After Effects (5 page)

‘So Mrs Galloway might have been having only harmless tablets?' This, Sloan realized, was going to take some explaining to the superintendent.

‘Inert would be a better description than harmless, Inspector,' remarked the doctor.

‘Inert,' conceded Sloan between clenched teeth. ‘So she might only have been having inert tablets—'

‘She might.'

‘Well?'

‘On the other hand,' said Byville precisely, ‘she might not.'

Sloan's teeth were now so tightly clenched that he was surprised the others couldn't hear them grinding.

‘Do you toss for it?' enquired Detective Constable Crosby with every sign of genuine interest. ‘Heads you get the real stuff, tails you don't?'

Dr Roger Byville didn't look as if he'd ever tossed anything more than a pancake and that a long time ago. ‘Matched controls,' he said stiffly, ‘are selected every bit as carefully as test cases.'

Sloan didn't like test cases in law. He didn't know anything about medical ones; but he was beginning to think he wasn't going to like them either. ‘But surely, Doctor,' he said, ‘withholding a life-saving new drug could be potentially harmful, too.'

‘Oh, yes, indeed. That's quite different,' said the specialist readily. ‘Once we are really certain that it is effective, then it would be quite unethical to withhold it from all sufferers.'

‘So?'

‘So then,' said Roger Byville immediately, ‘the comparison trials with the matched controls would be abandoned forthwith and the new drug given to all patients with the condition from then on.'

‘How do you tell?' asked Crosby.

Dr Byville smiled thinly. ‘It's not always very easy.'

‘This new drug—' began Sloan, going back to his notebook.

‘Provisionally called Cardigan,' supplied Byville.

‘Tell me about it,' invited Sloan, hoping that the doctor's words wouldn't be long ones.

Dr Byville visibly relaxed while he expounded on what they hoped to gain from the medicinal properties of the drug called Cardigan. ‘It's got a compound number, too, Inspector—these things are all done by computer these days. There's no room for sheer inspiration any more but more than that I can't tell you.' He smiled thinly. ‘It's not my baby, you see.'

Sloan nodded his understanding. Almost everything at the police station had a number and was done by computer these days, too, but they hadn't yet found a mechanical substitute for the smell of malfeasance somewhere.

Or the nose that could sniff it out.

Sometimes, of course.

Not always.

He wasn't sure about the smell—if there was one—of anything here yet.

Any more than he knew if the ‘leaning on the gate' approach to problem-solving was better than feeding everything under the sun into a computer and pressing a few keys.

Dr Byville was still talking. ‘But, gentlemen, you'd do better talking to the real expert. Naturally, Dr Paul Meggie as the Consultant Cardiologist to the Hospital Trust is the doctor in overall charge of the Cardigan Protocol.'

Unfortunately, reported the Hospital Administrator regretfully after a further twenty minutes on the telephone, Dr Meggie was not available for interview. No one, it presently transpired—that is, when they'd cut their way through the Administrator's circumlocutory manner of speaking—was quite sure exactly where Dr Paul Meggie was.

The person who was missing Dr Paul Meggie most of all at this moment—and that rather to his own surprise—was his registrar.

In the first instance Dr Martin Friar had welcomed the opportunity of taking his consultant's clinic single-handed, then he had positively relished responding to a call from Barnesdale Ward about a case that could have been bacterial endocarditis. In Dr Meggie's absence he had pontificated, prescribed and prognosticated—in fact, generally fulfilled the role of clinical specialist to which he so keenly aspired.

It was different now.

He had just been settling nicely into this agreeable mode when there was a call from a general practitioner out in the country. Dr Angus Browne wanted Dr Meggie to do an urgent domiciliary visit to see a Mr Abel Granger and made it quite clear that as Dr Meggie couldn't be contacted, he, Dr Friar, would have to come instead.

That was when Martin Friar's difficulties had started.

‘Larking?' he said. ‘Where's Larking?'

‘Take the Cullingoak Road from Kinnisport and then second left after the pub,' said Dr Browne. ‘Willow End Farm's up a track on your right. Mind you keep right when it forks or you'll end up in the stream. I'll be at the house—the patient's too ill to move or leave.'

