Her Dr. Wright

by Meredith Webber

  Apart from one kiss!

  The arrival of a third tired and listless child suggested the hepatitis was originating at the school all three attended.

  ‘Maybe the carrier is someone handling food up there,’ Sarah told Rowena as they ate their own lunch in the little café up the road. ‘Do they have a tuckshop?’

  Rowena nodded.

  ‘But Bessie Jenkins who runs it is the cleanest of souls.’

  Sarah smiled.

  ‘I’m not accusing Bessie of being dirty, but perhaps when we finish here you could go up and have a talk to her. Find out if she’s wearing gloves while she prepares sandwiches and serves food. If it’s not a food handler, it could be a contaminated water supply, which would involve official notice to the health authorities.’

  ‘But you’ve patients all afternoon,’ Rowena protested.

  ‘No worries! If you leave the stack of files, I can see them in. It’s not as if there’s anything in the waiting room anyone would want to pinch. I leafed through a magazine yesterday then realised it was years out of date when I saw an article on Princess Di.’

  Returning to the surgery, Sarah worked through another hour of patients with wounds, aches and pains she suspected would have been ignored were it not for her novelty value. Her arrival hadn’t been announced so the two days she’d spent with David had been her only introduction. Word had now spread and islanders, who had as much curiosity as anyone, were coming to check on her.

  ‘Just rest it,’ she was telling Mrs Armstrong, who was complaining of pain ‘moving up and down my arm’, when she heard the bell ring on the outer door as it was opened.

  Assuming it was Rowena returning, or another patient, she was surprised, when she ushered Mrs Armstrong out, to see David slumped on a stool in the small storeroom. His head was bowed, his shoulders hunched and he radiated pain so palpable Sarah caught her breath.

  ‘I’ll be out for the next patient in a minute,’ she said, poking her head into the waiting room where an elderly couple sat, hand in hand.

  Then she went into the storeroom, put her arm around David and urged him off the stool.

  ‘You can’t sit there. Come in and tell me what’s wrong. You can go out again through the back door so you don’t have to see anyone.’

  ‘I can’t go out again,’ he said, allowing her to lead him into his own consulting room. ‘You have to go. Out to the farm. They need you there. I’m sorry, Sarah!’

  The words were as dry as desert dust, flat and toneless—not making sense.

  He staggered forward with the gait of a hundred-year-old and slumped again—this time into his chair.

  ‘I’ll take the rest of the patients.’

  He tossed a bunch of keys to her.

  ‘Take my car. Rowena can run me home. If I haven’t been arrested.’

  Arrested?

  Sarah stepped towards him and seized his shoulder to give him a slight shake.

  ‘You’re in shock. I can see that, but you’ve got to snap out of it, David. You can’t possibly see patients in this state. There’s no one urgent—I can send them home, close the surgery.’

  He raised his head and turned pain-filled eyes to hers.

  ‘I need to work,’ he told her. ‘Need to do something, don’t you see?’

  Sarah rested her hand against his cheek.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said gently. ‘Tell me why?’

  He shook his head like a bewildered animal, then breathed deeply. As she watched he almost visibly pulled himself together, consciously tightening all the sinew and muscle in his body.

  ‘They’ve found her,’ he said, his voice stronger, level, but still as remote as the Arctic. ‘Found Sue-Ellen. Obviously, as chief suspect in what is most probably a murder, I can’t help with the forensic side of it. Barry Ryan, our local police sergeant, wants you to take a look.’

  ‘Murder?’ Sarah murmured.

  ‘Very few people commit suicide by shutting themselves into a trunk, Sarah!’

  A coldness, harsher than the rain beyond the window, seeped into Sarah’s body. She searched for words but knew there weren’t any to help her friend.

  ‘Are you sure you want to see patients?’ she asked him, and he nodded.

  She heard the bell again and prayed it was Rowena.

  ‘OK, but first you’ll have a hot drink. It won’t hurt anyone to wait.’

