After Effects by Catherine Aird

Safety of Medicines people …’ carried on Gledhill.
    â€˜Never a breath of enthusiasm there,’ seconded his deputy.
    â€˜That’s their whole trouble,’ said Gledhill. ‘All they want to do is keep their noses clean.’
    â€˜And what they don’t like,’ said Mike Itchen, ‘is criticism. Can’t take a breath of the stuff.’
    They didn’t come more worldly than Al Dexter. ‘They don’t have anything riding on success, that’s the difference.’
    The Chief Chemist shrugged. ‘True.’
    â€˜And you fellows have,’ said Dexter simply; he pronounced the word with relish: ‘Cardigan.’
    Gledhill’s face lit up suddenly. ‘I’ll say we have. And so has Dr Paul—fresh carnation buttonhole—Meggie. Wherever the old fox’s got to this morning.’
    Detective Constable Crosby drew a neat line in his notebook after talking to the luckless Darren Clements in the Accident and Emergency Department. He hadn’t got very far. That young man was clearly prepared for martyrdom rather than disclose the names of his confederates.
    â€˜Me, shop my mates?’ he’d said. ‘You must be joking. Catch ’em yourself.’
    â€˜I dare say we will,’ replied Crosby equably. ‘We caught the monkeys all right last time and your lot aren’t as clever.’
    He found Dr Dilys Chomel more co-operative, although she wasn’t herself making a lot of sense of her interview with the detective constable. For one thing she was still rather confused and for another the policeman wasn’t making himself very clear.
    â€˜You had an old lady here this morning, miss, on Woman’s Medical in heart failure—’ Crosby had taken a unilateral decision about addressing any young woman with hair like rats’ tails as ‘Doctor’.
    â€˜Mrs Galloway?’ said Dilys, who hadn’t really reckoned on having the police in on her first death. ‘Yes. She died, of course … I mean.’ she halted in mid-speech. She had just realized that she was sounding like the woman in the children’s verse who had swallowed a fly and worked her way up to swallowing a horse. She, too, had died, of course. The House Physician started again. ‘I mean,’ she said haltingly, ‘naturally she died. She was very, very ill.’
    â€˜Ah, that’s what we wanted to know.’ Detective Constable Crosby made a new entry in his notebook. ‘You say she died naturally?’
    â€˜That, too,’ said the young lady doctor drily, wondering if she would ever truly master the manifold intricacies of the English language.
    â€˜Did you attempt resuscitation?’
    â€˜No.’
    Detective Constable Crosby said ponderously, ‘Not to attempt resuscitation when you can, miss, is murder.’
    â€˜No, it isn’t.’ She shook her head and said, ‘It’s not to resuscitate when you should that’s murder.’
    This much she did know. Dilys Chomel had paid particular attention her medical ethics lectures since in her own home country in Africa a very different view was taken of almost all such situations. Especially the survival of girl babies born to families who wanted only sons.
    â€˜Deciding not to resuscitate makes the doctor into judge, jury and executioner,’ persisted Crosby, who didn’t like hospitals anyway.
    â€˜That’s euthanasia,’ said Dilys Chomel firmly, deciding, since the policemen seemed a bit strong on ethics, not to reveal Dr Paul Meggie’s simple rule on resuscitating the terminally ill or very elderly. Detective Constable Crosby, she sensed, might not like it.
    This unwritten procedure had been spelled out to her by her predecessor in the house officer’s job when she took it over. ‘You don’t,’ he’d said meaningfully, ‘do it without consulting Dr Meggie first, understood?’
    â€˜But,’