Chapter 2
Nurse Hensted arrived at last. “What’s going on? Oh lor, is …?”
“I think he’s dead,” Daisy faltered.
Pushing past Mrs. Talmadge, who seemed incapable of movement, Miss Hensted scanned the anaesthetic apparatus. “He didn’t turn on the oxygen. I knew he’d bungle it sooner or later.” She turned a couple of valves, then reached for the wrist Daisy had dropped.
“Shouldn’t we take off the mask?” Daisy asked.
“No. I’ve turned off the nitrous. He’s getting pure oxygen now, or would be if he was breathing. It’s the only antidote, but the gas bag’s full and the dial’s not moving. It’s too late.” Grim faced, she laid the limp hand on the arm of the chair. “He’s long gone.”
“Dead!” Mrs. Talmadge burst into noisy sobs, mixed with hiccuping laughter.
The nurse slapped her face, hard. The laughter stopped abruptly, but she started gasping and clutching at her throat,
while tears ran down her face, streaking her face-powder and making her eye-black blotch.
“Hysteria. I’ll deal with her,” said Miss Hensted, “if you wouldn’t mind ringing up the doctor, Mrs. Fletcher. Not that he can do anything, but it’s got to be reported.”
Not waiting for an answer, she hustled Mrs. Talmadge out. Daisy heard her in the passage, calling, “Gladys! Gladys, come and help me get your mistress upstairs.”
Accident or suicide? Daisy wondered. Why had Mrs. Talmadge jumped to the conclusion that her husband had killed himself?
Whichever, Talmadge’s death had to be reported to the police as well as to his doctor.
Alec wouldn’t believe his ears when he heard she’d found herself mixed up in another unnatural death.
Accident or suicide, not murder. She nerved herself to take another look at the dead man’s face.
He looked too cheerful to have committed suicide, but of course that was the effect of the gas.
Odd how he had a discoloured, pinkish brown patch around that horribly smiling mouth, in the otherwise pallid face. A rectangular patch.
Steeling herself, Daisy bent to sniff at the discoloration. The cinnamony odour of benzoin tincture was faint but plain.
Suddenly cold, she looked again at Talmadge’s arms, laid so neatly on the arms of his chair.
Wouldn’t a man who was going to kill himself, or one who planned a few minutes of gas-induced euphoria, relax with his hands in his lap?
And what were those creases in the sleeves of his white jacket, an inch or two up from the wrists?
The sleeve she and the nurse had not disarranged, in feeling for a pulse, also
showed a sort of dent or furrow, as if something had compressed the material.
Daisy wildly scanned the room, hoping for something—anything—to dispel her suspicions.
She saw all the paraphernalia of a dental surgery: adjustable light, electric drill, a rack of vicious steel implements, sinks for spitting and hand washing, a sterilizer, a mahogany cabinet with dozens of miniature drawers for supplies, a waste bin, and a small table with a blank loose-leaf ledger page on it, headed with her name, waiting in vain for notes on the state of her teeth.
The cupboard with a red cross on the door presumably held a first-aid kit, a kit containing the simple tools necessary for this particular murder.
The evidence might be in the waste bin, but Daisy couldn’t bring herself to look.
That was a job for the police. No one must touch anything until they arrived.
She checked that the key was in the keyhole on this side of the locked connecting door to the waiting room.
Without another glance at the dead man, so much more pathetic now she thought of him as a murder victim, she went to the door to the side passage.
The door stood wide open. The key was on the inside.
With her gloved hand, Daisy took it out and put it in the outside.
She pulled the door closed and locked it, doing her best not to smudge any “dabs.” Sergeant Tring would be proud of her, she hoped.
Then she wrapped the key in her hankie and dropped it in her handbag.
She mustn’t give herself time to think about what she had shut away. Time to ring up the doctor and the police. She recalled seeing a ’phone in the waiting room, but by now
more patients might have arrived and she didn’t feel up to coping with them. Surely there was one in the house.
As she passed the stairs, the maid came dashing down, pink faced with excitement, the ribbons on her cap floating behind her. She slowed to a more decorous pace on seeing Daisy.
“Can I help you, madam?”
“Yes—Gladys, isn’t it?—I’m looking for a telephone. Do you know who is the Talmadges’ doctor?”
“Dr. Curtis, m’m. There’s a telephone in the study, in there.
The mistress is in such a state, I never seen the like in all me born days!
Miss Hensted sent me to put on a kettle for tea and Miss Kidd said fetch the brandy, but I’m sure, m’m, she ought to have the doctor to her, right enough.
