by J M Gregson
Then, abruptly, they were gone, leaving a severely shaken businessman combing his tousled fair hair and wondering how much of his discomfiture would be apparent to his staff when he felt ready to move among them again.
Peach drove slowly, revolving events in his mind, wondering how much resistance their murderer would offer, reviewing the evidence they could offer the Crown Prosecution Service if a vehement denial was the response.
There had been silence for a full five minutes when Lucy Blake said, “She isn’t much of a loss to the world, this Verna Blake. But I know it’s not our job to worry about things like that.”
“And thank God it’s not,” said Percy firmly. “This job’s difficult enough as it is.”
He might have been more severe upon her for such unprofessional thoughts, he supposed. But they made her sound very young and innocent, the way he might once have been himself, though he could not remember it. Made you blinkered, sometimes, this job did: you had to be, if you were going to collar the villains. He would have preferred a different murderer himself. But crime wasn’t tidy, and it was just as well you didn’t have a choice, sometimes. Certainly just as well for that conceited young wanker they’d just left.
And there was always the excitement that came from closing the net on a killer.
Twenty-Seven
It was not a theater day for Richard Johnson. Good word, theater, he thought. He never went in there to perform as a surgeon without the nervous excitement, which all actors are said to feel in the wings while they waited to go on stage. Once there, he lost his tension in the supreme concentration which was necessary for success. But he was always aware that he was the star, the central figure around which the drama of life and death revolved in that quiet, enclosed, sterile room called the theater.
It was the place where he was most at home, most sure that he was thoroughly in control of both himself and events around him. But the rest of the hospital was good too. He felt a surge of contented confidence as he drove between the high Victorian pillars which were almost all that remained of the original building. He was lucky, he thought, as he parked the big BMW in his designated space: not many people actually enjoyed going to work as he did, or experienced that little surge of satisfaction he felt as he moved from private into public life.
He conducted his morning ward round in his usual self-assured manner. He was brisk, more so than the other consultants, yet his patients never felt that this was an empty exercise, or that he did not have time for them. There was no small talk, but he knew each individual by name; knew the details of their cases and what he was trying to achieve with them; knew their worries about what was going to happen next.
He offered comfort, but no false comfort. When he agreed with the ward sister that a mother of two young children might go home, he shared her joy in the reunification of the family.
Without any affectation, he went behind the screens and held the wasted hand of the man who was transferring to a hospice for his final days, sharing his serenity, envying his courage, thanking him for the little, unsuccessful time they had spent together, finally silent because his charge wanted to be quiet for these last few moments they would spend together.
The old man looked at the edge of his cold, wasted paw, almost invisible between the surgeon’s dark, strong, yet delicate hands. He said, “I didn’t want a darkie to treat me when I came in here, you know, lad. It seems daft now, right daft. But it shows you can still learn something, even right at the end.”
Richard Johnson smiled down at him. He did not speak. Watching the little cameo, the sister decided that knowing when to be silent was one of his greatest strengths in his exchanges with patients. After a little while, the consultant rose.
“Goodbye, Walter,” he said to the old man. “You’re going to the best place, you know. I’d like to go there myself, when the time comes.”
Although he was used to death, the bright weather outside seemed inappropriate to him as he went out into the broad corridor which linked the wards. Life went on, as everyone knew, but weather like this seemed to mock those who had to leave it. Death should come dressed in nature’s wilder garb, with thunder and lightning and storm, as Shakespeare dressed it. Or was that just abnormal death, like Verna’s?
When he went into his secretary’s room, she was standing, looking at a picture on the wall. He scarcely ever saw her like this. Almost always, she was at her desk, with the word-processor whispering in front of her and the filing cabinet within reach on her right-hand side. She was clearly upset.
“Those detectives are here again. I put them in your consulting room.”
She should have worn a black cap, he thought, for she made it sound like a sentence of death.
*
He found them standing by the window, looking across the canal at the old industrial town with its grubby nineteenth-century bricks and its terraces of workers’ houses snaking away over the hills.
It was not until they were all seated that Peach said, “Have you spoken to your wife, Mr Johnson? Since we visited her yesterday, I mean?”
“I didn’t even know you’d been to see her,” said Johnson. And in that moment, he knew he was lost. It was over. He didn’t know how he could ever have thought he might get away with it.
Peach, as quiet and to the point as Johnson had been himself with patients a little while earlier said, “She wasn’t able to support your story. About your movements on Saturday night, I mean.”
He nodded, accepting, feeling his world tumble about him, envying that old man he had just left who was about to die. When he did not speak, Lucy Blake prompted, “It was a story, wasn’t it, Mr Johnson?”
He didn’t answer her directly. He said with infinite sadness. “So Carmen didn’t help me, in the end.”
Peach said, with a touch of his normal harshness, “She couldn’t, could she? You were asking her to lie, to shield a murderer. We should have arrested you eventually, without her help, and then she’d have been an accessory after the fact. And where would your children have been then?”
Johnson nodded, speaking as if in a dream. “The children always meant most to her. But that’s fair enough. I didn’t deserve to be put before them.”
