’ murmured Marion absently. ‘Everyone said so. I must remember to thank them tomorrow.’

  ‘I thought,’ went on Paul, ‘that I’d just pop over and have a word with Elizabeth. Let her know that I’m safely back and all that.’

  ‘That poor girl,’ said Marion compassionately.

  ‘And catch up on things,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘Your friends Trevor and Tim came to the funeral,’ said Jane. ‘I saw them there.’

  ‘So did I,’ said her brother shortly.

  ‘I didn’t really see anyone at all in the church,’ confessed their mother. ‘I couldn’t help just looking at the coffin all the time and thinking of your poor father lying there in it.’

  Paul, embarrassed, paused with his hand on the door handle. ‘There’s just one thing, Mum …’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Dad’s caving stuff. You haven’t given any of it away, have you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It’s all at the back of the garage. I haven’t touched it. I couldn’t bear to, not after … when …’ her voice trailed away into silence.

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  She swallowed. ‘It’s exactly where he left it the last time he came back from the Crags. He was looking like death and said he couldn’t go back down there again no matter what.’ Marion Tridgell’s hard-won reserve started to crumble. ‘He told me that he’d been back to Hoath Hole to say goodbye to Edmund Leaton.’ She brushed a little tear away from the corner of her eye.

  Paul stiffened. ‘Dad said what?’

  ‘Well, your father knew he was going downhill quite fast. You should have seen him, Paul. He looked quite terrible and he was losing weight by the week. He’d lost all his strength, you see, and he didn’t think he could climb out of there ever again.’

  Jane’s head came up. ‘But I thought the farmer had said no one was to go down there ever again after the roof fall.’

  Marion looked confused. ‘Perhaps he had but your father got in all right. He mustn’t have asked old Bartlett – he’s the farmer over there – and the man couldn’t be everywhere on the farm.’ A faint smile crossed her lips. ‘Bartlett might even have been at Berebury Market that day – your father wasn’t silly, you know.’

  ‘Dad always told me that the whole place is riddled with caves that lead one into the other,’ said Paul. ‘I knew that anyway. Don’t you remember Dad took me down there once and tried to get me to crawl along a streamway. Hoped I’d take up caving like him, I expect.’ He shuddered. ‘Fat chance. Give me the open air any day.’

  ‘And fast cars,’ said his sister.

  ‘That’s unfair, Jane, and you know it.’

  ‘All right, then. Snorkelling, not fast cars. Anyway, I thought you didn’t like potholing. You always said so. So why do you want Dad’s gear now?’

  ‘Be quiet, both of you,’ snapped Marion, unexpectedly fierce. ‘I won’t have you two quarrelling today of all days.’

  ‘Just letting off steam, Mum, that’s all,’ said Paul cheerfully, slipping out of the door as he did so. ‘Put it down to sibling rivalry.’

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ said Marion when he’d gone. She sank back thankfully into a chair. ‘And Jane …’

  ‘Yes, Mum?’

  ‘If the phone rings, don’t answer it.’

  ‘No? Why not?’

  ‘If,’ said her mother shakily, ‘I have to tell one more person that I’m quite all right, thank you, I’ll tell them what it’s really like to watch someone you’ve loved die like your father did after twenty-five years of happy marriage and after the funeral come back to an empty house, I’ll scream.’

  Jane, dismayed, said, ‘But you’ve still got us.’

  ‘I’m sorry, dear.’ Her mother pulled herself together with a visible effort. ‘Of course I have. But you know what I mean.’

  Jane Tridgell, maturing by the minute, wasn’t sure that she did.

  Detective Inspector Sloan, sitting beside Crosby who was at the wheel of the police car, directed the constable towards one of Berebury’s best residential areas. Beginning its life as
a country market town, there had been a gradual accretion over the years of good houses on its fringes. As agricultural prosperity had waxed and the railway arrived in the town, other businesses had come there and now it was a flourishing settlement in the heart of rural Calleshire.

  Jonathon Sharp lived in one of the very best of the good houses. Double-fronted and built along the plain but ample lines that betokened a good architect, there was a deceptive simplicity about its appearance. As they approached, Detective Inspector Sloan noted with approval the detail of what was called door furniture – an elegant letter box, a finely worked key escutcheon and a substantial ornamental door knocker. He applied his hand to this, confident that the powerful car in the drive marked the return of its owner from the wake at the Lamb and Flag Inn at Friar’s Flensant.

