It was Tom Culshaw who picked up the telephone at his home outside Calleford. ‘Gordian Knots Cut,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said a man’s voice. ‘You’re just the chap I need to talk to.’
‘And how may we be of assistance to you, sir? No problem too big or too small for us to tackle,’ carried on Tom Culshaw fluently, although he was now old enough and wise enough to know that this was not always strictly true. ‘We solve them, anyway.’
‘It’s small. By the way, this is Martin Pickford speaking.’
‘Who?’
‘You know, you met me in that lawyer fellow’s office when he was going on about the good old araucaria araucana.’
‘About the what?’ Tom Culshaw asked.
‘The monkey puzzle tree.’
‘What monkey puzzle tree? I don’t remember anything being said about a monkey puzzle tree then.’
‘All right, all right. The family tree, then – same thing, seeing as we’re all descended from monkeys and in our case it’s all a bit of a puzzle anyway. You were one of the Mayton crowd there, weren’t you?’
‘So I was,’ said Tom Culshaw warily. ‘I remember you now. What about it?’
‘I’m afraid you’ll also remember that I was a bit hungover at the time,’ said Pickford.
‘It was quite early in the morning.’ Tom Culshaw had been on a business course, which had included learning how to project sympathy to potential clients whatever your private opinion of them. Censure was only allowed if customers didn’t pay their bills. ‘So what can I do for you? Or is this all a joke?’
‘I only want a chap delayed from getting somewhere in time, that’s all.’
‘We don’t do anything illegal,’ said Tom Culshaw stiffly.
‘No, no, it’s just that I need him held up for a while. Diverted, you might say. For a couple of hours at the outside.’
‘And we don’t do anything physical, either,’ said Tom Culshaw.
‘Perish the thought, old chap,’ said Pickford. ‘All I need is for him to be a little bit late in getting to a meeting.’ He paused and added meaningfully, ‘Like you were when you arrived at the solicitors’ that day.’
‘That was because of heavy traffic between Calleford and Berebury,’ said Tom Culshaw.
‘Could happen to anyone, heavy traffic,’ mused Pickford thoughtfully.
‘I think I get your drift,’ said the other man.
‘So can punctures,’ went on Martin Pickford. ‘Happen to anyone, I mean. A flat tyre can hold you up no end. Look here, this isn’t anything sinister. You could truthfully say it’s a sporting matter rather than a joke.’
‘A bet? Look here, Pickford, I’m not getting involved in anything crooked.’
‘Certainly not. This is only to do with a game.’
‘And that makes it all right, does it?’ Tom Culshaw was a painter manqué, not a sportsman.
‘No, old chap, it doesn’t but it makes it much more fun. I’m sure you’re game for that.’
‘Supposing – just supposing – we were to take the job on, how long would you need this man delaying for?’ Tom Culshaw stopped, halted by a sudden thought. ‘If it is a man, that is.’
‘Oh, it’s a man all right,’ said Pickford airily. ‘That’s the whole trouble.’
‘I see – so it’s a case of all being fair in love and war, is it?’ said the other man.
‘Not quite and not war, I promise you,’ said Pickford.
‘And what is this man like? He’s not a nasty piece of work, I hope.’
‘Certainly not. He’s a helluva good fellow. Everybody likes him. That’s part of the trouble.’
‘And how will I know what he looks like?’
‘I’ll send you a photograph of him in rugby kit. Without a mouthguard or headband, of course. He’s actually quite good-looking, if a bit on the beefy side. That’s part of the trouble, too.’
‘How long do you need him delayed for?’ asked Culshaw, now suspecting, as the other man had hoped, that there was a love rival involved.
‘A couple of hours would be perfect.’
‘And his name – I’ll have to have that – if we take it on, that is.’
‘Jim Stopford, otherwise known,’ replied Martin Pickford with sudden savagery, ‘as Twinkletoes.’
‘And where, may I ask, isn’t he to get to?’
‘Oh, he can get there all right but not until after nine o’clock.’
‘Where?’ asked Tom Culshaw, this time more sharply.
‘The Bellingham Hotel in Berebury high street. Do you know it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Tom Culshaw, ‘I know it all right and I also know that we can’t just barge in there. It’s not that sort of place.’
‘I don’t want you to. I want him held up before he gets there – and I don’t mean what you think I mean by that. This isn’t a game of cops and robbers.’
‘I should hope not.’ Tom Culshaw took a deep breath. ‘And when, may I also ask, isn’t this Jim Stopford to get there until after nine o’clock?’
‘This coming Thursday evening.’
‘And where will you be while all this carry-on is happening?’
‘Me? Oh, I shall be at the Bellingham myself,’ said Pickford lightly, ‘but with him safely out of the way.’
‘Oh, you will, will you? And in the restaurant, I suppose?’
‘Look here, Culshaw, I can assure you it’s all quite above board.’ That he hadn’t given the man a straight answer to his question – and that there was quite a different board involved – Martin Pickford had not seen fit to tell him.
