“Did Margot know about this addiction?” asked Strike.
“No,” said Gupta, “I didn’t tell her, although I should have done. She was my partner and the person I ought to have confided in, so we could decide what to do.
“But I was afraid she’d storm straight into Dr. Brenner’s consulting room and confront him. Margot wasn’t a woman to back away from doing what she thought was right, and I did sometimes wish that she would exercise a little more tact. The fallout from a confrontation with Brenner was likely to be severe. Delicacy was required—after all, we had no absolute proof—but then Margot went missing, and Dr. Brenner’s barbiturate habit became the least of our worries.”
“Did you and Brenner continue working together after Margot disappeared?” asked Strike.
“For a few months, yes, but he retired not long afterward. I continued to work at St. John’s for a short while, then got a job at another practice. I was glad to go. The St. John’s practice was full of bad associations.”
“How would you describe Margot’s relationships with the other people at work?” Strike asked.
“Well, let’s see,” said Gupta, taking a second fig roll. “Dorothy the secretary never liked her, but I think that was out of loyalty to Dr. Brenner. As I say, Dorothy was a widow. She was one of those fierce women who attach themselves to an employer they can defend and champion. Whenever Margot or I displeased or challenged Joseph in any way, our letters and reports were sure to go straight to the bottom of the typing pile. It was a joke between us. No computers in those days, Mr. Strike. Nothing like nowadays—Aisha,” he said, indicating the top right-hand picture on the wall behind him, “she types everything herself, a computer in her consulting room, everything computerized, which is much more efficient, but we were at the mercy of the typist for all our letters and reports.
“No, Dorothy didn’t like Margot. Civil, but cold. Although,” said Gupta, who had evidently just remembered something, “Dorothy did come to the barbecue, which was a surprise. Margot held a barbecue at her house one Sunday, the summer before she disappeared,” he explained. “She knew that we weren’t pulling together as a team, so she invited us all around to her house. The barbecue was supposed to…” and, wordlessly this time, he again illustrated the point by interlacing his fingers. “I remember being surprised that Dorothy attended, because Brenner had declined. Dorothy brought her son, who was thirteen or fourteen, I think. She must have given birth late, especially for the seventies. A boisterous boy. I remember Margot’s husband telling him off for smashing a valuable bowl.”
A fleeting memory of his nephew Luke carelessly treading on Strike’s new headphones in St. Mawes crossed the detective’s mind.
“Margot and her husband had a very nice house out in Ham. The husband was a doctor too, a hematologist. Big garden. Jheel and I took our girls, but as Brenner didn’t go, and Dorothy was offended by Margot’s husband telling off her son, Margot’s objective wasn’t achieved, I’m afraid. The divisions remained entrenched.”
“Did everyone else attend?”
“Yes, I think so. No—wait. I don’t think the cleaning lady —Wilma!” said Dr. Gupta, looking delighted. “Her name was Wilma! I had no idea I still knew it… but her surname… I’m not even sure I knew it back then… No, Wilma didn’t come. But everyone else, yes.
“Janice brought her own little boy—he was younger than Dorothy’s and far better behaved, as I remember. My girls spent the afternoon playing badminton with the little Beattie boy.”
“Was Janice married?”
“Divorced. Her husband left her for another woman. She got on with it, raised her son alone. Women like Janice always do get on with it. Admirable. Her life wasn’t easy when I knew her, but I believe she married again, later, and I was glad when I heard about it.”
“Did Janice and Margot get along?”
“Oh yes. They had the gift of being able to disagree without taking personal offense.”
“Did they disagree often?”
“No, no,” said Gupta, “but decisions must be made in a working environment. We were—or tried to be—a democratic business…
“No, Margot and Janice were able to have rational disagreements without taking offense. I think they liked and respected each other. Janice was hit hard by Margot’s disappearance. She told me the day I left the practice that a week hadn’t passed since it happened that she hadn’t dreamed about Margot.
