Some Die Eloquent (7 page)

‘Yes?'

‘They used to have a couple of old women.'

‘Did they, sir?' Sloan shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He hadn't come here on a busy day to be lectured on ancient customs. He was a police officer and he'd come about a sudden death.

‘They called them Searchers.'

‘Really, sir?' It was Sloan's invariable practice to allow other people to give him information – however recondite – without let or hindrance. Or interruption.

‘Two of them,' said the coroner gratuitously, ‘used to totter along to the graveside and view the dead before burial.'

‘Did they, sir?' He himself felt no necessity to bring the Bow Street Runners into the conversation.

‘They made up their minds what the cause of death was.'

‘It was one way of doing it, sir, I suppose.'

‘None of this stainless-steel nonsense,' said the coroner, dismissing several thousand pounds' worth of highly sophisticated forensic pathology equipment with a wave of the hand.

‘No.' That would have saved the taxpayers a packet, though Sloan did not say so.

‘Then they'd pop round and tell the Parish Clerk.'

‘No red tape,' observed Sloan, aware that some remark was expected of him.

‘He kept a stroke record,' said the coroner.

‘Saved a lot of paper work,' agreed Sloan, entering into the spirit of the thing in spite of himself.

‘And before you could say “Jack Robinson”,' said the coroner, ‘you had your Bill of Mortality.'

‘Not,' remarked Sloan, ‘quite as accurate as the Registrar General's Statistics but good enough.'

The coroner re-adjusted his pince-nez and looked thoughtful. ‘No three-ring Civil Servant circus either, of course.'

‘And so,' said Sloan, making a game attempt to get back to the matter in hand, ‘you'll just notify the Registrar General that Miss Wansdyke died from the complications of diabetes?'

‘I shall say,' said the coroner cautiously, ‘that the pathologist so advises me and that I deem an inquest not necessary in all the circumstances that have been presented to me. I may, of course,' he added unconvincingly, ‘be in error.'

Mr Chestley might have considered this last possibility a little more seriously had he been present when Sloan got back to the police station.

Detective-Constable Crosby rang in just after he reached his desk.

‘You've done what, Crosby?' demanded Sloan martially. ‘Say that again!'

‘Found her dog, sir.'

‘You're sure it's hers?'

‘Long legs and short hair, sir, like you and Dr Dabbe said. An Airedale.'

‘Answering to the name of Isolde?' said Sloan. It was not a name he for one would care to go around the streets of Berebury late at night calling out aloud, but even so …

‘Not answering to any name, sir. Not now.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Dead,' said Crosby lugubriously.

CHAPTER VI

No one can stop until there's nothing left.

At the Berebury District General Hospital Nurse Briony Petforth came off duty from Fleming Ward with relief. She thankfully changed out of her uniform into a soft blue and brown mixture matching skirt and jerkin that went well with her auburn hair. After a moment or two's consideration she selected a rather more dressy blouse to go under her jerkin and slipped a couple of strings of contrasting beads into her handbag. They would do for later.

She debated with herself for a moment whether she should telephone the ante-natal clinic again but in the end she decided against it. Roger Elspin knew where she was going. He would come along as soon as he could get away from the clinic and the ward. She sighed. Obstetrics was no speciality for a clock-watcher.

Dermatology, she decided, was what he could take up after they got married. Skin patients never needed their doctor urgently in the middle of a dinner-party, or got him up in the small hours of the night either. They never died – and seldom got better, for that matter – and yet were always profoundly grateful for whatever could be done for them that helped. Dermatology it would have to be.

Having thus mentally resolved the professional fate of one promising young obstetric surgeon, she slipped on a duffel coat and made her way across the town to North Berebury. Her cousin, George Wansdyke, and his wife Pauline lived in a detached house in Cullum Crescent. They received her with relief.

‘Poor Briony,' said Pauline Wansdyke with a shudder. ‘Come in and sit down. I couldn't have looked at Aunt Beatrice like you did. I really couldn't.'

‘I didn't mind.' Briony brushed this to one side, marvelling, as she always did, at Pauline's capacity for striking just the wrong note.

