Second Opinion

by Claire Rayner

  She took the tube for her journey westwards, climbing into a train at Shadwell and joining the District Line at Whitechapel. She sat contentedly as it rocked its way through the dusty tunnels, agreeably daydreaming of Gus’s admiration and praise and warm gratitude when she came back to him with the case half solved. It would be marvellous if the killing of Harry turned out to be linked with Hillman-Oberlander as well, she thought, but then was ashamed of herself once more. Harry’s death had been a tragedy; she had no right to diminish it to a mere puzzle that she would enjoy solving. Though to deny she would was impossible.

  Sloane Square, when she emerged into it, was bustling with people, and the dull January day was lit up with the cheerful glow from shop windows and the remains of Christmas lights, and her spirits lifted even more. She spent far too little time in other parts of London, she thought. I should go to more theatres and concerts, shop here in the smart and witty streets, live a little; even though she was enjoying herself hugely where she was in Shadwell.

  As she turned to walk down Sloane Street in search of Manderly Mansions, the address on Hillman’s letter, she contemplated that fact. When she had come down from Inverness to take the Old East job — was it just a year ago? Amazing — she’d been very doleful about it. The surroundings had seemed to her drab beyond belief and the hospital itself depressingly shabby. But now she felt so much a part of the place, and so — the word came into her mind and surprised her a little — so fond of it, she had no more complaints. How much Gus was part of the pleasure of course, it was hard to be sure.

  She looked down at the letter in her hand and concentrated on the matter she had come here for. No more private thoughts; only detective ones, she scolded herself. Only detective ones.

  What sort of businessman was he to live in so elegant a block of flats? was the first detective question that came to her as she looked up at the facade of Manderly Mansions. Smart indeed: each window carefully boxed with glossy ivy; brass name plate glinting in the dull light; windows polished to a rich gleam; and a uniformed man standing on the front step.

  He looked suspiciously at her when she asked for Mr Hillman and told her he could only let her in after he had telephoned Mr Hillman to be sure he was there.

  ‘Wouldn’t you know anyway, if you’re here all the time? You’d have seen him go out,’ George said. He looked at her forbiddingly. ‘It’s my job to call every flat when people come here, to see if they are at home to visitors,’ he said heavily. ‘It’s no part of my job to make any decision for them.’

  ‘Ah,’ George murmured. ‘So New York style security has arrived, has it? There’s a happy thought for a dreary day.’

  ‘Not for me to say, madam,’ said the uniform with insulting emphasis, and went into the building. She followed him, enjoying his hauteur. ‘Who are you, she says,’ the man said, one hand over the phone.

  George thought for a moment and said, ‘Tell him — her? the Hillmans, it’s about the advertisement.’

  He spoke into the phone, listened, nodded and hung up.

  ‘Lift’s over there,’ he said sourly, making no effort to show her the way, but she found it and went up to the third floor, noting the number of the flat beside the relevant button. The lift smelled of beeswax polish and flowers and was thickly carpeted, not only all over the floor but on the walls as well. This place breathes money, she thought, and her excitement sharpened and tightened her breathing.

  The door of Flat 32 was open as she stepped out of the lift and looked to her left. A middle-aged woman in a blue striped nylon overall stood there looking at her with a face quite expressionless; no welcome, no surprise, nothing.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said as George came up to her.

  ‘A — Mrs Hillman?’ George ventured.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the woman demanded.

  ‘I’m Dr George Barnabas. I’ve come about the advertisement that appeared in last week’s —’

  There was a little noise from behind the overalled woman and a voice cried in a high tone, ‘Doctor — Oh! It’s all right, Olive! I’ll come, it’s all right.’

  The nylon overall looked at George again, but with some expression now: a faint sneer. George watched her retreating into the flat, leaving her place at the door to be taken by a very thin woman in a dark green dress that even to George’s not particularly experienced eye was an expensive one.

