‘Is he your prime suspect?’ Gus asked. She looked at him sideways, and slid down a little on the sofa. ‘Dammit,’ she said after a pause. ‘No, he isn’t. I wish he were. He’s not really a likeable man.’ She stopped.
‘So, what have you discovered about the other one? Who, I take it from your reaction, is a nice man. Which shouldn’t carry any weight, but I know how you feel. I gather it’s the same man Chambers talked about’
‘Yes,’ George said. ‘And I thought he was — Well, what I thought of him doesn’t really matter, I guess. Maybe he’s a good actor. I suppose he has to be to do what he’s been doing.’
‘How do you mean?’ He was sharply curious now, seeming to know that she had a very special piece of information for him. ‘Have you got some hard evidence?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet. But it’ll be the easiest thing in the world to get. The thing is, Gus, I don’t think Jim Corton is a doctor. He’s a hoaxer with no qualifications to be dealing with patients at all, either at Old East or at St Dymphna’s.’
33
Gus sat very still and stared at her, and then, to her amazement, leaned back and opened his mouth wide to roar with laughter.
‘I don’t See what’s so goddamned funny,’ she cried. ‘We’re going to have to gather evidence and if — no, dammit, when we do, I’m in one hell of an ethical quandary. And you’re laughing?’
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his streaming eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said huskily and managed to calm down. ‘It was just that I got this sudden set of images. I mean, admit it, George, it’s like one of the corniest of Doctor in the House gags, or some seaside comic card joke. You know, “Big breaths,” says the doctor. “Yeth,” says the sexy girl. “And I’m only thirteen.” And then the so-called doctor leers at the audience and says, “I’m really a fishmonger, but a white coat comes in handy.” Oh, dear.’ He shook his head, wiped his eyes and stowed his handkerchief. ‘Sorry, ducks. I’ll be sensible now. So, how do you know?’
‘I got the idea because of a lot of things. Things people said, but particularly the night cleaner on my department. A Mrs Glenney. She talked about people in white coats all looking the same and how people sometimes pretended to be doctors. I didn’t pay much attention at the time, but later … Well, I won’t detail it all. Just say I went to HR —’
‘Personnel,’ he muttered. ‘I hate these new labels.’
‘Call it what you like. I went there, and conned a girl into showing me his file. All highly improper, of course. And there’s nothing there that they’ve checked. Not his qualifications, not his references, nothing. Apparently, employers don’t.’
‘They do in the police force,’ Gus said.
‘I’m not surprised. Some very flaky people get involved in the police,’ she retorted, ‘I mean, if you got past their vetting, what are the ones they discard like?’
‘Oh, lovely,’ he said approvingly. ‘That’s more like my girl. OK, so no one checked his references. But this alone doesn’t make him a fraud.’
‘The references are all written in the same sort of way, same tone of voice. It’s hard to explain but you know how different people use different speech rhythms? These are all matching. Also some of the words used are repeated, like saying he has “perceptive judgement”. That one was used in every reference, and that has to be unusual. It’s not a phrase you normally find doctors using about other doctors. They might say something clichéd like “sound judgement”, but “perceptive”? In three separate references supposed to be from three different people? No way. And there’s more. The way the paragraphs are indented. The use of semi-colons — I mean, who uses semi-colons in letters these days? There’s no individual personality behind them either. I know doctors, and you can spot the sort of guy most of ’em are from the way they write. Add it all together, I plain didn’t believe those references weren’t all written by the same person.’
‘It’ll be easy to check, of course,’ he said. ‘All we have to do is ask the named referees if they know him and wrote those references. If we can get the names and addresses, of course. But we’ll have to get his consent to seeing his employment file. Data protection and all that.’
‘Do you have to?’ she said uneasily. ‘Because as I told you I got a peek at it kinda illegally. But long enough to take note of the names and addresses of the referees in question. Can’t you just use the stuff?’ She picked up her clipboard and raised the pad. Underneath it, tucked against the back, was a sheet of paper with her handwriting on it. ‘Here you are.’
