Rules, Regs and Rotten Eggs (A Harriet Martens Thriller Book 7)

by HRF Keating

  Years ago in Delhi, negotiating for Majestic Insurance with the Ministry of External Affairs, John had lunched a junior diplomat at a particularly good restaurant, if one haze-thick in the customary Indian way with cigarette smoke. As they finished the meal, the young man dropped on the table a packet of Goldflake, still in its British wrapping.

  ‘Mr Piddock,’ he had said, ‘I wonder could you do me a favour?’

  ‘If I can.’

  ‘Would you offer me a cigarette from that packet there?’

  ‘But …’

  ‘You see, I’ve taken a vow not ever to smoke again, and a vow must be kept or what’s the use of making it. But I have allowed myself a period of grace during which a cigarette does not count — if it’s one that’s offered to me.’

  John, even as he had held out the packet — so he would end the story — had seen how by going to an influential uncle the young diplomat had mentioned he could circumvent the obstacle threatening his whole negotiation.

  ‘Listen, Happy, I have an idea.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘What if I have a word with my friend, Mrs Maltravers, in Admin? She might, you know, find some complication in your retirement paperwork that would delay it for some time, and …’

  ‘That’d please me, all right. Please me, no end.’

  *

  Arriving at St. Oswald’s, where she herself had once spent long sedated days poisoned to the point of being at death’s door, Harriet found a shock awaited her. When she asked at Reception who could tell her about Robert Roughouse’s condition, at once had come the answer ‘Not here any more.’

  ‘Not here? What do you mean? You — You aren’t saying he’s died?’

  ‘Wouldn’t ever go roundabout that way to break bad news,’ the man at the counter replied. ‘Not the number of times I’ve been left to tell it. No, your Mr Roughouse has been taken off to somewhere his friends think better than St Ozzie’s.’

  ‘Where? Where? And what friends?’

  ‘Where’s he gone? To that Masterton Clinic out beyond Boreham, I was told. But who those friends of his were is more than I know. Three of them came, my mate said when I arrived for duty. Here before six. Straight up to the Night Admin Officer they went. And, next thing the chap here at reception knew, the lift was bringing down someone on a stretcher and taking them straight out to a private ambulance. Only then did somebody say it was that fellow as was shot or something last night.’

  ‘What about the police officer I arranged to be on duty down here? Didn’t he show up? And if he did, didn’t he ask questions? Where is he? Is he still here?’

  ‘There was a cop here, so my mate said. But, when your Mr Roughouse was put in that private ambulance, he took himself off.’

  ‘Right,’ Harriet said. ‘I’d better have a word upstairs. I take it the Administrator himself is in by now?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Since before nine, matter of fact.’

  Questions began shooting up in her mind.

  Three men coming with a hired ambulance to St Ozzie’s even before it was fully light? What could that mean? Has Roughouse been taken away, not by any friends but by the very man who shot that grenade at him? The man and a couple of his accomplices? Did he never get anywhere near that redoubt for the rich, the Masterton Clinic? Has he been driven off somewhere and killed? Surely that can’t be what’s happened. A St Oswald’s administrator, even a night deputy, can’t have been that easy to hoodwink. But, all the same, is there behind that dawn descent here something more than a wealthy man being removed to where he’ll get luxury treatment? Would, in fact, any clinic offer better treatment than Birchester’s biggest and best hospital? Or can it be simply that the men who whisked him away were only taking him to somewhere safer from any chance infection than a big public hospital? Or — Is this it? — were they wanting to keep him safe, not from infection, but from an enemy wanting to finish the job? Do these friends of his, if that’s what they were, know a lot more than I do about who wants him dead? Or are they simply anxious to protect him from the intrusive media? But why should that require such hurried, and risky, action? Questions, questions. And no answers.

  She found Mr Green, the Administrator, sitting happily sipping at his mid-morning coffee. Barely introducing herself, she asked point-blank why a seriously ill patient had been allowed to be taken away in such unusual circumstances.