  She left him behind the desk, staring blindly at the few remaining patient files. Rowena was chatting to the elderly couple, still hand in hand, and Sarah had to excuse herself and ask Rowena if she could spare a minute.

  She led the surprised nurse out to the kitchen alcove just inside the rear door, and filled her in on what had happened.

  Rowena’s reaction mirrored David’s, although Sarah knew Rowena’s pain was for her boss, not for herself or the dead woman.

  ‘Take him in a cup of coffee and see if you can get him to eat something—a couple of sweet biscuits. It will help with the shock. And keep an eye on him. Send the patients home if necessary, or rebook them for this evening. I can come back and see anyone urgent then.’

  Rowena seemed to understand so Sarah left, assuming that activity of some kind out at David’s place would show her where to go when she got there.

  The activity—in the form of the Range Rover they’d seen earlier, an ambulance and one of the big four-wheel-drive police vehicles parked by the bigger of the two sheds behind David’s house—suggested Sue-Ellen’s body had been found there.

  In a trunk, David had said.

  An old-fashioned cabin trunk, perhaps.

  What would a cabin trunk be doing in what Sarah had assumed was a machinery shed?

  She parked beside the police vehicle and walked towards the open doors.

  ‘Because it’s where someone, perhaps the twins’ grandfather, kept all his junk.’ She answered her own question as she viewed the contents of the shed for the first time.

  There were crates and cartons, old machinery of every description, buggies and drays once drawn by horses, and yokes obviously made for oxen.

  And that was just at first glance.

  What looked like an old stagecoach took up most of one corner, but the majority of the paraphernalia was smaller and stacked in teetering towers. An ancient perambulator topped a chest which was set on a table while underneath crouched a piece of metal which might have come direct from the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition, though Sarah assumed it could just as easily be a farm implement of some kind.

  The smell reached her nostrils at the same time as a voice registered in her ears.

  ‘Dr Kemp?’

  The policeman, whom she’d seen in town but not met, appeared from behind a drum on wheels—a mobile silo? He was followed by the ambulance attendant, who nodded a greeting at her and continued on his way—obviously not needed.

  ‘Barry Ryan,’ the man in khaki added, holding out his hand, then, realising it was gloved, withdrawing it to nod awkwardly at her.

  ‘It’s Sarah,’ she said, acknowledging his introduction with a smile and an offer to use her first name. ‘David tells me you’ve got a body.’

  ‘What’s left of it,’ the man muttered, leading her into the shed and along a narrow corridor left as a walkway through the collection. A harsh rhythmic sound like asthmatic breathing made her look around.

  The woman Sarah had glimpsed in the waiting room the previous day was crouched in an old chair at the far end of this particular walkway, the tall man by her side so erect he gave Sarah the impression he was standing guard. The noise was the woman breathing and instinct took Sarah to the living patient first.

  ‘Are you all right? Are you an asthmatic? Have you medication with you?’

  The woman looked at her, her dark eyes blank.

  Sarah tried the man.

  ‘Do you want to take her over to the house? Fix her a warm drink?’

  ‘I doubt the sergeant wants us in the house,’ the man said.

  ‘Oh, for
heaven’s sake!’ Sarah snorted. ‘David Wright’s been living in the house for the last three years—and I’m not the only visitor he’s had in that time. Don’t you think any evidence there might have been has disappeared or been destroyed by this time?’

  ‘Destroyed by him!’ the woman said bitterly, but her breathing had improved, lessening Sarah’s concern.

  ‘You’re right, of course.’ Barry Ryan had followed Sarah towards the pair and hovered behind her, but he now stepped forward. ‘Though I’d prefer it you didn’t go into the house, Mr…’

  He consulted his notebook then added, ‘Page. It might be best if you took…’ Another pause while he checked his notes again, then, either because he couldn’t read his own writing or couldn’t pronounce Mary-Ellen’s surname, he opted for the easy way out. ‘The lady back to town.’

