The Body Politic (11 page)

That both schools of thought were wrong would have been apparent had they happened to have overheard Dr. Brian Lyulph, general medical practitioner of Mellamby, talking to old Andrew Rebble, veterinary surgeon of the same parish, and father of Hazel Ottershaw.

The enquiries of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Calleshire Constabulary had not gone unnoticed by either man.

“If it wasn't a heart attack, Andrew,” said Lyulph wearily, “then I'm damned if I know what it was.”

Old Rebble nodded a grizzled head. Known himself over half the county as a good man with a labouring cow or an injured horse, he knew that Brian Lyulph was equally sound with ill humans. “Always start with the simple,” he said.

That was part of the diagnostic process of both professions.

“And,” he went on, “common diseases occur most commonly.”

That was another.

“God knows,” responded the doctor, tacitly acknowledging this, “Alan had everything you'd expect in the way of the signs of a heart attack, let alone symptoms.”

It was a phraseology comprehended by the vet and he nodded again. His patients only had signs. Symptoms—that which the patient complained of—were a luxury denied to veterinary surgeons.

“He was sweating,” said the doctor, “and he was having difficulty in breathing. In fact he was quite dyspnoeic.”

Old Rebble jerked his head. “I know. I saw him myself.”

“I'd forgotten that,” admitted Lyulph. “He'd been sick, of course. There was vomitus all over his rig-out.”

“There was marked pallor, too,” said the vet, lapsing into the impersonal vernacular of both professions. They were both of them talking about a patient now, not a person.

“He was almost beyond speech by the time I got to him,” said the doctor. “I'd been dusting off the Member of Parliament after that near miss with a lump of stone at the foot of the tower. He was all right, though.”

“Alan wasn't.” Rebble's expression was grim. He had a young widowed daughter and two grandchildren to think about now.

“No,” acknowledged the doctor readily. “The poor fellow was obviously in great pain. I gave him a hypodermic injection of morphia
statim
—I didn't want to waste time trying to raise a vein at that stage.”

“He was clutching his heart when I got there,” said the victim's father-in-law, “so it hadn't worked by then.”

“His pulse was all over the place, too,” said Lyulph. “When I could find it,” he went on, his voice pregnant with meaning.

Old Rebble nodded.

“And pretty rapid,” said the doctor, obviously enumerating to himself a mental list of signs. Not for the first time, Rebble judged. “His blood pressure was way down,” added Lyulph.

“It would be,” said the veterinary surgeon. Animals had hearts, too.

And heart attacks.

“He had a cardiac arrhythmia, of course.” Dr. Brian Lyulph was accounting to a well-informed relative. But only in a way.

“I thought he would.”

“I found ventricular extrasystoles as well as an almighty tachycardia.” He grimaced. “I thought he was going into ventricular fibrillation then and there.”

“That happened in the Accident and Emergency Department at the hospital,” said the vet sadly. “I went in with him and Hazel, too, remember? Though they sent us out into the corridor when he went into acute failure.”

“The ambulance took its time,” said Lyulph, unsure if there was an unspoken criticism in the air. “I was in half a mind to take it up with their Controller but I didn't in the end.”

“It couldn't have been that the men didn't know the way,” growled Rebble. “I recognised 'em. They were the same two fellows who came out the day before for that false call-out to the Member.”

“I shouldn't think there's anything wrong with
his
heart,” said Lyulph. “Cool as a cucumber.”

“Nor with Bertram's,” said the vet. “Do you know he walks right through the Chase every day? In season and out.”

“Sportsmen like Rauly always get the right kind of exercise,” said the general practitioner, who was too busy for either sport or exercise. “He doesn't overeat, either.”

“You can't fatten thoroughbreds,” said the vet absently.

“I can't honestly say, though, that Alan would still be alive today if the ambulance had got there any more quickly,” said Brian Lyulph, coming back to what was worrying him.

Old Rebble was too experienced in the way of the world to ask him if he really meant what he had said. “Shouldn't have wanted a cabbage for a son-in-law,” he said gruffly instead.

