Inheritance Tracks, page 18
‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ said Pickford, baffled, ‘but I thought all the same I’d ask you about something very odd that’s happened.’
‘Ask me what?’
‘Ask you if it was you who’d spilt the beans on me about what happened with Jim Stopford and the rugby club.’
‘Certainly not. I wouldn’t do a thing like that and you should know it. Why do you ask?’
‘The police have been out to see him at his farm, that’s why. Twice.’
‘What about?’
‘That’s the funny thing. The first time they said it was because of that little tiff Jim Stopford and I had at the Bellingham the other night, though why that should interest the police all that much I don’t know. That sort of thing must happen all the time.’
‘Little tiff? That doesn’t sound like an accurate description of the right good mauling Stopford gave you after he found out what you’d been up to. Not that I blame him myself. It was a rotten trick to play on him and just what you deserved.’
Martin Pickford ignored this jibe and went on. ‘And then they went back again later with men in white overalls and masks and took some samples away with them from a field of rye on his farm.’
‘Why on earth would they want to do that?’ Culshaw frowned.
‘Search me, Tom, but it turns out that Jim Stopford usually sells the rye crop on his farm to your sainted brother.’
‘Does he, indeed?’ remarked Tom Culshaw. ‘That’s interesting. Where does Mr Bun the Baker come into the picture?’
‘What picture?’ asked Martin Pickford, unfamiliar with the card game of Happy Families.
‘The Culshaw picture or, rather, the Mayton one.’
Martin Pickford looked quite bewildered now. ‘Don’t ask me. I don’t know.’ After a long pause he said awkwardly, ‘There is something about the Mayton matter, though, that I did want to ask you.’
‘Like what?’ Tom said discouragingly. ‘And I’ll tell you now that if it’s anything like last time, I’m not going to do it.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Tom Culshaw, ‘whatever it is.’
‘You see, I’m a bit up the creek financially.’
‘You mean you’re having money troubles,’ translated Tom.
‘And how.’
‘Why?’ asked Culshaw bluntly.
‘I’ve just got the push from my firm. Sacked. Actually, what they said was that I was being let go.’
‘I do know what all those expressions mean,’ said Tom.
‘The same.’ Martin sighed.
‘So why – not how – were your employers prepared to manage without you?’
Martin suspecting – but not understanding – irony, rushed into an explanation. ‘I didn’t turn up to work on Monday morning for an important meeting and they didn’t like it.’
‘Overdid it at the weekend and slept in, did you?’ suggested Tom solicitously.
‘I got my place in the county team – thanks to you, of course,’ he added hastily, ‘and we won big time on Saturday.’
‘And drank big time, too, I guess.’
‘It wasn’t only that.’
‘No?’
‘My face got a bit bashed in the maul and I didn’t look exactly like the promising young businessman they wanted representing their firm.’
‘I can well believe it,’ said Tom, scanning the other man’s still bruised face and missing front tooth.
‘I was practically black and blue all over and could hardly walk straight.’
‘So?’
‘So, since your outfit Gordian Knots do jobs that other people won’t do …’
‘Can’t do …’
‘I was wondering if we could find this missing man called Daniel Elland …’
‘I know what he’s called,’ said Tom.
‘Then we could all …’
‘All?’
‘Well, obviously not Susan Port, but I’m sure the rest of us could then have some of the ready to be going on with. I could settle my money worries and so could anyone else if they’ve got them, too. And then it wouldn’t matter if it took me a little longer to get another job.’
Tom Culshaw sighed and said, ‘You’d better sit down.’
‘I mean,’ explained Martin, lowering himself carefully into a chair as if the rest of him hurt, too, ‘we know roughly where he’s hanging out because of that other down-and-out having a go at your brother.’
‘But not the name Daniel Elland’s using now. Remember, we don’t even know that,’ pointed out Tom, ‘or what he looks like these days.’ He didn’t mention this to Martin, but he had already acquired a studio photograph of a business-suited Daniel Elland in his prime as chairman of his own company and persuaded a skilled techno friend to create a computerised picture of roughly what the man might look like suitably aged and ill-cared-for.
