James still lay silently on the couch, but now his eyes moved and he looked appealingly at Gus.
‘Sorry, mate,’ Gus said to him. ‘But whether you like it or not, it’s true. You’ve been a right Charlie. Let me spell it out more. You fiddled with that bottle in the Beetle cupboard in the lab and changed the chemicals. A gag, she said. I bet. Her and her gags! It must have been obvious it was dangerous. You saw afterwards what it did to Jerry. You must have felt pretty Godawful about that.’
This time James closed his eyes. It was clear he accepted all that Gus said as accurate.
‘So there you are. She killed Tony to stop him turning on her. She killed Lally Lamark because she was a smart lady, almost as smart as Sheila, who spotted something in a set of notes that alerted her. Not her own notes at all probably, but some others — the fact Sheila said it was her own notes she wanted to look at doesn’t mean it was true, does it? Sheila showed her someone else’s notes, secretly — and burned the evidence when you caught her, remember. But when she got the request from Lally, for whatever it was, she realized this was a potentially dangerous opponent. And knowing how to fiddle with the woman’s insulin pen, she did just that.’
‘You can’t know that,’ George protested. ‘That has to be surmise.’
‘Tell me a better one,’ Gus said.
George was silent and Gus nodded. ‘See what I mean? Some of the time we have to use a bit of informed imagination. Not with Pam Frean, though. No need for imagination there.’
He stopped and Zack lifted his head, and then bent it again. He seemed to thrum with tension, and for a moment George felt aware of embarrassment, as though she knew Gus was about to strip him naked, and she’d have to sit and let him do it.
‘Poor Pam Frean,’ Gus said gently. ‘Poor little Pam. That one is down to you, Zack, isn’t it? You didn’t kill her, of course, but if you hadn’t played your games with her, she’d be alive still.’
Zack said nothing. He sat very still with his head down, staring at his hands on his lap as though he’d never seen them before.
‘So let’s get it out of the way. You’re the man Sheila had her beady eyes on, isn’t that so? You flirted with her, and she chatted you up like a right ’un, making it very clear she wanted you. It wasn’t only sex, was it? She wanted a clever, successful husband with a good future and the promise of a good income she could fiddle with. She wasn’t above having a bit of fun with a man like Jerry Swann’ — George made a grimace —‘but she wanted her own way when it came to the real business of marriage. It took her a long time before she realized that you weren’t up for that. That you chatted up every reasonably attractive woman just because she was a woman.’
‘Gee, Gus, thanks for making me feel real good,’ George murmured.
‘Don’t be daft.’ Gus was sharp. ‘It’s not your fault, it’s not any woman’s fault when men behave like that, any more than it was Zack’s fault, except for swanning from one girl to another, letting ’em think he cared about ’em.’
‘Get on with it, friend,’ Zack said. ‘You might as well make a job of it’
‘OK. Well, for you women are like a box of toys. You play games with them until you don’t want them any more and fancy a new one.’ He didn’t look at George, but she knew she had reddened. ‘But one of your toys fell heavily in love. This to Pam Frean wasn’t a game but a grand passion. Zacharius was her God-given man, not to put it too high. And when you’d had your fling and wanted to move on, she found she was pregnant.’
‘I thought she used a contraceptive, for Chrissakes!’ Zack burst out. ‘What girl doesn’t, these days? The girl was so sweet, and eager, so —’
‘So much in love,’ Gus said, ‘that it seemed to her the right thing to make love. No matter what her religious training and education. She loved you. And hers was a loving religion, not the cruel one everyone thought it was. Strict but loving. That’s your problem, you see, Zack. They simply fall on their backs for you.’ Again, he didn’t look at George. ‘As Sheila did too. Only when she found out she had a pregnant rival, she didn’t panic. She was much cleverer than that — her sort is. She befriended her. Found out that she was planning to go home and have her baby and learn to live without the love of her life, while devoting herself to God and her child. At first Pam felt guilty — when she was first diagnosed by Hattie —but after that, she was OK about it. Had plans for the future, once she got over her initial shock. So, Sheila had to act. She couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t get more involved with Pam, under the circumstances. The birth of a baby does have that effect on people, even Don Juans like you. And she couldn’t risk that because you were to be her property. If she couldn’t have you, no one would.’
‘But Sheila took it so well when I told her I wasn’t — that I already had a wife, and had no notion of being divorced because my wife’s a Québecois and a Catholic’ Zack said it almost despairingly.
‘Oh, took it excellent well, i’truth,’ said Gus in rolling Shakespearean tones. ‘So well she invites you to come out with her for a last farewell party and has every intention of pushing you under a train. Once George told her we were close to cracking the other two killings, she had to cut her losses, to keep us off her trail, didn’t she?’
‘It was my fault then, that …’ George looked stricken, but Gus shook his head at her.
‘Don’t blame yourself. She’d have done it eventually, now she was convinced Zack wasn’t going to come across with a wedding ring. And if she hadn’t been so cocksure about her hold over James, and made no effort to hide from him how she felt about things, she’d have done it too. And you’d have gone down in history as a triple murderer who got done in by the person you’d meant to make your fourth victim.’
