‘You know I don’t.’
‘You tell yourself that you’ve got the job on your own merit, and that when you get promoted that will be on merit too, and not just because you’ve paid a bribe. And then you meet somebody like Flynn — who so obviously really has risen on merit — and you begin to ask yourself if you’d even be a sergeant if you didn’t have Daddy behind you.’
And that’s when it becomes important to you that your theories on the case are the right ones, Blackstone thought. That’s when it becomes vital that you solve the case unaided — because it’s the only way you think you can convince yourself you’re up to the job.
‘You’re the one who paid for Flynn’s private room at the hospital, aren’t you?’ he asked.
Meade nodded. ‘Yeah, I am.’
‘Because you felt guilty?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Then you have to be careful not to let that guilt get in the way of your doing good police work,’ Blackstone said sternly.
‘Is that what I’m doing?’
‘I think so — otherwise you’d see I was right about Flynn’s theory.’
‘Prove to me that you’re right!’ Meade demanded.
‘All right, I will,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘Put yourself in Big Bill’s shoes, Alex. You learn from a contact in the District Attorney’s office that you’re about to be subpoenaed — and that an arrest is likely to follow. What do you do?’
‘Grab all the money I can lay my hands on and make a run for it.’
‘Exactly! What you don’t do is draw more attention to yourself than you have to, by, for example, staging your own kidnapping.’
‘Holt could have thought that the kidnapping would throw us off the scent for a few days,’ Meade pointed out.
‘He didn’t need to throw us off the scent,’ Blackstone argued. ‘Flynn said it would have been at least another week before the subpoena was served.’
‘So?’
‘So what was the most sensible course of action for Big Bill to follow? Was it to take the money and run, knowing that, because he hasn’t been seen for years, no one was going to miss him until the subpoena was served? Or was it to do something that involved the death of two Pinkerton agents, which would mean that if he was eventually caught, he’d not only be charged with fraud, but prosecuted for murder as well?’
Meade sighed heavily. ‘You’re right, Sam. Inspector Flynn’s theory makes no sense at all.’
‘Big Bill probably was planning to make a run for it,’ Blackstone said, ‘but the kidnappers struck before he’d had time to get it properly organized.’
‘So where, exactly, does that leave us?’ Meade asked despondently.
‘In a deep, dark hole,’ Blackstone said. ‘Our best chance of solving this case was to get our hands on Mad Bob and Jake. Once we had them behind bars, we could have sweated them for the name of whoever hired them. But the kidnappers realized that they were the weak link in the chain, too — and that’s why they had them gunned down.’
‘Maybe if we could catch the killers. .’ Meade began.
But there was no chance of that — and they both knew it.
The men who had murdered Bob and Jake had been professionals, and had carried out their work with the same cold-blooded detachment as butchers in an abattoir. It was unlikely they’d known — or cared — why the two men had to die, and just as unlikely that they knew who wanted them dead. Even if the police managed to arrest them — and that would be a big ‘if’ even in London, where the coppers actually saw it as their job to solve crime — it was unlikely to lead the investigation anywhere.
Meade sighed again. ‘What’s our next move?’ he asked.
What indeed, Blackstone wondered.
‘We could go to the Cornell University Medical School, and pick up Fanshawe’s autopsy report,’ he suggested.
‘Why would we bother?’ Meade asked. ‘We know how he died.’
‘And we think we know why he killed himself,’ Blackstone said. ‘But what if we’re wrong? What if, for example, he was totally innocent of the kidnapping, but had some incurable disease?’
‘Then why wait until the place was swarming with police before topping himself?’
‘Maybe because he found the additional strain of the investigation just too much to take?’ Blackstone drew a deep breath. ‘Listen, Alex, I’m not saying it’s probable that he had a disease. The most likely explanation is that he was involved in the kidnapping, and hanged himself because he thought he was about to be arrested. But we can’t say that definitively until we’ve eliminated all the other possibilities. And the autopsy report will help us to eliminate at least a few of them.’
‘You’re clutching at straws, Sam,’ Meade said.
‘You’re right,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘And I’m sure you have at least a dozen much better ideas about what do next — so why don’t you tell me what they are?’
Meade thought about it for a moment. ‘Why don’t we go and pick up Fanshawe’s autopsy report?’ he suggested.
TWENTY
The clerk sitting at the main desk of the Cornell University Medical School was a pretty girl in her mid-twenties. She had intelligent, expressive eyes and once they laid sight on Alex Meade, they said quite clearly that she was smitten.
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ she asked, in a voice which suggested that the services she offered might well extend far beyond those available in the hospital complex.
‘We’ve come for the autopsy report on Robert Fanshawe,’ Meade said, his own voice perhaps slightly higher than it normally was.
The clerk checked her records. ‘I don’t have it,’ she admitted. She examined a second list. ‘Oh, that’s the reason — it’s being performed right now in Lecture Theatre Three.’
‘It’s being done in a lecture theatre?’ Blackstone exploded.
‘Sure, this is a teaching hospital,’ the clerk said, looking at Meade again. ‘There’ll be students there to watch.’
