Joint Enterprise (The Romney and Marsh Files Book 3)

by Oliver Tidy

  ‘They haven’t said and I haven’t asked. I quite like being looked after.’

  ‘Well don’t overstay your welcome. Remember that the NHS has plenty of genuinely sick people in need of beds. They don’t want malingers filling up the private rooms.’

  ‘I seem to remember you enjoyed your last stay for a good few days, sir,’ said Marsh.

  ‘That was different. My injuries were far more serious than yours.’

  Marsh didn’t have the energy or the inclination to bother with his pettiness. Instead she said, ‘And did Hugo Crawford finally get his film back?’

  Romney scowled. ‘I was all for impounding it as evidence, make him sweat a bit longer for it, but his uncle – Crayfish major – had other ideas. Just goes to show, it’s not what you know, but who you know that makes the difference in this life. Crayfish minor wasn’t even particularly grateful when we returned his film and his money to him. About the only crumb of comfort I can take from the whole business is that Wilkie made him look an idiot. Right,’ said Romney to Grimes, ‘come on. I seem to remember Superintendent Falkner passing on something from Professional Standards about you not conferring with the prime witness in your investigation. If they catch us in here, there’ll be trouble. You got everything you need?’ he said to Marsh.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind a few decent books to read. You know the sort of thing I like don’t you, sir?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. Speedy recovery we need you back quickly.’

  ‘Thanks, sir. I’ll do my best.’

  Romney walked towards the door and Grimes sidled up to the bed. Under his breath he said, ‘At least you were beaten up by a man, Sarge, not some poor disturbed girl. Get well soon.’

  ‘I’m not deaf you know,’ said Romney. ‘For your information, she had superhuman strength and the element of surprise. Also she was lucky and I tripped. Most of my injuries were sustained as a result of the fall down the stairs.’ Marsh and Grimes looked at each other and smirked.

  ‘Thanks, Peter. I owe you and I won’t forget it, but don’t think that when I get back to work I’m going to start bringing you coffee and pastries every morning.’ They shared a little laugh.

  Romney coughed loudly from where he was holding open the door. ‘When you two have quite finished.’

  After they had departed and the peace had returned to her room Marsh lay there in the clean and comfortable sterile bed alone with the vivid recollections of her near death experience. She wondered seriously, not for the first time since her admittance, whether maybe she would now leave the police force.

  *

  The following day was Friday. Romney was glad that the recent whirlwind of crime had blown itself out and the mopping up operation was all over bar the inevitable paperwork. He had personal business to attend to. First on his list was his doctor’s appointment.

  Romney had always tried to look after himself physically and he had been blessed with a decent and reliable constitution. Health problems for him had been few and far between. Apart from a brush with Shingles, they had also tended to be injuries rather than diseases.

  Romney’s GP was a man he’d known for many years. He had been the family’s GP when Romney had had a family to speak of. He was near retirement age and this fact comforted Romney. He would undoubtedly have seen everything there was to see in local medical practice. He was old-fashioned and no frills and that’s what Romney needed. With the personal invasion and examination he knew he was going to have to endure, he definitely would not want to be seen by a man younger than himself, or, God forbid, a woman. It was all going to be horribly embarrassing and distressing enough as it was. And that was only the examination.

  There would need to be tests, probably further, more thorough, examinations, samples taken, biopsies performed and then the excruciating waiting and waiting as the overloaded wheels of the National Health Service eventually got around to grinding out his diagnosis. If he hadn’t left it too late and there was still a chance he could be cured there would be the rounds of chemotherapy, hair loss, sickness, absence from work, a miserable quality of life, possibly a period of remission, but he would spend the rest of his days waiting for it to return and finish him off. What kind of a life could he have with that hanging over him?

  The waiting room contained half-a-dozen people all sitting as far away from each other as possible. Two of them were old and frail looking and might have been there just for a warm and some company now that the library was permanently closed. There was a middle-aged couple holding hands and staring quietly at the information posters detailing the causes and symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases and trying to forget the reason they were there. Wedged into a corner was a young mother – probably single – talking loudly into her mobile phone. Her toddler was running around and screaming, unchecked, pulling the magazines onto the floor and trying to take off people’s shoes. It was a boy and he seemed completely mad to Romney. He thought about just leaving and coming back another time, but he caught the receptionist’s eye and she raised her eyebrows at him expectantly from behind her bullet and germ proof glass.

  He gave his name and she directed him to take a printout of his vital signs by placing the palm of his hand into some contraption and then waiting for the piece of paper to be spewed out. He looked at the numbers and letters, but none of it meant anything to him.

  He found himself a seat as far away from the kid and his mother as he could and picked up a magazine on pregnancy. He was flicking through this without registering any of what was in front of him when a shadow fell over him. He looked up to see a young woman, barely more than a girl, dressed in some sort of medical uniform. He saw that she was looking at the magazine open on his lap with a look of disappointment. He looked down to see a large colour photograph of a new-born baby suckling at the enlarged breast of its attractive and smiling mother. He closed it quickly and put it down on the seat beside him.

  ‘Can I take your printout?’ said the girl.

