Stiff News (6 page)

‘Well, Hamish…' said Mrs Maisie Carruthers.

‘Well, Maisie,' said Brigadier Hamish MacIver.

‘It's been a long time.'

‘A long, long time.'

‘Sir, sir.' Someone was tugging urgently at Sloan's sleeve. ‘Sir, please can you come?'

He turned, missing the rest of the scene in the dining room, to see his detective constable standing directly under the head of a stag fixed to the wall above his head. ‘Well, what is it, Crosby?'

‘The pathologist says he's waiting to start the post-mortem on Gertrude Powell now, sir.'

The detective constable had kept his voice down but the Matron had heard him. She, too, slid quietly out of the dining room and into the corridor, closing the door behind her.

‘I'm sorry, madam,' explained Sloan, ‘but we've got to go now.' He hesitated. ‘We will have to come back, you understand.'

‘I think you should,' said Muriel Peden unexpectedly.

Sloan looked up.

‘I didn't say anything before,' the Matron murmured awkwardly, ‘because I couldn't imagine that it could be important.'

‘Circumstances alter cases,' said Crosby prosaically.

‘But now…' she said as if the constable hadn't spoken.

‘Now?' said Sloan.

‘Now, I think you ought to know, Inspector,' she said, ‘that I – we, that is – have reason to believe that someone may have been into Mrs Powell's room very soon after she'd died.'

‘Been into?'

‘All right then,' she conceded unwillingly, the word almost wrung out of her, ‘searched.'

Chapter Six

And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crookèd scythe and spade

‘And what have we here, Sloan, may I ask?' said Dr H.S. Dabbe, Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury and District Hospitals Trust, by way of welcome to the two policemen standing in the mortuary. His taciturn assistant, Burns, was already helping him into his green operating gown.

‘Body of a female aged eighty-two,' responded Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘who died six days ago.'

‘And what brings you two here as well?' Dr Dabbe raised his eyebrows quizzically as he started to tug on his rubber boots.

‘A written allegation by the deceased,' said Sloan succinctly, ‘that she had been murdered.'

‘Well, well.' The pathologist grinned and said, ‘We don't get a lot of self-referrals in this branch of medical practice. Come to that, Sloan, I don't get many people brought in here in a shroud. You two been body snatching?'

‘Only in a manner of speaking,' said Sloan, explaining the circumstances. ‘Her name is Gertrude Eleanor Murton Powell.'

Dr Dabbe reached for a form. ‘Place of death?'

‘The Manor at Almstone.'

The doctor's pen hovered above the paper. ‘Where did you say?'

‘The Manor at Almstone,' repeated Sloan, adding, ‘I believe that technically speaking its classification is as a residential care and nursing home for the elderly.'

‘One of God's waiting rooms,' said Crosby. In the constable's book, decrepitude set in soon after the age of thirty.

‘The Manor at Almstone…' Dr Dabbe frowned. ‘That rings a bell, you know.'

Under his breath Crosby chanted, ‘Oranges and lemons, said the bells of St Clement's.'

Sloan decided he hadn't heard this and raised an enquiring eyebrow towards the pathologist. At this moment anything – anything at all – to do with the Manor and its residents might be of interest. ‘It does, doctor?' he said encouragingly.

‘It's coming back to me now. What it was,' the pathologist said, ‘if I remember rightly, was that I did rather an odd post-mortem on someone from there not very long ago.'

‘You did?' Sloan leaned forward, all attention now. Dr Dabbe always remembered rightly.

‘Burns,' called out the pathologist, ‘get me the bought ledger, will you, there's a good chap.'

‘The office of the dead,' intoned Crosby. ‘That's where we are.'

Dr Dabbe ignored this. ‘I can't remember the woman's name, not off the top of my head.'

‘Odd, did you say?' Detective Inspector Sloan, policeman first, last and very nearly all the time, seized on the important word in their exchange without difficulty.

‘All right, then, Sloan,' said the pathologist easily. ‘Have it your own way. Shall we say instead that it was slightly unusual?'

‘In what way exactly, doctor?'

