Second Opinion

by Claire Rayner

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ Gus said encouragingly. ‘Keep it up.’

  ‘There’s Dave Ritchard and he’s got the Garnett fellas with him.’

  ‘Brothers?’ said Gus.

  ‘No, they’re cousins, those two. Come from over Plaistow way. Old mates of Eric Phillips and Les Lincoln. They’re there too.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Gus softly. ‘I know them.’

  ‘Dave’s nearly paralytic. I’ll have to send him off soon. But Eric’s looking after him all right. Then there’s that Paki, all dressed up and nowhere to go.’

  ‘Paki?’

  The landlord opened his eyes briefly. ‘The one that got done,’ he said and then closed his eyes quickly as Gus opened his mouth to react.

  ‘He’s talking to someone,’ the landlord said. Gus closed his mouth and listened intently. ‘I can’t quite see …’

  ‘You never mentioned Harry talking to anyone before,’ Gus said.

  ‘You never asked. Anyway, I’ve only just remembered. Sort of. It’s like I’m looking at him … yeah. He’s definitely talking. Waving his hands about.’ The landlord’s face suddenly lifted and he opened his eyes wide and stared at Gus. ‘Here, hang about a bit! This bloke — he’s left. I mean, he went out with this other one, the one he was talking to. He went out, following, and there’s Dave.’ He closed his eyes again quickly and stared inside his lids at this memory. ‘Yeah, there it is! I can really see it, like! Dave Ritchard’s sitting there as pissed as a man can be and still alive, not fit to walk as far as I can tell, and your bloke’s gone.’

  He opened his eyes finally. ‘So, if you were thinking it was Dave went for that bloke, it wasn’t, because he was still here after the bloke walked out. And I reckon he still was when that bird what found the Paki came running in here shrieking her head off. I mean, even if he could have gone after him to the car park, he wasn’t in no state to walk, take it from me. So, there you are. It’s amazing what you can remember when you have to, ain’t it?’ And he looked at Gus with huge self-satisfaction.

  16

  ‘You win,’ Gus said. ‘Dave Ritchard’s out of it. Not that I won’t be keepin’ a close eye on him. The way that bloke talked, he’s dangerous. I’ll see to it that the race relations group here keep an eye on him too.’

  He stretched and yawned, then settled back into a comfortable posture at his desk. George watched him from her seat in the battered armchair he kept in the corner of his office, listening to the sounds that came from the busy police station beyond his glass door, and felt absurdly happy. A puzzling case, Christmas coming, and Ma here (and for all her irritations and problems she was dear old Ma). George tried not to add in the last and most obvious reason for feeling as she did, that she was with Gus, who was getting more and more important to her. That was a complication to her life she really didn’t want to think about too much.

  ‘Can we do a sort of recap?’ she said. ‘Go over what we’ve got — see where it takes us?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Questions first, though. Have you any more on the Oberlander baby?’

  ‘Not a bloody thing.’ He looked petulant, sticking his lower lip out like a sulky child. ‘Dammit all, you’d think it’d be easy enough to find out what baby’s disappeared from where, wouldn’t you? Neighbours are mostly very nosey when it comes to kids and they notice if they vanish, but I’ve put a check out to every nick in the country, and no one reports any kid like this. There are missing children all right, but no babies. Certainly not any sick ones that look much younger than they are.’

  ‘There’s a bit more to this one than that,’ she said. ‘He had AIDS.’

  He stared at her. ‘You didn’t tell me that before.’

  ‘Wasn’t sure. Prudence Jennings was the one who put the idea up. She said she thought he might be HIV positive. I’ve only just got the last test results through. He was HIV positive but he also had clear evidence of opportunistic disease, so AIDS has to be the diagnosis. Damn.’ She bit her lip then. ‘I feel a certain twinge of guilt here. I should have told Prudence Jennings.’

  ‘Oh?’ He looked puzzled.

  ‘She asked me to do the tests. I did the first ones and went back to tell her, but by then the child had vanished, and she wasn’t there herself, either. And after it died and I’d done the PM, the whole case was over and done with — sort of — I didn’t go back or try to reach her any other way. I have to admit I didn’t think of it. She’s entitled to know, though.’

