Body Line

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Try yourself,’ Atherton said. ‘I’ve got this.’ He pulled out a newspaper from his pocket and unfolded it.

  ‘Is that today’s?’ Slider said, surprised – they had started off early.

  ‘No, it’s yesterday’s. I haven’t read it yet. I thought I might have a chance to read it in the car, but it comes in handy now as a stage prop.’

  ‘As long as no one notices it’s yesterday’s.’

  Atherton rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, please! Most people wouldn’t notice if their own leg dropped off.’

  There were remarkably few people about, and very few cars, and it was pleasantly restful, Slider thought, sitting in the sunshine, which actually had quite a bit of warmth to it, and listening to the sparrows bickering in nearby hedges while Atherton read his paper. He leaned back and half-closed his eyes, hoping they looked like ordinary people. He saw no sign of anyone who might be a villain, no men sitting in parked cars or loitering purposelessly within sight of the house. He hoped there was not a more efficient and professional surveillance going on, but he doubted there would be. If they had been going to kill the wife as a risk, surely they would have done it at the same time as Rogers.

  Fifteen minutes later a woman came along the pavement on the other side of the road, and Slider knew instinctively that it was their quarry, even before she slowed. She cast a nervous glance around, but it passed with hardly a hesitation over the man absorbed in his newspaper and the one dozing in the sun, and she stopped before Number 23 and reached into her handbag for her key.

  ‘It’s her,’ Slider said to Atherton without moving his lips. ‘Let me go first – don’t want to frighten her. Come over when I signal.’

  Atherton observed with amused approval how Slider could move like a cat when he had to, was across the road in a flash and yet managed not to appear to be hurrying. The woman had her key in and the door was opening when Slider got up beside her, and Atherton saw her jolt with shock. But the guv was a very soothing and reassuring sort of bod. He was discreetly showing his warrant card, talking all the while, and the woman was looking at him with saucer eyes like a rabbit before a snake. Now she flicked a glance across at Atherton, nodded slightly; Slider gestured to him to come; and they went inside, leaving the door ajar for him.

  They were in the hall when Atherton went in, shutting the door behind him. Slider was helping her off with her coat, he saw with amusement. Probably she had been at church. She wasn’t wearing a hat, but she had on a smart dress and coat, and plain, low-heeled shoes. She turned to look at Atherton with wide, anxious eyes.

  ‘This is my colleague, Jim Atherton,’ Slider said. Atherton proffered his warrant card, but she only glanced at it briefly: she had accepted Slider now, and therefore what came with him. She nodded to him, and turned her attention back to Slider.

  She was quite a surprise to Atherton. He had expected a busty babe, if not a bimbo, or failing that, at least a sleek and high-powered beauty. This, after all, was the one of all the many that Rogers had actually married and wanted to leave everything to. But Helen Marie Aldous was nothing you would pick out in a beauty contest. She was not even terribly young – probably in her late thirties or early forties. She was around five-foot five, with an unremarkable figure – not fat, but solidly put together – and dark brown hair in the sort of practical, short, curled style that Atherton had heard Connolly describe as a ‘Mammy-hairdo’. As to her face, it was perfectly pleasant, but if the original Helen’s had launched a thousand ships, this one would have been looking at a couple of tugs and the Isle of Wight ferry, tops.

  Mind you, he thought on further inspection, she might have gone up the shipping register a bit in better times. She had obviously been crying a lot recently, and not sleeping too well: her eyes were swollen and brown-bagged, and she wasn’t wearing any make-up. Her expression was doleful, and her pale mouth drooped at the corners, which made her look older. But even at her best she wasn’t going to be someone who turned heads. Had Rogers been drunk when he met her, or did she have other qualities which spoke to the man who so far, it had to be said, had shown the depth of a rapidly evaporating rain puddle when it came to women?

  She was looking at Slider earnestly, as if ready to read the truth or otherwise in his face when she asked, ‘So it’s true then? He is – dead?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Slider said with such gentleness even Atherton was touched. ‘I saw him myself.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure. There was just one mention in the paper, and then nothing. I thought it might be a trick. I suppose I didn’t want to believe it.’