  He handed it to her and she left him without another word. As she passed by the receptionist’s window she said something to the woman the other side of the glass and they both looked over at him. He turned his attention to a poster about AIDs.

  A thin bead of sweat had formed on his brow by the time his name was called. His breathing had become faster and shallower and he felt light headed and weak. He dragged his leaden feet down the corridor towards his doctor’s office door. Before he made it halfway, it opened and Dr Leach stepped through it holding his medical bag and shrugging on his coat. Romney stopped and stared at him dumbly.

  ‘Hello, Tom,’ said Leach, as he came up to him. ‘Long time no see. Sorry, but I’ve just been paged on a local emergency. You can wait if you like, but to be honest I could be hours.’ He registered the look of disappointment on Romney’s face and said, ‘Dr Lawrence is in. Do you want me arrange a quick appointment?’

  Romney thought that that might be good. He was there after all. He could see a male doctor who was a complete stranger and get it over with. He couldn’t face re-scheduling. It was done and within five minutes Romney found himself being called again. His system was still betraying his feelings as he knocked a soft courtesy knock on the office door of Dr Lawrence and walked in.

  Doctor Lawrence was, of course, a woman. If he hadn’t been convinced he was dying of cancer Romney might have found something funny in this repeated error of assumption. As he stood there staring at her all his fears and anxieties seemed to crowd in on him at once: his insides liquefied, the colour drained from his face, a chilling layer of perspiration broke out on his forehead and his mouth dried up.

  Doctor Lawrence, probably ten years his junior, looked up at him expectantly and said, ‘Are you always this nervous about visiting your doctor, Mr Romney?’

  Romney was a little taken aback by her abruptness and lack of empathy. ‘I think that I suffer from iatrophobia. It’s a pathological fear of doctors,’ he managed, with some effort.

  ‘I
know what it is, Mr Romney, and you don’t suffer from it. No one who suffers from iatrophobia could hardly bring themselves to voluntarily walk into a doctor’s surgery. You just share a commonality with a large portion of the population – you get anxious when you visit the doctor or the dentist. It’s perfectly rational and normal. Just accept it and deal with it like a man is my professional advice. Now, why don’t you sit down and tell me what seems to be the problem?’

  Romney sat. He heard himself explaining that he had been sore around his back passage for a couple of weeks. There was an unusual swelling. A sort of spongy protrusion. He had found blood on the toilet paper when he wiped. He could have also added that he was slowly dying of embarrassment, but felt that any attempt to explain his feelings in front of this cold and businesslike dowdy lump would earn him short-shrift.

  ‘Right. You have two choices,’ she said. ‘Given the personal nature of your complaint you can reschedule to see a male doctor who will give you a brief examination, or you can make your way over to the bed, drop your trousers and your underpants and I can do it now. You won’t have anything that I haven’t seen before.’

  The complete and utter ignominy of it all washed over Romney, like a heavy salt-water wave. Deep within himself he found barely glowing embers of his police inspector fortitude and made a conscious effort to fan them. ‘Let’s just get it over with can we?’ he said.

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ she said, clapping her hands together loudly.

  He shuffled over, fiddled with clumsy fingers at his belt-buckle and his clothing and was soon standing with his back to the room, using one arm to lean against the bed and the other to hold up his shirt tails. His exposed backside detected a chill in the air. He heard her moving around behind him and the rubber snapping of skin tight gloves being put on.

  She applied gentle pressure to his lower back to encourage him to bend over. He closed his eyes in his humiliation and tried to think of something jolly to cheer himself up. All that came to mind was the AIDs poster he had been looking at in the waiting room.

  ‘Dear me. Romney by name, Romney by nature.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Romney.

  ‘Bit hairy aren’t we? Like one of the Romney Marsh sheep on my father’s farm,’ she said.

  He was trying to make sense of why she would make such a personal remark when he felt a cold, latex finger probing his anus. He instinctively clamped his backside shut and then realising that this would not be helpful made an effort to relax and breathe. She could have bloody warned him. She prodded and poked while he died a little bit more of the shame.

  To compound his wretched degradation a little pocket of trapped foul-smelling gas he had not been aware of was released by her intrusion to colour the air around them. Romney mentally braced himself for another farmyard comparison, but the farmer’s daughter showed some professionalism and ignored it.

  After the worst thirty seconds of his life, she said, ‘All right. All done.’ Her voice indicated she was moving away. ‘You can get dressed now.’

  By the time she was at the sink washing her hands vigorously he had his trousers up and fastened.

  ‘Sit down if you can,’ she smiled. Had she actually enjoyed his discomfort? he wondered.

  She came back around to sit behind her desk and ignored him while she tapped a couple of keys on her computer keyboard. Then she turned the computer monitor around to face him. The screen was filled with several small diagrams of a human anus. Each was labelled with words that Romney could barely pronounce let alone understand. She pointed with her pencil at one of them. ‘See this?’ she made a circling movement with her pointer. ‘Perianal haematoma. Aka haemorrhoids. Also known as piles.’

  ‘Piles?’ said Romney. ‘Are you sure? I mean can you be sure, just from that examination?’

  ‘Quite, but you’re free to ask for a second opinion if you like. Had any constipation lately?’

