Amendment of Life (11 page)

‘I thought he was going to flop on us,' admitted Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘People do, of course.' That was when the police had to watch very carefully. There were those who thought that a genuine faint could easily be copied by the conscious, but it couldn't always.

‘He was sweating, too,' added Crosby. It was one of the things he'd been taught to watch out for especially in anyone he was interviewing. ‘They say you can't fake sweat.'

‘Very true, but each to his own,' said Dr Dabbe, himself a man almost devoid of human reactions. ‘The husband's your province, Constable, not mine.' The pathologist gave a wolfish grin. ‘Remember, I only deal with the dead.'

‘Quite so, Doctor,' put in Sloan. He often wished the same could be said of the police. The dead never attacked them.

‘And I am advised that the deceased is thought to have been missing from half-past four yesterday afternoon,' continued Dr Dabbe, resuming his address to the microphone. He winked at his assistant. ‘We like having a
terminus ab quo
and a
terminus ad quem,
don't we, Burns?'

‘It helps, Doctor.'

‘Gives us all something to go on,' agreed Detective Inspector Sloan. He had learned to be thankful for small police mercies …

‘Saves a lot of work, too, if she was reported missing early on,' said Dr Dabbe.

‘Not all that early on, Doctor,' said Sloan. ‘Not until the middle of this morning, actually. By the husband, though.' If, thought Sloan irreverently to himself, the pathologist had been about to perform the legendary magician's act of sawing a woman in half on stage, he could hardly have set the scene better, even to the microphone suspended above the post-mortem table into which he was speaking now.

‘Slightly built, well groomed and somewhat underweight for her height.' Dr Dabbe grinned and turned away from the microphone in an aside. ‘We don't get many underweight women here, Inspector, unless they're anorexics or addicts – on the contrary, in fact. That right, Burns?'

‘Yes, Doctor,' responded Burns dutifully.

‘For heavyweight you can often read deadweight,' said the doctor pithily.

‘Make a good slogan for slimming food, that would,' said Crosby from the sidelines, grateful for any diversion.

‘Adequately nourished, though, all the same,' pronounced the pathologist, carrying on considering the dead woman's contours with the calculating eye of a sculptor. ‘Rather a shapely figure, I should say. Good ankles and all that.' He jerked his head towards the microphone in an aside to an unknown secretary. ‘Don't put that in the report, Beryl.'

Sloan registered this and nodded, his mind wandering away again. He was actually wondering how accurately he could have described his own wife had it been she who had been missing. For one thing, he would have to state from the first that she, too, was well nourished. Mrs Sloan, there was no denying it, favoured Chaucer's Prioress in being ‘by no means undergrown'.

‘No signs of recent dieting visible on the skin,' Dr Dabbe was noting into the microphone again. ‘And no macroscopic evidence of gross injury.'

‘We know the deceased had been very anxious and worried lately about her son, who had had to have a serious operation,' offered Sloan. ‘Comfortable' would have been how he would have had to describe his own wife's figure, although she wouldn't have wanted him to say anything about love handles, for sure: would have been very cross if he had … but not if she was dead and they needed to know why. It might be important then. Death changed things. This woman – Margaret Collins – wouldn't – couldn't – possibly mind how she was described. Not now …

The pathologist was looking carefully at the deceased's fingernails. ‘Manicured and not broken,' he said, taking samples of scrapings from under the nails. He stepped back and scrutinized the whole body. ‘In fact, no external signs of injury at all except to the face—'

‘Ah, the face,' said Sloan. He'd noticed the blood on the woman's face himself while she was still in the maze.

‘A bruised nose and some post-mortem bleeding,' said Dabbe. ‘See how the blood hasn't travelled far?' He bent forward. ‘Distribution consistent with the deceased having fallen forward face downwards on a hard surface after death—'

‘Stone,' supplied Crosby.

‘On which, as you saw, she was spreadeagled somewhat artistically,' Sloan reminded the pathologist.

‘In front of the Minotaur himself,' said Dr Dabbe. ‘Saw please, Burns.'

Crosby shut his eyes.

