Inheritance Tracks, page 3
‘Which doctor?’ asked Sloan.
Detective Constable Crosby, a young man with a low boredom threshold, muttered, ‘They’re all witch doctors. They should wear pointy hats.’
Doris Dyson, not understanding, ignored this and replied to Sloan. ‘Dr Browne, of course. He sees to everyone round here.’
‘And what did he say?’ asked Sloan. Dr Angus Browne’s surgery was going to be the next port of call for the police, but he didn’t say so.
‘Like what we had thought – still some form of food poisoning, although he couldn’t say what. Not without doing some tests.’ Doris Dyson sniffed once more. ‘It’s what the doctors say all the time these days, isn’t it? Won’t make up their minds without them now.’
Detective Inspector Sloan nodded gravely. In his book that was an improvement on the past. His own grandparents had lived at a time when pathology wasn’t advanced enough for any tests for some dire conditions that exist, let alone be reliable, or for there to be a cure for those same dire conditions, once diagnosed.
‘Anyways,’ said Mrs Dyson, ‘whatever they were he didn’t get the results back in time to prescribe anything useful.’
This was something Sloan did understand. Many of his own cases had been held up because forensics hadn’t got back to him quickly enough for his liking. The fortnight that seemed commonplace to the police laboratory to report results nearly drove him to despair. The importance of keeping up the heat of an investigation was something those bench-bound boffins just didn’t seem to comprehend.
‘Then what?’ he asked now.
‘She got worse,’ said Doris Dyson lugubriously. ‘Much worse. She started to feel the cold so much that I had to bring some of my own blankets over from my place for her, not that the weather had turned or anything. I piled them on top of her, but even then she still complained of being cold. Then …’
‘Then?’ prompted Sloan.
‘She started not being able to sleep. Time and again she went all night without dropping off. The doctor gave her something for that, too, but it didn’t work either. That’s when I started to get worried. Not that not having slept a wink all night seemed to make her tired. That was the funny thing.’
‘I’ll say,’ said Crosby, himself always notably irritable after a bad night.
‘We could none of us understand that,’ she said.
‘Go on,’ said Sloan.
Doris Dyson drew breath and said impressively, ‘Then quite suddenly she went into meltdown.’
‘Meltdown?’
‘She started to see things that weren’t there,’ said Mrs Dyson.
Detective Inspector Sloan metaphorically sat up. ‘What sort of things?’
‘Animals, mostly, she told me, and in ever such bright colours. Not,’ Mrs Dyson went on, ‘proper animals, mind you, but weird ones.’
‘Such as?’ prompted Sloan.
‘Such as lizards with horns in funny places, men with tails and eggs with people’s parts sticking out of them. Bats, everywhere, with swords coming out of their mouths, too. She said it was like a painting by someone – I can’t remember the name now – it sounded like Bosh, and if you ask me pure bosh it was. But she said it was the colours that really frightened her.’
‘On the magic mushrooms, was she?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby with an informality that Sloan, officially his mentor, could only deplore. It was no way to begin a delicate line of questioning.
Detective Inspector Sloan might have taken the query amiss, but Mrs Dyson didn’t.
‘That’s what I wondered,’ she said frankly, ‘seeing as how that was how young David from the pub behaved after he’d been on them for a bit. Don’t know exactly what, but David had certainly been on something. He saw elephants.’
‘Sounds to me as if she was away in La-La Land,’ scoffed Detective Constable Crosby.
Sloan had to make a heroic effort not to remind the constable that his opinion hadn’t been sought, deliberately postponing a reproof until they were alone. It was the duty of a police officer to listen, not to pontificate, a fact that it seemed Detective Constable Crosby had not yet grasped.
‘They had to stop young David from the pub from jumping off the belfry tower,’ Mrs Dyson informed them. ‘In fact, I did ask her if she’d been mushrooming. Plenty of ’em in the woods round here – good and bad. Being from the town she wouldn’t have known one from t’other.’
‘And?’ said Sloan.
