Somewhere in Cassie’s head the question of why a bodyguard would know about behaviour modification surfaced, but that wasn’t the issue at the moment, so she ignored it.
‘I’m not talking about your suggestion to Cheryl, though you had no right to be talking to her at all. I’m talking about you telling her you’re my boyfriend.’ Even in her own ears the conversation was convoluted, but she struggled valiantly on. ‘Don’t you know anything about country towns? I can’t keep Cheryl in here with a scalp wound, and that story will be all over town within an hour of her walking out the door.’
McCall, looming over her in the small area, smiled smugly.
‘But that’s exactly what we want,’ he said with maddening complacency.
‘It’s not exactly what I want,’ Cassie reminded him. ‘My mother works in town—she’ll hear it from one of the office juniors coming back from lunch. What’s she supposed to think? That I’ve been having some wild affair and not told her about it?’
‘Do you always tell your mother about your wild affairs?’
Wondering what the consequences would be of braining a man with a heart monitor, Cassie counted to ten—then to twenty to make sure she wasn’t going to damage hospital property.
‘Get out of here,’ she said, pleased to find no tendrils of smoke escaped from her fury to curl around the words.
‘But I thought you wanted me to follow you in here,’ he said, and she was close enough to guess he was enjoying teasing her.
‘I did—so I could say goodbye. And I’m saying it now. Goodbye! I want you out of here—out of this hospital and out of my life. Talk about overkill! I mention to Dave I’ve received a couple of funny letters and suddenly I’ve got a bodyguard.’
‘Your mother already knows. Dave took me to meet her this morning—before we came here.’
It took a moment for Cassie to get a handle on this remark, going back as it did to an earlier bit of the conversation. But getting a handle on it didn’t make it any more believable.
‘Dave took you to meet my mother?’
McCall nodded.
‘I can’t believe he’d do a thing like that. The last thing she needs at the moment are more worries.’
‘She’d already talked to Dave. She knew you’d had at least one letter.’
The man’s words, though quietly spoken, stopped Cassie cold.
‘How do you know that? How did she know?’
McCall shrugged ridiculously broad shoulders—of course bodyguards would have to be well built—and said, ‘Something to do with a child going into your room? I think that’s what Dave said happened.’
The twins, one day last week. Apparently they’d not only emptied all the lower drawers in her wardrobe but had been through her desk as well!
‘Mum should have said something to me, not gone running to Dave!’ Cassie muttered, more to herself than to McCall. ‘What if I’d opted not to bother Dave with this?’
‘Dave is there to be bothered, and only an idiot would not report anonymous mail.’
‘Well, label me idiot, then,’ Cassie snapped. ‘There’s no way I’d have mentioned it if I hadn’t remembered something Lisa Santorini said to me not long before she died. Something about nuisance letters.’
‘Lisa? The woman who drowned? Did you tell Dave this?’
Suddenly aware of a change of atmosphere in the small, enclosed space they still inhabited, Cassie looked up at this man who’d materialised so suddenly in her life.
‘Yes, I did tell Dave, but what do you know about Lisa? It’s too late to do anything about her death, so why did Dave mention it to you?’
‘Background,’ McCall said, but, though Cassie could accept it was reasonable Dave would pass on her concerns about Lisa’s death, she didn’t entirely believe McCall’s answer.
Too swift. Too glib.
An uneasiness close to distrust skittered through Cassie’s mind, but before she could demand more answers they were interrupted.
‘OK, you two—out of there. Go canoodle somewhere else! I need to get some dressings to restock the trolley.’
‘Canoodle!’ The word escaped through Cassie’s gritted teeth, but Betty’s voice had reminded Cassie of where they were, and she didn’t need to see the wrinkles at the corners of McCall’s eyes crinkle and his lips twist into a beguiling smile to know exactly what he was thinking.
Their interlude in the storeroom had strengthened the lie he’d told earlier—that there was something going on between the two of them.
