by Val McDermid
Charlie followed him into another unspoiled corridor. Halfway down, he wheeled left into a cubicle office. One internal wall was a long window that looked on to a pathology suite. A technician in a white overall and rubber boots was methodically cleaning surfaces. Patel tutted and pulled the blinds down. 'Have a seat,' he said, gesturing to a folding chair squeezed into a corner at the end of his desk. Neat piles of paper flanked a flashy laptop. A stainless steel Thermos and a phone sat beside the computer. Charlie couldn't imagine a life that involved being constantly up to your elbows in human remains, but she did envy Vik Patel his obvious capacity for neatness.
He pushed black-rimmed glasses up his nose and gave Charlie a puzzled stare. Closer up, she could see a few strands of silver in his hair and fine lines in his tea-coloured skin. He was older than she'd thought at first. 'I'm bemused,' he said. 'You're a psychiatrist, right?'
That detail wasn't on her ID. They'd either recognised her name or quickly Googled her. But still Patel had decided to see her. That was probably a point in her favour. 'That's right,' Charlie said, on her guard nevertheless.
'By definition, you deal with the living. Me, I'm a pathologist. By definition, I deal with the dead. I'll be honest with you, Dr Flint. I'm struggling to find some common ground here.'
His accent wasn't local. He was a northerner, like her. Leeds or Bradford, she thought and wondered if she could use that as a bridge between them. Instead, she said, 'Call me Charlie.' Another of the charm-offensive smiles. 'I'm looking for some information, Vik. About an old case of yours.'
'How is an old case of mine a concern of yours?'
He wasn't making this easy. But then, why should he? 'In my line of work, people have a tendency to make confessions or allegations that aren't always truthful. But sometimes they are true and they force us to take another look at cases that may have been closed years before. I've got a situation where someone is making an allegation about a death that was written up as an accident. If they're right, then we could be looking at a murder investigation.'
Patel nodded impatiently. 'I get that, Charlie. I assumed it was something like that. What I'm not getting is why it's you sitting here, not a police officer. In my experience, they're the ones that hunt down murderers.' Again the hand smoothed his hair. It seemed to be a mechanism for reassuring himself, she thought. His hair was under control, so was the situation.
'There's no point in wasting police time until I know whether there's anything worth investigating, is there?' She'd worked this answer out over breakfast and hoped it would hold up under pressure.
'We don't want to waste police time, do we? And time's what you've got a lot of right now, isn't it, Charlie?' He wanted to be pleased with himself, so Charlie let herself look more dismayed than she felt.
'I wondered if you'd recognised my name,' she said. 'It's true that I'm not as busy as usual. It's given me the chance to look more closely at some of the files I'd had to put to one side.' She spread her hands, palms upward. A gesture of openness and trust. 'You know how it is. There's only so much time, and certain cases carry more weight.' A dart aimed straight for common ground.
Patel returned her smile. 'Tell me about it.' He glanced over his shoulder at the clock on the wall. 'I've got ten more minutes. I'm interested in what it is that is worth taking you away from building your defence against the GMC.'
Charlie gave a dry laugh. 'It's no big deal. I've been working with someone who claims she witnessed a murder. I get this kind of thing all the time, but when I checked out what she told me, I discovered there had been an unexpected death at the precise time and place she'd given me. That's more unusual than you'd think.'
'And this unexpected death was one I dealt with? Is that why you're here?'
'That's it in a nutshell, Vik. The inquest wrote it up as accidental death. The police said all the evidence was congruent with accidental death. But I wanted to ask you if there was anything at all ambiguous in what you saw on the table. Anything that gave you pause but wasn't enough to make the police change their tack.' Charlie shrugged. 'To be honest, Vik, I fully expect to walk out of here empty-handed.' It was a line calculated to make him want to prove her wrong.
'Thames Valley Police take me seriously,' he said, the hand running over the hair again. 'They don't ignore my concerns.'
'I'm sure they don't. But like you said, we've all got to prioritise. ' He hadn't said that; she had. But she didn't think he'd argue with her.
'When was this case?'