‘She did say she’d gathered some mushrooms but not lately,’ said Mrs Dyson. ‘I told her next time she had to ask me before she ate any of them.’
‘Goes with the territory,’ said Crosby, who had not long ago been on a course on the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. ‘Jumping off high places, I mean.’
Doris Dyson’s face hardened and she said tonelessly, ‘Then she took a real turn for the worse and we had to send for Dr Browne in a hurry. She’d climbed up on her kitchen roof – it was one of those cat-slide ones that you can get up easily − and she was talking gibberish. The doctor came straight out here and said he’d get her into hospital at Berebury immediately, but before the ambulance arrived, poor Sue had slipped down off the roof, fallen and died. Just like that, poor thing.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘About whom?’ Dr Angus Browne asked the two policemen across the desk in his consulting room.
‘A patient of yours, Doctor, a Mrs Susan Mary Port,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, his notebook at the ready, ‘of Pear Tree Cottage, Church Lane, Bishop’s Marbourne.’
‘Ah, yes. Died yesterday,’ said the doctor promptly. ‘I had already arranged for her to be admitted to hospital in Berebury as an emergency because she had taken a turn for the worse, but in the event she died suddenly at home after a fall and before the ambulance could get her there. Naturally, in those circumstances I wasn’t prepared to issue a death certificate.’
‘Why not?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby naively. ‘She was dead, wasn’t she?’
‘Because, Constable,’ explained Dr Browne patiently, ‘I couldn’t certify the cause of death. The fact of death certainly, the mode of death possibly, but not the cause, and I therefore immediately advised the coroner to that effect.’
Sloan made a mental note that that meant the coroner’s officer, PC York, would have been involved, it being his responsibility to carry out the coroner’s orders as to the removal of the body. He would have a word with him back at the police station later.
The doctor was still talking. ‘As far as I was concerned, her problems started off as what at first sight appeared to be a straightforward case of food poisoning. Vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal pain and so forth.’
‘The usual,’ put in Detective Constable Crosby, who had once dined unwisely on mussels and lived – just – to regret it.
‘Quite so,’ said Dr Browne, peering at the two policemen over the top of his glasses. ‘She lived alone so there was no one else involved with the same symptoms. I was waiting to see if she was an index patient, but she wasn’t.’
Detective Inspector Sloan asked what one of those was.
‘An index patient is the first person in an outbreak to have a particular disease, Inspector. And if there had been others out there at Bishop’s Marbourne with the same symptoms at the same time, it would probably have clinched the diagnosis then.’
‘But it didn’t?’ suggested Sloan, something about the outbreak of the plague at Eyam coming into his mind. That had come, if he remembered rightly, from a bale of cloth from the south. As a holiday destination for children, he’d thought at the time that the plague village had left a lot to be desired. He’d wanted to go on the Big Dipper in Blackpool instead.
‘No.’ The doctor was still talking. ‘There were no other similar cases. In any case, Mrs Port then went on to develop some other signs and symptoms that didn’t quite fit that diagnosis. They only appeared a little later, as it happens, which didn’t make it any easier.’ He pulled a medical record towards him. ‘Bradycardia, for a start.’
‘And what would that be, Doctor?’ Speaking in tongues was how Sloan thought of the usage of medical terms by doctors to lay people. He saw it as a display of power and never liked it.
The general practitioner translated the term for him. ‘Very slow heartbeat. That was one of the reasons why I wasn’t too worried about her − to begin with, that is. Her blood pressure was rather on the low side, too. Again, nothing really to worry about at that stage. I prescribed something for her digestive symptoms and thought she’d recover quite soon. I did tell her to come back and see me if she didn’t, because you can’t be too careful these days.’
Detective Inspector Sloan agreed heartily with this sentiment. Banking establishments might have compliance officers, but the police had the even more powerful combination of the press and public ganging up to make quite sure they didn’t overstep the imaginary line of what they expected of the force. And always in the background was Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary. He wasn’t sure how doctors coped – probably, like everyone else, by writing everything down.
‘And then?’ he asked.
