They seemed to vanish into the building like wraiths, silently and with an amazing efficiency. George stood behind Gus waiting for him to make his move, which he did as soon as the others had vanished into the various sections he’d sent them to. Then he made straight for her office.
She had never been unduly fussy about the way her office was arranged. She had the usual Busy Lizzie plant drooping on the window-sill; the ever-present heap of unread or about-to-be-read medical and professional journals in the corner; and the shelves full of her most trusted texts. Her desk, however, piled high though it usually was with the detritus of the busy department, still had some charm about it. A small crystal clock Gus had given her as a Christmas present was there, alongside a rather chipped old glass jug stuffed with multicoloured plastic paper clips; and, in central place, a photograph of her mother beaming out of an antique silver frame with an absentmindedness that George had learned to live with, knowing her mother’s illness and how very far away her mind now was as a result. That was the first possession she looked over Gus’s shoulder to ensure was there; and its presence helped a lot. The broken plant on the floor, the way the papers from her desk had been scattered everywhere, the smashed coffee cups from her corner tray: she could bear all of that as long as Vanny’s picture was safe, and she darted into the room under Gus’s arm and seized it. He opened his mouth to protest, caught her eye and thought better of it.
‘A bit of tidying up to do, I guess,’ she said, keeping her voice as colourless as she could as she slid the picture into the big pocket of her skirt where it sat against her hip heavily and comforted her. ‘Let me know when I can start.’
‘SOCO’ll have to come first,’ Gus said in an abstracted sort of voice. ‘George, come over here, will you?’
He was crouching on the floor beside her big filing cabinet. She stared down over his shoulder and this time she was angry. Very. There were her files, the records she had kept from the very beginning of her career as a pathologist, waiting for that magic day when she’d have time to write that definitive textbook, which would not only make her name in her field but also a great deal of money, since it would of course be a required text for every student in the entire world, lying in a pathetic heap. Photographs had been pulled out and left strewn around (and even the experienced DC Hagerty blenched at the sight of some of them) and papers lay scattered and crumpled higgledy-piggledy.
‘What the hell could he possibly want with these?’ she said furiously, staring at what looked like the wreck of the record of her whole career. ‘Why on earth should anyone want to do this? It’s just wanton —’
‘Are you sure?’ Gus peered at her sharply, his eyes bright, and for a moment she wanted to laugh even though anger still bubbled in her. There was something so attractively simian about him as he crouched there and looked up with those sharp, warm and very knowing eyes of his. ‘Not until you’ve been through lists and checked it all can you possibly know what’s what. If there’s anything missing then we’ll know what he was looking for. If nothing is then indeed this is mindless destructiveness.’
‘Or he didn’t find what he was after,’ DC Hagerty said, and there was a little silence in the room.
‘Oh, very clever, Hagerty’ Gus got to his feet and shook his head in heavy irony. ‘Will I ever get accustomed to the lightning minds of the best of the Bill what I have in my team? Will I ever cease to be blinded by their flashes of brilliance?’
‘Well, I only meant, Guv —’ Hagerty began.
‘You only meant to put the fear of God into the doctor here, right?’ Gus sounded savage. ‘On account of if they haven’t found what they want then they’ll be back to do so, right? You’re a thoughtful bugger and no error.’
‘Lay off, Gus,’ George said. She was crouching beside her files. Her training prevented her from touching, but she was using her eyes very carefully ‘He’s absolutely right, of course, and I’m not stupid: I had realized the same thing myself. But I’ll tell you what. This isn’t quite as bad as it looks.’
‘Eh? How do you mean?’
‘Well, it’s funny, but only some of the files have been pulled out and scattered. See over here?’ She scrabbled in her pocket for a pencil and, using it carefully, lifted a corner of the uppermost file. ‘Under here. They’ve been pulled out and dropped on the floor, but no attempt’s been made to gut them, has there? Not like this one.’ She peered even closer. ‘It looks to me as though only this one’s been pulled about.’