'November 1993.'
Patel's eyes widened. 'And you expect me to remember the details of a case from seventeen years ago?' His voice rose in incredulity. 'Do you have any idea how many autopsies I perform every week?'
'You don't perform many on twenty-year-old women in peak physical condition,' Charlie said. 'Her name was Jess Edwards and she drowned in the Cherwell by the St Scholastika's boathouse.'
Watching the light dawn behind Patel's eyes was a beautiful thing. 'I do remember,' he said slowly. 'No detail, mind you. But I do remember the case.' He made tutting noises behind his teeth. 'November 1993. We were using computers by then. This should be on the server ...' He picked up his phone, turning away from Charlie. 'Matthew? I need you to pull down a report for me from November 1993 . . . Jess Edwards . . . How soon?' He nodded. 'Thank you.'
He woke up the laptop. His calendar for the day filled the screen. He ran his finger down the list of appointments then turned back to Charlie. 'Can you come back this afternoon? Three thirty? Would that work for you?'
'That would be perfect.' Charlie stood up. 'I appreciate your time.'
Patel nodded. 'She was the same age as my daughter,' he said. 'Sometimes we have to go the extra mile.'
16
Waiting patiently had never been one of Charlie's skills. She had friends and colleagues who seized downtime like a gift from the gods but she'd always suffered a compulsion to fill those inevitable gaps in the action with something productive. So she left Vik Patel's office with great plans for going back to Schollie's to continue her online researches. But when she logged on to her laptop, the first thing on her screen was an email from Lisa.
If she tried to work online now, the message would taunt her till she opened it. And she didn't want to read anything Lisa had to say. Charlie knew herself well enough to understand that Lisa still had power over her. And she didn't want to be seduced by her words again. So she closed the laptop and stretched out on the bed to consider her options.
When she woke up, it was after two o'clock. Charlie couldn't believe she'd slept for almost three hours. She didn't do naps, and the way she felt now reminded her why. Groggy and thick-headed, she stripped and showered, desperately trying to get her brain back in gear. Vik Patel was no pushover; she couldn't afford to have a head full of cotton wool for this encounter.
Hair still damp, she hurried to her car, checking her phone for messages as she went. A text from Lisa. 'For Christ's sake,' Charlie muttered. When she'd been desperate for a crumb from Lisa's life, next to nothing had been forthcoming. Now she wanted to be left alone, Lisa seemed to be in pursuit. 'I'm going to ignore you,' she said as she got into the car. 'I don't need this.'
She made it to the hospital mortuary with five minutes to spare. But this time, the receptionist hustled her straight through to his boss's office. Patel jumped up when she walked in, a troubled look on his face. 'This is very disturbing,' he said, cutting straight to the point.
'You found something?' Charlie said, not bothering to hide her eagerness.
Patel sucked in a sharp breath. 'Oh yes,' he said. 'As soon as I looked at the file, I remembered. An anomaly. A very definite anomaly.' He waved Charlie to the corner seat and pointed to his desk. To her bewilderment, the space where his laptop had been was occupied by a chunky Lego model sitting on a sheet of paper. He sat down and patted a blocky rectangle sitting on the green base. 'Think of this as the boathouse and jetty at St Scholastika's College,' he said. 'And this sheet of paper
is the river.'
Charlie nodded. It was a loose interpretation of the scene she'd visited that morning, but she could do imagination. 'OK.'
He produced a Lego figure that looked suspiciously like Princess Leia. 'This is Jess. She comes out of the boathouse ...' He moved the stunted figure from the building towards the edge of the platform. 'She slips . . .' The feet go from under Princess Leia and her head hits the sharp edge. She falls on to the paper, face down. 'She's unconscious when she hits the water. She drowns. And there you have it. A perfect narrative of death.'
'What's the anomaly?' Charlie asked, excitement buzzing inside. 'What's the problem with this perfect narrative?'