‘And then Mrs Port telephoned me to say that she had had another attack and was now having great trouble sleeping. She told me she hadn’t slept a wink for three days.’ The doctor paused. ‘A lot of people say that, of course, and don’t really mean it. They usually doze off and forget by morning that they’ve done so.’
Sloan nodded in agreement. ‘Almost a manner of speech, you might say, Doctor. Not sleeping a wink.’
‘In the event it transpired that she did mean it, which was a quite unusual symptom in itself. I prescribed her a sedative but then, after giving it a fair go, she told me that it wasn’t working at all.’ He paused. ‘There would have been problems in increasing the dose …’
‘Problems?’ queried Sloan.
Dr Browne leant back in his chair. ‘My old professor used to say that the correct dose of any drug was enough to produce the effect you desired. It seemed to me that enough to deal with her state of sleeplessness would have killed her and that wouldn’t have done at all.’
Sloan nodded. The phrase ‘Death, and his brother Sleep’ floated into his mind and was gone again.
Dr Browne was still talking. ‘She told me she was getting worse and said she had now got a bad place on her leg. She just couldn’t sleep at all and was getting absolutely worn out.’
‘Well I never,’ said Crosby, visibly bored.
‘Then,’ went on Dr Browne, ‘yesterday I had this urgent call from a neighbour saying the woman had suddenly gone berserk. Her exact message was that Mrs Port had completely lost her marbles. So I went straight out to Bishop’s Marbourne but by the time I got there she was in a really bad state. She was having a full-blown psychotic episode.’
‘Away with the fairies?’ suggested Crosby.
‘Completely out of her mind,’ said the doctor tersely. ‘If she hadn’t been a respectable late-middle-aged woman with no history of drug taking I would have said she had been full to the gills with illegal substances – lysergic acid, most probably, or perhaps heroin, since she was hallucinating and really high. Apparently, she had had this impulse to jump from a great height – she had been climbing up the cat-slide roof at the back of her cottage when Mrs Dyson found her and sent for me.’
Detective Inspector Sloan turned over a page in his notebook. ‘Very worrying,’ he said.
‘Especially,’ said Browne dryly, ‘as the first duty of the doctor is to remove the danger from the patient or in this case remove the patient from the danger.’
‘And then, Doctor?’
‘While Mrs Dyson tried to talk her down I rang the hospital. I arranged for an ambulance to take her in as soon as possible. The minute she put a foot back on solid ground – she slid down off the roof in the end, landing on an ankle and breaking it, which could have been what we call a distracting injury – I pumped a dose of powerful sedative into her gluteus maximus muscle.’
Sloan didn’t need a translation of that for all that it was a medical term. ‘Glutes’ was the one he would have used himself.
‘Without her by-your-leave?’ asked Crosby indignantly. Nobody had asked him about whether he had wanted childhood injections and he still nursed resentments in the matter.
‘As Shakespeare put it, “Dangerous diseases demand dangerous remedies”,’ said Dr Browne. ‘I thought that would quieten her down long enough for the ambulance people to get her into Berebury Hospital and that then I could come back here to tackle a full waiting room.’
‘But she didn’t get there,’ said Sloan.
Dr Browne shook his head. ‘In the event she died just before they’d loaded her in the ambulance to get going.’ He straightened his shoulders and pushed the patient’s record away. ‘We’ll know all the answers soon enough, Inspector. The pathologist is doing the post-mortem first thing tomorrow morning. The outcome of that will make the practice’s next M and M meeting a lot simpler, too.’
‘M and M?’ asked Sloan.
‘Morbidity and Mortality Conference. All the doctors in our practice here have a quarterly meeting to discuss the outcome of problem cases, to see whether we’ve missed something, made a mistake or could just have done better for our patients. Or, more often, I am happy to say, agree we couldn’t have done anything more for them.’
It was the Independent Police Complaints Commission that did that for the force but Sloan did not say so. He had not met them yet and he didn’t want to.
Dr Browne added in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘Sometimes people say that breast-beating helps, but I don’t think anything at all could have been done for Mrs Port. She was beyond aid.’
