Prescription for Murder

by David Williams

  The emergency plan had worked well so far. Neither of the children was ever left alone out of school hours.

  Rosemary was with her daughter now, meeting her out of school and taking her to a dental appointment arranged the week before. Accompanying her daughter to the dentist was something Rosemary would have done in the normal way.

  Mary Ricini had left Closter Drug that afternoon in time to pick up Tim at his school at three thirty – something his mother usually did. Routines hadn’t been noticeably changed, nor arrangements cancelled. The children weren’t aware that they were being protected from special danger.

  The alternative of Emma and Tim being sent away to safety somewhere, in the middle of the school term, would have created too many questions – in their own minds as well as other people’s. It had been Mary herself who had devised the lower-keyed solution. Its credibility depended on the children accepting that the woman doctor needed Rosemary as much as Rosemary needed the woman doctor. The migraine research had met the situation admirably – particularly at night when normal medical supervision wouldn’t be available outside a hospital. It explained to the children why Mary was sleeping at their house, and also satisfied the concern of Bob Larden and the other directors that there should be two adults there after dark.

  Mary hadn’t been alone with Tim before, or not for any length of time. She preferred his company to that of his sister. He had all his father’s pleasing traits. She hoped he would never develop the unpleasing ones. She watched him now guzzling the orange juice, eyes sparkling at her beguilingly over the top of the glass, blond eyelashes flashing.

  ‘Daddy’s been away a long time,’ he said, standing on tiptoe as he washed the empty glass under the tap.

  ‘Not that long, surely? Only from Sunday lunchtime.’

  Tim wrinkled his nose. ‘Emma and I saw him after that,’ he offered in a conspiritorial voice. ‘We haven’t told Mummy. Emma says we mustn’t. She gave me 10p not to,’ he added, as if proud of this less than objective reason for his reticence.

  ‘Have you told anyone else?’

  ‘Only you.’

  ‘Where did you see him?’ She was doing her best to keep her interest at a low sounding level.

  ‘At Heathrow. Emma took me to see the new Aeroflot plane take off.’

  ‘What a coincidence. Did Daddy see you?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘About tea-time was it?’

  ‘Three o’clock. That was the take-off time.’

  ‘Was Daddy watching the take-off too?’

  ‘No. He was in his car. With a lady.’

  ‘That would be his secretary, I expect. Short girl with dark hair?’

  Tim shook his head. ‘She’s called Lorna Smith. It wasn’t her. This one was ginger.’

  They both heard the front door slam, together with voices in the hall. Mary quickly moved across to Tim, her mind racing. She knelt beside the boy and whispered. ‘Emma was right. Better not tell Mummy. Not at the moment. Nor anyone else. All right?’

  ‘Yes, Auntie Mary.’ He looked over her shoulder. ‘Hello, Mummy.’

  ‘Teeth all right, Emma?’ Mary enquired brightly, getting up as the girl came into the kitchen behind her mother. The black family cat was also in train.

  ‘Fine, thanks. Just a scaling.’

  ‘Tell you what, Tim and I were just going to play a TV game. Could you play instead of me?’ She turned to Rosemary. ‘I’ve just remembered something I should have done at the office. I’ll have to go back. Shouldn’t take long. Let’s see, it’s four twenty. Back in an hour, I expect.’

  But it was after seven o’clock when she returned.

  At a quarter to five, Alison McFee was locking the door of her Austin Metro in the basement carpark of the supermarket. She had already done her shopping – just enough to get the money back on the parking token. Food prices were higher in Chiswick than they were in Maidenhead where she normally shopped, and parking was free in the supermarket there. She was careful with her money, not mean, but careful. It was why she still felt these trips to Chiswick were an extravagance, despite the improvement in her figure. The feeling was worse this time, too.

  Up to last Monday she had been confident that she and Hughie were going to be rich because of the Closter flotation, that a few modest extra expenses could be justified. Now the shares were gone, her prudent Calvinistic upbringing had reasserted itself. Even though the shares had fetched a million pounds, she had almost decided to cancel the rest of her treatments – almost, but not quite.