‘I couldn't have done it,' repeated Pauline Wansdyke dramatically, ‘not if I'd been the last person on earth.'

‘We've all got to die,' said Briony briefly. ‘There's nothing unnatural about that.'

‘That's the trouble with doctors and nurses,' complained Pauline Wansdyke. ‘They get so unfeeling.'

‘No, they don't,' countered Briony spiritedly.

‘Dr Paston wasn't in the least bit sympathetic about my bad back,' said Mrs Wansdyke, not listening. ‘Just rheumatism, he said, and nobody knew how painful it was.'

‘Doctors and nurses have feelings just like everyone else,' insisted Briony Petforth, forbearing to remind her that everyone – but everyone – had known all about how painful Pauline's back had been. ‘More than some people, actually.'

‘Not Dr Paston,' said Pauline, always inclined to the personal. ‘He was quite unfeeling, I can assure you.'

‘But …'

‘He gave me some white tablets that didn't begin to touch the pain and told me to go away.'

‘He did say to come back if you weren't any better, though,' put in her husband fairly.

‘It's just,' continued Briony Petforth, more to herself than to the Wansdykes, ‘that doctors and nurses have to adjust to all the unhappiness around them all the time early on.'

‘Learn to live with it,' nodded George Wansdyke.

‘But I don't see why …' began Pauline.

‘Otherwise,' said Briony, between clenched teeth, ‘they'd go stark, raving mad, that's why!'

‘Pauline was just going to make some tea,' interposed George Wansdyke swiftly. He was adept now at smoothing over any hiatus created by his wife's approach to the world. ‘And the children are in bed, so sit down and tell me exactly what happened at the hospital.'

Briony sank thankfully into a chair. ‘Nothing much, really, George. I identified Aunt Beatrice as Beatrice Gwendolyn Wansdyke, that's all.'

‘Sorry I wasn't there,' he said. ‘I would have come.'

‘I know you would,' she said. ‘Couldn't be helped.'

‘I've been on to Morton's,' he said carefully. ‘They don't know what all the fuss was about either.'

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘No harm done. In fact, now we know for sure that it was the diabetes, don't we?'

‘Yes, indeed,' agreed George. ‘Not that there was ever any doubt in my mind.'

‘There was in someone's,' pointed out Briony, ‘otherwise …'

‘Quite,' said George Wansdyke. ‘Anyway, everything should be plain sailing from now on, shouldn't it?'

‘I hope so,' said the girl fervently. ‘I hope so.'

There was a pause and then she said more casually, ‘Roger's coming round to collect me as soon as he comes off duty.'

Wansdyke nodded. ‘Right.'

‘We're going out somewhere to eat.' She pushed back a stray lock of hair. ‘Not that I'm hungry.'

‘No,' said Wansdyke, ‘but I dare say you'll have plans to make.'

She looked at him curiously. ‘Perhaps.'

‘If you're not going to live in the house in Ridley Road you'll have to decide what to do about it pretty quickly, my dear. An empty house is just an open invitation to squatters these days. You can't just leave it.'

‘Don't rush me, George. Not yet. I'm … I'm not used to Aunt Beatrice not being there yet.'

‘Sorry. Take all the time you need, Briony.' He pointed to a bureau in the corner. ‘I haven't really begun to look at her affairs anyway. I've been devilish busy at work. Malcolm's been on this export trip to the States. He'll be back on Thursday, though, for this product launching we've got laid on and then I'll be more my own man again, thank goodness.'

Briony yawned. ‘Poor Aunt Beatrice never found her particular crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, did she?'

George Wansdyke shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. But she enjoyed looking for it.'

‘Perhaps that's all that matters.'

‘Travelling hopefully, you mean?' He gave her a quizzical look.

Briony wasn't really listening. ‘That's your front-door bell, isn't it? Roger's got away early if it's him.'

It wasn't Dr Roger Elspin at the front door. It was Detective-Inspector Sloan and Detective-Constable Crosby.

The Superintendent never gave up. Bulldogs as a breed had nothing on Superintendent Leeyes when his jaws were locked firmly on to a problem. Nor was he one to accept a dead end. Immediately after writing off the post mortem he had proceeded to turn his mind to other aspects of the death of Miss Beatrice Wansdyke.