“But none of us were ever quite the same afterward,” said Dr. Gupta quietly. “One does not expect a friend to vanish into thin air without leaving a single trace behind them. There is something—uncanny about it.”
“There is,” agreed Strike. “How did Margot get along with the two receptionists?”
“Well, now, Irene, the older of the two,” sighed Gupta, “could be a handful. I remember her being—not rude, but a little cheeky—to Margot, at times. At the practice Christmas party—Margot organized that, as well, still trying to force us all to get along, you know—Irene had rather a lot to drink. I remember a slight contretemps, but I really couldn’t tell you what it was all about. I doubt it was anything serious. They seemed as amicable as ever the next time I saw them. Irene was quite hysterical after Margot disappeared.”
There was a short pause.
“Some of that may have been theatrics,” Gupta admitted, “but the underlying distress was genuine, I’m sure.
“Gloria—poor little Gloria —she was devastated. Margot was more than an employer to Gloria, you know. She was something of an older sister figure, a mentor. It was Margot who wanted to hire her, even though Gloria had almost no relevant experience. And I must admit,” said Gupta judiciously, “she turned out to be a good appointment. Hard worker. Learned fast. You only had to correct her once. I believe she was from an impoverished background. I know Dorothy looked down on Gloria. She could be quite unkind.”
“And what about Wilma, the cleaner?” asked Strike, reaching the bottom of his list. “How did she get on with Margot?”
“I’d be lying if I said I could remember,” said Gupta. “She was a quiet woman, Wilma. I never heard that they had any kind of problem.”
After a slight pause, he added,
“I hope I’m not inventing things, but I seem to remember that Wilma’s husband was something of a bad lot. I think Margot told me that Wilma ought to divorce him. I don’t know whether she said that directly to Wilma’s face—though she probably did, knowing Margot… as a matter of fact,” he continued, “I heard, after I left the practice, that Wilma had been fired. There was an allegation of drinking at work. She always had a Thermos with her. But I may be misremembering that, so please don’t set too much store by it. As I say, I’d already left.”
The door to the sitting room opened.
“More tea?” inquired Mrs. Gupta, and she removed the tray and the now-cooling teapot, telling Strike, who had risen to help her, to sit back down and not to be silly. When she’d left, Strike said,
“Could I take you back to the day Margot disappeared, Dr. Gupta?”
Appearing to brace himself slightly, the little doctor said,
“Of course. But I must warn you: what I mostly remember about that day now is the account of it I gave the police at the time. Do you see? My actual memories are hazy. Mostly, I remember what I told the investigating officer.”
Strike thought this an unusually self-aware comment for a witness. Experienced in taking statements, he knew how wedded people became to the first account they gave, and that valuable information, discarded during that first edit, was often lost forever beneath the formalized version that now stood in for actual memory.
“That’s all right,” he told Gupta. “Whatever you can remember.”
“Well, it was an entirely ordinary day,” said Gupta. “The only thing that was slightly different was that one of the girls on reception had a dental appointment and left at half past two—Irene, that was.”
“We doctors were working as usua
l in our respective consulting rooms. Until half past two, both girls were on reception, and after Irene left, Gloria was there alone. Dorothy was at her desk until five, which was her regular departure time. Janice was at the practice until lunchtime, but off making house calls in the afternoon, which was quite routine. I saw Margot a couple of times in the back, where we had, not exactly a kitchen, but a sort of nook where we had a kettle and a fridge. She was pleased about Wilson.”
“About who?”
“Harold Wilson,” said Gupta, smiling. “There’d been a general election the day before. Labor got back in with a majority. He’d been leading a minority government since February, you see.”
“Ah,” said Strike. “Right.”
“I left at half past five,” said Gupta. “I said goodbye to Margot, whose door was open. Brenner’s door was closed. I assumed he was with a patient.
“Obviously, I can’t speak with authority about what happened after I left,” said Gupta, “but I can tell you what the others told me.”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” said Strike. “I’m particularly interested in the emergency patient who kept Margot late.”