  She left the carpark by the street exit wearing her dark glasses.

  She hadn’t told Hughie anything about the slenderising course.

  This was partly because she hadn’t been certain till the last but one visit to Ivan Popinov that his treatment was working on her. Now she was pretty sure that it was. The results weren’t startling yet, but even Hughie had remarked on how svelte she was looking all of a sudden. That was an exaggeration probably, but she thought she was definitely on the way to a better shape. She had told Hughie it was due to dieting and exercises, but it was scarcely that. Alison found it impossible to keep to a serious diet.

  After crossing Chiswick High Street, she hurried down the narrow lane beside the furniture store.

  What Mr Popinov did was to dissolve or redistribute the excess flesh. It was what his advertisement in The Lady had promised. The diet part wasn’t rigorous and she’d got used to the foul-tasting vitamin drink. As for the process of ‘dissolving and redistributing’, that was the most abandoned experience Alison McFee had enjoyed in her whole life, though she tried not to admit it to herself quite as baldly as that – to stem a much more insidious sense of culpability than the one caused by the cost.

  The road into which she now emerged was residential. The new block of flats where Mr Popinov lived was some distance to the right. The basement carpark there was strictly for residents only, with apartment numbers painted on the bays. That was why she had taken to leaving her Metro at the supermarket. On the first visit to Mr Popinov she had looked for space in the basement of the flats without success, and eventually parked outside in the street. She hadn’t noticed until she came away that the street parking was also restricted to residents. If the car had been clamped or towed away, she wouldn’t have known how to cope. She relied on Hughie to handle all brushes with authority, but she would have had to explain to him why she was parked in a Chiswick sidestreet, twenty miles from home.

  Mr Popinov used some electric ray equipment for part of the treatment, but Alison was sure it was his massaging that was working the miracle. He had fingers like steel when they needed to be, but a velvet touch for the rest of the time, so soothing and gentle – and other things too that she didn’t care to admit to herself. He was quite young and very good-looking, or more distinguished than just good-looking perhaps, with his high forehead and pointed black beard – he reminded Alison a little of pictures of the last Tsar. The white medical jacket he wore, buttoned at one shoulder, was cut like the summer uniforms officers wore in those days. He was Russian of course, but from one of those Baltic states. He had told her about his background on the first visit, but Alison had been nervous at the time and forgotten the details. She hadn’t liked to ask again. She did recall he had aristocratic connections.

  She crossed to the other side of the road to be out of the sun.

  Of course Mr Popinov’s conduct was absolutely proper. There was a receptionist, a pleasant young woman, and quite pretty. She came into the consulting room, when called, to help with the equipment, but went back to her desk in the waiting room at the massage stage. But she was there all the time, on the premises as it were, so there couldn’t be any suggestion of impropriety.

  Alison McFee’s still stout little body experienced a tremble of pleasure at the thought of impropriety with Ivan Popinov, though she quickly suppressed it.

  She was especially glad the assistant wasn’t present during the manipulative part of the
treatment. It was then that the patient had first felt a spiritual as well as physical rapport with Mr Popinov. She had never experienced faith healing, but she could imagine now what it must be like.

  Mr Popinov had a healer’s touch all right. It was why the treatment worked so well. Faith was better than dieting: he was spiriting away her excess pounds – she was convinced of it. But it involved a very delicate relationship (she hesitated to use the word intimate), and one that could easily be shattered by the presence of a third person. Alison was much too modest to give herself over to such a spiritual experience if there had been anyone other than Mr Popinov in the room – especially when he took away the towels. That was prior to his moving his magic, searching hands slowly down her body, from her brow to her feet, while he exhorted her in an urgent whisper to relax and allow the unwanted tissue to dissolve and drain away through the very ends of her tiny toes.