‘And that one over there.’ Gus was on his knees beside her, also armed with a long pencil. ‘And is that another one there? See? You can just see the name on the top piece of paper. All the others are covered over with the mess.’
‘It’s the M file,’ she said. ‘M’s a huge one of course, it’s amazing how many names begin with it. And how many conditions.’
‘Conditions?’ He looked at her sharply.
‘Mmm. I use a filing system all my own,’ she said, looking a little defensive. ‘I find it works perfectly for me. If I have a special interest in mind, then I’ll file the notes under the name of the condition with a cross referral note to the right place in the file lettered by patient names. See this one on top: his name’s Gradalski, but he’s in the M file because he died of a myocardial infarction. I did him only last week, that’s why I remember.’
Gus sat back on his heels and shook his head at her. ‘Oh, George, George!’ he said disgustedly. ‘I might have known it! You’ve really cocked it up, haven’t you? Here was I thinking that once we had the initial letters of the files that had been gutted, we’d at least know this bugger was interested in people whose names begin with M or whatever. But it could be because they had a myo whatsit.’
‘Myocardial infarction,’ George said helpfully. ‘Or myasthenia gravis. Or a myeloid leukaemia, though that’s more likely to be in the L file. Or Marfan’s syndrome. That’s a rather rare condition that may lead to premature death in affected children. I’ve made rather a study of it, had several cases and —’
‘Or Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all,’ Gus said, turning away. ‘Well, there it is. It’s going to take you longer than you hoped to get this stuff sorted out, isn’t it, so that you can tell me what’s missing?’
‘I suppose so.’ She looked mournfully at the mess and then straightened up. ‘But dammit, how am I supposed to know what’s missing just by looking? There are years of records here. I brought some with me when I came here, and then there are those I’ve done since I arrived.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s a master list on a floppy disc anywhere?’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘Why should there be? This was just my private collection. No need to make a great fuss over it. I just had to open the filing cabinet and there it all was.’
‘There it all was, past tense, indeed,’ he said. Then he growled over his shoulder: ‘Well?’ as the door opened.
The rest of the team were there, all reporting that there had been no other damage done anywhere.
‘The main lab’s all right as far as I can tell,’ DC Morley said. ‘If you’d just come and take a dekko, Dr B., and tell us for sure?’
‘Of course.’ She escaped gladly, feeling positively guilty because she hadn’t protected her files on a computer, if only to make life easy for Gus now. But why should she? It made no sense …
It wasn’t until she’d taken a look at the main lab and reported that, indeed, nothing had been disturbed, and done the same down in the mortuary with Mike Urquhart, that she remembered. And came belting up the stairs from the basement calling for Gus at the top of her voice.
‘Gus!’ she called. ‘Hey, Gus! I’d forgotten, dammit. It comes from getting up in such a hurry so early. Listen, last night…’
‘Yeah?’ He looked at her hopefully.
‘Well, last night, I was looking for notes as well. I was in here late, and I took away one set that I was interested in. I didn’t feel up to going through it here, so I took it home. So that’
s one we haven’t lost.’
‘So what? I mean, does that help us to know what he was after? What you might have lost?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I just thought that it might. You see, it was the notes for Lally Lamark’s post-mortem. She was one of those three we dealt with last week. The suspected suicide, remember? Maybe if we look for the other two files, we’ll get some idea? I mean, if they’re missing …’
‘If they’re missing, then we may indeed have one end of a piece of string in our hands,’ he said. He grinned suddenly, carving his face into agreeable crags. ‘Listen, George, the minute SOCO finishes here, we’ll get down to the search, right? And I’ll tell you what. I’ll help you.’
‘I was afraid of that,’ she said.
13
Despite his offer of help with the files, in the event Gus had to go back to Ratcliffe Street and leave her to it The SOCO left her office a little before nine, gloomily telling everyone that they shouldn’t get too hopeful on account he’d seen some messed-up prints in his time but this was really ridiculous.
