by Valerie Laws
Her phone buzzed just as she was about to summon her first patient of the afternoon through into her room.
‘What follow-up piece, Erica?’ the voice of her nemesis growled.
‘I was hoping to talk to a few people about him, you know, ‘the real man’ sort of angle. Kingston’s murder is big news here after all. It’d keep public interest simmering while the investigation goes on. Keep up the profile of the case until the trial of whoever did it.’
‘All right, but try to keep the facts straight - luckily dead men can’t sue.’
By the end of the afternoon, Erica was ready for some exercise. She usually swam early in the morning, but now the pool would be teeming with after-school tots, so she went to the gym and did a hard work-out with the cardiovascular machines, and then did one of her regular classes with some friends she always saw there. Then they all went out for a curry and walked home together along the seafront, the waves creaming in the darkness, the lighthouse like a ghostly beacon against the black sky. Erica drank mineral water with a slice of lime with dinner, but she felt faintly drunk, as she always did with spicy foods. Something to do with the spices stimulating the pain receptors and causing the release of endorphins, the body’s own morphine. Cheap, and legal. And a good kind of pain.
In bed, she felt the spices marinading her from the inside, could smell them oozing out through her skin, and she fell asleep in an oriental haze.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After the obituary came out, Erica rang the hospital, explaining she was doing a further article on Kingston, and would it be possible to talk to anyone about him, a colleague or patient. At first, she got the usual primitive territory-guarding response - she must understand they were all so busy, their time was so valuable, they couldn’t afford to waste it in chatting about colleagues who were no longer there, and so on. And of course talking to patients was a total no-no, confidentiality... So she sent an email to all the consultants, registrars and other staff in the orthopaedic department, saying the same thing and inviting responses.
She got one in a couple of hours. Mr Rohan would be willing to talk to her. A consultant! The only one that was on the same level, same specialism as Kingston, in that hospital, according to the local NHS trust website. He apparently dealt with fractures higher up the body, specialising in ‘halos’. Erica didn’t expect any huge revelations from a fellow consultant, but she should be thorough and collect the praise with the blame, if indeed there was any. And she might get talking to someone else there who might have info. She kept thinking of Tessa, who she wanted to protect and help, but who could be a killer. Though surely in a case of long term abuse, there was some mitigation? Perhaps Erica’s own antipathy to the late doctor’s phoneside manner was biasing her too much. She had to admit to herself that she was hoping to find some dirt on him. And her such a nice person. It didn’t feel good
She managed to fit in her morning mile at the pool and with frantic hair-drying and moisturising was in time for her appointment with Mr Rohan. Not out of any special respect, but because she was chronically punctual. She’d bet herself he’d be wearing a bow tie, consultants always do, to prevent ties dangling into open wounds, blood, or private parts as they leaned in to inspect them.
Mr Rohan had a bald dome, a fuzz of grey hair round his ears and a neat little goatee beard which was still brown touched with grey. He had gentle brown eyes and a middle eastern appearance. His manners were rather formal, and he was indeed wearing a bow tie, yellow and brown plaid to match his smart brown suit.
A nurse bustled in with a tray of tea in china cups, probably this tea had never seen the inside of a machine, and some good but boring biscuits. Erica was glad she’d borrowed her respectable outfit again, the one she’d been wearing when she found Kingston’s body. At this rate it would be worth investing in her own dowdy disguise.
He sipped at his tea, black. She did the same, thinking the chance of soya milk was slim to none and not wanting to trigger any prejudices about tree-hugging yoghurt-knitting veggies which might make him reluctant to speak to her.
‘So, you are writing an article on my late colleague for the local paper. A dreadful business, dreadful. I believe you found him? I hope you are recovering from the shock.’
‘I’m trying to take a positive attitude, Mr Rohan. It helps to do something, to tell his story and make people realise what kind of man he really was.’
That was safely ambiguous enough.
