“After all dear, when I get out of prison,” continued Garten, pausing after the word prison, “We’ll still have each other, so please put down the gun.”
“Prison!” squawked Mildred
“But not for too long dear,” soothed Garten. “I’ll probably be struck off, of course but…”
“Struck off!” echoed Mildred.
Saracen could see what Garten was doing. He wanted Mildred to shoot him. He was pretending to dissuade her while all the time he was inciting her with bleak pictures of their future. If the gun went off by accident they might both get away with it. If not then he would have the tape to show that Mildred was the murderer and that he had tried everything possible to stop her. The nonsense about covering up for Wylie would give him a chance to invent some story to account for the missing Archer body, something that laid the blame at Wylie’s door and diminished his own involvement to little more than misplaced loyalty. Garten could come out of this smelling of roses.
“You little shit,” said Saracen, unable to contain himself any longer. “You devious little turd.” He turned to Mildred and said, “Can’t you see what he is doing you silly bitch? How can you be so stupid! Your precious husband is responsible for covering up an outbreak of plague in this country. He is responsible for the death of Dr Chenhui Tang and for blackmailing a consultant pathologist into falsifying records.” Saracen was vaguely aware of Garten switching off the recorder.
“You are lying!” screeched Mildred.
“It’s the truth!” insisted Saracen.
“Nigel is a gentleman! He is going to be a Member of Parliament one day, Daddy said so.”
“Members of Parliament don’t have wives who shoot people Mildred,” said Saracen. “Put the gun down before someone gets hurt.”
“Yes dear,” said Garten softly, “Being a Member of Parliament isn’t everything…”
Mildred clutched the gun tighter and Saracen pushed himself back into the seat in trepidation.
“No! You are not taking this away from us,” she cried at Saracen. She struggled with the gun and Saracen realised that she intended to shoot. He threw himself sideways to the floor.
There was an agonising silence in the room broken only by Mildred’s grunting as she struggled with the weapon, unable to fire it for some unknown technical reason. As Saracen poised himself to make a bid for the gun Mildred swung it to the side to look at the triggers, not realising that both barrels were now pointing at her husband.
Garten opened his mouth to protest but Mildred, now satisfied that she could pull the right thing instead of the trigger guard, did so and emptied both barrels into Garten’s chest. The force of the blast lifted Garten clean out of his chair and nailed him momentarily to the wall before he slid to the floor, his chest a hollow, crimson crater. The recoil of the weapon drove the walnut stock of the gun back into Mildred’s stomach making her retch violently as she fell to her knees. Saracen looked at the scene from his kneeling position on the floor and whispered to no one in particular, “Christ Almighty.”
Chapter Nine
It was four thirty in the afternoon before the police had finished questioning Saracen. He himself had called them, Mildred being incapable of doing anything other than scream hysterically. Garten’s name and the fact that he was Matthew Glendale’s son in law ensured that the most senior police officers in Skelmore were in attendance, in fact Saracen had noted that officers of junior rank seemed to be markedly absent during the proceedings. This raised a question in his head that might have developed into paranoia had Mildred not already conceded that she had fired the weapon.
The confession however, had been made amidst loud protests that ‘it really hadn’t been her fault,’ that the gun had ‘gone off’, and that ‘if it hadn’t been for that swine,’ meaning Saracen, her husband Nigel would still be alive. Saracen feared that the police might lean towards the welfare of the establishment and so it proved to be. Rest and sedation were prescribed for Mildred while open hostility was the order of the day for him.
As the seemingly endless round of questions proceeded Saracen could sense that the police were determined to interpret Garten’s death as being accidental, the tragic outcome of a domestic accident while he himself was an interloper who had somehow precipitated the whole sorry affair. Saracen found himself becoming more and more annoyed. He would not allow himself to be rail-roaded along that particular path and determinedly stuck to the truth. Mildred Garten had been trying to kill him when the gun had gone off and killed her husband instead. She had been trying to stop him reporting Garten to the police over irregularities in the handling of two deaths at Skelmore General. Saracen was further annoyed that no one seemed to be writing anything down. “I thought that I was making a statement,” he protested.
“All in good time sir,” said the superintendent with a smile that bore no humour.
“Can I ask what you are going to do?” said Saracen.
“We are going to gather all the facts together and then make our report sir,” said the superintendent with a condescension that put Saracen’s teeth on edge.
“I understand that you are presently under suspension from the General Hospital sir?” said one of the other policemen.
“Is that relevant?” snapped Saracen.
“It might be,” replied the policeman. “I further believe that it was Doctor Garten himself who instigated your suspension?”
“Yes it was but that has nothing to do with…”
“Quite so sir.”
The senior policeman present leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his ample stomach. He regarded Saracen with a world weary gaze. “Now then, let’s see if I have got this right,” he said. “This woman, this Myra Archer, was not buried in St Clement’s Churchyard. She was cremated because she died of plague which she caught in Africa before coming here. She gave it to one of her neighbours who also died and he was cremated too. You say that Dr Garten covered up the true nature of these deaths in order to avoid public alarm and loss of business confidence in the area?”
“It’s not just a case of covering up,” replied Saracen, alarmed that the policeman had made it sound so unimportant. “There should have been a full scale epidemiological investigation of the outbreak.”
“Epi..?”
“He should have notified the public health authorities so that one of their teams could have identified the exact source of the outbreak, traced and isolated all the contacts, placed quarantine orders if necessary.”
“But I thought we had established that this Archer woman brought the disease with her from Africa?” said the policeman.
“Well yes but…”
“Then what you are really quibbling about is Dr Garten’s failure to do the paperwork?”
“No I’m not,” retorted Saracen angrily. “We are talking about plague! Black Death! Not influenza! You don’t take anything for granted and you never take chances with it!”
Saracen could see from the glances that passed between the policemen that he had been cast in the role of meddling busybody. He considered for a moment telling them the full story of Cyril Wylie’s involvement in the affair and of Wylie’s attempt to murder him but found that he had no heart for it. There was no point, he decided. What he really wanted was to go home.
Saracen poured himself a large whisky and slumped into a chair facing a window in the flat. He looked up at the sky and the passing clouds and, for once, was glad of the silence; it was exactly what he needed.
As the minutes passed the whisky did its bit in blunting his nerve ends and it was tempting to climb into the bottle for the rest of the evening but there was something else he had to do. He felt he had to go and see Timothy Archer and explain personally about his wife’s death and why she had not been buried where they had always planned. There would be no pleasure in it but then there was no pleasure to be taken in any of it.
Feelings of self recrimination began to arise in Saracen. Perhaps it would have been better all round if he had
