“Do you think,” Barnaby was asking now, “that this was a boyfriend she was referring to?”
The Brockleys opposed this suggestion with what the Chief Inspector could not help thinking was a ridiculous degree of certainty. After all their daughter was nearly thirty and, even if her social life was somewhat limited, must have met plenty of men in the course of her work. Brenda’s photograph was on the edge of Barnaby’s sight-lines and registered only as part of the background.
“Nothing like that,” Reg was saying.
“Brenda’s a most particular girl.”
“We’ve brought her up to be very choosy.”
“Tell me again if you would,” said Barnaby, “about the phone call. Her actual words, if you remember them.”
If they remembered them! The eager, breathless sentences were engraved on both their hearts.
“Daddy, I might not be home for a little while. I’ve run into a friend. We’re going for something to eat. Don’t worry if I’m a bit late. See you soon. Bye.”
“The strange thing was—”
“Apart from getting such a message in the first place,” Iris interjected.
“—she seemed to be speaking from a railway station.”
“Oh yes?” said Barnaby.
Troy glanced covertly at his watch and yawned inwardly, stretching his lips without parting them and lifting the roof of his mouth. He glanced covetously at the rest of the chocolate wafers. Amazing, no matter what state people were in they always made some tea and prised open the biccy box.
“There was a lot of background noise,” explained Reg.
“Announcements.”
“Well, Mr. Brockley,” Barnaby got up, his large frame blocking half the light from the window, “I suggest the best thing to do, if you haven’t heard from Brenda by tomorrow, is to come into the station and register her as a missing person.”
“The police station?”
“That’s right.”
“Couldn’t you do that for us now, Mr. Barnaby?” said Iris.
“I’m afraid not. There are certain procedures to be followed. Forms to be completed.” Barnaby did not add, as many of his colleagues seemed so easily able to do, I’m sure everything will be all right. He had knocked on too many doors and had to tell too many distraught families that the situation regarding their children was very much not all right.
They were shown out through the kitchen. Troy stopped at the poodle’s basket, bent down and patted the dog. Fondled its dejected ears.
“She’ll be back soon,” he said cheerily. “Keep your tail up.”
The preliminary stages of the postmortem were completed by six o’clock. The full report would not be on the Chief Inspector’s desk until the following afternoon but George Bullard rang the results through straightaway.
Alan Hollingsworth had died from an overdose of the tranquilliser Haloperidol in a solution of whisky. There was no food in the stomach. The drug was available only by prescription under various brand names usually in 0.5 milligram capsules. As near as could be reasonably assessed, around six or seven milligrams had been taken. No capsule casings appeared to have been swallowed. There were no unexplained marks on the body. The heart, lungs and other internal organs were sound.
“Good for another forty years,” concluded Dr. Bullard.
“What about times?”
“Late Monday night, I’d say. Or early Tuesday. It’s hard to be more precise after forty-eight hours.”
“Oh, come on, George.” Silently he cursed Constable Perrot.
“Sorry.”
Barnaby sighed then said, “Would such a dosage be enough to kill someone?”
“Probably. Especially with all that booze. From the way he was lying I’d say he took the stuff sitting on the sofa then, when he became unconscious, just rolled off. The rug was very thick and, let’s face it, dying is about as physically relaxed as you can get. Which was why he wasn’t bruised.”
“And what’s this about ‘no casings?’ Are you saying he took the stuff in tablet form?”
“Couldn’t have. Only made up in capsules.”
“Hang on.” Barnaby paused and felt again that strange and unsubstantiated conviction which had visited him when he first saw Alan Hollingsworth’s body. “Isn’t it bitter? The stuff in these tranquillisers?”
“Sometimes. Not in this case. Haloperidol’s pretty tasteless.”
“Wouldn’t the casings have dissolved anyway?”
“Perhaps. But there’d still be traces of gelatin in the stomach.”
“Right. Thanks, George.”
So there it was. A straightforward enough story. A man’s wife has left him. He tries to drown his sorrow in drink. But drink wears off. More must be taken, which in its turn will also wear off. And so on and wretchedly on. Much better to end it once and for all.
So, having been driven to this miserable conclusion, what does Hollingsworth do? Chuck the tablets in his mouth, wash them down with hooch and get it over with? No, he sits on the settee, carefully pulls the sixteen or so gelatin capsules apart, tips the contents into his glass and stirs till dissolved. Then disposes neatly of the cases. It was possible, of course. Some people would behave with such neatness and precision even in extremis—the Brockleys for example. But that was not how the dead man had acted so far. He had shown nothing but shambolic desperation.
Though still wary of setting a full-scale investigation in motion, Barnaby now saw his next step as unavoidable. And so it was that early the next morning a Sherpa van turned into St. Chad’s Lane. Shortly afterwards, Scenes of Crime, to the intense excitement and satisfaction of the village, unloaded their stuff and set in motion the austere and impersonal machinery of investigation.
Chapter Four
Notified that his car was ready, Barnaby, rejecting the lift, made his way downstairs. Huffing and puffing to and from the car park to his room was practically the only regular exercise he got these days. He discounted gardening which was necessarily intermittent and, as his plot was now so old and well-established, involved very little in the way of hard digging.
He had quite a distance to huff and puff. In common with the headquarters of many civil businesses, the higher a person’s rank in the police force the further away from the ground floor his or her office would usually be found. The Chief Super was rumoured to reside in the crow’s nest, a steel and plastic anti-lightning device screwed halfway up the radio mast on the roof of the main building.
Passing through reception Barnaby noticed the Brockleys and could see straightaway that the stays of their lives had loosened further. They were sitting side by side in comfortless polystyrene shells. Plainly their daughter had not returned. There was a sad reversal in the manner of their appearance. Reg now looked as ill and distraught as had his wife the previous day. Iris sat like a rock. Her tightly folded arms pressed a framed photograph hard against her chest. Her face, though expressionless, was savagely compressed, appearing to spread outwards. She looked like the lemon on the old squash advertisement: Idris When I’s Dry.
They had indeed waited, as Barnaby suggested, almost another whole day before reporting Brenda missing. Such subjection to authority in a situation like this seemed to him almost unbelievable. Ridiculous even. He was about to go over when a policewoman came out from behind the desk and approached them.
The heatwave, promised for some days by the weather forecasters, was now well on the way. The car was like an oven. All the windows were open but Barnaby could still feel the leather burning his legs. His shirt was limp and already glued to his back. Troy, in a crisp, apple-green Lacoste sports top (genuine Alligator motif, three pounds from a car boot) looked as if he had just stepped out of a fridge, not a trickle of sweat anywhere. He was moaning, as always, this time about his sex life.