“Ah,” said Gupta, now placing his fingertips together and nodding, “you know about the mysterious dark lady. Everything I know about her came from little Gloria.
“We operated on a first-come, first-served basis at St. John’s. Registered patients came along and waited their turn, unless it was an emergency, of course. But this lady walked in off the street. She wasn’t registered with the practice, but she had severe abdominal pain. Gloria told her to wait, then went to see whether Joseph Brenner would see her, because he was free, whereas Margot was still with her last registered patient of the day.
“Brenner made heavy weather of the request. While Gloria and Brenner were talking, Margot came out of her consulting room, seeing off her last patients, a mother and child, and offered to see the emergency herself as she was going from the practice to the pub with a friend, which was just up the road. Brenner, according to Gloria, said ‘good of you’ or something like that—which was friendly, for Brenner—and he put on his coat and hat and left.
“Gloria went back into the waiting room to tell the lady Margot would see her. The lady went into the consulting room and stayed there longer than Gloria expected. Fully twenty-five, thirty minutes, which took the time to a quarter past six, and Margot was supposed to be meeting her friend at six.
“At last the patient came out of the consulting room and left. Margot came out shortly afterward in her coat. She told Gloria that she was late for the pub, and asked Gloria to lock up. She walked out into the rain… and was never seen again.”
The door of the sitting room opened and Mrs. Gupta reappeared with fresh tea. Again, Strike stood to help her, and was again shooed back into his chair. When she’d left, Strike asked,
“Why did you call the last patient ‘mysterious’? Because she was unregistered, or—?”
“Oh, you didn’t know about that business?” said Gupta. “No, no. Because there was much discussion afterward as to whether or not she was actually a lady.”
Smiling at Strike’s look of surprise, he said,
“Brenner started it. He’d walked out past her and told the investigating officer that he’d thought, on the brief impression he had of her, that she was a man and was surprised afterward to hear that she was female. Gloria said she was a thickset young lady, dark—gypsy-ish, was her word—not a very politically correct term, but that’s what Gloria said. Nobody else saw her, of course, so we couldn’t judge.
“An appeal was put out for her, but nobody came forward, and in the absence of any information to the contrary, the investigating officer put a great deal of pressure on Gloria to say that she thought the patient was really a man in disguise, or at least, that she could have been mistaken in thinking she was a lady. But Gloria insisted that she knew a lady when she saw one.”
“This officer being Bill Talbot?” asked Strike.
“Precisely,” said Gupta, reaching for his tea.
“D’you think he wanted to believe the patient was a man dressed as a woman because—”
“Because Dennis Creed sometimes cross-dressed? Yes,” said Gupta. “Although we called him the Essex Butcher back then. We didn’t know his real name until 1976. And the only physical description of the Butcher at the time said he was dark and squat—I suppose I see why Talbot was suspicious but…”
“Strange for the Essex Butcher to walk into a doctor’s surgery in drag and wait his turn?”
“Well… quite,” said Dr. Gupta.
There was a brief silence while Gupta sipped tea and Strike flicked back through his notes, checking that he had asked everything he wanted to know. It was Gupta who spoke first.
“Have you met Roy? Margot’s husband?”
“No,” said Strike. “I’ve been hired by her daughter. How well did you know him?”
“Only very slightly,” said Gupta.
He put the teacup down on the saucer. If ever Strike had seen a man with more to say, that man was Dinesh Gupta.
“What was your impression of him?” asked Strike, surreptitiously clicking the nib back out of his pen.
“Spoiled,” said Gupta. “Very spoiled. A handsome man, who’d been made a prince by his mother. We Indian boys know something about that, Mr. Strike. I met Roy’s mother at the barbecue I mentioned. She singled me out for conversation. A snob, I should say. She didn’t consider receptionists or secretaries worth her time. I had the strong impression that she thought her son had married beneath him. Again, this opinion is not unknown among Indian mothers. He’s a hemophiliac, isn’t he?” asked Gupta.