  ‘I’ll phone David right away,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Right away. Doctor, you say? Oh, I’m so glad you came! It’s wonderful that you took the time to actually come — David didn’t tell me — do sit down, I’ll just call him. Olive! Fetch some coffee and so forth, will you? Now, are you comfortable there? I’ll just phone …’

  She flurried away to the other side of the very large drawing room into which she had taken George, reaching for the gilded and white enamel telephone which had been tricked up to look as a Louis Quinze one might have looked had the France of the period ever heard of Alexander Graham Bell, leaving George to settle herself a little gingerly on a sofa that had been upholstered in so heavy a velvet that it made her feel she was slipping back into the womb.

  She looked around the room as the woman murmured and was first amused and then puzzled. The money that had been spent in here had to be staggering and it was that which seemed funny to her. It was so excessive. The curtains were the same thick blue velvet as the sofa, as were four massive armchairs. The gilt tables and a buhl escritoire against one wall were obviously costly antiques and the floor, huge as it was, was completely covered in a heavy Chinese carpet of magnificent depth and design.

  Her puzzlement resolved itself into one question: how was it that people who lived as richly as this had appeared at an NHS hospital in an area as shabby as Shadwell? If this woman was the female half of the Oberlanders, as she suspected (and she might have to find out from Prudence Jennings if she recognized her, unless they admitted it to her themselves), why had she taken her ill baby to Old East? Why hadn’t she taken him to a private doctor, or even a nearby NHS hospital? It would have been what George would have expected of someone who lived in these conditions.

  The woman hurried back from the phone and sat down close beside George to stare at her with wide dark eyes. She looked, George thought, to be about forty or so, maybe a little less; she had one of those bony faces that made it hard to tell. George looked down at the woman’s hands, which were clasped nervously on her lap, and saw how thin and fragile they were, and wondered briefly if the woman was anorexic. She could have been. The green dress was not designed to cling to the figure but a soft and draped affair that would disguise the effects of such behaviour.

  ‘David said not to talk about this till he comes. He won’t be long, his office is just down the road. But I have to ask some questions, don’t I? Like, I mean, are you the same group? Did she send you? And if you’re not, how is it that you’re able to do anything? We’ve been trying so hard for, oh, so long, and everyone said it was impossible, the Government had clamped down and there was no hope and we can’t go to see for ourselves what we can do because David can’t get a visa or something and he won’t let me go alone, he’s so protective and careful and anyway I don’t think I could —’

  George tried not to show her bewilderment. ‘Which group?’ she said carefully. ‘Go where? I’m not sure that —’

  ‘But aren’t you working with these countries? Romania and Bosnia and so on? That’s what we were told before. Or are you dealing with Brazil? I’d heard about them but I wasn’t certain, but then David told me that they were lovely, just as dark eyed and dark haired as us, so I don’t mind at all,’

  ‘Perhaps I should wait till your husband comes, Mrs Hillman,’ George said, not sure if she was cutting off a source of information, but also concerned that she might be mishandling this strange woman. She certainly had a wild look about her, and was now sweating heavily across her forehead and upper lip with anxiety, even though the room was only pleasantly warm. ‘It will be easier t
han explaining twice, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s what David said, but you know how it is … Some coffee? These biscuits are nice, I made them yesterday. I do so love doing things in the kitchen even though it does irritate Olive when I get in her way, but she understands it’s so difficult to be busy when there’s — when there’s not a lot — Oh dear!’ Her eyes filled with tears and she rubbed her face with both hands, smearing her eyeshadow a little. She looked deeply unhappy and very vulnerable and for a moment George wanted to reach out and hug the pathos out of her.

  The sound of a key in the door lifted the spirits of both of them. George relaxed with relief as the nervous woman leapt to her feet and ran to meet the arrival, and registered the need not to let herself be infected by Mrs Hillman’s tension. It wouldn’t be easy, for she couldn’t remember ever meeting anyone in such a state of anxiety outside a hospital ward.