‘Thank you.' The pathologist took the surgical saw and started to work away at the deceased's cranium. ‘There's a divinity, Sloan, that shapes our ends, roughhew them how we will.'

‘Yes, Doctor,' said Sloan, agreeing with the general principle, even if some magistrates weren't so sure. They still believed that defendants had been masters of their own fates since birth.

‘Some suicidal women take a lot of care about how they're going to look when they're found, you know.'

‘Yes, Doctor.' That was something Sloan was aware of. The doctrine of free will was less certain. It was all very well for the courts to assign all the responsibility to the individual, but it wasn't like that in real life.

‘Do anything for effect, if they have a mind to it, the ladies,' went on Dr Dabbe mordantly. ‘If they've taken an overdose, that is, of course.'

‘Pride is sometimes one of the last of the seven deadly sins to go,' observed Detective Inspector Sloan, trying to remember something in a moralistic play which his church-going mother had made him read when young. Pride hadn't featured at all at Everyman's end, though, now he came to think of it. Everyman, poor fellow, on his way to the tomb had gradually lost all that made life worthwhile – Good Fellowship had gone early and his Five Wits, too. Only his Good Deeds had stayed with him to the last. He said this to Dr Dabbe, while Detective Constable Crosby opened his eyes and then averted them.

‘Dante, you know, didn't even list Pride in his Circles of Hell,' remarked Dabbe. ‘Though lust and gluttony were there.'

‘More harmful than pride, perhaps,' said Sloan moderately. Gluttony didn't give them a lot of grief down at the police station, but the same certainly couldn't always be said for lust …

‘Dante did have a Circle of Hell for those who were violent against the self,' remarked Dabbe as he continued his examination, ‘if that's what's in your minds today, gentlemen.'

‘We have nothing in our minds at the moment, Doctor,' promised Sloan. ‘Not until you put it there.'

‘You're as bad as the surgeons,' grinned Dabbe. ‘They don't know what they're dealing with either until we've told 'em. That right, Burns?'

‘Yes, Doctor,' said Burns.

The pathologist turned his attention from the skull to the alimentary canal. ‘Surely you've heard the one about the physician, the psychiatrist, the surgeon and the pathologist, Inspector?'

‘No, Doctor.' Category jokes were now out at the police station.

‘Well, they were all out duck-shooting together and when one flew over, the physician spent so much time debating what tests he should do to make sure that it was a duck that he lost it … Spencer-Wells, please, Burns … thank you. When the next duck came over the psychiatrist wasn't sure that it was a duck and not repressed anxiety over whether his mother had loved him enough…' He stopped and peered down intently at something in the cadaver that had caught his eye. ‘Retractor, please, Burns, while I take a look at the liver.'

‘Out for a duck,' said Crosby.

‘What's that, Constable?' said the doctor. ‘Where was I?'

‘Shooting ducks,' said Crosby.

‘Oh, yes. Then another duck appeared. The surgeon shot it and turned to the pathologist and asked what it was.'

‘I don't see…', began Crosby.

But the whole atmosphere in the mortuary changed suddenly as Dr Dabbe stooped further over. ‘I think we may have found the cause of death, Sloan – can't be sure, of course, until we've done some more tests – but I should say that some noxious substance had been ingested.'

‘Ah,' said Detective Inspector Sloan, glad he'd instituted a search of the maze for a drinking vessel of any sort at all.

‘Can't tell you what it was yet, Sloan, but the good news from our point of view is that there's some of it left in the stomach contents.'

‘Which should help,' said Detective Constable Crosby, getting ready to go.

The pathologist shrugged. ‘Not all that much, I'm afraid. The noxious substance – if that's what it was – may have killed her, but I reckon someone moved her after she'd had it.' His tone hardened. ‘And they either banged her face on the stone as they arranged her there or her head fell forwards accidentally.' He straightened up. ‘If that's what happened then you could be dealing with murder dressed up as suicide…' He grinned. ‘Nearly as unattractive as mutton dressed as lamb, eh, gentlemen?'

Chapter Eleven

It was difficult to know who was the more upset in the Close at Calleford, the Bishop or his wife.