Miss Florence Fennel placed a folder on Simon Puckle’s desk before announcing the two policemen. ‘The Mayton file, Mr Puckle.’
He thanked her before punctiliously rising to greet the newcomers.
‘You wrote to the police yesterday, sir,’ began Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘about the late Mrs Susan Port of Bishop’s Marbourne.’
‘Indeed, I did,’ agreed Simon Puckle. ‘I felt that I should advise the police that I was somewhat concerned about her death – that is, about her sudden death.’
‘“Somewhat concerned”?’ It seemed a curious choice of phrase to Sloan, although you never knew with the nuances of the law. But then ‘Let’s be having you’ was an expression usually understood only by police and villains.
‘You see, Inspector, I was not aware that she was other than in good health when I last saw her.’
‘And when exactly would that have been, sir?’
Simon Puckle glanced down at a note. ‘About two months ago.’
‘And you had no reason to believe that she had been suffering from anything before or since?’
‘Not then or now,’ said the solicitor vigorously. ‘If she had been, she certainly didn’t mention it when I saw her then.’
‘I see, sir. And might I enquire exactly what your interest in the circumstances of her death is?’
‘I really wanted to be reassured that it was from natural causes, Inspector.’
‘And why would that have been, sir?’
Simon Puckle tapped the file on his desk. ‘Mrs Port was one of half a dozen legatees due to inherit a share in a considerable inheritance from an old trust set up by her great-great-great-grandfather.’
‘Going back a bit, isn’t it?’ muttered Detective Constable Crosby.
The solicitor said, ‘Not by trust standards. They can go back generations.’
‘Ah, now I understand, sir.’ Detective Inspector Sloan got the picture without difficulty. In his view, where there was big money about there were usually big worries as well. The corollary that where there was big money about there were usually solicitors, too, he did not admit to his conscious mind at this moment.
‘Where there’s a will there’s a relative,’ muttered Detective Constable Crosby.
‘And would you therefore happen to know, sir,’ went on Sloan, ignoring this, ‘of any person or persons who might be expected to benefit from her death?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Puckle promptly. ‘To be exact there are five of them known to me. That is, not including their eventual dependants, of course. There may be others, naturally, but the late Mrs Port’s own legatees, who I’m afraid are not known to me, don’t come into it as her claim on the trust lapses with her death, she being childless. The benefit of her death to those other five dependants is somewhat – shall I say – tangential?’
‘Like I said,’ muttered Crosby, sotto voce, ‘where there’s a will there’s a relative.’
‘I take it that there is a will in Mrs Port’s case?’ said Sloan. Again, he found the word ‘somewhat’ difficult to quantify.
‘I’m afraid I couldn’t say, Inspector,’ replied Simon Puckle unexpectedly. ‘The late Mrs Port was not a client of this firm.’
‘I take it, then, that you have other professional reasons for your enquiry about Mrs Port’s death?’ Detective Inspector Sloan hadn’t thought he needed to spell this out.
‘Yes, indeed. My own specific interest is as the current trustee of the estate of the late Algernon Mayton,’ explained Simon Puckle, lightly tapping the file on his desk again. ‘As I said, he was Mrs Port’s great-great-great grandfather. He had made a fortune out of selling a useless nostrum to the credulous Victorian masses.’
‘Nice work if you can get it,’ remarked Crosby from the sidelines.
‘Yes, indeed, Constable,’ agreed the solicitor, adding wryly, ‘Most of us have to work a little harder.’
‘This product …’ began Sloan, who wasn’t quite sure what a nostrum was.
‘It was called “Mayton’s Marvellous Mixture” and consisted largely of water coloured with cochineal and sprinkled with pepper. The advertising, though, was impressive.’
‘That would have been, I take it, sir, before there were any legal restrictions in the matter?’ Some situations had benefited from regulation – the Advertising Standards Authority was one of those institutions that had helped bring this about. Sloan himself warmed to whoever it was who was trying to corral the more exotic ambitions of the banking industry.
