Second Opinion

by Claire Rayner

  15

  In the event she couldn’t go with Michael Urquhart to meet Gus at the Ritchards’ flat; when she got back upstairs, there was a crisis over a set of blood sugars that Jane had done, and Jerry had checked, which the Diabetes consultant, Dr Maurice Carvalho, swore had been done wrongly. He had come over to the department himself to make his complaints and George, hurrying to collect her typed-up notes, walked straight in on the uproar.

  Dr Carvalho was a small self-important man with a pronounced belly (which infuriated his patients when he lectured them on dieting and not putting on fat) and a sharp way of speaking which was guaranteed to upset people. Certainly by the time George reached the lab Jane was almost in tears, Jerry was in a towering rage and Sheila was white with barely contained temper.

  George looked at them and at once sent the junior technologist scurrying up to her office, where Michael Urquhart was waiting, with a message to go ahead without her; she’d call the nick when she was ready to go and they could call back on her mobile phone to tell her where they’d be. Then she weighed into the blood sugars argument to see what she could do to defuse it.

  By the time she had worked out what had happened, which was that one of Dr Carvalho’s nursing staff, a junior working in the Diabetic Clinic for the first time, had carefully attached the blood samples to all the wrong notes by accidentally reversing the case note numbers on the computer and then failing to check on the actual names of the patients, a great deal of energy had been expended, and several more people from the lab’s staff had been dragged into the row. By the time all this had been dealt with and Dr Carvalho had been sent off, after being persuaded to apologize (albeit grudgingly) to the path, lab staff, and the staff had been carefully soothed by George, it was lunchtime.

  She hesitated, looked at her desk, which wasn’t as badly piled up with work as it might have been and then checked through the labs to see the level of work that was going through. It all seemed containable, she decided; the place wouldn’t collapse if she vanished for the afternoon. So she told Sheila she was going out on a case and phoned the Ratcliffe Street police station to find out where Gus was and to instruct them to tell him she intended to join him wherever that happened to be.

  Her mobile phone rang about five minutes later. ‘He said to make it down at the Rag and Bottle,’ the junior constable reported. ‘And please will you bring your post-mortem report with you.’

  ‘Huh!’ George said, nettled, even though the report was actually in her pocket as she spoke. ‘When does he want his next miracle? Before supper, or will afterwards do?’

  The junior constable snickered. ‘Well, doctor, you know what he’s like as well as we do. Enjoy yourself.’ George hung up crossly. She’d wanted to impress Gus by having her report on the PM all ready for him; to have him demanding it as of right was decidedly annoying.

  She walked to the pub, a ten-minute journey through the back alleys which she quite enjoyed, going at a fast rate with her hands thrust deep into her pockets and her shoulders hunched against the cold. There was a smell of Christmas in the air; not the pine needles and freshly cut holly of her childhood but hot chestnuts and potatoes being roasted over battered anthracite burners, and from a food factory somewhere nearby a scent of yeast. I really must make my Christmas plans soon, she thought. It’s barely a week away now —

  The pub smelled too, but not of Christmas, despite the great swathes of glittering aluminium foil in unappetising shades of poison green, blood-clot purple and electric blue that festooned the bar. It was old cigarette smoke and stale beer with, underlying it, human sweat and urine and sick and she tightened her throat against it and looked around her with distaste.

  ‘If you’re looking for the Bill try over the way.’ The landlord was standing behind the bar looking sour and she nodded at him and ducked out gratefully; she could never get used to the way some English pubs were so pleasant and some so revolting. She peered across the road to where Gus might be, and saw his big shining 1970s Austin Vanden Pias blatantly parked on double yellow lines in front of a pizza parlour.

  He greeted her with an expansive wave as she came in and shouted at the man behind the counter, ‘You can serve it up now, Giovanni!’ and grinned at her as she made her way through the crowded tables towards him, very aware of the fact that every other customer was now staring at her with avid interest.

  ‘I told you.’ The man behind the counter was slapping plates down on the table at which Gus was sitting. ‘My name’s bloody Gary, so stop being so bleedin’ funny.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ Gus said and winked at George. ‘I’ve ordered for you. It’s the sort you like.’

  She looked down at the hot crisp pizza that was waiting for her; a classic with olives and anchovies and extra cheese and she thought for a moment of saying she wanted something entirely different, just to annoy him. But of course he had remembered accurately that this was the only sort she liked and she shrugged out of her coat and sat down.

  ‘You get worse instead of better,’ she said. ‘Always taking things into your own hands. I mightn’t have wanted a pizza at all.’

  ‘You’d ha’ wanted something,’ he said, all sweet reason. ‘This way you’re not kept waitin’.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, well —’ And couldn’t think of anything else. How was it this wretched man always managed to wrong-foot her? ‘Thanks then. I suppose it looks — well, OK.’ It was an ungracious speech but the best she could manage. She began to eat.

  The pizza was excellent and he watched her as she dealt with it hungrily, and then laughed. ‘You are funny, George, old girl,’ he said. ‘You try so hard to be dignified with me and it’s daft really. I don’t give a puppy dog’s toss for dignity. Intelligence, now, there’s somethin’ that really does get to me. I get all hot under the collar and various other places too when people are clever. You’re clever —’

  ‘I came here to talk about the case,’ George said with her mouth full. ‘Let’s do just that, OK? I’m not up to anything more complicated this afternoon.’