  The woman who answered his knock on the door invited them in and said that her husband was just changing and would be down in a minute. As she led the way indoors, Jonathon Sharp came down the stairs in an open-necked shirt and trousers that Sloan categorised as recreational, even though he himself put on much less elegant wear for his own recreation of gardening. Sharp was a big man, with broad shoulders, but far from flabby. Sloan would not have been surprised to learn that rugby had been his choice of sport.

  Unlike most people, Jonathon Sharp did not immediately overreact to the mention of the word ‘Police’. Instead, he waited in a controlled manner and then asked courteously, ‘In what connection?’

  ‘A death at Luston Chemicals,’ said Sloan.

  Jonathon Sharp’s shoulders sagged. ‘That poor man …’

  ‘Michael Linane,’ said Crosby.

  Sharp ran a hand through his hair and said, ‘I didn’t actually see him afterwards, thank God, but I gather it was all pretty terrible.’

  ‘Terrible but not pretty,’ offered Crosby from the sidelines.

  ‘But you did see him before?’ persisted Sloan.

  ‘Of course, Inspector. We – that is my chief scientist, Derek Tridgell and I – had gone over to Luston earlier that day expressly to see him and my opposite number there, their chairman Ralph Iddon.’

  ‘And why was that, sir?’ Asking questions to which they already knew the answers was a police technique learnt early on. If nothing else, it was a test of accuracy.

  Or memory.

  Or something else: those who remembered a day too well could be suspect if they couldn’t remember the days either side of it equally well. That could betoken a memory too well rehearsed.

  ‘To see if we could come to some agreement about the marketing of our respective products, Inspector,’ went on the man, unaware of Sloan’s train of thought. ‘The two have similar clinical outcomes even though they are very different pharmacologically.’

  ‘But patented?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Sharp wearily. ‘You could say that the patents were the least of our problems.’

  ‘And you couldn’t come to any agreement?’

  ‘That, Inspector, would be putting it mildly. Ralph Iddon, their chairman, and his head of sales, Michael Linane, wouldn’t even countenance discussing the matter.’ He gave a bitter smile. ‘They were hell-bent on destroying us and it looks as if they will do just that before too long.’

  ‘Taking you to the cleaners, are they?’ asked Crosby chattily.

  ‘Trying to,’ growled Sharp. ‘All we can do now is to try to come up with something else new.’

  ‘And different,’ chipped in Crosby.

  Jonathon Sharp stared at him. ‘Naturally, Constable. Let me tell you that Berebury Pharmaceuticals most certainly isn’t into manufacturing “me, too” drugs.’

  ‘And what might they be, sir?’ asked Sloan. He wasn’t sure whether he was taking a crash course in business at its worst or in the drug industry behaving badly.

  ‘“Me, too” drugs, Inspector,’ explained Sharp, ‘are ones made by other manufacturers climbing on the bandwagon after someone else – such as our firm – has done all the hard work of research and initial marketing.’

  ‘The easy way,’ remarked Crosby at Sloan’s elbow.

  ‘I see, sir,’ said Sloan, ignoring this. ‘So you and your chief chemist …’

  ‘The late Derek Tridgell,’ said Sharp. ‘The man’s died, more’s the pity. We’re missing him a lot.’

  ‘So you and he,’ went on Sloan, undeflected by this, ‘went over to Luston Chemicals hoping to make them change their minds? That it?’

  ‘Well, try to reach a compromise, perhaps.’

  ‘You were in the last-chance saloon anyway, weren’t you?’ remarked Crosby unnecessarily.

  ‘It was worth a shot,’ said Sharp, looking curiously at the constable. ‘Not that it got us anywhere. Ralph Iddon – I think I told you he’s their chairman – was backing his head of sales all the way.’

  ‘With pound signs in his eyes,’ added Crosby for good measure.

  ‘The first duty of a company is to its shareholders,’ intoned Sharp. ‘Like it or not, gentlemen, that’s the law of the land. In the last analysis I suppose we could go in for manufacturing generic drugs if we wanted to do so but it’s not the same.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan’s head came up like a gun-dog pointing. ‘Generic drugs?’ He’d never come across anyone pushing those. Heroin and cannabis, yes, in plenty but not generic ones.

