Читать книгу To Love and Perish - Ernest Dudley - Страница 7

CHAPTER THREE

1.

The telephone rang in Castlebay police station and the desk-sergeant got it. He listened and then he put down the receiver, and went out and across the passage to Inspector Owen’s office, and knocked and went in. ‘It’s Dr. Griffiths, sir,’ he said. ‘On the phone he is.’

‘What about?’

‘He didn’t say; he didn’t want to discuss the matter on the telephone, he said.’

‘All right, tell him to look in, anytime this morning. I shall be here.’

The police station was a red-brick building in the middle of one side of Castle Square; at the back a cliff rose up on top of which towered the ruined old castle from which the town took its name. An hour later, as the clock in Castlebay clock-tower in the centre of the square was striking midday, Dr. Griffiths arrived at the police station, and the desk-sergeant showed him into Inspector Owen’s room.

Inspector Owen got up from a large oak desk, and pulled out a chair and asked Dr. Griffiths what his visit was in aid of.

‘It’s difficult,’ Dr. Griffiths said slowly, as he faced the other. ‘I don’t exactly know. The truth is I’m worried about something, and I don’t know what to do. Truth to tell, I don’t know if I ought to do anything at all.’

Inspector Owen had sat down again in his old, creaking swivel-chair and he leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, his square chin resting on his stubby hands. ‘Afraid of disclosing anything that might be regarded as contrary to the ethics of the medical profession and all that?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Someone going to have a baby who shouldn’t?’

‘If only it was as simple as that.’ Dr. Griffiths shifted uneasily. Then he opened his mouth and let the words come out. ‘It concerns Dick Merrill and Mr. Stone,’ he said.

‘And no doubt Mrs. Stone,’ Inspector Owen said slowly. ‘Gossip gets around here as quickly as any other small town.’

Dr. Griffiths reflected for a moment or two. Then looking straight at the other he said: ‘Look here, the night before last I had a telephone call from Mrs. Stone. Would I come and see her husband. She said he was sick, terribly sick. I went at once. I found him in bed, and his wife said they had both been to dinner with Dick Merrill. Her husband must have eaten something, she thought.’

‘Was she sick?’

‘No, she was perfectly all right.’

‘Had she had the same to eat as her husband?’

Inspector Owen had picked up one of the three pipes that were on his desk, and he got a tin of tobacco out of his desk drawer, pushing his swivel-chair back to rummage for the tin.

Dr. Griffiths nodded. ‘Consommé, roast lamb, and fruit salad and ice cream.’

‘Anything special to drink?’

‘Just some wine. I think Stone had a brandy as he was leaving.’ He paused and then squaring his shoulders, took the plunge. ‘That’s not the only thing that puzzles me. You know Merrill’s wife died about six months ago?’ Inspector Owen stopped tapping the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. ‘The symptoms are precisely the same. Only difference is that Mrs. Merrill died and Stone hasn’t.’

‘From where I’m sitting it sounds as if you’re suggesting there’s some connection between Mrs. Merrill’s death and Mr. Stone’s illness.’

‘I have no evidence in either case.’

‘Evidence of what?’

Dr. Griffiths sat silent, his face set in bitter lines.

Inspector Owen looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I know the spot you’re in. I want to help you. But for instance, why should Merrill have wanted to get rid of his wife? Or why should he want to get rid of Stone?’

‘All I know is that when I was hooking a trout last night, the thought suddenly flashed through my mind that the symptoms in both cases were identical. Now you see why I’m worried. If I make any allegation against Merrill, and it proved to be unfounded it’s the end of me. Quite apart from the fact that I’m a friend of his, and I was a friend of his late wife. Fine sort of friend, eh, to start thinking what I’m thinking?’

The other made a sympathetic noise behind his pipe. Dr. Griffiths eyed him anxiously, then drew some comfort from his expression. ‘What am I to do?’ he said. ‘At the same time, if there has been an attempt on Stone’s life, mind you I don’t say there has been, I don’t want there to be another. It might be fatal.’

There was a heavy silence in the office, while the smoke from Owen’s pipe drifted lazily in the warm air through the half-open window behind him.

‘On what you have told me, I don’t see that we can make a move. We’ve got to have some evidence.’

