by J G Alva
Janice came in to the room carrying two plates and noticed his attention on the washing line. She blushed.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” she said. She put the plates down. “I’ll just be a minute.”
And presently she went out with a basket and took it all down.
As he sat at the table she closed the back door and came through with a can of beer and a glass of wine.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
He laughed.
“What’s funny?” She asked, with a half-smile, and sat.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“You’re odd,” she said.
“Not as odd as someone who apologises for taking their washing down.”
She smiled.
“Alright. We’re both odd then.”
“I think we are,” he agreed.
Their eyes locked and Sutton was suffused with that warm glow of the beginning of something, of that rare connection that allows two people to feel less alone than they once had been.
Janice again looked great, even though she had big purple smudges under her eyes – still trying to get her body clock around, she informed him. She was wearing faded jeans and a grey and white tracksuit top, and her hair had been pulled back in a severe ponytail. She looked like a Yoga instructor but, he thought with private glee, she was his Yoga instructor.
As one they turned to their plates and began tucking in. Janice had concocted an elaborate salad with brie, cherry tomatoes, strips of fried bacon and grilled chicken, and despite Sutton’s earlier scare, or maybe because of it, he couldn’t remember having such a good meal. He firmly believed that half of the meal was the company anyway, and he was in splendid company. By mutual wordless consent neither of them spoke until they were done, perhaps aware that any conversation would invariably turn to the grim task that lay before them, and would put to bed the delicate buds of their appetites once and for all.
“Dessert?” She asked, collecting his plate.
Sutton had the vague guilty feeling of being well looked after.
“Really?”
“Chocolate fudge cake. With cream.”
“Sounds fantastic.”
She smiled.
“Coming right up.”
The dessert was delicious enough to be really bad for the heart but they both finished it, sitting back with a contented sigh.
“You’ve got some chocolate just here,” she said, leaning forward to wipe it from the corner of his mouth.
Almost without conscious thought, he took hold of her wrist.
She did not resist. Again, their eyes locked, this time in a seemingly unbreakable pairing. He was keenly aware of the rise and fall of that area of skin below her throat and above her breasts, aware that her breath was coming quicker, that the skin there was darkening with blood, and his own throat felt thick with something, and he realised that he too was breathing faster, God, he wanted her, and her mouth, slightly agape, seemed to capture all of his attention in that moment and, still holding to her wrist, he drew her down to him until he could taste those lips, and the world seemed to narrow to that small point of contact, and decades passed until she pulled back from him, slightly out of breath.
“If we don’t get down to business, we’re going to start skipping stages,” she said.
Her face was perhaps an inch from his.
“You’re a good kisser.”
“Thanks. You don’t kiss at all like I thought you would.”
“How did you think I would kiss?”
“Sort of...rough. But that was...well, that was perhaps the most sensuous kiss I’ve ever had from a man.”
“You’re welcome, m’ lady.”
“God,” she breathed. “Fancy helping with the washing up?”
“Gladly. If there’s another kiss waiting for me at the end of it.”
“I’m not sure I could stop myself if I wanted to.”
He found that indeed she couldn’t stop herself, and their hands, wet and covered in foam, grasped each other tightly, hungrily.
“I’m wondering if it was a bad idea to invite you back here,” she said, their foreheads touching.
“Why?”
“Well. It’s not that I don’t want to skip a stage or two, just that I don’t know if I’ve got the willpower to deny myself if we should.”
“Does it feel like we should?”
“I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything. Up or down, left or right. It’s all a bit of a jumble.”
“Then let’s have an intermission. Let’s go in to the lounge, and then you can tell me what you’ve found out.”
She nodded.
“Okay.”
Releasing her from his grip was actually painful. He had not felt this way about someone for a long time.
They took their drinks in to the lounge. Sutton was aware of her in the room as an iron filing is aware of a magnet, as he believed she was aware of him as well. They each moved carefully, perhaps afraid that were they to touch again they might not be able to separate themselves. They both sat on the sofa, with an entire cushion separating them. A safety barrier, if you will. Sutton was caught up in a delicious anticipatory thrill, and it was something of an effort to ground himself enough to be able to concentrate on what she was saying.
And then she said something that was shocking enough to clear his system of any and all erotic thoughts.
“First off, I have a confession to make: I knew Gavin Thompson. I was the one helping him to find out what Dr Bodel was doing.”
*
CHAPTER 20
MONDAY
He couldn’t believe it at first.
It simply couldn’t be. Her reluctance to help him had seemed so genuine, he had not thought for one moment that she had been engaged in a similar task. And his guilt at pushing her to do so…in that moment it was erased, and he felt stupid for feeling it. He wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or angry. Instead, the emotion he felt was suspicion. There were too many lies, none of which he had seen through…and now he was not sure he could trust anything she said. The hair, the eyes, the mouth, the smooth way she moved…all of it had been decoration and distraction, so that he hadn’t properly heard what she had been telling him. A magic spell, and he was under its influence.