  The woman came back clinging to her husband’s arm. He was a round man in every way; face, eyes, body, glasses even. His surprisingly black hair was ridged on his head like a corrugated iron roof and he shone with cleanliness and comfort and a sense of his own worth.

  ‘I understand from my wife that you are a doctor?’ he said as she shook hands. ‘Are you perhaps from the same people as — I mean, where from?’

  ‘Yes, I’m Dr Barnabas,’ George said. ‘From Old East Hospital. In Shadwell.’

  The room seemed to become so quiet that even the traffic in the road outside was silenced. He stood and stared at her, her hand still in his, and his wife, clinging to his arm, was transfixed also, her face actually paling as George looked at her.

  ‘Old East,’ he said, his voice thinner than before. ‘In Shadwell. I’m not sure that I know it.’

  ‘Oh, I think you do,’ George said, and then somewhere deep inside herself gathered up all her courage and rolled it into a hard ball to throw at him. ‘You can’t have forgotten the place so soon, Mr Oberlander.’

  The woman threw back her head and howled. It was a dreadful sound, a deep baying note of utter misery, and George started forward, driven by an instinctive need to hold her, to help her, as her husband pulled on her arm and half dragged, half led her across the room to the sofa, at the same time as the woman in the nylon overall appeared at the drawing-room door, her face now showing more than a hint of expression.

  ‘It’s all right, darling. Please, it’s all right,’ the man was murmuring as he made his wife stretch out on the sofa. ‘Sylvia, sweetie, do stop, please. It won’t help. Please, darling, please Sylvie, choochie, please don’t cry so.’

  But the thin woman was now in an ecstasy of tears and George stood there still and silent as he fussed over her, sitting beside her and mopping her streaming eyes. It went on for some time, until at last the loud sobs lessened and slowed and she seemed too exhausted to weep any more.

  ‘Come and look after her, Olive,’ David Hillman said after a while. ‘I have to speak to — to this doctor here. You look after Sylvie. We won’t be long.’

  He got to his feet and looked at George. The light from the lamp Olive had switched on behind the sofa glinted on his spectacles and blanked out the lenses, so that he looked anonymous and strange, and George felt a moment of fear herself. What had she walked into here? Was this man intending to do her some harm?

  But then her common sense returned to her and that was a comfort. David Hillman was somewhat shorter than she was herself and for all his bulkiness unlikely to be particularly fit. There was no physical threat here, she told herself, and was able to nod politely when he said, ‘Please come to my study, will you? We can talk quietly there,’ and followed him to a door on the far side of the drawing room.

  She looked back as she reached the door, and saw the woman Olive on her knees beside the sofa, stroking Sylvia Hillman’s forehead. She looked resigned and a little angry; but then Olive looked up and, catching her eye, lifted her brows in a sort of ‘Honestly, some people!’ message, friendly and conspiratorial, making of George and herself a pair. How very odd, George thought, and followed the round man into his room.

  He sat down at a desk, ensconcing himself behind it, and George recognized what he was doing: putting a guard between himself and her, with some pomp, and the last shreds of her fear vanished. He was as nervous about her as she was about him, clearly. So she smiled at him when he indicated the chair facing him on the other side of the desk and sat down, relaxing without difficulty.

  ‘This is a lovely room,’ she said conversationally, as if she’d been at a cocktail party. ‘Leather is so very beautiful, isn’t it?’ The space was as leathery as a harness store, she thought privately, deep buttoned chairs and sofa, a desk with leather inset into the top, leather-handled paper knives and pens on it; everything that could be covered in dark green skin had been. It looked like a shop window in Tottenham Court Road.

  He brushed the comment aside. ‘Why are you here?’ he demanded.

  ‘I told your wife. Didn’t she tell you when she phoned? It was about the advertisement I placed. About babies for adoption.’

  He was silent for a moment and then seemed to stiffen himself. ‘Why did you address me by — what was it you called me? Is it because … Well, why?’