  Mr Green looked abruptly unhappy.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know what you mean. But —’ He shifted in his seat. ‘But — well, my night-time colleague, who incidentally got me out of my bed to answer the phone, told me the people who were there with him were very insistent. Mr Roughouse, they said, had to be protected from any intrusion.’

  ‘Protected from what sort of intrusion? Did they tell him?’

  ‘Intrusion was all they said, insisted on.’

  ‘And did you say he would be perfectly well protected from that here at St Oswald’s?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Of course I did. But — well, my colleague said they were persuasive, the visitors. Very persuasive.’

  ‘You’re not — You’re not telling me he was offered some sort of inducement?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. I would have immediately … No. No, eventually I told him to use his own judgment. After all, I couldn’t, at the end of the phone, at that hour of the morning, make any reasoned decision myself. So in the end he let them take Mr Roughouse. He told me, when I came in, that they were … It’s difficult to explain really. They seemed to act, he said, as if there was no question but that he would agree to — to whatever they asked.’

  Harriet felt pure astonishment. Could anyone, could any three visitors, really act in that high-handed way? At once an answer came to her. Yes, they could — if they had the arrogance of the really wealthy.

  And didn’t Roughouse’s friend from school and all that tell me last night that all his friends were — unutterable word — rich?

  ‘And — And one of the people who came,’ Mr Green plunged on, ‘was actually a member of the medical profession. Quite a well-known surgeon, Mr Jackson Edgeworth. And he did give my colleague his assurance that the short ambulance trip to the Masterton Clinic could not possibly aggravate the patient’s condition. I don’t know … should I, all the same, have withheld my agreement?’

  ‘No,’ Harriet said, feeling a flicker of sympathy. ‘No, I think I can understand how you came to agree as you did.’

  ‘Thank you. And after all Mr Roughouse did arrive safely at the Masterton. I rang them from home myself, and they told me he had arrived and his condition was — er — stable.’

  *

  Condition stable. Does this mean he’ll be able to talk? Right, off to the Masterton straight away. Wait. No, collect Bolshy Bill first. The Masterton, as I recall, is well used to ‘protecting’ anyone admitted to it. Over the years more than one film star caught up in some media brou-haha has taken refuge there for treatment for ‘a nervous condition’. It might be no bad thing to arrive at the citadel, as it were, mob-handed.

  ‘Bloody Masterton Clinic,’ Bolshy grunted as, half an hour later, he brought their car to a halt just inside its ornate gates. ‘Clinic for the masters, ask me.’

  Yes, Harriet thought, a useful weapon sitting here beside me.

  She sat looking at the house ahead. It seemed, from her line of vision taking in its front and part of one side, to be a mansion from the Victorian era. Ponderous in uncompromising dark brick, half-masked by a heavy growth of dull green ivy, it sat there proclaiming I’m here and I’m staying. Only incongruous glass entrance doors and clean-as-clean white paintwork showed its purpose had altered.

  Yet best perhaps to keep Bolshy in reserve should its defences prove as formidable as they looked.

  She tasked him with using his mobile to continue his inquiries into Roughouse’s background.

  ‘I mustn’t be too long,’ she added as she set off. ‘When I came to collect you I found a message from the ACC. He wants me to report as
soon as I can.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ Bolshy acknowledged.

  Had there, though, been a touch of I know about you and the ACC behind the brief word? Or, damn it, am I being absurdly touchy?

  Mounting the steps to those out-of-keeping heavy glass doors, she found they swung open at a single easy push. At the far end of a spacious entrance hall she saw, half-hidden on the reception desk by a massive bowl of glowing bronze chrysanthemums, a young smartly dressed black woman. She crossed over towards her, each step echoing out on the decoratively patterned tiled floor.

  To her surprise, the girl seemed not to hear. Even when she was near enough to read a neat plastic triangular name-plate saying Tonelle, the girl did not so much as look up. Only from directly in front of the desk was it apparent she was deeply absorbed by the crossword in her newspaper.

  At a crisp Good morning she gave a sudden start and pushed the paper, in a welter of rustling pages, down to her knees.

  Some rule against slovenly newspaper-reading while on duty?

  ‘Oh. Oh. Yes? Yes, may I help you?’