‘But—'

‘I've promised the family a second opinion,' said the general practitioner a trifle testily, ‘and I need it now. Tomorrow will be too late.'

‘I'll be there,' promised Friar. ‘No problem.'

But there was a problem when he got there.

Not knowing what to do with his hands was only part of it. There was, of course, absolutely nothing Martin Friar could do with them. The registrar was having his first experience of watching a man dying in his own bed without the benefit of hospital support. It was, he soon realized, he—Martin Friar—not the patient, who was missing the benefit of hospital support. There was no hiding in Sister's office or behind Dr Meggie here. The man was beyond aid and that was all there was to it.

What Friar did have was the experience of watching a really skilled general practitioner at work in a domestic setting. Standing in a large farmhouse kitchen, round a big table scrubbed to bare-bone whiteness, was a silent anxious family, hanging on Martin Friar's every word but still looking to their father's own doctor—the man they knew and trusted—for real comfort. He could learn a lot, he decided, from listening to Dr Angus Browne.

‘Remarkable man, their father,' the family doctor was saying in front of the adult children. The patient's wife was where she'd been for the last seven days and nights—by her husband's bedside. ‘Built this farm up from nothing.'

The elder son nodded.

‘He's had good home nursing, too,' said the local doctor. ‘Everything he needed.'

A daughter caught her breath.

‘A king couldn't have had better care than he's had,' asserted Angus Browne. An historian might have suspected irony here since various monarchs had been subjected to medical treatments that could only have added to their discomfort and accelerated their demise, but the patient's family took this pronouncement at its face value and were reassured.

Martin Friar nodded gravely. Several kings that he knew about would have kept their thrones a lot longer had the same attention been paid to their electrolyte levels as it had to those of the old farmer upstairs but this was not the time to say so.

‘It's Mother I'm worried about,' said the younger son. ‘She hasn't had her clothes off for nearly a week now.'

Angus Browne said sapiently, ‘She'll no' thank you for taking her away from your father now.'

‘But, Doctor,' protested the younger son, her favourite, ‘she'll collapse if she goes on like this.'

The general practitioner shook his head and said with the wisdom of long experience, ‘She'll no' collapse, Christopher, all the while your father needs her. I can tell you that.' He paused and then added significantly, ‘And it won't be for long now, will it, Dr Friar?'

Martin Friar looked solemn. ‘I'm afraid not.'

‘So Dad's nearly at the end of the road, is he?' asked Simon, the elder son, his own role at the farm about to change significantly and new duties begin.

‘He's had a good innings,' responded Browne obliquely, ‘but I think they'll be drawing stumps, soon.' He turned politely to the quondam consultant and said, ‘Don't you, Dr Friar?'

Martin Friar nodded gravely. It was about the only thing he could do.

‘Although,' said Angus Browne, automatically hedging his bets, ‘the heart has a remarkable capacity for keeping going.'

The younger son found his tongue again. And was surprised to find how dry it was. ‘When …' he licked his lips. ‘I mean … can you say how long?'

‘Not long now,' said Browne gently, as they all heard the sound of another, rather noisier, car coming up the farm lane.

‘That'll be the rector,' said the daughter, taking off her apron and hurrying through the house. ‘We'd better get the front door open, hadn't we?'

Dr Browne led Martin Friar out of the back door as the representative of the next world came in at the front one—the seldom-opened farmhouse front door that the coffin would be going out of very soon.

‘Thanks for coming,' Browne said when they were well out of earshot.

‘There was nothing I could do.'

‘Oh, yes, there was,' said Angus Browne unexpectedly. ‘Now you've seen the patient for yourself, you can go back and tell your boss that I don't like this new drug he's peddling one little bit.'

CHAPTER FIVE

Doctors have their uses, real as well as imaginary.

Over in the village of Staple St James, Dr Paul Meggie had also been noted as an absentee by Gilroy Pharmaceuticals (Berebury) Ltd.

‘Sorry about this, Al,' said George Gledhill, their Chief Chemist. ‘he wanted you to meet him while you were over here.'