  ‘Why?’ He looked genuinely interested.

  ‘Well, it’s the right thing to do, you know. Colleagues should co-operate. And as I say, it was she who put the idea of HIV infection into my mind in the first place.’

  ‘I see.’ Gus looked judicious. ‘You know, I think maybe I’ll have a word with her too.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, it’s this business of her being away and leaving young Harry when she was supposed to be on call. Maybe there’s a link there somewhere.’

  ‘With Harry’s death?’

  ‘Well, maybe. Let’s face it, ducks. We’ve proved he wasn’t killed by a bunch of racist yobs, haven’t we? You found out from your PM and I found out from my questioning. That means that someone else killed him. Who? Since he had few if any connections outside the hospital, as far as I can find out from the interviews we’ve done so far, it has to be someone inside. So why not your Prudence? Maybe there was something going on between them. Maybe she set him up for someone else to lure him to the Rag and Bottle and organized for him to be run over. Maybe Prue herself ran him over.’

  George shook her head. ‘Hardly. The landlord at the pub said Harry was talking to a bloke.’

  ‘Did he?’ Gus said. ‘Are you sure?’

  She blinked. ‘How do you mean? Didn’t he?’

  Gus flipped open his notebook. ‘Let’s see, now. Here we are. Um — “He’s talking to someone … Waving his hands about”. No, hang on, it’s further on. Ah, here we are. “He’s left. I mean, he went out with this other one, the one he was talking to. He went out, following …”‘ Gus closed his notebook and stowed it back in his pocket. ‘So there you are. It could have been Prudence, couldn’t it?’

  ‘You said you were going to get a description from him. Did you?’

  ‘We did. And it doesn’t help. I can remember it — it was in Urquhart’s notebook though, because he did the checking on that. I was just listening and looking over his shoulder. Let me see.’ He closed his eyes, waited a moment and then said, ‘Jeans. Blue anorak. Trainers. Woolly hat in green and orange stripes pulled down over the ears. Medium height and build. Not very much of anything, really.’ He opened his eyes again and grinned at her. ‘See what I mean? It could ha’ been a woman, couldn’t it? At a pinch.’

  George was staring at him, fascinated. ‘You’ve got an eidetic memory too,’ she said almost accusingly. ‘You never told me that!’

  ‘So? You’re not the only one! I’ll bet there’re lots of people can remember like that.’

  ‘Shutting their eyes and seeing it all over again, right? The way I do. The way I did when we were doing the Oxford case.’

  ‘The way I made the landlord do it. It’s not all that difficult, after all. I have to admit I was impressed when you did it, though, so I thought I’d try and see if I could too. And I found out I could. What is it you called it? Eidetic? All I know is I’ve been practising calling up pictures of what I’ve seen in my mind and sort of reading them off, and I’ve managed to show other people — a few of ‘em — how to do it, too.’

  She grinned, suddenly elated. ‘It’s great, isn’t it? I used to pass most of my exams that way. Sort of call up the memory of my notebooks and look at the pages and read off the answers. Just like a crib.’

  ‘I’m not as good at it as you are. I can still remember being gobsmacked by the way you managed to remember everything that had been in that bloke’s bathroom cabinet. Amazin’. It made me want to be the same.’

  She laug
hed. ‘OK. Is there anything else you can remember now that might help with this recap?’

  ‘Ah! Back to our muttons, eh? Fair enough. Let’s see what we’ve got.’ He began to tick off on his fingers: ‘Item, three babies dead of cot deaths in Old East.’

  She frowned. ‘Look, I don’t want to seem argumentative so early in the proceedings, but what have they got to do with these two murders? They were just cot deaths.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Like you, I’m bothered by that note someone put on the PM request form — even more bothered by the fact that you can’t find out who wrote it. So maybe they were murders. You said yourself it’s hard to tell with these infants what they died of. Smothering shows no signs, and —’

  ‘Sometimes it does!’

  ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t always. So that’s enough to make a mystery, right? They could have been deliberate deaths.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said slowly. ‘But I’ve got a deep hunch those babies died naturally, somehow. It was just a fluke there were so many — though I have to agree the note’s a puzzle.’