It was therefore not very long before he came up with the question which came – like Death – late or soon to Everyman. Or at any rate to every policeman.

‘Who benefits, Sloan?' he demanded. ‘Tell me that.'

Which was how it was that Detective-Inspector Sloan and Detective-Constable Crosby came to be ringing the doorbell of a house called ‘The Laurels' in Cullum Crescent, Berebury, at this particular moment. George Wansdyke admitted them.

‘Of course. Come in,' he said, when Sloan had explained who they were. ‘We were expecting someone to come along to tell us what all the fuss was about.'

Sloan decided that that line would serve as as good an introduction as he was ever likely to get.

‘We're sorry to have bothered you, sir,' he said, slipping easily into a semideferential manner which, had they been privileged to witness it, would have at the same time both considerably startled Larky Nolson and vastly amused Mrs Margaret Sloan. It was nicely done. The tone implied apology without actually meaning it. ‘Some sort of mix-up somewhere along the line …'

‘No trouble,' said Wansdyke, equally magnanimous. ‘Briony … Inspector, this is my cousin, Miss Petforth.'

‘We have met,' said Sloan. ‘At the hospital.'

‘Oh, really?' He looked up as his wife came back into the room. ‘Pauline, dear, these are police officers who have come to tell us about poor Aunt Beatrice.'

‘Poor Aunt Beatrice,' echoed Pauline Wansdyke without noticeable conviction.

‘Briony – Miss Petforth, here – stood in for me at the identification,' said George to Sloan.

‘You're her executor, though, sir, aren't you?'

‘I am indeed.' He shrugged his shoulders ruefully. ‘Not that I imagine that the duties are likely to be – er – exactly onerous.'

‘Oh?' said Sloan, utterly deadpan.

‘Her pension rights die with her, of course, as she didn't reach sixty …'

Like the mustard left on the plate, that was where the pension fund money was, thought Sloan to himself.

‘… and the house goes outright to Briony here,' continued George.

Briony flushed but said nothing.

‘I see,' said Sloan mendaciously. ‘And the residue?'

‘She wasn't a rich woman,' said George Wansdyke.

‘No?'

‘My grandparents left her a little, naturally, including a small stake in the firm.'

Sloan looked expectant. ‘She wasn't their only child, though?'

‘Of course not.' George Wansdyke looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Otherwise she wouldn't have a niece, would she? But she had nursed them both, and my father – her brother – had built up the firm into something by then.'

Sloan, who could count as well as the next man, said: ‘And Miss Petforth's mother?'

‘Cut off with a shilling,' said Briony, flushing again.

‘She was not mentioned in the wills of either of my grandparents,' said Wansdyke.

‘I see.'

‘My mother, you might as well know, ran off with a no-good-boyo,' said Briony Petforth, showing a working acquaintance with the works of the late Dylan Thomas as well as a sense of humour.

‘My grandparents were very old-fashioned,' said Wansdyke stiffly.

‘When my great-aunt married the coachman,' said Pauline Wansdyke, ‘her parents went into black and never mentioned her name again. They were Hartley-Powells, of course.'

‘They turned my Auntie Nellie's picture to the wall,' contributed Detective-Constable Crosby chattily.

Everyone looked in his direction.

‘She didn't marry anyone,' said Crosby. ‘That was the trouble.'

Pauline Wansdyke wasn't used to being upstaged.

‘They drew the window blinds, too, on the day she married,' she said firmly, ‘as if she'd died, and then they rubbed her name out of the family Bible.'

‘My parents did die, Inspector,' said Briony softly. ‘In a car accident when we were little.'

‘We?' queried Sloan.

The interrogative hung unacknowledged for a moment.

‘My brother and I,' said Briony after a pause.

‘Winding up Beatrice's estate,' interposed George Wansdyke fussily, ‘won't be a difficult matter.'

‘Good,' said Sloan warmly. If George Wansdyke believed that, then like somebody else, he could believe anything.

‘She had a friend called Hilda Collins,' said Wansdyke obliquely. ‘She gets a little. An eighth, actually. So does Dr Paston.'

‘Her general practitioner?'