‘You did what?' exploded Bertram Wallingford on a rising note, his much advertised commitment to non-aggressive behaviour seriously at risk.

‘Oh, Bertie, that poor man,' said Mary, a wife as skilled in deploying diversionary tactics as any other woman. ‘I know that that young Constable couldn't tell us anything when he came for David Collins, but we all know what being asked to identify a body means, don't we?'

‘You gave my favourite dressing gown to the goat?' thundered the Bishop, a man renowned on his diocesan committees for sticking to the matter in hand.

‘Your only dressing gown,' pointed out his wife unapologetically. ‘The police must have been fairly sure it was Margaret Collins, mustn't they, to have come here for her husband like that?'

‘Has the goat eaten it all?' he asked, still undeflected.

‘It was very hungry,' said Mary Wallingford. She reverted to David Collins. ‘As if having his son so ill wasn't enough…'

‘Pelion upon Ossa,' agreed the Bishop, finding as he often did that the Greeks had a better phrase than he could conjure up. He sought for an equally suitable quotation from the Book of Job, but soon gave up. He found, as usual, even to think about Job depressing beyond measure and immediately turned back to his own troubles. ‘I was very fond of that dressing gown, Mary…'

She sighed. ‘That poor little family. I sometimes wonder, Bertie, if the good Lord knows what he's about.'

Bertram Wallingford took a deep breath and was about to launch into a carefully prepared piece, often delivered from his pulpit, about the ways of the Lord being truly mysterious as well as being hidden from the sight of mere mortals, but thought better of it and closed his mouth without saying anything.

‘Apparently David thought his wife was staying at the hospital with little James, which was why he came over here and carried on working yesterday evening,' said Mary.

‘I know Double Felix have got as much work as they can handle,' said the Bishop, momentarily diverted from his grievance. ‘They're a clever pair. They say there's no one to touch them in Calleshire in their own speciality. Did you know that they can conjure up an image just from light?'

Mary Wallingford was not and never had been interested in the sciences. ‘I wish now I'd spent more time with Margaret when I went into the nursery, but we all knew how worried she was and you can't just go on about an illness, can you?'

‘No,' said the Bishop firmly. ‘That only makes it worse.'

‘I wonder what will happen to that poor little boy now? Margaret Collins has a mother somewhere, I know.'

‘Then she'll cope,' said her husband confidently. ‘In my experience grandmothers always do.'

She gave a little laugh. ‘It's funny how a big trouble soon drives out a little one, isn't it? I'd almost forgotten about that dead rabbit and the pentagram.'

‘I hadn't,' said the Bishop seriously. ‘Whichever way you look at it, Mary, it means trouble.'

*   *   *

‘Aye, Inspector,' agreed Dr Angus Browne without hesitation, ‘I gave Margaret Collins a prescription for some sleeping tablets called Crespusculan … let me see now … it must have been a month or more ago.'

‘If we could just have the date, please, doctor…' said Sloan. In his experience, coroners liked firm figures of whatever nature.

‘It was the night before the infant's first operation,' said the general practitioner, handing over a scribbled note on which was spelled the name of the sedative. ‘I can tell you that.'

‘Understandable,' said Sloan.

The doctor peered at the two policemen over the top of his spectacles. ‘Mrs Collins would no' be reassured that the operation itself presented no danger to her son James.'

That was quite understandable in Sloan's view if not that of the medical profession, but he did not say so.

Dr Browne sighed. ‘Besides, both husband and wife had stopped sleeping since the child's condition was diagnosed.'

‘I'm not surprised,' said Crosby stoutly.

‘Mercifully, it's a rare condition,' said the doctor.

‘And the quantity of these tablets?' asked Sloan. Someone would have to be detailed to search the Collinses' house for any that might be left. Somehow he didn't think there would be many.

‘Aye,' said the doctor. ‘I take your point. He glanced down at his notes. ‘Enough, I suppose, to do her a serious injury if she took the lot. I didn't think that likely, of course.'

‘Why not?' asked Crosby.

The general practitioner turned to him. ‘When a child is ill, Constable, motherhood usually triumphs over a depression, however deep.'