Unconsciously, he moved back on the sofa.
“Oh, please, don’t, don’t,” Janice said, and she looked genuinely upset. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m really, really sorry. But can you just please look at it from my perspective for a moment? Please? Will you do that for me?”
He stared at her, seeing her anew, perhaps really seeing her for the first time…and despite everything, he still liked what he saw.
Only now he couldn’t be sure of himself.
“Alright,” he said gruffly.
She checked him, and then said, “I met Gavin in August. He spent a lot of time with Dr Bodel around that time, and so of course I bumped into him occasionally, and we chatted. When I first met him he was just…devastated. Bodel had done the tests, and he had just gotten the results: Bodel predicted that he would, maybe, with a bit of luck, have six months left to live. We went to the patient canteen to talk about it. Well, he talked really; I just listened. He couldn’t understand it. He told me about his wife, what had happened…I felt so sorry for him. He had really had things rough.”
She paused then, and gave Sutton a look of incredulity, and he understood it was perhaps the same emotion she had felt at their next meeting.
“And then the next time I saw him, in September, he told me he was cured.”
“He must have been elated.”
Janice shook his head.
“He was angry. He thought Bodel had lied to him. He said he’d been following him, that some of Bodel’s activities were suspicious, and that he was going to go to the General Medical Council with a complaint against him. I…talked him out of it.”
“Why?”
Janice looked vaguely ashamed.
&nb
sp; “Because it would have been dismissed. A misdiagnosis, and then swept under the carpet. Bodel was too valuable to the hospital for them to entertain the idea that what he was doing was wrong, they would just have dismissed any allegations outright. Not unless we had an absolute airtight case against him. I had my researches on him, on his career. There’s not much about him personally, but I was able to trace most of his medical career through records and some contacts I had.”
“Do you have that information?” Sutton said. “It would be nice to know of any cracks in the armour. Should it come to that.”
“Yes. It’s upstairs. Let me go get it.”
While she was gone, he tried to sort the jumble of his emotions. He wanted Janice, that much was clear…what wasn’t clear was…well, Janice. Who was she? He didn’t know; he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. She had so thoroughly deceived him that he was a little shocked. She had seemed forthright, honest, direct, without duplicity. And here he had thought he knew about women. He had to stop being so naïve. She could even be a plant for Bodel; a distraction to throw Sutton off the investigation. He didn’t really think she was, but it might be prudent to verify whatever information she shared with him for himself. Just to be on the safe side.
But he still wanted her.
He’d have to be careful; she was eminently good at pulling the wool over his eyes.
She returned with a file folder, which she spread out on the sofa between them.
He looked at her as she bent over the paperwork. Her hair was still in its ponytail, for which he was grateful; he couldn’t deal with any more distractions. Her skin was almost golden. The curve of her cheek was perfect. He wanted to draw her. The cheek, moving down to the neck, the collar bone moving obliquely against that line…
Damn it, stop it.
There were photocopies of records, printouts from the internet, scrawled notes, old grainy photographs.
“So,” she said, picking up an A4 sheet of paper. It was filled with her neat handwriting. “He was born in Cheltenham in 1964. His mother died from NHL when he was seventeen, which I think explains a lot about him.”
“Yes,” Sutton said. “His fight against NHL is personal.”
“Yes. A mission.” She returned to her A4 sheet. “His father was an Engineer, but died in 1986; he never saw him become a doctor. He did have a younger brother, but he died in 2004 in the Iraq War.”
“He was a soldier?”
“A Regimental Sergeant Major in the Royal Marines,” she said, reading. “He was killed by an IED.”
“Okay.”
“He graduated from the University of Bristol at Gloucestershire Academy in 1989.” She looked at him. “He was a year late, graduating.”
“Why?”
“Apparently, failure to complete all his training modules in the allotted time. He was skipping out on some of his classes to work as an ambulance attendant at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital.”
“Really?”
Janice nodded.
“I spoke to a nurse at Gloucestershire Royal. She was there when it happened. She said he was almost kicked out, but was allowed to stay on for another year to finish. Apparently, most of his work was brilliant, and it was decided that castigating someone whose intentions were benign seemed against the Hippocratic Oath. That’s what my friend said, anyway.”
Sutton wondered about that. Putting his medical studies at risk to work as an ambulance attendant seemed at odds with his very personal fight against NHL.
Janice continued.
“He then worked as a GP in Weston-super-Mare. Three years later, a former patient of Bodel’s left him a substantial sum of money in her will. £500,000.” Janice rubbed at her left eye. “There was some dispute over the will; her children complained, because the new will pretty much denied them anything. Her death was investigated, but it was found that she died of natural causes. There’s a lot about the case on the net, but Bodel was found to be completely innocent.”
“I wonder,” Sutton said.
“It does seem a little fortuitous,” Janice agreed.
