The Crozier Pharaohs

16

Exhumations

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In different locations, but on the same subject, four conversations had been carried on.

‘If that is what Dame Beatrice suggests,’ said Sir Ranulph, the Home Office forensic expert, ‘we had better have both the coffins up.’

‘I hardly think much can be discovered in the case of Dr Rant which did not come out at the inquest,’ said the county pathologist. ‘The man drank and doped himself to death. The evidence at the inquest was quite clear and the coroner’s direction to the jury was the only possible one. I had examined the body and both the police doctor and I concurred in our findings. I cannot think why Dame Beatrice entertains any suspicions. Given the facts, she cannot query them.’

‘The fact remains that she has queried them. More than that, I understand the police were not altogether satisfied with the outcome.’

‘That is true in the case of this man who died at Watersmeet, not in the case of Dr Rant.’

‘Several people benefited from Dr Rant’s death, though, I believe. That, in itself, may have aroused doubts in Dame Beatrice’s mind.’

‘Who can read the mind of a psychiatrist who specialises in tracking down murderers?’

‘A single-track mind, you think. I do not agree with you there. She has something up her sleeve, I think. Perhaps when the next analysis has been carried out, we may know what it is. I have been associated with her as a Home Office colleague for several years now. I have learnt to respect her judgement. Anyhow, bring out your dead!’ concluded Sir Ranulph, lapsing into incongruous cheerfulness.

‘We shan’t be called upon to identify father, shall we?’ asked Morpeth anxiously, after the sisters had been informed of what was in the wind. ‘I couldn’t bear that, I really couldn’t.’

‘Of course we shan’t be asked to do anything of the kind. What a horrible idea!’ responded Bryony. ‘Father’s name is on the coffin. That will be sufficient identification. Nobody will query it, so stop worrying. I don’t know how they will manage about the other one. He was buried before it was known that he was the Castercombe chemist’s assistant. The cemetery people will have records of the graves, though, and anyway he is no business of ours. I take it very unfriendly of Dame Beatrice to have father dug up, but there it is.’

‘I don’t think it was her decision,’ said Morpeth. ‘Once she had voiced her suspicions they must have carried some weight, but after that the whole thing would be up to the police.’

‘I loathe the business of digging people up when once they’ve been buried,’ said Laura. ‘We ought to leave the dead in peace, whatever they’ve done in this life.’

‘Coffins are often dug up,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Sometimes the dead are honoured in the process. How would you like to be transferred to Westminster Abbey after you have lain for a period in a not very attractive local burying ground?’

‘Don’t be frivolous. That sort of re-burial is an entirely different matter and you know it. Not that one wouldn’t find Westminster Abbey rather chilly. At least the local cemetery gets some warmth whenever the sun chooses to shine.’

‘Which does not appear to be today.’ Dame Beatrice looked out of a window against which the heavy summer rain, borne on a south-west wind, was lashing and streaming. ‘I do not envy the grave-diggers their task if this break in the weather we are experiencing has reached Axehead.’

‘Well, good luck to them, but I can’t see any point in tomorrow’s activities. Even if Dr Rant did die when he did because something extra had been put into the dope or drink he furnished for himself, there wouldn’t be any traces left after all this time, would there? I mean, he’s been dead for several years.’

‘There is always our old friend arsenic,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘and it is a treacherous friend to a murderer. It leaves long-term traces of itself in hair and fingernails, neither of which, in the grave, is likely to receive the attentions of a barber or a chiropodist, even a ghostly one.’

‘Arsenic? Surely no poisoner uses that any more? I mean, it’s so readily obtainable from all sorts of things you can find in any gardener’s shed that anybody can get hold of it. It would be suspected and tested at once in any cases of unexplained death.’

‘But Dr Rant’s death was not unexplained. From what we have been told, he was, perhaps unintentionally, heading for suicide anyway.’

‘Then why should anybody help him along by killing him?’

‘That, as you would say, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. There must be an answer to it and, although this is nothing but speculation, I think the answer may be that the Castercombe chemist, now deceased, may have been suffering from impaired eyesight.’

Laura looked resignedly at her employer, but then her expression changed.

‘Ah!’ she said. ‘But that wouldn’t be murder if he misread Dr Rant’s prescriptions. The worst that could be brought in is criminal negligence.’

‘The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are markedly similar to those of gastro-enteritis.’

‘But that fact has been known for donkey’s years! Somebody would have smelt a rat in Dr Rant’s case.’

‘Dr Rant’s weakness for alcohol was also well known. That, coupled with his dangerous practice of taking a drug as well, causes me to think that nobody who knew him would have been surprised by his death.’

