1 First Blood

by Claire Rayner

  And it was delicious. George helped herself to plates of stuffed crab claws and small spring rolls and other Eastern delicacies and ate with real pleasure as she sat beside Dr Schenck and talked even more of the evening’s proceedings. He was a serious man who liked nothing better than discussing his own subject and they were deep in conversation when Charles Dieter came to sit beside them.

  ‘I’m delighted to see you taking so strong an interest in this matter, George,’ he said with great cordiality. George blinked. So far he’d always been very formal with her. ‘Are you beginning to be convinced we have some justice in our arguments?’

  ‘I’m far from convinced,’ George said. ‘I take your point about the contributory factors of poverty and homelessness – they always add to the effects of any illness, of course they do – and you may have a point about the immunosuppressive effects of substance abuse. But to suggest that the virus is not significant –’

  ‘We’re not saying that at all,’ Charles said. ‘Just that it is of very small significance in the presence of other factors.’

  ‘And we do people a disservice if we concentrate solely and wholly on the effect of the virus,’ Schenck put in.

  ‘But –’ George began and then stopped as Toby Bellamy came to stand alongside them. She hadn’t realized until they’d all arrived at the house that he was in the party, and then discovered that he was the ‘friend’ of Felicity Oxford of whom Beatrice Dieter had spoken when she’d rattled off the list of her dinner guests. Had she realized, George had told herself furiously, she would have escaped the invitation, no matter how offensive she had to be to do it. But it was too late, and all she had been able to do was studiously avoid catching his eye all evening, although it had been difficult to be unaware of his presence. She had been constantly conscious of the fact that he was there in the room, mostly sitting next to Felicity Oxford and listening to her as she talked. Now, however, she couldn’t ignore him and she looked at him briefly before bending her head to concentrate on the cooling contents of her plate.

  ‘What do you think, Toby?’ Charles said, looking up at him, and Toby lifted his brows.

  ‘I remain unconvinced,’ he said. ‘There may be a point in what you say, inasmuch as the lifestyle could shorten or lengthen the latency time between infection and the appearance of symptoms. But if you’ll forgive me, Charles, I’ve had a long hard day and I really must be going back. Mrs Dieter has arranged for me to give Dr Barnabas a lift, since she came in your car.’

  ‘Oh!’ Charles said and looked at George who had opened her mouth to protest. ‘To tell the truth I hadn’t thought about the problem of getting you all back.’

  ‘I did, Charles.’ Beatrice came and joined the little group and, despite George’s efforts to object and demand the right to call a cab to take her back to Old East, overruled them all with the power of her shrill voice, her will, and her plans.

  ‘Felicity is staying here tonight so that we can do some important work about the Barrie Ward committee early tomorrow morning, before I have to leave for the Biological Sciences Faculty lunch. So there’s room in Toby’s car for Dr Barnabas. It’s all arranged. I’m sure you’re ready to go when Toby here is, aren’t you, Dr Barnabas? Yes, I thought so. Well, there it is, it’s all settled. Now, just before you leave you must try some of Maria’s special red-bean pancakes, Toby. They are most delightful. Come along, Charles, let us leave the rest of the discussion on this matter for another day. We’ve all had quite enough to get on with tonight.’

  Which was how George found herself sitting next to Toby in his rather battered old car at midnight and parked on the side of the road under a tree in the darkness.

  24

  ‘Look,’ he said as the sound of the engine died when he switched off the ignition. ‘I can’t handle this. You sulking all the way to Old East’s more than any man could be expected to put up with.’

  ‘If you think I’m going to sit here and talk to you at this time of night you’ve got one hell of another think coming,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll get a taxi.’ And she tried to open the door, but he reached across and held on to it.

  ‘Don’t be so stupid and melodramatic. There isn’t a taxi rank for miles and you’ll never get a cruising one in the middle of a suburb like this at midnight. For Christ’s sake, you don’t think this was my idea, do you? I wouldn’t have suggested driving you back for all the world. It was that bloody juggernaut of a woman who made me.’