  ‘I don’t know if it helps at all,’ Slider said, ‘but it would have been very quick. He wouldn’t have suffered. He wouldn’t even have known it was coming.’

  She looked up at him consideringly. ‘No, I don’t think it does help. Not much. Not at the moment. But one day it might. All I can think of is that he’s not coming back. I’m never going to see him again.’ She stared at nothing for a blank moment, her face slack, her hands loose at her sides, and then came to life again, as though a faulty relay had reconnected. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Thank you. That would be very welcome,’ Slider said. Atherton knew his methods: people with something to do with their hands talked more easily.

  She led the way through the house. The stairs were straight ahead and the narrow hall dog-legged round them – hence the name for the style. There were two reception rooms on the left, one with the bay window to the front and the other with French windows to the back. At the end of the passage, straight ahead, was the original kitchen and scullery, which had been knocked together and had an extension added, to make one large kitchen-breakfast room. It was a very nice room, bright and sunny, with white walls and an oak floor, expensive modern fitments with granite work surfaces, and at the far end a large refectory table in the breakfast-room section, which had French doors on to the garden. A glance into the two rooms they had passed had shown them well furnished in an upper-middle-class taste. It was a comfortable house, the rooms were a good size, and it was no longer a surprise to Atherton that David Rogers had felt he could, at least partially, live here. It was certainly a lot more homelike than the Radisson Suites style of the Hofland Crescent house.

  ‘Can I help?’ Slider was saying.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ Helen Aldous said. ‘Please sit down.’

  Slider and Atherton sat at the table, one on either side, turning their chairs so they could face towards her, and she moved about, filling the kettle, putting it on, getting out teapot and tea caddy. ‘Do you mind mugs? And Earl Grey or builder’s?’

  ‘Mugs are fine,’ Slider said. ‘And builder’s, if you don’t mind.’

  Atherton would have had Earl Grey for preference, but Slider always had his reasons so he just said, ‘Same for me.’

  Slider, without even thinking about it, felt builder’s was the choice of the likeable and reliable man you could trust and tell things to. It seemed to work. She didn’t smile – she looked as though she’d never smile again – but she nodded as if in approval. Her movements about the room were brisk and capable. She didn’t slump in her misery, and Slider thought this was from old discipline. The way she walked and carried herself, the movements of her short-nailed hands, the awareness of her eyes – except in those pulled-plug moments of utter despair – all said ‘nurse’ to him.

  ‘Tell me how you first met David,’ he said. He wanted to get her talking while she was still busy with the tea-making, but he wanted it to be the easy stuff first. The more she told him before she got to the hard part, the more the hard part would flow.

  ‘That’s easy,’ she said. ‘He was a doctor and I was a nurse. We met at the Cloisterwood – that’s a private hospital in Middlesex.’

  ‘Yes, I know it,’ Slider said. His voice conveyed that there was nothing sensational at all in this revelation. ‘I didn’t know he worked there.’

  FIFTEEN

  Artful Dodgers

  ‘He
didn’t,’ Helen said. ‘He visited from time to time, but I think that was just to see Sir Bernard Webber – socially, I mean. They were old friends.’

  ‘So where did he work?’ Slider asked, careful not to make it sound important.

  ‘When I first saw him, I thought he was a consultant at another hospital.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘That would be – about seven years ago. In the spring of ’03. I’d just gone to Cloisterwood from the Royal Free. It had been open about two years then. I wanted to get into plastics, but there were never very many openings in the National Health, so I thought I’d make the switch to private.’ She poured tea. ‘Do you take sugar?’

  ‘No, thanks. Neither of us.’

  ‘Well, that makes it easy. No, don’t get up. I can manage.’ She brought the three mugs over and sat down at the end of the table, between them.

  ‘So you were on the plastics side at Cloisterwood,’ Slider said, to get her going again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how did you meet David Rogers?’