‘People’s faces don’t change,’ protested Martin.
‘Unless they get damaged,’ said Tom pointedly. ‘Rugby boots don’t do them a lot of good.’
‘Being broke doesn’t help how you look, either,’ said Martin. ‘I’m sure I’ve lost weight. My face is thinner already and I’ll be totally skint in a week.’
‘Why tell me? Are you hoping I’ll do a second job for you for free, because if so, you’re barking up the wrong tree.’
‘No, no, it’s not that.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s that two heads are better than one, especially if one of them’s yours.’
‘Flattery will get you nowhere, Pickford.’
‘It’s true, all the same,’ he insisted. ‘Brain is better than brawn.’
‘Even for rugby players?’ asked Culshaw ironically.
‘Don’t be like that. It’s not funny.’
‘Had it ever occurred to you, Martin, that since someone else is looking for Daniel Elland, too, that you or I might also be in danger if we tried to find him?’
Martin flexed his not inconsiderable muscles and said, ‘I don’t mind that – I like a good fight.’ He put up his fists like a boxer and waved his left one at Tom. ‘I call this one “Hospital” and the other,’ he said, bringing up his right fist alongside the left one, ‘“Graveyard”.’
Tom Culshaw sighed and shook his head.
‘It’s high time you grew up, Pickford. You’re not ten years old any longer, you know.’
‘What is it now?’ asked Superintendent Leeyes irritably when Sloan appeared at his office door. ‘I’ve got to go to a meeting of the Corporation’s Watch Committee or whatever it is that they call themselves now.’ He scowled. ‘They won’t leave any names alone these days. You can’t tell where you are.’
Detective Inspector Sloan knew better than to try and unseat his superior officer from one of his favourite hobbyhorses and so stayed silent.
‘They think,’ Leeyes grumbled, ‘that if they can change an outfit’s name people will forget whatever mistakes they’ve made in the past but they won’t.’
‘No, sir.’
‘And the press always puts the old name in as well as the new one so no one forgets, anyway.’
‘Naturally, sir,’ agreed Sloan, remembering somewhere to do with nuclear production in the north-west of England. Both its new name and its old one always came into his mind – and that of newspaper editors – concurrently.
‘Anyway, Sloan, I’ve got to be there any minute now and you know what they’re like.’
Sloan didn’t actually know what the Watch Committee was like but he felt as if he did from listening to Leeyes’ many animadversions about its workings in the past.
‘Bunch of interfering old nonentities, with ideas well above their station, that’s what they are,’ declared the superintendent, ‘and now they think that I can get rid of all our rough sleepers at a stroke.’
‘Sir.’ Sloan advanced a step forward and coughed. ‘Dr Dabbe’s report has just come through. He’s heard from the forensic laboratory about that man Terry Galloway’s post-mortem at last.’
‘About time too,’ said Leeyes testily.
‘And the cause of death was poisoning. Not the head injury.’
Superintendent Leeyes, poised to leave, stopped in his tracks. ‘Don’t say he’d been taking ergot, too? Or,’ he added an afterthought, ‘been given it with malice aforethought?’
‘No, sir. I understand that there was no trace of ergot in his body. He died from an overdose of a drug called Ameliorite.’
‘And what, pray, might that be?’ asked Leeyes, who every now and then took Winston Churchill’s prose as his model.
‘Dr Dabbe said that it’s a powerful painkiller with very pronounced sedative side effects.’
‘Not the original head injury, then?’
‘It would seem not, sir.’
‘Don’t be so mealy-mouthed, Sloan. It either was or it wasn’t.’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘So someone had it in for him as well as for his godmother,’ concluded the superintendent slowly.
Sloan nodded. ‘First a blow on the head, which didn’t do the trick …’
‘Can’t have been hard enough,’ said Leeyes.