  ‘We’re staying right here,’ Mary-Ellen decreed. ‘That’s my sister there. And finding her like this just proves there was a cover-up the first time the police supposedly searched the place. If you think I’m going to let you get away with it again…’

  The threat might have been implied but it was no less real, and Sarah, glancing towards the woman once again, saw sparks, like tiny flares on a dark night, had brought the dull eyes back to life.

  ‘We’ll treat her right and not make any mistakes,’ Barry promised, but Mary-Ellen showed no sign of moving and he didn’t push her.

  Instead, he led Sarah back along the walkway, then a couple of steps down another aisle diverging off the first.

  ‘The lady says it’s her sister, she recognises the clothes,’ Barry told Sarah. ‘David seemed less certain—he’s worried about the hair because, he said, his wife was a redhead at the time of the disappearance and the deceased is definitely blonde.’

  The policeman was speaking in what he probably thought was an undertone, but for a man used to shouting against the winds which regularly ravaged the island, his undertone had all the boom and carrying power of a megaphone.

  ‘I told you about that!’ the woman yelled from her invisible perch beside the wall. ‘I told you she met me at the airport when I got back from Austria and the first thing we did was go to a beauty salon and have our hair cut and coloured the same. We always did it when we were together. It was fun!’

  Because it fooled people and probably upset them, Sarah thought, remembering what Rowena had said about the twins when they’d been young.

  But it wasn’t her place to agree or disagree. She ignored the remark, concentrating her attention on Barry.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  He scratched his head, and shrugged his shoulders as if in discomfort.

  ‘Have a look at it where it is, then maybe again at the hospital. We don’t have a proper mortuary, but there’s a kind of sluice room out the back with a stainless-steel table, hoses and everything else you’ll need. Eventually, the deceased will have to go to the mainland, and we’ll get homicide detectives taking over here. I’ve already phoned the mainland, but a four-year-old body doesn’t excite them to the point of chartering a plane to send experts over today. They said for me to do the preliminaries and they’ll fly someone over on the scheduled flight tomorrow, though, with the weather closing in, the airport’s likely to be closed…’

  Sarah listened to the wailing of the wind above the building and knew exactly what he meant. Forget the homicide people not arriving, her family might not make it!

  Dismissing the selfish thought, she considered the situation from the policeman’s point of view. If planes were unable to land, they were on their own in the investigation until the faithful ferry, Trusty, came in next week.

  If it was able to come in…

  ‘I need to know it’s all there—the whole body,’ Barry explained. ‘Or if we have to search for more of it. It’s not a big trunk, you know.’

  ‘Bodies can fold up pretty small,’ Sarah told him, then, knowing she couldn’t put it off any longer, she walked across to have a look.

  The trunk was small, but the pitiful remains of the once beautiful woman didn’t overfill it. Sarah closed her eyes against the sadness that never failed to overwhelm her at the sight of any death, then took a deep breath, knelt and looked more closely at the body.

  It was held together by the clothes as much as anything else, but they were disintegrating, contaminated by the destruction of rotting body fluids and an insect infestation which proved the trunk couldn’t have been airtight.

  Sarah suspected the clothes would fall apart when touched. Scraps of skin and flesh, dried to the consistency of leather, clung here and there to the bones, and the body seemed to curl around itself in a parody of the foetal position, except that the head was turned upwards.

  The small face, so perfect in life but now stripped back to desiccated bone, looked back at her. The vivid blonde hair, still falsely bright and pulled forward towards the victim’s right eye, made a caricature of the skull.

  Using a pen she had in her pocket, Sarah lifted the hair and saw the perfectly round hole just above the temple.

  She heard Barry swear but he had the good sense not to comment. But suddenly the need for privacy, the need to do whatever she could for this slain woman, became paramount in Sarah’s mind.

  ‘You’ve taken photos?’ she asked the policeman, who nodded towards his constable. Sarah registered the young man for the first time, and saw he was holding Polaroid and video cameras.

  ‘Though if you hold her hair like you did, we’ll take a shot of that,’ he said, waving the constable forward.