'Imagine the skull hitting the edge of the jetty on a downward trajectory. The wound is wedge-shaped. So when I examined Jess Edwards' skull, I expected to see a wedge-shaped wound. And that's what I did see. Except that the wedge was upside down.' He picked up Princess Leia again. He walked her backwards from the boathouse to the edge of the jetty and pulled her feet out from under her again. This time, the back of her head hit the edge of the jetty but her body remained on the decking. 'For the wound to exhibit the shape I saw, she would have had to fall backwards on to the edge. So her body would have stayed on the jetty. And she wouldn't have drowned.'
Charlie thought about what he'd said, looking for the wriggle room. 'What if she'd still been conscious? Rolling about in pain? Could she not have gone over the edge then?' It wasn't that Charlie doubted Patel. She wanted to believe him, wanted to be convinced that Corinna hadn't sent her on a wild-goose chase. But she was trained to mistrust, to call into question, to test.
'Exactly what the policeman said. And I will tell you what I said to him. It is my professional opinion that she could not have been conscious after that blow to the head. But here's the thing. It's notoriously difficult to be definitive about the effect of head wounds. There are recorded cases of people being shot in the head and walking round perfectly coherent afterwards. So in theory, what you suggest is right out there on the outside edge of what might be possible.'
Charlie released the breath she'd been holding. 'What did the policeman say?'
'He said there was no evidence to indicate this was anything other than a tragic accident. Nothing. No circumstantial, no forensics, no witnesses. If there was an explanation that covered it, he would take it. If an anomaly was the only way to explain it, he'd live with the anomaly.'
'You didn't say anything about this at the inquest,' Charlie said.
'No. Because anomalies do happen. And apart from that, there was nothing that raised the slightest question in anybody's mind. In those circumstances, you have to think of the impact on the family. There was no evidence to support a murder inquiry, and if I'd raised a doubt in their minds ...' Patel ran a hand over his hair. 'All I would have done was to deny them closure. For ever. Because there could be no closure.'
'What if she was murdered?'
'You mean, what if your patient is telling the truth about witnessing a murder?'
'Yes.'
Patel looked troubled. 'Then there's a lot of pain coming up for a lot of people.'
'You included?'
He gave a sad smile. 'I won't be joining your club, Charlie. I'm not the one rocking the boat.' He stood up. 'Good luck getting anyone to take your crazy person seriously.'
Charlie was feeling pretty pleased with herself. Halfway round the barely moving car park that was the motorway encircling Birmingham, and she still hadn't opened Lisa's text or email. Just as she was congratulating herself on her strength of will, her phone rang. 'Blocked,' the screen read. Could be anyone from her lawyer to her mother, who liked to call from work when her boss was out of the office. Charlie decided to go for it. 'Hello?' she said cautiously, aiming for an accent not quite her own.
'Charlie?' From the sound of it, she'd succeeded in confusing Nick. 'Is that you?'
'Hi, Nick.'
'I just thought I'd give you a ring to see how it went with Dr Patel.'
Charlie told him. At the end, he gave a low whistle. 'An anomaly, eh? We like anomalies, don't we, Charlie?'
'What's this "we", Nick?'
A moment's silence, then he said, 'You're not fit to be let out on your own on this, Charlie. You need somebody that knows which way is up.'
'And that would be you?'
'It would.'
Charlie was touched, but she was also wary on Nick's account. Heaven forbid he should get dragged into her particular professional hell. 'You've got a job of your own already. Don't be greedy,' she said sternly, braking as the van in front juddered to a halt.
'This is like a stress-buster for me,' he said. 'I want to help, Charlie. You've never let me do anything for you, and that's not good. Friendship's supposed to be a two-way street. So let me help you with this.'
Charlie felt tears constrict her throat. She wasn't accustomed to people seeing her vulnerability, never mind acting on it. 'Whatever,' she said gruffly. 'I can't very well stop you, can I?'
'Good. Now, the way I see it, we're not going to get much further with the Jess Edwards case. Its main evidential value is that it establishes an MO - this is how she killed Jess Edwards, almost identical to the way Philip Carling was killed. And the two people banged up for his murder very definitely didn't kill Jess Edwards. So what you need to do now--'
'Nick?' Charlie interrupted. 'Is this some meaning of the word "help" that I'm unfamiliar with? The one where you just take over?' There was a laugh in her voice, but she hoped he picked up on her underlying seriousness.