‘Well, he was a fine surgeon. He’d been here for seven years, I’ve been here a little longer. He specialised in hip and knee joint replacements originally but lately he did more and more work on tibia fractures. Always a challenge, the blood supply being so sparse in that area, and such common bones to break in road traffic accidents or sports injuries. Comminuted, compound fractures often result....I’m more of a spinal man myself. You can contact the patients’ groups, I’ll get the office to give you the numbers.’
‘I’ve already got those, but thank you. What I’d like from you is some idea of what kind of a colleague he was - the man, as well as the surgeon.’
Rohan looked a bit puzzled. ‘Well, all I can tell you is he was an intelligent, able man... come in!’
The last was a response to a knock at the door. A young doctor came in, still in the white coat stage of the metamorphosis into consultant, and put a folder on the desk.
‘The results you wanted,’ he said to Rohan. He looked Chinese, with neat features, soft black hair like soot, his colouring set off by the extreme whiteness of the coat which looked new. A baby doc! A cute baby doc. Oh, yes. He looked back at her and smiled slightly in a reserved way. She wished she wasn’t wearing the horrible shapeless dowdy clothes.
‘This is Dr. Lau,’ Rohan said. ‘Jamie, this is Erica Bruce from the Evening Guardian. She’s doing a follow-up piece on Mr Kingston.’
The young man’s smile remained, but she thought she detected a tightening of the skin over those lovely cheekbones. Clearly Mr, or was it Dr, Lau was subordinate to Rohan and Kingston; maybe he would bear close investigation. It would be a pleasure, as well as a duty, to find out what was under that white coat.
‘Perhaps I could talk to you too, if you can spare me the time, that is,’ she ventured.
‘Erm maybe.’ His head went down, and he looked a bit awkward. Shy, or something to hide?
‘Our junior doctors hardly get time to sleep,’ laughed Rohan. ‘They don’t even have a social life, eh, Jamie?’
Jamie politely acknowledged his superior’s remark and excused himself. Dammit! Well Jamie you can run but you can’t hide.
‘It’s a tough time for him, or any young doctor,’ mused Rohan, ‘but he’s young enough to take it. When you get to my age and experience, the pace isn’t so hectic. Time for other things.’
‘You mean, the better you get at this job, the less you do it?’
He looked startled. ‘I suppose you could say that,’ he said, still charming but with more of an effort.
Careful Erica! ‘Mr Kingston had a thriving private practice, I believe.’
‘Yes, he had a lot of contacts in the Arab nations and elsewhere. He went out to Saudi when he had leave from the hospital, and of course he saw local private patients, often at his home in the first instance and for follow up, then he’d operate on them at the private Hospital in town. He was a most sought-after surgeon, with a fine reputation.’
‘Both here and in his private practice, you mean?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘So there were never any complaints or controversies about him?’
‘Certainly not.’ Rohan was looking less genial now. ‘And now that he is dead would not be the time to discuss it if there were.’
‘Of course not,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I only meant, it’s impressive that all his patients were satisfied, considering how many he helped.’
‘Yes it is.’ He sounded more relaxed. ‘Orthopaedic surgery is a fine branch of medicine, young lady. It may
not be as, hem, ‘sexy’ as brain or heart surgery, but the work we do getting people mobile again after accidents is really worthwhile. And arthritis takes a terrible toll on the old, even the middle aged and the young. Not only crippling, but painful too. To see someone walk again without pain or recover from serious injury is a true privilege.’
His sincerity sounded genuine enough, she had no reason to doubt him, and felt a little ashamed of even mentioning complaints or controversies. But she would have to harden her heart a little if she was going to get anywhere with this.
She switched off her recorder and thanked Rohan for his help.
‘I’ll be visiting all the spheres Mr Kingston was involved in, the Golf Club, for instance. Did you play together at all?’
‘No,’ he said firmly, getting up to see her out. ‘I know nothing about golf. We did not mix outside the hospital, and very little in it really. He had his patients, I had mine. But as far as I’m concerned, he was a valued colleague.’