  ‘Out of patent products,’ amplified Sharp. ‘Anyone can manufacture them. The National Health Service likes them because they’re cheaper.’

  ‘But not better?’

  ‘They are said to be the same, Inspector,’ said Sharp.

  ‘If you believe that, you can believe anything,’ muttered Crosby, sotto voce.

  ‘But the patients don’t always think so,’ Sharp went on, choosing not to hear this.

  ‘But you don’t make them?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘We prefer to stay at the cutting edge of research,’ said Sharp austerely.

  ‘Even though it’s a dangerous place to be?’ asked Sloan. They knew all about the other sort of cutting edges at the police station. ‘Bladed items’ was what they called them when giving evidence in assault cases.

  They were very dangerous, too.

  Jonathon Sharp shrugged shoulders that would have sat very well on a prop forward. ‘Some you win, some you lose.’

  ‘And have you lost?’ enquired Crosby with interest.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Sharp grimly. ‘And not, gentlemen, if Chris Honley and I can help it.’ He waved an arm. ‘He’s the new man I’ve got coming into the firm to take Derek Tridgell’s place.’

  ‘Now that Derek Tridgell is dead,’ observed Crosby unnecessarily.

  ‘I shall be seeing Marion Tridgell this week and telling her what’s happening,’ said Sharp stiffly. ‘She’ll understand, gentlemen. Corporate wives do.’

  The image of Sloan’s own wife, Margaret, floated into his mind. Policemen’s wives had to understand a lot, too. Their husbands coming home desperately late or working all the hours that God gave were the least of them. Husbands coming home dead-tired happened, too, but worst of all was husbands coming home emotionally drained to the dregs of their beings and not being able to say why. Sympathy had to be wordlessly implied, restlessness during the night ignored and long silences forgiven until a man had thawed out emotionally, so to speak, and was ready to resume normal life.

  ‘This man Chris Honley is the white hope of the side, is he?’ asked Crosby.

  Sloan made a mental note to discuss with the constable the inappropriateness of colloquial speech during an interview just as soon as they got back to the police station.

  Sharp gave him a twisted grin. ‘You could put it like that, Constable. Actually Chris is taking up our Project 242 where Derek Tridgell left off. What we hope,’ he said, confirming Sloan’s guess that he was a rugby player, ‘is that he’ll pick up the ball and run with it.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘You’ve got to hand it to him, sir,’ remarked Crosby as the two policemen left the house and
walked back to the police car. ‘If you ask me, he’s pretty smart.’

  ‘He doesn’t hang about,’ conceded Detective Inspector Sloan. He reluctantly admitted, too, to the constable that they had been very little wiser at the end of the interview than they had been at the beginning. He agreed, though, that the chairman of Berebury Pharmaceuticals was playing at the sharp end of the keyboard. Even to not telling the police that the aforementioned Chris Honley was coming to the firm from that of their deadly enemy, Luston Chemicals.

  ‘But we knew that anyway,’ protested Crosby.

  ‘That’s not the same thing at all,’ said Sloan.

  Crosby, who wasn’t sure what he had meant by this, aimed a kick at the front tyre of the police car. ‘Where to now, sir?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Back to base,’ said Sloan, adding simply, ‘if not square one.’

  He didn’t know whether the dice were loaded against the police or if this was just the feeling he usually had during a case. He didn’t even know for certain, at this stage, what sort of a case the police had. The only thing he was sure about was that two intangibles – a deathbed statement and a young man staring meaningfully into a congregation when giving a biblical reading that mentioned a killing – hardly amounted to evidence of the level required by the Crown Prosecution Service.

  Detective Constable Crosby had his mind on other things. ‘Isn’t it a crime to poach someone else’s employee, sir?’

  ‘You’ll have to look that one up,’ said Sloan absently. What with golden hellos and golden handcuffs, he wasn’t at all sure about employment laws any more. And you didn’t go on gardening leave when you left the police force. You just went in search of another job to keep the home fires burning.

  The game of snakes and ladders still on his mind as they travelled back to base, Sloan was beginning to think that they might need to throw a six to begin on this case. He was not yet sure either whether there were any snakes on the board in the shape of murderers, or ladders in the form of evidence.