‘Oh, for gosh sakes!’ Cassie mumbled, pushing past him to escape both the culprit and the situation. She’d phone Dave and tell him he had to get rid of this man.
She didn’t have to phone Dave. He was there—right in front of her—when she emerged, probably flushed scarlet, from the storeroom.
‘I came up to check on Cheryl. Bill’s here, too. He’ll drive her home.’ Dave held up his hand as if he knew exactly what she was about to say. ‘And I’ve given them both an official warning. I don’t care who starts it, who finishes it or who gets hurt, next time I’m taking them both in and charging them with disturbing the peace. The station first, hospital later if necessary, but it’s time this nonsense stopped.’
He nodded to McCall as if seeing him emerge from a hospital storeroom was no surprise.
‘That’s the only way I can take legal action against them,’ Dave continued, explaining the local knowledge to McCall. ‘If one charges the other, the charges are always withdrawn before it gets to magistrate’s court.’
Cassie frowned at Dave. He had no business explaining things to McCall—the man didn’t belong here. He’d be moving on.
Just as soon as she’d given Dave a piece of her mind…
‘Can I see you in my office?’ This to the policeman.
Dave nodded and followed her out of A and E. Cassie didn’t look, but she was reasonably sure the bodyguard was tagging along as well. She couldn’t make a scene here, but she didn’t have to let him into her office.
‘Of course he has to come in.’ Dave overrode her protests and ushered McCall into the room, where once again he didn’t sit, but prowled, finishing up at the window, not right behind her because she could still see him in her peripheral vision, but far enough out of the way to give the impression he wasn’t part of the conversation.
‘I doubt the gardener or any of the laundry women are good enough snipers to shoot me through the window,’ Cassie told him. ‘And if you’re trying to render yourself invisible, I’d give it up. You’re too big, for a start, to pass unnoticed anywhere but at a basketballers’ convention.’
‘I know,’ he said mournfully. ‘But I’m not a sitter. I tend to think better when I prowl.’
Good to know you can think, Cassie wanted to say, but the manners drummed into her by her mother made her hold her tongue.
She turned her attention—or most of it—to Dave.
‘Look, Dave, I’m sorry if I bothered you with those letters, and that you’ve gone to this trouble, getting McCall here from wherever, but, honestly, I can look after myself. And we don’t know for sure the deaths are linked to the letters. I checked back over the hospital statistics at the weekend, and a run of fatal accidents is unusual but not way off the charts statistically.’
Dave nodded.
‘Our stats told much the same story, and I wouldn’t have done any more, but Mrs Ambrose’s daughter—the one who’s been living in the US—came home last week. Albert, Mrs A.’s brother, had just shut up the house and left it until Roslyn arrived to sort out what’s in it. She found these, neatly filed under “N”, perhaps for nuisance.’
He passed Cassie a small wad of A4 paper, held together with a paper clip.
Cassie took it, conscious of the other man turning from the window and stepping towards her as if to read over her shoulder.
‘Mrs Ambrose?’ she whispered, as she clutched the papers against her chest, unwilling to look at them. ‘Mrs Ambrose got letters? Her death wa
sn’t an accident?’
‘Yes, she got letters, but as for the accident…Those are photocopies,’ Dave said, then added bleakly, ‘Not that we’re likely to learn anything from the originals. Computer-generated, no fingerprints—the envelopes might have been a help but Mrs A didn’t keep them.’
Cassie forced herself to release her death grip on the thin file. She glanced at the first note, a single sentence printed in the middle of the page, then looked up at Dave.
‘Mrs Ambrose had pets? Like dogs and cats? I didn’t know that. She always travelled so much I didn’t think—’
‘I don’t think the writer meant those kinds of pets,’ the precise voice said, and Cassie turned towards the man who’d spoken. ‘Dave tells me she was a high-school teacher. Pets as in favourites?’