  These body sweeps, as Mr Popinov called them, were the key to the treatment. Alison could quite see that now. The sweating they induced was incredible. They made her feel utterly exhausted. It was prudish of her to have been so obviously embarrassed over her nakedness the first time. She blushed at her past inhibition. What a goose Mr Popinov must have thought her. That was if he noticed, and he probably hadn’t. The concentration and effort he put into the sweep sequence would obliterate trivia from his mind.

  She quickened her step, then restrained it again after a sobering glance at her watch.

  Since the second visit she had tried always to be just on time. On that occasion she had been nearly forty minutes early. She had found it embarrassing to be sitting waiting with the patient who had the appointment ahead of hers. Treatments lasted half an hour. Then the patient before the other one had come out of the consulting room, joking with Mr Popinov in a show of familiarity that Alison found very nearly irreverent. This patient had then turned out to be the first one’s friend. The two had come together and were returning together, so Alison had had to wait the next thirty minutes in the company of the second.

  Both the other patients had been glamorous, younger than Alison, and hardly at all overweight: they had also had a great deal more in common with the pretty receptionist than with her. They had treated Alison with what seemed at worst cynical disdain and at best the kind of humouring she sometimes applied to her aged mother. It had made her very uncomfortable, as though she was somewhere where she shouldn’t have been, up to something unworthy or even immoral. That this had been her guilt complex asserting itself and not because of any intended slight by the others was neither here nor there. She came to Chiswick partly because she didn’t care to attend for similar treatment any nearer her home where she might run into people she knew. Now she found the presence of sophisticated strangers equally irksome.

  She was nearly at the entrance to the flats now.

  She hesitated before crossing a side road because of the white VW Golf. It was approaching from the other side of the flats, but slowing, and with its flashing indicator suggesting that it was going to turn into the road she was about to cross. But the car turned earlier than that – into the entrance to the basement carpark of the flats.

  Alison’s heart gave a leap as she identified the single occupant of the Golf. It was Jane Larden.

  It was a substantial block of flats, but Alison had a horrifying premonition that Jane was heading for the same destination as herself. Oh the mortification of it! – for lumpy, fifty year old Alison to find herself in that waiting room with the gorgeous Jane of the perfect body profile. Jane would be coming for treatment to keep her natural shape. Alison was just hoping to alter the ravages of time and overindulgence – and if she was totally honest with herself, it was a pretty forlorn hope at that.

  Despite the cheek kissing and the affected greetings when they met, Alison was sure Jane would be inwardly laughing at her. It would be the same as with the two pretty young patients on the second visit – only worse. And Jane was bound to tell her husband.

  Alison stood at the kerb edge desperately wondering what to do. Thank God she had been wearing the dark glasses. She was sure Jane hadn’t seen her – not yet. Seconds later a plan formed in her mind. She would allow just time enough for Jane to park her car and take the lift, then follow her into the basement. There were indicators above the lift doors in the building, and if Alison was quick enough, and if no one else had used the lift meantime, it should be possible to tell which floor Jane had gone to. If it was Mr Popinov’s floor then Alison would find a telephone and cancel her appointment.

  Surprised at her own ingenuity, Alison scampered across to the basement ramp, then down into the building. She soon found the empty white Golf because of its colour. It was parked in a bay on the left. Alison looked around feverishly for the lift. It was some distance to the right. Before she reached the door she could read the indicator above it. The light was steady on the figure 3. Mr Popinov’s flat was on the fourth floor.

  Alison was breathless but satisfied. Whatever reason Jane Larden had for being here, it was now almost certain that it wasn’t to see Mr Popinov. It was the end of the afternoon. Jane had driven in less than a minute before. No one else had entered or left the building. There was no one else in the basement. If the lift had gone to the fourth floor it would almost certainly still be there, because if anyone had used it since Jane, it surely wouldn’t have been just to go down one floor? It had taken a moment for Alison to work out the last conclusion.

