After Effects (6 page)

‘It's all right for you,' said Mike Itchen.

Dexter Palindome (Luston) plc weren't research chemists, but manufacturing ones. They didn't have to waste their substance on research-and-development programmes which got through money like water. They merely processed what the boffins thought worth making, leaving the risk business to others. Their highest-paid employees weren't research chemists at all but production engineers and marketing men.

‘I don't think anyone's aiming to corner the market,' said George Gledhill piously. He didn't add that with patents and licences this was hardly necessary these days. ‘With Roger Byville it's more of an interest.'

‘And,' said Itchen, ‘it's not such a crowded field as some.'

‘I guess Joe Public doesn't really understand the spleen,' said Al Dexter.

‘You can say that again,' said Mike Itchen, who found the lay members of the Ethics Committee the most difficult of all to deal with. Give him a scientist any day. Unless he could have a businessman, of course.

‘So what,' asked Dexter curiously, ‘didn't they like about the APX 125 trials, then?'

‘Everything,' said the Chief Chemist, rising to his feet rather abruptly. ‘Come on, let's eat.'

A curious mixture of altruism and business acumen had led the founding fathers of the firm of Gilroy Pharmaceuticals (and they were men only now just starting their retirement) to buy a large, empty Victorian mansion. It was a time when large, empty Victorian mansions were something of a drug on the post-war housing market.

‘The dining room's straight ahead,' Mike Itchen reminded Dexter.

It would certainly have been a misnomer to call it a canteen. The Hall at Staple St James had not been quite stately enough for preservation and had been converted into offices and research laboratories well before the Victorian revivalists had been sufficiently interested or organized enough to protest.

‘Some eating place you've got here,' said Dexter, suitably impressed by a painted ceiling reminiscent of the worst excesses of the French neo-classical period.

‘Built to last, did the Victorians,' said Mike Itchen with his first show of enthusiasm.

‘We've found a use for almost everything here except the maze,' said George Gledhill proudly, going into his set party piece for visitors. ‘You name it and we've got it here. Stables, ice-house, game larder, laundry, greenhouses, cellars … you'll have a little of this white Burgundy won't you, Al?… lake, grotto …'

‘What on earth's a grotto?'

‘It's where the bad man of the garden lived. You know—before the era of something nasty in the woodshed came in.' Gledhill looked preternaturally solemn. ‘No real old garden was complete without a hermit.'

‘You don't say!' Al Dexter went back to a topic he found more interesting. ‘Say, do you people get much hassle from these ethics committees of yours?'

Mike Itchen frowned. ‘It all depends.'

‘On the face of the guy putting the product forward?' suggested Al, since human nature is the same the world over. ‘Or other things?'

‘Well, Al,' temporized Itchen, ‘you know yourself what committees are like.'

‘Sure,' said Al Dexter untruthfully. There were no committees built into the corporate structure of Dexter Palindome (Luston) plc. The decision-making process was delegated to a nail-biting level; bucks stopped as far down the management pyramid as possible and all potentially unprofitable work was headed off at the pass long before it got on to anyone's time-sheet.

‘They're the very devil,' admitted the Chief Chemist since he was talking to a contractor and not a business rival. ‘How it can be OK to let thousands suffer and die from some untreatable condition and all wrong for one poor sod—'

‘Who was going to die anyway,' contributed Mike Itchen cynically.

‘—to snuff it while we're using him to try to find a cure for the same thing beats me.'

‘It's an unfair world,' agreed Al Dexter ambiguously.

‘In the first place,' grumbled Gledhill, still sore from this morning's rejection, ‘the Ethics Committee's always so totally negative.'

‘It's not their product, of course,' contributed Al Dexter reasonably.

‘And as for the Safety of Medicines people …' carried on Gledhill.

‘Never a breath of enthusiasm there,' seconded his deputy.

‘That's their whole trouble,' said Gledhill. ‘All they want to do is keep their noses clean.'

‘And what they don't like,' said Mike Itchen, ‘is criticism. Can't take a breath of the stuff.'

They didn't come more worldly than Al Dexter. ‘They don't have anything riding on success, that's the difference.'

