Charlie's spirits sank. Oxford with no prospect of whiling away the hours with Lisa. Because she couldn't let that be an option now, however much it hurt to turn her back, not given what she'd seen earlier. She sighed. 'Yeah, I'll still be there.'
'OK. I'll call you as soon as I have what you need.' He leaned over and topped up her glass. 'You want to hear what I've been working on?'
Charlie couldn't help smiling, admiring his bounceback skills. 'Why not?' she said. It had to be better than listening to the arguments inside her head.
15
Tuesday
Others might fail her, but Nick hadn't let Charlie down. Just after ten, he texted her with all she needed to know. Dr Vikram(Vik) Patel. Still @ John Radcliffe Hosp. At least Dr Patel was local. She could try to talk to him today then get out of Oxford before the depression that was nibbling at her really took hold.
Listening to Nick's multitextured guitar compositions had been the last enjoyable element in her day. The train had been overheated and overcrowded, the Chinese takeaway she'd picked up on her way back to her cheerless guest room at Schollie's had been greasy and bland, and Maria had been out at the cinema with a colleague so she couldn't even whinge to her. By the time they'd been able to talk, Charlie had been too tired to be bothered. The one thing she could point to with pride was that she hadn't gone near Lisa. Hadn't phoned her, texted her, emailed her or even checked her Facebook page.
In spite of her exhaustion, she'd slept fitfully. She'd almost fallen out of the narrow bed at one point, waking just before her body reached the tipping point. 'I can't even manage to lie in bed now,' she said aloud. 'Is it just me or is everything shit?' By any objective measure, she had to concede it was just her. Sometimes she wished she could acquire a taste for drugs. At least that would keep the world at a distance.
Breakfast had been an ordeal. Faces from her student days kept drifting past her or stopping to say hello. From kitchen staff to college fellows, it seemed she'd made more of an impact than she knew. Or maybe it was just that they all read the Daily Mail and it was notoriety jogging their memory rather than affection. Of course, they were all curious to know why she was there. Luckily Oxford's personnel and libraries always provided the easy answer of 'doing some research'. Even the disgraced could hide behind that excuse.
As she'd been leaving the dining hall, Corinna had walked out of the Senior Common Room opposite. A furtive glance to see how close any observers might be, then Corinna hurried across to her. 'How are you getting on?' she said. Her face looked strained, her eyes tired. Charlie imagined things had not been particularly pleasant in the Newsam household since Magda's Saturday revelations.
'It's not easy,' Charlie said. 'You'd have been better off hiring a private investigator.'
Corinna gave her a shrewd look. 'They wouldn't understand the way you do. And they wouldn't have anything at stake. I've got confidence in you, Charlie. I know you will do whatever you can to protect my daughter. Just keep me posted, eh? A quick phone call every day, that should do it, right?'
'I'm sorry, Corinna, but that's not going to happen,' Charlie said firmly. 'I don't do my best work when I feel like somebody's looking over my shoulder. Leave me to get on with things in my own way, and I'll talk to you when I have something to say.' The door of the SCR opened and two other fellows emerged. It signalled the end of their conversation and spared Charlie from getting into an argument.
'We'll talk soon,' Corinna said, frustration drawing her brows down.
'When I'm ready.' Charlie walked away, wondering again how she'd let herself be sucked into this.
By the time Nick's text arrived, she was prowling round the remains of the boathouse, checking out the scene of the alleged crime for herself. It had changed dramatically since Jess's death, replaced now by a more modern facility on the Isis. The wood was grey with untended age, the dilapidation far advanced. Charlie was surprised the college hadn't demolished it on the notorious grounds of health and safety. But enough remained for her to conjure up its image. The main change, apart from the state of disrepair, was that famous non-slip surface. It covered all the exposed wood of the decking, its bright green faded now to a dull mud colour, its edges nibbled at by the passage of time. Evidentially, this was a meaningless visit. But it made more vivid the hazy images of memory. Charlie could envisage the scene much more clearly now.