George had been a tad affronted at that. ‘Well, what do you expect? I dare say my office is a bit on the undusted and unpolished side, but that’s because we’ve got more important things to do here than housework. People’s fingerprints would pile up. But you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. I’m pretty well the only person who uses that cabinet so you ought to be able to find something you can work on if you look properly.’
‘It’s not that easy when they’re umpteen layers deep,’ he muttered as he went off.
Gus grinned at her. ‘Don’t be too offended, doll. He’s always like that: a real misery. Anyway, I didn’t expect to get much from prints. Something tells me this isn’t a professional job, which means we won’t have the prints on file. It’s an enthusiastic amateur who made that mess.’
As George, only partly mollified, settled down on her haunches to start the sorting, the phone rang. Gus took it. The call was for him and he listened, grunted, spoke in a few monosyllables, said, ‘I’m on my way,’ and hung up.
‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘Left to do it on my own again.’ But she didn’t really mind. To have Gus around helping with this job might be more trouble than assistance; she had her filing system clear in her own head, but having to explain it in all its labyrinthine detail was more than she fancied doing. He’d probably jeer at it anyway. So she smiled at him happily enough.
‘There’s a meeting I can’t miss,’ he said briefly, sounding for once as though he wasn’t interested in such an activity. ‘But they’ve got some results from forensic over at the big lab on Sheila’s car. I pushed ’em on it yesterday, told ’em I wasn’t prepared to wait as long as their first estimate. And apparently they’ve worked out a report on the chocolates too.’
The smile vanished from her face. ‘Well, I sure as hell hope they’ve found fingerprints there,’ she said. ‘So that they can compare them with mine and prove I had nothing to do with either one.’
‘Fingerprints don’t prove absence from the scene of a crime,’ he said. ‘Only presence. You could have used gloves.’
‘Thanks a bunch!’
‘I have to think like a devious-minded Machiavellian brief,’ he said. ‘Or one of said devious Machiavellians’ll clobber me and any case I bring from here to hell and back. And you should have known that about fingerprints anyway.’
‘I know and I do and get going,’ she said. ‘I’ve got too much to do here to put up with your pontificating at me. Let me know as soon as you can about those forensics, will you? I do have an interest after all. It’s not just idle curiosity.’
‘I will.’ He bent and kissed the back of her neck. ‘Am I forgiven for being such a bastard the other night? You’ve proven me wrong again and I grovel, like I said this morning.’
‘Too much grovelling and you’ll get a headache,’ she said. ‘Go on, scram. I’ll think about forgiveness. The jury’s still out on that one.’
‘Well, send ’em a judge’s message that it’s time they pulled their fingers out. I’ll be back as soon as I can, doll. Hope you can find what we need there.’ He kissed her neck again and was gone.
It had seemed an interminable task when she started but in fact, as her hands moved among the piles of papers, photographs and scattered files, she found it wasn’t nearly as bad as she had expected. First, she had to sort the papers into sets, so that she at least knew the content of each subfile in the L and M letter files, and then put them into alphabetical order — or sometimes date order — internally. By the time Jerry came in with a tray of coffee for her, having realized there was no way she’d take time out to make her own, she was in fairly good order.
‘No problems inside,’ he reported. ‘We’ve had another nose around to make sure everything was ticketyboo and it is. No one was in the big lab, I’d swear to that.’
‘Good,’ she said absently, setting aside the now tidy and, as far as she could tell, complete L section (except of course for Lally Lamark’s file which she had at home) and set to work on her Ms. ‘It’s obvious that what whoever it was wanted is in here.’
‘I hope so.’ He sounded uneasy, and hovered at the door for a moment. ‘I mean, maybe they were after something else, too?’