The Chief Chemist shrugged. ‘True.'

‘And you fellows have,' said Dexter simply; he pronounced the word with relish: ‘Cardigan.'

Gledhill's face lit up suddenly. ‘I'll say we have. And so has Dr Paul—fresh carnation buttonhole—Meggie. Wherever the old fox's got to this morning.'

Detective Constable Crosby drew a neat line in his notebook after talking to the luckless Darren Clements in the Accident and Emergency Department. He hadn't got very far. That young man was clearly prepared for martyrdom rather than disclose the names of his confederates.

‘Me, shop my mates?' he'd said. ‘You must be joking. Catch 'em yourself.'

‘I dare say we will,' replied Crosby equably. ‘We caught the monkeys all right last time and your lot aren't as clever.'

He found Dr Dilys Chomel more co-operative, although she wasn't herself making a lot of sense of her interview with the detective constable. For one thing she was still rather confused and for another the policeman wasn't making himself very clear.

‘You had an old lady here this morning, miss, on Woman's Medical in heart failure—' Crosby had taken a unilateral decision about addressing any young woman with hair like rats' tails as ‘Doctor'.

‘Mrs Galloway?' said Dilys, who hadn't really reckoned on having the police in on her first death. ‘Yes. She died, of course … I mean.' she halted in mid-speech. She had just realized that she was sounding like the woman in the children's verse who had swallowed a fly and worked her way up to swallowing a horse. She, too, had died, of course. The House Physician started again. ‘I mean,' she said haltingly, ‘naturally she died. She was very, very ill.'

‘Ah, that's what we wanted to know.' Detective Constable Crosby made a new entry in his notebook. ‘You say she died naturally?'

‘That, too,' said the young lady doctor drily, wondering if she would ever truly master the manifold intricacies of the English language.

‘Did you attempt resuscitation?'

‘No.'

Detective Constable Crosby said ponderously, ‘Not to attempt resuscitation when you can, miss, is murder.'

‘No, it isn't.' She shook her head and said, ‘It's not to resuscitate when you should that's murder.'

This much she did know. Dilys Chomel had paid particular attention her medical ethics lectures since in her own home country in Africa a very different view was taken of almost all such situations. Especially the survival of girl babies born to families who wanted only sons.

‘Deciding not to resuscitate makes the doctor into judge, jury and executioner,' persisted Crosby, who didn't like hospitals anyway.

‘That's euthanasia,' said Dilys Chomel firmly, deciding, since the policemen seemed a bit strong on ethics, not to reveal Dr Paul Meggie's simple rule on resuscitating the terminally ill or very elderly. Detective Constable Crosby, she sensed, might not like it.

This unwritten procedure had been spelled out to her by her predecessor in the house officer's job when she took it over. ‘You don't,' he'd said meaningfully, ‘do it without consulting Dr Meggie first, understood?'

‘But,' she'd protested, ‘you've only got half a minute. By the time I've located Dr Meggie, the patient'll be dead.'

‘Got it in one, haven't you?' he'd murmured, giving her a pitying look before going off to climb the next rung of the uncertain ladder that comprised the greasy pole of his medical career.

They took a very different view of the care of the elderly, too, in the far country from which Dilys Chomel had come.

They cherished them.

‘The Coroner,' Detective Constable Crosby was saying at his stateliest, ‘has ordered a
post-mortem
examination at the request of the police.'

‘The consultant—' began Dilys. In hospitals, consultants ranked directly under the Almighty.

‘The Coroner,' repeated Crosby, ‘has ordered a
post mortem
examination.' In the eyes of the police force the Coroner represented the Crown and thus easily outranked chief constables as well as hospital consultants. ‘And I've come to enquire into the whereabouts of the body of the deceased.'

‘If it hasn't been released to the relatives,' said Dilys, ‘then it'll be over in the Potter's Field.'

‘Come again, miss?'

‘Sorry.' She tossed her head. ‘It's what the staff here call the mortuary. Most hospitals, you see, have a private name for their mortuary so that the staff can mention it without upsetting the patients. Didn't you know, Constable?'