  ‘Greater Birchester Police, Detective Superintendent Martens. I believe you have as a newly arrived patient, a Mr Robert Roughouse. I’d like to see him.’

  A rather too hastily summoned-up extra smile appeared on the ebony-black face looking up at her.

  ‘I’m sorry, but we have a strict regulation that no visitors are allowed without prior notice.’

  Harriet was hardly going to be stopped by this.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘I’m giving you notice now that I wish to see Mr Roughouse as soon as possible.’

  A tiny flash of a grin came back to her at this attempt to get round the imposed regulation.

  But no dice.

  ‘I don’t think the Administrator, Mrs Fishlock, would quite accept that.’

  Second administrator today, Harriet thought. And will she …?

  ‘Shall I try seeing her?’

  She had been tempted to add something like Unless, of course, she has to have prior notice too. But that would have been rather unfair on young Tonelle whose duty it must be, when not defying the edict against the sloppy reading of newspapers, to defend to the last the privacy of the clinic’s clients.

  Peering a little further forward to satisfy her curiosity about the rapidly concealed paper, Harriet saw it was the Guardian.

  Well, well. So the Masterton employs receptionists of a good deal higher than average intellect. Able not only to tackle the Guardian crossword but also to deal effectively with any awkward inquiries from the local media. And, as it seems, the police.

  ‘You want Mrs Fishlock? I’ll ring through. But I can’t guarantee she’ll let you see Mr Roughouse.’ Another half-mischievous flicker of a grin on the generous, and generously reddened, lips. ‘She’s a bit of a dragon, actually.’

  ‘Is she? Well, thanks for letting me know.’

  When Mrs Fishlock’s secretary ushered Harriet though the door into her office — Mrs Sylvia Fishlock, Administrator the plaque on the door proclaimed — she saw at once what Tonelle had meant by dragon.

  Sylvia Fishlock was a lady of fifty or so, slim almost to viciousness, with a long, sharply downwards-lined face and greenish eyes glittering behind rimless glasses.

  ‘Detective Sergeant — er — Martens, didn’t Reception say?’

  Tonelle on the phone had been more accurate, and perfectly clear.

  ‘Detective Superintendent,’ Harriet corrected her, flatly.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ A tiny pause. ‘I’m sorry.’

  But not, Harriet registered, very sorry.

  ‘And you are wanting to see one of our patients? I must say this is very irregular.’

  ‘It’s Mr Robert Roughouse, who, I understand, was admitted here early this morning.’

  ‘That would be quite impossible.’ The immediate answer.

  ‘Oh, and why is that?’

  A sharp come-and-gone smile.

  ‘Our Medical Superintendent informed me, only a few minutes ago as a matter of fact, that Mr Roughouse has not yet recovered consciousness. And, as there is some question of the necessity for a minor operation in the area of the head, he is unlikely to be in a fit state to receive visitors for some time to come.’

  Then she made her mistake.

  ‘Not even a visit from a senior police officer,’ she added.

  Open war then. But not, actually, at this moment defeat.

  ‘I perfectly understand. And of course I’m satisfied.’

  As soon as she saw that Mrs Fishlock seemed satisfied in her turn, Harriet began to get up from the low chair she had been directed to.

  ‘Oh, and by the way,’ she said, almost at the door, ‘Who was it who brought Mr Roughouse here in that private ambulance?’

  And, nice to see, a flicker of dismay behind the glinting glasses.

  Then something that might be a gulp of recovery.

  ‘I am afraid I am unable to say.’

  ‘Unable? Does that mean you don’t know? Or is it that the Clinic’s rules forbid you to say?’

  For a moment she thought she had Mrs Fishlock at a disadvantage. If not on the ropes. But she was a tougher fighter than that.

  ‘I can only repeat that I am unable to say.’

  Harriet thought for an instant.

  Can I ask who made the Clinic’s rules, and whether they are the sort that can be observed or not according to circumstances?

  But at once she decided her war had to be won by other means. Means perhaps not within some Geneva Convention’s curious code of what, in any international conflict, is or is not permissible. War as a sort of game.