Cassie heard the words, but what registered more were the man’s eyes. Beneath the heavy lids, which gave an impression of a slumberous lethargy, keen brown eyes peered intently at her. He might smile easily—causing the little wrinkle lines—and his bulk and lazy way of moving might give the impression he wasn’t the shiniest bauble on the Christmas tree, but…
Disconcerted by her thoughts and the effect of this scrutiny, she turned back to Dave.
‘I wouldn’t have said that—would you?’
‘I don’t think that’s the issue, Cassie, though it does suggest a local author,’ Dave told her. ‘Read the other notes.’
She flicked through them, reading the nastiness that escalated into one final, unmistakeable threat.
You had pets.
You were unfair.
You think you’re so smart.
You will be sorry.
You won’t see seventy.
‘And she didn’t,’ Cassie said bleakly, her fingers trembling slightly as she handed the papers back to Dave. ‘There is someone, isn’t there?’ she said quietly. ‘My letters are printed in the same way—a single line in the centre of the page.’
For the first time she felt not the mild irritation the first letter had produced or the anger that had grown with the second and third, but cold, bone-chilling, tremble-inducing fear.
‘You’ve had three?’
It was McCall who asked and though she glanced towards him, she directed her own question to Dave.
‘You’ve shown them to him?’
‘Of course. He has to know the background. In fact, he has to know everything you can tell him, which is why it was best to put him close to you. You knew Lisa well, Judy Griffiths less well, but you know the town and the people in it probably better than anyone. Talk to McCall. The more he knows the easier it will be to protect you.’
Cassie wanted to protest the protection angle, but disbelief that this could be happening blocked all other thoughts. She looked at Dave and shook her head. How could she need protection in a town of six thousand souls—the town where she’d grown up?
Because someone in this town was killing people?
Might kill her…
‘But they could all have been accidents. Lisa drowned swimming at night after she’d been drinking, Mrs Ambrose could have hit the accelerator instead of the brake as she drove down into her garage, and Judy was the victim of a hit-and-run accident—these things happen,’ she said weakly, going straight into deep denial in order to cope with the magnitude of her thoughts.
‘Yes, they could,’ Dave agreed, ‘but is it likely, given what we now know?’
‘We can’t take that risk,’ McCall said, coming around in front of the desk and resting his hands on the back of the second visitor’s chair—leaning forward towards Cassie as he spoke. ‘Can we?’
Big moment here! Cassie was only too aware of it, but she was also annoyed at being forced into a situation not of her own making. Well, she thought that was the cause of her annoyance…
‘Surely there’s some other way of doing this, without wasting McCall’s time hanging around me. Think about the cost. I don’t know how much bodyguards get paid but he must get paid something and I know taking on an extra person at the hospital would play hell with the budget so I guess the same applies to your police budget, Dave.’
‘Don’t worry about the police budget,’ Dave told her, though he’d paused before he’d replied and Cassie was almost sure she’d caught a look she couldn’t read passing between the two men. ‘By rights, I should have a whole investigating team up here, but I couldn’t get that on suspicion and veiled threats so I got McCall.’
McCall smiled. It was obviously meant to be a reassuring smile—an ‘I’m as good as a whole investigating team’ kind of smile—but it struck Cassie that someone else seeing the smile might interpret it differently.
Some women might even consider it downright sexy.
CHAPTER TWO
SHOCKED by her thoughts, Cassie said goodbye to Dave, nodded to McCall who, much to her relief, was also heading for the door, and turned her attention back to deciphering the writing on the letter she’d received from the local doctor. She guessed it was a complaint, as this particular patient of George Raptis had complained the entire time she’d been in hospital and, no doubt, had complained to George as well.
Unfortunately, George, who’d been a doctor in town since before Cassie had been born, was one of the old school who believed a doctor’s handwriting was entitled to be illegible.
‘And there’s no way he’d touch something as newfangled as a computer,’ she muttered to herself, then, sensing she was no longer alone, she looked up to see McCall had reinserted himself, silently, into her office.
‘Well, we can cross him, whoever you’re talking about, off the list,’ he said cheerfully.