Lyulph grunted. “They shoot horses, don't they, but not men.”

The ability to administer a
coup de grâce
legally was a powerful weapon in the armentarium of the veterinary surgeon but officially denied to the registered medical practitioner.

“And for all that the police want to talk to me.” Lyulph shook his head worriedly. “I can't tell them anything more than I've told you, Andrew. I completed my part of the cremation certificate in all good faith.”

“That's what Hazel wanted,” said Hazel's father. “The young chap at the hospital said he could do the first part and she was very anxious that you did the other as you knew them both.”

“The crematorium's medical referee wasn't unhappy,” said Lyulph, “so I can't for the life of me understand why the police should be snooping around and wanting to see me.”

“Neither can I.” Old Rebble looked even older. “But, let's face it, they'll have their reasons.”

“I'm very much afraid so.”

The two men sat together in silence for a long moment, and then Andrew Rebble spoke. “Brian, we've known each other for a long time …”

Lyulph looked sharply across at the older man.

“I hope,” continued Rebble, “that we understand each other, too.”

Lyulph's expression changed subtly and began to assume its usual mask of professional inscrutableness. “So?”

“So, if there was anything—er—at all out of the way—untoward, say—about Alan's death, you'd tell me, wouldn't you?”

“There wasn't,” said the doctor flatly. “Or, if there was, I didn't spot it.” He got up to go, more worried now than when he had come. “By the way,” he said, attempting to leave on a lighter note, “what did you prescribe for John Newby's sheepdog?”

The veterinary surgeon frowned. “It had a bad ear, didn't it? Oh, canker powder.”

Lyulph grinned for the first time. “It's cured John's chronic middle-ear infection. Can you do anything for his hiatus hernia? I can't.”

“Nice little creature, isn't she?” said Adrian Dungey. “Don't let her put on too much weight, will you?” The young veterinary surgeon gave Miss Mildred Finch a quick professional smile as he patted her Bedlington terrier on the head. “You'll both live to regret it if you do.”

“Certainly not,” said Miss Finch, who didn't carry any spare weight herself, and whose dog Bebida was exercised and fed strictly according to the book.

“We see far too many chubby chops here for their own good.” Adrian Dungey was the veterinary practice's small-animal specialist and, just as paediatricians develop dialogue skills with very little children, so he had come to extend his vocabulary of small talk with their owners. In the same way as his senior partner, old Rebble, had a good working rapport with the farmers of the district, so Dungey had a considerable following among the many single women with pets in the Mellamby area.

Miss Finch resumed possession of her dog but was clearly in no hurry to leave the consulting room. “Have the Committee decided on our next engagement yet, Adrian? I shall need as much time as possible if I've got to do the costumes again.”

“Not that I've heard,” said Dungey. His next patient was a Pekingese with bad breath and he was only too happy to let its owner wait a little longer. “Let's see, we've done all the interesting Civil Wars now, haven't we?”

“And the Wars of the Roses.” They had been a great success.

“There's always the Battle of Hastings,” said Dungey, “as long as I'm not King Harold. I never have liked,” he added lightly, “that bit about ‘'Arold, with his eye full of arrow on his 'orse with his 'awk in his 'and.'”

Miss Finch toyed with Bebida's lead. “I've been wondering about Crécy myself.”

“Good idea. The same armour might do.”

She leaned forward. “But what would be really interesting, Adrian, would be an Old Testament battle.”

“That's thinkable,” said the young vet with the boyish enthusiasm which his clients found so attractive. “Gideon and the Midianites, do you think? Gideon was a really great general. I think you could almost call him the first of the management-selection people. Sorted out the good soldiers from the rest by the way they drank. Some cupped their hands and kept their eyes open for the enemy and some just plunged their heads down. Did you know that?”

“I,” said Miss Finch, “was wondering about Saul and the smiting of the Amalekites.”

“Coming down like a wolf on the fold, you mean?” He grinned. “That would be great.”

“They spared Agag, of course,” said Miss Finch enigmatically.