  For a moment into her head there came a picture of a favourite childhood pursuit, Dover Patrol. Little cardboard warships advanced dice-throw by dice-throw on their tin stands. By virtue of their blank, red or blue backs, each one sea-mist shrouded.

  ‘Well, thank you for your assistance,’ she said to Mrs Fishlock, keeping out of her voice even the least trace of sarcasm.

  Down below on her way out, something tickled at the back of her mind as Tonelle, unauthorised Guardian now altogether hidden away, gave her a friendly told-you-so grin. But what that tickle of thought was she could not, hurrying off, put her finger on.

  Getting into the car beside Bolshy, ignoring in the interests of a good relationship the throat-tickling smell of the cheroots he was notorious for smoking, she told him briefly of her lack of success. In return, she received, hardly to her surprise, no more than a couple of words reporting only the most minimal success with his Internet inquiries.

  ‘You want me to go in there?’ he asked then, with a careless nod towards the house. ‘Give that — what did you say? — old battleaxe a taste of the way we really do things?’

  Harriet sighed.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, DS. I’ll make sure I get to visit Robert Roughouse just as soon as he’s fit to talk. In the meanwhile I need to find out everything I can about him. Then we may begin to see why he was the victim of that disguised egg. Out there in Gralethorpe last night I exchanged a few words with a man kneeling beside him, a close friend I gathered, one Matthew Jessop. Here’s the card he handed me. Give him a ring and fix a time for me to meet him in London, a.s.a.p.’

  ‘Simple task for the lower ranks, as per usual.’

  ‘Yes, DS. And I’d be obliged to have that interview this very afternoon.’

  Immersed in thoughts about what could possibly lie behind the attempt at assassination — it was assassination, it could be nothing else — Harriet at last became aware that Bolshy was stuffing the mobile back into the bulging pocket of his horribly loud jacket.

  She waited till the process was over.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Gave you a warning.’

  A warning?

  Harriet almost allowed herself to be caught by what she immediately guessed was a piece of junior officer’s cunning. The man she had talked with across Robert Roughouse’s slumped body could have had no w
arning of any seriousness to give.

  ‘Well, DS …?’ she said, keeping fury just under hatches.

  ‘Said parking’s bloody imposs where he lives in smart old Notting Hill. And in any case he can’t do nothing till tomorrow. Eleven a.m., not earlier. He said if that won’t —’

  He broke off.

  ‘Hey,’ he banged out, ‘that cab that just come in the gates. Y’know who’s in it?’

  Chapter Four

  Now why should I please bloody Bolshy by asking who it is he’s seen, Harriet asked herself. She looked over towards the cab just coming to a halt outside the ivy-clad house. At that moment the sun broke through the grey clouds overhead and a dazzlingly bright reflection from the clinic’s glass doors made it impossible to see anything of the passenger darting up the steps. Not even whether they were man or woman.

  But a visitor entering? A possible visitor for Robert Roughouse?

  ‘All right,’ Harriet said to Bolshy. ‘Tell me then. Who was that?’

  ‘Can’t be sure,’ Bolshy answered, mulishly. ‘But I’d say, ask me, it’s that marathon runner, Charlie Nyam-something.’

  ‘And what’s so interesting about him?’ Harriet asked, not without sharpness.

  ‘Not him. Her. It’s Charity Something-or-other. Don’t you ever read the papers? Always called Charlie in the sports pages. She’s the one going to bring us a cert Gold next Olympics, so they say. Comes from Kenya, but British now, some reason. Nyambura, yeah, that’s what she’s called.’

  ‘That’s all very interesting, DS,’ she said, finding in fact her own interest rapidly fading. ‘But the sooner I get back to Headquarters the better. I do have to report to the ACC, you know.’

  ‘But what you don’t know,’ Bolshy replied, ignoring that, ‘is Charlie Nyambura must be here for the purpose of visiting one Robert Roughouse. They’re an item. Saw it in the paper, other day. Tasty bit of gossip. Black Charlie seen out, some smarty restaurant, with new party leader, giving his ex-Tory chums a bloody nose.’

  Over at the Clinic, as the sun was swallowed again by the grey pall above, the big glass doors came firmly together.