'Sorry, Charlie. Just getting carried away in my own area of expertise. What were you thinking of doing next?'
'I want to find out as much as I can about Kathy Lipson's death. Apparently, in Scotland they have a thing called a Fatal Accident Inquiry instead of an inquest, and the reports are in the public domain. Online, even. How advanced is that?'
'Very impressive. Are you going to go to Skye and talk to the mountain rescue people?'
'Funnily enough, I thought I might do just that.' The traffic started inching forward again and Charlie put the car in gear.
'Don't forget to ask about the phone,' he said.
'What about the phone?'
'If it was retrieved with Jay's backpack.'
'I don't even know that the backpack was retrieved,' Charlie pointed out.
'Something else to ask about, then.'
'Nick, with it being a satellite phone, would there be a record of the calls made to and from it?'
'Back in 2000? I suppose so, in theory.'
'Do you think there's any way you could get hold of it?'
'Probably not without a warrant. Even if I knew which company it was.'
'There can't have been many sat-phone companies around in 2000.'
'Yeah, and the chances of any still being around now in the same form are pretty low.' Nick sounded glum.
'They were so expensive back then, it would be really interesting to see who she thought it was worth spending money talking to.'
'You'll get no argument from me on that. I just think the chances of getting hold of that info are near to vanishing point.'
Seeing a space opening up, Charlie moved over to the outside lane. 'You're probably right. Thank God it's not the only shot in our locker. I also want to touch base with Magda, ideally when Jay's not around. She opened up to me so readily on Saturday, I think it would be useful to capitalise on that. Find out what she might know that she doesn't know she knows, if you see what I mean.'
'Totally. Good idea.'
'So, what was it you thought I should do next?'
Nick chuckled. 'I think you should talk to Paul Barker or Joanna Sanderson. If Corinna's right and they've been framed, they might have something to say worth listening to. You know how it is - the lawyers decide on a line of defence and anything that doesn't sit right with that gets put to one side.'
Charlie sighed. 'You're probably right. But they're in jail now and I've got no standin
g to get in to see them.'
'You could talk to the lawyer. Offer to help with the appeal. They'd jump at a free psychological assessment from you, Charlie.'
Charlie snorted incredulously. 'I'm in disgrace, Nick. I'm persona non grata. Nobody's going to want an assessment from me, free or otherwise.'
'Ah, bollocks to that, Charlie. You're going to be back in the driver's seat in no time. We both know they're going to find you're guilty of nothing more than honesty. You'll be queen of the castle again before you know it.'
She wished she could believe him. But the Bill Hopton case wasn't going to disappear from memories or headlines any time soon. And for as long as it lived in people's minds, she would have no role as an expert witness. 'Yeah, sure,' she said, subdued now.
'Talk to the lawyer, Charlie. Make the call when you get home. If you're accredited by the lawyer, you can get in to see them at short notice. What have you got to lose? Promise me you'll make the call.'
'All right, Nick. I'll make the call. And since you're so desperate to help, you can talk to your opposite numbers in Spain and find out what you can about Ulf Ingemarsson.'
It was Nick's turn to sigh. 'He's the one whose work on 24/7 she allegedly stole, right? How do I spell that?'
Charlie obliged. 'He died in Spain in 2004. If you can talk to the cops, that would be great. What I really want is a contact for Ingemarsson's girlfriend. She apparently knew all about his work. I'd be interested to hear what she has to say about Jay.'
'OK, boss. I'll get on to Spain, you get on to one of the defence solicitors. We'll talk again.'
And he was gone. So too was the traffic jam, dissolved as if by magic. Charlie put her foot down, feeling more uncomplicated delight than she had for a long time. Until Nick had weighed in on her side, she hadn't allowed herself to realise how isolated she'd been. Or how negative an impact that had been having on her. Now she had someone to bounce her ideas off and, more importantly, she had someone to take on the things she couldn't do.