Dr. Griffiths slowly produced a specimen jar from his pocket. ‘That’ll tell you whether there’s anything in what I have been saying or not.’ The other stared at the object on the desk between them. ‘I took a sample of Stone’s urine. Don’t know what made me do it. I suppose I was instinctively worried about the poor chap’s attack.’

Inspector Owen moved briskly to the door, and called. Sergeant Parry, tall, clean-shaven, young, came in. ‘This is Dr. Griffiths. The specimen jar on the table is his. That’s so isn’t it, Doctor?’ Inspector Owen’s tone was suddenly official.

‘Yes, it is.’

Inspector Owen turned to the police-sergeant. ‘I want you to take possession of it. I am going to ring the Divisional Superintendent to see if it will be all right for you to take it to the police laboratory at Cardiff. Get the Super on the phone for me.’

Inspector Owen spoke on the telephone to the Superintendent of the division, Caernarvon, a case of suspected poisoning reported, and should he send Sergeant Parry to the laboratory at Cardiff with the specimen? Would that be all right?

All right by him, the Superintendent said and Inspector Owen hung up.

‘Sergeant Parry will take it down to Cardiff,’ he said to Dr. Griffiths.

‘Meanwhile, what about Stone?’

‘What about him?’

‘I mean, giving him a warning?’

‘You think it necessary?’

Dr. Griffiths gave a helpless shrug. ‘I’m not used to coping with suspected murder every day. I think it would be wise for him to keep away from Merrill. Until we know the truth one way or the other.’

‘I think I’d better keep quiet about it,’ Inspector Owen said. ‘If I looked in on him it might only arouse comment. You do it. You could drop a hint when you next see him. Tell him not to accept any more invitations from Merrill for the time being.’

Dr. Griffiths gave the other a nod and stood up slowly. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He smiled more cheerfully. ‘I feel a bit of a load off my mind.’

‘Not to worry,’ the other said. ‘It’s probably a false alarm, and if it is, it’s a secret between you and me. I’ll let you know what I hear from Cardiff.’

Sergeant Parry took a train early that afternoon to Cardiff, the specimen-jar bulging his jacket pocket. It was a tedious journey with two changes. He reached the laboratory at five o’clock and handed the jar to Dr. Richards, with a request for the usual analysis to be made. ‘Come back in an hour; I’ll tell you what the reaction is,’ Richards said.

Inspector Owen got the news on the telephone an hour later. Immediately after he had hung up on Sergeant Parry, he phoned Dr. Griffiths. ‘You don’t need to worry over your doubts about doing the right thing,’ he said, ‘if the information I’ve just received from Cardiff is correct.’

Next he phoned Caernarvon and spoke to the Superintendent, who in turn spoke to the Chief-Constable, named Pritchard. ‘I’ll get in touch with Scotland Yard,’ Pritchard said. He put a call through to London, and a few minutes later he was speaking to the Assistant Commissioner, Crime.

2.

That same evening Philip Vane was chatting over a drink with a caller at his flat in Jermyn Street, and he was saying he had been up at Castlebay in North Wales. His caller said what a coincidence, because he happened to know that Superintendent Larrabee had left a couple of hours ago for Castlebay. Larrabee had taken Detective-Sergeant Pitt with him, and the murder bag.

Vane suddenly recalled Dr. Griffiths landing the boss-trout, and muttering the name of Mrs. Merrill. Vane had seen Merrill a couple of days before in Castlebay. He had been with Dr. Griffiths who had told him that he had attended Merrill’s wife, who had died a few months before. Why, Vane was now asking himself, had Dr. Griffiths been so interested in a patient who had died, so that it had taken his mind off the boss-trout? Doctors aren’t usually all that anxious about a dead patient, they have enough thinking about their live ones.

Was Dr. Griffiths’s sudden interest in Mrs. Merrill for a special reason, the same reason which had sent the two Scotland Yard detectives heading for North Wales? And whereas Dr. Griffiths might no longer be interested in the late Mrs. Merrill, Superintendent Larrabee might be very interested in her death, and what lay behind it.

After Vane’s caller had gone he phoned a couple of people and then he drove through the night to arrive at Conway in the early hours. He had a feeling he would do better not to stay at Castlebay, instead he had fixed a room at the hotel at Conway.

He went down to breakfast at eight-thirty. As he went into the coffee room, there at a corner table sat Superintendent Larrabee and Detective-Sergeant Pitt.