‘Where to, sir?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby, crouching ready for the off at the wheel of the police car.
‘Calleford,’ said Sloan. ‘The main hospital there.’ He glanced down at a note. ‘To see a Dr Helston at their Poisons Unit.’
‘With nee-naws?’ suggested the constable hopefully.
‘A siren is not necessary,’ said Sloan repressively. ‘Nor, Crosby, is a blue light either, should you happen to have been thinking of switching one on.’
‘No, sir. Of course not, sir. It’s only that it’s a good fair way over there and if you should have an appointment at the hospital, then …’ He gave Sloan a sideways glance and went on slyly, ‘It does help when it comes to parking.’
What proved even more difficult than finding a parking space was finding the whereabouts of Dr Helston in the vast teaching hospital at Calleford. While Sloan could take or leave anonymous backdoor visits to mortuaries for the purpose of attending post-mortems, he was rather less sanguine about entering major hospitals by the front door. The receptionist at the desk there didn’t help.
‘The Poisons Unit?’ she said. ‘It’s not signposted because you’re not supposed to go there.’
Detective Constable Crosby asked why not.
‘Because if someone thinks they may have been poisoned, they want them in Accident and Emergency straightaway.’ She looked appraisingly at Sloan. ‘And if you’ve taken something you shouldn’t have done then you must go there immediately.’ She fixed him with her eyes. ‘Like now.’
Detective Inspector Sloan said in an austere tone that he hadn’t taken anything that he shouldn’t have done but that he did have an appointment at the Poisons Unit and wanted to know how to get there. ‘Like now.’
The receptionist, obviously a last-ditcher by nature, said, ‘They don’t usually have visitors in that department.’
‘They do now,’ said Detective Constable Crosby as Sloan started to feel in his pocket for his warrant card.
‘I’m afraid that it’s a bit tricky to explain how to find it,’ said the receptionist, still keen on having the last word.
‘Try me,’ said Sloan tightly.
‘For the Poisons Unit you’ll have to follow the blue arrows on the floor to Haematology, then turn left, go past Neurophysiology and you’ll find it on your right.’
‘Thank you,’ said Sloan.
‘It should have been red arrows for the blood place, shouldn’t it?’ remarked Crosby to nobody in particular.
‘The Poisons Unit door’s not labelled,’ said the receptionist, firing a Parthian shot in the direction of the departing policemen with grim satisfaction.
‘It’s worse than foot patrol,’ grumbled Crosby as they eventually reached the door they were looking for.
‘Not a dark night in winter in the rain, it isn’t,’ said Sloan, more experienced in the matter.
‘All the same, I reckon finding Dr Livingstone would have been easier,’ said Crosby, knocking on an unmarked door.
‘We’ve got an appointment to see Dr Brooke Helston,’ said Sloan to the young girl in a white coat who answered their knock.
‘Police,’ supplemented Crosby.
‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘I’m Brooke Helston, the chief chemist here. Come in.’
Following her into the unit, Sloan experienced a moment of melancholy. He was aware that doctors of whatever variety, like constables, were getting younger, but surely they shouldn’t be as young or as pretty as this girl? He banished the thought immediately. It wasn’t one of which Sergeant Polly Perkins would have approved.
‘And how can I help you?’ she asked, waving them towards high laboratory chairs. ‘Sorry we haven’t anything more comfortable to sit on, but we don’t get many visitors here.’
‘And I don’t suppose they stay long when they do come,’ said Crosby, looking round at an unpromising collection of bottles, retorts and balances and stationing himself, although he didn’t know it, beside an electric centrifuge.
‘We don’t often get to see them in the first place,’ she explained. ‘We just get their history and their body fluids as a rule.’ She smiled, revealing a row of perfect white teeth. ‘It’s usually enough.’
‘We are investigating a death that in the opinion of Dr Dabbe, the pathologist at Berebury,’ began Sloan formally, getting out his notebook, ‘was the result of the ingestion of a poisonous substance. All the tissue samples that he took have gone to the police forensic laboratory but he suggested we talked to you, too.’
‘The Sailor King,’ sighed the girl, instantly coming over all dreamy-eyed. ‘Hector Dabbe, I mean. He took me out in his Albacore last month. Round the headland beyond the Cunliffe Gap. It was a wonderful trip and I haven’t forgotten it yet. Isn’t he great?’
‘The poison he suggested was ergot,’ persisted Sloan, ignoring all mention of boats, the pathologist and the sea at the Cunliffe Gap.
‘Mal des ardents,’ said Dr Helston promptly. ‘That’s what they used to call ergot poisoning in France.’
‘Beg pardon, miss?’ He knew he shouldn’t have called her ‘miss’, but it didn’t seem right to address this little slip of a thing as a doctor of chemistry or of anything else.
To his relief the girl didn’t seem to take it amiss. She said, ‘St Anthony’s Fire.’
‘Who’s St Anthony?’ asked Crosby.
‘What’s St Anthony’s Fire?’ enquired Sloan, more to the point.