‘Actually, Sloan, now I come to think about it, it was odd in two ways,' said Dr Dabbe as his assistant advanced, bearing a heavy old leather-bound volume. ‘Thank you, Burns. Let me see now…' The pathologist ran a bony finger down a list. ‘Don't get any wrong ideas about this book, Sloan. They may make us keep records on computer here but they can't stop us keeping our own as well. Yet. So we still keep this book going, just to be on the safe side … Ah, here we are.' He looked up. ‘I thought so … on the twelfth of last month I performed an autopsy on one Maude Chalmers-Hyde, a female aged seventy-nine, of the Manor at Almstone.'

‘You said unusual in two ways,' Sloan prompted him. They had computers down at the police station, too – and practically everywhere else as well – but he agreed with the pathologist. There was no substitute for the good old-fashioned handwritten policeman's notebook. Concentrated the mind, did a pencil.

‘Unusual in one way, Sloan,' said the pathologist, ‘because it was requested by the deceased's general practitioner.'

‘Ah,' rejoined Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘So that's out of the ordinary, I take it?'

‘It is when the patient's reached that age, multiple pathology being very common by then. Mind you,' added Dabbe, ‘the doctor in this case was Angus Browne of Larking and he's a stickler for having everything right.'

Sloan, upholder of law and order as well as accuracy, said he was glad to hear it.

‘He refused to sign the death certificate,' said Dr Dabbe, ‘and that meant the Coroner ordered a postmortem.'

‘Did he now?' Sloan pulled out his pencil and notebook. ‘Tell me more.'

‘The family were very cut up about it,' murmured Dr Dabbe, ‘and said so.'

‘I'm sure they were,' said Sloan smoothly. Pretty nearly all the families they dealt with in F Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary were cut up about something either literally or metaphorically. He didn't know which was the worse for a policeman to have to deal with.

‘So you cut up the patient instead?' contributed Detective Constable Crosby, who didn't like attending post-mortems and was not averse to any delay in their starting.

‘I did,' responded Dr Dabbe before Sloan could speak to the constable about what someone had once called ‘proper words in proper places'.

‘And?' said the detective inspector.

‘And this is where it was quite unusual in another way,' said Dr Dabbe cheerfully.

‘Tell me,' said Sloan.

‘Because,' said the pathologist solemnly, ‘my post-mortem findings agreed completely with the cause of death diagnosed by her general practitioner but which he had declined to certify to that effect.'

‘Not common?'

‘I shouldn't like to have to tell you how uncommon,' said Dr Dabbe. ‘Not suitable for your young ears. Besides, it might shake your faith in the medical profession or something.'

‘So why had the doctor wanted a post-mortem for this Maude Chalmers-Hyde then?' persisted Crosby with the innocent air of one just wanting to get everything straight.

‘Because,' said the pathologist neatly, ‘Angus Browne hadn't thought she was quite ready to die from the condition from which she had been suffering at the precise moment when she did.'

Sloan hunted for the right word.

‘Untimely?'

‘He thought, like Macbeth, that “she should have died hereafter”,' said Dabbe.

‘When you got to go, you got to go,' said Crosby to nobody in particular.

‘General practitioners get quite good at judging that sort of thing after a time, you know,' remarked Dr Dabbe. ‘Most of 'em develop a feel for knowing when death is nigh.'

‘Practice makes perfect,' said Crosby sententiously.

‘Now then, Sloan,' said Dr Dabbe, pulling on a green cap, ‘are you going to tell me what Angus Browne was quite happy to say this patient died from or am I supposed to make an educated guess?'

Detective Inspector Sloan unfolded a copy of the death certificate that Lionel Powell had given him. ‘Chronic renal failure secondary to hypertension.'

‘Well, that shouldn't be too difficult to demonstrate one way or the other for starters,' said Dabbe. ‘Right, Burns, I'm ready now.'

*   *   *

‘I'll be with you as soon as I can,' Mrs Muriel Peden promised the Powells, withdrawing rapidly. ‘If you'll excuse me, I have some things I must attend to first.'