  ‘OK. So we’ll include them in our recap. I put them at the top of the list, not because they’re the most important element but because they happened first. Then we have a baby with AIDS fetched into Old East in mysterious circumstances, who disappears and is then found smothered in a plastic bag on a piece of waste ground. I think we’re entitled to regard that one as a right oddity.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said gravely. ‘I won’t argue about that one, though we didn’t have the definitive AIDS diagnosis till after the PM, of course.’

  ‘Don’t pick nits. So, where was I?’

  ‘Putting the Oberlander baby on the list.’

  ‘Right. Then we have Harry Rajabani’s murder. This one really is a bit tricky. I still can’t help wanting to think about the racial motive. Not because I’m obsessed,’ he added hastily, seeing her expression. ‘But because of the link, tenuous though it is, between the blokes who went for Choopani and bashed in my window while they were at it, and Harry.’

  ‘What link?’ she demanded. ‘Just the fact that Choopani and Harry weren’t white?’

  ‘The blokes who went for Choopani were the same ones who were Dave Ritchard’s mates. Some of them were in the pub with him last night, even though the landlord is adamant they couldn’t have got out to the car park to do it while Harry was there. They were in the pub though. And there are one or two other tie-ins. Choopani was the GP who sent Kevin Ritchard to Old East in the first place. Though what Dave was doing on the list of an Asian GP, with his views, Gawd only knows.’

  ‘The local GPs run a rota on-call service for each other,’ George said. ‘It’s cheaper for them than hiring locums when they’re off duty. They each take a turn at covering for all each other’s calls. It could be that Choopani got to see Kevin that way, and spotted something his own GP missed.’

  ‘Fair enough. So there are other links, you see, between Harry and Choopani via Kevin, and between Dave and Choopani’s heavies.’

  ‘But no links with the Oberlander case and certainly none with my cot deaths.’

  ‘I’ll grant you,’ he said handsomely, and sighed.

  There was a little silence and then she said, ‘I think I’m going to talk to Prue. See what happened to her that night, and why she left Harry on his own when she was on call.’

  He thought for a moment and then nodded. ‘I think that’s a good idea. We will interview her, as I said, but if you can get anything out of her now, on the old girls’ network, it’d be handy.’

  She grimaced. The excitement of hunting down clues and unravelling mysteries was unalloyed pleasure for her, generally speaking, but it did make her uncomfortable to think she might be abusing the fellowship of her medical colleagues as part of her unravelling; and Gus caught her eye and seemed to read her mind.

  ‘It’s tough, ducks, but there it is. A murderer is a murderer, even if he or she turns out to be your best and dearest mate. If it’s too much for you …’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly, dismissing her qualms. ‘That’d be daft. It’ll do Prue no harm if she’s done nothing wrong. And if she has — well, better we find out. Listen, can you do anything more about the Oberlander baby?’

  ‘We’re still trying, like I said, but I have to tell you it’s a cold trail. If no one reports a baby missing, and we can’t find any evidence of a missing child, then finding out who he was, let alone who killed him or why, is almost impossible.’

  ‘As for why,’ George said. ‘Could it be because of the AIDS, I wonder?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Is that a motive for killing a child?’

  ‘Let’s think it through. You’re a parent and you’ve got this sick child. And you’re HIV positive. You know you are, but you don’t want anyone else to know. If the baby shows that he’s got the disease …’

  ‘Then that shows you’ve got it, because he must have got it from someone …’

  ‘Precisely.’ George leaned forwards eagerly. ‘And I’ll tell you something else. Children don’t get HIV infection from their fathers.’

  ‘Never?’ Gus said. ‘I think I know the answer, but —’

  ‘You do. The disease is spread by body fluids. The most likely cause for a baby to be HIV positive is via breastfeeding from an infected mother.’