‘The hospital has been informed Robert Fanshawe was involved in a murder inquiry, hasn’t it?’ Blackstone asked.
The clerk glanced briefly down at her notes again. ‘It says here that it was a suicide.’
He was being unreasonably bad-tempered, Blackstone realized. Fanshawe had taken his own life, so did it really matter that he was being cut up in front of an audience, when the autopsy was likely to give them nothing?
Even so, he could not help hearing a mocking voice in the back of his mind — a voice, furthermore, which sounded uncannily like Inspector Flynn’s — say, ‘Now why give the body to our simple Coney Island doctor, when you can have a big shot in New York slice through him for the instruction and delectation of all his runny-nosed trainee sawbones?’
‘You can go and see the process yourselves, if you want to,’ the clerk said helpfully.
‘We can?’ Meade asked.
‘Sure, there’s a gallery above the lecture hall. It’s only supposed to be for doctors, but sometimes our doctors bring guests with them.’ She winked. ‘And those guests, I have to say, look as if they’re loaded.’
‘Drunk?’ Meade asked.
‘Rich,’ the clerk replied. ‘But sometimes drunk as well,’ she added. ‘I suppose people can do what they like with their money, but even if I had a fortune, I still wouldn’t pay to watch anything as gruesome as an autopsy.’
Standing in the gallery, Blackstone and Meade looked down at the lecture theatre. There was only one person there at that moment, and he was lying on an operating table at the centre of the theatre, covered with a white sheet, bathed in a brilliant white light — and quite dead.
‘This is kinda weird,’ Meade admitted.
‘Is this your first autopsy?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Hell, no, but at all the others I hadn’t met the guy until after he’d died. This is somebody I actually talked to — and who talked back — and, like I said, it feels kinda weird.’
A lab technician entered the theatre,
pushing a trolley on which knives, saws and tweezers were neatly laid out. He parked the trolley beside the operating table, stepped back to see if it was properly aligned, and then left.
The students arrived next. There were a dozen of them, all wearing surgical gowns, masks and caps. Whilst trying not to appear to do so, they jostled for position around the operating table, though none of them crossed the line which — though invisible — was clearly understood by them to exist.
Now all we’re waiting for is the star of the show — the great doctor, Blackstone thought.
The doctor arrived right on cue. He was a small man — at least a head shorter than any of his students — yet even from the gallery, he seemed to have a presence about him which almost made it appear as if was towering over them.
He reached the table, and walked around to the top of it, from where he could see all his students.
‘Well, gentlemen, here we all are, so let’s get to work shall we?’ said a voice from behind the doctor’s mask that Blackstone knew all too well.
‘Good God! It’s Ellie!’ he gasped.
‘Ellie?’ Meade repeated, mystified.
‘Ellie Carr!’
‘You mean your Ellie?’
‘Exactly,’ Blackstone agreed, although he was not at all sure that she was — or ever would be — his Ellie.
Not after what had happened between them in London.
It is ten o’clock in the evening. He is sitting in a pub, with Charlotte Devaraux, a beautiful and talented actress. They have been talking for some time when she makes her proposal.
‘You do understand that I’m not offering you a lifetime of love, don’t you?’ she says.
‘Yes, I do understand.’
‘I’m not even offering you companionship — at least, not beyond one single night. But if companionship for that single night would suit you, then it’s there for the taking.’
It should be every man’s dream, but instead of agreeing to it immediately, he says, ‘If you’ll excuse me, there’s a phone call I have to make.’
He rings the lab, where he knows Ellie will still be hard at work.
‘Listen, Sam,’ she says the moment he has identified himself — and before he has had time to say why he called, ‘I think I may have found the source of that poison of yours, but it’s far too early for me to be able to give you any definite results, so don’t even bother to ask.’
‘I wasn’t going to ask. Forget work.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Ellie retorts, as if he’s suddenly started speaking in a foreign language.
‘Forget work,’ he repeats, with just a hint of a plea in his voice. ‘Give it a rest for tonight. It’s still a couple of hours until the pubs close. I could meet you outside the hospital and we could go and have a drink somewhere.’
‘The kind of work that I’m involved in at the moment can’t just be dropped whenever I feel the inclination,’ she answers, talking slowly, as if to an idiot.
‘What does that mean?’ he demands. ‘That you can’t stop? Or that you won’t stop?’
‘A little of both, I suppose,’ she says honestly — because she is always honest, except when it is only herself she is fooling. ‘I think I may be breaking new ground here, and it’s very difficult to tear yourself away from something like that.’
‘Is it?’ he says, the plaintive tone more evident now — at least to him! ‘Even if I asked you to? Even if I say that I’m feeling low, and would really appreciate your company tonight?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Sam, stop being so difficult. If you want company, why don’t you give Sergeant Patterson a ring?’
‘It wouldn’t be the same.’
‘No, since he’s a man and I’m a woman, it would obviously be somewhat different,’ Ellie says, with maddening scientific logic. ‘But Patterson can keep you amused tonight, and, once the investigation’s over, I’ll find a way to make it up to you.’
‘You really don’t understand, do you?’
‘Understand what? I understand that you want the results from my tests. You do still want them, don’t you?’
