First Blood

by Claire Rayner

  7

  Everyone was early the following morning. When George walked into her office at half past eight Jerry and Jane were already sitting with their heads together chattering busily, with Sheila hovering around them, clearly torn between wanting to join in and her status as senior in charge, as Peter sat and listened, clearly fascinated but not deigning to speak.

  ‘Good morning,’ George called and they all – even Peter – turned and looked at her expectantly, like children waiting for lollipops when their mother comes home from shopping, and she laughed at the sight of their eager faces. ‘So, what’s new?’

  ‘That’s what we want to know,’ Jerry said. ‘We’ve been buzzing with it. We gather old Oxford’s gone to the Happy Adventure Playground in the sky.’

  ‘There’s no need to be offensive,’ Peter muttered and Jerry flicked a look at him.

  ‘If you think that’s offensive, wait till I really try. So, Dr B., is there any news? Did you find out –’

  ‘I have to ring the coroner’s office,’ George said. ‘The body’ll be here at some time after nine for the autopsy. Then maybe I’ll know a bit more.’

  ‘Oh, Dr B., don’t!’ Jerry got to his feet and came over to her, his head turned to one side in his familiar wheedling manner. ‘Do be a darling. Let us in on it. What do you think? You must have some idea! Did he get himself done over by a bit of rough trade? Or did he just expire of allround decadence and an overdose of ambrosia in his bath of asses’ milk?’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘Now, why should you get ideas like that?’

  ‘You only had to look at him to see what an oddball he was!’ Jerry said. ‘Jane and I thought so ages ago, didn’t we, Janey?’

  ‘Leave me out of this,’ Jane said promptly. ‘It’s you does the talking, me who does the listening. You know that.’

  ‘Well, he did.’ Jerry was unrepentant. ‘He’d got – had – one of those spongy faces, you know? Hands much too soft and smooth, like he had a manicure every week, probably from some terribly precious lad in glitter earrings and lurex socks, and the sort of body that made you think he pampered it to the top of its bent. Am I right? What’s his place like?’

  George knew she shouldn’t. She’d worked in Britain long enough to know that the hierarchical structure of hospital life was important. Consultants didn’t usually gossip with their staff, even their junior medical staff (if they had them, she thought sourly), but she still had enough of the relaxed American style about her to find it hard to be aloof; and now she pushed the hesitance away. After all, they might have information she’d like to hear.

  ‘I suppose I have to say it was on the decadent side,’ she admitted and Jerry let out a little whoop of triumph. ‘Or maybe it’s just that I’m not used to that sort of – well, opulence.’ She described the flat, and they listened with total absorption. Even Peter gave up his pretence of lofty indifference.

  Jerry sighed with satisfaction when she finished. ‘I knew he was that sort. He had to be. The clothes he wore … Did you see that suit he had on the last time he came to a hospital meeting, Jane? Sort of silvery with a sheen on it. One of those unbelievably expensive materials – mohair, is it?’

  ‘Vicuña,’ Peter said unexpectedly and reddened as Jerry looked at him. ‘He’s got – he had a vicuña overcoat too. I touched it once. Amazingly soft. Even more expensive than mohair.’

  ‘Maybe that was why he was killed,’ Jerry said. ‘For his wardrobe.’

  George looked at him sharply. ‘How you can jump to the conclusion that he was killed is beyond me. I wouldn’t say that until I’d done the autopsy, so how can you?’ And she buried the memory of her own conclusion-jumping last night.

  ‘I can see it all,’ Jerry said with relish. ‘Picks up a bit of rough trade, takes him back to the flat, plies him with costly drink, chap gets above himself, takes a machete or a kitchen knife or some such to him –’

  ‘Phooey,’ George said loudly. ‘He died peacefully in his bed, as neat as you like. Probably the night before last, going by body temperature and the degree of rigor.’

  ‘Oh, well then’ – Jerry was unabashed – ‘some remote poison unknown to medicine. He picked up a sailor, that was it, and the sailor –’

  ‘Shut up,’ Jane said. ‘He was a married man, for heaven’s sake. If he picked up anyone it’d be a prostitute. A female one.’