‘So I’m not so stupid after all.’ James’s voice came thick and cracked from the couch. ‘Am I?’
‘What?’ Gus said.
‘Not so thick. It was me who realized what she was going to do, me who realized she’d killed the others, so she was going to kill Zack. And me who stopped her.’
‘Yes,’ Zack said. ‘Thanks.’ And he meant it, painful and spare though it sounded.
‘I’m ashamed,’ George said. ‘I should have spotted it — Pam Frean’s death being definitely murder, I mean.’
‘Why should you?’ Gus said sensibly. ‘Jesus, no one would have, in your position. I reckon she used George Joseph Smith’s method — the Brides in the Bath guy from a hundred years or so ago. Nice girlfriend comes round to spend the evening with preggy Pam and all that stuff, and then when she gets tired she says she’ll help her in her bath, wash her back and so forth. In the tub Pam goes, and Sheila, who must have spiked her whatever-they-drank with Valium, takes her by the ankles and pulls hard, and down she goes, and stays down, because Sheila keeps her legs in the air. That’s all there is to it, apart from tapping out a suitable message on the ward computer as soon as she got back to Old East. And because people are so used to seeing Sheila all over the place, they pay no attention to her.’ He shook his head with a sort of admiration. ‘You’ve got to hand it to her. She got the tone of the note spot on, didn’t she? And found the ideal way to kill her. It wasn’t hard, not even for a small woman.’
‘The girl died at once of a sort of shock reaction,’ George said. ‘I’d better read up some Victorian forensic pathology, I guess.’
‘Don’t be ashamed of being conned by the likes of Sheila Keen,’ Gus said. ‘I was too. And I’ve been dealing with bad ’uns a lot longer than what you have, lady. And don’t forget, you knew her so well, had known her for years.’
‘Which is something I couldn’t forget,’ George said in a low voice. ‘Not ever.’
‘Any more than I could,’ Zack said. He suddenly stood up. ‘Am I being charged with anything? I’m dead on my feet, I need bed. I want to go.’
‘You’re free as air,’ Gus said. ‘As long as you come back to give me a statement when I ask you.’
‘Sure,’ Zack said. ‘I’ll b
e back.’
He made for the door and then looked down at James, who was now lying fast asleep. ‘Do you need help with this fella?’
‘I’ll look after him,’ Gus said. ‘I have to arrest him for the hoax doctor bit. Poor little bastard.’
‘Let me speak in his favour at his trial, will you? He saved my life, after all.’
‘If you can help him, I’ll let you know,’ Gus answered. Zack nodded and turned to go, but then came back. ‘I’m sorry, George,’ he said. ‘I — Listen, I’m sorry. It’s just I like women, you know? I can’t settle for one, and get sort of — I suppose you could say I’m knicker-happy’
‘If you have to use such a phrase,’ she said icily.
‘Well, all I’m trying to say is sorry. At first I thought I’d try to get you into bed. It’d have been fun. But after a while, well, I guess I liked you as a person better. I’m glad we never got between the sheets.’
She looked at him, her eyes wide, and behind them Gus coughed. ‘Is this a private discussion, or can anyone else get involved with a few penn’orths of their own? Something along the lines of if you’d tried really hard, I’d have pushed every tooth you’ve got in your head so far down your throat you’d have needed a haemorrhoidectomy to get them back. If you get my meaning.’
‘And I’m much too old to need two men discussing who or who will not take me to bed, goddamn it,’ George roared. ‘So shut up, the pair of you.’
‘Fair enough,’ Zack said, grimacing. He went to the door. ‘And so you shouldn’t think too badly of me over young Frean, I’d have paid upkeep for her and the baby, you know. Only I couldn’t have married her.’
‘The Québecois wife?’ Gus was sardonic again. ‘Remember who you’re talking to. I know bloody well there was no wife in Quebec! I researched you very carefully!’
‘I had to tell the woman something,’ Zack said. ‘Didn’t I? Oh, shit, what a mess.’ And he looked across at James. ‘Remember, I’m here if he needs anyone. Goodnight’ And this time he really did go.
There was a long silence and then Gus picked up his phone and gave some terse instructions about arresting and booking James Corton on a charge of deception and theft of hospital property and anything else they could use to keep him safe in a cell while being looked after. ‘Tell him,’ he ended, ‘when he’s woken up enough, that we’ll see if we can get him into some sort of training scheme somewhere. When this is all over. He’ll probably make a useful — Well, I dare say some sort of hospital job can be found for him.’
Long afterwards, when a couple of police, one of them a woman, had come and taken James stumbling away down to the detention cells, they sat in silence as the clock ticked round and they thought their own thoughts. Then Gus stirred and stretched and grinned at her.
‘Ho hum, George, me old darling,’ he said. ‘Shall we go home to my place and go to bed? And then, tomorrow, talk about that holiday we planned to take?’
‘Oh, Gus,’ George said. ‘Yes, please.’
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