‘I can’t think what.’ She stretched her now aching back a little. ‘We’ve nothing here anyone would want, really, have we? No interesting substances to shove up noses or give yourself a trip to wherever; nothing remotely saleable apart from big gear like microscopes, and we’re not missing anything like that, are we? That couldn’t possibly happen again — not since we put the security in place after the last time.’ That had been over three years ago but none of them had forgotten it. The microscopes were now firmly bolted in their places. ‘No one after real folding stuff would come sniffing around here now, would they?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I suppose not. Well, give me a shout if you want anything else. We’re well up to speed with the work inside so no need to worry about that. And I called on Sheila in Ballantyne on my way to work this morning and she said they said she can go home so long as there’s someone there to make sure she’s OK. So I’ve said I’ll go and sleep on her sofa for a night or two. Thank God she’ll be too shaky still to try to entice me to sleep anywhere else.’
He made the obvious joke without any of his usual leering enthusiasm, and she, already half preoccupied with her sorting, looked at him with a brief smile and said, ‘You’re a good man, Charlie Brown,’ and returned to her task. He hesitated just a beat longer and then went.
She let the coffee get cold as she moved more and more swiftly through the job of imposing order on the chaos the interloper had created. When she had finished with the Ms she sat back on her heels and looked hard and long at the array of neatly stacked files before going through them once more, just to be absolutely sure.
There could be no doubt about it. She had been right. The file for Tony Mendez, the theatre porter who had died (she had been sure) of alcoholic poisoning, was not there. And though at the time of doing his post-mortem she had been content to accept that he had ingested the alcohol that had killed him accidentally, inasmuch as there had been no indication of a desire for deliberate self-harm, now she was not so sure. She had badly wanted to read again the notes she had made at the time, so that she could if necessary reassess the situation. It was certainly what she would do with the Lamark file as soon as she got back home. But here she had been halted, and it infuriated her.
There was still, though, she reminded herself with a surge of hope, the other set of notes. Had the intruder found them too? The F section took longer to reorganize and her heart flickered in her chest when she realized that this was the only one left that had been rifled as the M and L files had been. The others needed only a simple stacking. Nothing inside them had been disturbed at all; that much was very clear. Unlike the F files.
Her excitement was justified. All the Fs, with the exception of just one set of notes, fell i
nto order beneath her hands. It was the notes on the post-mortem she had done on Pamela Frean which had vanished. And vanished for good, all because, like those other two, they had not been transferred to the hospital computer. PM notes were regarded as too sensitive for detailed electronic storage apart from a brief note of the last diagnosis of cause of death; which George told herself now, was, in the circumstances, richly ironic.
She was sitting at her desk, finishing the last of her piled-up paperwork, a half-eaten apple on the desk at her side because she had had no time to go to lunch, when her door slid open. She was aware of it, but didn’t look up, assuming it to be one of the staff from the big lab, or perhaps Danny.
‘Uh-huh?’ she said after a moment, still without looking up. ‘What is it?’
‘I just wanted to check you were still on for this evening.’ The voice sounded slightly apologetic. ‘I don’t want to be a pest, but I hadn’t seen you around the place all day, and someone said there’d been a break-in here last night so I thought I really ought to leave you alone. But then I thought, well, you might be just as glad to get away from it all anyway. So here I am.’
‘Zack!’ she said, not at all sorry to be pulled away from cross-checking a long list of blood-sugar readings from the diabetic clinic that had been carried out for one of Dr Carvalho’s more esoteric pieces of research. He was always asking her to do various analyses for him but there was never any sign of a published paper afterwards; one day she intended to tackle him about that. But not today. ‘Come and sit down! How nice of you to find the time to come visiting. Coffee?’
‘It’s my pleasure,’ he said gravely. He came in and took the chair she dragged forwards for him. ‘Thank you. And I have to say that I have Professor Hunnisett’s approval of my asking for your help.’
‘Professor Hunnisett?’ She was surprised. ‘How do you mean?’
Fourth Attempt Page 13