He looked at it for a long moment, thinking. ‘This is tricky,’ he said. ‘Here I am with information to use, but can I legally use it? And more to the point, if I go into court with evidence gathered this way, will it be admissible?’
‘Can’t you make discreet enquiries?’ she asked. ‘Send a chap to these hospitals and get them to snoop about the way a private detective would? Then if we find we’re right, we treat him as a prime suspect and act accordingly. Once we start watching him properly, surely he’ll do something that’ll give us the evidence we need without ever letting anyone know I — er — bent the rules a bit?’
‘Hmm,’ he said and was silent again for a while. ‘I suppose so. It’s highly improper, but this is a murder enquiry after all, and I’m not above crossing the boundaries occasionally if it’s in a good cause. You genuinely think he could be our murderer?’
It was her turn to be quiet. ‘It’s hard to say,’ she said at last. ‘He seems such a nerd, so shy and — not helpless, exactly, but very vulnerable. But that has to be an act, of course, if he’s a hoaxer. That alone takes enormous chutzpah. In which case, his whole manner is a con and he could well be our man.’
‘Mmm.’ He looked again at the sheet of paper. ‘Birmingham,’ he murmured. ‘And … well, the London one’ll be the first we do. See what we can find there and then go on if necessary. When was he supposed to be there? OK, I’ll put someone discreet on to that first thing in the morning. If he draws a blank there we’ll have scored, and I’ll send people on to Birmingham to check what happened there, and also to the medical school. We’ll do it as a mispers search.’
‘Mispers?’ she said.
‘You know that! Missing person.’
‘Sorry, I forgot. Of course.’ She sat up a little straighter then and smoothed the paper on the clipboard, not looking at him. ‘Gus, I’ve one hell of a problem if you do find out that he’s a fraud. An ethical quandary, in fact.’
‘I’d have thought the reverse,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a direct pointer to a piece of behaviour which, if it isn’t usually murderous, certainly gives us reason to suspect he has a possible motive to murder. Someone finds out — maybe the theatre chap Mendez spotted something in his behaviour which gave him away? Or Lally Lamark noticed something in a patient’s medical record? It makes sense.’
‘I’m not sure I can see why Pam Frean should have died,’ she objected, momentarily diverted. ‘If that’s the criterion.’
‘That one’s horribly easy,’ he said. ‘Easiest of the lot. They were lovers, right? They got together because they’re both these shy, nerdy types. Or at least he’s pretending to be like that, which is what attracts her. He plays along ’cause a fella has to get his jollies where he can, so they become lovers. She gets pregnant and demands marriage. He knows the chances of her finding out the truth about him are higher if they marry — when people call the banns and get marriage licences and so forth, it’s amazing what information shakes out of the branches. And she gets too demanding, maybe. Whatever it is, he’s already got his head round killing two people, what’s one more?’
‘And Sheila?’
‘Ah! Again she knows something about him. Or she seems to.’
‘Then why doesn’t he just do the same to her as he does to the other three? Why mess about with abortive attempts that seem to be designed deliberately to fail?’
That stopped him. He narrowed his eyes as he looked
at her, though his stare was glazed. Then his vision cleared and he opened his eyes widely, and said, ‘Because he wants to know what it is that she knows! No good getting rid of her if there’s evidence lying around that could be found by her successor, right? So he wants to frighten her off so he has time and space to look around for whatever it is she might have.’ He jumped up and began to prowl the room, too excited by his thinking to sit still. ‘That makes a lot of sense, George. The fella who went spying round in your lab, dressed in a white coat, the one Mrs Glenney scared off. The theft of Sheila’s bag and the keys, and the break-in at her flat and then into your office to steal the notes of the people he’s already killed — maybe he got more than that. Maybe he found something somewhere else in the department that he was looking for.’