‘St Anthony’s Fire,’ explained Dr Helston, ‘was called after a French saint who is said to have caused those suffering from gangrenous erysipelas to recover. Only he didn’t.’
‘No?’ said Sloan.
‘They recovered from ergot poisoning because they moved away from the source of the poison.’
Sloan nodded. That would have saved many a victim of domestic violence too, let alone poisoning. Had they known they were being poisoned, of course, Madeleine Smith and arsenic coming to mind. They didn’t always know, indigestion getting much of the blame to begin with. Domestic violence they did know about but weren’t always willing to acknowledge.
Or act upon. That was the trouble.
‘And not because the sufferers wore the tau cross, either,’ she went on, unaware of his train of thought.
‘You’ve lost me, miss,’ said Sloan.
‘An artefact in the shape of the Greek letter “T”, thought to save the wearer from St Anthony’s Fire.’
‘But it didn’t cure them either?’ said Detective Constable Crosby, who had been paying more attention than usual.
She shook her head. ‘Nope. They could still say amens accedit about anyone who was wearing it.’
‘And what might that mean?’ asked Sloan, who’d never liked hearing words he didn’t understand. It sounded like Latin and it was Greek to him anyway.
‘A rough translation is “He arrives out of his mind”,’ she said.
‘That figures, anyway,’ said Sloan, remembering what Dr Browne had told them about Mrs Port’s behaviour.
‘The doc said the deceased was absolutely bananas by the time he got there,’ supplemented Crosby.
‘They say we share a lot of our chromosomes with bananas,’ remarked the chemist inconsequently.
‘And what exactly is it? This St Anthony’s Fire?’ persisted Sloan.
‘Well, for starters, it wasn’t the gangrenous erysipelas they thought it was.’
That came as no surprise to Sloan. Medical cases had been misdiagnosed for centuries, the miasma theory being a case in point. ‘No?’
‘As you know, Inspector, it was poisoning from a mould on rye.’
Detective Inspector Sloan made a note. He would have to find where the rye came from in rural Calleshire.
And the mould.
And, more importantly, how it had got into the late Mrs Port’s system.
And, more importantly still, exactly why.
Dr Helston was still talking. ‘And so it wasn’t a miracle at all. All the sufferers had to do to be cured was to stop eating rye bread with the mould in it.’
A working lifetime in the police force had caused Detective Inspector Sloan not to believe in miracles anyway.
‘And in any case, as I said,’ went on Dr Helston, ‘it wasn’t erysipelas that they were suffering from, either.’ She looked across at the two policemen and shook her head. ‘Sadly, it was gangrene, though.’
‘So Dr Dabbe said.’ Sloan couldn’t bring himself to refer to the pathologist as ‘Hector’. Instead he flipped through the pages of his notebook until he found the place. ‘In both hands and feet of the deceased.’
‘That figures,’ she said. ‘Ergot, ergotamine tartrate or ergonovine poisoning. Take your pick.’
‘What’s ergotamine tartrate?’ Sloan asked.
‘One of the therapeutic versions of ergot, Inspector. They use a product called ergometrine in hospital more these days when delivering babies.’
Detective Constable Crosby frowned, taking this on board. ‘Doesn’t that mean it does good, too?’
‘It is often used at a certain stage in childbirth,’ she said with scientific precision.
‘A therapeutic preparation?’ Detective Inspector Sloan made a note. That opened up a whole new ball game.
‘Yes, indeed, Inspector. It’s a derivative of ergot.’ She brushed her hair away from her eyes like a child and grinned at them. ‘So’s LSD.’
Detective Constable Crosby sat up. ‘You’re talking acid?’
She beamed at him. ‘I am, Constable. And trips. Ergot’s where LSD comes from, too.’
‘Well I never,’ marvelled the constable. ‘We know all about that back at the station.’
‘This mould,’ said Sloan, firmly sticking to what he needed to know.
‘Claviceps purpurea,’ she said promptly.
Sloan was still feeling a certain melancholy. It didn’t seem right to him that a head as pretty as Dr Brooke Helston’s should be full of learning of this sort. No doubt, though, that Woman Sergeant Perkins would take a different view. He made a note, at the same time revising his opinion of the pathologist. Dr Hector Dabbe obviously wasn’t such a dry old stick as he seemed to be when giving evidence in court.
‘The rye gets made into bread and there you have it,’ Dr Helston said. She gave a little twinkle with the bluest pair of eyes that Sloan had seen in many a year. ‘Ergo and then ergot, you might say.’
‘Quite so, miss,’ said Sloan, not really a player of word games. ‘Thank you for all your help. Dr Dabbe was right to send us here.’
She looked wistful. ‘He’s promised to show me his jury-rigging next time we go for a sail.’
‘Not his etchings, then,’ said Detective Constable Crosby under his breath.
Detective Inspector Sloan, his hand on the door, hurried into speech. ‘The only sort of jury-rigging we have anything to do with in the police, miss, are the attempted corruption of twelve good men and true.’
‘And we don’t like it,’ added Crosby.