‘We know that Dr Rant was unpopular with the villagers, but if he was poisoned it’s unlikely that anyone outside the house was responsible. How would they have got at his food and drink?’

‘You see where all this leads us, do you not?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Laura soberly, ‘it leads us straight back to Bryony, Morpeth, Susan and Dr Mortlake. They all benefited from the death of Dr Rant. The girls got their freedom, the house and most of the money, Mortlake got his own medical practice and Susan, although she seems a long shot, got the job and the companionship she wanted. Oh, I know the two sisters didn’t take on the Pharaoh hounds until some time after their father’s death, but there’s no proof that Susan hadn’t made their acquaintance and so heard of the plans they had made for when their father handed in his passport. She may then have made her own plans.’

‘Susan, however, falls into the same category as the villagers, ’ Dame Beatrice pointed out. ‘She had no entrée to Crozier Lodge until after Dr Rant’s death, and therefore, so far as I can see, no opportunity to poison him.’

‘There is something we’re leaving out of our calculations, though,’ said Laura. ‘Wasn’t there some rumour that Rant had inherited a lot of money from an old lady in the Midlands and was more or less hounded out of the place because of all the gossip and ugly rumours which were being circulated?’

‘The same objection stands as in the case of the villagers and Susan. They may have had the means and the motive, but they lacked the opportunity.’

‘I don’t agree. The old lady’s relatives, hopping mad at having the cup of opulence dashed from their lips, could have traced Rant to Abbots Crozier easily enough. I suppose he was in the Medical Register and the telephone book and so forth. It might have proved a longish job to track him down, but they could have done it.’

‘Oh, yes, as you point out. What then?’

‘They could have posed as patients and gone to his surgery. That would have got them inside Crozier Lodge. There they could have polished off the man who had done them out of the lolly. Ten to one he wouldn’t have known them if they had never turned up at the old lady’s bedside while he was attending her, so he wouldn’t have suspected that any dirty work was afoot. Weren’t we told that the villagers, in the end, avoided him and that most of his work was tending the sick or injured holidaymakers? He wouldn’t have suspected a thing when this lot blew in.’

‘You think of everything,’ said Dame Beatrice admiringly, ‘but you seem to gather your theories out of thin air,’ she added. ‘We do not even know whether there were any dispossessed relatives.’

‘And we don’t even know for sure that Dr Rant was murdered,’ retorted Laura.

‘As I believe I said once before, if Dr Rant was not murdered, my own theories collapse like pricked balloons,’ said Dame Beatrice.

The fourth conversation had been held in the evening of the day before the exhumations were to take place. Detective-Inspector Harrow was in conference with Detective-Sergeant Callum. They had returned to the Axehead police station after they had superintended the erection of tarpaulin screens around the two graves and the digging operations which were the preliminaries to the work of the morrow.

‘Even if we do find out from Sir Ranulph that both were murdered, I can’t see how it’s going to get us any nearer to finding the murderer, sir,’ said Callum.

‘Or that the same person murdered both of them,’ said Harrow. ‘In fact, on the face of it, it seems very unlikely that the same person did. The bank here has been very helpful and there is no indication at all that Rant had obtained any money by blackmail. Yet Dame Beatrice seems certain that blackmail is at the bottom of this business and that the murderer, whoever he is, killed because he was being blackmailed. Even supposing that somebody poisoned Dr Rant a bit quicker than he was already poisoning himself, we’ve found nothing to connect his death with that of the other two.’

‘Money must come into it somewhere, though, sir.’

‘One thing Dame Beatrice has done for us is to produce this flint object.’

‘Do you think it will fit the hole in that fellow’s head, sir?’

‘That’s for Sir Ranulph to say, but it wouldn’t surprise me. We’ve been doubtful about the verdict at that inquest from the beginning, but, given the evidence, such as it was, I suppose the coroner had no option but to direct his jury to find as they did. Neither you nor I, I take it, would have taken off his trousers and thrown them to a dog to pacify it, but it takes all sorts. Anyway, we’re both convinced that nothing of the sort happened. We’ve both seen the dog and Pollyanna could take its correspondence course. It’s almost indecently friendly and couldn’t scare a child of two.’

‘Some people are terrified even if the most affectionate dog jumps up at them, sir. I don’t know which of the phobias you would call it.’

