A Death Divided

by Clare Francis

  By morning, he was left with only one incontestable fact: that he had left his briefcase, stuffed with important papers, in the back of the taxi, never to be seen again.

  Chapter Two

  Joe left early the next morning before the Christmas shoppers clogged the streets. His car was a small runabout that he used rarely. Often forced to park three or more streets away, he was always rather surprised to find it intact and functional.

  Soon he was over the river and through the centre of town, heading north. The rain had gone, leaving a grey sheen on the roads, while in the east the first light lay in cold ribbons against the sky.

  Somewhere near Stevenage he tried calling Sarah. She had got up with him before seven and, wrapped in his kimono, disappeared into the kitchen. When he emerged from the bathroom at a rush, she’d handed him a mug of filter coffee, diluted with cold water to bring it down to drinking temperature.

  Once again he was struck by her thoughtfulness; once again he wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. Last night, in the aftermath of love, he’d broached the subject of his holiday entitlement, which he must use before March, and suggested she come with him to Morocco.

  ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to get away.’

  ‘What, at three months’ notice?’

  A pause. ‘I’m not good at planning ahead.’

  ‘In general, do you mean? Or for holidays with men?’

  ‘It’s work. We’re short-staffed.’

  ‘There’s life outside work, Sarah. Or if there isn’t, then we’re all mad.’

  Another silence, which seemed to stretch out into the darkness.

  ‘I’ll see if I can work something out.’

  Stung, he made a bad joke of it. ‘It’s not compulsory.’

  ‘No, I’d like to go to Morocco.’

  ‘But do you want to go with me? That’s rather more to the point, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course I do.’ She was very still in his arms.

  He said, ‘That’s fine then,’ though it seemed to Joe that it was far from fine.

  To break the silence, he said, ‘It might actually be fun, you know.’

  ‘Of course. Really - I’d love to come.’

  She squeezed his hand. In confirmation? Secret regret? With the intention of keeping her options open? Perhaps she was terrified of committing herself even three months ahead. Perhaps she didn’t think their relationship would last that long.

  Perhaps she made a habit of moving on before things got too serious.

  They rolled apart to sleep. In the five minutes before Joe dropped off he was aware of Sarah lying tensely, as though she were reliving some secret sadness.

  Her troubles seemed to vanish with the night, however, and as he rattled off instructions for locking up she kissed him firmly and told him to take care driving. As he ran down the stairs, she came out onto the landing and waved to him over the banisters. Like a proper lover, he thought; like someone who wants to come to Morocco.

  Now, her mobile didn’t respond. It was still early; she wouldn’t have bothered to switch it on.

  The town where Joe had grown up lay near the junction of three counties and was characterised by none. It wasn’t quite the Midlands and it wasn’t quite the North; to the stranger’s eye it was flat country, but compared to the Fens twenty miles to the east it was positively undulating.

  For decades the town had resisted the machinations of the housing lobby and maintained the boundaries shaped by the thirties planners who’d laid out the unoffensive tree-lined suburb where Joe had grown up. But government edict and the agricultural slump had finally defeated the conservationists, and now, within view of his old home on the pasture where he had so often walked as a child, a new road lay like a white gash across a sea of mud. Fanning out from the road a web of roped posts and fluttering ribbons extended across the ancient rabbit warrens, delineating the routes of drains or foundations, while the wooden frame of a show house stood like a sentry box beside the road.

  He had known the developers were coming, but he was unprepared for the changes closer to home. Approaching the turn for Shirley Road, he saw that two of the six shops in the small arcade that served the neighbourhood had closed down since his last visit a month ago. The loss of the chemist’s had a certain irony - his father banned even. the mildest cough syrup from the house - but the sight of the shuttered and padlocked grocer’s made his heart sink. Now, the only shops selling food within walking distance of home were a newsagent’s, stocked with crisps, chocolate and fizzy drinks, and a gaudy Chinese takeaway, an unrepentant champion of monosodium glutamate.