  She felt she could stop worrying. Then, for the first time, she wondered what authority if any Jane had for parking down here. It was probably the usual thing – that people like Jane always got away with breaking rules that people like Alison never dared to challenge. The notice at the entrance said RESIDENTS PARKING ONLY – TRESPASSERS REPORTED TO THE POLICE. Jane certainly wasn’t a resident. Perhaps she had a resident’s permission?

  Out of curiosity, Alison walked back over to the white car. It was parked in a bay marked 3/14. That had to mean the bay belonged to flat 14 on the third floor. Thankfully it fitted the hypothesis that Jane was visiting someone on that floor. The next bay had exactly the same marking. So flats were allocated two bays. The second bay was also occupied – by a car larger than Jane’s, but enveloped by a lightweight car cover. It was the same kind of cover that Hughie had for his company Mercedes and never used – well, there was never any reason with their big garage at home.

  On her way back to the lift, Alison did a small detour looking for the bays marked 4/ 23. That was the floor and number of Mr Popinov’s flat. She found the bays. They were both occupied – one by an expensive red Porsche, the other by a dilapidated Mini. She wondered who the smaller car belonged to – Mr Popinov’s receptionist, or his wife (if he had a wife), or a favoured patient perhaps? Alison thought the first idea the most likely: Mr Popinov’s patients were expensive, like his prices – no doubt a wife would be the same.

  While she was on her way up in the lift, Alison came to a decision. When Hughie got home this evening she would tell him about the treatment. Then they could decide together whether she should go on with it – whether it was worth it, worth the price. She was tired of deceiving him. ‘Deceiving’ was too strong a word, of course, but she had always hated to do anything or to be anywhere that she couldn’t tell him about, and that would diminish her if someone else told him. Nearly running into Jane Larden had been a stern reminder.

  By the time Alison rang the bell to Mr Popinov’s flat, she was feeling a whole lot easier. Already she couldn’t wait to get home ready to tell Hughie what had been happening. It was then that the other thought struck her, the one that prompted her to return to the basement after her treatment – just to make sure of something.

  Of course, it was just one of those silly compulsions, probably. But she needed to be certain in her mind that it was just the cover that was similar.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Exactly what have you been doing?’ asked Molly Treasure as her husband got into the ba
ck of the Rolls again beside her.

  The car was parked in front of the ponderous main door to the Closter Drug factory. Molly had been waiting in it with Henry Pink, the chauffeur while Treasure and Giles Closter-Bennet had gone inside the deserted building. That had been a quarter of an hour earlier, at just before 8 p.m., which accounted for the impatience in Molly’s voice. The two men had promised they would be only a minute or two.

  ‘We’ve been testing a theory of Mark’s. He was right, as usual,’ said the perspiring Closter-Bennet, getting into the front passenger seat.

  ‘We’ll go to that address in Chiswick now please, Henry,’ Treasure instructed. ‘You know where it is?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Miss Gaunt explained.’

  ‘What theory?’ demanded Molly.

  ‘It’s a bit complicated to explain, darling,’ said her husband leaning back in the seat.

  ‘You mean I’ll have to listen extra carefully?’

  ‘Sorry, I meant tortuous. The door into the research laboratories works on a voice lock. There’s a recording of Dermot Hackle’s voice that we knew worked the lock. Giles got the tape out so we could demonstrate it.’

  ‘Trouble is, there’s another voice on the tape that also sprang the lock. It shouldn’t have,’ Closter-Bennet put in, turning round, with a bit of a strain, to look at them both. ‘Mark knew it would.’

  ‘No. Only guessed it might,’ Treasure corrected.

  ‘We couldn’t be sure after that that anyone’s voice wouldn’t do the same thing,’ said Closter-Bennet.

  ‘Yours or Mark’s for instance?’

  Closter-Bennet shook his head. ‘Mine would because it’s in the … the authorised voice bank.’

  ‘That sounds very grand,’ Molly said.

  ‘Not really.’ Closter-Bennet wasn’t sure whether she was being serious. ‘All the directors’ voices are on it.’ He faced front again because twisting his neck around was making him dizzy.