” Her voice sank to a whisper. “Screaming and crying she is that the master’s dead! ”
“I’m afraid Mr. Talmadge has met with an accident. When you have done as Nurse Hensted told you, you had better go around to the waiting room and tell people there will be no appointments because of an emergency. Put up a notice.”
“Yes, m’m.” The girl bobbed a curtsy.
“Thank you, Gladys.” Daisy nodded dismissal and hurried to the study.
More of an office than a comfortable retreat, this was apparently where Talmadge did the business of his practice.
Daisy sat down at the utilitarian desk, pulled the telephone apparatus towards her, and asked the operator to put her through to Dr. Curtis.
The doctor was another local man she had met socially, an elderly GP who had been the Fletchers’ family practitioner for donkey’s years.
The phone rang and rang. At last Dr. Curtis’s maid answered. The doctor was out on his rounds.
“Blast!” Daisy muttered. But it wasn’t really an emergency. Raymond Talmadge was beyond help, and Miss Hensted was surely capable of coping with Daphne Talmadge’s hysterics. The police would send their own doctor anyway.
The police. Taking a deep breath, Daisy asked the operator for Whitehall 1212. Alec was not going to be happy when he heard that after four peaceful months—well, three and a half—she had once again enmeshed herself in a murder enquiry. Or was she imagining the whole thing?
“Scotland Yard.”
“I’d like to speak to Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher, please.”
“Who’s speaking?”
“This is Mrs. Fletcher. It’s urgent.”
“Right you are, ma’am, I’ll see if the Chief Inspector is in.”
Over the wire came the sound of whispering and a snicker.
Daisy felt herself blushing, a despicable affliction even when there was no one to see.
The whole Metropolitan Police force probably knew by now that she was in the Assistant Commissioner (Crime)’s black books for her meddling in a number of cases.
“Sorry, ma’am, the Chief Inspector’s out.”
“Sergeant Tring?”
“Went with him. If it’s police business, ma’am, not personal, you’d better tell me about it and I’ll put you through to someone else.”
“I …” Daisy hesitated. She didn’t want to speak to someone
else, she wanted Alec. “It’s … I’m afraid it’s a suspicious death.”
“Where are you, Mrs. Fletcher?” the voice asked sharply.
She gave the address. “It’s …”
“You need to ring division HQ, Mrs. Fletcher. Have you got a pencil? Here’s the telephone number. I’ll see a message gets to the Chief Inspector when he comes in.”
A message and a lot of ragging, Daisy thought resentfully as she wrote down the number and thanked the officer. It wasn’t her fault, let alone Alec’s, that dead bodies bestrewed her path through life. She’d much rather they didn’t.
She clicked the hook a couple of times to disconnect the call and summon the operator, and gave the girl the new number. On the first ring a bored voice asked her business.
“I want to report a suspicious death.” It sounded sillier and less likely each time she said it.
“Suspicious?”
“Well, unnatural, anyway.”
“Your name, please, madam, and the number you’re ringing from.”
“Mrs. Fletcher.” Daisy gave the Talmadges’ number, and added their address.
“Is that your residence, madam?”
“No, it’s the victim’s residence, and his dental office. I’m just a patient. A would-be patient, rather. Mr. Talmadge, Raymond Talmadge, has died of an overdose of laughing gas. Or maybe suffocation,” she said doubtfully, remembering the turned-off oxygen.
“You can leave that to the medicos to decide, madam.”
Boredom banished, the voice was quite cheerful now. “I’ll send the police surgeon and one of our detective officers round right away. Hold on a minute, please, madam.”
This time, no whispers or snickers reached Daisy’s ears. Either the Yard gossip had not reached the divisions, or they had not realized that she was that Mrs. Fletcher.
“Mrs. Fletcher? You stay right there, if you please, madam. Detective Sergeant Mackinnon is on his way and he’ll want to ask you a few questions. Can you keep everyone away from the scene of the … incident?”
“I’ve locked the surgery.”
“Good for you! DS Mackinnon will be with you shortly. I need to clear the line now, but you ring me right back if you need to.”
Daisy hung up the earpiece. She considered ringing up her mother-in-law to say she’d be delayed, but then she would have to explain why.
Mrs. Fletcher knew she had been mixed up in several of Alec’s cases, though they had managed to keep some from her.
Not unnaturally, she strongly disapproved.
What she would feel about Daisy’s involvement in the local murder of an acquaintance didn’t bear thinking of.
In fact, Daisy really didn’t want to think at all, but she had run out of useful things to do. She longed for a cup of tea.