“His first donation,” Sutton remarked. “Maybe there was nothing untoward about it, but it certainly demonstrated to Bodel that ample funds could be manipulated out of people, with the proper leverage.”
“Yes,” Janice said, looking unhappy at the thought.
“Shipman did it better,” Sutton pointed out.
Janice shivered.
“Shipman was psychotic. And greedy. He was forging wills left, right and centre.”
“I think the criminologists call it devolving. Bodel is too controlled for that.”
“God.” Janice looked momentarily aghast. She went back to her list. “In 1997 he wrote a paper on Monoclonal Antibodies that won some awards. Some of the techniques described in that paper are used today to fight NHL. It was around this time that he began working on some projects with a genetics lab in Bath.”
“The Miescher Centre,” Sutton said, nodding.
“You know it?” She said, surprised.
“Yes. Do you know what he was doing there?”
“No. Not really. Not the specifics. I couldn’t find out. But…that’s it. That’s all I have.” Janice shrugged. “Along with Bodel’s patient list. Me and Gavin looked through them, and then identified ones that – for whatever reason – might be suspicious. We didn’t have chance to do much before I found out that he had been murdered. Honestly, I panicked. I stopped investigating. It might have been a coincidence…but it so obviously may not have been a coincidence. I was scared to death. I’ve just been…on hold, all this time.” A look came into her eye in that moment. “And then I met you.”
Sutton refused to be engaged. She already knew how to play him; it was best to at least force an immunity to her, even if he didn’t feel it.
“When did you get suspicious of Bodel?”
“About a year after I started working with him in the Children’s Hospital.” She made an unhappy face. “It’s hard to explain why I became suspicious of him. Or at least, hard to make someone understand. It wasn’t any one thing. And it wasn’t necessarily that a lot of his patients died. I mean, he has a very high mortality rate. But that’s simply because of the types of cases he takes on.”
Sutton leaned back, rubbing at the bridge of his nose; rubbing at the spot where the pressure of these revelations was pushing on his brain.
“If he’s so bad, I’m surprised people come to him at all.”
“Well. This is the thing. His science is incredibly sound. He’s been published, and his research has helped to make great leaps. But for all that, he still has a very high mortality rate.
“But, like I said, that isn’t unexpected. NHL is notoriously difficult to treat, at least the aggressive side of it is…and most of his patients, when they find him, have the aggressive type.”
She pulled a face.
“I don’t know, I think…It was the way he was with his patients. You’ve met him, you know what he’s like. He seems to bring this sort of well of calm with him, wherever he goes. And patients and family members respond to that. That’s why they trust him so completely. But when it turned out that a patient wasn’t going to make it, then something else seemed to rise up in him. He’d be around all the time. Family members thought it was because he was so considerate, but…I don’t think it’s that at all. It’s hard to put my finger on what it is. It’s like the calm is a cloak, and underneath it is this – I don’t know – schoolboy, who likes setting fires to things. Who likes seeing things go wrong.”
She looked at him.
“I sound like an idiot, right?”
But Sutton was inclined to think that the opposite was true.
“No,” he said. “You sound like someone particularly attuned to other people. To picking up on nuances other people might miss.” Thinking of her recent revelations, and that she had hid so much of herself from him, he said, “maybe too attuned.”
She nodded seriously and conti
nued.
“So you can see how difficult it was. I couldn’t stand by and let him get away with it, but I also couldn’t stop him…not without losing my job, and possibly putting myself in worse danger. I had to swear Gavin to absolute secrecy, because I couldn’t risk losing my job, once I’d be dismissed I wouldn’t be able to work anywhere else in the NHS – who would take me? – and this is all I know how to do, and…and I’m good at it. Alright? I’m a good nurse. And also…I was afraid.”
“When was the last time you saw Gavin?”
“A week before he died,” Janice said. “He had a friend, he said, someone who was going to help him – I’m assuming he meant you – but he didn’t tell me anything about who it was, so I didn’t know, okay? It might have been you…but it could just as easily not have been. I couldn’t risk it. But then you mentioned his name, but I still wasn’t sure…Gavin had been killed, I didn’t know who I could trust, so I just decided to trust nobody. I still didn’t have enough to fully convince the General Medical Council. I thought, maybe, if I got a job somewhere else, then maybe I could have more time to build a case…But then I would be on the outside, and it would be so much more difficult to get the information. I didn’t know what I was going to do…I still don’t…” She shrugged, looking helpless and upset. “So you see. That’s why I didn’t say anything until now. And I’m sorry. I should have trusted you sooner.”
Sutton stared at her, and she must have been able to see by his expression that he was sceptical.
“Right,” she said, sitting up. “Fine. You don’t believe me. I can understand that. But what if I said I can prove it.”
This, he found highly doubtful.
“How can you prove it?” He asked mildly.
“The lockbox,” she said. “I’m the one who has the key to the lockbox.”