“Not that I’ve heard,” said Strike, surprised.
“Yes, yes,” said Gupta “I think so, I think he is. He was a hematologist by profession, and his mother told me that he had chosen the specialty because of his own condition. You see? The clever, fragile little boy and the proud, overprotective mother.
“But then the little prince chose for a wife somebody utterly unlike his mother. Margot wasn’t the kind of woman to leave her patients, or her adult learners, to rush home and cook Roy’s dinner for him. Let him get his own, would have been her attitude… or the little cousin could have cooked, of course,” Gupta went on, with something of the delicacy he had brought to the mention of “black ladies.” “The young woman they paid to look after the baby.”
“Was Cynthia at the barbecue?”
“That was her name, was it? Yes, she was. I didn’t talk to her. She was carrying Margot’s daughter around, while Margot mingled.”
“Roy was interviewed by the police, I believe,” said Strike, who in fact took this for granted rather than knowing it for certain.
“Oh yes,” said Gupta. “Now, that was a curious thing. Inspector Talbot told me at the start of my own police interview that Roy had been completely ruled out of their inquiries—which I’ve always thought was an odd thing to tell me. Don’t you find it so? This was barely a week after Margot’s disappearance. I suppose it was only just dawning on us all that there really was no mistake, no innocent explanation. We’d all had our hopeful little theories in the first couple of days. She’d maybe felt stressed, unable to cope, and gone off alone somewhere. Or perhaps there’d been an accident, and she was lying unconscious and unidentified in a hospital. But as the days went by, and the hospitals had been checked, and her photograph had been in all the papers and still there was no news, everything started to look more sinister.
“I found it most peculiar that Inspector Talbot informed me, unasked, that Roy wasn’t under suspicion, that he had a complete alibi. Talbot struck all of us as peculiar, actually. Intense. His questions jumped around a lot.
“I think he was trying to reassure me,” said Gupta, taking a third fig roll and examining it thoughtfully as he continued. “He wanted me to know that my brother doctor was in the clear, that I had nothing to fear, that he knew no doctor could have done anything
so terrible as to abduct a woman, or—by then, we were all starting to fear it—to kill her…
“But Talbot thought it was Creed, of course, from the very start—and he was probably right,” sighed Gupta, sadly.
“What makes you think so?” asked Strike. He thought Gupta might mention the speeding van or the rainy night, but the answer was, he thought, a shrewd one.
“It’s very difficult to dispose of a body as completely and cleanly as Margot’s seems to have been hidden. Doctors know how death smells and we understand the legalities and procedures surrounding a dead human. The ignorant might imagine it is nothing more than disposing of a table of equivalent weight, but it is a very different thing, and a very difficult one. And even in the seventies, before DNA testing, the police did pretty well with fingerprints, blood groups and so forth.
“How has she remained hidden for so long? Somebody did the job very cleverly and if we know anything about Creed, it’s that he’s very clever, isn’t that so? It was living ladies who betrayed him in the end, not dead. He knew how to render his corpses mute.”
Gupta popped the end of the fig roll in his mouth, sighed, brushed his hands fastidiously clean of crumbs, then pointed at Strike’s legs and said,
“Which one is it?”
Strike didn’t resent the blunt question, from a doctor.
“This one,” he said, shifting his right leg.
“You walk very naturally,” said Gupta, “for a big man. I might not have known, if I hadn’t read about you in the press. The prosthetics were not nearly as good in the old days. Wonderful, what you can buy now. Hydraulics reproducing natural joint action! Marvelous.”
“The NHS can’t afford those fancy prosthetics,” said Strike, slipping his notebook back into his pocket. “Mine’s pretty basic. If it’s not too much trouble,” he continued, “could I ask you for the practice nurse’s current address?”
Troubled Blood: A Cormoran Strike Novel Page 11