  Accelerating past Shirley Road, he drove on to the supermarket which had undoubtedly brought about the grocer’s demise. He filled a trolley with the nursery food his father liked - tins of steak and kidney pudding, mince, baked beans, stewed apple, custard - along with some fresh fruit and vegetables which the old man would leave to rot before throwing them out amid complaints of waste.

  It wasn’t difficult to spot his old home in the row of almost identical red-brick semis that made up Shirley Road; it stood out as a model of neglect in a world of conspicuous consumption.

  While the neighbours had acquired replacement windows and ruched curtains and gardens with water features, Woodside remained untouched by all but the most basic maintenance.

  On his last visit, Joe had swept the rotting leaves from the path and hacked back the denser shrubs, but it had been no more than a gesture. Parking now, he noticed new dilapidations: the front fence was sagging out over the pavement, while one of the bay windows had been covered with a sheet of badly fitting chipboard. He carried the shopping to the side gate, which swung on rotting hinges, and stepped around the split and bulging wheely-bin. The kitchen door was locked. He put his face to the window and saw gloom. He rapped loudly on the door and called his father’s name, then stepped back onto the sodden ankle-high grass and aimed his calls at the upper floor. Nothing moved in the dripping garden, and no sound came from the silent windows. He went to the shed and looked for the spare key on the nail above the door frame where it used to hang in his mother’s day, but there was no key there now. In the end he tried phoning and heard a soft warble deep in the house before the answering machine picked up and relayed his father’s rather querulous tones. You have reached the Campaign for Victims of Medical Negligence …

  Joe rang off before the beep sounded, and went back to the lawn, where, he stood, hands in pockets, in a stance of boundless patience, and repeatedly called his father’s name in a studiously neutral tone. The two of them had played this game before; it was a matter of time.

  Finally, Joe saw a movement behind the frosted glass of the bathroom. A moment later a shadow darkened the small upper window, which was latched open, and he caught what might have been the glint of an eye.

  Pretending not to have noticed, Joe made no move towards the kitchen door until he heard the bolt turn. The door opened a short way and his father’s face loomed warily into the opening.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  ‘Oh, it’s you.”

  As Joe pushed the door open, the old man turned and walked away across the kitchen. Joe followed him into the hall.

  ‘How are you, Dad?’

  The old man halted in the doorway of the front room and said over his shoulder in a fretful voice, ‘You should have told me you were coming.’

  ‘I left a message on the machine.’

  ‘Oh, the machine.’ He lived in a state of permanent irritation with the phone, which he regarded as an instrument of time-wasters and fools who failed to share his views on medical negligence. ‘I was just about to start work.’ He gestured hopelessly.

  ‘I won’t stay long then.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I could …’ He looked at his watch, he gazed longingly into the front room, he said on a note of painful compromise, ‘A cup of tea then?’

  ‘I’ll go and make it.’

  The old man peered at Joe as if for the firs
t time and, blinking furiously, jerked his mouth into an approximation of a smile. ‘It’s the e-mails, you see. There are always hundreds on the weekends. It’s just nonstop.’

  For a moment Joe saw his father as others must see him: a string-bean of a man, too thin by far, with a stern expression and restless eyes, who looked older than his sixty-five years.

  While the kettle was heating, Joe made a quick inventory of the kitchen. The fridge had a few scraps in it - milk, butter and a couple of sausages - while the cupboards contained a collection of tins and jars whose contents had seen better days.

  A half-consumed Dundee cake sat alone in the bread-bin.

  He unpacked the shopping and arranged it on the shelves in food groups. Each surface was cold and greasy to the touch, every corner and crevice grouted with a thread of grime, while under his feet the lino was by turns uneven or slightly tacky from some ancient spillage. The last cleaning lady had stayed four weeks, which was long service where his father was concerned. Joe had tried offering above the going rate, but it seemed that money could not compensate for his father’s obstructive tactics and childish resentments. It wasn’t that the old man was opposed to a clean house, it was simply that he loved being alone infinitely more.