  ‘Oh, come on! You know perfectly well I called you Oberlander. And it meant something to your wife, didn’t it? I’m sorry if I upset her. I didn’t want to, believe me. But I do have to find out what happened. The baby’s death was —’

  ‘The baby’s what?’ He was so stiff now that he seemed to George to be made of board. She lifted her brows at him, never taking her eyes from his face, trying to assess the truth of every hint of expression there. His round face served him well, however. There was little to see in it but a sort of blankness.

  ‘The baby’s death,’ she said again. ‘We — the police and I — have been investigating that death. I am the pathologist at Old East, Mr Oberlander — or Hillman. Whichever. I did the post-mortem and …’

  He was no longer blank. His face too had crumpled and tears had appeared behind the glasses. She watched with horror as, slowly, they began to trickle down his soft cheeks. Behind her, through the door to the drawing room, she could hear his wife still sobbing. What on earth had been done to these two people to have this effect on them?

  32

  The sky outside the windows that looked down into Sloane Street slid from grey to charcoal to a deep indigo that vanished into blackness when Olive, fetching yet another pot of fresh coffee, switched on more lights. Still Sylvia was sobbing softly. It was as though she had a bottomless pit of tears locked inside her pathetically thin body from which she would never cease to draw.

  David sat close beside her on the sofa, holding her hand, and George, watching them as they told their story, felt her belly taut with pity. People shouldn’t be like this, so despairing and desperate, so hungry. She tried to put herself in their shoes, to feel the need as urgently as they did, and failed, despite the fact that she had herself thought often enough over the past few years of the way time was rolling on and her own chances of parenthood were becoming slimmer with each year that passed. To want children, yes, that made sense; but to ache for them, need and yearn and long for them to the point of utter desolation as these two had for so many years, that couldn’t be right. It had become for them a form of obsession. Not a normal wanting, but a pathological despair. And someone had made a lot of money out of it. There was a great deal of anger deep inside George as she listened to the slow building up of the story, sentence by painful sentence.

  ‘We thought it’d just be easy, at first. Well, you always do, don’t you?’ David Hillman looked down at his wife at his side. ‘Twenty years now. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? I was twenty-five and my Sylvie here was twenty when we married. The first two, three years we weren’t that interested. We even used something so we wouldn’t — Do you remember, Sylv?’

  She lifted her chin to look at him and the tears still ran down her face as she essaye
d a smile; it was a gut-wrenching thing to see and George looked back at David quickly.

  ‘But then things got better. I made a few bob, we moved here and it had everything. There’s the park and the Square so near, lots of fresh air, and we thought, right, now we’ll start our family. Once we have three we’ll get a big house in the country …’

  His voice trailed away and he looked down at his wife’s hand held closely in his. After a moment he patted it with his other hand and then went on. It was clearly not easy.

  ‘We went to ever so many different people. The top specialists. Here and in America too. I can’t tell you what we spent. Tried everything. They never could find out what was wrong with us. They said I’m all right, said Sylvie was, but we still never started a baby.’

  ‘If I’d even had a miscarriage it wouldn’t have been so bad.’ Sylvia spoke so unexpectedly that George almost jumped. ‘I mean it would have proved it was possible, you know? But I never even had that.’ Her voice was thick and rusty, as though she’d forgotten how to use it in the flood of tears that had engulfed the afternoon.

  ‘At first, we didn’t want to even think of adoption. It was our own babies we wanted, ones that looked like us. We’ve got pictures of our grandparents, even our great-grandparents, and it’s marvellous to see the way people look like each other and we thought … But after a while that stopped being so important. Just to have a baby of our own to care for …’

  ‘We tried the donor thing, you know,’ Sylvia said. Her voice was still thick and choked but she seemed a little less tearful. ‘David wasn’t keen but he said, for me, he said it’d be —’ She stopped, shook her head and wept again.