She had established Lionel and Julia Powell on their own in a small sitting room well away from the more stalwart of the residents still occupying the dining room. Julia Powell sank thankfully into an easy chair.

‘Trust your mother,' said Julia bitterly as soon as the door had closed behind the Matron, ‘to be embarrassing right to the end.' She was really wondering if it would be in order for her to slip her shoes off in here. She compromised by carefully easing her right foot out of its tight black patent-leather casing.

‘She could always be trusted to do that,' said Lionel with a notable absence of filial piety.

‘She couldn't even die quietly.' Julia let out a deep sigh as the shoe came off. ‘Ah … that's better.'

‘She was in a coma for three days,' pointed out Lionel with meticulous accuracy.

‘I didn't mean that.' The relief of taking her right shoe off was so great that Julia promptly kicked off the left one too. ‘I meant she couldn't die – well – decently like everyone else.'

‘But…'

‘You know what I mean, Lionel, and it's no use your pretending you don't.'

He answered the thought rather than her words. ‘We can't get away from the letter whatever we do.'

‘It might just have been your mother's idea of a joke,' said Julia Powell, her face flushed with champagne.

‘It might,' he agreed cautiously.

‘You know what she was like.'

‘Only too well,' he groaned. ‘Incorrigible. Absolutely incorrigible.'

‘I wouldn't put it past her myself,' said Julia Powell, aided by generous quantities of white wine as well as champagne.

‘Neither would I,' admitted Lionel morosely.

‘And,' Julia Powell almost wailed, ‘we still can't find it.'

‘No.'

‘Are you quite sure they've given you all her papers?'

‘How can I be sure?' he asked. ‘How can anyone be sure? Her letters have all gone … and as to who took them and why, it's anyone's guess.'

‘After all,' she said as if he had not spoken, ‘you are one of your mother's executors.'

‘That, at least,' he said with a touch of irony, ‘is not in any doubt.'

She sank back in the chair. ‘Well, Lionel, what are you going to do about it?'

‘I'm not sure.'

Julia sighed in pure exasperation. Lionel's responses were always literal.

He said gloomily, ‘We must accept the fact that we may never find it.'

‘Your mother was married to someone after her first husband was killed…'

‘So she always said.'

‘… and before she met your father.'

‘Before she
married
my father,' Lionel corrected her automatically. ‘She may have met him before.'

Julia dismissed this as hair-splitting and got straight to the point. ‘Well, why can't we find out who?'

Lionel Powell steepled his fingers very much as he did in the office when he was composing his thoughts before commencing dictating an important memorandum. ‘Because, my dear, we do not know the country in which this … alliance … took place.'

‘If it did,' she bounced back at him.

‘Exactly.' He started to enumerate points on his fingers. ‘First of all we have no real evidence that she did marry someone else.'

‘She always said she had.'

‘That, Julia, as I have said many times before, is not evidence.'

‘But…'

‘What my mother said was always – let us say – imaginative but unreliable.'

‘You don't have to tell me that,' snapped his wife. ‘And what about the famous Tulloch treasure that she was always talking about? How do we know that it – whatever it might have been – ever existed?'

‘We don't.'

‘Have you ever seen anything that might have been it?'

‘Never,' said Lionel.

‘Neither have I.' She sniffed. ‘And if it's jewellery that she hadn't wanted me to have, which I can quite understand…' It was something she couldn't actually understand at all and paused for her husband to protest at this, but he didn't so she hurried on, ‘… you'd have thought she'd at least have shown it to the girls. She was fond enough of them.'

‘You would.'

‘So, if it still exists, where is it?'

‘She might,' said Lionel, ‘have left it in the bank or in a safe deposit somewhere. But there isn't a receipt with her things.'

‘That doesn't prove anything, does it?'

He replied mildly, ‘It makes it more difficult to locate though.'

‘She was always boasting about the things different men had given her,' said Julia with distaste.

‘I don't think she married them all,' he said drily. ‘And for what it's worth, my father told me that she was absolutely penniless – really down on her beam ends – when he married her, so everything would have been gone by then in any case.'