Upsetting their clients wasn't one of their worries down at the police station. There—like it or not—they called the charge room the charge room. Crosby still looked puzzled. ‘The Potter's Field, did you say, miss?'

‘It's from the Bible.' A missionary culture had done well by Dr Chomel. ‘You'll find it in St Matthew's Gospel.'

‘I still don't see—'

‘The Potter's Field was where they buried strangers,' explained Dilys Chomel. ‘Mrs Muriel Galloway's body'll be there if it's still in the hospital.'

It was.

And, the mortuary attendant promised Detective Constable Crosby, it would be sent over to Dr Dabbe, the Consultant Pathologist, for a
post mortem
without delay.

Crosby thanked him and was just about to take his departure when the man asked him if Dr Meggie had turned up yet. It wasn't like him, the mortuary attendant said, not to be at one or other of the hospitals, throwing his weight about as usual.

‘Not yet,' said the detective constable, ‘but I expect he will.'

‘'Im and his perishing buttonhole,' said the man. ‘Who does he think he is?'

‘God,' said Crosby simply. ‘They all do.'

CHAPTER SIX

Doctors if no better than other men are certainly no worse.

‘Thanks for talking to my housewoman about that congestive heart failure on Women's Medical over at Berebury this morning,' murmured Roger Byville as he found himself standing just behind Dr Beaumont in the antiquated lift at St Ninian's Hospital. He'd already forgotten the patient's name. ‘It's her first house job and she's still very new here.'

‘No trouble,' said Beaumont politely, ‘although there was nothing to be done, I'm afraid.'

The lift creaked to a standstill at the first floor and two nurses and a pathology technician got out.

‘The family are kicking up a bit of a stink all the same,' said Byville now that the two doctors were alone together.

‘Are they?' Dr Edwin Beaumont inclined his head sympathetically. It was the relatives of Mr Daniel McGrew's patients who usually did that.

Pour cause.

Byville said, punching the lift button with quite unnecessary force, ‘They're asking for a
post mortem.
'

‘That should put their minds at rest.'

‘I hope it does.' Byville gave an unamused laugh. ‘They've already been to the police.'

Dr Beaumont raised his eyebrows and decided against getting out of the lift at the floor which he'd been heading for. ‘On what grounds?' he asked carefully, as they continued upwards.

‘God knows.' Byville grimaced. ‘The next thing they'll be doing is talking to the local newspaper. The editor would enjoy that.'

‘It would be a great pity,' observed Edwin Beaumont in his usual measured way.

‘It would.' In contrast with most of the other consultants on the staff of the two hospitals, Roger Byville was a controlled, rather colourless man, but even he sounded heated now. ‘St Ninian's gets quite enough bad publicity as it is from the antics of that maniac, McGrew. We don't need any more.'

Dr Edwin Beaumont glanced at the lift indicator and sighed. ‘Our Dan doesn't exactly help the healing image, does he?'

Byville scowled. ‘I can never see why the surgical people don't shop him. I would. Gives the whole place—let alone the profession—a bad name.'

‘Not our headache, though,' said Beaumont, one physician to another, and unmindful, too, of Edmund Burke's famous dictum that for evil to flourish it was only necessary that good men do nothing.

‘Thank God it isn't,' said Byville.

‘I've heard,' advanced Beaumont cautiously, ‘that even the Three Wise Men don't know what to do about him next.'

‘I never did hold with that idea.' Roger Byville sniffed contemptuously. ‘Catch someone as egocentric as Dangerous Dan being told by three of his professional colleagues—' It was well known that Daniel McGrew didn't admit to having peers ‘—that he's not doing his job properly—'

‘Well—'

‘And then his pulling his socks up. I don't know about you, but I don't call that likely, myself.'

‘Quite,' agreed Dr Beaumont, although that wasn't the way in which he himself would have described the remit of the three distinguished surgeons who were summoned when a Calleshire consultant showed signs of what were euphemistically described as ‘human failings'. ‘Quite,' he said again.

‘And I still don't see why,' grumbled Byville, ‘I should have to pay whopping insurance premiums for medical defence just to keep clowns like McGrew out of trouble.'