Peach cautioned him then, in a measured voice, speaking the ritual of arrest which was so familiar to him, so strange to the dark-suited man before him. Johnson listened like one in a dream to the warning that anything he now said might be given in evidence. At first, they were not sure that he had registered the notion that it might prejudice his defence if he did not mention when questioned something which he might later rely on in court; then he swatted the air near his temple as though a troublesome fly was plaguing him.
“If Carmen isn’t supporting me, I’m finished,” he said. He sat down at the desk he would use no longer, and for a moment, it seemed he might cry. But then he put his elbows upon the desk and set both hands precisely at the edges of his forehead, as if it was important now that his head should have support. “She should have told me, that’s all. That would have been a kind of loyalty.”
Peach, scenting a descent into the examination of a marriage, said briskly, “You went out earlier than you said on Saturday night, didn’t you? And you went to Wycherly Court before you went to the hospital.”
Richard Johnson nodded slowly, then spoke as if even now he could not quite comprehend his actions. “I went to see Verna. To tell her I was serious, as she had pretended to be when we – when we first got involved.” He glanced quickly at Lucy, and she realized that he had almost said, ‘When we first went to bed together.’ Such old-fashioned consideration came oddly from a murderer, she thought.
Peach said insistently, “And you argued. And the argument ended up with your killing her.”
“Yes. I couldn’t believe what had happened at first. I still find it difficult to believe it now, though of course I must.”
That was the line for him to take in court, thought Peach. Crime of passion. British judges
weren’t yet as sympathetic to the idea as the French, but they were moving that way. Johnson would no doubt have the best brief for the job: Percy used that thought to harden his line. “You didn’t get what you wanted. So you suffocated her. Your mistress became a victim.”
Johnson, as a scientist, accepted each unwelcome statement with a tiny nod, as a fact he could not dispute. “She told me I meant nothing to her. Never had done. It had been a fling with a black prick, she said, nothing more.” This time he was too involved with the pain of his recollection to consider DS Blake’s reaction. “She told me to go home to my dull wife and tell her that Verna Hume had bigger fish to fry.”
Peach, trying to take the emotion from a confession he needed, said quietly, “This exchange was taking place at about quarter past nine, I suppose.”
For a moment, Johnson looked at him as if he could not comprehend the question, as if time was irrelevant in this maelstrom of lust and hatred. Then he actually smiled; perhaps in bitter resignation, perhaps in recognition of the farce that lay at the heart of his tragedy. “Yes. She said that I was ridiculous: that the idea that she might have lived with me was even more ridiculous. Perhaps I looked amazed: I don’t know. I don’t remember saying anything. Then she told me to get out, because the man she was going to marry was coming to the house tonight – he was already overdue. He was going to take her in this very bed, she said. I should go home to my wife and think about them coming together. It might get me going.”
The surgeon was suddenly very still, repeating the phrases like one under hypnosis, as if it was important to get them exactly right, until they could see the scene in that bedroom, where the corpse had lain undiscovered for another day and more.
Peach said quietly, “And that was when you killed her.”
The even, trance-like tones resumed. “I found myself with the pillow over her face. Anything to stop that awful mocking voice; anything to cover that harridan face that I had thought I loved. I’ve no idea how long I held it there. I don’t think I even thought of killing her. I just wanted to make sure that when I took the pillow away there would be no more words, no more of that mouth twisted in such contempt for me. But I knew she was dead when I left, of course. I am a doctor, you know.” He smiled again; this time there was no doubt that he was appreciating the irony of that fact. “I had written Verna a rather foolish letter declaring my love for her. She waved it in my face while she taunted me. I took it away with me.”
“And you went directly from Wycherly Croft to the hospital.”
“Yes. I was coming here anyway, to check on my patient. It was only when I got here that I thought I might be able to establish an alibi.” He stopped and looked around the bright room, as if he were coming out of his self-imposed trance. “I can think here, you see. I’ve been all right at work this week, even after that dreadful night. Even when I felt you getting closer to me.
He was like Othello, thought Lucy. That other man who had killed a wife in her bed had been perfectly at ease in public office, master of all he ruled, yet totally lost in the intimacies of his private life. She bent to the shoulder bag she had set beside her chair, producing the handcuffs she had brought for this arrest.
Richard Johnson looked at them; they were the first intimation of the horrors which lay ahead of him. “Is that really necessary? I still have a reputation in this hospital. I have done quite well here, I think.”
Or as Othello said, ‘I have done the state some service’, thought Lucy. She looked at Peach, who gave her the slightest of nods. Thankfully, she returned the bracelets to her bag.
Three minutes later, she sat with Johnson in the back of the police car. He looked not at her but at the grimy streets of she town he had served so well, at the people he passed, who would be reading the sensational tabloid accounts of his fall the next morning.
Back in the office beside his consulting room, his secretary, her experienced, efficient face streaming with tears, was ringing round to cancel his list of appointments for the afternoon. After each call, she strove to compose herself for the next one, muttering over and over again the same phrase.
“Such a waste,” she said. “Such an awful, awful waste.”
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