‘I can understand a child or a nervous woman being alarmed, but not a grown man and certainly not to the extent that has been suggested. The myth about the trousers was unbelievable from the first and, very soon, so was the theory that the fellow had slipped on the stones in the riverbed, knocked himself out and was drowned before he could save himself. No. Dame Beatrice may be dead right about one thing. If a stone killed the chap, this could easily be the one.’ He picked up the neolithic dagger and looked it over critically. ‘It fits the hand all right, although I think it would fit Dame Beatrice’s small hand better than it does mine.’

‘She seemed a bit vague as to where she found it, sir, I thought.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. She said that Mrs Gavin went paddling and noticed that the thing looked different from the other pebbles. She admitted that they had been looking for it.’

‘After all this time, sir? Oh, well, perhaps it wasn’t the first time she and Mrs Gavin had been to Watersmeet to look for it. There’s no proof it was the murder weapon, though.’

‘She produced what she seems to think is double proof: first, that, as we knew a long time ago, there is no flint in this part of the country; second, that this is a worked flint.’

‘Flint could be brought in for road repairs, sir, and this piece brought in along with the rest of the chippings.’

‘All right, show me the part of a local road where such repairs have been made. Even if you can, it couldn’t be anywhere near Watersmeet. There’s only a woodland path beside the river which leads to where the man died.’

‘You will be showing the bit of flint to Sir Ranulph, of course, sir?’

‘Of course. Don’t ask damn silly questions. Still, as you have asked one, I’ll give you a damn silly answer. When Sir Ranulph has done with it, I shall show it to the murderer.’

‘But we don’t know — ’

‘Who the murderer is? No, we don’t, but Dame Beatrice swears she does and, such is her reputation, I am forced to do as she says when she names the murderer. Well, come on down to the Axe and Sapling and I’ll buy you a drink.’

‘They don’t take axes to saplings,’ said Callum, ‘but it’s a new pub and the landlord is a Londoner, so what can you expect?’

‘His country lore may be all askew, but there’s nothing wrong with his beer,’ said Harrow.

The exhumations took their grisly course, beginning at five in the morning. The rain soaked down, the ground around the graves was a mass of trampled mud, and the only comfort to be got out of the affair was that the weather kept away even the most morbid-minded sightseer.

The two graves were a long way apart. Dr Rant’s head-stone had an honoured place along the central path through the cemetery; the chemist’s one-time errand-boy had been buried on the outskirts and his grave was unmarked except on the custodian’s map.

The little knot of men whose business it was to be on the scene waited in the rain, hats pulled down and dripping from the brim, coat collars turned up; but the heavy work had all been done on the previous evening when the cemetery had been closed to the public, so the time of waiting in the wet was not over-long and the coffins were soon on their way.

Sir Ranulph and the county pathologist were both present at what the former called ‘the lifting’, so were Harrow, Callum and a reporter (uninvited and outside the cemetery railings) from the Axehead local newspaper. There were also two grave-diggers, there to put the finishing touches to their work of the previous day and also to join with the custodian in verifying the information on the metal labels of the coffins. At the gates of the cemetery two uniformed constables had been stationed to ensure that no unauthorised persons attempted to storm the fortress of the dead, and in the street an ambulance waited to receive the newly resurrected doctor and the erstwhile chemist’s assistant.

‘Nothing now but to wait for the findings, whether negative or positive,’ said Harrow to Callum as they sheltered in a shop doorway before making their separate ways home for breakfast. ‘It will take some time, I reckon, before we get a report.’

‘At any rate, our investigations, since we knew the identity of the Watersmeet body, have given us some satisfaction, sir. We’ve traced the man’s movements to a certain extent. We know he emigrated and we know he soon got into trouble and came back here pretty well broke. That’s when he turned to blackmail, I’ll bet.’

‘I’m not as well satisfied as you seem to be,’ said Harrow. ‘We didn’t discover who the chap was. It took Dame Beatrice to work that one out.’

‘We beavered away at the Australian end, sir.’

‘Only with a lot of boost from our own top brass, and we could have done nothing unless Dame Beatrice had got a name put on the man. Thank goodness he didn’t festoon himself with a set of aliases like the valley chap.’

‘Well, when he emigrated he had done nothing wrong, sir, so far as we can prove.’

‘That’s true, but he seems to have made up for it since. Dame Beatrice thinks the chemist left him to make up the prescriptions when he could no longer be sure of reading the doctor’s writing himself, and it’s likely enough. Her theory is that our chap mixed the ingredients cheerfully enough at first, but then something about the prescriptions made him suspicious, so he must have kept them as evidence in case anything should rear itself up later.’

‘He wanted to cover himself and the chemist, you mean, sir?’

‘Dame Beatrice is certain that’s all there was in it to begin with, but that when he came back to England he saw the prescriptions as a means of blackmail.’