  ‘I was just bein’ thoughtful,’ he said mildly. ‘Didn’t want to talk about nasties while you were eatin’. It’d put me off my grub, talking about post-mortem reports and what that bugger Ritchard had to say this morning, but if it doesn’t worry you …’

  ‘Tell me about Ritchard, if you must,’ she said. ‘Then when I’ve finished I’ll tell you about my report of the PM. Not because it’d spoil my appetite now, but because I need both hands to deal with this.’ She speared another piece of pizza. ‘Not that what Ritchard had to say is all that important, frankly.’

  ‘Oh, really!’ He was sardonic. ‘So you know in advance, do you, what he had to say?’

  ‘I think I do.’ She chewed busily, watching him over her rhythmic jaws. ‘In fact, I’ll have a go and tell you what he said. He knew nothing about it, wasn’t there, feels you’re coming on to him unjustly and —’

  He lifted his brows. ‘Is that so? Well, well. Let me see now.’ He reached into his breast pocket and hooked out his notebook. ‘Interview, David Richard Ritchard. His mum and dad must ha’ thought they had a sense of humour, poor buggers. David Richard Ritchard, of — well, never mind all that Let’s get to the juicy bits. Ah, yes. Here we are.’

  His accent changed, became the slight whining falling inflexion sound that so many of the patients at Old East used, and she watched him with fascination as his face drooped and somehow he actually became the man she had watched with horror hurling invective at Harry over at Old East. Gus could have been an actor, she thought. He’s got the talent. And, sort of, the looks. She remembered a film star of her childhood whom she’d watched with fascination in old black-and-white movies on TV. Edward G. Robinson, she thought and her lips quirked.

  ‘How would you feel if it happened to you, then?’ Gus went on. “Ere I am, just me and Kev and a right little villain he was, took after ‘is mum’s side of the family and no error; anyway it’s just me and ‘im and
‘e gets ill and goes into this ‘ospital and the next thing I know, they say ‘e’d got a sorta cancer and then ‘e’s bloody dead. Wouldn’t you get mad if you found out that some black bleeder was practising ‘ow to be a doctor on ‘im just so as to save the expletive deleted ‘ealth service a few bob? Wouldn’t you be upset if it was your kid that was dead? Yeah, I ‘ad a go at ‘im and meant to do more ‘n’ all, and I don’t care who knows it. I told some of my mates, they all said the same, ‘e needs a right seein’ to, that doctor and we would ‘a done it if someone else ‘adn’t done it first. But it wasn’t me. Yeah, I was at the Rag and Bottle, it’s my local, why shouldn’t I be? But I tell you it wasn’t me or none of my mates what did it for ‘im. It was some other bugger and I’d like to shake ‘im by the hand.’

  ‘Did you write all that down?’ She was incredulous.

  ‘Most of it. Not all the details, you understand, I like to use my memory an’ all. If I was in court givin’ this as evidence it wouldn’t sound quite like this. But you got the gist of it.’ He grinned at her. ‘So you’re wrong, you see. Our friend Ritchard was indeed involved.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t.’ She pushed away her now empty plate and settled down to explain. ‘He said he was going to — that he intended to do Harry harm. But not that he’d actually done so.’

  ‘You’re a sweet woman, aren’t you? Even believe men like the Ritchards of this world are telling the truth.’

  ‘When there’s corroborative evidence pointing in the opposite direction, then yes. It’s nothing to do with sweetness, everything to do with using a bit of common sense. Now listen.’

  She reached into her pocket, pulled out her notes, and smoothed them in front of her as Gus crooked a finger at Gary and demanded coffee. ‘I think I’ve got a clearer idea of what had happened than you have. You think he was attacked by a mob, right?’

  ‘Something like that,’ he said, looking at her quizzically. ‘Are you going to tell me that you’ve got real evidence he wasn’t?’

  ‘I’ve got some highly indicative material. Listen.’ She explained as carefully and succinctly as she could. Pointed out how it was clear the car had passed over the body three times and how the direction in which it was travelling each time could be inferred from the pressure on the body at different bruise sites, and then went on to detail the state of the skull.

  ‘If he’d been attacked by a group of people there’s no way he’d be as unmarked as he was,’ she said. ‘I mean, of course he had marks, but they weren’t inflicted by hands or by objects. Only by the ground and by pressure.’

  He was leaning forwards now, very alert. ‘You’re sure of this?’

  ‘As sure as it’s possible to be at this stage. I mean, there’s no way I can prove whether he was unconscious or conscious when the car ran over him, but logic says he wasn’t. No one’d just lie there and let a great lump of car run over him if he knew what was happening, would he?’

