The Crozier Pharaohs

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.’

17

Judgement Suspended