  ‘Either way, what does it matter?’ Jerry said. ‘And don’t you jump to conclusions, Jane. Married men like a bit of the other sometimes, you know. They’re not all like me, solid masculinity all the way through, with never a hint of anything nasty.’

  ‘There’s nothing nasty about people who happen to be bisexual or homosexual,’ George said sharply. This was the sort of prejudice she loathed as much as she hated colour prejudice, and it chilled her to hear such talk coming from Jerry.

  He had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘Sorry, Dr B. I didn’t mean it. Some of my best friends and all that. But you have to admit this is exciting. It’s not every day someone as close to the hospital as Oxford is – was – goes and dies in mysterious circumstances. Let me have a bit of fun with it, do! It beats screening gut washings five times over.’

  ‘Apropos of which, you ought to be working,’ Sheila said, but made no effort to get the day started. She turned to George, her eyes bright with curiosity. ‘I suppose he could have committed suicide, couldn’t he?’

  ‘If he did, I don’t see how,’ George said. ‘Until I do the autopsy I can’t be sure of anything. But there was no note, and nothing beside the bed that shouldn’t have been, either. A carafe of water, as I recall. Nothing else.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he had,’ Sheila said. ‘Poor devil.’

  ‘Oh?’ George had turned to go back to her office but now she stopped and looked at Sheila with interest. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s her, isn’t it?’ Sheila had everyone’s attention now and was clearly enjoying it. ‘She’d be enough to drive any man to despair, the way she goes on.’

  ‘Oh, magic!’ Jerry said. ‘Do tell. Why? What? Where? What have you dug out, She?’

  ‘Nothing that isn’t common knowledge for those who have eyes in their heads,’ Sheila said tartly. ‘That wife, she’s like a – a bitch on heat. Anybody’s.’

  ‘She doesn’t look like one,’ Jane said, giggling. ‘That hair!’ And the clothes she wears – she beats him hollow. They must have spent a fortune between them. Did you see that thing she had on last night? That didn’t come off any common-or-garden peg, believe you me.’

  ‘It was a Vivienne Westwood,’ Sheila said. ‘You can always tell. And I meant her behaviour, not what she looks like. She looks all right,’ she added grudgingly. ‘No one could say she doesn’t.’

  ‘She’s a knockout,’ Jerry said. ‘Of course blokes go buzzing round her, what do you expect? Looking like that, and rich as hell besides. That’s always sexy.’

  ‘I don’t mean anything like that, either. I’m talking about …’ She hesitated. ‘Well, it’s the way she is with people. The sort she’s interested in. She just sort of eats them up. I mean, I’ve seen her before. It used to be the Professor.’

  Jerry gaped at her. ‘Prof. Dieter? You’ve got to be kidding.’

  She shook her head. ‘It didn’t go far. But she was after him, no question. I don’t know what changed it but then she stopped. You have to remember I saw her a lot, both of them really, at the meetings and then the rehearsals for the show. Which was all spoiled.’ She brooded for a moment over that and then went on. ‘Anyway, it’s not the Professor now.’

  ‘Oh?’ George was puzzled. Hadn’t Professor Dieter told Sergeant Dudley last night that he wasn’t close to the Oxfords? Yet here was Sheila saying he’d had an affair with Felicity. Idle gossip, perhaps, built on nothing much in the way of real knowledge, like so much hospital talk? Or … She looked at Sheila and said casually, ‘Well, if it isn’t the Professor, who is it?’

  Sheila didn’t look at
her. ‘Toby Bellamy.’

  George felt a jolt and was startled more by that than by what Sheila had said. Toby Bellamy was after all only a friend, and a very recent one at that. He flirted a little, that was all, nothing to take seriously. But clearly she had taken him seriously; if she hadn’t, why the jolt?