‘These medical bods do tend to get held up more than some,' replied Al Dexter easily. He was Head of Dexter Palindome (Luston) plc, manufacturing chemists, and liked other people to get off on the wrong foot anyway. ‘Can't be helped.'

‘Oh, he'll be along all right, never worry,' contributed Mike Itchen, Deputy Chief Chemist and resident boffin at Gilroy's, in the laid-back manner he was cultivating so assiduously. ‘He's keen.' Behind the laid-back manner were the research brains of Gilroy's.

Al Dexter took another sip of his preluncheon drink. ‘Trobuble is, you can't ever check up on the medics. All they've got to say is that they've had an emergency wall.'

‘True.' George Gledhill glanced at his watch. ‘All the same, I don't think we'll wait to eat.'

He pushed his chair back. Doctors with a penchant for drug research could be recruited for clinical programmes without difficulty—for a fee, of course. Good cooks were more tricky to come by and trickier still to keep—fee or no fee. The cook at Gilroy's was first class and all of their visitors enjoyed her cooking. Most of them relished the corporate dining room at the Hall, too, and Gledhill was happy to note that their guest had every appearance of a man who hadn't seen his toes for quite a while.

‘Fine with me,' said Al Dexter automatically. ‘Glad you yourselves could make it on time anyway. Sounds as if you've had a busy morning, both of you.'

‘We've got people looking at the roof now,' said the Chief Chemist indirectly. ‘They were lucky not to get themselves killed, silly young fools.'

‘If that's all they were,' remarked Dexter, ‘then you haven't anything to worry about, have you?'

‘The Health and Safety Executive for starters and the insurance people …' began Mike Itchen, who was a worrier.

‘I mean,' explained Dexter, ‘that if it was only the monkeys they were after, you don't have problems, do you?'

Gledhill looked up sharply. ‘You think they might have been real burglars?'

‘It's what I would have been worried about,' said Al Dexter. He didn't have the look of a man who worried about anything. ‘Good cover for getting in—animal rights—if you were looking for something, don't you think?'

Gledhill and Itchen carefully avoided looking at each other.

‘In my experience,' Dexter added authoritatively, ‘people are prepared to believe anything about animal rights activists.'

‘We'll look into it,' said Itchen in the neutral tones he favoured these days. He had an expression that was similarly blank.

‘You're still working on Naomite surely,' said Dexter, ‘aren't you?'

Gledhill looked round quickly as if someone else might have been listening. ‘It's only in the embryo stage, Al,' he said. ‘Nothing doing there at all yet.'

‘Sure,' said Dexter comfortably, ‘but they don't know that, do they?'

‘And nothing doing at the Ethics Committee at Region this morning either,' added Itchen gloomily. ‘We only had one submission and it got the chop.'

A different sort of ethic prevailed as Al Dexter studiously avoided enquiring about the form of Gilroy's new submission. He was here with other fish to fry and if the two chemists wanted to tell him about their firm's newest compound then they would tell him fast enough. And if they didn't, then he, All Dexter, didn't really want to know.

‘Just like Byville's last effort,' said the Chief Chemist regretfully. ‘He's a trier, though, I'll give the man that.'

Dexter raised an enquiring eyebrow.

‘They wouldn't wear our APX 125 trials, Al.' George Gledhill shook his head. ‘A great pity, especially as Byville was so keen to test the refined compound. Said he's nearly there with some really good “effect-size” figures.'

‘Byville's no good with committees,' pronounced Itchen weightily. ‘Puts their backs up as soon as he opens his mouth.'

‘He's really into spleens, though,' said Gledhill. ‘Been making quite a speciality of treating them lately. We might have something for you there one day, Al.'

‘But he's no good with people,' insisted Mike Itchen, still brooding about the committee meeting. ‘Doesn't see that he's got to convince the Safety of Drugs Committee before he gets anywhere,'—he sniffed—‘for all that he wants to examine everyone in Calleshire without a spleen. And,' he added mordantly, ‘some with.'

‘If you can corner the market,' said Al Dexter simply, ‘then you should.' It was the spirit that made millionaires.