  ‘I have to hand it to you, George,’ Gus said, his tone clearly admiring. ‘This really does make a hell of a difference. I can’t be sure that you’ve got it right, but it certainly sounds as though it puts Ritchard right out o’ the frame. However …’

  ‘Did he strike you as a man who’d be so — so premeditated as to knock someone out and then arrange the body so that he can be run over, and then to get into a car and —’

  ‘I see what you mean and I hear what you’re saying. But you can’t chuck him out altogether. Hmm.’ He clasped his fingers on the table in front of him and studied them with an air of great severity. ‘This gives me furiously to think. Leave me in peace and drink your coffee.’

  She did, watching him closely. After a couple of minutes he nodded decisively, picked up his coffee cup, drained it in one long gulp and got to his feet.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘For what?’ She put down her own empty cup.

  ‘Being a real detective instead of a knife-and-fork one. Come on.’

  ‘Knife and fork?’ she asked as he helped her into her coat and hurried her out.

  ‘Yeah. You dig around for facts with your tools there in your butcher’s shop, and I have to go out and plod around and ask questions and peer and pry. Real detection.’

  ‘Mine’s as real as yours!’

  ‘Course it is. If I wasn’t jealous, would I knock it?’ He grinned at her. ‘OK. Back to the Rag and Bottle.’

  It still smelled disgusting and now was noisier too, since some workers on their lunchtime break had arrived and the games machines were pinging and buzzing like demented insects while the juke box poured out its heavy unmelodic thumps, and she looked round with discomfort as they made their way to the bar. The place seemed to be threatening and she found herself wondering how the younger doctors at Old East could bear to use it; then she remembered that there was another bar, less unpleasant than this one. She could see it through the glass that surrounded the landlord’s centre area, and in fact caught a glimpse of some of the people from the administrative offices in there with their heads together over glasses that looked as though they held gin and tonic. She wondered, not for the first time, how people managed to work in the afternoon after they’d had liquid lunches.

  ‘I told you all there was to tell you when you was in this morning,’ the landlord said truculently. He was a tall man with patches of baldness in his dark hair. George looked at them and thought inconsequentially, I wonder if he’s ever been over to see our dermatologist about that? and then made herself attend to the business in hand.

  ‘I know,’ Gus was saying. ‘I just fancied hearing it again. Do it here or down the nick?’

  ‘Oh, do me a favour! Don’t come the old acid with me, mate,’ the landlord said and looked at him sideways like a nervous horse.

  ‘Then you stop being awkward!’ Gus advised, ‘and tell me again. I can make it easier this time. Was this bloke in here last night?’ He showed him a picture, obviously removed from a photograph album, George thought, going by the patches of stickiness on the back. Had Gus been given that by Dave Ritchard or helped himself? She strongly suspected the latter. Gus could be unorthodox when he chose. The landlord peered a bit and his face cleared.

  ‘Oh sure! No harm in telling you that. He’s all right, is old Dave. Poor devil. His kid died, you know. Leukaemia. Taken it real bad he has. Not that the kid wasn’t a right little villain, a proper tearaway, led him a hell of a life. Never been any holding him since his mum sloped off to New Zealand with Dave’s brother. You should hear him go on about them.’

  ‘No doubt. You say he was here last night?’

  The landlord nodded. ‘In with his mates, he was. They were buying him drinks. Comforting him, like. Not that it helped. He was in tears after three Scotches and useless by the time he’d had four. Used to be able to hold his booze, old Dave, but this has knocked the stuffing out of him.’

  Listening, George felt a twinge of sympathy for Dave Ritchard. The way he’d spoken to Harry had been dreadful, of course it had; but in his state of grief, and after growing up in these tight narrow streets where everyone shared the same hostilities and suspicious view of outsiders, especially the sort who could be easily identified by the colour of their skins, could he help his attitudes? Not entirely. But then she hardened. Not entirely meant that he could to an extent; and he had threatened Harry, after all. Her conviction that he was not involved with Harry’s death began to waver.

  ‘Did you see him leave?’ Gus was asking.

  The landlord wrinkled his face in an effort of recollection. ‘It was dead busy last night. Busier than —’

  ‘So you told me before. Listen. Let me help you. Shut your eyes.’

  ‘Eh?’ The landlord looked like suspicion personified.

  ‘Don’t be any dafter than you can help,’ Gus said impatiently. ‘Do as you’re told and don’t argue. Now, shut your eyes. OK. It’s getting on for ten o’clock — No, keep them shut. Inside your head you’re looking, inside your head. It’s last night and you’re look
ing inside your head at what’s going on here. See the clock?’

  The landlord, standing with his eyes closed and looking absurdly like a devout if overgrown choirboy, much to the delight of some of his customers who were shamelessly watching and listening in, looked surprised. ‘Yeah, I can see it.’

  ‘OK. Now look round your bar. See who’s in tonight. Give me the run-down.’

  The landlord kept his eyes closed and frowned. ‘Right. Yeah. Well, there’s Chalky over there with his dog. I told him before, next time that dog gets stepped on and makes a fuss is the last time it comes in here. Chalky, yeah. And then there’s a table of silly bits from the betting shop. It’s that Dawn’s birthday. Look at ‘em! Skirts up to their you-know-whats and about as much shame as Old Mother Riley’s tomcat. They’re chatting up some fellas I don’t know. They’ll know the girls well enough before the night’s out though. You can see they’re on to a good thing. Um …’