In other words, Rohan knew no ill of him, and nothing at all about the man himself. Or that was all he was willing to say. The profession always closed ranks against outsiders, whatever rivalries there might be.
The waiting areas had been filling up steadily while she was in Rohan’s office. Fracture clinic. She felt very conspicuous walking past them, a queue jumper, with all her limbs in working order. She tried to look like a sales rep for bandages as she walked past the suspicious eyes. There was a woman standing behind a loaded refreshments trolley. She wore a bright overall and a smile to match. An ‘excellent woman’, if Erica was any judge, and as a Barbara Pym devotee, she could spot the species a mile off. Clearly she was a volunteer with the Friends of the Hospital. Erica chose a mini carton of apple juice as the least harmful thing available, provided she was careful putting the straw in through the little dimple of foil. They tended to have a premature ejaculation all over you if you squeezed them too much, and everyone knows what a nuisance that can be. A fat woman sitting nearby must have read her mind, because she called over,
‘Be careful, pet! Mine’s just shot out all over me, like a little lad’s willy!’
Everyone in earshot laughed, the trolley woman rather forcedly she thought.
‘This is certainly an improvement on the departments I usually go to,’ she said to the trolley lady, but loud enough for anyone else to join in. ‘Horrible machine tea there and no other choice.’
The trolley woman beamed.
‘We have a shop too, further in by the general entrance, with flowers, newspapers and so on. And we go round the wards. Do you know, some of the old dears never have a visitor. No-one to bring them any treats.’
‘Aw, what a shame, and I expect some patients spend a long time in wards like, oh, orthopaedics,’ Erica said cunningly.
‘They do. There’s Mrs O’Rourke. Broke her hip, but she’s never been able to get up yet, complications you see, and the longer she lies there, the harder it’ll be to ever get her going again, poor old soul.’
‘Maybe I could visit her if you don’t think she’d mind. Take her some little extras.’ And get the patient’s eye view of Kingston.
‘I’m sure she’d be glad to have a visitor,’ said the trolley woman warmly.
‘Ginger marmalade,’ announced the fat lady. ‘Always on about it she was, when I was on Ward 5. Said it kept her regular. Missed it in here. They give yer pills instead that don’t work.’
Erica felt she should have been trying to spread the word about alternative medicine while she was there, handing out samples of remedies for arthritis and so on. It would be a bit like smuggling bibles into a communist regime. But there was no need to make herself conspicuous just when she was about to do a bit of undercover work, if you could call taking a jar of ginger marmalade to an old lady that. You never read about Philip Marlowe carrying ginger marmalade. Oh, well, down these shining corridors a woman must walk.... she found out the afternoon visiting times and left.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hassan and Sally were interviewing Mrs Marie Browning, cleaner to Mr Robert Kingston, deceased.
‘Very good of you to come back early from your holiday, Mrs Browning.’ Hassan was in full genial mode.
‘No probs.’ Marie blew her nose.
Paul Lozinski had spoken to her on the mobile number he found in Kingston’s address book (which was boringly unhelpful, plumbers, electricians, lawn mowing service and so on but Kev was plodding his way through them all) to break the news. Marie was thin, energetic, with bright orange-dyed hair held back by blue plastic slides, wearing skinny jeans and a floral smock top. She’d been staying at her son’s so hadn’t been too far away. However, leaving aside fiendishly clever use of railway timetables, stolen bicycles or disguises beloved of golden age thriller writers, it seemed likely that she really had been with her son and his partner near the Scottish border, and had in fact been with them in a lock-in at the village pub on the night in question, and was therefore more likely to be informant than suspect. Paul had been told to check it all out however, just to dot all the t’s and cross all the i’s, as Golden Boy would say. Marie was a very hyper woman, her cleaning must have been turbocharged, and she was someone who specialised in emotional multi-tasking. She seemed upset, and angry, and pleased by the drama and attention, all at the same time. She sipped the coffee Sally had given her, and blew her nose again using the box of tissues placed at her elbow.