  ‘No. Actually, yes. A couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Straining on the toilet?’

  ‘No. Well a bit. Maybe more than a bit. But it’s all right now.’

  ‘Any itching around your anus.’

  He opened his mouth to say no, but remembered that there had been a noticeable itchy sensation for a little while and said yes.

  ‘Do you practise anal sex?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ he said, with as much indignation as he could muster, which considering not three minutes ago she’d had her finger up his arse, sounded a little flat.

  ‘Piles,’ she repeated. She patiently explained the different types and told him that his were the external kind. Simple small blood clots around the exterior of the opening of the anus and they would probably clear up on their own after a few days. If he wanted to he could buy some over the counter cream at the chemists, but in her opinion they were all a waste of money. Let nature and his body deal with it.

  She scanned the printout of his vital signs that had come through and told him that they were all what she would expect for a man of his age. She advised him to think more about his diet and getting enough exercise. Then she bid him good day.

  Stepping out of the building Romney felt a great weight lifted from his shoulders. He was not going to die after all. He breathed in the clean fresh air and got the tang of salt from the Channel. By God it was good to be alive. Piles. Idiot.

  ***

  21

  With good will in his heart after his stay of execution, he had called in at home and selected a few decent paperback titles for Marsh. He’d also snuck in a copy of Edy Vitriol’s, ‘All Women Are Prostitutes’. On his way to the station, he dropped them into the hospital, along with a replacement bag of grapes for the ones he’d eaten on his previous visit and some flowers bought in the hospital foyer that looked like they’d been recycled from a cheap wreath.

  When she’d shown her surprise at his inclusion of one of Vitriol’s signed hardbacks, he told her he’d seen a couple of online reviews that had panned it and the general consensus of opinion was that it was a load of rubbish and that the man’s death, however sad for him and his loved ones, was no great loss to English literature. He did enjoy her reaction when he told her that Vitriol’s mother had unloaded the whole box of books from her son’s room onto him and that instead of making a fortune on an online book auction site, he’d now be taking them to the nearest charity shop at the earliest opportunity.

  *

  As if Romney’s morning hadn’t been remarkable enough, his evening became, without a close contender, the most surreal of his life. He doubted whether even Dali could have conceived of such a cast and plot.

  In his forty-and-a-few-years, Romney had had some strange nights, bizarre nocturnal experiences, been involved in weird twilight incidents, but the night of that Friday the thirteenth raised the bar in biscuit taking. Indeed, such was the outrageousness of it all – the interplay of statistical improbability regarding the unfolding of coincidences and the characters involved – that he, a committed Atheist, was even forced to briefly wonder whether he’d been the temporary plaything of a bored deity who had finally got around to punishing him for his lack of faith.

  The evening began ordinarily enough. As per Diane Hodge’s emailed instructions, he found his way to her home in a classy suburb of Deal, the next town along the coast. He’d hoped she might like to dine somewhere local to her house so that they could walk or taxi. He might then be able to risk a couple of glasses of wine. She had other, more definite plans. She had reserved them a table at a new Greek taverna-style eatery that she’d heard of in Dover. Somewhere called The Olive Tree. Did he know it? Yes he did.

  They arrived a little after eight-thirty. The place was quite busy. Alexis greeted them and showed them to their table. Romney stole a furtive glance at her and noted that she looked tired and anxious. She gave no indication of their previous encounter but welcomed him as a repeat customer should be welcomed. He wanted to tell her that he’d made enquiries that had borne no
fruit. He wanted also to ask if they’d been paid a visit by the extortionists, but the opportunity did not reasonably present itself and when she’d seated them she moved away to another table.

  ‘Did you see that sad frumpy looking woman sitting on her own reading a book?’ said the forensic scientist.

  Romney followed her gaze to see Dr Lawrence at a table set for one, apparently engrossed in a thick paperback, as she spooned up her soup. A ripple of embarrassment, at the memory of passing wind while she had her finger up his bottom not twelve hours previously made him hot.

  ‘I think it’s a bit pathetic and attention-seeking to take a book out for dinner, don’t you?’ she said.

  Romney shifted his chair so that his back was more fully to the medic and mumbled an agreement. It had struck him as a pitiable sight.

  In the table’s candle-light, Diane Hodge looked particularly stunning in a revealing dress that she almost had on. The jet black of her garment and her hair contrasted in a most appealing way with her crimson lipstick, crimson nail polish and crimson stilettos. Her fragrance had filled Romney’s car so that by the time they’d driven back to Dover he was almost completely intoxicated by whatever she’d sprayed all over herself. He found himself hoping she might invite him in for coffee when he took her back and then wondering idly if the toilets at The Olive Tree boasted a contraceptive dispenser. As an ex-boy-scout Romney would carry their motto, Be Prepared, to his grave.

  They were through their starter when Romney looked up to see a familiar face staring intently in his direction. It took him a moment to recognise the handsome and refined features of Dr Puchta – her hair now out of its tight bun and hanging loosely to frame her classical face – sitting a couple of tables away in the company of another woman. She raised her glass to him and he excused himself from Diane Hodge for a minute to go across and speak to her.