Free Stiff News by Catherine Aird

Browne. ‘I made a point of doing that early on.’
    Sloan made a note. Something else the good books stressed as important was the positioning of the interviewee. It wasn’t like that here. Crosby had been relegated to the chair reserved for the patient’s friend or chaperon – well away from whatever action there was. And he, Sloan, was sitting on the patient’s chair, where the full light from the window fell upon his face.
    â€˜At least two months ago,’ said Browne calmly. It was the doctor’s face that was in shadow.
    â€˜I see.’ Nor was Sloan sitting across a desk but at right angles to the medical man. It was hard to be confrontational – let alone bring pressure to bear – while sitting sideways on. As it happened, he wanted to do neither of these things: but he did very badly want to know everything he could about the life and death of Gertrude Powell.
    â€˜Moreover, she was in a uraemic coma at the end,’ said Angus Browne briskly, ‘and there’s no two ways about that.’
    â€˜Ah, the end…’ Sloan began carefully. These days witnesses as well as suspects had to be handled with kid gloves. Not, naturally, that he had ever thought that it was fair to sit a man on a chair in the middle of a room and then circle round him, throwing questions at the man from behind his back so that he was forever spinning round, off-base, to face his interlocutor. ‘I wanted to talk to you about the end, doctor.’
    â€˜Not unexpected,’ said Browne immediately. ‘As it happened, I saw her the day she died.’
    â€˜You were sent for?’
    â€˜I was sent for to see someone else at the Manor and naturally I looked in on her, too.’
    â€˜May we ask who it…’
    â€˜Judge Gillespie,’ said Browne. ‘He’s always been a bit of an old woman about his health. Ye’ll notice his Hippocratic facies if you see him.’
    â€˜Beg pardon, doctor?’
    â€˜Lower jaw hanging open as if he was dead.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not to be wondered at. He’s been very, very shaky since he hit ninety.’
    â€˜Like that clock,’ said Crosby.
    â€˜What clock?’ asked the doctor.
    â€˜You know,’ said Crosby, beginning to chant, ‘the one in the song that stood ninety years on the wall, tick tock, and stopped, never to go again, the day the old man died.’
    â€˜The Judge hasn’t died,’ said Dr Browne, regarding the constable in a distinctly clinical way. ‘Although I agree some people do die when they’ve hit a new decade. Dangerous things, birthdays. Make you think. Especially when you’re suffering from too many of ’em.’
    â€˜So, doctor…’ resumed Sloan tenaciously.
    â€˜The birthday,’ carried on the doctor, ‘that really worries a lot of men…’
    â€˜Forty?’ suggested Crosby.
    â€˜No,’ said Dr Browne, recognizing a Freudian slip when he heard one. ‘It’s the one at the age at which their own fathers died.’ The general practitioner pulled open the late Mrs Powell’s medical record envelope. ‘I get a lot of nervous men in then.’
    Detective Inspector Sloan leaned forward, undeterred. ‘Mrs Powell…’
    â€˜It so happens, Inspector,’ said the doctor, neatly playing a trump card, ‘that I had asked one of the hospital consultants to take a look at her a week or so before she died.’
    â€˜You did?’ Sloan tried not to sound too interested. He was aiming for what was known as an open-ended interview. In theory, the semi-structured format allowed respondents to talk at length about any matter that concerned them yet still left the interviewer scope to explore difficult issues. In reality it seemed the doctor was making all the running. ‘Do you always do that?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜So why would that have been in this case