  Joe added two slices of Dundee cake to the tea tray before carrying it in.

  ‘They cheat on the almonds,’ his father commented, his eyes already back on the computer screen. ‘Halves instead of wholes. And thirty per cent fewer.’ Joe didn’t doubt he had counted them. ‘And of course they whittled the weight down years ago; From two pounds to 800 grams.’ He scoffed, ‘That’s what metrication did to us.’

  He had set up his office in what had once been the front room. A few pictures still hung disconsolately on the walls, but the table and four remaining chairs had long since vanished under stacks of legal bundles, newspapers and boxes. The computer took pride of place, a beacon of brilliance in a sea of disorder.

  The old man had a puritanical disdain for heating, but even by his Spartan standards the house was freezing. Joe asked about the broken window.

  ‘Mmm? Oh, kids.’

  ‘How did they do it?’

  The old man was at the computer, scrolling down a list.

  ‘What? Oh… a football.’

  ‘Why were they playing so close to the house? They weren’t bothering you, were they?’

  ‘No, no.’

  Something in his tone made Joe ask, ‘Who were they. Dad?

  Have you reported them?’

  The old man was stabbing impatiently at the keyboard.

  ‘For heaven’s sake! Where’s it gone?’ He rotated the mouse impatiently. ‘Here! Here!’ A bright screen began to download.

  ‘Have they bothered you before, Dad?’

  ‘Look! Just look at this! Someone’s finally going to give it a go under the Human Rights Act. Just as I said they should.’

  ‘They weren’t trying to break in, were they?’

  ‘See! This chap here - Turney - he’s going for Article 2.

  I always said it was the way to go! I always told that fool Bartlett.’

  Joe gave it one more try. ‘You should call the police, you know, if—’

  His father’s temper had always been volatile, but nothing prepared Joe for the ferocity with which the old man turned on him. His hands flew into claws, the veins on his temple stood out, and he trembled so violently he might have been connected to a socket. ‘You’re not listening, Joe! You’re not listening! I’m trying to tell you something important and you’re not listening! Why don’t you listen?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You come here and you simply don’t listen!’ He gave a last shudder and seized up, eyes glaring, face rigid, completely immobile, before the rage dropped away almost as rapidly as it had come. He lowered his eyes and frowned.

  ‘Sorry,’ Joe said again in a low voice. ‘I interrupted you.’

  The old man blinked rapidly and shook his head, as if to clear it of some mysterious obstruction, and turned back to the computer.

  ‘You were saying - you’ve found something important,’ Joe prompted.

  It was a job to get the old man to open up again. For a while he maintained a stiff silence and when he finally answered it was grudgingly, in monosyllables. Gradually, however, Joe managed to gather that through a new chat forum dedicated to medical negligence he had made contact with a bereaved husband whose case, like his own, had foundered in a morass of legal argument and time limitations.

  ‘They tried to fob him off with the Act, of course,’ the old man declared with a scathing snort, and Joe relaxed a little because the Limitation Act was always guaranteed to get his adrenalin flowing. Watching the old man grow increasingly animated, Joe wondered not for the first time at the strength of his purpose, at the unwavering sense of injustice that burned so fiercely in him even after so many years. Joe’s memories of the months after his mother’s death had been overshadowed by the disastrous term he’d spent at a weekly boarding school in Rutland, yet one picture had burned itself into his mind’s eye, it must have been during the summer holidays, of his father sitting at the dining table hunched over a letter. It might have been a trick of memory, a replaying of a single scene, but Joe saw him returning to this letter time and again, day after day, picking over the words with increasing agitation. It was this letter, of course, that had given rise to his father’s suspicion that ‘something wasn’t quite right’ with his mother’s death, that the family was being denied information that would reveal incompetence on the part of the surgeon or inadequacies in the hospital’s standards of post-operative care, or both. The letter signalled the start of the lawyers, the outpouring of money, the reams of paper that spread across the dining table like so much volcanic dust. There had been friends in those early days, a sympathetic audience for the stream of antiestablishment grievances that spilled from his father’s lips, but few friendships can survive the fervour of righteous outrage for long, and in time even the most loyal supporters had drifted away. But it was after the old man fell out with the national support organisation, after he brought a doomed and ruinously expensive action against his own lawyers, that his real isolation began. The cyber forums were his salvation. His fellow victims provided the one audience that would never desert him.