‘Sheila has a file that she calls her own. It isn’t really, it’s a sort of back-up, only it’s on paper and not on disc. She stores a lot of past path, results and reports on staff and patients in these files in a little cubby hole of her own. Most of our later stuff’s on computer, of course. So, whatever he’s looking for would be from the past, not the present.’ She shook her head then and subsided. ‘No, I don’t think it’s that. I’ve looked around Sheila’s files. Believe me, no one’s been interfering in there. I could tell at once if they had.’
‘Then it’s what we said before. It’s what the guy thinks she has. He hasn’t found it yet, but he’ll carry on till he does.’
‘It’s all falling apart in my head,’ George complained, uncertain now of her original conviction that James Corton was indeed the object of their search. ‘Why go to all this trouble just to cover up a hoax, like pretending to be a doctor when you’re not? Let’s face it, it happens a lot. It’s not a capital crime — there are always cases being reported. Sooner or later they’re flushed out because they display ignorance of an important subject that every doctor knows. That’s his big danger. Unless …’ She went off into a brown study of her own.
He waited a while and then said, ‘Well? Let’s be having you.’
‘Unless,’ she said slowly, ‘he’s already done something that’s led to a patient’s death. Maybe in one of his other hoaxing adventures — and we’ve no way of knowing where else he’s worked, of course — he’s done something that led to a death. Which means he’s got a hell of a lot to hide, right? That would account for him being so willing now to risk deliberately killing people, in case one of them lets it out that he’s a hoaxer and that starts a search for previous activities. After all, if you’ve killed once, what can they do if you do it again? No one gets executed any more, glory be. How does that sound?’
‘It sounds sound,’ he said gravely. ‘A sound judgement. Listen George, we could be on to something good here. I’ll start the wheels rolling in the morning.’ He sat down, leaned back and stretched. ‘What was the ethical quandary?’
‘Mmm?’
‘You said you had an ethical quandary: one hell of a problem, if we do find out he’s a trickster.’
She’d forgotten her words in the thrill of the deductive chase but now it all came back to her. She bit her lip. ‘Ideally no one lets him know if we find out he’s a hoaxer, right? We just stake him out and watch for actions that could be evidential, right?’
‘Of course,’ he said, sounding almost shocked. ‘You wouldn’t rush off and tell him we’ve rumbled him, would you?’
‘I might have to,’ she said flatly.
‘What?’ He stared. ‘Why on earth — oh Gawd!’
‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘I wondered when you’d see it.’
‘You can’t let an unqualified fella loose on your patients any longer than you have to. In fact, you ought to report your anxieties to the hospital right now, yes?’
‘If not to the management, at least to the Three Wise Men.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s a rather neat system they have here in Britain. If a doctor spots something about a colleague’s behaviour that worries him and doesn’t want to alert management or make waves, he goes to one of the people — doctors, you know — appointed by all the medical staff to be one of the Three Wise Men and says, “Say, Jack, old boy, I’m a touch bothered about old Fred. Tends to drop his tools in theatre, don’t you know. Could be because he’s always pie-eyed. What do we do about him before he kills someone and gets us all in the soup, hmm?”’ She managed a creditable imitation of a drawling Oxford accent and he grinned fleetingly.
‘Well,’ she went on. ‘I could go and tell them what I know, getting myself in trouble no doubt for snooping round the employment records, but I can wriggle out of that, I dare say. Once I tell them I’m off the ethical hook.’
‘What would they do?’
‘It’s my guess they’d go straight to him to have it out. They wouldn’t go to the management, not till they knew, in case he really is a doctor. But once they did he’d be out faster than you can say “hang about a bit”, even though we’re looking for a murderer here. And then we’ll never get our evidence and these cases get listed among the great unsolved.’
‘Then don’t tell your Three Wise Men,’ Gus said, sounding very reasonable.
‘I’ve got to do something,’ she said. ‘There’s no way I can let the guy go on working as an anaesthetist when I suspect that he isn’t trained to do so! People die in operating theatres because of good anaesthetic practice, for God’s sake. When the anaesthetist isn’t a good one, the risk is enormous.’