  Sarah repeated her movement, while her eyes scanned what she could see of the rest of the body.

  ‘Are you finished with the chest? Have you drawn it in place, marked what’s around it? Done your plans?’

  She knew the danger of moving anything from a crime scene before the area had been carefully documented, though she had no idea how anyone could ‘document’ an area like this.

  ‘I’ve got my sketches,’ Barry assured her. ‘Me and the lad did the measurements, but I’ll have another look around when we’ve shifted her.’

  ‘What about fingerprints?’

  The policeman gave a bark of laughter.

  ‘Look at all this stuff. Who knows when people have wandered in and out of here? And David, the lady and her gentleman friend have all admitted touching the trunk several times this morning. Apparently, David had decided to go through all the stuff, and the lady came to see he didn’t throw away anything valuable.’

  ‘They started at one end of this main walkway, David writing everything down and putting a mark against what the lady wanted.’

  Sarah wondered about the continued references to ‘the lady’. Could Barry not remember her name or was he disinclined to use it?

  ‘Then the lady saw the trunk. It was under other things, some kind of hatstand and a corner cabinet—they’re over there.’

  He nodded to where the discarded items lay.

  ‘She wanted to look in it so the other gentleman moved the stuff off the top and David went to lift the trunk to bring it out into the walkway where it was easier to open. It was too heavy so the other chap helped, then the lady opened it—so you’ve three sets of recent prints on it.’

  ‘But there could be older ones as well,’ Sarah said cautiously.

  ‘Too right,’ Barry agreed. ‘Which is why I’m not touching it. Next thing it goes to town and some anorak at the crime lab curses me for my stupidity because I’ve destroyed his chances of using something special on the surface.’

  Sarah understood. Even with her limited knowledge of the techniques of lifting fingerprints, she knew different chemicals had to be used in a specific order as the use of a particular chemical too early could destroy the opportunity to use another more effective one later.

  ‘With new light sources and the latest ways of making fingerprints obvious, I wonder if they’ll be able to work out what’s recent and what’s ancient. Although if the trunk belonged to Mary-Ellen�
�s family, and has been shifted around in here, it’s logical that family fingerprints could be on it for innocent reasons.’

  ‘The lady’s already explained!’ Barry said gloomily. ‘Said it was her mother’s trunk and they used to keep old clothes in it for her and her sister to dress up. It’s why she wanted it out, she said.’

  Sarah looked at the trunk and shook her head. It didn’t look like a trunk a woman would keep in the house. Particularly not a woman as wealthy as the twins’ mother had been.

  ‘Well, if you’re all done here, let’s take her into town,’ Sarah suggested. ‘Exactly as she is in the trunk. I’ll lift her out onto a sheet of plastic first so no trace evidence is lost. Even the dust around her will have to go to the city crime lab for testing.’

  ‘I’ll just see off the others first,’ Barry told her, and he walked towards the far end of the corridor where Mary-Ellen and her protector had moved so they could watch what was happening.

  The tall man argued and, although Sarah couldn’t hear the words, she could read anger in his stance. Barry’s voice rumbled back to her, explaining crime scenes to a man who’d probably walked a few in his time.

  ‘You can’t stay here and I don’t want you in the house either,’ Barry said. ‘So don’t make things difficult for me, mate!’

  More conversation, then the couple moved away, Barry following them and remaining in the doorway until Sarah heard an engine come to life, followed by the growl of the departing vehicle.

  Yet even with the onlookers gone, Sarah felt edgy and uncomfortable. By rights, the body should go, still in the trunk, straight to the city, but if it wasn’t complete the police would have to mount a search for the rest of it—as soon as possible. Now the discovery had been made, the perpetrator would lose the sense of security he’d had for the last four years.

  He—or possibly she, Sarah told herself firmly—might panic and change the hiding place of any further evidence. Even destroy evidence by burning the shed.

  She wondered for a moment why he—or she—hadn’t done exactly that earlier.