  ‘I bumped into him. Literally. I was going in the staff entrance as he was coming out and he cannoned into me, nearly knocked me over. I banged my funny-bone on the door frame, so I was hopping about in agony, but you couldn’t want to be bumped into by a nicer person. He was so charming and apologetic, you’d think he’d broken my leg at least.’ She looked up sharply. ‘It wasn’t phony. I was never much to look at, not like some of the glamour-pusses on the wards, but I’ve had my share of pick-up lines. Men always think nurses are easy. And I know a bad hat when I see one. David wasn’t like that. He was just genuinely a nice man. He was really sorry for barging into me – and believe me, most consultants would have knocked you to the ground without thinking twice about it. And while he was making sure I was all right, we looked at each other and something just clicked.’ Her face softened as she remembered it, and for a moment she looked almost beautiful. ‘He asked if he could buy me a coffee to settle my nerves. I said I was just going on duty, and he said could he see me later, then. So we made a date. And it started from there.’

  ‘He told you he was a consultant?’

  ‘No, he didn’t actually say so. But when we met later and I said I was on plastics, he said that was his specialty, and we talked about it, and it was obvious that he really knew his stuff. He told me about his training, and it was sort of implied he was still a consultant.’

  ‘So you didn’t ask him where he was working?’

  ‘Not then. We had plenty of other things to talk about. I just assumed he was still at the hospital where he trained.’ Again the sharp look. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but he wasn’t trying to con me. Later, when it got serious between us, he told me all about it.’

  ‘All about—?’

  ‘About that woman. Mrs Lescroit.’ She took a fortifying sip of tea, and went on, staring past them out of the French windows into the sunny garden. ‘We’d been seeing each other about a year, not very regularly, but whenever he could manage it. He didn’t come often to Cloisterwood, and when he did, I didn’t usually see him, except at a distance. When we met it was always away from there. Nurses aren’t supposed to go out with doctors so we had to keep it secret. It suited me, anyway. The other girls would have made my life hell if they knew anything was going on between me and him. Anyway, this particular time, we’d been away for the weekend – the first time we’d done that. We came here, as it happens,’ she said, with the closest she’d come yet to a smile.

  ‘To Southwold?’

  She nodded. ‘Got a room at The Swan. I thought it was lovely – I’d have expected Brighton. But David always liked quality. We had a lovely time. It was June, and the weather was perfect. The sea was a bit cold but I didn’t mind that. We had lovely meals, and long walks. We talked and talked – he told me all about his childhood, and how happy he’d been, and how wonderful his parents were. He didn’t come from a rich home, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I think that was one of the things that made a bond between us, that our backgrounds were so similar. We both got where we were though our own efforts, not because we had money or knew people. Anyway, that weekend was just wonderful, and then on Sunday morning when we were lying in bed he said he had something he must tell me.’ Her expression wavered, remembering the moment.

  ‘You thought it was something alarming?’

  ‘I thought he was going to tell me he was married, to be truthful,’ she said. ‘I’m ashamed now to remember I thought that, because he was always straight with me. The things he didn’t tell me to start with didn’t affect me, you see. But now he said he was falling in love with me, and he wanted to get everything out in the open. And he told me about that woman accusing him of messing with her.’ She looked at them, first Atherton, then Slider, a direct and clear look. ‘He didn’t do it, you know. It was all a mistake. The woman was confused, sedated and muzzy. I’ve seen people in that state, coming out of anaesthetics. They have images in their brains and in the half-conscious state they think they’re real. David said he didn’t do it and I believed him. But if it had gone any further it would have ruined him, even if he was proved innocent. People always remember. They say “there’s no smoke without fire”, and things like that. So the way it went was the best he could hope for. She dropped the charges in exchange for a big payout, and Sir Bernard pulled various strings so David wasn’t struck off. But he couldn’t practise any more.’

  ‘Yes, we were told about that. He wasn’t allowed to work with patients.’