‘Has anyone died after one of his anaesthetics since he came here to Old East?’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Not to my knowledge, though maybe there’ve been some near misses, and that was what alerted people like Mendez. Or Lally when she saw from the notes what had happened in a particular case? Hell, Gus, what do I do? Whether there’s been a death already isn’t what matters. Preventing a future one is the important thing.’
‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘Shit! Have you no ideas apart from telling these wise monkey doctors? We all know what doctors are — when they’re under threat, they close ranks tighter’n a duck’s bottom, and that’s watertight.’
‘Like the police don’t?’ she said, firing up. ‘I remember what happened when you were in trouble.’
‘OK, OK,’ he said hastily. ‘No ancient history, please. Is there no way you can get him relieved of duty that won’t make him suspicious?’
‘I’m a pathologist,’ she said. ‘Not occupational health. And even they couldn’t do anything unless he came to them with symptoms. Except when —’ She stopped.
‘Except?’
‘Except when there are special pushes on infection control,’ she said slowly. ‘Do you remember? When we were looking into the baby case, a couple of years ago, I used the ploy of saying I was checking infection control and had to swab all the noses and throats of people in the maternity unit. I did it to find out where everyone was on a particular day, without actually interviewing them.’
He was grinning widely now. ‘I remember that very well. So, a variation on a theme?’
‘Indeed. Let me think.’ He looked at her and then got to his feet and padded out to the kitchen to make them some coffee. When he came back with the tall cafetière steaming gently on a tray, she was scribbling furiously.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s the remedy?’
‘MRSA,’ she said.
‘Ah.’ He waited but she offered no more, still scribbling, scratching out and scribbling again.
‘So, explain already!’ he said plaintively. ‘MRSA sounds like something to do with World War Two, like — like —ENSA, Every Night Something Awful. Or the NAAFI — Nasty Attacks of Awful Flatulence Immediately. Only they didn’t say flatulence. So what’s MRSA? Let me see — Make Randy Superintendents ’Appy?’ And he leaned over and slid one hand into the neck of her shirt.
She wriggled and said absently. ‘Shut up. I’m trying to word this announcement right.’ She went on writing as he sipped his coffee, but at last stopped, read over what she�
��d written, and then, satisfied, leaned back. ‘Got it.’
‘So, what is MRSA? Could it possibly be I was right?’
‘Not at the moment,’ she said crisply. ‘It’s Methycillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus.’
‘Serves me bloody right for asking.’
‘It means a dangerous pathogenic — disease-causing — organism that can make people very ill, which is resistant to treatment by the toughest of antibiotics, that’s all. If it gets into a hospital — especially the theatres and surgical wards — it’s the very devil to get out. We’re always doing checks for it. If I set up a random sampling operation no one’ll be a bit surprised. And after I do it, if I tell James Corton sadly that I’m very sorry, he has a dubious result and I’ll have to keep him off duty until such time as I can clear him —’
‘You mean he can have this disease without being ill?’
‘He can carry it. Like typhoid or hepatitis or HIV — there are lots of things people can carry while being symptom-free themselves. And they can pass them on, that’s the thing. I’ll put this in hand tomorrow, send this note to all theatre staff and get the job done quickly. I’ll have him off duty very fast indeed. How’s that?’
‘Great.’ He slid an arm across the back of the sofa to rest on her shoulders. ‘So, we’ve done a good job tonight. Let’s go to bed and rest after our labours. Or rest eventually, anyway.’ He leered sumptuously.
‘I’ll be glad to,’ she said. ‘Eventually. But right now, we’ve got to finish the paperwork.’ And she flourished her clipboard at him.
‘No point,’ he said. ‘We’ve got two suspects in there. First Corton, who has to be our main man, and, secondly, Klein.’
‘I think Frances Llewellyn too,’ she said.
‘Why? She wasn’t involved at St Dymphna’s, was she?’
‘The St Dymphna’s connection only points at a link between the murders and Mendez. But she could have had links with some of the other victims. She was researching gynae. matters, remember, so she might have treated Pam Frean.’
Fourth Attempt Page 33