  ‘You’d much rather be driving Felicity Oxford, of course,’ she retorted, and then could have kicked herself for letting the words out, for he stiffened beside her and then relaxed, and finally laughed softly.

  ‘Dear me! It’s like that, is it?’

  ‘It’s like nothing of the sort,’ she shouted. ‘Start this car and get going at once!’

  ‘Shut up. I’ll start again when I’m ready and no sooner. So, you’re jealous, are you? Poor little darling! Here was I thinking you’d just been leading me on and it turns out that you do fancy me after all! It’s a pity you can’t trust me as well as fancy me, mind, but you can’t have everything.’

  ‘I do not – I never – I mean – Oh, will you take me back? I can’t cope with this.’

  He leaned over again and for a moment she thought he was going to open the car door and let her go, and somewhere at the back of her mind she prayed he wouldn’t. This was a long dark silent road, she remembered, and it could be a good hike to a place where a taxi might be available. But he didn’t touch the door. Instead he pulled her shoulders round towards him and kissed her very thoroughly. Then he leaned back, drew the back of his hand across his mouth and said with great satisfaction, ‘There! I feel better now.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. I’m damned if I do. How dare you? How could you –’

  ‘Oh, do shut up, George.’ He sounded amiable. ‘You didn’t mind one bit the other night, so don’t come the outraged female with me now. It doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘The other night I didn’t know you were a suspect in a murder and I didn’t know that you were – were involved with someone else. I’m one of the old-fashioned kind, Bellamy. I want a one-to-one relationship, not to be part of some bloody man’s harem.’

  ‘I said you were jealous,’ he said happily. ‘It’s Fliss that’s bothering you and always has been, not the matter of my being a suspect. Look, let me tell you about Fliss, OK?’

  ‘I’m not interested.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to listen anyway. You’ve no choice. Yes, Fliss and I are old friends. Yes, we’re on affectionate terms. But it’s not what you think.’

  ‘I didn’t think about you at all,’ she said icily. ‘Will you stop chattering like a romantic novel and take me back to the hospital and –’

  ‘It’s anything but romantic, you silly object,’ he said. ‘I don’t sleep with her –’

  ‘I’m not interested.’

  ‘– because she’s HIV positive and she reckons safe sex is no sex. But she gets lonely and frightened and needs a little affection from time to time.’

  George sat and stared ahead of her through the rapidly misting windscreen and tried to get her head clear. ‘HIV positive?’ she said after a long pause.

  ‘You ain’t got cloth ears,’ he said with a mock cockney accent that grated a little. ‘You heard me.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she said at length.

  ‘Well, she does say that quite often, not that she’s all that religious.’ Toby said. ‘But she also says she needs someone to talk to who talks back, and since I’ve known her a long time, I’m the one she tells.’

  ‘He was too,’ George said abruptly. ‘Richard Oxford.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise!’ Toby sounded very sardonic. ‘Who could possibly have thought that? Where do you think she collected the virus, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘She’s sure it was …’ She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to …’

  ‘She was never promiscuous.’ He laughed then, a short bark
ing little sound. ‘She’s never been all that interested in sex, that’s the ridiculous thing. Looks like that, and couldn’t care less! It’s probably why she went for Oxford in the first place. These men who are AC/DC make life easy for a woman like Fliss. What you see is what you get with her. And you have to admit she’s the image of the original ice queen.’

  George nodded in the darkness. ‘Yes, I suppose so. She always looks so …’

  ‘Perfect. Precisely. Not a human woman who sweats and swears and gets her hair in a state and sometimes loses her temper. Just a piece of perfection. Me, I couldn’t be doing with it. Not in a one-to-one relationship, you understand.’ She knew he was laughing at her and couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘It’s fine in a friend, but no use in a real set-up, is it?’ He moved a little closer. ‘So, does that make a difference? Does that make it possible for us to use this time parked at the side of a deserted road in a more rewarding manner?’

  ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘It’s – it’s late and you’re still a murder suspect and –’

  ‘Oh, piffle,’ he said. ‘Knowing what you know now about the sort of relationship there is between Fliss and me, do you think your pal Gus’ll keep me on his list? I’ll gladly talk to him, if I must – though I can’t deny I’d rather not because it’s a bit tough on poor old Fliss to have all her private affairs, not to say soiled linen, hung from the highest flagpole – but if I must I will. And then he’ll know that I don’t have a smidgen of a motive. Do I?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She turned to look at him in the dimness. ‘Maybe you have after all. If she’s a real friend and you’re as angry as she must be about her being infected with HIV –’

  ‘But she isn’t angry! She accepted the fact long ago. It’s been close on two years, you see. She knew he liked men as well as her when she married him and, as I say, it suited her. When it happened and she found out, she was distressed of course, but she had more sense than to blame him. She blamed herself for marrying him at all.’

  ‘I can’t see why she did.’ George shuddered a little. ‘He must have been a hateful husband. He was certainly a nasty man. I thought so, anyway.’

  ‘He was good fun. And he had money. That’s always been important to Fliss – she’s the most insecure person I ever met,’ Toby said after a moment. ‘Tell me, are you saying he was hateful because he was bisexual? And even more wickedly went and caught himself a sexual infection?’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s because he was a –’ She hesitated. She felt differently now about Toby’s relationship with Fliss, obviously, but all the same, wasn’t he still a suspect? Couldn’t he have been a victim of Oxford’s blackmail? She thought rapidly, trying to get her head sorted out, remembering all sorts of minor details. His own tightness with money: so glad to get a free supper, scrounging free theatre tickets. Was that because he too was like Felicity, inordinately fond of money? Or could it be that he had to watch every penny because he was being bled by a parasite? Maybe there was some disreputable fact about him that Oxford had got hold of and used against him? To tell him now that Oxford’s blackmailing behaviour was known to the police could be a very stupid thing to do. She was after all alone with this man on a remote country road where anything could happen …

  ‘It’s because he was so, well, smarmy to me. And the way people talked about him, he was from all accounts a very selfish person,’ she extemporized lamely. ‘He must have been, not to give her a divorce, and –’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk tommy rot, George! She didn’t want a divorce! It suited her very well to have her income secure and, as long as she was married to Richard, it was. It suited him to have a wife when it was handy to be seen as straight, and one who closed her eyes to his life when he preferred being gay. She got what she wanted, which was security, and he got what he wanted, which was respectability. A better arrangement than a lot of marriages, take it from me.’

  ‘Have you ever been married?’ she said, startled by the bitterness in his voice, and he caught his breath in the darkness.

  ‘Long ago, when I was a student, yes,’ he said after a while. ‘It lasted till I qualified and then she couldn’t handle a junior doctor’s lifestyle. Like working all the hours God sent. So she went to Australia with a dentist.’ He laughed then. ‘Which was a bit like taking coals to Newcastle, wasn’t it? All the male population of Australia practises dentistry, I reckon.’

  ‘So that’s how you know what was right for Felicity and Richard Oxford’s marriage.’ She sounded sharp and knew it, and didn’t care.

  ‘No. I know it because Fliss told me so.’

  ‘Have you known her long?’

  ‘About seventeen years,’ he said. ‘I needed some money and I took some work as a model, believe it or not. They liked the rumpled type in those days. And she was running the agency.’

  ‘Good God!’ She was so startled she could only stare at him.

  ‘I know. It’s not something I tell many people – would you? Anyway, that’s how I met Fliss and later Oxford. It’s why I work at Old East. He put in a word for me with the Board and …’ He shrugged. ‘You know how the system works as well as anyone. It’s not what you know but who and so forth. The clichés are true. That’s why they’re clichés.’

  ‘I see.’ She took a deep breath. ‘So you owed him, really.’