‘… and then poison, which did do the trick.’
‘And how, may I ask, did whoever gave it to him get hold of the stuff?’
Detective Inspector Sloan turned over a page in his notebook. ‘I’m looking into that now, sir. The hospital seems the most likely source.’
‘Go on.’
‘A drug cabinet at the hospital was broken into last Saturday evening. I’ve seen the incident file now.’
‘The night Galloway was killed?’
Sloan nodded. ‘It was reported by the ward sister and the duty doctor who came across the damage when starting the drug round in the Accident and Emergency ward that night. They checked what had been stolen – quite a lot of the more addictive drugs had been taken …’
‘And that one you mentioned?’
‘Ameliorite? Yes, sir. Some but not a lot.’
‘Saturday night, when presumably they are at their busiest,’ nodded Leeyes. Saturday night was when the police were at their busiest, too. ‘Good timing.’
‘And they usually have plenty of experienced low lifes about in the department then.’ Sloan snapped his notebook shut. ‘Breaking into anything wouldn’t have been too difficult for most of them. Been doing it for years, a lot of them, I daresay. And there would have been addicts among them, to be sure.’
Leeyes nodded. ‘Bound to have been.’
‘We’re going back there next to take another look into it, now that we know about Ameliorite being used to kill Galloway.’
The superintendent nodded. ‘And we still don’t know the reason why the man was killed?’
Detective Inspector Sloan, a veteran of working under Superintendent Leeyes, was relieved to hear his superior’s use of the plural pronoun ‘we’. It was when Leeyes said ‘you’ and not ‘we’ that indicated that he wasn’t going to share the problem with the force’s Criminal Investigation Department. ‘I’m afraid that we don’t, sir,’ he said, tacitly acknowledging Leeyes’ stance in the matter. ‘Not yet, that is.’
Leeyes grunted.
‘All I think we can assume at this stage, sir,’ hurried on Sloan, ‘is that there is something in Susan Port’s cottage that someone didn’t want him to find.’
‘Or perhaps had been there,’ pointed out Leeyes, ‘once upon a time but not by then.’
‘And maybe that someone was there lying in wait for him,’ said Sloan, mindful of a smashed kitchen window.
‘Or was just seen by him and who didn’t want to be seen by him, Sloan. Someone, at a guess, who shouldn’t have been there in the first place.’
‘But he’d only just arrived from Australia the day before. He couldn’t have known anyone and they couldn’t have known him.’ He paused. ‘There was quite a good photograph of Galloway on the sideboard, though, come to think of it. The deceased must have been very fond of him.’
‘And why was someone there in the cottage in the first place?’ Leeyes asked, ignoring sentiment. ‘And what was he or she looking for, anyway?’
If Detective Inspector Sloan had been talking to a friend or colleague, he would have said, ‘Search me.’ Instead he said in quite a different tone that he couldn’t possibly say, not at this stage of the investigation, ‘Unless it was the deceased’s computer.’
‘If we knew that we’d know everything, Sloan.’
‘Not quite everything, sir. We’ve got the computer here and that hasn’t helped us so far.’
‘If whatever it was he …’
‘Or she,’ said Sloan, ever mindful of Woman Sergeant Perkins.
‘If that which he was searching for,’ said Leeyes, rising above this, ‘is in the deceased’s computer, we still don’t know what it was, do we?’
‘No, sir.’
‘But nevertheless, Sloan, remember that it might matter so much as to kill a man for.’
‘The experts are still examining it for any sort of clue, sir. Apparently, it can be a long job.’
‘So how did this other stuff …’
‘Ameliorite.’
‘Get into the godson?’
‘We don’t know that yet, sir, either. It’s manufactured for delivery by both tablet and injection. Dr Dabbe said he would have to repeat his examination of the body before he could say which, the patient having had a number of needles stuck into him in the hospital.’
‘As they do,’ said Leeyes, never a good patient.