‘But Dr Rant was dead by then. He wrote his own prescriptions. You can’t blackmail a dead man.’

‘The dead man left two daughters and left them pretty comfortably off, remember.’

‘Is that what Dame Beatrice thinks? — that the women were being blackmailed?’

‘It’s what I think. That older one, Miss Bryony Rant, is bright enough to have picked up doctor’s shorthand from her father and I’ve no doubt she had access to the official pad on which the prescriptions were written out before the leaf was torn out and given to the chemist.’

‘So, as she was in charge of the Crozier Lodge car, she took her father’s prescriptions into Castercombe to get them made up, you mean, but the prescription the doctor had written out for himself was not the prescription handed in to the chemist? I thought, though, that we were told Dr Mortlake took over from Miss Rant in delivering the prescriptions.’

Strange and bizarre things are done in the name of science. Some are cruel, some repulsive. The clipping of Dr Rant’s nails and hair came, to the lay mind, under the latter heading, but to Sir Ranulph it was all in the day’s work. That done, the corpse was decently re-interred. The Watersmeet man was already back in his grave, for the fitting of the coup de poing to the hole in his skull had proved to be no more than a formality.

The shrouding tarpaulins in the cemetery had not gone unremarked although, with the break in the weather, they had been seen by few. The news, however, found its way around in the way news seems to do and it reached Dr Mortlake through the agency of the local tobacconist.

‘Doings at the cemetery, so I heard,’ she said. ‘Don’t do to believe everything you hear, though, does it? There’s some as knows how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, whatever our grandmothers used to say.’

‘A funeral, Mrs Wake? I didn’t know anybody in the town had been buried. Who was it?’

‘Not buried. Un-buried, if you take my meaning, doctor, and there was two of them, at that. All done secret, with screens around and policemen on the gate and everything.’

‘Good gracious me! Who were they!’

‘Oh, well, you know what people are! They’ll say anything if it’s a bit spicy. I was told it might be Dr Rant for one. It was along the main path and just about where he laid, but, if that was so, I reckon you’d have knowed about it, you being a doctor, too.’

‘Where was the other screen put up? You mentioned two graves, I think.’

‘That’s right, or so I heard. The other tarpaulins was over on the Beestone road end, but nobody don’t seem to know whose grave it was.’

The reports came through in due course and could not be kept out of the local paper. From there they reached the big dailies and there followed a sensational article in a Sunday paper headed: How many other graves ought to be investigated? Analysis of Dr Rant’s hair and fingernails had revealed nothing, so there was still no conclusive proof that his death had been anything but accidental. However, the subject of poison had been raised and provoked much speculation. Perhaps the doctor’s worsening condition could be attributed to a slow, systematic poisoning which, combined with the quantities of alcohol he had consumed, eventually proved fatal?

And so on and so forth. The article skated round the edges of libel, for, although he was not named, it was clear that the writer blamed Dr Mortlake for not having spotted what was wrong with his chief. The report went so far as to call Dr Mortlake’s professional ability in question. The London readers of the paper were titillated; Axehead, Abbot’s Bay and Abbots Crozier were enthralled, and some of the visitors were distinctly apprehensive and confided to one another in the hotel lounges after dinner how thankful they were that they had not been compelled by illness to consult so incompetent a practitioner.

Dr Mortlake himself kept a low profile, but he did seek legal advice. He was warned that in an action which involved the Goliath of a popular Sunday newspaper and the David of an obscure country doctor, David was unlikely to win, so he held his peace and went to Crozier Lodge.

Here he found only Susan and the poacher. Adams was there on the excuse of having brought rabbits for the hounds, but the truth was that he was there to keep Susan company. She had been invited, with the Rants, to go to the Stone House, but she would not leave the dogs unattended even for a few hours.

‘What do you make of the news, doctor?’ she asked, when she had put Adams, with his cup of tea, thick bread and butter and scones, jam and cream, in the kitchen and had taken a tray for herself and Dr Mortlake into the sitting-room.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m not very happy, of course, but I had no suspicions at all regarding the death. A man who was juggling with his life the way Rant was doing was bound to lose out. It happened a bit before I thought it might, I suppose, but he had been undermining his health for years, ever since his wife died. I came over to offer my sympathy to his daughters. It must have been most unpleasant for them to have to face the details of their father’s suicide all over again.’

‘Suicide do you call it? Personally I believe in calling a spade a spade, ’ said Susan. ‘Murder is a very ugly word, but, if it tells the truth, well, that’s that. I heard they dug up a second grave. I wonder whose that was? Nobody at the Crozier Arms seems to know.’