And then the text had arrived that gave her no more excuse to hang around Schollie's. Charlie took the Marston Ferry Road towards the John Radcliffe Hospital, trying out various strategies in her head as she drove. She had confidence in none of them. Only if Vik Patel had been living on Mars for the past year did she have any chance of getting him to talk to her.
Like most hospitals, the John Radcliffe did not advertise the location of its mortuary on the maps conveniently provided for patients and visitors. Charlie headed for the information desk and mustered her best smile. 'I'm looking for Dr Vikram Patel, the pathologist. I wonder if you could direct me to the autopsy suite?' By one of fortune's lucky oversights, nobody had asked her to surrender the Home Office ID card she had been given to allow her entry to police premises. She slid it in front of the woman on the information counter, who gave it a cursory glance. She pulled a map towards her and scribbled on it, then passed it to Charlie. 'You're here. You need to be here.' She pointed. 'There's the entrance, the lifts are down the hall.'
Charlie couldn't quite believe her luck. She'd expected a knock-back; at the very least, a call to Dr Patel to check whether she was expected. Perhaps it was because she'd taken the trouble to look like a medical professional, with her best suit and laptop bag slung over her shoulder. It almost made her feel she was on a roll.
The building that housed the mortuary was either pretty new or had recently been refurbished. It didn't have that slightly scuffed, entirely unloved feeling that Charlie associated with NHS premises. The walls were clean, the doors fit properly and the signs on the doors were all in the same font. She followed the directions and ended up in a tiny reception area with two chairs facing a desk that barely had room for the monitor and keyboard that formed a barrier between the public and the receptionist, a scrawny man in his early twenties dressed in pale blue surgical scrubs. Not for the first time, Charlie thought she had never encountered anyone whose appearance was improved by scrubs. Real life was never like ER in that respect.
The receptionist didn't look up when Charlie entered. His eyes were focused on the monitor, his freckled fingers flying over the keys. It took her a moment to realise that under the thatch of springy ginger hair, he had ear buds that were presumably pumping dictation directly into his brain. She moved closer and waved a hand at him.
He started and pushed back from the desk as if she'd physically hit him. 'Jeez,' he said, yanking the ear phones clear. 'You nearly gave me a heart attack.'
'Sorry,' Charlie said. 'I'm looking for Dr Patel. Vik Patel.'
The young man frowned. 'Is he expecting you? Only, he's doing an autopsy right now.'
Charlie made a rueful face. 'I know I should have phoned ahead. But I found myself in the area and I thought I'd take the chance.' She smiled. 'Any idea how much longer he's going to be?'
The young man looked surprised, as if nobody had ever asked such a question before. 'Can I ask who you are?' Charlie produced the ID again. This time, it was carefully scrutinised. Blank-faced, he said, 'What is it that you want to see Dr Patel about, Dr Flint?'
'I want to talk to Dr Patel about an old case,' she said. 'I won't take up much of his time.'
'I need to go and see what's possible,' he said. He glanced at her, frowning again, and closed down his computer before he left by a door in the back of the room. Charlie sat down on one of the visitor chairs, crossed her legs, and waited.
It took almost ten minutes for the young man to return. 'If you can hang on for quarter of an hour, Dr Patel will meet you.' He stared at her, as if committing her face to memory in case he needed to take part in an identity
parade at some point down the line.
Charlie smiled. All this pleasantness was starting to hurt her face. 'Thank you. That'll be fine.'
In the end, it took almost twenty-five minutes for the door at the back of the room to open again. A short, squat Asian man in green scrubs appeared in the doorway and stared at Charlie. He ran a hand over thick black hair brushed straight back from his forehead in an impressive quiff and his mouth twitched. 'You're Dr Flint?' he said.
Charlie stood up. 'That's right. Dr Patel?'
'Call me Vik,' he said. 'Come through. We'll need to make this quick. I've got another autopsy before lunch.'
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 troub
led 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.'
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