Plots and Errors

SCENE I--BARTONSHIRE Saturday, September 27th, 11:00 a.m. The garage and various rooms of a semidetached house in Stansfield Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd looked at the two bodies in the elderly Ford Fiesta and sighed. The man, he had never met. He was about Lloyd's own age--late forties, early fifties; difficult to say at the best of times, and this was not the best of times. He had more hair than Lloyd, but most people did. He had the same dark colouring, but he was much bigger, taller. The car had been specially adapted for a disabled driver; he was in the driving seat. The woman he had met, and had worked with, but that was a long time ago now. She had been twenty-four when he'd seen her last; she had left the job to marry the man whose hand she had been holding while their car had filled up with lethal fumes, pumped through a vacuum-cleaner hose from the exhaust pipe. "Their daughter found them this morning, sir," said the constable. "She walked along the passage between the house and the garage, to the back door of the house, and heard the engine. She pulled the hose from the exhaust, but she couldn't get into the car to turn off the engine." The garage, its overhead door closed and firmly locked, still held the heavy odour of exhaust gases; the small door at the rear stood wide open to admit as much fresh air as possible, but even diluted and dispersed, the pollution in the atmosphere was unhealthy. Undiluted, confined in the small car, it would have been lethal in about ten minutes. "It wouldn't have made any difference if she had. They'd been dead for hours by the time she got here," said the Forensic Medical Examiner, straightening up from the car. "Life pronounced extinct at . . . " She looked at her watch. "Eleven-seventeen a.m.," she said, and smiled at Lloyd. "I'm a bit puzzled about why you're here, Chief Inspector. How come you got called out? Am I missing something?" "No," Lloyd said. "You're not missing anything. I'm not here on duty--the officers dealing thought I'd want to know, that's all." He could hear his own Welshness when he spoke; usually his accent was very carefully controlled, ranging from barely discernible to impenetrable, depending on the impression he was choosing to give. It was when he got what Detective Sergeant Finch called a gut-feeling that it popped out all by itself. From his soul, he liked to think, rather than his gut. "I knew Kathy--twenty years ago, admittedly, but I knew her." He smiled at the slightly wary look on the FME's face. "I wouldn't rush round to see all my friends' dead bodies," he said. "But I want to be sure that this is really a suicide pact, because I don't think Kathy was a quitter." "Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't realize you knew her. But there's nothing to suggest she didn't go through with it of her own accord." "No," sighed Lloyd. "But it doesn't add up," he said, almost to himself, then smiled apologetically at the doctor. "Kathy always had a tendency to wade in first and think second," he said. "She never thought ahead. She survived by finding a way out of whatever problem she found herself with. She was famous for it." "Well," said the doctor doubtfully, "this is a way out." "True," Lloyd conceded. "And I don't know what her problems were yet--this may have seemed the only way out." He took the notes that she had made. "Thank you, Doctor," he said, lifting a hand as she left. "Where's the daughter now?" he asked the constable. "She's witMcGown, Jill is the author of 'Plots and Errors ' with ISBN 9780449002537 and ISBN 0449002535.