  The old man’s analysis of the Internet case was detailed and for all Joe knew legally impeccable. When at last he fell silent, Joe asked a question to show he’d been paying attention and saw his father become aware of him with an expression of faint surprise.

  The old man shifted a little in his seat and peered at him sideways. ‘Well…’ His mouth lifted into an abrupt smile.

  ‘And how are things with you, Joe? All right?’

  ‘Oh, pretty busy, Dad. As always.’

  ‘Good. Good.’ He nodded vaguely. ‘And they’re looking after you all right, are they? Since the partnership.’

  ‘It was senior associate. Dad. The partnership won’t be for another couple of years yet. If I’m lucky.’

  ‘Ah.’ The old man would have turned back to the computer then, but feeling something more was expected of him he took a stab at another question. ‘But interesting stuff?’

  ‘It’s all right, yes. Though sometimes - well, it’s like two bullies slugging it out to see who’s the tougher. There doesn’t seem much point.’

  This produced a look of mystification. ‘Bullies?’

  ‘Large corporations. You know - counterclaiming.’

  The old man cast Joe a sharp glance, as if the nature of his work had come as a sudden and unpleasant revelation to him.

  ‘But what are they claiming for?’

  ‘Oh, breach of contract. Losses. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Money.’ The old man winced censoriously. ‘Money.’ And then, in a tone of lingering disappointment, ‘I suppose it has to be done.’

  They had been here before; Joe knew better than to argue.

  ‘Atkins now …’ Atkins was the old ma
n’s latest hero, the latest in a long line of pioneering lawyers who were pushing at the boundaries of medical negligence law. ‘He gave a fantastic interview in The Times - did you see it? How he nailed that Leeds gynaecologist who removed ovaries without consent.

  Without consent! I ask you. There’s no limit, absolutely no limit.’

  Joe put the tea mugs back on the tray. ‘Sorry, Dad, I’m going to have to leave you to it. I need to catch Alan before he starts on his rounds.’ No sooner were the words out of his mouth than Joe regretted them.

  ‘Alan?’

  ‘He’s asked me to drop by.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To help with something.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘He wants me to try and find Jenna.’

  ‘Alan does?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why you? What on earth does he think you can do?’

  ‘I can start things off, I suppose.’

  His father shook his head slowly, with exaggerated wonder.

  ‘Quite extraordinary. Asking you.’

  ‘I’ll send someone to fix the window. Dad, and the fence.

  And I’ll try and find a cleaning lady. You’ll have to have one, you know.’

  The old man was still muttering his astonishment as Joe carried the tray out of the room.

  Joe was washing up when he heard the steps coming across the hall. ‘I suppose they blame you - is that it?’ his father said.

  ‘For Jenna going off. For introducing her to that awful chap.’

  Joe stared out at the ragged garden. ‘I don’t think it’s that.’

  ‘I always knew he was bad news. That was obvious from the start. A complete waster. Never understood how you were taken in by him, Joe. How you never saw him for what he was.’

  ‘I’ve left a bit of food for you, Dad.’ Joe threw open the cupboard doors and stood to one side, like a salesman exhibiting his wares.

  But the old man was still staring at him. ‘You came down specially then?’

  ‘I’ve come a week early, that’s all, Dad. I was coming down next weekend anyway, if you remember. And then it’ll be Christmas.’