Pestilence (20 page)

“I’d like to see your husband.”

“You can’t. He’s busy.”

“I still want to see him.”

“Are you stupid? He’s busy I told you.”

“Tell him it’s about sandbags. He’ll see me.”

“Sandbags? Did you say sandbags?”

“Yes, deceased sandbags.”

“Diseased sandbags?”

“No Mildred, deceased as in dead.”

Mildred Garten looked at Saracen as if he had taken leave of his senses and backed away into the house leaving him alone with the gardener. The man winked at Saracen and whispered, “You wouldn’t think I used to go supping ale with her old man would you? A proper Lady Muck that one turned out.”

“Fur hat and no drawers,” said Saracen.

The old man cackled and got on with his raking before pausing again to say, “Tell you one thing. Them bloody plants are stopping where they are!”

Mildred returned and Nigel Garten was with her. “You had better come in,” he said to Saracen. Saracen followed him inside and up the stairs to his study on the first floor. He closed the door behind them leaving Mildred standing at the foot of the stairs wondering what was going on.

Garten cleared away a pile of political leaflets from a chair and invited Saracen to sit down. Saracen could see with some satisfaction that Garten appeared to be very nervous; he noticed that he was deliberately taking a long time to clear his desk as if unwilling to face him. He waited patiently until he finally had Garten’s attention and then said, “What did you do with Myra Archer’s body?”

Garten’s shoulders visibly sagged and he seemed to have aged ten years. “What do you know?” he croaked.

“I know that she is not in the ground at St Clement’s and I have witnesses to prove it.”

Garten closed his eyes as if in prayer and then sighed with resignation. “I had her cremated,” he said.

Saracen said nothing but kept looking at Garten who took this as a sign of disbelief. “It’s true,” he said, “I had her cremated. I had to.”

“Had to?”

“She died of plague.”

Saracen felt his eyes open wider. “You did say plague?” he asked softly.

Garten nodded. “Chenhui recognised the symptoms when Medic Alpha brought her in. She had seen it before in China. She told me and I persuaded her to say nothing after the woman died in the ambulance.”

“But why cover it up for God’s sake?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Black Death in the town. How long do you think Skelmore’s bubble would have lasted with rumours of that kind of outbreak in the offing? We aren’t the only development area in the land you know. Scotland could suddenly have seemed a very attractive alternative to the Japanese.

“But this isn’t the Middle Ages.” protested Saracen.

“Some diseases still scare people witless.”

“But the fuss would have died down.”

“Do you know what happens to a business at full stretch when something like that happens? When housing developments lie empty and the bank still demands payment?”

“You mean your father in law would have gone bust?” asked Saracen, determined to introduce a personal note to Garten’s altruism.

“If you like,” admitted Garten. “But not just Glendale’s. Lots of small firms would have gone to the wall. Any suggestion of even short term labour difficulties on the horizon and the Japs would have pulled out. With their muscle they can set up almost anywhere they like and get the same concessions.”

Saracen shook his head and said, “But to cover up an incidence of plague…”

“It’s not as bad as you make it sound,” said Garten. “It was obvious that the damned woman picked up the disease in Africa before she came here. She was just an isolated case, that’s all, and her contacts in this country were minimal. She had no friends or relations here and she was living on her own. There was just too much at stake for the town to notify the case to the authorities. I thought if we just kept it quiet that would be the end of it.”

“But what about the contacts she did have?” asked Saracen.

“I invented a Salmonella infection so that hospital staff and passengers on the plane she came over on could be given appropriate antibiotic cover. The risk to anyone was minimal.”

“You hope,” said Saracen. “It should have been done properly.”

“I keep telling you, there was too much at stake.”

“And Leonard Cohen?” asked Saracen.

“The whole affair seemed to be fading and then Cohen was admitted. He died of plague too.”

Saracen raised his eyes to the ceiling and swore softly.

“But it was just an oversight,” protested Garten. “Cohen lived in the same block of flats as the Archer woman we just didn’t realise that he knew her; the caretaker told us that she didn’t associate with anyone in the building.”

“So you wanted to cover up that one too and Chenhui disagreed?”

“More or less. Her nerve seemed to snap when she saw Cohen’s body and she started screaming at me. I tried to convince her that it was just a case of one contact having slipped through the net and that, as he lived alone and didn’t go out much, there was still no danger of an epidemic but she wouldn’t have it. She practically went berserk.”

“So you drugged her?”

“I didn’t really mean her any harm. I thought that if I could just keep her quiet until she saw that I was right and everything was back to normal then everything would be fine.”

“But instead, she’s dead.”

“Don’t think I don’t feel badly about it but it was an accident, that’s all, just an accident.”

“Just one of these things eh?” said Saracen pointedly.

“Well, if the silly bitch hadn’t gone off her rocker and listened to reason instead she would still be alive today wouldn’t she?” snapped Garten.

Saracen kept his temper but the urge to strike Garten was strong. “You were behind the affair at the mortuary when I got hit over the head?” he asked.

Garten nodded. “You stumbled across Dolman’s men removing Myra Archer’s body.

“And then they disinfected the place with formaldehyde?”

“Yes. Now I suppose you are going to call the police?”

Saracen did not get the chance to reply for Mildred, who had been listening at the door, burst in and she was holding a double barrelled shotgun.

“Please Mildred, put the gun down,” said Garten softly. “This isn’t going to help matters.”

Mildred ignored her husband and moved towards Saracen, hugging the gun into the folds of fat around her stomach. Saracen remained absolutely still. He could see from the look in Mildred’s eyes that any false move on his part could precipitate disaster. Mildred stopped with the gun only inches from Saracen’s face. She hissed, “If you think that you are going to destroy everything we have worked for you are very much mistaken.”