  ‘That’s right. Well, Sir Bernard – or I think it was only Mr Webber then – got him a medical PR job.’

  ‘And that’s what he was doing when you met him?’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ she said, and looked unhappily at her hands. ‘I wish it had been, because everything would have been all right, if only he’d stuck with that. But I didn’t know anything about it then. And soon after that weekend things started to fall apart and I had my own problems to think about.’

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ Slider said.

  She drank some more tea, and went on: ‘After David told me about the trouble he’d been in – well, I loved him more than ever, if you want to know. It seemed to me he’d been the real victim, and that he’d behaved the best of everyone. He was so relieved that I’d taken it all right. When he told me, he said, “I suppose you won’t want to see me any more.” When I told him how I felt, he hugged me so hard I thought he’d break something. For a couple of weeks we were very close, and I had a feeling he was going to ask me to marry him. And then it all blew up at work. I was called before the disciplinary committee for stealing drugs.’

  ‘Surely not!’ Slider said, and it wasn’t just lip-service. He couldn’t imagine this plain, transparent woman doing anything like that.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said bitterly. ‘They found some of the drugs in my locker on a random search. I didn’t put them there, but I could never prove it. Those lockers were child’s play to break into. Either someone was trying to save their own skin by framing me, or someone wanted rid of me specifically – though I’ve no idea who. I wasn’t really friendly with anyone but I didn’t think I had any enemies, either. Well, I protested my innocence, but it didn’t do me any good. I was sacked. But Sir Bernard intervened and said he wasn’t satisfied that I really was the culprit. He said I still had to go, but nothing would be put on my record, and he’d get me another job. As long as no other evidence against me came up, he wouldn’t tell. And he recommended I sever links with everyone at Cloisterwood. Well, that wasn’t hard to do. I never really liked any of them. And one of them at least obviously had it in for me.’

  ‘Did you ever find out who the culprit was?’

  ‘No. I can’t even guess. It could have been anyone. But anyway, that’s how I left the Cloisterwood – and I wasn’t all that sorry, if truth be told, because it was really the reconstructive side of plastics I was interested in,
and at Cloisterwood it was all rhinoplasty and breast enhancement and ear tucks, silly rich women fiddling about with their bodies because they’d got nothing better to think about. It made me sick. You should make the best of what God gave you, in my opinion.’

  ‘So where did you go?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘I went home to my mum at first, while I waited to hear about the new job. It was a dreadful time. I was miserable and angry – there’s nothing worse than being accused of something you haven’t done. I didn’t hear anything from Sir Bernard for ages, and as time went on I started to think he’d just been blowing smoke. But I suppose it wasn’t all that easy to arrange, and he was a busy man. Anyway, bless him, he came through in the end, and I got an appointment for an interview at the Norwich and Norfolk. My mum was upset I was going so far away. She said I should turn it down and find my own way, because the job wasn’t even in plastics. But it was a very good job – in intensive care, which was the next best thing – and I didn’t want to start again at the bottom doing agency work. And anyway, if I’d gone solo, how was I going to explain why I’d left Cloisterwood? No, I was pretty much bound to Sir Bernard – and grateful to him as well, I promise you. So I went to the interview, and I got the job.’

  ‘And what about David Rogers?’ Atherton asked.

  She gave him a rather bitter look. ‘You would ask that. It wasn’t a good time for me. I was in a terrible state, and it was only after about a week that I realized he hadn’t rung me. I hadn’t told him I was going home to my mum’s, but he had my mobile number. That was how he always called me. Anyway, I got it into my head that he’d heard about what had happened, and he’d cut me off.’

  ‘Didn’t you try to call him?’ Slider asked.

  ‘I was angry and upset. I felt he ought to call me. I wasn’t going to chase after him if he had doubts about me. I’d sided with him over his scandal, and he ought to do the same with me. So I didn’t ring. And then when he kept not calling, it became a matter of pride. I thought “if that’s how little he trusts me, to hell with him”. So I went to Norwich and I thought that was that.’