“He was the one who had to step warily, wasn't he?” said Dungey. “At least he did better than Harold.”

“Coming down like a wolf on the fold would make a good charge,” said the retired schoolmistress. “I've noticed that a good charge always goes down well with Society members.”

“Old Testament weapons might be a problem,” said Dungey, “even if the costumes were a doddle. I've never used a sling.”

“Talking of costumes,” said Miss Finch severely, “you got King Henry Ill's clothes into a pretty bad state at the Battle of Lewes.”

“It was a great day,” said Dungey, stretching himself to his full height. “Until poor Alan collapsed I enjoyed every minute of it.”

“Not everyone did.” She waved a hand. “Apart from poor Alan, I mean.”

“Oh?”

“Didn't you hear?”

“What?”

“About the Member of Parliament.”

“Peter Corbishley? Oh, old pinstripe isn't a Camulos Society member,” said Dungey. “He only came back to Mellamby over the weekend to make a speech about Simon de Montfort and the first Parliament. David Chadwick said he'd persuaded him.”

“I know, I know,” said Miss Finch grimly. “On the Saturday he'd just got well and truly into his spiel when an ambulance turned up for him.”

“I didn't know he'd been taken ill,” said Adrian Dungey, surprised.

“He hadn't,” said Mildred Finch. “That's the whole point. The ambulance people insisted that they'd had a message that he'd had a heart attack.”

“And he hadn't?”

“Never felt better in his life was what he said to them. He told the ambulance men that he was as fit as a fiddle.”

The vet frowned. “Odd, that.”

“Mind you,” said Miss Finch, “the ambulance crew didn't believe him at first. Apparently they quite often have turn-outs to people who don't realise how ill they are and who don't want to go to hospital.”

“I've always thought that being a vet is easier,” said Dungey, patting Miss Finch's terrier, “isn't it, Bebida? Not only can't your patients talk but they can't disobey you either.”

“Or worry,” said Miss Finch unexpectedly, “about themselves or anyone else.”

“True. So what happened in the end?”

“Oh, the ambulance people went away after a bit and said they'd chalk it up as a hoax call. That wasn't so important but on the Sunday it was much worse.”

Dungey leaned forward. “Tell me.”

“Mr. Corbishley was standing at the bottom of the Motte tower when a lump of masonry came down and only just missed hitting him on the head. It was a near thing, I can tell you.”

Dungey didn't seem very interested in the Member of Parliament. “The thing I thought was strange,” he said, “was that odd black Figure of Death that was leaping about.”

“Not as strange as I thought it,” said Miss Finch astringently.

“I know it fits in with the period and all that but I can't remember his being on the muster roll.”

“He wasn't,” said Miss Finch.

Dungey looked up sharply.

“Moreover,” said Miss Finch, “I wasn't responsible for his costume. I'd never even seen it before.”

“So,” concluded the vet, frowning, “we had Death in our midst without recognising him?”

“Just like in the old Mystery Plays,” said Miss Finch, adding, “with a little Thornton Wilder thrown in.” She was still cross with herself that she hadn't thought to bring the tide
To Kill a Mocking-Bird
into her vote of thanks to the Member after his speech. “Staircase wit” Diderot had called that.

“I can see that there's a moral lurking about somewhere,” admitted Adrian Dungey, “but I must say something in all this doesn't quite add up.”

“Or,” said Miss Finch profoundly, “it adds up to something very funny.”

NINE

When the Last Sigh Is Heaved

“One of the reasons, Sloan,” said Dr. Dabbe, “why the cremation procedure in this country is so comprehensive is that in the nature of things the process destroys the forensic evidence. If such there be.” The pathologist stared down at the queremitte pellet lying in an old Petri dish before him on his desk and amended this. “Nearly all the evidence.”

“But it doesn't affect the medical history, Doctor,” responded Sloan. “In fact I thought that cremation made writing down exactly what the patient died from all the more important.”

He and Detective Constable Crosby had gone back to the hospital mortuary and were sitting in the pathologist's office.