‘The pathologist was happy, though, that it accounted for the liver damage that he found.’
‘I’m glad somebody’s happy,’ said Leeyes morosely, ‘because I’m not.’
Resisting the temptation to say, ‘Me neither,’ Detective Inspector Sloan murmured that he was afraid that they still didn’t know who had administered the fatal dose of Ameliorite, or when or where, and that they were checking whether Galloway had been given an accidental overdose in the ambulance. ‘The attendants could have thought that the patient might have been in great pain.’
‘What about that man who was on bed watch? You’ve seen him, I trust.’
‘He swears no one out of the ordinary came on the neurology ward all the time he was there – the patient arrived at nine o’clock from the Accident and Emergency ward – that’s including the doctors and nurses on duty that night, and he checked them all out.’
‘And he was there all the time, I take it?’ said Leeyes.
‘So he says, sir, and he’s pretty reliable.’
‘So I should hope,’ said Leeyes absently. ‘By the way, that field of rye that forensics was looking into? Anything back from them yet?’
‘They said there had been a lot of rye growing in the field and subsequently sold to Clive Culshaw’s firm but that they couldn’t possibly tell whether any of it had had mould growing on it.’
‘Mould?’
‘On which ergot can grow.’
‘Can?’ Leeyes pounced. ‘Did it?’
‘Not that they could establish but, on the other hand, they couldn’t swear that there hadn’t been any either.’ The phrase that had come most readily to Sloan’s mind when he had read the report was ‘Yes, we have no bananas’.
Superintendent Leeyes sighed heavily. ‘I don’t like it, Sloan. If you ask me this is a case where it’s one step forward and two steps backward at every turn.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
‘And what time was this break-in, Doctor?’
Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby were at Berebury Hospital questioning the young house surgeon and Sister Peters about exactly when the drug cabinet had been smashed, the report from the original investigating officer in their hands.
Dr Chomel wrinkled her nose. ‘It must have been sometime on Saturday evening, Inspector, but I couldn’t say exactly when.’
‘I can,’ said Samantha Peters immediately. ‘It’s bound to have been when I was on handover just after eight o’clock, or I would have been around and heard it. You, Dr Chomel, if you remember, were dealing with that stabbing in Bay Five. We very nearly lost him.’
Dr Chomel nodded. ‘That’s right, Sister. So I was.’ She turned to the two policemen and explained, ‘Stabbings are always more serious than they appear from the outside. A blade can go through an artery before you can say—’
‘Knife,’ put in Crosby, smirking.
She looked at him in a calculating way for a long moment and then went on in an even voice, ‘It’s not necessarily that it does so – what really matters is that you can’t tell whether or not the knife’s severed the artery before the patient bleeds to death.’
‘The hospital did inform the police of the break-in at the time because of the street value of some of the drugs that had been stolen,’ said Samantha Peters. ‘And we told them that a man from our ward had said that he’d got lost looking for X-ray, although it’s quite clearly signposted. Where he got to, I can’t imagine.’
‘Do you know who he was?’ asked Sloan.
‘I don’t know who he was, Inspector, only what he called himself, and that was Little Sir Echo, and he had a dog with him, in spite of our rules on animals.’
‘So what went walkabout, then?’ asked Crosby, peering at the newly repaired drug cabinet. He had been instructed to make a list and wanted to get on with it.
‘Morphine, mostly, Constable, and all our stock of heroin as well as any other major painkillers that would have been in there, such as pethidine and ketamine – Dorothy, they call that,’ said the nurse. ‘Cocaine, too, although we don’t use all that much of it these days.’
‘Ameliorite?’ suggested Sloan.
‘Some, probably, but not a lot,’ she said. ‘It’s not all that popular with the junkies – especially if they can get their hands on anything better.’
‘Better?’ queried Sloan.
‘Ameliorite’s a good enough painkiller, Inspector, but it’s quite slow-acting and doesn’t deliver any of the real kicks, which is what the druggies are after. Highs.’