‘I haven’t got a list and if I did have one, George would be the last person I’d put on it,’ Cassie told him. ‘And I can’t believe even someone as ingenious as the letter-writer could harm me while I’m in this office so there’s no reason for you to be here.’
‘Don’t want anyone listening to the conversations you have with yourself?’ McCall asked, the smile accompanying the words crinkling up the corners of his eyes.
‘I don’t want anyone listening to any of my conversations,’ Cassie snapped at him.
‘Fair enough!’
McCall saw his agreement had taken her aback, and pushed the advantage.
‘So, how about you start thinking about a list? I’ll just mooch around the hospital. I’ve done jobs in hospitals before, which means I do know how to behave with both patients and staff.’
‘I don’t care where you’ve done jobs before—you can’t just “mooch” around this hospital. What will people think?’
She was frowning ferociously at him, and he couldn’t blame her. Dave should have prepared her for this invasion of her privacy. Dave’s theory had been to spring it on her, arguing that she’d have less time to think of objections that way.
‘She’s a very independent woman,’ Dave had told him. ‘Whole damn family of independent women!’
He’d sounded so upset about this independence, McCall had been forced to question it, and had seen the embarrassment in Dave’s face when he’d said, ‘No, Emily was the Carew girl I fancied. Cassie’s been more a friend and I can’t think of her in any other way. In fact, I don’t think Cassie’s into relationships, though she was once engaged to some doctor down in the city. But she’s been back in town six years now—came back to help Abigail out when Mr Carew died—and though I know she’s been out with a few local blokes, nothing ever developed with any of them.’
All this ran through McCall’s head as Cassie continued to frown at him.
‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’
‘I think they’ll assume I’m checking the place out, but they won’t be uptight about me doing it because they believe I’m here on a kind of test run. Even better, they might believe I’m so besotted I just can’t stay away from you, and when you’re busy in your office, I mooch around until I can be with you again. Don’t tell me the nurse who was fixing Cheryl’s
head won’t have spread the story of our interlude in the storeroom.’
‘We were arguing in the storeroom,’ Cassie reminded him, but he knew she was weakening.
Embarrassed, but weakening!
He tried a smile his sister had always said would charm birds from trees—just not the right kind of birds in his experience.
‘But they won’t know that, will they?’
She responded with a smile of her own. He didn’t know about birds in trees but he guessed plenty of men had been snagged by Cassie Carew’s smiles if that weak effort was any guide to what the full-blown expression would be. Which made him wonder what had happened to the doctor in the city—and what was wrong with the ‘blokes’ Dave claimed she’d been out with…
‘I suppose not,’ she admitted. ‘And you’re right. There are so many people already mooching about this place, what’s one more? But you’ll have to go mooch now, because I’ve a heap of work to do.’
McCall knew a concession when he heard one, and would have left immediately but in his experience killers grew in confidence with their success and, though Cassie might kick and argue, there was no way he was going to leave her unprotected, even here in the hospital where she was surrounded by people.
‘What’s your programme? How long will you be in this office? If you’re called somewhere, is it over a loudspeaker, or do you respond to a pager? Do you do regular ward rounds? At the same time each day? One of the things we have to do is vary your routine.’
She stared at him and he could tell he might just as well have been speaking Urdu for all she’d understood.
‘You can’t be serious! Vary my routine? There is no routine. I do a ward round in the morning when I come in and again in the afternoon before I leave, but as for regular times? For one thing, my arrival time depends on whether I’m called in for some reason, or on whether I’ve been called out at night, or on what else is happening that particular day. Thursday, once a fortnight, the flying surgeon’s here so I assist with ops. He brings an anaesthetist and a registrar, and one of the surgeons does pre- and post-op sessions while the other operates. Alternate Wednesdays, it’s the flying gynae so once again I could be assisting in Theatre. I do minor theatre work myself, I treat patients as outpatients—Oh!’
Doctor and Protector Page 2