‘You turn your back for five minutes...’ She looked at the plate of biscuits with initial interest which waned when she clocked how inferior they were. ‘Poor Robert!’
‘So you’d been with Mr Kingston, er Robert, a long time?’ Sally pushed the tissues nearer as if to make up for the biscuits.
‘Seven years. I cleaned for him, and for his mum too till her house was sold. Easy enough, she lived next door! Lovely woman, lovely, but particular.’
‘Ah yes we understand she died recently?’
‘Bout year and a half ago pet. Oh Robert was a good son mind! D’you know he bought that house for his mum? He couldn’t do enough for her!’
‘So he’d have made money on the house? His mother’s I mean. All those houses along by the Golf Club are worth a fair bit.’
‘Oh yes. Well he was a surgeon of course, he earned a hefty wage. Deserved it too! Whoever did this should be strung up by their balls with barbed wire!’
Hassan winced reflexively at this image. Change the subject. ‘So your holiday was arranged well in advance?’
She nodded.
‘For the recording, please Marie.’
‘Yes it was. I usually do three times a week. But with going away, I gave the whole place a good bottoming, it must’ve been the morning before... his last day.’ She blew her nose again and finished her coffee. ‘That coffee’s shite. So at least he got to die in a clean house.’
‘Er yes. So you cleaned his private consulting room?’
‘I did. I could have been doing it all along, but well her ladyship had to do that room. Until she naffed off, then all of a sudden it was my job.’
‘Her ladyship, would that be Tessa Kingston, Marie?’ Sally could feel a galeforce bitch attack coming. ‘The wife who left him?’
‘S’right. Dead common she is. Did well to bag Robert. He was way out of her league. But you know what men are pet, think with their dicks if at all.’ Sally daren’t look at the DS.
He tried not to defend his gender but to keep on this promising tack. ‘So you didn’t like Tessa?’
‘Never did me any harm. Just, nowt much to her. Pretty nurse who married the surgeon. Like a Mills and Boon. She was about as much use as a chocolate erm, what’s the word?’
‘Fireguard?’
‘Teapot?’
‘Condom! She just flitted about getting her hair and nails done 24/7. Speaking of chocolate, you could get some chocolate hobnobs in you know. They’re bogof at Asda just now. These things are false economy. Anyway, Tessa cleaned his consulting room herself, he su
pposedly insisted on it, not that she’d exactly have worn herself out. Had to be surgically clean. Well what do nurses know about that these days, what with MRSA and flesh eating bugs all over the hospitals? And if you want my opinion, she drinks. Broke her arm once falling downstairs, I ask you. And he was that nice to her. Well, it’s the good that get taken. Poor Robert.’
‘So what happened when Tessa left?’
‘Oh well I had to clean that room as well didn’t I? She was just, not there any more when I went along one day. He didn’t want to talk about it, too upset I s’pose. But she was most likely bored, no interests but herself and her appearance, no job, no bairns, and he worked really hard operating on folk so she had too much time to herself, nice for some. Caffeteer. That’s what you want in here, proper coffee. So you’d better catch the bastard that did this. Barbed wire, balls!’
‘So,’ Hassan summed up for Will afterwards. ‘Marie doesn’t like Tessa. But interestingly doesn’t seem to think she did it. I mean all her comments on the killer were shall we say, gender specific to men. Though she might just make the assumption it’s a male crime. Seemed to think Tessa’s pretty much useless.’
‘Big fan of Mr K isn’t she? Blames the split on Tessa.’
‘Yeah, anyway, so Tessa knew the contents of his consulting room very well, but then so did Marie, and anyone she might have spoken to, and all the patients who consulted him privately. We can get the uniforms chasing them up. Also Marie has a key of her own. Anyone with access to her house could have copied it or borrowed it. She swears Kingston kept the front door locked, unless a patient was due. Before the split, Tessa would have been there to act as receptionist, nurse and chaperone.’