  ‘Or from a blood transfusion, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But if this baby got ill from blood transfusion it’s obvious the parents would have taken the child back to the doctor who gave him the transfusion, wouldn’t they? Or at least would have told Prue about it when it was brought in to Barrie Ward. And, anyway, in the UK transfusions are safe now. It seems to me to point straight to the parents — well, anyway, the mother. She has to be the one who’s HIV positive and who passed the virus on. I mean, look at what they did. They brought the child in under an assumed name because it was ill, took it away in panic when Prue talked about doing tests — maybe she even mentioned HIV? I’ll have to ask her — and then the baby turns up dead. Maybe they thought that was the simplest way out, since it was likely to die anyway, sooner or later. And looking at the poor little scrap when I did the PM I’d have said probably sooner. Maybe they just, well, cut their losses?’

  ‘And the mother’s secret about her HIV status is still safe.’ Gus shook his head. ‘There’s a catch in this. Hang on …’ He wrinkled his face and stared at her, his eyes glassy with concentration. ‘It’s got to do with film stars, I know it has. The catch …’

  George stared back at him and then her own expression became gloomy.

  ‘I’ve just seen the catch,’ she said. ‘If the mother got her HIV infection from a blood transfusion a long time ago, before the baby was born —’

  ‘Before blood was safe in the transfusion service … and I’ve remembered the link. There was a Hollywood actor that happened to, wasn’t there? His wife got HIV from blood, she breastfed and so gave it to their baby. A dreadful business. Do you remember?’

  George nodded, eagerly. ‘That’s right. I do remember. And, if this mother, like the Hollywood one, had a transfusion and got the infection, there’d be no need for all the secrecy, would there? No one would be able to point a finger and accuse her of some sort of sexual fling where she picked up the virus.’ She shook her head in sudden anger. ‘Not that anyone should ever have to be ashamed of being ill. It’s a tragedy that happens to some people, and it’s got nothing to do with morality any more than — than heart disease. But there’s a lot of ignorance about and maybe this mother —’

  ‘Maybe this mother didn’t have a transfusion and wants to keep from her husband the fact that she’s infected, and maybe she killed the baby to stop him finding out?’ Gus stopped, irritable. ‘Too many maybes. Look, I’ll spread my own boys about further. It’s facts we need, not guesses. We’ll do some checking on sexually transmitted disease clinics and with HIV consultants. See if that way we can find a mother who fits the bill. Meanwhile …’
<
br />   ‘Meanwhile, I’ll talk to Prue and see what happened there.’ George got to her feet and stretched. ‘I’d better get home. Um — see you soon, then.’

  Gus seemed abstracted, already reaching for his phone, and she thought a little bleakly: He doesn’t mind me going.

  ‘Mmm. You do, ducks. And yeah, see you soon. Call me with the news, if any. I’ll be here late tonight, and most other nights, I think. There’s a lot of routine stuff you have to get through with these murder cases. Like checking the car that ran over Harry. ‘Night, Dr B.’

  ‘Night,’ she said and went. There was no elation left now.

  At home, she found her mother and Bridget busy in the kitchen.

  ‘We’re making supper, darling!’ Vanny called. ‘We found this country market where they had all sorts of nice things. I’m making you the sort of things you used to like a lot.’

  George, her lips curling delightedly at the thought of the sort of country market they might have found in Shadwell, put her head round the kitchen door. Doubt filled her. The smells that were wreathing the place were indeed familiar and her heart sank.

  ‘Ma! Not, I beg you, candied yams!’

  ‘Why not? You always adored them the way I did them, with the toasted marshmallows on top and all. We got some ham steaks too, and some spinach. No collard greens but spinach comes close.’

  ‘It’s all a bit Southern style for a Yankee,’ George said, knowing when she was licked. The dish of yams with marshmallows on top was already in the oven; she could see the topping bubbling and browning through the glass door. ‘You must have found Watney Street. Lots of Afro-Caribbean stalls there. They have yams and sweet potatoes.’

  ‘Indeed we did.’ Bridget lifted a flushed face from the minute kitchen table where, George now realized, she was putting the last trimmings on a pumpkin pie. ‘I saw they had pumpkin and I said to Vanny, we’ll give her the Thanksgiving dinner she never did have. Just to get her all set up for Christmas. We’re making it, you know, honey. All of it. There, doesn’t it look good?’ She held the pie up on one hand, making the fingers into a sort of five legged stand for it. ‘Just like the pie Snow White made for the dwarves!’