The Crozier Pharaohs

9

Poacher and Doctor

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The noun,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘I will ignore. The adjective I find intriguing. Whom did Dr Rant murder? — and under what circumstances?’

‘Is it worth a fiver to you?’

‘We shall both know that when I have heard the story.’

‘What do you want to know for?’

‘Because this death at Watersmeet may well lead to a charge of murder against person or persons so far unknown.’

‘Dr Rant couldn’t a-done it. He’m dead.’

‘I believe, though, that certain people still harbour such a grudge against him that they have extended it towards his daughters and even to their kennel-maid. What can he have done to arouse and sustain such rancour? All doctors make mistakes at times.’

‘Ah, well, one or two of his mistakes, folks reckons, was made a-purpose.’

‘The story, if credible and well substantiated, is worth the five pounds you postulated. Fire away and do not spare the details. We have plenty of time before the Crozier Arms opens its hospitable doors to you.’

Beyond emphasising that he had obtained his information by what he referred to as ‘pub talk’, Adams told his story as though he had personal knowledge of its details.

After the death of his wife, Dr Rant had taken to the bottle, but this, it was surmised, was not so much because of his loss — there might have been sympathetic understanding for that — but because two of his patients had died when, in the opinion of the ‘old wives’ of the village, who included in their number the village midwife, the first of the patients should have recovered.

The inquest that followed the death of Dr Rant himself found that, fuddled by drink, he had taken an overdose of the drug he had prescribed for himself and died from the combined effects of the drug and the alcohol. It was pointed out by the medical witnesses that a doctor, of all people, should have known the danger of combining the two, and there was some talk that the truer verdict would have been one of suicide.

When the doctor’s will was proved, the bulk of the money and the house itself had been left to Bryony and Morpeth. However, Dr Rant’s younger partner, who had ‘lived in’ at Crozier Lodge for several years, received a sufficiently handsome sum to buy his own practice in Abbots Bay. This again displeased the villagers, since they then had no doctor at all in Abbots Crozier and were obliged to go down to the other village if they needed to attend surgery.

‘So what had caused the deaths of the two patients?’ Dame Beatrice enquired. Adams could answer this question. One of the doctor’s victims had been apprenticed to the village carpenter. While at work, the youth had dropped a chisel and made a nasty gash in his thigh. The doctor, as usual, had referred him to the hospital, but the boy demurred, so Dr Rant had stopped the bleeding and put on a dressing. Local opinion was that the dressing was unsterilised and possibly even soiled., At any rate, the wound became infected and the lad died of septicaemia.

The other case was markedly different, although it was the immediate result of the first one. The aunt of the dead apprentice went to Crozier Lodge to take Dr Rant to task because of the young man’s untimely end. A bitter altercation ensued and the doctor turned the woman forcibly but of the house. She was alleged to have missed her footing on the front steps because she turned her head to shout abuse at Rant. That was the version he gave at the inquest and there was no one to dispute it, since the only other person present was a jobbing gardener who was too far away to be able to give an acceptable account of what had happened and who claimed that, until he had heard the woman scream as she fell, he had been unaware that anybody was leaving the house. The woman was concussed by the fall and died by the time the ambulance reached the Axehead hospital.

Her husband claimed that Dr Rant must have pushed her down the steps and, in his cups, although not in court, the jobbing gardener had admitted that the sounds of vituperation proceeding from the top of the front steps had been audible to him, that he had stopped work to listen and look, and that he had seen the woman come hurtling down the steps on to the concrete path below ‘like she had been given a good sharp shove’.

He had dropped the garden fork he was holding and had run to where the woman lay. There was no sign of Dr Rant, although the gardener had seen him standing at the open front door only a few moments earlier. In that case, even if he had stepped inside and closed the door, he must have heard the woman scream as she fell. Finding her unconscious, the gardener had hammered on the door. This produced the elder daughter, Bryony, who looked down and saw the woman lying on the path. Bryony, according to the story, had gone indoors to find her father.

‘It seems a pity, ’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘that village animosity against their father should have spilled over on to his daughters. It savours of witch-hunting and is equally unjust.’

Adams agreed.

‘Nice ladies,’ he said, ‘but the village has their reasons. They don’t like all them dogs, for one thing, but, more than that, there’s them as reckons one or other of the ladies could have testified at the inquest of Mrs Subbock, her what was killed falling down them steps. Stands to reason, says some, as the row outside the front door must have been heard by them insjde the house and somebody would have looked out the window, even if they done nothing else, to see what all the palaver were about.’

‘And so witnessed the accident? I take your point and I think it more than likely that you are right and that there would have been a witness to the accident — more than one witness, perhaps. However, witnesses are not always prepared to come forward, especially when their evidence may bring trouble to a member of their own family. Do you know anything about relations between the doctor and his wife?’

‘Used to bash her about — the girls, too, so I heared,’ said Adams, ‘but it don’t do to believe everything you hears. As for Dr Mortlake, now, down in Abbots Bay, as used to be Dr Rant’s assistant, well, they all testified as he were out on his arternoon rounds when Mrs Subbock cracked her nut falling down them steps.’

It was Laura who telephoned Dr Mortlake.