“Mildred please!” insisted Garten. “You are overwrought dear. Please put down the gun.”

Saracen still did not say anything, hoping that Garten could calm his wife down. He did not believe that Mildred was capable of cold blooded murder but there was a very real chance that the gun could go off by accident, especially when it was in the hands of someone so blessed with incompetence as Mildred. Mildred began to listen to her husband but still chose to argue. “Nigel, I will not let him take away everything that Daddy has planned for us. He’s just a cheap trouble maker. You did nothing wrong. Everything you did was for the benefit of the town.”

Saracen looked to Garten to continue the argument but was puzzled to see Garten’s hand sneak casually across the desk to the buttons on the intercom. Who could he be alerting? There was no one else in the house as far as he knew. Garten gave a fake cough and Saracen suddenly realised that he had done it to cover the sound of a recorder being switched on. A shiver of fear ran up Saracen’s spine as he tried to fathom what Garten was up to. Why in God’s name did he want this scene recorded?”

Garten said, “Mildred, my dear, I appreciate your loyalty but I have done wrong and must take the consequences. Please put down the gun.”

Mildred looked doubtful.

Garten continued softly. “It’s not the end of the world dearest, I know that I shouldn’t have covered up for Cyril Wylie but I did out of regard for an old friend and now I must face the music.”

Saracen frowned. What was all this nonsense about covering up for an old friend. He was blackmailing Wylie. Even Mildred looked puzzled but then the world continually puzzled Mildred.

“After all dear, when I get out of prison,” continued Garten, pausing after the word prison, “We’ll still have each other, so please put down the gun.”

“Prison!” squawked Mildred

“But not for too long dear,” soothed Garten. “I’ll probably be struck off, of course but…”

“Struck off!” echoed Mildred.

Saracen could see what Garten was doing. He wanted Mildred to shoot him. He was pretending to dissuade her while all the time he was inciting her with bleak pictures of their future. If the gun went off by accident they might both get away with it. If not then he would have the tape to show that Mildred was the murderer and that he had tried everything possible to stop her. The nonsense about covering up for Wylie would give him a chance to invent some story to account for the missing Archer body, something that laid the blame at Wylie’s door and diminished his own involvement to little more than misplaced loyalty. Garten could come out of this smelling of roses.

“You little shit,” said Saracen, unable to contain himself any longer. “You devious little turd.” He turned to Mildred and said, “Can’t you see what he is doing you silly bitch? How can you be so stupid! Your precious husband is responsible for covering up an outbreak of plague in this country. He is responsible for the death of Dr Chenhui Tang and for blackmailing a consultant pathologist into falsifying records.” Saracen was vaguely aware of Garten switching off the recorder.

“You are lying!” screeched Mildred.

“It’s the truth!” insisted Saracen.

“Nigel is a gentleman! He is going to be a Member of Parliament one day, Daddy said so.”

“Members of Parliament don’t have wives who shoot people Mildred,” said Saracen. “Put the gun down before someone gets hurt.”

“Yes dear,” said Garten softly, “Being a Member of Parliament isn’t everything…”

Mildred clutched the gun tighter and Saracen pushed himself back into the seat in trepidation.

“No! You are not taking this away from us,” she cried at Saracen. She struggled with the gun and Saracen realised that she intended to shoot. He threw himself sideways to the floor.

There was an agonising silence in the room broken only by Mildred’s grunting as she struggled with the weapon, unable to fire it for some unknown technical reason. As Saracen poised himself to make a bid for the gun Mildred swung it to the side to look at the triggers, not realising that both barrels were now pointing at her husband.

Garten opened his mouth to protest but Mildred, now satisfied that she could pull the right thing instead of the trigger guard, did so and emptied both barrels into Garten’s chest. The force of the blast lifted Garten clean out of his chair and nailed him momentarily to the wall before he slid to the floor, his chest a hollow, crimson crater. The recoil of the weapon drove the walnut stock of the gun back into Mildred’s stomach making her retch violently as she fell to her knees. Saracen looked at the scene from his kneeling position on the floor and whispered to no one in particular, “Christ Almighty.”

It was four thirty in the afternoon before the police had finished questioning Saracen. He himself had called them, Mildred being incapable of doing anything other than scream hysterically. Garten’s name and the fact that he was Matthew Glendale’s son in law ensured that the most senior police officers in Skelmore were in attendance, in fact Saracen had noted that officers of junior rank seemed to be markedly absent during the proceedings. This raised a question in his head that might have developed into paranoia had Mildred not already conceded that she had fired the weapon.

The confession however, had been made amidst loud protests that ‘it really hadn’t been her fault,’ that the gun had ‘gone off’, and that ‘if it hadn’t been for that swine,’ meaning Saracen, her husband Nigel would still be alive. Saracen feared that the police might lean towards the welfare of the establishment and so it proved to be. Rest and sedation were prescribed for Mildred while open hostility was the order of the day for him.

As the seemingly endless round of questions proceeded Saracen could sense that the police were determined to interpret Garten’s death as being accidental, the tragic outcome of a domestic accident while he himself was an interloper who had somehow precipitated the whole sorry affair. Saracen found himself becoming more and more annoyed. He would not allow himself to be rail-roaded along that particular path and determinedly stuck to the truth. Mildred Garten had been trying to kill him when the gun had gone off and killed her husband instead. She had been trying to stop him reporting Garten to the police over irregularities in the handling of two deaths at Skelmore General. Saracen was further annoyed that no one seemed to be writing anything down. “I thought that I was making a statement,” he protested.