  Jerry covered the hiatus with his excitement. ‘D’you mean the gastro chap who keeps on about helicobacter? He keeps sending me biopsies from his endoscopy clinic looking for it.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Sheila said. ‘Last night, after you went, Dr Barnabas, and before Bell told Danny and it got all over the place that Richard Oxford was dead –’

  ‘Oh,’ George said. ‘Then she didn’t have to wait to hear it from the Professor that her husband had died. He said to the police that he’d tell her.’

  ‘What? Oh – no. Like I said, Bell told Danny and he told everyone.’ Sheila was irritated at the interruption. ‘Anyway, as I said, as soon as she heard, she came straight over to him, and the way she went on – well, it was obvious.’

  ‘What was?’ George couldn’t help it.

  ‘That there was something there. She talked to him in that way people do, you know. Sort of close and intimate, and he listened with his head bent and looking into her eyes, and, well, you could tell.’

  Yes, you could tell, George thought. He talked to me like that. I rather liked it. Bastard!

  ‘And then, when everything was over, she went on to the stage herself, would you believe it, and she said that her husband had died suddenly, and that was why he wasn’t here, and she wouldn’t want people to think he hadn’t cared enough to turn up, that was why she was telling us.’

  ‘Good God!’ George said. ‘She did that? Surely someone else could’ve –’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But who was there? Professor Dieter had gone off with you and I suppose she didn’t fancy Herne doing it.’

  ‘She looked incredible,’ Jane said. ‘Just standing there in front of the red curtain in that amazing black dress with all the flowers glinting in her yellow hair –’

  ‘She looks sort of buttered, doesn’t she?’ Jerry said and snickered. Jane ignored him.

  ‘– and she spoke in a very dignified way and, do you know, people applauded her. Then she just walked off and put her hand into Toby Bellamy’s elbow and he led her out. She walked all the way with her head up while they applauded. It was quite something.’

  ‘It sounds a bit theatrical,’ George said a touch spitefully.

  ‘Oh, it was,’ Sheila said. ‘Amazing performance.’

  ‘I’m sure it was,’ George was sardonic now. ‘And then what happened?’

  Sheila again threw her one of those sideways glances. ‘I don’t know. She went off with Toby Bellamy and we all went home. No after-show party, or anything. I’d been looking forward to that, too.’

  ‘Never mind, ducky,’ Jerry said. ‘I’ll take you out at lunchtime and we’ll have a private party.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  She looked at Jane. ‘Have you got those slides ready for Neville Carr yet? He wanted them for this morning’s teaching round.’

  ‘Almost,’ Jane said. She slid off her stool, went back to her place and sighed.

  ‘All right, all right, O Big White Chief,’ Jerry said and sketched a salaam. He returned to his own bench. ‘Ever onwards shall I plod with my helicobacters. Wish me luck.’

  ‘And for heaven’s sake use a proper microscope,’ Sheila said. ‘You can’t get the full definition on that old wreck.’

  ‘Don’t say such things in front of him! You’ll hurt his feelings.’ Jerry patted the microscope. ‘He never lets me down, you know that. And anyway, I haven’t got one of the others.’

  ‘Then where is it?’ Sheila said wrathfully. ‘You had one on your bench yesterday, didn’t you?’

  ‘I think so. I was using this one all afternoon. I imagine someone from the other lab must have come and borrowed it. They often do.’

  ‘They don’t need to any more,’ Sheila said. ‘We got three new ones last month. God knows we had to wait long enough for them. I’ll sort it out. Peter, those sensitivities are needed for this morning’s clinic, so you’d better get them out of the way first.’

  The day swung into action as George went slowly back to her office to sink a little heavily into the chair behind her desk. The excited energy that had filled her when she woke this morning after only five hours’ sleep had vanished, to be replaced by a deep inertia and a sense of emptiness, and that puzzled her. Because she’d been taught all those years ago by her mother that there was no sense in sitting wallowing in bad feelings, you had to think them out of the way, she pondered on that. And knew perfectly well why she felt as she did.