‘Yes, but. .’
‘So I’m doing my level best to get them for you as soon as possible. And I promise you this, Sam — in the morning you’ll be glad that at least one of us has shown some self-discipline.’
He gives up.
‘Who knows how I’ll feel in the morning,’ he says. ‘Goodnight, Ellie.’
When he gets back to the bar, he is hoping that the actress — offended by his cavalier behaviour — will have gone. But she is still there, and they spend a night of wild passion together.
Who has betrayed who, he wonders, even in the throes of that passion?
Has Ellie betrayed him by putting her work above his desperate need for her?
Has he betrayed Ellie by refusing to wait for what — they both knew — was bound to happen between them sooner or later?
Or since nothing has happened yet, is all talk of betrayal meaningless?
He doesn’t know.
But later, looking back on it, he knows that since that night, things have never been the same between them.
‘So, now that we’re all here, what shall we do first?’ Ellie asked the students.
One of them raised his hand tentatively in the air.
‘Yes?’ Ellie said.
‘The first thing that we should do, ma’am, is make a chest incision,’ he suggested.
Ellie reached on to the trolley, took hold of a scalpel, and held it up under the brilliant white light for all the students to see.
‘Does everyone agree that should be our first step?’ she asked.
The students nodded enthusiastically.
Ellie returned the scalpel to the trolley.
‘Say you were going to cut up some cloth to make curtains,’ Ellie began. She paused. ‘Sorry, that analogy wouldn’t work for you, would it? I forgot for a moment that even though this university has an admissions policy which — in theory — puts men and women on an equal footing, there are, in fact, no women present.’ She looked around, as if to confirm the truth of her statement. ‘All right, then, let’s try something else. Say you were going to build yourself a chest of drawers — would you start cutting the wood before you’d taken your measurements and studied the grain?’
Even from the gallery, it was possible to sense the students’ feeling of bemusement, and when someone chuckled, Blackstone was slightly surprised to discover that that someone was him.
‘None of you has ever built a chest of drawers, have you?’ Ellie enquired.
The students shook their heads.
‘Of course not,’ Ellie said heavily. ‘Coming from the background you have come from, you’ve never felt the need to. In fact, even though you may end up as surgeons, the chances are that you’ve probably never really done anything with your hands — not even make an omelette.’
The students looked down at the ground and shuffled their feet.
‘But don’t despair, gentlemen,’ Ellie continued, in a much lighter tone. ‘Everyone has to start somewhere. Even I — though you might find this hard to believe — was not born a doctor. And between now and the time that you mount the podium to be awarded your shiny new certificate under the eyes of your proud parents, you will have ample opportunity to learn.’ She paused for a second. ‘So, to return to my initial question, what’s the first thing we should do?’
‘We should study the cadaver in its current state,’ said one of the students, who’d latched on to her line of thinking.
‘We should study its current state,’ Ellie agreed. ‘This cadaver is as new to me as it is to you — I promise you, I haven’t even taken a peek at it — and we’ll all be looking at it with fresh eyes. The one thing I can tell you is that it was found hanging from a tree — so let’s see if we can work out how the man died.’
Several of the students laughed, but when they saw the look in their instructor’s eyes, the laughter quickly died away.
Ellie Carr stripped back the sheet.
‘Take your time,’ she said.
Almost immediately, the student who thought that he’d already got the measure of her said, ‘Asphyxiation.’
Ellie covered the cadaver with the sheet again.
‘What’s your name?’ she demanded.
‘Jackson,’ the student said, with less certainty now. ‘Andrew Jackson. I was named after the president.’
‘Which would seem to suggest that your parents had high hopes for you — at least when you were younger,’ Ellie Carr mused. ‘So you think he died of asphyxiation, do you, Mr Jackson?’
‘Yes, ma’am, I do.’
‘And you don’t think the gunshot wound to his stomach had anything to do with his death?’
‘The. . the gunshot wound,’ Jackson stammered. ‘I didn’t see any gunshot wound.’
‘Didn’t see a gunshot wound!’ Ellie scoffed. ‘And you call yourself a medical student!’
She stripped off the sheet again.
‘There is no gunshot wound!’ Jackson protested.
‘No, there isn’t,’ Ellie Carr agreed. ‘But when I said there was, you couldn’t tell me there wasn’t — because you hadn’t looked.’
‘Is she always as formidable as this?’ Meade asked Blackstone.
‘This is nothing,’ Blackstone told him, and realized he was sounding quite proud of Ellie. ‘She’s very much the new girl here, and probably hasn’t quite found her feet yet. So she’s taking things carefully — holding back a little.’
‘Jesus, in that case, I’d hate to meet her when she has a full head of steam,’ Meade said.
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Blackstone countered. ‘You’d find her fascinating.’
And I find her fascinating, he thought. I find her much more than that.
But he was still not sure how to come to terms with the fact that she was actually in New York.
Ellie glanced down at the corpse’s face and neck.
‘Was it asphyxiation, Mr Jackson?’ she asked.
‘I. . I don’t know, ma’am.’
‘Then take a closer look — and this time, please don’t rush it.’
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