  ‘Owed him? No. I’d long since paid back anything I owed him.’ He sounded hard suddenly. ‘Looking after Fliss for him. No, George, don’t go running down that cul-de-sac. I owed Oxford nothing and he had no interest in me, except as a friend of his wife’s. There’s no motive for me, you know. I didn’t kill the man. I had no reason to. Every reason not to, in fact. Now I have to take even more care of Fliss. She’s genuinely upset, for all she looks so calm. There are depths to that woman few people recognize.’

  ‘Except you of course.’

  He ignored the hint of a sneer in her voice. ‘Except me.’ He leaned forward and switched on the ignition. The engine coughed into life. ‘I’ll take you back now. There’s no need to sit here any longer. Obviously you aren’t feeling at all amorous.’

  ‘Ha!’ was all she managed. She sat back in her seat and glowered through the window as it cleared under the attack of the warm air from the demisters, and tried to clear her head to match. There was a lot to think about here; but she was too tired right now to get anything straight. But she did feel rather better than she had, and that was something for which to be grateful.

  The following morning she was heavy-eyed with lack of sleep, which didn’t help, since there was a great backlog of work to be done and Sheila and, unusually, Jerry were both in filthy tempers. It took her until almost noon to sort out a pile of irritating jobs and disagreements, and to pour what little soothing oil she could find on Sheila and Jerry’s thoroughly ruffled heads. She certainly had no time to look at the printout that Gus had brought her, or to think about the revelations of last night.

  At noon Gus telephoned. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he announced. ‘How would it be if you came over here to the incident room and we had a bit of a talk about this case? Would you be willing to do that?’

  ‘I’m gratified to be asked,’ she said, and meant it. ‘But I can’t leave here, I’m afraid. We’ve got a bit of a push on, and – well, it wouldn’t be politic’

  He sighed. ‘I was hoping I wouldn’t have to come out on such a rainy morning. All right then, I’ll pick up some grub and come over to you.’

  ‘What?’ She was furious. ‘You were willing to drag me out in the rain to keep your own feet dry? Is that the only reason you suggested I come to you?’

  ‘No, not the only one. I thought you might be interested to see the progress we’ve made. It’s quite a bit. But if you can’t, you can’t.’

  ‘Well, I can’t.’

  ‘So I’ll come to you. I told you I would. Now, I’ll get the sarnies. BLT suit you?’

  ‘I couldn’t care less what sort,’ she said, no longer feeling gratified. ‘In fact I�
�m not sure that –’

  ‘OK then. BLTs it is. I’ll leave it to you to lay on the coffee. I might find a little something to go with it. Leave that to me.’ And he snapped down the phone and left her listening to the buzz of a dead line.

  By the time he arrived she’d worked herself up into a state of considerable temper, but he seemed oblivious to her glare as he came in and shook his wet coat much as a dog shakes itself when it comes out of a stream.

  ‘It’s coming down like bleedin’ stair rods, as my old granny used to say,’ he announced and then shook his head too, so that water sprayed half across the room.

  ‘Here, go easy!’ she protested as the drops spattered her. ‘I don’t want my papers ruined.’

  ‘See what I saved you?’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m a good old sort after all, aren’t I? Yes. Now, where’s the coffee? I’ve got the ideal thing for a day like this.’ And he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a miniature bottle of brandy. ‘Share that between us and it’ll warm the cockles and never make a ha’p’orth of difference to the old brain boxes. And we’re goin’ to need ’em. Off you go, then. Fetch the coffee.’

  He moved over to her desk and plonked down a large cardboard box tied with pink ribbon which he began to untie, and she, to her own amazement, obeyed him and went to fetch her coffee tray. She certainly had no intention of asking Sheila to provide it.

  When she brought it back she found he’d laid out his offerings on the desk and they looked good. As well as the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches, there were a couple of tubs of fresh cole slaw and potato salad, and a large dill pickle which he’d cut into neat slices.

  ‘Thought you’d like a bit of old-fashioned New-York-style deli,’ he said. ‘We can get anything in this part of London. Just you wrap the old choppers round that lot. Ah! The coffee. Here we go then.’ And he carefully shared the contents of the small bottle between the two cups and then topped them up with the strong black coffee.