  It wasn’t that she really cared all that much about Bellamy. It wasn’t like Ian (and again she managed to think of him without undue discomfort; after only six weeks, too! She must have a shallow heart, she told herself a little sadly) but it had been fun. The thing is, she thought, I like to be admired. Most women do, she knew that. But for herself it was more important. Never having been one of the people at high school who got chosen for anything interesting in the cheerleader or prom queen line, she’d settled long ago for being labelled always ’the clever one’. To discover, as she had at some time in her first year at med. school, that some men found a lively intelligence attractive had been a great moment for her. But the basic uncertainty created by those schooldays spent in the back seats while other people necked joyously in the front had left its mark. Any man who fussed over her, she thought now with some gloom, was one she liked. Well, that had to end. She’d chosen a bummer last time, no doubt because she’d been flattered out of her mind, and she wasn’t going to do it again.

  Except that I already have, she told herself, remembering how much of a jolt it had been to discover that Toby Bellamy had a special thing going with Felicity Oxford. I already have, goddamn it. And I’m going to reverse it. That’s the end.

  And she looked at the clock and reached for the phone. Time to get some real work done. If she concentrated hard, she could do it.

  The death, the coroner’s office told her, had been reported to them and the autopsy could go ahead. The documentation was on its way, with the coroner’s officer, and they’d be grateful if the job could be done as soon as possible so as not to keep Mr Constant hanging about.

  ‘I have other things to get out of the way this morning,’ she told them crisply. ‘And I can’t start this job till … let’s see, I can start at noon. No sooner.’

  ‘That’ll be fine,’ said the clacking little voice on the phone. ‘Thanks for your help.’

  She hung up feeling irritated again. Why? They hadn’t been awkward. It was she who was prickly this morning.

  She settled to some of the desk work that she’d left from the day before, but she’d barely picked up the first piece of paper before the phone rang.

  ‘Dr Barnabas?’ the voice said, a little thin and tense. ‘Er – George?’

  ‘Yes?’ He sounded familiar and yet …

  ‘This is Charles Dieter. Are you all right this morning?’

  ‘Oh!’ Clearly his own late night hadn’t agreed with him. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Well, what was it? Have you decided?’

  ‘I haven’t done the PM yet. I really can’t say.’

  ‘Oh! I thought – when you insisted on staying last night – that perhaps …’

  She was glad he couldn’t see her. Her embarrassment was, she knew, written all over her face. ‘I just wanted to do all the necessary checks,’ she said as smoothly as she could. ‘But I won’t have any firm answer for a while yet, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Pity,’ Dieter said gloomily. ‘I’ve got Felicity Oxford to keep informed.’

  ‘Yes,’ George said non-committally, remembering what Sheila had said about the Professor and Mrs Oxford. ‘So sorry.’

  ‘Well, can’t be helped,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll let
me know as soon as you can.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘The coroner’s usually quick in his decisions.’ She sat with the phone in her hand for a while after he’d hung up. He really has been rattled badly by Oxford’s death, she thought. To sound as uptight as that … Well, he’d have to wait for the PM like everyone else. And that reminded her. She jiggled the phone rest and rang down to Danny in the mortuary to tell him of the coming body and the booking for noon. He grunted and said he had to come up and get the register if she didn’t mind and he’d get the details then, and snapped the phone down in a way that made her even more irritable. Ill-mannered creep, she told herself wrathfully, and when he did come in, an hour or two later, glared at him.

  ‘It’s him, is it, what’s coming? Oxford?’ He looked at her lugubriously. ‘Well, it’ll make a full circle, I s’pose, seeing as he’s been hanging around this place for years. Mortuary must ha’ been the only place he never put his nosy old head into, and now he will.’ And he made that soundless shake of his shoulders that passed for laughter with him.

  ‘Yes, it’s Richard Oxford,’ she said, her head down over her work. ‘You can take the register. It’s over there – and take my kit down with you, will you? I used it last night and it needs cleaning.’

  ‘So much for all his concern for the kiddies’ charity campaign,’ Danny said, picking up the register and the kit. ‘He really scuppered it last night, didn’t he? We was going to go round with the bucket to get some more cash, but after that wife of his got up and said he’d been and gone and died, there wasn’t a chance.’ He sniffed rather disgustingly. ‘Just shows you.’