Some Die Eloquent by Catherine Aird

Author:Catherine Aird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

CHAPTER XI

Our furnace too for calcifying action,

Our waters in a state of albefaction.

‘What!’ bellowed Leeyes. ‘Do you mean to just stand there and tell me you lost him?’

‘We did,’ said Sloan. Sometimes with the Superintendent a short answer stood one in better stead than a long one.

‘And what were you afraid of?’ snarled Superintendent Leeyes in a transport of rage. ‘Foot and mouth disease?’

‘Quarantine,’ said Sloan, speaking for himself. Detective-Constable Crosby had been muttering about the Black Death.

‘He was within your reach …’ moaned Leeyes, taking a deep breath.

‘But he slipped through our fingers,’ finished Sloan for him.

Unwisely, as it happened.

‘Sloan, this isn’t one of your fancy games of cricket. This is for real.’

‘So is the Bio-activity, sir.’

‘What does it mean?’ asked Leeyes suspiciously.

Sloan, too, had had to ask. ‘It’s the place in the hospital – in the whole of Calleshire, actually – where they keep the cultures of the stuff that they don’t want to get out and about. Viruses, mostly.’

That hadn’t been quite how the Administrators had put it to the two policemen but it had been what they had meant.

‘Catching,’ said Leeyes, reducing the matter to its simplest.

‘Highly,’ said Sloan. All the people working in the department there had had head-to-foot white gowns on and masks and there were lots of glass barriers everywhere. ‘You could see things, sir, but not touch them.’

‘Supermarkets should be like that,’ said Leeyes, momentarily diverted. ‘Save a lot of trouble.’

‘I gather,’ offered Sloan, ‘that there’s quite a bit of medical research going on in there too.’

‘There always is,’ said Leeyes. ‘No one ever wants to get on with the actual job these days.’

The Administrator at the hospital and George Wansdyke of Messrs Wansdyke and Darnley, plastics specialists, had both spoken more reverently about research but Sloan knew what Leeyes meant. The well-meaning and the academic had both been researching into crime since Cain killed Abel without coming up with a satisfactory solution.

‘So,’ Sloan resumed his narrative, ‘we didn’t go in. We rang the bell instead.’

‘And,’ snorted the Superintendent truculently, ‘the footman said he would enquire if there were any wanted men roaming around waiting to give themselves up.’

‘And,’ said Sloan steadily, ‘we were told that even if Jack the Ripper were loose inside we wouldn’t be allowed further in.’

‘In the name of the Law …’ began Leeyes weightily.

‘Furthermore,’ reported Sloan unemotionally, ‘we were also told that should we step inside as unauthorized persons we would be sent to an Isolation Hospital and kept in strict quarantine until such time as the medical authorities deemed us free of risk to the community.’

It was this threat more than the nameless horrors of the Plague that had deterred them.

‘And your man?’ demanded Leeyes who never for one moment lost sight of essentials.

‘Disappeared.’

‘Carrying the Lord knows what in the way of germs all over the hospital?’

‘We don’t know how near the real stuff he got. They said that the next set of doors was locked but they promised to do a big search themselves and tell us if they came up with anything.

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